So is eating a moderate amount of higher quality and more expensive chocolate. Its okay to enjoy a treat every once in a while

Latest jobs report showed a reduction in total jobs in the economy of 80k. The recession that’s been trying to happen for years is finally about to happen.

It’s really hilarious because economic indicators were all looking super good going into the 2024 election, and even jobs were starting to show some growth after being a bit slow following the insanity of 2021-22. Trump could simply walked in and went to sleep and the economy would be in brilliant shape right now but instead we have this

Yeah gas prices (about the only commodity that normies interact with) have only gone up by like 30-40 cents per gallon, about the same price they were 6-12 months ago. Normies only wake up once it gets to around $4/gallon or about a full dollar per gallon more than usual.

The last time gas prices went over $4 a gallon I heard many drivers of excessively large gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks complaining that they couldn’t fully fill their tanks due to the $100 limit on most gas pumps.

The $4 mark was also when people started actually making choices to drive less (and voicing these choices) and if it was sustained they seemed likely to choose to replace their vehicles with something more efficient

Hey man, I’m sorry that I did put you in that position with my comments! I thought you were exaggerating about the social anxiety (I’ve known several people who do) and that it was like myself where the best thing to do is to push past it, be awkward and do whatever it is anyways to build the skills to be less awkward later

I hope my comments are worth saving and coming back to later! I’ve had my own thoughts and ideas for running events in my community but I have my own challenges I should work on before undertaking such a project. But I did dump a basic framework for creating an event based on my experience volunteering at a few nonprofits and helping them run events so maybe there’s something there?

Any of the ideas I’d said above wouldn’t be solo operations. Sure they could be but finding a friend to be your business partner or creating a small organization to manage and run things both helps manage risk but also helps fill in the gaps in your own skillset.

The easy option is just to talk to the local library about running a film festival, get it scheduled in the community room and put on the library events calendar and just bring a laptop and a projector if the library doesn’t have one and watch some public domain films. This can grow into a larger indie film festival in time and in the short term you can get your feet wet and have some fun doing something meaningful in your community

Now if you wanted to go all out and do it for real with an actual budget (still only talking single digit thousands at the most though! I know folks who spend that much annually on their private hobbies, and if you play your cards right you can probably break even pretty easily) and really try to make something of the whole thing, this would be my gameplan if I were to try to set one up in my town:

1. Enlist some friends/trusted family members to help run it, create some loose organization amongst your enlisted folks to help delegate tasks and share the responsibilities and costs, create a regular meeting/working session schedule and break out into task forces as needed
2. Look around your local community and identify potentially suitable event spaces. Is there a local art gallery or community center you can rent out? Maybe an indoor/outdoor space at a park you can rent out from the city? What’s the cost to rent it out for an evening? How many people would be allowed in the space at once and what would it take to setup a projector, some speakers and a laptop?
3. If you find a suitable enough space and have reached this stage, strongly consider officially registering your organization (a non-profit would probably be lowest-risk since businesses and governments love donating to non-profits and it makes it much easier to rely on volunteer labor and donated hardware and licenses further reducing risk) this is also the stage where you should have ideally identified your budget and general gameplan for running this thing
4. Consult your local government and any local colleges for assistance. See if you can get any film, culture, English or even just liberal arts instructors on board with helping boost your event. Your city government may have resources they can offer as well, since boasting an indie film festival is usually a good thing for any city. This is one instance where living in/basing your operation in a smaller town is a big benefit because the local government will likely be excited to help however they can to build more local culture and draw to the town.
5. Schedule it! Book your reservation of the event space
6. Advertising! Post fliers, ensure its mentioned in the local paper and local news (if they exist) make sure its listed on the events schedules that would be relevant. Get any local/regional colleges aware of the event so that students might come attend. Contact the senior centers and make sure you’re on their event calendars so you get some bored retirees to attend too
7. Get your equipment in order. If you went the non-profit route contact local AV/IT companies for donations of equipment/time. Many of these companies will donate both in exchange for plastering their company name on event as a sponsor. Also get your food vendor(s) in order. See if there’s a good spot for a food truck to setup shop and contact some local food trucks to gauge interest. This is also the stage to line up your tuxedo rental so you can look the part when you give your opening/closing speech about how proud you are to have seen this event come together
8. Run the event! This is probably the hardest part because everything you thought would be fine will go wrong, while the parts you thought would catastrophically fail go perfectly, but ultimately its fine because its a brand new indie film festival and nobody expects it to have the polish of Sundance or the Grammys.
9. Do it again the next year! Or even in 6 months! Once you’ve held a couple of festivals you’ll start collecting some regular attendees, made some extremely important contacts, and you’ll have started to establish a reputation. Maybe this is just a cool thing you do now, or maybe it grows into an actual big thing! (if it does and my comment inspired you, please let me know though! I’d love to know if my random brain dumps on weird corners of the internet actually impact people in meaningful ways!)

Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work

Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.

What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live

Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.

In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing

The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life

The other way to look at it is what are hobbies and volunteering but work in of themselves? Human existence involves work, but every human should be able to find work that they can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

So here’s the thing, many people hate their jobs and just work them because they don’t really see any other option than to keep working the job they hate, but also plenty of people really enjoy their jobs. Depending on your interests you might have to get a little creative or try something you’d never thought about or something you’ve never heard of

If you enjoy problem solving (a very common human trait), there’s some lucrative corporate careers out there in things like project management, asset management or even just straight management. If you just want to zone out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day there’s tons of machine operator jobs that will absolutely fill that role (and often in small towns with very low costs of living as an added bonus) if you want to just get paid go hike there’s jobs to be had in surveying and land management. If you like working with animals the ag sector has you covered, and if you like working with your hands there’s always tons of jobs in trades. If you like helping people there’s the healthcare sector and if that’s too much blood there’s always medical coding or outside of the healthcare sector there’s tons of banks out there looking for loan officers who will talk to people and fill in the blanks on the forms. Sales is also very lucrative and very cushy if you can get into B2B sales. There’s tons of jobs that exist and every job is different, so there’s bound to be one out there that scratches an itch for you and you can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

And this is all assuming you want to work for someone else, you can always start something on the side while keeping another job that pays the bills, or if you have a supportive partner who’s willing to cover the bills while you take you shot at a business. Go start a hardwood furniture business, or find an obscure thing that nobody makes anymore and start making those. Go create an event that people can buy tickets to attend. Open a bar or a store or a pilates studio! Buy an old building on some unfarmable land and create a winery or fish farm or wedding venue! Sell pancakes out of your garage! Paint murals for people! Grow mushrooms to sell at the farmers market! Start a commune or a bus tour company or a bike taxi! Is it hard? Absolutely. Will there be roadblocks and challenges to overcome? Indubitably! But overcoming these challenges is fulfilling in itself and plenty of people start businesses successful enough for them to retire off of (or at least successful enough to sell to someone else who can make it successful enough to retire off of)

I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.

You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.

There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!

“I’m sure they were just good friends”

A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her

When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community

Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.

Banning advertisements to kids is the correct approach. I’ve observed with my own kids, they genuinely don’t yet have the mental faculties to be critical of advertisements. They see something advertised, they want it, simple as that. Their brains aren’t developed enough for content with advertising nor product placement.

Maybe there’s a sweet spot in limiting it to toy ads and ads for other content on the same platform that they’re watching. I’m not sure, I’m not a child psychologist, but kids should not be presented ads for energy drinks/drink supplements (I wish I was kidding but I’ve specifically had to have a conversation with my daughter about why we’re not buying the drink band owned by a certain YouTube celebrity who got himself banned from returning to Japan) nor for restaurants (especially not fast food!) nor for sketchy paid mod launchers for games (fuck you to the like only YouTuber who focuses entirely on Wobbly Life and is constantly advertising that!), nor most of the other things I’ve seen advertised to the kids recently

The way I see it, if my kids start finding ways to circumvent parental controls we should be able to have some frank discussions about what the parental controls would be setup for

I setup my wife’s old Android phone to be super locked down via parental controls. Only approved apps, no installing apps, time limited etc. set it up so my kids can use it on days when we need them to zombify for a bit in the afternoons

Its kinda mind blowing how YouTube Kids is their go to and they don’t move to any other apps until they’ve run out of time on it (family had already let the cat out of the bag about the existence of YouTube so I had to limit rather than block) and we still have had to block a number of concerning channels they kept watching. Its crazy how they’ll just zombify staring at YouTube but then for the age appropriate games they’re so much more engaged and actually seem to have a healthier interaction. Its also sad how some of the content I see the kids watching on YouTube Kids has writing and direction about on par with Disney’s current crop of age appropriate shoes for 3-6 year olds (and from what I’ve seen Nickelodeon isn’t much better right now). My kids primarily watch PBS Kids and a handful of shows we carefully selected on DVD because we want to minimize the brain rot (as well as minimize annoyance for us)

Would a safety deposit box at a bank be an appropriate option for your off-site backups?

This is the real consideration, depending on your career so far, such a role might be easier just left off the resume. But they did say it was an internship so they likely have no good career experience to speak for. Personally, I’d aim for purely talking about the experience and just say that “the internship ended”

I might as well just go ahead and replace the PSU too, so the rating is up to date

A good PSU will have an 8-10 year or longer warranty so that’ll should a couple of refresh cycles or more usually. Especially if you’re upgrading every 3 years (I’m on a 5-10 year cycle, or more accurately a “whenever a key component dies or is truly no longer up to the task at hand” cycle)

I freaking love wearing a wristwatch, but it’s most useful for stuff when you’re running around grabbing stuff trying to get kids out the door, or carrying a ton of stuff while setting up/tearing down a display for an event, basically situations not condusive to most smart watches where you have to do a gesture of some kind to wake the screen, you just want to quickly glance and continue

Also having been getting heavy into fitness (biking specifically but also some running and hiking), I get how cool having heart data and whatnot is, but ehhhh. Kinda not really necessary. I get handy GPS data from my phone and that’s sufficient. I can’t do anything meaningful with the heart data, but I can make very useful decisions with distance/time metrics! Or when lifting just knowing the weight I’m working with, how many sets & reps is more than enough

In context that makes a ton of sense for why you don’t want to go to concerts anymore! Burnout is a bitch! But there’s something beautiful about once you’re past the burnout and try the thing again, where it’s been long enough it’s like trying it again for the first time except with the knowledge of what to expect and how to best enjoy it already there.

Rock on and enjoy yourself! 🤘