I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.

Do you mean English loanwords or when people switch back & forth?

Your thumb is an arrow pointing at where you want the screw to go. After you curl your fingers, your fingers are arrows showing the direction to turn the screw

In elementary school I read this book called “Flawed Dogs” and it was unforgettably wild. It’s about a dog who escapes some kinda confinement by jumping over a barbed wire fence and loses his back legs in the process, and then joins a dog gang and does dog gang activities. Also one of the dog gang members was a cat in disguise.
Honestly I should see if I can find a copy of it and reread it. It was pretty wild.

edit: I looked it up and maybe I have a lot of the details wrong but it’s still pretty wild

Probably my favorite anime
Also, it was directed by Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Gunbuster)

Is it moral and ethical to pirate media?

This is a good one. I had a high school computer class and we had a quiz question that was something like:

Digital piracy is:
a. Moral and legal
b. Moral and illegal
c. Immoral and legal
d. Immoral and illegal

Of course, the only correct answer was “d”. I thought it was such a one-dimensional and purposely ignorant question. I’m not even a piracy advocate or anything, but that was kinda ridiculous.

Seconding AltSnap although I use normal controls with an Alt key bound to a mouse button. Special shoutouts to “Action menu” for all the cool stuff it lets you do and “Windows list” which is just a better version of Alt+tabbing if you have multiple monitors.

I discovered this one recently
Country Music Stars Challenge Al-Qaeda

I see a lot of tapes at thrift stores or even antique stores. You could also get a Bluetooth or AUX tape adapter which are conceptually very cool

#8 Beef Lemongrass banh mi style sandwich from a place called Baguette in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. I ate it many times in the short while I stayed there, probably 8-10 years ago. Sometimes I think about going back just to have it again…

Imagus feels like in an alternate universe it could be default browser behavior. When you hover over an image it will expand to full resolution and then you can press buttons to open in new tab, download, zoom in, etc.
Works on pretty much any website and is nice if the website has sized the images too small or if your eyesight is less than great.

Half-Life, Half-Life Opposing Force, Half-Life Blue Shift

The fact that people so often use the past tense instead of the past participle is perhaps evidence that it doesn’t really matter, descriptively?

Chinese and Japanese would have so many. My favorite is probably 緑 which means green. I also like the simplified Chinese horse: 马. Special shoutout to 凸 meaning convex, 凹 meaning concave, and 凸凹 meaning bumpy (not sure if this is true in Chinese). There’s thousands to choose from so of course there are a lot of other handsome one-character words, but those are the first few I thought of.

A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.

Love & Pop the Hideaki Anno movie? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else mention it online before

I’m surprised only a handful of people have mentioned Ghibli movies. For me it was Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it’s probably one of the first movies I remember watching in general. Still my favorite Ghibli movie and I must have watched it dozens of times as a kid.
The source material for it is a manga by Miyazaki himself and it’s much longer and deeper (the movie only covers about 1.5 out of 7 volumes, and changes a lot of details). Highly recommended.

Everywhere? or in what country/place?

I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.

1. Universal Paperclips
2. Dark Souls
3. Return of the Obra Dinn
4. Golden Sun (duology)
5. Persona 3 FES
6. Night in the Woods
7. Pseudoregalia
8. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
9. Splatoon 2
10. Stacklands