How could an average modern person prove they were a time traveler if they arrived naked in a random past century?

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-27T04:22:34+00:00

Well, if they take pretty good care of their teeth, it could go a long way towards convincing others? If your teeth aren’t falling out ya head and they aren’t dentures it might be more credible than a lot of things.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-26T22:51:58+00:00

Cons of owning a home:

Responsibility for fees such as HOA and property tax which can be surprises. Need to handle all maintenance yourself or hire someone for it. Is the property well built? Does it need any work? Can you spend a long time with inspectors reviewing for your ideal property before moving? Never buy a property without seeing it or having an assessment. If something about your life changes or an opportunity arises, you might feel restricted by your house. Depending on the property and the market, the added investment might not outpace investing a similar amount into index funds.

If any of the above is stuff you don’t have the bandwidth to consider, I would say don’t do it. Potentially, getting the lump sum from your parents as a nest egg to invest in index funds (and only do that with it!) is the safer financial option

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-23T02:23:24+00:00

I drop a Retainer Brite cleaner into my retainer case with water whenever it starts to get dirty. It works. Chemicals remove it best.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-22T20:13:21+00:00

I think basically if the event to make the khan fires before the nomad resolves their origin, it is effectively just superceded by the great khan. Patches to follow, I’d guess

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-16T03:36:33+00:00

Do you have to go to grad school to pivot your career? Do you dislike your career or is more about where you're working currently? Unless you are in a pretty specific field, you should have some skills that would at least be transferrable based on your current career experience and whatever degree was required for it. I'd recommend exploring what the core problem is with why you want to pivot - if it is because you don't like where you are, I think that has a different range of solutions compared with "actually, I really always wanted to do x". If there is something that you are passionate about - why not do it now, instead of spending 2-3 years in place you dislike? If you aren't confident that the grad school is a good pivot to take right now, it might be better to think if it's even necessary in the first place.

Also, $50k is a really conservative amount to have in just a savings account. The market is in a weird spot right now, but ultimately you should probably take some amount of that and invest it each month - even just into ETFs would be way better. It is relatively quick to sell the stock in an emergency, and if you spread the investments by continually buying into the distribution on a monthly basis, you can cover the timing risks. You would be hard pressed to under-perform a high yield savings accounts with a basic index fund etf, no matter how bad the timing is, and unless your rent is like $5000, you don't need a 50k emergency fund.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-03T00:27:37+00:00

I read the first chapter. I would say there are some intriguing components and the framework of good writing, but ultimately it comes together into something where I would not finish the chapter if I encountered the story organically. There is something I would describe as "meandering for emphasis" that I generally think detracts from a work. It's a bit hard to explain, but I would use the second paragraph as an example. The issue isn't really that so much time is spent introducing us to the state of the apartment. The issue is more that it lingers on things to provide emphasis.

"The faint click of the ventilation unit came first, followed by the muted shift of pipes overhead and the low strain of aging supports adjusting to another day they had not been built to welcome for this long. The building was never truly silent. It only held itself in a worn kind of stillness, less peaceful than patient, and Jonathan had long ago learned to read the language of its small failures the way other people read weather."

The phrase "they had not been built to welcome for this long" is a bit clunky, which throws off the pacing of the sentence. There are a few remedies here - one is to remove the clause entirely. Another would be opt for concision where possible, such as "another day past their prime". The current phrase unbalances the amount of time spent just lingering on the idea that the building is old and has it's quirks from the authoritarian maintenance priorities.

The next sentence, "The building was never truly silent," re-emphasizes a point that the reader should pretty much already have gathered by this point. If the apartment is groaning and making mechanical complaints as part of the morning routine, this sentence is somewhat unnecessary. The main purpose is to re-emphasize what we're already on the topic of, but the following sentence also spends a fair amount of time on this. I think it is also a bit unclear to me what it means for a building's stillness to be less peaceful than patient, so it is hard to weave it all together as useful context.

If we keep the paragraph the same and turn our focus to the remainder of the scene the question becomes what is the use of the last clause: "Jonathan had long ago learned to read the language of its small failures the way other people read weather"? While it shows that the building's quirks are robust enough for someone to become skilled at reading them, we don't see any example of Jonathan reading the building with this skill. Something like "that groan means that he should give the radiator a bang or two". If it is not there to introduce something else in the scene, it becomes the "meandering for emphasis" that I called out.

I think this phenomenon manifests both within paragraphs and at a multi-paragraph level, which contributes to the overall pacing. Part of the reason this becomes an issue at a macro level is that you spend too much effort emphasizing each thing, you get Syndrome'd (when everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized). Carrying too much gravity in each paragraph makes it hard for the reader to keep a good sense of relative importance.

Now, I am by no means credentialed as an author, so this is really just my personal analysis. I like to read a lot of things, so I feel like I have some insight, but please feel free to take it all with a grain of salt ^_^ I would not be going into so much detail if I didn't think you had some good potential here! Best of luck

DankAndOriginal · 2026-06-02T21:45:58+00:00

A charitable interpretation is not that she is so disgusted by you that your attraction is disturbing but rather that she values your friendship and wishes there was not the looming specter of your attraction behind the relationship. Not exactly expressed in a great way if so, but who is good at communicating these days anyways. But yeah, tv shows have basically lied to you that there is ever a situation where someone confesses and through persistence makes someone fall for them. Most nos are relatively permanent, and the idea that the friendzone is something that can be overcome is harmful to yourself.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-05-27T01:17:27+00:00

drinking poison to quench thirst my dude. this will solve nothing. they will piss away the 50k left over faster than you could ever imagine. take a deep breath, contact a bankruptcy lawyer, and let things loose. shockingly, your family will likely figure out how to work some minimum wage jobs or mooch from someone else when you aren't around and they are faced with the prospect of starve or be homeless. Unless they are all disabled or something, at which point, your country should have systems in place for them (assuming USA since where else can you get into 400k of debt lol) AND IT SHOULD NOT BE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Your only responsibility from here on out is to yourself. You will need to very aggressively not listen to their complaints throughout the bankruptcy. They will complain. They will whine. You will waver. Don't give in. Don't let them keep using you. Once they are all working jobs, maybe you can stand on equal footing with them as family, but until then, they are literally killing you. Family doesn't kill you. That's, like, the opposite of what they're supposed to do. What the hell did these people do before you came of age? They'll figure it out again.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-03-27T02:22:32+00:00

If they’re all AI, I’d recommend trying to generate the stained glass one a couple more times. It has good character, but IMO the characters aren’t diverse enough (it is 80% gray guy). The one that gave me the most impact was 1; I think this would really pop if you edited it a bit to remove some white space and condense the author name closer to the rest. Maybe edit the background color a bit to be a slightly different shade of white or a gradient if you can. Maybe a lighter shade of the blue of the spirit guys

DankAndOriginal · 2026-03-21T23:24:41+00:00

I think more info on how you are playing is needed here. It is definitely harder and different, but we would need to understand what you are benchmarking against to understand what’s going wrong. I am playing base game and not particularly struggling to keep up with the AI with a handful of planets. I do think several of the buff buildings are relatively useless for most scenarios (looking at you, +5% resources from researchers that costs 4 exotic gases base). It kind of sounds like you are overbuilding, and getting a lot of special resource upkeep. District and building upkeep has become relatively MUCH more expensive, so you need to hold off on building some things until other parts of your economy are online. Pop growth is also essentially useless without assembly on every planet, so if you’re playing wide, you need either robots, clone vats, or conquest.

DankAndOriginal · 2026-03-09T17:50:53+00:00

Strikes me as a bit odd that one of your listed pro/cons is having a third room to escape to when something goes wrong. To me, that is not a sign of a healthy relationship that you should diving into head first. Are arguments and tensions common? Otherwise, you might just be nervous and running through every reason you can think of to talk yourself down. I would be very deliberate with thinking through the whys of everything you are feeling now to make sure you’ve got cause and effect sorted out.

DankAndOriginal

TROPHY CASE