I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.

I feel like I first saw this pic before AI image generation was any good, so it might just be good old fashioned Photoshop.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

Smoking proves that you officially Don’t Give a Shit about your long-term health, and Not Giving a Shit is the essence of being cool. I mean, I guess for a long time now “cool” has just meant “good,” but the original “cool” aesthetic was all about acting like you were probably going to die young and looking sexy doing it.

Edit: And smoking definitely contributes to the sexy part. Smoldering embers. Oral fixation. Taking a long drag and letting it out slowly. Maybe it’s not for you, but it sure pushes my buttons, and I know it’s not just me.

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.

This is a pretty common style of humor among older people IRL, I feel like? The problem isn’t that he isn’t thinking of them as people, the problem is that since they can’t see him laugh at their reaction they never get let in on the joke, which is an important part of the difference between joking and trolling.