Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

I really like the idea of calling it XFree86/GNU/Linux and then if anyone ever asks “but what about (other contributing software package)?” just tacking it on at the beginning.

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.

Just scroll past it? I just assume it’s going to be wrong anyway.

• Do what thou wilt
• This shall be the whole of the Law
• This space intentionally left blank

https://youtu.be/4nyHPIcbn88 (nsfw lyrics)

Was that this studio, or their other studio that’s been running since 2017? This one, “Team Blue,” was supposed to be working on some unannounced AAA game.

I think you’re right, it must have been the sequel!

Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn’t let me go into any building that wasn’t the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.

How good of a friend are we talking? I care about my roommate’s new nephew. I know his sister, and we’ve played D&D with his brother-in-law. The baby is, like, a relevant part of being friends with them. Similarly, if he went on vacation I’d want to hear about how it went, especially if anything interesting happened.

On the other hand some of my coworkers at my last job liked to talk about this kind of stuff, and I didn’t really care, but it was nice to have something to talk about while I was setting up a new printer for them, or whatever.

They won’t, because there’s no other company that can credibly meet the Artemis objectives for a lunar lander in a reasonable time frame. Boeing is the main competitor but they’re already struggling to satisfy all of their current contracts: Starliner was supposed to be operational in 2017, but it had its first crewed test flight this year and it malfunctioned seriously enough that they decided it wasn’t safe to bring the astronauts home on it. NASA pulling SpaceX off of the Artemis project would functionally be the end of it.

I’m just in favor of throwing paint at things!

I had a Tamagotchi, but it was the original Digimon toys that I was really obsessed with. I got my friend into it too so that I had someone to battle with. We were even raising them in class. We had all sorts of hypotheses about what made them stronger, which were probably based on no real evidence. I had a bulking-cutting strategy where I force fed my 'mon to increase its weight and then trained it until it reached the minimum weight for its rank.

I picked up an anniversary digivice a few years ago, I should replace the battery and raise some more digimon.

There are definitely some things it is healthier not to know, and I’m pretty sure this is one of them. It’s why I don’t ask my mom questions about my dad, who I have never met since being old enough to form memories and I would like to keep it that way.

My friend seems to have good success meeting people in Discord channels about his niche interests, with the caveat that there is a lot more video calling than there is hanging out, because nobody lives in the same state. Maybe join a furry chat and say hello?

All, top 6 hours.

I think you need to use the same phone number you signed up with, but other than that I don’t know. If you signed up with a burner phone, maybe you could do that.

I don’t know, but mine guesses correctly when I’m a passenger about 90% of the time. Unlike the other commenter, mine doesn’t have a bluetooth connection to my car or a device in my car.

Once in a while I have to tell it I’m not driving.