This reminds me of a story I saw once (screenshot of someone’s post). I’m probably butchering this, I can’t find it.

They were talking to their very young niece or something about becoming a success, and the kid asked if it was a lot, and she said she needed to get accepted to college, take a bunch of classes to graduate, and find a job after, and the kid said “thats easy, it’s only three things.”

And so I have a friend who also struggles with neurospicy, and we try to simplify each other’s lives by saying “yeah, but that (enormous thing you need to do) is only two things!” And when either of us gets a lot done, whatever number of tasks gets listed, we say “I’m so proud of you, that’s so many things!”

So it feels a lot better to break things down strategically, but it can also help to strategically underplay them :). the external support has also been a blessing, but in a totally different way.

He was a rich boy, but how rich could he have been if he’s hiring Quint instead of a proper crew on a research vessel?

That feels very “those billionaires wouldn’t have realistically gone down on that titan submersible” to me

Have literally never seen that sub tag used in any way but as an insult, but alright, I’ll take your word for it.

Haha, I totally understand. I don’t trust those guides at all.

I’m a language lover myself (I like learning, but after trying for many years with multiple languages, I’m not super into practice ;) so I learn about how languages work instead!) and if there’s anything I’ve learned about language it is this:

It does not matter how you sound or what you actually say as long as the message you intended to get across actually gets across to whomever you mean to hear it. If people mispronounce, it is usually either regional (and thus correct for them) or something they read and have never heard anyone say. If they use the wrong word but it’s kinda right, they are probably language learners.

This was galvanized for me when I took an art history class as a general education credit in college. I learned that clerestory is pronounced clear-story. I’d only ever read the word before that, and thought it was more in line with modern patterns to be CLE-rest-ory, which is embarrassingly wrong. I’d been reading it that way for years.

Your sister sounds like a language prescriptivist, and they are always wrong, because language simply doesn’t work like that.

That’s just rude. I like knowing random things and sharing them with people. I have a literal degree built around doing that. You don’t have to think I’m being genuine if you don’t want to, but this is my experience.

This pairs nicely with anxiarrhea: the shits you get when you get really anxious, especially prevalent in the morning before work.

I don’t think that’s a word, just what I call it…

I wouldn’t either, and I’m one of the people who knows me.

I actually have a number of games that are Ubisoft that I love. They aren’t super new or anything, but they aren’t flops by my metrics (granted, I bought them used long after launch)

I didn’t know they were when I got them, then the ubiconnect thing comes up and I just don’t do that, and it’s just a game that takes longer to load than it should.

Idk about any super bad practices, maybe PC is different from console stuff? (which is how I play, hence used game market, because I can sell it later if needs must) or is this something that spans console as well? What sort of bad practices?

It has gotten to the point where the people I know just wholly believe almost everything I say, unless I preface or follow up with “I’m pretty sure that’s right but now I’m gunna double check” (and if I’m wrong because of new info, or I misremembered something, I totally own it, and read the correction from someone else out loud)

I could so very easily horribly mislead all the people I know, because I’m a random information machine, but I almost never say things I’m not entirely sure about without the preface or follow up combined with actively looking it up and setting the record straight. If I turned evil, it would take them years to realize it was intentional.

New people are fun. They challenge me a lot on things I don’t need to preface or follow up. Never works out that well for them, but we get to learn about each other!

Good reason to be an ex.

I think this game is called car jam mania or something like that. The cars can’t turn and you have to figure out how to get them out before the timer runs out and the cops show up to start issuing citations. The more citations get handed out the lower your score :(

Afaik, the closest walmart is way further than an actual grocery store, since we shut down their plans to pave a marshy woodland to set up a super center eyesore just across the highway (walking distance from my place; that would have been a nightmare). idk, I haven’t shopped there in over 20 years. Don’t really plan to start now for the sake of convenience, since that’s how we got that mess in the first place, but I appreciate the info all the same :)

Around here, that stuff tacks on a huge convenience fee for pick and pack, making it actively not worth doing. Last I looked, it was some $18 fee no matter how many items, and I’d still have to drive 20 min to pick it up, so might as well just… do my own shopping. (For reference, I live alone in a semi-rural area, so each trip is like $100)

Now if I could get it delivered (same fee, but nobody has a service area that overlaps my address), that’d be a different story.

Sure, they might know my identity. But very importantly, they aren’t every single random company out there whose website I happen to briefly access for whatever reason. They don’t need to know anything about me, and they shouldn’t.

I can’t do anything about big tech companies knowing things about me, tho I do try to limit it when I can, but not literally everyone needs to know who I am just because I want to access their content. That’s absolutely absurd.

It definitely isn’t impacting me in the slightest. Idk what you do with your time, but I don’t really want my platforms to be unmoderated cesspools, and the places I do choose to exist or use are in line with what I want, so… meh. It’s literally not an issue I have.

Breweries and bars in my area are often kid-friendly with toys and everything, and I just don’t go to those places. I do the same with online spaces. They aren’t meant for me if they aren’t what I’m looking for, so I don’t go. There’s plenty of places that are for me, though, and I go to those places on and offline.

Nope.

I don’t want anyone verifying my identity for any reason other than government or financial business, where there is a legitimate reason to do so. There is absolutely no reason some random-ass company needs access of any sort to my demographic information, when I am a legal adult doing things well within my rights to do. Especially if this thing was automated to feed that data without my consent or knowledge, as you are suggesting. Absolutely fuck all of that. Plus that would mean there’s a central query database of all the sites you’ve ever accessed for any reason, and that’s fucking scary, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

This wouldn’t work any better than any other privacy-leaky method anyway. People hand down phones to their kids a lot without factory resetting them. And stolen IDs/identity theft are a thing. And you don’t think that central identity bank would be prime target #1 for hackers? If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that companies WILL NOT protect your data properly, and they WILL NOT suffer consequences of any sort when (not if, when) there is a breach.

At the end of the day, ensuring someone else’s kids don’t have access to something said parent doesn’t want them to access…? Not my problem, and absolutely not a good enough reason to violate my privacy that thoroughly.

That’s totally fair; I’m also not really capable of doing something like that consistently (even tho I would absolutely love talking to smart people - my degree is science communication, so talking to smart people to learn about things and pass them along is easily my favorite thing), so I get it.

That kinda makes me wonder if interviewing comedians would be funny… I’ve never really talked to any in person for the full impact, but some of them have that timing and wit that means any conversation can be funny. I certainly thought morning radio shows where they have guest comedians on sucked big time, but those are meant more for mass appeal, and they probably work for a lot of people or they wouldn’t have them on.

Have you ever listened to the podcast “ologies”? It’s a woman who interviews people who are -ologists (proctologist, ornithologist, geologist, etc., as well as some non-ologist specialties that nonetheless fit the theme)

Maybe something like that would work for you :) then you aren’t stuck with a single topic, you don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to find one person to commit to it, it could be several. Just come up with good questions and have a semi-formal chat. It’s a very enjoyable model for learning new things you didn’t know you wanted to know about.

https://www.alieward.com/ologies

Yeah fair. I don’t have many options here, unless I want to pay 2-3x as much as a normal grocery (and I think probably zero options that don’t donate to conservative shit, realistically). We only have piggly wiggly locally, and those are so freakin expensive for almost everything (probably because they know they have a truly captive market in the people who can’t go that far, and everyone else is pushed there by sheer distance to the next option - if you run out of sugar, you’ll pay the extra $2 to save an entire hour) The closest real grocery store is 20 min by highway, and it’s also not very good.

I’ll keep that window trick in mind, thanks! Won’t work for baked-in-situ, since that’s all timer based, but I’m thinking that’s the full source of the failures anyway (it rises, but it’s pretty dense and then collapses a bit. My slices no longer look like Batman, but they still fall a half inch or so during baking… I’ve had to tone down the yeast, which alters the flavor and texture I’m sure)

Anyway, it’s cheap enough that I don’t mind trying a thousand iterations to find the lazy method that works, even if that does include just using the dough setting and transferring to my silicone bread pans. It’s fully edible, great for croutons, it’s just dense and a bit overly sweet most of the time. I wish I had the brain for fully hand-made bread, but I’d never remember to do the next steps on time to have it turn out properly.

Most people actually get paid either weekly or every other week, rather than monthly. So it really still won’t match up properly.

Most people here just intuitively understand how our pay/bills system works, because we are so accustomed to it. I’m not saying this to be flippant or anything but we have basically two types of standard employment job. We have hourly workers, who typically can tell you their hourly rate, but won’t really know what their take-home for a given pay period will be, due to inconsistent scheduling, tips, whatever, so using the whole year’s income (a number you have to use for taxes anyway, so you definitely know it) makes sense. Then you have people who have fixed hours or who are paid salary, and they usually describe their compensation package annually, because the specific monthly amount doesn’t matter so much as having it consistently, and it’s presented to them by their employer as an annual number because big numbers feel better when all the numbers are pretty small overall.

It makes adequate sense (in an “it functions well enough” sort of way) when you live in it your whole life and are used to it and nothing else, but I can see it being mighty confusing from the outside.

Oh hey, bumfucksville is right down the way from me! I feel your pain. Everything got wicked expensive super quickly, and wages suuuuuck, especially if you aren’t in/around Madison or Milwaukee. Even kwik trip bread has gotten wildly overpriced. I think that’s currently sitting around $5 for 2 (just a few years ago, used to be $1/2) And their eggs, used to be $0.99/12, now almost $4!! (I haven’t even looked at a regular grocery for those things lately, can’t afford them.)

I’ve started making my own bread. I have a bread machine I got used decades back for $20. It’s not very good bread yet, and I’d probably be better off not baking it in the machine, but it’s nearly free and stupid simple, so whatever. And if I can get my city to permit me for chickens (which they do, thankfully, up to 6, as long as your neighboring houses are either more than 100 feet from the coop, or they agree that it’s fine). Due to a company warehouse sharing my lot lines, I only have one neighbor, and I think it’s maybe more then 100 ft from where the coop will be. I have a (quite large) compost pile that will be included in their run, for them to scratch in and eat bugs, scraps, and mushrooms from (I added some leftover blue oyster spawn to the pile this year to help with the breakdown, since it’s largely sawdust cat litter, and for future chickens to eat), so I think they will end up being great nutrition for fairly limited cost.

Never thought I’d be the type to keep town chickens (we had a dozen growing up in the country, so I know exactly what effort is involved), but with costs being out of control, here we are.