Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

I am hoping they are going to release that documentary on solitary confinement. That sounded like a pretty powerful experience.

Interesting. I guess the same could be said of a traditional game, or movie, could it not? Everyone in the 30s and then 80s was probably wondering what the deal was with the movie screen or video game thing until Citizen Kane and Pac-Man came around.

But alas, I’m married with two kids now. If I want to experience a hot tub with two attractive friends, I’ll need some kind of…

looks directly at camera

…Hot Tub Time Machine.

They both have advantages and disadvantages but VR introduces a concrete sense of scale and personal space that neither of those mediums have. When an avatar gets in your face in a game and makes a sexually explicit motion it’s at worst an eyeroll. When that happens in VR it can be actually upsetting to people, just like real life. VR reintroduces personal space as a thing, for both good and bad.

Games also have to go through all kinds of hoops to present scale effectively. Just scaling things without the right presentation will often fall flat. VR gives you an immediate, effective perspective for scale while still able to take advantage of all the various tricks to make it even more impressive.

I dealt with my mother all weekend. She’s in very bad health due to advanced atherosclerosis. She made a decision last year she wanted to avoid further surgeries related to it, as the disease is so advanced now, they wanted to do a quadruple arterial bypass and warned they were unsure of the success due to major blockages where bypasses were needed. She’s on borrowed time, that kind of period where doctors tell you things like, “well, anywhere from a few months to a few years.”

This weekend she had a stroke. She’s had one before. Though not as major as one she had prior, it was still bad enough that she will need rehabilitation and reassessment of her living alone. Talking about all this with my sisters was extremely hard, depressing, and sad. I hate being the sibling that is pragmatic, especially when things like this happen. I also hate being the sibling with the furthest emotional distance from my mother, because it makes discussions like that even harder for my sisters to take. Discussions with doctors and staff, palliative care, hospice care, social workers, clergy, family, all of it is completely exhausting and even more depressing than what is happening in the first place, which you simply numb to over time.

Sorry for bringing the thread down a bit, I’m getting this off my chest. It’s been hard to deal with, as each step along the path of my mom’s failing health just leads me to self-reflect on my own mortality and just how quickly things can change in life. Even today we transition her from a hospital stay to the stroke rehabilitation center not far away.

I offer my sympathy. It is a heart wrenching decision to make. In my case, it was the choice of placing my grandmother in a nursing home or her potentially burning the house down from leaving pots on a little stove and forgetting about them.

No apologies. I hope the best for you, and that you can do what is best for your family. Sounds like you have a tough burden being the voice of reason, but you have our support. Chin up.

Agreed with Craig. One of my favorite things about Qt3 is that we can come together to support each other for everything from tips for a tough game puzzle to life-changing moments of pain and fear. Never feel bad about bringing something like this to the forum, man.

I hope the best for you and yours and, at the end of the day, I think folks will be grateful for your calm and steady leadership through this stuff. It sucks that responsibility’s been thrust on you, but it sounds like you’re well-equipped to handle it.

Best, Skip.

Thanks, guys.

Man, the one thing you just never prepare for is the eventuality of taking care of your aging parents/siblings/SO. Or at least, I never prepared. And it sneaks up on you so fast. One small event leads to another and suddenly, you’re the parent, the caretaker, the one making decisions on health and care, etc.

Hang in there. I’m also the pragmatist in my family and damn stupid when it comes to not understanding proper human communication so I’ve been there. You’ll get through it.

It’s hard, being in the role of caregiver to a parent. I’ve done it twice, for my Mom who suffered through, and died of, ovarian cancer seven years ago. And more recently my father, who had a degenerative neurological condition from age 49 to his passing last year at age 79 from an unknown illness, probably unrelated to that condition. So I know of what I speak. It’s damn, damn hard. And at times you will probably be angry at the unfairness of it all, and resentful, and that’s so normal as to be a cliché. It sucks, and that’s it. So, as one fellow traveller to another, just keep doing what you can, when you can, in the way that you can live with. And that’s all anyone can ever do.

I ran with a few thousand other people!


About 12000 participants across the three races (5k/10k/25k), and I’m guessing at least that many more in volunteers, spectators, etc. Downtown Grand Rapids was pretty crowded!

Awesome!

Well I’ve turned my swamp back into a pool again. It’s a little cloudy but I just need to even out the chemicals.

The first year here I hired a company to open and close the pool. Second year I had them close it with a cover but I had to get help removing the cover and not dump the swamp water into the pool… This year, I called to see how long it would take to get a team here… 3 weeks, decided to do it myself. This was solid green with swimmers in it about… five days ago.

I might do the more expensive cover thing this year, with a roller though so I can remove it solo. We’ll see.

As someone who grew up with a pool, I feel your pain @Nesrie. My parents put in a small pool when my sisters and I were younger. I was the oldest and just starting high school at the time. That meant I was free labor, thus I was the pool boy. Back then, it was a horrible chore, now not quite as much from what I understand.

I’m assuming you did a shock for the beginning of the season. Pool chemicals are pretty awesome that way. Opening/closing was something we did every year as well due to NC getting a bit too cold for swimming around September or so, and we usually opened late April or early May. We had a very shitty cover. At some point you just say, screw it and yank it off, mucky water or no. It just means more shock and a little more skimming and filter vacuuming after.

I’m assuming water testing has changed since I had to do things then. Is it easy to do now? Are there less types of chemicals you have to add for shock and then maintenance?

By the way, just looking at your pic I can tell you recently shocked it, as it hasn’t quite filtered out yet. By next week or so that will be crystal clear I’m betting.

My parents had a pool, the house came with it when we moved in when I was 3. So I spent many years cleaning and preparing the pool. Ironic as I hate the feeling of skin after drying with the chlorine making it all tacky.

But back then we had the vials with droppers to test pH and chlorine levels, now they have paper strips that combo them. Dip them in the water and done. Given the trees nearby the opening and closing always required heavy skimming to remove plant matter. Also it tended to get heavy algae. We didn’t open until mid may/ early june, and closed by Memorial day. Chicago, what you gonna do.

But we always had problems with holes in the covers. Ducks and various other creatures loved to go out onto the pool cover, since it tended to collect water. So very few made it past 3 years before they were too full of holes to be any use.

I had the same, what a royal pain it was using those vials. We had the same issue with pool covers as well. They were made of a crap material that eventually just needed to be replaced. The first uncovering each year always led to being grossed out with all the wildlife that had still ended up in the pool/skimmer. I routinely pulled live and dead critters from the skimmer throughout our pool season. It’s just one of the nasty parts about having a pool you get used to. My biggest surprise was always a dead snake, guaranteed about once a season. But dead birds, frogs and field mice were … common?

Fortunately ours was an above ground pool, so we never had anything more exotic than wasps and spiders. Or during those special years, cicadas.

Hey, speaking of, it’s that year here, Cicadapocalypse. I’m so glad I don’t deal with a pool anymore. Once bitten, twice shy.

Well we had an above ground pool when I was a kid… and the kids spent a fair amount of time vacuuming or you know just swimming in a green pool.

Yeah I’ve been shocking it off and on for about a week and the Aquabot and myself with a scrub brush has cleared up most sides. I need to sit down and really check out the chemical levels this week. As far as I can tell there are some really good testing kits out there but they’re still about the same. They have strips and apps… they aren’t as accurate though as the droppers.

I plan on updating mine this year because I had a stabilizer problem one year and started shifting to just plain Chlorine/Bleach instead of the tabs.

Emptying 3 inches off the top of an in ground pool is no small amount of water, let me tell you. I can’t imagine why some people around here actually drain their pools rather than shock it back to life (they’re not supposed to do that).

My first critter this year, outside of bugs, was a snake… but he wasn’t dead.

Now I’m unsure if you’re an experienced herpetologist, or if you’re talking about the Metal Gear Solid series somehow. :)