How do some people "read lips"?
Try making $150k in a "reasonably priced area." It can be done, but is not the norm. The problem is that to make a good salary, you have to be in a place that pays those wages. Obviously, this attracts more people, so real estate is more expensive.
The trick is to make $150k in some kind of sweet spot where housing does not compensate. But it's always a moving target and is extremely difficult. Then in you lose your job? Start all over again.
Worked for a company that hired some Harvard guy who fired the QA team for "being down on the product." He didn't see value in a team of people who did nothing but test the software and report what was wrong with it.
I have a cat who looks just like yours. He's only 1, but black, plump, and one white dot on his lower neck. Sadly in this photo, his tags cover it mostly.
Science fiction conventions. Back in the day, a World Science Fiction Convention ("WorldCon") was incredible when the reached over 1000 people. New York Comic Con has almost 180,000 people last I checked. And adjacent to that, anime. It used to be niche weirdos in basements in the US but now in an enormous industry.
Deleted
Permanently Deleted
Jump
Will somebody get these daycare dropouts out of legislation decisions? I am sick of their fairytales making policy.
Without going into detail about how their personality types were both wonderful, but clashing, there's the obvious point that my first wife would have to cope that she's been dead for many years and that I moved on. That wouldn't be pleasant. She would probably see me happy with my second wife as happy as I was with her, and think, "what the HELL?" "Well, you died." "Okay," she'd say, and definitely NOT be okay. I might add, "you said I needed to find someone after you're gone," which I think the reality of what that meant in a context in front of her would hit her like an iron fist. We were each other's first, see. My second wife would be gushing towards her, thanking her for everything in an awkward way, because while I was truthful about my previous marriage, I was also really kind. My second wife is also a widow, so she gets it. She credits my wife for "the man I have now," which is true. I am a better person because of my first wife, but I have also changed and "grown" a little since her death. So now, I would be a different person to her. One seasoned by the death of a spouse. That shit changes you.
I think a majority of our discussion would be, "well, what has happened in the world since 2014, then?" and that would be... bad. For all the reasons most people looking outside of this room would know. My first wife would be very upset how things progressed a few years after she died. "Trump? The asshole from The Apprentice?" And so on.
My wives did meet, but didn't know it. My wife was kind of a local celebrity, but my second wife was a vendor IN those circles. I has also met my first wife several times, but only as a character in the background. If that makes sense. We friended because of a local widow's group, which she still runs with a friend. We didn't even start dating until years after both our spouses passed, and only recently remarried. Our friends, many of them mutual since way before, approve of us finding one another.
This reminds me of some Ohio Christian university advertising racial diversity in all their media, and some guy exposed them as having exactly three non-white students, all whom turned out to be shills from another country who were technically employees.
My first wife is suddenly alive and meets my second wife. Awkward.
What might be worse is if someone was there that you didn't know that you had sex with. Like some random person who raped you while you were unconscious after a party in college, or your uncle from your childhood.
I pretend to be another call center. Or an IVR.
"Thank you for calling Punkadye Laboratories and Archives. My name is Terry. May I have your GSN number please?"
I don't know what a GSN number is; just something that I made up. Once in a while, I get an actual person, but I insist that I have "their latest GSN or a recent invoice," before I continue. I have "a call center voice," and can reasonably fake gender neutral.
Sometimes I answer, "Thank you for calling Punkadye Laboratories and Archives. Please listen closely, as our menu options recently changed. If you know the number of your party's extension, you may dial it at any time. If this is a billing question, please press 1. If this is technical support, please press 2."
Rarely does the call get past the press one part. Often this cuts the latest wave of calls quickly.
"Hej," pronounced "hey" is Swedish for "hello." Also "Hej hej" these days if you want to be more casual. It seemed weird to me at first, like "Hej mormor," for "Hello, grandmother," seemed informal, but if I said, "God afton," (good afternoon) my cousins said I sounded like a government issued language tape.
A friend of mine had an expensive LED TV set get bad RAM about 10 years ago after a firmware fix. You could watch TV for about 2 hours before it went blank. Only official fix via the manufacturer was to disconnect it from power, wait until the rechargeable battery went down, then it was fine again for another 2 hours. It seems like it's overheating, but it's not. Something to do with a memory leak and video buffering. It was a known issue among tech enthusiasts, there was a homemade wiki on how to replace the shitty low end RAM with a $30 stick of laptop DIMM and it worked! He still has it, I think.
"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."
I grew up with pretentiousness like this. Lot of upper middle class twits who wanted to be upper class. I used to get their goat with a kind of backhand kindness.
"You know about ABC?" Where ABC is a question about a topic he claims to be an expert in.
"If you don't know how to ABC, you aren't very educated."
"Ah, I see you don't know either."
"I never SAID that! But I have neither the time nor patience to explain it to you."
"Let me ask around, and we can find the answer together."
"I KNOW the answer!!!"
"Not well enough to explain it, though. But that's okay, we can learn that, too. Let's ask this guy. Hey, my colleague and I were wondering if you could explain ABC..."
Oh my god, this makes their pompousness positively FUME with rage.
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 was part of a Reddit gift exchange ages ago, before they separated domestic from international. I had to ship a $30 coffee mug to Brazil and it cost $220. Oof.
Similar for me: when my hearing started to go in my 30s, the doctor said "you already know how to lip read." I didn't believe him until he showed me "am I saying 'top' or 'cup'?" and if he had his mouth covered, I couldn't tell which one he was saying.