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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • My son went as Wario.

    • Overalls, $15 used on Mercari
    • Yellow shirt: already owned
    • Yellow hat, $10 from a hat store

    I went as Waluigi, similar stuff and costs.

    There’s one more key consideration I haven’t heard people mention: you can choose to make your costume out of stuff you can wear outside of Halloween!

    My son can wear purple overalls any day of the year. Our hats aren’t cheap costume hats, they’re baseball caps, which are useful accessories you can wear any time.

    If you’re looking to get started making a Halloween costume, try going to a thrift store or an online reseller like Mercari and recognize that Halloween is an opportunity to buy stuff you kinda want to wear but feel self conscious about buying. Buy yourself a used leather biker jacket. It’s just a costume! But also… Now you happen to have a dope jacket in your closet. Maybe wear it the week after Halloween and see if it feels right…

    That’s one of the best parts of putting together Halloween costumes, imo.





  • Agreed. His comments are so bizarrely stupid on so many levels.

    They’re not just “wrong”: they’re half-right-half-wrong. And the half that is wrong is idiotic in the extreme, while the half that is right casually acknowledges a civilizational crisis like someone watching their neighbors screaming in a house fire while sipping a cup of coffee.

    Like this farmer analogy: the farmers were right! Their way of life and all that mattered to them was largely exterminated by these changes, and we’re living in their worst nightmare! And he even goes so far as acknowledging this, and acknowledging that we’ll likely experience the same thing. We’re all basically cart horses at the dawn of the automobile, and we might actually hate where this is going. But… It’ll probably be great.

    He just has a hunch that even though all evidence suggests that this will lead to the opposite of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for some reason his brain can’t shake the sense that it’s going to be good anyway. I mean, it has to be, otherwise that would make him a monster! And that simply can’t be the case. So there you have it.

    It’ll be terrible great.




  • I think it’s remarkable that you and several other folks actually give notice. Now-a-days, I think that’s somewhat unusual.

    A lot of people just bounce. Sometimes they don’t even bother telling anyone, they just don’t show up and stop picking up the phone. I hear about this happening regularly at my husband’s workplace (which to be fair is retail).

    I told my last boss when I began reaching final round interviews so that he could plan accordingly. A lot of people thought that was risky and that I should’ve just quietly lined up my next job and told him I was leaving once I’d accepted, but I liked him and liked the work (it was lab research. I wasn’t a big-time scientist, but I’d been managing the lab for a while and actually gave a shit about what we did).

    Regarding your situation, I think you did what you could and showed a lot more integrity than is common. Could you have stayed until your boss was back from vacation and then given a proper notice? If so, well… then maybe you should’ve. If not… then it’s unfortunate, but there wasn’t much I think you could’ve done.


  • I appreciate this answer, because it at least tries to reason from first principles. You can’t, imo, have this conversation without actually defining what we consider to be the problem.

    I think the key concern is that age – particularly during teenage years – typically correlates with a power imbalance. And the concern is that the younger person could be exploited and/or suffer harm. However we need to remember:

    1. It’s possible for relationships to have a power imbalance and no one is harmed or looks back with regret.
    2. It’s possible for relationships between people of the same age to be very harmful/regretable.

    So the questions I have are: how correlated is a specific age gap with severe harm? And what would we advise in this situation?

    I think that a 16 year-old probably has around a 50% of getting badly hurt in a relationship with another 16 year-old, and probably a ~65% chance with a 19 year-old. Because a 19 year-old can probably manipulate a 16 year-old better than their peer, but they’re also presumably a bit more experienced and mature, which can be a good thing.

    I’m making these predictions presuming that they’re sexually active, btw. Which I think is probable. But if they’re not, I think that the risks go down to around 10% chance in both cases. This is just my gut impression. So I’d just advise any 16 year-old in a relationship with a 19 year-old to move VERY slowly physically, and talk frequently to an older friend or sibling. And if your partner wants to do anything you’re uncomfortable talking about with your older friend or sibling, that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.

    If you follow that rule, I think 16 and 19 is no big deal. Because I really want to emphasize: a lot of the risk already exists when a 16 year-old dates someone their own age.







  • 100%.

    I try to remind myself, though, that it would be a waste of time trying to yell at this tidal wave of rage that’s bearing down on us just as it would to yell at an actual tidal wave. I think we need to be grabbing sand bags and securing our food supplies and looking to get to the other side of this period of history. I think it could easily last a generation. And if we’re really, really effective (and lucky) it could be as short as another decade. But there’s no use rubbernecking or bellyaching. We just need to focus on fixing this broken-ass world.


  • I think you’re right not to spend any energy on this, and I agree that it would be performative to pretend to be sad that he left the world. In some ways, our society is better for normalizing honest reactions to things.

    However: I want to encourage you to think about what it means to define him as vermin. Within the meaning of this word is the belief that he is low enough on a hierarchy of worth that he no longer falls under the protections and values we afford to “human”. And furthermore, he is of a group that can only be effectively dealt with through extermination.

    Personally, I don’t think this is a useful philosophical concept. It’s very central to the philosophies that Charlie Kirk sought to popularize: the idea that some people, through their worldview and lifestyle have forfeited any minimum universal protections we afford to humans, and instead should be eradicated. Obviously, his criteria of human worth was more or less an inverse of yours, but personally I’d reject his overall framework.

    I’m really sure whether I truly disagree with it. But I definitely believe that the framework itself inherently benefits the fascist project far, far more than it could benefit a socialist project.

    I definitely don’t encourage you to mourn him. But I would encourage you to ask whether you really think there’s utility in agreeing with him at all on the principle that humans can be vermin.





  • I set up a Nextcloud home server. It was moderately easy.

    I wanted to stop using Google Drive and went looking for the most popular free, open source alternative. I found that not only is NextCloud popular for this, but you can set it up by burning a premade .iso disk image to an SD card and then starting it up on a Raspberry Pi. So that’s what I did.

    I still had to follow guides to set up remote access and security, but following the guides was pretty straight forward. I really recommend it!