honestly I hate “can you pet the dog?!?” not for any of the common reasons but because it was initially interesting as a proposition of “can you interact with the world in a way that is not within the primary mechanical loop” and that very quickly fell away to being “well now any indie developer making a game has to have a pet the dog button or they’re going to get letters”
I think a lot of people really haven't considered the unlimited opportunities of being able to just commission art. Like you can literally just pay someone money to have them make practically whatever you want for you. Like you could probably hire some smaller soft rock band to write you a song about some shitty couple who obviously hate each other but instead of just breaking up already they keep getting drunk and fighting about the same damn subjects over and over and over while the neighbours can do nothing but listen to their publicly broadcasted private grievances.
And then put your stereos against the wall and play it on a constant loop until your annoying neighbours pause and go "wait, is this song about us?"
okay so theres an episode of whats new scooby doo where the gang goes home on valentines day, and i guess the studio really wanted to avoid the implication that daphne and fred were sleeping together because daphne and velma live together and fred lives with shaggy and scooby
but that attempt at avoiding anything risque backfired spectacularly because now it just seems like daphne and velma are a comfortably domestic couple and fred is trying to learn how to live with his boyfriends over excitable and really hungry great dane
No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.
Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.
Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.
the way the internet facilitates a sort of memetic decay of phrases related to sexual attraction to slowly, inexorably point towards the same conventionally attractive people in their 20s instead of the original meanings is so disgusting to me
playing erdtree with my pal we get invaded by someone named "Drip Inspector" and im like "waitwaitwait. ok lets just pose leaning back to back and wait for them to show up maybe our outfits will be so good they wont kill us"
so we wait until they show up and then they get reaaaal close to us . and then pull out their telescope and start circling around us and zooming in for a good 30 seconds. then they clap, use the "wonderful" and "youre beautiful" prattling pates, and jump off a cliff. invader vanquished
Or as Strunk and White said in Elements of Style (to the best of my memory), "Feel free to ignore everything in this book rather than write something inelegant."