I went back and checked my SO account history. I stopped posting answers regularly at the end of 2011. I can't remember now what drama caused me to stop, but in 2011 I was posting 2-3 answers per day, then in 2012 I didn't post anything until mid-year, then about a post or two per year, and my last post was over 6 years ago.
Digging through my local notes and journals as to why I stopped, I have an unpublished draft blog post from 2012 that has some examples of bad questions from 2012, and I later added https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 to it as something that resonated with me - "Why did I even help this guy? I have just been wasting my time". I must have been burned out on the whole thing by that point, but it was 10+ years ago and I've not even visited SO in years.
I do remember they added a tier of moderation around this time, and I had sufficient points to have access to that. Every time I visited the site it showed a red dot on the stuff-to-do icon, encouraging me to review a queue of bad questions. I'm pretty sure that was when I decided to stop contributing, because the site felt like it was more focused on the tedious bureaucracy of it all than the technical stuff.
Your story resonates with mine, and is also a complete opposite of what most people claim is the problem. Most people say "SO is full of unfriendly power users", and that's why it's in decline. But to me it's the opposite. The power users are what made SO, and they're tired of the influx of badly written questions, entitled people they're trying to help for free etc., of course people get burned out. But it's the useful users going away.
Hey, starting to write a reply to you caused me to remember why I quit. It was the moderation tools for sure.
One of them changed so that when you reviewed something it would show you at random a sample that had already been reviewed, but this was not indicated in any way. If you got the review "correct" it said "well done, that was to test you are paying attention!" - it was even more patronizing if you got it wrong.
I was so annoyed that they had wasted my time in this way that I stopped contributing all together. It was a wake up call that the whole site was taking advantage of our free labor, and I decided to do better things with my time.
The only other thing I can think of is GB Studio - https://www.gbstudio.dev/ - but the visual scripting there is like regular coding, but with visual blocks. It doesn't use boxes and lines. Instead, the script elements are more like blocks within blocks.
This explanation [2] on how the 3D was achieved may be interesting to you. The game X [3] used a similar technique to draw 3D on tiled backgrounds on the even more limited hardware of the old black and white (green and yellow?) Game Boy.
A breathing specialist (on a podcast, so take that with a grain of salt) said that breathing through your nose uses less overall muscles than through your mouth. This was focused on athletics training. By nose-breathing, the athletes were getting enough oxygen without heaving their chests so much, which uses more energy. The idea was that when you suck in air through your mouth, it works your chest more than is required, so you are wasting effort doing that. I tried it, nose breathing while working out, and it is incredibly difficult. Another guy on the podcast, the presenter, is an ex-rugby player and said he had to tape his mouth shut to be able to try it, and his nose was pouring with snot while jogging because he was not used to it.
I'm not saying it isn't to do with muscles, perhaps a sort of "muscle memory" due to years of breathing through your mouth, but my feeling is there's also a large psychological aspect to it. I nose breath when I remember, but it has to be a conscious effort to sort of clamp my mouth shut. Otherwise I'm :-O like that breathing. I feel like I'm going to suffocate if I nose breathe, but that's not the case of course when I actually force myself to do it.
Yep, I was not excluding muscle memory when I said it had to do with muscle. It is true that breathing through the nose seems effortless (at least when resting).
The "reeducation" consisted in a few 30 minutes sessions (probably around 5, not sure) and I don't remember having done any conscious effort to breathe through my nose after that. It just seemed easy.
That said, I still have to breathe through my mouth when running.
Yeah I stopped playing it pretty quickly. There was that not-wordle game where you had to not get the word. It made me realise just how tricky failing wordle was.
I still do "where taken", which is photos of countries, tradle for oec trade commodities and guess the game for video games. They're all far more interesting than guessing some random word.
Wow, that seems super hard but unusable on desktop for me. No native keyboard support? I could overlook that, but the letter reveal is extremely slow to load for me. Could be an issue on my end.
Here's a curated awesome-wordle list [1]. Back in the days (as if it is long ago) I used a different one and had quite some fun with some of the clones (I didn't check this specific one).
This repo still being up shows they probably didn't just auto-takedown every repo that has the word "wordle" in its name at least. Often not the case with DMCA abuse.
In Spanish it's officially "velcro" from the French abbreviation https://dle.rae.es/velcro and no alternative. About as generic as you get.
Speaking of velcro shoes, I inherited some velcro fastening trainers because my eldest kid felt he'd grown out of using them (he has the same size foot as me). I feel very self conscious wearing them in public because nobody wears velcro trainers. In the 6 months I've had them, I've been keeping an eye out in a busy European city, and I've seen just 1 person and that was a sort of work uniform shoe some guy had. Nobody has "fashion" velcro shoes. They do look kinda goofy I suppose.
This use has almost died out in everyday speech though. I listen to many podcasts in which different people across different age groups and backgrounds are always messing it up, e.g. "if I was good at this", which really clangs to my ears, but it's very common.
Yes! We discovered this during the pandemic, but usually cut more like classic French fries. Wedges like that recipe are also great. I used to hate making fries, messy and they're always too soggy, but done in the oven they're easy peasy and always great.
Digging through my local notes and journals as to why I stopped, I have an unpublished draft blog post from 2012 that has some examples of bad questions from 2012, and I later added https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 to it as something that resonated with me - "Why did I even help this guy? I have just been wasting my time". I must have been burned out on the whole thing by that point, but it was 10+ years ago and I've not even visited SO in years.
I do remember they added a tier of moderation around this time, and I had sufficient points to have access to that. Every time I visited the site it showed a red dot on the stuff-to-do icon, encouraging me to review a queue of bad questions. I'm pretty sure that was when I decided to stop contributing, because the site felt like it was more focused on the tedious bureaucracy of it all than the technical stuff.