I was in my 50s before I started understanding this stuff. Before that, I was married to a very gregarious man who was my social buffer. I could hide behind his small talk. But then he passed away and I was left twisting in the wind until I started to learn how to make small talk. Often I just ask myself what my husband would have said.

So are you autistic? Because the literal-mindedness of your answers and the lack of awareness of how to engage in small talk is telling. I say this as one on the spectrum myself; it took me a long time to understand this is just an attempt to establish social connections by finding points of commonality. “Oh, you’re from Calgary? I used to live there, too! Did you know a store called Myth Games?” Neurotypical people are also waiting for you to ask the same things in return and often feel miffed if you don’t show any curiosity about them.

Let’s get KOTOR2 with an actual ending as well

A FPS packed with Myst-like puzzles and atmosphere

Sewing on a button

Seen any good movies or shows lately?

Bartlet

Jed Bartlet from West Wing

Emoticon is made with text characters like this " :) "

Multiple methods, not really important which ones. I use an external hard drive plus I email zip files to myself.

Literally where can one go?

Was majoring in accounting and had to take a CS101 class programming in Pascal. Changed majors immediately, thinking “Where has this been all my life?” This predates PCs, although I did have a Commodore 64 to practice coding on BASIC after that.

Ingratitude

Halt and Catch Fire felt like my autobiography

I’ve been lucky with having good doctors, but my best friend OTOH … I took her to an ER because she had severe back pain for no reason. She’s diabetic, and I noticed one of her toes looked black. I pointed this out to the doctor, who dismissed it. She said my friend just needed some pain killers for strained muscles. As we were sitting in a drivethru waiting to pick up the prescription, my friend was getting worse, so I took her to a different ER. They said she was just constipated and gave her some laxatives. Two days later she is screaming in pain, can barely move, and is shitting herself from the laxatives. We take her to a third hospital ER and insist she be admitted. She lay in a hospital bed for days with no diagnosis. Finally when she fell and they realized her legs were paralyzed, they did an MRI and found she was nearly dead of sepsis and had three abscesses along her spine.

They put her on strong IV antibiotics and did surgery to clean the abscesses – telling her she only had a 20% chance of surviving the surgery and would probably never walk again. Four months later, after learning to walk again, she finally went home. She still has chronic back pain and adhesions from the surgery.

All from an infected toe that doctors couldn’t be bothered to check out.

COBOL because I am a fossil

Double-knit polyester leisure suits

Came here to say this. The term was meant as an insult although it really isn’t when you think about it.

Nightmare fuel

Interesting. This describes my experience pretty well, up to the point where I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and took an involuntary lungful of water. However, while the chest spasms and all the rest of it were uncomfortable, I didn’t consider it painful, per se. I was a strong swimmer at the time and accustomed to holding my breath to my limits of endurance, so maybe that made the difference.