On the windshield I’m totally okay with this type of vandalism. It cleans up easily with alcohol and everyone will know this guys a douche canoe until he can do it.

Boston suburb. Barely…outside the 495 belt. Closer to Providence.

The belt used to be the dividing line for commuters and where housing costs started to skyrocket. It slowly moved outside the belt until 2020. So everybody around me is a Boston commuter with Boston wages and costs of living reflect that. Nobody is moving in since everyone is WFH, so our house value stagnated while houses further outside the commuter zone went up.

We actually would love to live somewhere a bit cheaper, but with that shift in the market, and the higher rates (we refi’d near the bottom), it’d be cost prohibitive to say the least.

Samesies. Nearly 200k gross between my wife and I. Wouldn’t know it after taxes, insurance, 401k, and HSA get taken out.

At least I’m fortunate enough to have those things. I’m quickly realizing that our weekly grocery bill alone for a family of 4 is almost as much as what I was taking home every week just 12 years ago. What fucking happened? Like, yeah, more mouths to feed, and we’re eating “better” (less prepared food, more plant based, etc).

How the hell do families get by? We are double the median household income for our area and our savings has stayed flat since our last vacation 2 years ago. We live rather modestly, one car payment, don’t buy a lot for ourselves, no major vices. Everything goes on credit cards that get paid off every month. Seems life just started nickel-and-diming us nonstop for a decade.

Proxies aren’t bad they are just dated.

Ironically the big problem with proxies is really that software doesn’t support them properly, usually due to lazy or unknowing devs.

A fridge keeping track of inventory is a massive PITA until all food has NFC chips in it and that raises further concerns.

I’d rather have a barcode scanner over the trash can if I’m gonna connect that much. Or even better, a full on camera. Then I can use it to scan barcodes on stuff as I throw it in the trash, plus semi-important mail and receipts.

That’s actually a cool little gimmick of some of the smart features. Downloading extra finish jingles.

Of course these are only a few bytes (or so I’d hope). And limited to what they do. Still sometimes they have seasonal selections. It’s cute and gimmicky and totally unnecessary, sure. But that’s the charm.

Push notifications are nice. Especially when the washer is uneven. But especially nice just to get a notification when it’s done.

Maintenance reminders too.

Best is when you leave the house with a blanket and a hoodie in the dryer on “remote start” mode. Turn it on when your 10-15 minutes from home and have a hot blanket and hoodie to snuggle up in as soon as you walk in the door.

Notepad is supposed to be the simplest most basic way to view a text file in Windows.

Yet if I have a large text file (like a log), it’s usually faster for me to just fire up WSL and use less. How is this still a fucking problem?

Yes, this is a fair point. The wait between episodes was just as important as the episodes themselves. All the community buildup, discussion, fan theories, etc.

That may not be the majority of viewers, but they certainly are your shows “free” hype men. They’re the ones that’ll tell everyone they know who would be interested (pre-qualified leads!) all about their favorite new obsession. They’re also the ones that’ll buy merch, or name their kid after Daenerys Targaryen (they say that Danielle is an old family name and they just call their girl Danni for short but you know it’s because they were heavy GoT watchers).

Maybe that’s part of why streaming services are going back to weekly (i.e. Handsmaid Tale) or split-season (i.e. Stranger Things) releases. It’s not just for profit…the suspense between the episodes can be just as, if not more, valuable and enjoyable as the episodes themselves.

I wouldn’t say it’s completely insane.

It’s a modification of the trolley problem. The “do nothing” path goes downhill and has a hell of a lot more bodies. The switched path still has bodies but at least it’s uphill and you’ll have a chance to slow it down or stop it.

That’s lame and easy to figure out.

Switch to wireless mice. Maybe Logitech Unifying. Then one day pull all the dongles out and put them in a bucket.

First person to figure out how to download and install the unifying software and re-pair their mouse without using it gets a bonus.

But most people nowadays are lost without mice so they’d probably cycle through all the dongles on the laptop plugged into the projector and all move their mice until they figure out which is whose.

This struggle is real. Except I forget which email address I used because I use a lot of aliases.

Normally my password manager would handle it but sometimes there’s re-branding and a new domain and the password manager can’t figure it out.

Yeah but who is a poorly maintained car gonna kill besides its occupants in a state like KY. Hell even emissions in a state that sparse. Juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

They must be somewhere that doesn’t salt and maintains its roads.

Does such a mystical place exist?

Don’t forget that when an amendment does get ratified, you’ve got to really nail it or else people will still be fighting over the verbiage.

You’d think “keep it simple stupid” would suffice, but look at how we interpret this:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

IANAL, but I see a few things as I read it:

• Militias must be well regulated. I agree.
• Militias are necessary to the security of a free state. Sounds a bit dated but I don’t disagree.
• The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Ok…so…is that “the right” can’t be infringed, or “the arms” can’t be infringed? Who are the people, and are they separate from the well-regulated militia? Because you can have a right to bear arms, but still limit what arms are available for civilian use. Non civilian use would be either military or para-military, the latter would be a militia, which ipso facto must be well-regulated, and as such there must be restrictions on arms because how are you going to regulate a militia if not its armaments? It’s not well-regulated if it’s a free-for-all. This is law. There are rules.

Should I be able to buy a nuke? An ICBM? A tank? Live grenades? Where is the line drawn? When does it transition from “civilian hunting and defense” to “military fetishism” to “para-military/militia” to “military”. Because it must be somewhere. And I feel like there’s one group of those four that’s really being a stick in the mud over it.

Have you met a bully?

Usually bully has a reason that they bully, but their targets are just whoever looks like an easy target. If it turns out that they are, they keep them.

Sounds like she got hooked.

They didn’t want people think OpenTF meant they were DownTF.

They totally are DTF, they just didn’t want you asking about it.

Most of our coffee is drip. Sometimes cold brew. Espesso, cappuccino, Turkish, press, etc…we don’t do that much. Fancy coffee, sure, but not our “it’s Monday and I can’t even” coffee. Or our “it’s Tuesday and I can’t even” coffee, or so on.

Fast service shops and such will have “cappuccino” or “espresso” but I think it’s either concentrate or it’s just not the same.

We do have a serious unspoken caffeine addiction though. It comes from our Protestant work ethic while having our wallets bled dry. We end up with hustle culture and a stimulant addiction. Hooray!

Led to a big dip in the arts as well.

Look at Tony Best Musical winners/nominees from the 90s. The only truly memorable ones (and probably the only ones still touring) are Rent (surprise, AIDS!) and Miss Saigon. Then a couple of Disney shows (Lion King and Beauty and the Beast) and that’s about it.

Starts picking up in 2001 again with Full Monty and The Producers…2002, Mama Mia…2003, Hairpray…2004, Wicked…2005, Spamalot…2006, Jersey Boys and The Wedding Singer…and so on. Nearly every season has had an amazing blockbuster show that has (or will have) staying power. The late 80s and 90s were a total rut for that.

I’d even say it started falling off earlier, circa 1979. What did we get after Sweeney Todd? The entire decade, best shows were Cats, Phantom, Joseph, Into the Woods and Les Mis. That’s about it. And a lot of people aren’t Cats-people.