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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Ask a local to show you some of their winter clothes or to take you winter clothes shopping. Your warmest clothes right now are not warm enough. Capacitive touch gloves will let you use your phone.

    If you have a car, get a snow brush and ice scraper (for windshield and windows). There is winter windshield fluid, get and use it when it’s snowing. Get winter tires, it makes a difference. Insurance companies give a discount for having them. If there’s snow on the road, go slower than you think you should, and start braking at least twice as early as when it’s dry. Accelerate and brake slowly. If your car is sliding on ice, resist the temptation to keep pressing your brakes, try your best to steer the slide instead.

    If your car gets stuck in snow and you need to run it to keep it warm, make sure the tail pipe is well clear of snow (carbon monoxide). Keep an emergency blanket, hat, gloves in the car in case of breakdown. If the wheels are stuck in a snowbank (just spinning in place), some sand or non-clumping cat litter can give you traction. You can sacrifice your floor mats for this, too.

    If you walk instead of drive, consider crampons for your boots for if it gets icy out.

    There’s different textures and density to snow. Wet snow is dense and heavy, dry snow is light and fluffy. Shoveling can be very different depending on the snow. Lift/push with your legs, now with your arms or back. Take breaks if needed.

    If you wear glasses, they will fog up when you go from outside to inside. Sorry. You could get anti-fog stuff used for snow and ski goggles, but most normal people just wait for them to warm up.

    A scarf makes a big difference.

    Wool can keep you warm even when wet.

    Be prepared for power outages especially if the area does not bury power lines. Heavy snow, or worse, ice, can make tree branches heavy and fall and snap power lines. If this happens, be mindful of carbon monoxide. People, families have died trying to keep warm by running generators, stoves, etc indoors without proper ventilation.

    Snow reflects sunlight; wear sunglasses if the sun is out and there’s snow on the ground.

    Go outside and listen when the snow is falling. It makes everything quieter and it’s really ice to hear.

    Snow that’s warmed slightly then frozen again is crunchy and fun to walk on.

    If you’re north enough, the sunlight will not be sufficient for creating vitamin D. (Plus you’ll probably be indoors more, less daylight in general.) Consider a supplement.

    Consider a SAD light if lack of daylight affects your moods.





  • Don’t take it personally, applying for a job is a game of chance as much as a game of merits. It’s simply a numbers game and luck whether your resume even gets looked at in the first place, even if you’re résumé how all their keywords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other resumes also hit their keywords.

    If you’re lucky enough to get through the first sifting and get an interview with the hiring person (not an HR screener who doesn’t know anything about the job), then you can ask and maybe get a response on how you could have improved. (Don’t ask why you weren’t hired.)


  • goes by Robert

    I’m sorry, I think you just short circuited my brain. JK Rowling, who has so publicly and venomously been anti-trans… has spent the last few years pretending to be a man??? What in the hypocrisy is wrong with her!!!

    And now that you mention it, I’d read a long time ago, before she became public with her TERF-ness, that she went by “J K” on the HP books instead of Joanne because she or the publishers didn’t want to discourage boys from picking up a book written by a woman. And now that I’m typing this, I realize the fact that she wrote her books from a boy’s perspective, too. So in all these examples, she’s inhabiting a male persona.

    My brain… can list these facts, but cannot compute them together.



  • To be serious, yes, absolutely. How many children hear their parents just bark orders at their virtual assistants without a please or thank you, and then do so themselves? I consciously say please and thank you because I want the children around me to learn they should say please and thank you.

    And, let’s be honest, how many adults get used to just barking orders without a please and thank you and then interact with people that way, too?



  • I’ve found this to be true in general once I started working. I don’t feel kinda this was a thing when I was and was integrating with other students. I had to readjust my “responsible” self who actually would follow up (to people’s horror) and tell myself it’s a polite saying that people don’t mean. Like when people greet each other with “How are you?”, they generally actually do not want to know how the other person is doing. You’re expected to say “fine” or “good” and deviating from that is violating an unspoken social contract.




  • Consider the phrase “be real with me” colloquially means “be honest with me”. Also “real talk”, “your real self”, etc.

    How can mirrors be honest if our eyes aren’t honest?

    Kid wasn’t wrong, in fact, was quite right. People are in denial about their outward appearances never mind other things) all the time. People with anorexia see themselves as overweight when they may actually be dangerously underweight. People think they’re ugly when they’re not. (Conversely, may think they’re really hot about when they’re not.)



  • People are saying being funny and having confidence, and they’re right, and I’m going to tell your why that’s right. When being around you makes someone feel good, they will want to be around you more. That’s not exclusive to romantic relationships, it’s true also of friendships and business relationships, too.

    An acquaintance asked me out not long ago, I declined. A mutual friend asked me “Why? He’s not bad-looking”. His looks had nothing to do with it, his negative personality had everything to do with it. The few times I’d talked with him, all he ever did was complain about stuff in general. The complaints were valid, but there’s nothing in a list of complaints that makes me think “I really liked taking to him today”. Complaints (without solutions) are inherently negative. I don’t need negative energy in my life, there’s enough of that already. It’s in going to add someone to my life, it’ll because he makes life better.

    A big thing is having interests. You having a life and interests is interesting. Even if they’re not shared interests, you having something you love is having something that makes you happy. You being happy gives people positive feelings about you.

    If your expectation is for someone to come and make you happy, then you are a happiness-sink. You drain joy from other people instead of mutually building up each other. No one wants a joy-drain, and I’ll be honest with you, your attitude is one of a drain.

    So, the question is, how do you make a someone’s life better? Do you being laughter to her? Do you make her feel safe? Do you give her confidence in herself? Do you bring interest to her life? Do you make her feel heard and seen?

    And to be clear, someone should do all those things for you mutually, too. Two people should be building *each other * up.



  • Mostly just Discovery and Picard is kind of halfway there.

    SNW is a really fun watch once they’ve dealt with Pike’s future (which they kind of really have to). Personally I like that they go for different genres, but I can see why some people might not like that if.

    Lower Decks is a riot and a half and I think it’s my favourite Star Trek, but it might be kind of cheating because it stands on the shoulders of all the other shows.

    Prodigy is quite a bit different from the other shows, but it’s full of optimism, hope, and friendship. It doesn’t start out that way, they’re all very suspicious of each other at first. They grow into it as they learn more about themselves and each other, and aspire to be part of the Federation and Starfleet.



  • To summarize a long story, I (a millennial) put in a task request to a Gen Xer, including step by step instructions. I knew what to do, I just don’t have access to do it.

    Xer told me that was the wrong service, it’s this other one, he can’t find the settings in the Other Service. We went back and forth a few times, he repeated I was wrong, until finally he showed me a screen capture from Other Service that showed “managed by service 1” that proved I was right in the first place.

    If he were willingly to accept I might know what I’m talking about and looked at the instructions, it would have been done in minutes instead of dragging it out over 11 days.

    Obviously this is a hand picked anecdote, but yeah, bosses and non- boss elders definitely get in the way of productivity.