People have said this to me many times over the years. I assume because I’m female, and thus it’s my “job”.

My resulting conclusion is people are fucking stupid and don’t know what they are talking about.

See, I don’t like kids. I don’t like being around them, I don’t like hearing them, I don’t like trying to communicate something to them, and I just hate that they never stop making noise. I’m also wildly irresponsible, a terrible housekeep, too lazy to eat proper meals, have attachment issues and bonding issues from my own shitty neglectful childhood, and just all around exactly the sort of person you wouldn’t want raising kids. Not a nurturing bone in my body.

I got my tubes tied in my 20s and I’ve still been on hormones, to avoid as much chance as possible. I don’t want to ruin another life. I won’t even take baby animals anymore because I tend to give them issues. I only want adults with fully-formed personalities (animals and humans alike).

So they say “it’s such a shame you don’t have kids, you’d be a great mother” and are met with a simple “you wouldn’t say that if you knew me better…”

I inherited birds from my mother, a pair of conures… they screamed so much. I hated them. (I’m prone to headaches so they weren’t a good fit for me anyway).

I ended up giving them to a rescue after spending about 5 years working with them, trying to get them friendlier, see if there was any way I could deal with them for the next 30 years… ultimately I had to remind myself that I didn’t buy them. I didn’t make that commitment. So I was doing the best for them by giving them to someone more prepared to handle them.

But I did order a year worth of monthly-release trichogramma wasps for the rescue. They are sand-grain-size parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in moth eggs and this clear moth infestations, something almost everyone with birds has. They probably didn’t need to release them every month, because they are extremely effective, but that’s an issue that’s easier to fix with numbers.

The drug testing and having to call for renewed prescriptions every month were too much of a barrier to me, so I’m back to being unmedicated. I just don’t have it in me to make appointments every month that feel like a gigantic waste of time.

“Yep, still have adhd” “Ok we’ll renew it, come by next week for a drug test”

Cool, yeah, I can definitely totally remember to do that every single month forever with ‘my can’t remember to function until it’s a catastrophe’ disorder, even though it’s nonsense. Not problematic gatekeeping at all.

I dunno if Roblox would even want to put on the effort

Well yeah, they clearly don’t because they haven’t done it yet, that’s why I said they should be required to do it. If your site targets kids you should be legally required to make it as safe as practically possible for said kids.

Just because some hypothetical clean record abuser could exist does not mean nothing should be done. That’s just dumb. You could make the same argument about teachers, or daycare workers, or parents. Yes it happens, that’s why lots and lots of oversight should be in place for these services. Maybe external oversight, like idk a licensing board or something. Like most other occupations that work with kids.

Teaching kids to be responsible about their online activities is good, but it can’t be the only solution. Just like teaching women to be wary of men can’t be the only solution to stop date rape. (Also, making the victims responsible for stopping their own victimization doesn’t really work anyway, particularly when it comes to kids. It just saddles them with tons of guilt if they fail to stop it, which can be used to keep the abuse going)

I don’t see why it’s such a problem to have billion-dollar sites aimed toward kids being required to hire adequate moderation if they have social services available. No age checks needed, no verifications or anything, just clear and very strict rules (because again, this is aimed at kids, if adults want to use it they can conform to the kid rules or gtfo) that get enforced across the board.

I just assume that anyone who needs to spend a lot on bothering me about their product… is either pushing a really shitty product, or offering it at a really shitty price, because so far that has been the case about 90% of the time.

If it was a good value, people would spontaneously recommend it when appropriate, with only light advertising in places where it makes sense (athletic gear advertised on sports websites, for example). Hell, it doesn’t even have to be all that good a product, just better than the alternatives. I mean look at Linux! :p

It’s so clear when you know what’s going on, but I think most people operate under the assumption that if they constantly hear about it and don’t hear bad things to the same degree, that the thing must be good. Propaganda is everywhere saying exactly that in lots of different ways, so hard to really blame them…

This perfectly voices why I’ve been disenchanted with things recently. It feels exactly like that. Exponential progress at first to get you hooked on hard work, because you have the energy to find and do jobs and no perspective on how much things will eventually cost, but then the rewards for things you can do depreciate, and the cost to unlock the next balloons, and man you just can’t unlock that next tier because it’s so expensive and your jobs income could only be leveled up so far…

That’s why most of them these days refer to themselves as sanitation engineers or whatever else. Sounds better to the uneducated and judgmental masses, and is more accurate anyway.

Current society puts so much emphasis on appearances and not nearly enough on what jobs are actually vital to social harmony. Trash collection and other sanitation jobs -should- be high-prestige high-paid jobs, simply because of how crappy they are to do and how indispensable they are to social functionality. There is no universe in which being a sportsball coach or lawyer is more vital to society than sanitation work, yet sportsball coaches and lawyers at almost any level are paid far better and have far more prestige. Instead we collectively treat sanitation workers like shit, mock them for doing a dirty job we certainly wouldn’t be willing to do, without which we would all die quite horribly from infections and disease…

Me ex’s dad was the mechanic for the city dump. Not just collecting trash but crawling under and fixing the very dirty trucks used to collect it. He was an odd duck and would salvage all sorts of stuff, but his very gross very dirty job kept 25,000 people from living in filth. That’s super important. Especially since we’ve largely forgotten how to live without constantly generating waste.

Reminds me of these guys

I rebuilt my pc just a few weeks before the ram explosion (replaced cpu, mobo, ram, and cooling), only thing it doesn’t have upgraded is graphics card, but the one it has is …… eh… ok for now until I can afford to pick something else up. Also definitely glad to have made that decision. And probably will be with my storage choice too, once it’s hindsight. I just hate spending money.

So yeah, thanks, that helps. :)

Heh, yeah, I’m assuming hard drives are going to do the same thing graphics cards did… get wildly expensive and never come back down, even if they could. With that in mind, this sounds like a good option.

Also I currently have no backups, and this much extra space fixes that handily. So it was sort of needed and something I was considering anyway.

I’m trying really really hard to convince myself I made the right choice here. 😅

I just picked up 40tb for exactly this reason. I was already considering an upgrade, but was planning like 16 tb. But with this news… Might as well get it while I can at prices I was expecting to pay anyway, even if it’s more than I really had budgeted for it…

(I got refurbished drives, with 3 yr warranty, so this wasn’t like several grand with no protection or anything)

Saw this yesterday. I’ve been toying with upgrading my storage for a while anyway, grow with my needs rather than scramble when I run out, so just said fuck it and picked up 40tb of refurbished surveillance drives… figure it’s probably not gunna get cheaper for a while, and the used market is gunna reflect the shortage in short order as well, so while I really don’t have the money for it right now, I’d rather spend this amount than spend twice as much (or more) later when I can afford it.

That almost triples my space, so should be plenty until the drives die. And if storage gets cheaper again quickly, well, that’s good too. This was still about what I was expecting to pay already for that storage, so doesn’t feel like a mistake.

Hairdresser’s cat got into the perm stuff again

Honestly going out on VD is the worst. It’s busy af everywhere, staff are exhausted dealing with the surge, everyone working wants you to spend a lot more than you do, everyone is either on edge or sad, you’ll probably be disturbed by some grand sweeping gesture…

Ick. The weekend before or after are much better. Or literally any other time. Go for romantic dates on other holidays when everyone else tends to be out of town, not the day when everyone else is trying to do the same thing.

Idk how much it would help you, but if you can source some fairly common stuff and do some mild DIY, you can make a cold pack/pad that “freezes” at room temp and lasts a super long time. It isn’t cold, more like cool water that stays cool. You could even make socks out of it, if you want. They would be weird and squishy and probably trigger some sort of sensory thing, but you COULD :p

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nqxjfp4Gi0k

“The” is his middle name, obviously.

I give it to my chickens if I can’t stand to eat it myself.

I know, I was making a joke

:)

But then how will I get shin splints trying to keep up with people who walk just faster than my top walking speed??

And if everyone has them, how can I feel superior by being faster than them because of the years of shin splints???