My wife generally says that she’s bi, but if she were coming out today she’s said that she’d probably call herself pan, that just wasn’t really a common term when back when she did come out so she’s spent most of her life calling herself bi, and she just kind of identifies with that label more at this point.

To her, the term bi does kind of imply that someone is attracted only to males or females and would tend to exclude non-binary gender identities (though not necessarily trans people, being MtF or FtM does still kind of line up with a traditional gender binary, a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman)

Which doesn’t really describe her, she’d be cool with any identity, which to her is more pan, but again she’s just been calling herself bi for so long it just feels weird to change that, and since she’s off the market at this point it’s a little bit of a moot point anyway since she’s not trying to get in anyone’s pants but mine.

I have an essential job and basically had to work as normal during COVID

I already commute at kind of weird times and basically never have to deal with much traffic anyway, but with almost everything else shut down and no one else on the road I averaged about 1mpg better than I usually do just from not having to deal with even that little bit of traffic.

And that was basically only for my commute into work, I go home at about 3AM, so even on a busy night I see maybe a dozen other cars on the road, so nothing at all changed there.

Just due to where I live and work and the hours I work, it’s probably never going to make much sense for me to take public transit, I’d pretty much be the only person ever riding that bus or train or whatever at those times (and there probably wouldn’t be too many taking that particular route at other times for that matter) and the nature of my job means I’ll probably always have to work at least part time in-person, but getting everyone who possibly can to WFH and/or take public transit means less traffic for me.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn’t take much damage for it to get totaled.

There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.

It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn’t care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.

But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.

I don’t know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn’t help

I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.

No Mans Sky comes to mind

I wasn’t exactly crazy about the story personally, but its there, and the game feels fairly Minecraft-y to me since you also mentioned that game.

I didn’t play it at launch, and I know that left a bit of a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths, but in its current state I think its pretty amazing.

I am no teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination, I have a home bar that is better-stocked than most actual bars.

I’ve definitely been drinking less this year that I have in previous years.

Drinking is, for me, a social activity. I don’t drink by myself, I need friends to be drinking with for it to be a good time.

Everyone’s schedule sucks these days, we’re all too busy and broke to go out to bars and such, and I barely have time to just straighten my house up for company to have people over to enjoy the booze I already have if their schedules manage wo line up with mine.

And even if by some miracle, all that lines up, its harder to get myself into a drinking mood. I have what I think is a pretty healthy relationship with alcohol, I’m not drinking to drown my sorrows, I do it to enhance an already good time. If I’m stressed or anxious or pissed off or whatever, I’m don’t and don’t won’t to drink, and with the world the way it is I’ve pretty much been at least a little pizzed off for most of the last decade or so.

And booze is expensive and so is everything else now, I’m having to choose between things I used to enjoy and things I just need to survive more than I used to.

And even if I find the wiggle room in the budget, I’m feeling like I need to be extra critical about where my money is going. If I buy, let’s say a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, that means that somewhere along the line the state of Kentucky is probably getting a cut of my booze money from taxes and frankly I don’t particulaly think KY deserves my money. If I gut a bottle of Canadian rye, what even is the current state of tarrifs? Is it worth forking over a bit of my money to the feds in exchange for some Alberta Premium? (or for that matter, giving money to Alberta, they have some idiots there too)

And I have a good handful of friends who don’t drink, some never started, some have stopped for various reasons (like all of the above,) so with them I’m usually not going to be drinking either.

Its just a bad time to be drinking.

I’m admittedly in a bit of a bubble, but right now my PC gamer friends are a pretty even split between windows and Linux. Know anyone with a steam deck? They’re gaming on Linux.

No, it’s not quite as user-friendly as windows, and it takes a couple extra steps to get things running, especially if you’re playing non-steam games, but that’s one-time setup stuff then you’re golden. Most games are able to run fine on Linux these days, by some measures more PC games may actually work on Linux than in Windows because sometimes new versions of Windows have broken compatibility issues with older games.

There’s edge-cases to be sure, like some stuff with kernel-level anticheat have issues, but the state of that constantly improving, even the game devs are improving Linux support from their end in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve had some cases where games are even running better for me on Linux than they did on Windows. Part of that is that most of the main components of my computer are pushing 15 years old, but I think that alone is a pretty big endorsement for Linux gaming that in some cases it can keep your rig relevant for longer.

When I was about 17 I started training for my first backpacking trip. First shakedown hike I loaded my pack up with about 40 or 50lbs, and I think I lasted about 5 minutes before I went back to my car to lighten my load because I was dying carrying it.

Worked my way up to doing it no problem over the next few months, and for the next few years I hiked and backpacked pretty regularly. I never exactly got in good shape, I had a gut the whole time but I could carry a heavy backpack 10 or occasionally 20 miles a day up and down mountains no problem.

I’ve been a lot more sedentary the last few years just due to being a busy adult with a wonky schedule. I still squeeze in some hikes here or there, but nothing with a heavy pack, and rarely doing more than 10 miles, and usually not going up and down any significant mountains, and I’m definitely not hitting the gym or anything, and I’ve probably packed on about 50lbs of mostly fat since I was 17.

But still, a couple months ago I went backpacking with a friend. Didn’t really do anything in particular to prepare for it, and I still carried about 40-50lbs in my pack

And I did just fine. Definitely huffed and puffed a bit more than when I was in my prime backpacking shape, and I was definitely a bit sore and had some blisters after it, but I was able to hit the trail with a heavy pack and almost no prep and I definitely couldn’t have done that when I was just starting out at 17 years old despite being generally younger, healthier, and more active back then.

So to a pretty great extent, my body definitely “remembers” how to backpack.

Unless… it is like for a space suit

Fun fact, the space suits used in the Apollo program were made by Playtex

promptly drove to the chick fil a right next door

That’s… not better, you know that right? The owners of chick fil a have funded some pretty horrendous anti-LGBQT organizations

Please lead the way and get off of it thene be the change you want to see.

I’ve casually perused some Gameboy mods over the years, but never actually done any

And I have no idea what these shops are offering

But to give you an idea of what I’ve seen out there in general

There’s of course shells and buttons, and replacement parts to replace worn/damaged components (and I would imagine that in some cases those new components might be better than the original)

There’s options for better screens, and backlit screens on models that didn’t originally come with them

USB charging (and charging in general for models that originally used disposable batteries, and higher capacity batteries for those that already had rechargeable)

Video output to hook it up to a TV or whatever

Amplifier circuits and such to improve audio quality

And I’m sure there’s others, but that’s what I remember seeing off the top of my head.

50000 yen is around $315 right now. I feel like I’ve seen some places selling pre-modded Gameboys at roughly about that price point, so depending on what they’re offering that’s potentially a pretty solid deal.

But a lot of mods seem like they’re pretty much just a matter of opening the case up and popping the new components into place, and the parts aren’t terribly expensive, so you could probably shave some money off by DIYing it at home if you’re more interested in having the Gameboy than the experience of going to a workshop to do it. Some mods do require a bit of soldering, it didn’t look like it was particularly complicated soldering, but I know that a lot of people just aren’t interested in attempting that themselves, don’t know what your personal comfort level with that is.

I think the name Donald has been out of style since before Trump was born.

Imagine spending your whole life being compared to Donald Duck.

I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)

And I’m not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn’t do delivery.

But I’ve stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices

But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.

And that happens, I’m not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I’ve been there

But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.

When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.

And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.

That’s what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.

And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don’t have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I’m going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.

My wife and I did a quick courthouse thing because I got a new job and she needed health insurance. The plan was to do an actual wedding of some kind a year or two later but COVID and a bunch of other stuff happened so it’s been on the back burner. I think we’re looking at a 10 year thing now, which is nice because it’s given us a lot of time to think about guest lists and such.

We have a pretty decent amount of friends we want to invite, I think we’re in the ballpark of around 30

Some of those are gonna have +1s, so that gets us up to around 50 or 60

Then we have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and some of them have +1s, depending on the size and relationship you have with your family, that can make things balloon really quickly.

And if you’re able to budget for it, it can be advantageous to invite as many people as you can, money and other wedding gifts can add up pretty substantially. That’s not a major factor in our guest list, but for a young couple, maybe looking to buy a house and have kids or whatever, that can be huge.

The real shame is that the coffee table isn’t really visible because it’s pretty cool itself, it’s a hatch from a ship (I believe a WWII Liberty ship)

Bit of family history with it too. My dad originally had it, but my mom hated it, so eventually it went to live with my grandfather. He died, and it ended up back in our basement. My sister and I both really liked it, and we had a bit of an agreement that whoever moved out first got the table, and I won.

EDIT: Also for anyone else who likes my setup, the entertainment center and shelves in the wall are IKEA Fjallbo, no pretty affordable. The shelf of the far right is just an IKEA Kallax.
And I have the TV synced up to Phillips hue lights behind it and in the ceiling

I’m not totally sure where the bottles came from, we don’t really drink chianti, and they’ve just kind of been hanging around on a shelf somewhere, but they ultimately ended up on this chandelier

I find it pretty weird that you’re obsessing over this so much and have posted about it several times tonight.

Yeah, it’s a bit strange, and it warrants investigation, and as the article says it is being investigated.

But also as someone who has spent a lot of time around water fishing, boating, swimming, etc. there are a whole lot of ways you can get yourself in trouble in or in the water, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that it was just plain bad luck.

My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)

It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.

And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.

Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession

It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.

Oh absolutely, I have 0 faith in this administration to do this in any kind of remotely sensible way

But in general, with different people at the helm, I could really get behind more hunting opportunities in national parks as a conservation tool.

Really I’d like to see predators like wolves reintroduced, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, and realistically for it to work in the parks around me that I have in mind for this we’d probably need to bulldoze and reforest huge swathes of suburbia to support those predators, so nothing that’s going to happen in a hurry, even if we somehow got the people living there to agree to move or eminent domained their properties (which isn’t going to happen) we’d probably be looking at years if not decades just to replant and regrow the forests.

I live near a national historic park in a suburban area. They have struggled with deer overpopulation since we have basically no predators left in our area.

A few times a year they have sharpshooters doing deer culls after hours, and it’s helped a lot, you see some of those ripple effects where since the deer aren’t eating all the vegetation you’re seeing more and different kinds of plants returning which has brought back populations of other animals that used to be pretty uncommon.

And the deer are generally healthier with less competition from each other, I remember seeing a lot of sickly-looking deer there when I was a kid and I don’t see that as much anymore.

But even though the culls have helped, there’s still a bit of an overpopulation problem, and allowing some hunting could help with that, and maybe eliminate the need to pay sharpshooters for culling. We have other, similar-sized parks in our area where hunting is allowed with few to no issues and in this part of the state you’re basically limited to bows and shotguns which helps to limit how far a stray shot could go.

I wouldn’t want the whole park to be opened to hunting all through hunting season, but I think allowing it in certain parts of the bark on certain days could be very beneficial.