I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I’d have put that thing on ASAP.
Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that’s totally apart from the safety issue.)
I needed Unicode symbols for a story I’m working on. (I want to use them as “magic runes” so I could type them into a document, but without using the standard “runes” that are typically used.)
Shape Catcher let me draw what I was looking for and then get a list of Unicode characters that matched that drawing. It’s not exact so if there’s no perfect Unicode match, it will give you ones that are close. This actually turned out to my benefit as I found shapes I hadn’t considered but which worked nicely for my uses.
Hey, I may feel old, but I’m not THAT old! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to yell at some kids to get off my lawn.
Back when I was in high school, a friend of mine introduced me to his friend. This kid, knowing that I’m Jewish, started to go on a rant ending with “the only thing Hitler did wrong was not finishing the job!”
Him saying that me and my family should be killed for the “crime” of being Jewish… Well, offended seems too light of a word. I blew right past offended and landed in ANGERED.
Now, usually, I’m a pretty relaxed guy. I typically don’t get angry even if I should. But this made me want to punch the guy right in his Hitler loving face. My friend had to hold me back.
(And before anyone asks, this wasn’t the kid being “edgy” or trolling me to get a reaction. He actually worshipped Hitler and thought he was a great man.)
Not a customs officer, but over a decade back I had job duties that involved posting photos of babies online. The parents would give their consent, maternity would snap the photos, and I’d put them on the website (complete with the option to order prints).
One of the babies was named “Secret Angel.” First name Secret, middle name Angel. That girl would likely be in her teens or early twenties by now. I still sometimes wonder if Secret had any trouble with her name given how much kids can bully other kids for the slightest thing.
That’s why I append my sarcastic posts with /s. It’s a habit I picked up on Reddit where you could easily see someone posting that same comment, but being 100% serious. The /s kind of ruins the joke, but I’d rather the joke be ruined than have people think I was serious when I said those kinds of things.
I frequent Lemmy, Mastodon, and Threads. I feel like this is true in any of the three. Occasionally, I’ll wade in, but more often than not I regret it.
This is especially true on Threads where the algorithm sees you arguing with someone saying X and then says “hey, you must want to see more posts that say X.” I finally realized that all I was doing was feeding the algorithm and stopped replying.
For the longest time, I wanted to see the Percy Jackson series adapted. (I’m not counting those movies!) Thankfully, it is and the first book/first season will be coming out in December. I hope they are able to expand to the entire universe that Riordan made. There are so many stories that would be great to see.
If all you consume is news and social media – which have incentives to show the most extreme views, events, and content – you’re going to have a distorted picture of the world as a 100% awful, dangerous place.
Especially with social media sites that have algorithms. Did you view a thread slightly longer because it was on a scary subject and people were arguing about it? You’ll see more of that. Did you get angry at another post and decide to reply to correct them (possibly using ALL CAPS)? You’ll get more of those.
Repeat again and again until the only posts in your feed are the ones that raise your blood pressure and make you want to scream.
GenX-er here. I grew up thinking that any day nuclear weapons would fly and obliterate us all. Coping with “one political party wants to turn the country into a Christian Fascist state” is easy by comparison.
With the nukes, I had no say in the matter. The USSR could have lobbed nukes at us at any moment and the best I would have been able to hope for would have been a quick death. (Dying slowly from radiation poisoning and starvation would be much worse.)
With the Republicans, I can vote and encourage others to vote. I can work against it. Yes, I’m only one person. I’m not going to topple their efforts myself, but thanks to the Internet, I have plenty of people helping me to thwart their plans.
And its sister shows Amphibia and The Owl House. (Though I’m still upset that The Owl House wasn’t given a full third season.)
ZScaler. It’s supposedly a security tool meant to keep me from going to bad websites. The problem is that I’m a developer and the “bad website” definition is overly broad.
For example, they’ve been threatening to block PHP.Net for being malicious in some way. (They refuse to say how.) Now, I know a lot of people like to joke about PHP, but if you need to develop with it, PHP.Net is a great resource to see what function does what. They’re planning on blocking the reference part as well as the software downloads.
I’ve also been learning Spring Boot for development as it’s our standard tool. Except, I can’t build a new application. Why not? Doing so requires VSCode downloading some resources and - you guessed it - ZScaler blocks this!
They’ve “increased security” so much that I can’t do my job unless ZScaler is temporarily disabled.
I think it also got tied into the incel movement and became a toxic phrase. Even if you didn’t know the actual science, would you want to call yourself an “alpha male” if it made people think you were an incel?
The technical description of that feat is called Plus Ultra.
That and the “Alpha Male” garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn’t about people.
Or the related one: “I’d like to thank God for coming through this surgery.”
What about the doctors, nurses, and various other staff members?
Try freezing peeled ripe bananas. Then puree them in a blender with some chocolate and peanut butter. Refreeze and you get a chocolate peanut butter banana “ice cream.”
Two times, but both are similar incidents:
The first was when my oldest was nearly 1. He was running a fever and we called the doctor to see what to do. The doctor suggested a lukewarm bath to bring his temperature down. This seemed to help and my wife went to get a towel. As she came back, my son looked up at her, but it was like he was looking through her. Then, his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.
I grabbed my son and shouted his name. There was no response and he was turning blue. My wife called 911 and her parents as I put him on the bed. The only thing that came to mind was “stop him from swallowing his tongue.” (This isn’t a thing I later found out, but I was panicking.) The emergency crews came as he started breathing again.
At the hospital, they said it was a febrile seizure and it can happen with infants/young kids. It’s harmless most times, but very scary.
The second incident was with my younger son. He started running a fever and the doctor recommended a lukewarm bath. I think you can see where this is going and so did I at the time. I told my wife to get the towel beforehand. She also called her parents and they came over before we put him in the bath.
Sure enough, our younger son was fine until he stopped responding. Only he didn’t turn blue. He turned grey. And he didn’t start breathing again on his own. We called 911 and my mother-in-law did rescue breaths on him.
I was running from the front door, looking for the ambulance, to the bedroom - watching my mother-in-law trying to help my lifeless son breathe. My father-in-law told me that I didn’t need to run back and forth. He said he’d look for the ambulance. I told him that I couldn’t just watch my son lifeless like that. I needed to DO something. Even if it was completely useless, I needed to be doing something.
My younger son finally started breathing on his own and was fine. He went on to have many more febrile seizures until he (FINALLY) grew out of them. (He also had a tendency to fall and hit his head thanks to a hip issue. I swear that half of my grey hairs are thanks to him!)
I got the tiniest glimpse of what losing a child might feel like and it was scarier than I could handle. Even writing this out is raising my anxiety. I never want to feel that way ever again.
We’d be up to Android “Toffee” with Android “Uncooked Cookie Dough” coming out soon.
My company switched up retirement plans and they held a seminar to explain them. The person running the seminar said that we should be putting 15% of our salaries into retirement.
Nice idea, but if I put 15% of my salary into retirement, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. I’m not living extravagantly or anything (buying something for $20 for my enjoyment seems like a splurge to me). Still, whenever I seem to be getting on a better financial footing, life throws me a curve ball. Need new hearing aids ($3,600). New a new dryer ($750). Might need a new car soon.
So either I need to be paid a lot more, I will be working until I’m 90, or I put away the money and go deep into debt but can retire. (Just kidding. I’m nearing 50. I likely won’t have enough to retire. Maybe when I’m 80.)