I spent some time discussing this with my buddy, who ate an RPG round in close proximity, while serving in Iraq. He gradually lost his vision, all of it. It's so depressing to even think back on the chats, as I cannot imagine living w/o the internet I grew up on. Does anyone want to pair up and work on software that treats disabled users with respect? And who know, maybe make something a deaf or blind or N player can experience? I lived a lot of live w/ 100% brain capacity, not really making use of it, and then it was taken from me in an IED blast (Afghanistan). What I lack in skills, I guarantee you I will make up with experience. A frustrated Infantryman turned UX/UI/Product afficionado (and $90k startup employee)
I think we need to treat apprenticeships better. We need a stronger blue collar sector. At the same time, I'm worried about this trend towards anti-intellectualism I'm sensing these days.. It smells fascist, and that is bad.
I am not anti intellectual but I am anti college. It is a racket. Costs have exploded while at the same time transmitting information is as cheap as it is have ever been. It is about the signal you give from your degree rather than the education you get.
I used to go kayaking with my buddy in Monterey. He lost his eyesight due to war wounds, mine stayed-we bonded over that. He taught me something similar so we could go kayak in the sea together, all I had to do was make a noise every so often (~20-30secs) and he would be able to navigate that way, free. Good times.
Can 2nd this one, I tried Mint and Slackware this year, just because of the Win11 app checker thing kept popping and reminding me that i don't want another few years worth of BS like that.
While on a foot patrol in southern Afghanistan, I took a 500lbs SVBIED impact. Went through a wall, woke up on the ground, confused. Black out, wake up on a chopper, confused. Black out. What happened next was a never-ending dream/nightmare loop that lasted a bit under 1mo. I went from dream world to dream world, until I woke up, with too many pipes coming out of too many places. I have the unfortunate experience of knowing what Neo felt like when he woke up from the matrix. It took me a few weeks to re-acclimate to reality, dealt with a lot of anxiety/panic attacks. It turns out that some of the people I met in the dreamworld were real people. That weird afghan lady who would never leave was in fact my wife. The torturer ended up being my cardiac technician, and he wasn't torturing, he was keeping me alive with cardiac massages. There's a lot more. Some of it was made up some of it was real. I woke up next to a picture of the president giving me a medal, and another picture of myself and bob dole. Basically, my brain was trying to survive, and it fished from books I read, movies I've seen, and then the little bits of reality my wounded self could gather. Pretty trippy stuff. The weird part? I remember that month long coma dream like a crystal clear memory. I'm trying to figure out the best way to brain dump this weird story in a sharable format, but you know. Gotta pay the the bills first. Maybe I'll write a book some day
Just my two cents. Please consider brain dumping while the memories are fresh, as there is strong evidence that our memories evolve over time[1]. It sounds like you have a valuable story to tell. Editing can come later.
