Back when the X-Files was ruling the airwaves, in the 90s, there was a companion show called Millennium. The first season was a bit weak, focusing on serial killers and gore. Second season went completely off the rails in the best way possible. The third season was a lackluster attempt to regain a wider audience.

I would recommend watching the second season for sure. It has religious satire (you will know exactly who they are skewering when you see it), the occult, end of days, mixed in with humor and solid human drama. The season finale, when they thought that they weren’t going to be renewed, is extraordinary.

Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.

Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!

I haven’t seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.

The database app in LibreOffice, based on the Firebird database engine, can do all that.

I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.

I haven’t done it, bit I believe that with a pressure cooker you don’t need to soak the chickpeas.

All but one of my grandparents had died before I was born, and the remaining one died when I was about 10. She was a stickler for social rules, so I found her kind of intimidating.

A quetzal in the rainforest of Panama.

To sleep, perchance to dream. And in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!

Hamlet (hopefully I didn’t get it too wrong)

I use Brevo as well. Free tier: 300 emails per day.

Very happy with them.

I have been using walkscape as well. My walks with the dogs have almost doubled in length, just because I have a little incentive to achieve a goal in the game.

There are estimated to be between 200,000 and 400,000 significant deviations (i.e. not just spelling mistakes) in the New Testament manuscripts we now have. Scholars make educated guesses about what the correct wording is, but those are still guesses.

You know the story of the adulteress who is going to be stoned? That was added at least 100 years after the rest of the Gospel of John was written.

The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Book of Luke, which was the first gospel written, ends with the women running away from the empty tomb and not telling anyone. It is believed that the resurrection story was added later.

Bart Ehrman does a very good job of explaining these issues on his YouTube channel.

I think that singing English songs would be very, very helpful. It forces you to use the phrasing, pronunciation, and emphasis of a native English speaker.

There was certainly a plug-in or something that made Reddit look like an Excel spreadsheet, so reading Reddit made you look like you were doing important calculations!

A nation of people so advanced that they decide their dictatorial ruler through a trial by combat.

In a sense, yes. If you are trying to get an international volunteer visa, most developing countries have no interest in more unskilled labor coming into their country. You need some kind of qualification, whether it’s a degree or a carpenter’s certification.

In the same way, to teach English in Japan you need a “Specialist in Humanities” visa. It’s easy to get one, as long as you have a university degree.

A lot of the education and engineering seems to be about the area you are studying, like chemistry or electronics or buildings. But in fact, the most valuable part of it is learning problem-solving skills in the middle of all of those courses. In that sense, I still use my engineering education all the time. But not the degree itself.

When I went into university to do chemical engineering, in 1981, I had never even touched a computer. I didn’t know until I got there that you could even do computers as a career.

I graduated, and then volunteered as a teacher in Africa for 3 years. I came back to Canada, and then taught English in Japan for 3 years.

But after my first year of university, my family got a computer (a Commodore Vic 20, with 3.5 kB of memory) and I was obsessed from that woman onward.

Leaving Japan, I went back to school and did a diploma in computer science. Unlike chemical engineering, where I dutifully learned things that I was told I needed to learn, I was delighted to have the chance to learn about software, operating systems, databases, graphics, etc. The difference was astonishing, and I found it easy to maintain a GPA just under 4.0.

I have been working as a programmer for more than 25 years, and although it has been stressful at times, the joy is still there. I’m not an artist by any means, but I do feel like a craftsman, and I enjoy the opportunity to continue learning everyday.

I have never, ever, in my life enjoyed running. I never got up to long distances, but used to be able to do about 5k without too much trouble. An hour of swimming? No problem. 30 minutes of high intensity rowing? Happy to do that. Cycling 50k? I’m all over that. But running just makes me feel bad.

I’m willing to bet that there are millions of teen parents who would have a different view of this. The problem is that teens often don’t have access to birth control, or are manipulated, or plain stupid because their brains haven’t finished developing yet.

I’m sure that some people would have regrets about not getting laid as teens. But it’s hardly a hard and fast rule.

Captain Sensible. He was the guitarist for the punk band The Damned, but had a #1 hit in the UK with “Happy Talk”, a song from the 1949 musical South Pacific.

This is actually a shortened version of the original.