I am a pharmacist and have vaccinated thousands of people. I am always impressed when someone listens to the reasons why a flu shot is an important civic duty and decides to get one when they haven’t previously.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed between 1-5% of the world population. For perspective, COVID-19 killed about 0.1%. Consider a pandemic that was 10 to 50x (!!!) the effects of COVID and specifically killed young people from the ages of 20-40.

Get your flu shot.

I can make a really loud noise that sounds like a Nazgul from Lord of the Rings.

To do it you have to pull air into your lungs against the resistance of your vocal chords. With low power it sounds like an old man/woman dying but with high power it sounds like a hawk. It takes some training because if you try to force it will aggravate your vocal chords but with some practice you can make a yelling-volume noise that does not at all seem human.

Bonus Story: I was on the brewery tour for Yuengling in Pottsville, PA, USA. It’s one of the oldest American breweries because it survived prohibition by using a small cave to shuttle beer out of the brewery. As part of the tour they take you through the unlit cave and the tour guide just going through the motions with the energy of Ben Stein doing preventative maintenance. In an effort to liven up the tour, when we got to the darkest parts I yelled, “Oh fuck, bats!!” and did the Nazgul shriek. The whole group ran out of the cave.

The tour guide was very annoyed and assured everyone there were no bats and bats don’t sound like that anyway.

I caused ~$100k damage to my middle school.

I am going to fuzz some of the details for obvious reasons, but when I was in 8th grade, I was dealing with a chaotic home life and had just moved for the 3rd time in 8 years across the country. I hated the school and didn’t really have friends so developed some destructive habits.

Our physical education teacher was a lazy, creepy, moron who would force us to run laps for an hour which let him sit in his office. He’d berate kids and give them mean racist nicknames and if you refused he would give you an F for your midpoint report which meant you couldn’t participate in any other sport or extracurricular activity the school sponsored. The class was half the grade at a time so it was over a hundred kids including the disabled kids and sometimes would just leave us unsupervised for an hour. At one point he crudely encouraged on two kids with downs syndrome make out, which they did while he watched and laughed and made fun of them. Just an evil spiteful man.

So before and after class we had 15 minutes to get ready so I would go around the locker room and find anything that would fit in a toilet and flush it. Towels, clothes, backpacks, food, pencils, paper - all of it in the toilet. They had insane flush power so would violently suck it all down and I thought it was just funny. I did it off and on for a month.

One day we heard gym was cancelled and then the school was cancelled the next day because of a facilities issue. Apparently the gym flooded pretty badly. We had to start having gym outside. Then after a couple weeks we had a school wide assembly and the superintendent was there and explained that a group of people had been flushing stuff down the toilet and they had to do a massive, emergency plumbing project that cost them $100k+. They were super mad and told us they already knew almost everyone who did it but if you come forward you won’t get expelled. Yeah, sure.

Anyway, I had no friends and no one knew I was doing it so I just didn’t say anything and got away with it. Also, a few years later the gym teacher was fired allegedly for some sexual misconduct issue.

I know!

The puzzles were the best part for me, and are undeniably good. I did do a deep dive into the settings too when I started to get frustrated and those options were key.

I tried very hard, but I did not enjoy The Outer Wilds.

For those who don’t know, it is a first person exploration game over ~12 planets within a small solar system. There is a core game loop that lasts about 20 minutes wherein you can fly your ship anywhere and explore until the cycle ends.

The thing I really disliked was that you only got ~10-15 minutes of exploration before you had to restart the cycle back at home and go back to where you started. There was also a plethora of environmental hazards that were instant death, all while you had oxygen and fuel to manage. Dying would also reset the cycle so it wasn’t uncommon to spend 5+ minutes getting somewhere only to die and restart a few times. It just made me frustrated.

I did complete it with the help of mods that let me teleport to the key locations. People really liked the story but it really didn’t hit for me. I feel like I was born with the cilantro gene for this game because I really didn’t like it.