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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Everything is easy until it isn’t.

    I built my family’s, and my extended families, computers until the early 2010s, I’ll never do it again. Building the computer was fun and easy, being on the hook for tech support is time draining and soul crushing.

    “Sorry Grandma, that cheapest possible 5400 rpm spinning drive is ten years old, you never backed it up, I’m really not the one to ask if you can get the pictures back. Okay we will try getting it to work as an external drive. Okay here we go, show me the folder you keep your pictures in. No this isn’t your desktop, (sign) we don’t need your hard drive to access your cable company provided email, yes the lemonade is wonderful (it’s bitter). Yes Aunt Martha’s cat is adorable.”

    Children think about your future weekends. It’s great being a hero, but with great heroics comes endless responsibilities. There’s ways less entertaining than sex to lose all your free time to helpless family incoherent babbling.








  • The CNC (computer controlled cutters) metals that slide into each other so tightly that you cannot see the seam, are created using 2 separate blocks of metal, one becomes the outer block and the other becomes the inner block, then they’re both polished together to appear seamless. There’s no practical way (as far as I know) to make significant cuts without losing or malforming some of the material (you can cut playdough without losing any of the mass, but it’s bunched up along the cut path.

    My very old understanding of how materials behave


  • Wish I had the exact number (my brain likes to count everything), but I’ve done like 100 flip turns at the pool this year. Back in high school I’d do over 100 a day. I’ve been telling myself for a decade “this is the year I’ll do flip turns every lap by x-date”, of course I set off this year with the same lie. And of course I’m not doing them on every lap, but at one point I did my first in over 20 years, and then I did a couple in a row, and then I realized how much less time I have to focus on such a trivial thing, but it was the act of exercising itself that I was benefiting from, not perfectly recreating who I was half a lifetime ago.

    I’ve kept going to the pool this year, and I’ve improved myself by doing that, I’m not going to be as fast or skilled or fluid as I used to be, I’m probably never going to flip turn every turn again, but I’m not going to get discouraged by not meeting my own goals that I’d set while looking in a rose tinted mirror.

    Could also phrase it as “swam over 100 km (really a bit impressive amount of distance, 1.5-2.5 km per day one of two days a week) listening to the same 4"the dollop”, “god awful movies” “citation needed” and “no such thing as a fish” episodes on repeat (because I kept forgetting to bring my swim headphones and their transfer cable to the same place at the same time)


  • The only time I touch the lever is if the person who’s responsible for putting people on the other track is on the other track (or if the other track is free and clear). Otherwise there’s never blood on my hands. You put me in this situation, with needing to pull the lever to make it happen, and I’m absolutely considering pulling that lever. You put the person who set that situation in motion on the “non pull” side and I still pull it.



  • Myself as well,

    A decade ago I built custom PC’s for my family and for my neighbors, the last ten years, ever since the chrome-books became viable, I’ve suggested just going with a bargain price laptop and GeForce now for gaming, I don’t need people asking me for help fixing issues, I don’t want to chase down bugs in hardware or compatibility,

    I’m not proud of losing my interest and letting my abilities be not put to use, but my time and blood pressure is better utilized in other areas. I have a 7 year old Dell laptop, a steam deck, and (until recently) an Xbox S. It’ll be nice to have something that plays my (very large) library at console quality without a subscription service/Internet requirement. I have GeForce now, but I don’t have the latency to run it.


  • 95% of the time when my best friend and I want to play together (and that’s 3-4 times a year these days with him having a family and my starting one), we end up trouble shooting for a decent portion of our gaming time.

    I’m not going to fool myself into the steam box never having any issues, as I am truly cursed (so much so that we even have unique problems with our decks), but taking Microsoft issues out of the picture would probably reduce our tech fixing instances by half.

    He has the money for a full gaming rig, I don’t have the means to get one going (believe me I used to, but I don’t any more), this has already been agreed on to be a day 1 purchase in my household, and the wife gets full custody of her monster train 2 machine (“my” deck)






  • Analytical chemist.

    Educated in Marine biology, started work on the dock that developed my ability to handle bizarre hours and self motivation, used the bizarre hours to get a harvest gig in wine making cellar work where I learned to grind, used my grind and bizarre hours to do some commercial electrical installation, then did some electric meter reading where I learned the importance of attention to detail, used all of the above skills to become a winery lab technician where I got experience working with high functioning lab equipment, wanted to get away from wine so now I’m a chemist.

    Life is good. I’ve been more underpaid at every step of the way, but I feel that’s allowed me to function with less stress at every step of the path.