There was the time I had to hunt down an employee to make a copy of a house key for me because they didn’t have any of the automatic machines and the other home improvement super store in the area which did have an automatic key making kiosk unfortunately did not have a functional automatic key making kiosk.

For 45 minutes, I tried to steer the conversation away to almost any topic besides the one he insisted on having about his favorite American football team, The Patriots. This guy was stopping the key duplication process just to look me in the eyes and tell me about The Patriots. He messed up his first 2 attempts at copying the key I was having made because he was too busy talking to me about The Patriots. I probably told him 10 times in the course of this episode that I don’t watch sports at all, don’t know the teams, the players, the rules, the seasons, and I have no interest in it. That didn’t dissuade his passion to discuss The Patriots with me at all.

Got home and of course the set of keys he made didn’t work.

Really depends on what the “old tech” is and who those people are, but the majority of people, the average person with average equipment, they’re not going to regret it at all.

Most of that old tech equipment is essentially just junk taking up space to the average person. Even if they had a use for it, new stuff (particularly low-end new stuff) is still relatively cheap. Like a quick peek at corporate retailer #4’s website and I see brand new tablets for less than $200 and laptops for less than $300. May not be good stuff, but generally good enough for typical non-techie users who are just simping for MAGA on Facebook while watching the Baby Yoda on their Disney+ account.

I got laid off because Trump & Elon are a disaster.

You got laid off because, well much the same, but also different.

Gas prices have been higher, both in a relative and absolute sense, if you’re looking at the USA’s national average. The biggest issue now is that these prices are due specifically and directly to Donald Trump, his administration, and the complicity of the courts and congress. They were avoidable and unnecessary.

This is in DIRECT contrast to his campaign promises: Lower prices, Day One. He’s going to immediately lower prices.

Average intelligence people and above knew that this was a lie from the get go. That millions upon millions of American voters believed it, is a shame.

For me it’s because, at least historically speaking, there’s usually no immediate feedback whatsoever if the command was successful or not. And then in addition, individual applications can also disable it entirely, often with no indication. Then on top of that, I switch back and forth between OSes, and some like Mac have different command keys and my brain doesn’t always automatically do the translation – especially since I’m using the same keyboard for all of them.

So, from a strictly reactive sensory perspective, my failure rate with just the single ctrl + c command is far from the non-zero it would take for my brain to be convinced that just the one ‘c’ is sufficient. Hitting the ‘c’ many times also gives my brain a tiny bump of endorphins / dopamine / whatever over and above hitting it just the once. It’s like playing the lotto or playing a slot machine, except all I win is paste.

I came from a big family like that. My mother had 13 children and 11 of us survived long enough to get married and start our own families. Lost one sister to fibroids and another to gang violence.

Thought it was a tattoo at first. That would make one hell of a tat that goes hard but seems like it would get limited use outside of the practical joke or diabolical revenge genre of social interactions.

Just move to the half of the USA that’s currently experiencing drought conditions and then at least you don’t have to worry much about mosquitos. That’s one point for climate change!

In the future, only the lucky ones get to keep their bones.

It’s to hold lizards and acorn caps.

This is why I stick to opaque footwear that you can’t see through unless you’ve got special powers like a superhero or you’ve got special equipment, if you know what I mean.

This is why I love living in a place that has more than 2 seasons.

Spring is short, but features temperatures in between 90 and 9, increasing daylight into the evening, blue skies and sun, moderate temperatures that don’t require that much in the way of bundling if at all, very little (if any) wintery precipitation, all the nature stuff at its earliest pristine moments, lovely parks, and the beach never goes away around here regardless of the season.

Okay, so limited to no swimming in the spring because most water is still kinda chilly.

We also have Fall. It tends to be longer than the Spring, but with fewer of the benefits.

It’s 2026. They’re going to pick an already poorly aged, no longer relevant, and entirely age inappropriate song like WAP and you know I’m right.

I don’t spend a lot of time on there, so some of the “new to me” stuff is probably fairly old.

But, I hopped on this weekend searching for videos on a specific topic and I was inundated with “Shorts”. Brief clips that from what I gather contain no valuable information and which require you to be on crack or meth to keep up with? I dunno?

Then I noticed that an old account I used to watch way back in the day showed up on my subscriptions page, so I clicked in to look at that, and now they have accounts or videos that you have to pay to watch/subscribe to? Is this OnlyFans without the sex stuff now?

Then to top it off, the close captions are apparently 100% AI and every sentence displayed is something like “Gum potion trial and barrier for job put chin”. Like I thought this stuff was supposed to be intelligent, it’s basically right there in the name, or am I missing something?

But also, you live in America where health insurance doesn’t cover vision, so a lot of us just go without corrective measures we’d need to be able to see all the work you’re doing or not doing.

Realistically, very little actually happens “fast” in my life. For me, things are more like the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Stretch of sameness, sudden life altering changes coming fast and heavy. Get used to the change. Stretch of sameness for another while. Sudden life altering changes coming fast and heavy again. Reduce. Reuse. Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.

Looking back, those stretches of sameness when life was relatively peaceful, calm, safe, etc tend to melt into each other, mentally compressed, then archived. Those sudden changes grow and balloon, warping my memories of the past, taking over seeming like they just kept coming. To the point where, it’s like just yesterday I was starting college.

But then on top of that, life just gets more and more complicated without even necessarily trying. Harder and harder and harder. Best of plans, greatest of hopes. Smashed to pieces. Most of it, I didn’t make complicated or intentionally bring upon myself. Much of it, in fact, was unavoidable even if it was predictable. And it keeps coming.

WHERE DEM NUGGETS AT?

All that technology for reporting and billing systems and they still cannot quickly and easily tell me how much treatment is going to cost, aside from the initial “co-pay”. USA of course.

Last time I was in, the provider recommended I get a specific blood test. I asked her if she, or someone at the office, could find out approximately how much that was going to cost me out of pocket. It was around a 30 to 45 minute circus show of a process and at the end, the best they could tell me was “this test is usually in the $800 to $1,000 range, and we don’t know how much of that your insurance covers.” So, at least I got an upper bound of cost (kind of), I guess.

This is why I stick with short-haired breeds, like instead of a girlfriend I just have a boyfriend. No hair pins anywhere in the house that I know of, just short and curly body hair everywhere, cause we’re hairy dudes and all. But definitely no hair pins.

NOT LIKE THAT