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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Thank you for the kind words and advice. I’ve been muddling through the stages of grief - as you say - bouncing around in no particular order - and I’ve been giving myself time to process, and I’ve reached out to the family of my deceased friend, I’ve been helping them deal with the practical sides of the loss; packing up their house, dealing with their pets, helping their kids with the loss of their mom, and also just supporting and caring and talking.

    I’ve always struggled at my job to stay on task - I tend to drift off and get easily distracted, and I’ve always been able to angle that to a benefit- I’ll rapidly jump from task to task, produce results quickly on multiple things. But now this new distraction is my overwhelming sense of loss. I can’t schedule grief, and it bursts into my mind (already churning away on five different projects), and I have to try to suppress it, or step back from my desk and talk myself through it.

    But it never seems to ebb completely. Always there, and any single little trigger - seeing anything that reminds me of my friend - puts me back into the misery spiral. I’m sure it’ll pass in time, and since she died (just over a month ago) I did notice things began to get a little less difficult. But then her parents asked me to take her phone and go through it and clean out any photos / references/ etc about what killed her (bad boyfriend, drug overdose) - and that process just re-opened the wound. I feel like I’m going through it all right from the moment it happened. And I find myself starting over on the grief cycle. The inability to shut it out of my mind.



  • I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.

    System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.

    And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.

    Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.

    Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.

    I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.