I was in a discussion the other day about this, and someone brought up the “freedom vs. security” as the kind of “trade” someone assumes if they would, with complete freedom, fuck up someone else because they had no restrictions. We were discussing how the reason most laws exist is because somebody fucked it up for someone else.

A friend of mine started the anime meme “Is this a butterfly?” She’s actually employed as a translator for anime, so it made sense.

I look at it like, he kept us safe! Couldn’t hurt, right?

The DC Metro system has no public bathrooms. This causes problems, if you can imagine. I was starting my first week of work in Silver Spring, and as I was exiting the station, there was a woman in leather spandex stirrup pants yelling at the station manager she needed to use the bathroom. The station manager told her “we don’t have bathrooms, lady.” Back and forth as I passed them. Then the woman just said, “A-IIGHT!” backed up, pulled down the spandex, pulled aside her thong, squatted, and dropped a huge, coiling log right in front of the turnstiles.

We had a homeless (?) guy named “Gandalf.” he was named that because he wore a stadium jacket with a broken zipper, tied at the waist with a rope, big floppy hat, and a cane. Used to rant in tongues. Near where I worked was the (now former) Discovery Building, and during “Shark Week,” they put a HUGE inflatable shark “through” the building (head on one side, tail on the other. This thing was stories high). Gandalf used to spend time across the street, shouting biblical phrases at it like he was banishing some demon. Thanks for keeping us safe, Gandalf.

Before they build the STSS, there were “gangster types” that would hang around, gun handles poking from their waistbands. That stopped the DAY after football player Plaxico Burress nearly shot his dick off in a nightclub by having his gun stored in a similar way. Never saw guys flashing their gun like that since.

This was also where “yo momma” insults were also invisible to me. Like, “You don’t even know my mother, you’re just saying that and it makes no sense.” It wasn’t a trigger for me like it was other kids. I saw it for what it was. I’d tell my friends, “they just say that to get you mad, don’t listen,” but they’d get mad anyway. It’s like they couldn’t help it. I think dares were in that headspace as well.

I wasn’t popular growing up. I was really awkward and non-athletic, so I didn’t bow to peer pressure as much as the other kids. I was going to be unpopular either way, so…

As a kid, I never got that concept because it seemed like being manipulated. “I dare you to do this dangerous thing for my amusement!” Uh. No? “Chicken!” Okay, whatever, dude.

This sounds kind of sad, but bear with me. This was c. 1976-1980.

My father was mostly absent, but I prefered his neglect to his abuse, so that was okay. He’d go on business trips a lot. My mom was an alcoholic, and sometimes she’d be passed out for days. I grew up an only child in a suburban home, and some weekends a year, I had the house to myself. From age 8-12, I had a few weekends here and there where fortune fell upon me and I’d be alone in the house with no real responsibilities. Friday night home from school to Monday morning going to school, all I had to do was check if my mother was still passed out, and if so, it was like one long vacation from my life to be myself. Bonus if there was still food in the house, which usually there was something I could cook myself.

I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, except sanctioned PBS shows, but we had a small B&W TV in the kitchen for my mom’s soap operas and cooking shows. I’d drag up all my Legos, pour them on the kitchen table, and watch “illegal TV” all weekend while building stuff with my Legos. Eating when I wanted to, or not, and I had free reign of pretty much anything there.

My positive childhood memories are scant and few, and most are just things like that. Like “sometimes the sun came out, if only for a brief time, before the storms returned.” I have a lot more as an adult.

This is something that influences a lot of culture. Like most people when they think of style and decor in the 1980s, are thinking of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The rest of America was not always neon pumps, leg warmers, and thin piano ties.

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

Not currently, but I did a few sides jobs in the last ten years.

I am a Linux systems administrator. Before I did full contract work, I did part time contract work (alongside my full time salary job) for a general contractor as a piecemeal basis. A job here, 20 hour support there. Some jobs I made $300, some $3000. It was sporadic and came in waves. I got this from a former contract job who recommended me when they folded.

I also did writing gigs. I optioned a few scripts and sold a few short stories. That’s still ongoing, but I haven’t sold anything for a few years.

MBAs who contract dev work out to India to make a quick buck without realizing how bad the code they’re going to get back usually is.

Ah, but some of them DO know what they are doing! In the IT world, I have seen where people say a job is about 2-3 years, show no loyalty to the company, and so on. But they don’t understand managers are doing this, too. Many KNOW these outsourcers are shitty (or don’t care because that’s not a metric they care about beyond selling points), but in a 2-3 year turnaround time, by the time it’s apparent they don’t work, the people who made those decisions are already gone. They ALSO thought ahead to the 2-3 year plan. Here’s how that goes:

Year 1: Make proposal based on costs. Find someone in Puna who will sell you some package with some bright, smiling, educated people who speak whatever language and accent that makes your pitch. Proposals are made, and attached to next year’s budget.

Year 2: Start the crossover. Puna Corp has swapped out the “demo people” for their core chum bucket. Sometimes, they don’t even change the names. How is an American gonna know that the Vivek Patel they saw in the demo is not the same guy named Vivek Patel who is working with your bitter employees who see the writing on the wall? Sadly to many who don’t care, “they all look/sound alike.” Puna is a product, their employees are a static pattern of commodity. Your people say they are shit, but, “oh, those grumbling employees. Your job is safe! We can’t fire you, you are too valuable!”

Year 3: The crossover has gone badly, but you are already looking for the next company to work for. The layoffs happen, and all the good folks are gone, and replaced by the Puna Corp folks. Things start to go badly, but you already got one foot out the door, charming your way into another company.

Year 4: You’re gone. Your legacy is that you saved a butt-ton of money. You are a success! The product is shit, but that’s not your problem. By the time the company realizes the tragedy, it’s middle manager versus middle manager, all backstabbing and jumping ship. Customers don’t matter, marketing covers up the satisfaction. “Wow,” you say. “Things sure when to shit THE MOMENT I LEFT.” You look fantastic! When you were there, you saved money! When you left, it all went downhill! You are a goddamn rockstar. Then repeat.

I have seen this happen since the 90s with a lot of tech folks. Everyone thinking short term for themselves. Only the customers get screwed via enshittification.

It would have been the 1990s by ADC, a street map company local to this area (and possibly other cities).

In the late 1980s, I had a roommate who graduated with a business degree and got recruited for a government contractor right out of college. She packed up her life and moved to the DC area. A month into her new job, the contract was pulled. But because she had a clause in the recruitment contract, they couldn’t fire her. But they had no work for her, either. So she had to come to work every weekday, 9-5. She’d sit at her desk with nothing to do. They didn’t ask her to look busy, just present.

She read about 3-5 novels a week. Over the next few months, we watched her get more and more depressed. She’d complain about her situation, but it fell on deaf ears. “Must be nice,” people said in jealousy. “Get paid to do nothing.” She became despondent in the lack of people’s sympathy. “Nobody understands how much this sucks!”

Eventually, she got a new job. Her mood vastly improved.

I’ll never forget that lesson. People need to feel useful, productive. Sitting at a desk with nothing to do, no purpose, no validation. It will destroy you.

I have not done this for Youtube, but I have done it for tech reviews as a ghost writer. Basically, a lot of those tech reviews done under a pseudonym in magazines. No, I won’t tell you which ones, I like getting paid. Anyway, I’d say about 40% I had to send back in a set amount of time, about 50% I am told to destroy or keep, and 10% they don’t tell me and won’t answer my queries. Reselling is almost always a huge no-no, and that also applies to giving stuff away.

Sounds fun, but some of this stuff is utter, unworkable crap. So many SBCs that never see the light of day, or have the most impotent release announcements on the planet. Like, “this is set for release Jan 3rd, 2024.” Then it’s not ever mentioned on any main page on their website, is listed as a .gz image in their repo (which is on gdrive), but only one release candidate and it’s the same one you reviewed where the wireless chip just randomly stops responding until you reboot. Maybe has a byline on their products page under “this power adapter works with [list of models, including the one they don’t have for sale on the same site].”

I have two HUD displays I got in 2022, which look amazing, but the screen never powered on (which is why I have 2, they sent me a replacement, which was broken the same way), and I am considering at this point making them some cosplay item or taking it to a rave, because it glows super sexy. But with no working LED screen, kinda useless.

The Silver Spring Transit Center. https://ggwash.org/view/30613/silver-spring-transit-center-is-unsafe-everyones-to-blame

They had a multimillion dollar transit project near where I loved, like $112 million to replace a train station, a subway stop, and a major bus terminal to combine them into a single entity near Washington DC. They projected 3 years from start to finish, but it took almost 7. They had to reroute the entire bus terminal to surrounding streets and parking garages, which was a traffic nightmare. People using the train station or subway had to reroute their walk sometimes up to a mile off their present walk. While doing demolition, they found that the previous bus terminal was on the site of an old gas station which had been improperly sealed off: they just filled the tanks with concrete. Underneath that, they found tons of the the natural mineral serpentine, which naturally contains asbestos. So now they had a biological hazard which they had spent the last few months blowing up with dynamite into the surrounding city. After that was cleaned up and sealed, The got underway.

There were a ton of other mistakes, but when it was completed, they found defects. The superstructure is made of concrete and thus construction specifications were replete with engineering criteria for the composition of the concrete, and its pouring, curing and tensioning. The Inspector General systematically examined 22 project management and control points from the time concrete was mixed until the time it was ready for final inspection. 14 of 22 control points that should have minimized defects were weak or ineffective. Those defects may require recurring engineering inspections, higher maintenance costs, and they could shorten the planned 50-year useful life. In addition, the IG described the risk of concrete falling onto transit-center patrons.

The entire thing was a huge boondoggle costing the downtown untold millions into the future.

No mention of external dimensions, so I am going to assume that it exists in the abstract since you mention teleportation. Like you just think about it and teleport there, not carry it upon your person like a portable hole in D&D.

Like others mentioned, a living space of some kind. I’d worry at first where I teleport inside, like hopefully not inside my mattress. Also, when I teleport back out, where is that? Where I teleported in? What if that gets replaced, like say I popped out while in an empty parking garage, but popped back in and a car is now parked where I left off? Might be nice if I pop back out anywhere I choose. Pop in while in New York, pop out in London.

Man, I’d save so much on rent. Or at least storage.

There’s almost always one guy who is “the omega worker,” like the lowest person on the totem pole that everyone uses like a bar one can’t cross. There has to be a “well, at least I am not THAT guy!” Opposite of the Alpha pack leader, this person is the other end. Yes, it’s abusive in toxic environments, but it’s nothing compared to the chaos that follows when that person leaves. The scramble to “not be at the bottom.”

Been a long time. The last time I got affected was via a Shockwave/Flash banner ad for the movie “Moulin Rouge,” which dates this story. It’s not so much that I clicked on it, but it was on a forum banner ad. I didn’t get a virus as much as I got “VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC MOI!!” screaming from my speakers from out of nowhere with no warning.

While the head of our Canadian operations was in my office.

Who, of course, spoke French.

Thankfully, she just teased me about it and I didn’t get fired.

Been using an ad blocker ever since.

Jesus was a famous lute player. Like, that’s why he traveled and what he was most famous for. A crooner, a lover, and a huge fan base. The ladies went crazy for the guy. His teachings were just ancillary.

You have Paul to thank for that. He was a bitter, failed musician. Just went on about how great Jesus was, yet somehow skipped all of his musical numbers.

Yeah, Florence in the 1500s I expected better with the spices and all. Everything was over salted and smelled slightly of sewage.

“Most people don’t carry a knife because it’s just not necessary in everyday life.”

See? There is a reason you do not have one, and would never ask for one.

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

In Scouts, when we got issued our first pocket knife, they had a whole thing to go with it about care and responsibilities. One part that still sticks to me this day is, “never ever loan your knife to someone. There’s a reason they don’t have one, and it might be a good reason. Either they aren’t allowed to have one, or not responsible with their last knife and lost it, or broke it, or had it taken away. The same will happen to your knife if you give it to him.”

Was part of an oceanography class who had just arrived at a local mall. We were returning from a field trip where we were studying river currents. This is done, in part, by a super concentrated dye that starts out black but eventually thins out to either hot pink or a weird high visibility yellowish green. Some of the students might have kept some of those packs. Some might have even emptied them into the mall fountain. Funny thing, large amounts of hot pink dye, in a closed loop recirculating fountain, never really gets pink, but more of a… blood red.

In our defense, we didn’t know the fountain was a closed loop. Thankfully nobody saw us, and it was written up as a “Halloween prank,” in the local paper despite it being early December.

My primary address is 192.168.0.1

There might be some kind of critical ratio formula of party size, alcohol distribution, and damage by one single idiot. I have seen so many stories like these. Usually “a friend” of another guest.

Scissors and knives.

I used to sell high end stuff like that, and let me tell you, there’s a trope about crafters considering murder when someone uses their, say, fabric scissors or sewing scissors to cut paper or something that ruins them. For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears used by professional hair stylists. Fuck, some go into the HUNDREDS of dollars or more. And then some clown wants to cut some box open with them.

Knives, though. Good set of chefs knives goes into the thousands. Like the kind used by professional chefs. I had some chef clients who tell me horror stories about some kitchen yokel using a $350 hand forged Santoku to stab open a can of tomato paste or toss into a cutting board like a throwing knife.

But even basic knives. People using them as prybars, hammers, screwdrivers, and tossing them in a drawer with other metal rattling around.

I worked in a job with build scripts. Developers would list what they wanted in a drop-down menu on a website, with very few “fill in the blanks.” This would create a template, which was sanity-checked.

One of the “fill in the blanks” was “home directory of user, if not default /home/username.” Some people filled it in, some didn’t. A lot of “users” might be apps with /home being “/opt/appname” “/var/www/html” or something. We checked to make sure that directory existed, if not, create, and set permissions. Easy peasy, all automated. Ran this lots of times.

Then one day, the script failed. Borked the whole box. Sometimes the VM was corrupt, so delete VM and try again. Usually worked. But this time, the build kept failing. The box went down. Wasn’t even bootable. This happened several times with this one build. So we mounted the borked drive under a new VM and checked out the logs. Just like the dessert stage of Willy Wonka chewing gum, it always failed at the last stage: making /home directories.

It would create them, then halt that it could not find bash. We looked for bash on the bad drive, and it was the usual /bin/bash shortcut to /usr/bin/bash and we were truly puzzled. I did a chroot to the drive and NOTHING worked. It just hung. That was the first clue.

The second was looking through the build script (in bash, which we didn’t write) and checking the steps. Looked it the logs. Always died at creating some user named sapadm, the user for the HANA database. Eventually, I checked the configure file, and noticed it was the only user with the odd home directory “/usr/sap.” Then it hit me: the permissions.

The script, thinking it was a home directory, did a chmod - R 755 for all directories and chmod - R 644 for all files! That meant, while creating home, it made everything under /usr not executable anymore! Holy shit, no wonder nothing worked! So we commented out that user in the config, ran the build again, and we were good! We created the sapadm by hand, and then later fixed the bug in the script.

SANITIZE YOUR DATA. Or you might turn Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry.

Alligator - oddly enough as fritters at a Margaritaville in New Orleans. Like most say, flaky like fish, tastes like chicken.

Horseneat served and packaged like baloney in Sweden, eating with crisp bead and breakfast cheese. Was not a fan.

Moose in Sweden. Like beef, only the “grains” of the meat were really large.

Reindeer in Sweden. Like venison, but I am told “less gamey.” I say I am told, because apparently I cannot taste the “gamey” in meat. That is, I have had gamey venison and non-gamey venison and can’t taste whatever gameyness is.

Cicada - tastes like weak shrimp.

I bought a $3 mini hook knife for my keychain off Aliexpress. I was tired of getting my pocket knife or Leatherman confiscated or stolen “for security reasons” at ever increasing (and surprising, like libraries, bars) venues. The majority of my needs was to cut open boxes and plastic packaging anyway. It’s the size of half a stick of gum, pops open with a button, and only the inside of the hook is sharp, making it pretty safe for wet hands. The handle is part carabiner clip. Not sure how long they last, since they get confiscated, but at $3 each, I don’t care. Keep it on my keys. The clip makes it easy to take off my keys if I need to leave it behind, but if I end up getting it stolen, meh.

It cuts through cardboard really well, and also opens that hard plastic packaging, burlap sacks, plastic strapping, and that weird material large dry dog food comes in.

“He certainly has a fertile imagination,” said by some upper class twat trying to sound intelligent while using an intellectual dog whistle to alert other highbrows I was a liar, and passing it off to stupid little me as a compliment.

Still gotta go with Streetlamp LaMoose.

I’m old, but “The Mephisto Waltz,” a1971 horror film about a dying pianist (and Satanist) taking over a young piano players body. Lots of murder, lots of screaming, and decanters of blue liquid. My parents took me in a drive in to see it, and I guess thought I’d be okay with it at age five, sleeping in the back of the car.

Nope.

Blue liquid still freaks me out.

This. I was eight when I found out. My mother was in denial and kept using santa as a manipulation tool for good behavior until I was maybe 13, but she was an alcoholic with the tentative grasp of reality. I got super bitter about Christmas until I was homeless as a teen.

Christmas was the first major attempt to wrestle back what I felt I was owed as a child. I refused to be bitter, because I saw that as giving in to the people who wanted me to fail. I enjoy Christmas as punk as fuck.

Still hard, though. I can’t find anyone as into it as I want to be and don’t have the energy to really go all in as I want to.

No age limit in this household. I’d say “just show up with a bag,” but I just gave treats so some 4yo with no bag. If an adult asked? They’d get them.

I just want to be kind. I wasn’t allowed to trick or treat as a kid. I did as a teen, and you know what? Nobody cared how old our group was. We got candy like the rest of them. God bless those neighbors.

And God bless Halloween.

Drywall patching spade that is a stain scraper.

Many years ago, I lived with two slobs. They often left dried food on the counters, floors, and other flat surfaces (like the stove top or floor of the oven). In addition, one of them fed their dog with human food that gave it the shits, and was not attentive towards talking the dog out to poop. So the floor would have clay-like puddles of drying dog diarrhea. This scraper was used to deal with the dollop of whatever organic matter was dried onto the counter, floor, or otherwise. Then washed in the next dishwasher cycle.

“But you’ll scratch the [surface material]!!!”

I don’t care. My house, my problem. Clean up after yourself, for fucks sake. Plus, I was always wiping down the counter with cleansers, so any cross contamination was not a concern. I am a voracious cleaner.

Those slobs have left, the dog passed away, and the dogs my wife and I have now are mostly housebroken and don’t have diarrhea. The scraper only rarely gets used these days. When she moved it, I had to explain to her what it was, though.

I have a lot of medications like this: huge boxes containing one pill bottle and 60% air. Why??? Also, injection meds that have “display boxes” like they are high end Samsung electronics.

I toss it in the recycling bin on the way back to the house. My sister’s ex used to obsess over it, though, and put it in a pile to be shredded. Then he never shredded it. His home office was a hoarders nest with yellowing junk mail everywhere.

I was at a crowded event, fully masked, still got it two days later. It had to be the event, I was not exposed in any other way. I work from home, so it was just my wife and I. She got it weeks later while at a nail salon. Again, fully masked.

Mine was bad, and over a year later, I am still suffering asthma side effects. To be fair, I had asthma before, but it used to be mild. My wife is still suffering from the lethargy, but she’s retired military on pension, so she can just sleep.

I read this as “chow” first, and thought what a clever dog to aim that well.