Amen to that. Caffeine is life!

Way more diet coke than can possibly be healthy for me…

Most people around us usually get it so isn’t really a “secret” language, but my wife and I are big Simpsons fans so we talk in quotes all the time.

One that gets a lot of play is “I’m going… to… stalk… Lenny and Carl” for when we’re going somewhere but really sure what we’re going to do

Indigo Prophecy was definitely a fun experience, but it has more quick time events than actual puzzles. Still worth a look if you are looking for a good story (although it got rushed in the end so the finale isn’t great)

I’ll always have a soft spot for the old Sierra games because they were the first adventure games I played, but I think I’d recommend the old LucasArts games to new players nowadays. The LucasArts games were just better designed - they don’t have fail states and you can’t unexpectedly die so you are more free to explore.

My recommendation would be to check out “Day of the Tentacle”. In my opinion it is the best example of point and click games. I don’t know about Linux compatibility but it recently had a re release so I think it should work.

I have my own little pet theory about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I think Sisko accidently created the wormhole aliens.

In the pilot, they don’t appear until his second trip through the wormhole. So my theory is that there was some kind of biological matter on their Runabout and, since they exist outside of time, it evolved instantly and they suddenly existed throughout all time. That is why they chose him as their prophet - he was kind of their father.

The Paradox of Tolerance in a nutshell…

Does anyone remember Voat? Man, that place went downhill real fast.

Ever seen “Trekkies”? It’s a pretty good documentary about the Star Trek fandom. I distinctly recall there was a woman who was obsessed with Brent Spiner. If I recall correctly she had a photo album just filled with pictures off him from conventions and could see his house from her balcony so she would go out there for “Spiner breaks”.

Anyway this reminded me of her. Still who can blame her? He’s awesome!

Yep we use placemats in our house. It was the first chore we ever gave to my daughter - to gather up the placemats after dinner and put them away in the drawer. I’m 37 by the way.

“Infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”

This is pretty niche, but if you’ve watched Summoning Salt and are looking for something similar, check out OneShortEye:

https://www.youtube.com/@OneShortEye

He does something similar for the world of speedrunning old LucasArts/Sierra adventure games. Highly recommended!

You know, I’ve always wondered if there’s any animosity from the other groups since they get two letters but everyone else only gets one…

Maybe they are fans of Terrance Howard’s new math?

OK, well I guess if water isn’t allowed at all then I’ll have to go with the Dehydrated Water canister from Space Quest 1

Sorry, I took a look and unfortunately I couldn’t find anything so it is possible I’m misremembering things. In fact, the stuff about Brink becoming an old man might have been something to do with eliminating his addiction to the life crystals - I think that is a detail that was in the novelization?

It did have a chaotic development that had to be restarted a few times. There’s info about that in the IMDB page for the game. There’s a neat tidbit in that there was originally supposed to be a fourth astronaut who had cofunded the mission but they were ultimately cut from the game (though supposedly early artwork still featured 4 sets of footprints)

That’s not their most recent published work. That was published in Feb 2023 and they released a more recent report on Jul 2023 (and I believe it has less troublesome references but I’ll admit I don’t have the time to go through them all):

https://uhrp.org/statement/uhrp-submits-comprehensive-report-for-un-consideration-of-chinas-human-rights-record/

Regardless, your point still stands, there’s likely more circular referencing than I originally believed. I’m still not convinced it is as much of a conspiracy as others have claimed, but it is food for thought. I appreciate the less combative tone and a willingness to discuss in good faith.

OK fair enough. I’ll admit that I first didn’t see any connection to Zenz at all, but then I noticed you have to click on each citation individually to see all of the sources (I assumed all the citations would be listed at the bottom so I could just search for his name and when it didn’t pop up I assumed he wasn’t there at all).

I fully admit that I don’t have the time to look through and vet every citation (who does?) and I never claimed I checked everything. People were just claiming that Zenz was the source of all of this info and that was clearly not true based on just a quick check. Lots of this information is corroborated by lots of reputable organizations so I don’t think it is appropriate to just dismiss it all.

I think at least the thing we seem to agree on is that people should do some research into this stuff themselves rather than blindly believe what everyone is shouting. I fully support that. I took a look and what I saw didn’t convince me of the claims people are making here. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Uhh, what? The links work perfectly fine and are not “invalid”. You do get a redirect notice but that doesn’t make them invalid links?

I’m not the one being intellectually dishonest here, man. I haven’t even accused other people of being dishonest. I’m just saying that I looked into what people have claimed and I can’t see what they are saying. People should check for themselves and I think they’ll see quickly who’s really spreading BS here…

I encourage everyone to look into the links provided and see for yourself what I’m talking about. In the very first link, out of 32 citations provided, Zenz was used 4 times. I’d hardly say his research was a critical part of their research or regardless there’s plenty of other sources provided if you don’t like him as a source. Don’t listen to all the others saying and look for yourself. There’s very little to back up their reasons for dismissing everything as some kind of anti China conspiracy.

Yep, I googled it and I encourage everyone else to do it too. There was nothing. I did see a few Chinese sources calling him out as fraud but nothing unbiased. I did see lots of other credible organizations backing up his findings too.

The Wikipedia article was simply a good starting point that I encouraged people to check out. There’s tons of citations in there that back up their points.