I used to carry a universal TV remote control with me. It’s simply staggering how often it was useful.

“YOU DRIVE VERY FAST”. Screamed at me out her minivan window by a middle aged Indian woman making a left across traffic in front of me. Still cracks me up.

There’s this scene at the start of War of the Worlds where the hero races his classic muscle car up this tiny neighborhood street at full tilt, exhaust notes at full blast, and I think he even screeches the tires by slamming the brakes pulling into the driveway. Then he walks up to his neighbor and they’re all chill with him. In any other world, the neighbors would have him in handcuffs.

Not a direct answer, but if you ever get a chance - go walk around a self-serve junkyard. This is where cars go when they finally just aren’t worth fixing anymore. It is eye opening. There are cars that you will still consider ‘new’ that have already given up the ghost (mainly Dodge/Chrysler, Hyundai/Kia, & Nissan). And you can’t help but think - WTF are these cars doing here, aren’t these still for sale at the dealership?

Conversely, there are also cars there so old you hardly recognize them (usually Honda, Toyota, and full size pickups from Ford/GM).

I’m super-out of date, so talking about the originals here.

For the Decepticons, I have to go with Devastator / the Constructicons. Something about “We build for EviL” is just so cartoon villian-y that I’ve always loved them. Plus, neon green & purple.

For the Autobots - my first transformers ever were Gears and Cliffjumper - two relative no-name minis, but they have a special place in my heart.

Steam has free voice chat as well. Hardly open source though.

My company is European. Although all our templates are written in English, the check-language is set to Italian. So, pretty much every single word.

And yes, every time a new template comes out, we have to go through block by block and reset them to English. But even then a bunch slips through. Usually takes about a month to filter all the filters out.

9 Parchments - Surprising gem with some depth and a lot of replay value. Reminds me a lot of the Harry Potter universe. We fire this up almost every weekend. I recommend setting friendly fire to ‘self’ instead, as it encourages actual cooperative play.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shredder’s Revenge - this is just a hack n slash quarter eater, but it’s mindless fun.

I assumed it was a lack of bots. Which is a good thing.

That, and we skew heavily towards introverts. So we’re not going to talk unless you hold a knife to our head.
Them: “How’s it going”?
Me: looks at shoelaces quietly, unsure if they’re talking to me or the empty wall behind me.

Witcher 3.

At the risk of sounding negative - if driving a car is too hard for you, maybe you shouldn’t. You’re going to be piloting a 4000 pound boulder down the road. Would you really be okay killing someone by accident?

We live in an age of Ubers & Lyfts. Taxis have never been cheaper nor more convenient. Being car free is totally possible.

Regardless, I would still encourage you to finish your studies and get your driver’s license, if only because it’s the one form of ID every adult is expected to have.

I always put the original Blaster Master on the NES up there.

It had no save capability at all, nor any codes to stop & restart later. When you sit down, you better be ready to do the whole 4+ hours in one playthrough (or just leave the NES on & walk away).

But the kicker was that once you got hit just a few times, you might as well restart. The gun (in person mode) would power down with each hit, and after a few hits, well, you just didn’t have enough ‘oomph’ to kill the bosses. But the power-ups to get the gun were fairly sparse in the first place, so once you got hit, it wasn’t like you could just retrace your steps & power up again.

Mildly interesting, at least to me, I understand it’s been remastered for the Switch. It now has save points AND being hit doesn’t reduce your gun’s power. That would make it a completely different game. I’m be curious to check it out someday. If nothing else, I’m curious to see how much of it I remember. I suspect I can autopilot the first 2 hours, despite it being 40(?) years later.

Landing my job. I had experience with a relatively obscure piece of software. Turns out the company had been looking for weeks and couldn’t find anyone. The guy I was replacing had a new job lined up, so they needed someone ASAP.

Not OP, but also drive simple, older cars. And yeah, the maintenance costs really aren’t very high. The bulk of my maintenance costs are stuff like tires & brakes - which I’d still be buying for electric cars too. Biggest cost by far is insurance, and once again, going to need to insure an electric car too.

Second biggest cost is gas though, and you are correct, not having to pay that would be nice. But I’m not yet convinced that when I need to replace the battery, that single cost will be more affordable than the running cost for weekly fill-ups. I have yet to see any automaker publicly list their battery packs for sale with a pricetag. Ditto for all of the aftermarket auto part shops. My fear is that lack of visibility is intentional, and that battery packs actually cost far more than we want to believe. I would like to be proven wrong, and I suspect someday I will. But I doubt it will be in the near future.

Could you point me to a good place to start learning how to troubleshoot? I added Unbuntu as a dual-boot to my gaming rig a while back, and when it works, it’s great. But as soon as I hit an error, I drop back to Windows because I know how to fix shit there.

I applaud the idea, but I can’t imagine an American city that would let these hang around for long. Police are already pretty “great” about making sure people can’t sleep in their cars overnight anywhere.

And then you want the owner to pedal this to an RV dump station? That’s simply not happening. Best case, they park it near a rainwater sewer drain and literally dump their shitpile in the road.

Sadly, what we’re really missing is the foundation. We’re going to need governments to step up & start making vanlife legal. Enable driver’s licenses & IDs without a permanent address. Create parks specifically for people living in vehicles. (Of course, the better solution would be to make living more affordable, but we’re currently heading in the opposite direction).

Maybe 10 or so years ago, was a real push to convert old malls into apartments or low income housing. Turns out it’s not that easy. Those buildings were built with minimal plumbing, just a few public restrooms and limited water service for the food court. There’s just not enough water/sewer to supply more than a small handful of apartments. You’d have to tear up significant portions of the building to run all new plumbing for all the kitchens & bathrooms. And that assumes the underlying city infrastructure that runs to the mall could even support the new water & sewage demands in the first place.

I’ll grant you, it is a cool idea. It’s just not nearly as simple as it sounds.

Funny, I’ve asked this exact question multiple times, and the answer I always get is that you just get fucked. You pay full price for the first vehicle, and then 90% of full price for every extra one.

Maybe it’s Georgia? I carry the minimum for the state (Liability + Collision), but then bump the Liability because I now live in a high cost of living area. So if I’m in a wreck, I get nothing, but the other guy gets a nice check for his car and his medical bills are covered.

My car insurance would be WAY cheaper for me to just drive one of my shitboxes 100% of the time than it is to split my mileage across four vehicles. But I make it up by being pretty handy. When one of them breaks, I have multiple other cars to drive while I wait for parts in the mail. So I’d still say I come out slightly ahead as far as costs go, but most of my ‘savings’ go straight to the insurance company.