Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between factual knowledge and just cleverness. There's no reason a bumpkin fresh off the farm can't be curious about what makes something tick, so they look under it or break it open - and whaddya know, they find a hidden thing. It's really up to the DM to say no, your character wouldn't know to do that. The intelligence you show when you figure out a puzzle or a trap could make total sense as the same spark that made the naive character want to leave the farm and explore the big wide world.
I'm surprised how many people don't know about a Linux utility called "fuck". When you make a mistake on the command line and get an error, you just type "fuck" and it looks at what happened and suggests a fix. If this looks correct - and it almost always is - you just hit Enter and it types that in for you. Best thing ever!
ClickBook - dunno if it's even available anymore, but like 20 years ago it was either a standalone or add-on that formatted Word docs for printing. I think it cost $35. You could lay out say a tri-fold brochure or a folded-in-half and stapled booklet and it would rotate, combine and print the pages in the correct order. My wife and I used it endlessly to produce publications for our kids' school. If your printer could only print on one side, there was a quick setup procedure that would would figure out how you should rotate or flip the stack of pages to do the second side. I haven't used Word in years so for all I know it might have these capabilities natively now, but in its time ClickBook was probably the most worth-it program I ever bought.
Everybody plays RPGs differently, but it's funny how some people don't get the term "roleplaying" and are constantly, relentlessly playing their real selves in the game. So you get barbarians with the sensibilities of software developers.
Thank you! I like making up usernames, and on reddit used to abandon them when I got tired of them. Past ones include HeebieMcJeeberson, MadJackMcMadd and AmiableBowelSyndrome. This was also a way to keep zeroing my karma so I didn't feel so addicted to reddit. I really like not having a cumulative Lemmy score.
My wife and daughter do this a lot, but their version is to quietly look up the actors and then announce their results during a lull, so it works out fine. I just do it in my head so I'm like yeah I know, she was also in whatever with Val Kilmer.
There are certain TV shows where you could spend the whole time figuring out who used to be in what - in the 80s Murder She Wrote featured just about every middle-tier actor from the 60s or 70s. Before that they were on The Love Boat. Seems like there must be a modern show full of 90s through 2010s actors but I don't know what it would be. Hey, there's Topanga!
Taxonomy is much more complicated than I remember from high school. For one thing I thought the top level was Kingdom, consisting of Animal and Plant. There's like 50x more to it. And I actually liked school and mostly paid attention. WTF?
Then the hunting party turned into a knocking everything on the floor party and a good time was had by all.