rollin with the homies

  • 2 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2024

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  • Yeah, I remember almost 20 years ago, an older dude telling me that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and giving me a copy of a movie called Zeitgeist on CD-R. That dude would be in his 60’s or late 50’s now.

    Before that, people like Art Bell made a living on AM radio late at night with things like the Taos Hum and UFO’s and paranormal stuff.

    Like, a lot of early US settlers got sent there because they were batshit crazy and a danger to society. The Puritans were kicked out of England, and then they were kicked out of the Netherlands of all places, how does that even happen, before they ran off to America and did a bunch of crazy shit. We think of the “Salem Witch Trials” with horror and then sing “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride” without batting an eye, who do you even think the Pilgrims were?

    So a bunch of criminals and wackos settled the United States, and when they got too crazy for their village, they just moved west, killed the native men, fucked a bunch of children, and made another crazy village. Pocahantas was like 12. And then if someone got kicked out of that village for being crazy, rinse and repeat until you get shit like Mormonism in Utah and Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and bombing the Olympics and speaking in tongues and sponsoring genocide through Biblical Tourism of the Holy Land.

    America is a land of crazy people who have been rewarded for generations for being batshit crazy, and have an ability to not see things clearly in front of their face. This is really nothing new.


  • Sisko was killed in TNG’s universe. Sisko survived in DS9’s universe due to the prophets saving him. The Trek universe diverged at Wolf 359.

    The Dominion War has drastically different outcomes. Existential crisis in one universe where Sisko does a lot of meddling; barely mentioned in the other.

    The biggest change to the cast is that Worf marries Jadzia Dax and becomes Ambassador to the Klingon Empire in one universe; in the other universe, he does a brief inconsequential stint at DS9 (without Sisko), never marries, then returns to the Enterprise E as pretty much the same character from TNG, and at some later point, he gets the Enterprise E destroyed.

    The Picard timeline is set in the universe where Sisko died at Wolf 359.





  • Not specifically waiting on right to repair, but older electronics have four things going for them:

    1. Very well documented: or you can just ignore the pieces that aren’t documented after so many years. This means they tend to work forever with Debian / Slackware / OpenBSD.
    2. Cheap / easy to find parts: the esoteric stuff falls by the wayside over time.
    3. More reliable: by virtue of the stuff that was going to die due to defects, dying in the first 18 months of use; and
    4. Generally easier to work on.

    So all of my laptops all cost well over $1000 new (EDIT: I’ve never purchased a laptop new in 25 years of using laptops exclusively). But wait a couple of years and suddenly they’re the price of a couple nice meals. Wait a bit longer and you can do a curbside pickup. And when something breaks, I can fix it myself with cheap replacement parts instead of waiting on warranty repairs. Also, going back to the documented thing – used MacBooks used to be great for Linux, but then the butterfly keyboard and T2 chip became a thing and I know to avoid them because that keyboard was never solved and ended up being replaced after multiple class-action lawsuits.

    Time works to our advantage in many ways.







  • I just don’t understand it. I see some people with $1000 car payments and nothing toward retirement. What ever happened to looking for good deals? We had a kind of “rugged ingenuity” thing growing up where you respected people who took care of their older stuff, and I guess that still holds true today. $1000 car payments, I would have paid off my car in under a year.

    Honestly, I’m scared to spend. Which I guess is okay because I’m comfortable with how we live and sometimes you have to spend on life events out of your control.





  • Live below my means, invest the rest.

    I don’t dress or act like people in my pay range. My house is small and in a quiet neighborhood and cost less than my salary. Car is older but paid off and I know all the quirks and have the toolbox in the back to fix it. It is probably one of the top 5 most reliable cars in history. My work dress shoes are 10 years old and my around the house shoes were new in 2019.

    I spend my money where I spend my time. So I have a nice phone, a very nice monitor and mechanical keyboard, and a good computer. And all with the right to repair philosophy. Same for my wife and kids. And also good running shoes, good exercise equipment.

    The plan is to get to a point where I can just not work at all and maintain my lifestyle. Three percent rule and all that. And also help launch my kids.

    Something about a 25 year roof and a Japanese shit box car in my fortress of solitude.

    FWIW I grew up really really really poor like you wouldn’t believe so I’m okay with this.