There is a lot of changes for most people in their late teens/early 20’s. As teens make the conversion to full adulthood, life has a way of rearranging priorities and changing attitudes.

Because of this romantic relationships that form prior 18 years old have around a 90% chance of dissolution within 10 years.

So do yourself a favor, give yourself 4-5 more years to get through schooling, work, pay bills etc and then look at getting married.

My wife’s college roommate married the guy she started dating at 14. They went to different universities 2 hours apart. They lived together when she went to grad school. They got married when they were 26 and have been happily married with 3 kids for over 20 years now.

Yep, 10 years with a reseller. I have 5 lines now and my bill is $150/month. I always purchase unlocked phones so I have the option of swapping whenever I want. I only run midrange phones and run them for 3+ years. I also pay for cable internet for another $80/month. Can’t wait until the fiber company finally gets around to installing in my neighborhood. That will cut that bill down by 1/2.

Molecular biologist: repeatedly spike their samples and reagents to cause random failures. Eventually lack of sleep from running it “just one more time” will kill them.

My kids who are teens/20 year olds.

“Dad why are you always playing in a tank or a plane on BF?”

Me “Because I am old.”

I used to have reaction times like that made other people weep. I was constantly on watchlists for cheating and even banned by a few poor losers in private servers. Those days are well in the past now.

The kitchen, dining and living room being together is pretty normal in smaller places. I have lived in several that were open that way over the years. It’s not great but it’s doable. The lack of wall space so less cabinets/closets and overall storage is the usual problem.

However the bedroom… That’s a bit too far.

Slight clarification

A brix meter measures soluable solids in the juice. A major portion of which is sugar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brix

Changes in Brix does not slways correlate exactly with sugar content as other soluable solids are included in reading. Things like carotinoids etc. A little something to pay attention too when comparing varieties.

Allow me to hit you with my cane. The Manchester blast was fucking loud.

Eastern Skunk Cabbage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplocarpus_foetidus

The western skunk cabbage is yellow and quite pretty, from a distance.

A bract is a modified leaf, that usually doesn’t look anything like a regular leaf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bract

Mostly we take advantage of the crazy shit plants do anyways. We speed the process up with technology and attempt to control it.

They toss their pollen out into the environment and say “fuck everything”. So we have things like wheat, a combination of 3 grass species. Hay fever is reaction to a plant attempting to make babies with you.

The also do stuff like spontaneous ploidy changes and other mutations all the time.

In my opinion fully parasitic plants that don’t even have chlorophyll is way crazier than anything humans have done

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuscuta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind’s_Eye

They were convinced enough it wasn’t that good that the sequel was supposed to be a budget film.

October 25th is the date that most stores pull down the Halloween stuff and transition to Christmas stuff. It’s not unusual for most stores to have zero Halloween stuff on the shelves on Halloween.

The seasonal arrival of Spirit in the many empty commercial buildings has made this worse. Regular stores bring in less merchandize and are often stocking Christmas stuff 2 or 3 weeks before Halloween in my area.

How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

My work truck looks like this most days. I spent 4-6 hours per day driving in remote areas/off-road.

I have more sensitive gear and equipment I need for my job in the back seat The bed is also usually full of equipment that is not as sensitive.

I keep a cooler full of water and several boxes of granola bars inside.

So whenever I fill up the tank, I spend a few minutes tossing trash out of the truck. It’s the only way I have found to keep the pile of mess somewhat under control.

Once I year I clear out the truck and have it detailed to start fresh on the dirt buildup.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.

Almost there…

A small cordless drill with a torque setting plus a driver set. A short flexible bit holder for the tight spots.

Drop the torque setting all the way down then use the drill for most of the work. Then finish tightening with a reacheting screwdriver.

Companies who have checklist to make sure they get “all” of the company property back are awesome. It’s always made by HR with no clue what the job entails. I returned all of the company property listed items on the checklist.

Last layoff - real human beings- “Do you have time to drive to the office for a meeting? We are so sorry, business isn’t going well an we are having to cut whole departments. You are laid off the end of the week plus severence. Return the truck laptop, phone etc then. We’ll transfer the phone number to you, the supplier contracts etc that you brought in, we will sign off to you as well.”

Layoff before slimy corporate shills (all laid off a year later) teams meeting labeled as business discussion". Surprise, HR is on the call. You are not allowed to drive the company vehicle. At the end of this call IT will cut off the laptop phone and we’ll arrange for for someone to go to you house and collect company property.

So I drove the truck for 4 hours to collect all the stuff from my 3 offices. Then grabbed a guy from the last stop to drive the truck back after I finished cleaning it out at home. While I was driving I called up the new job I was supposed to start 2 months later and said, “Hey you guys OK will me starting next month instead?” I then took a nice 3 week vacation. Getting severance from a job I was going to quit, chef’s kiss .

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.