I take care of my elderly parents and they would not last very long without me. I have fears of what could happen to me but they’re greatly compounded by having people dependent on me. I’m so glad I don’t have any children, at least.

All my life Spring has always been a happy time for me. This one has just sucked, though, even though the weather has been near-perfect.

My sister-in-law has two moms and a dad, all living together in a stable relationship for more than 40 years. The kids are a Brady Bunch-style grouping as well.

I bicycle past a catholic church that has a banner that says “JESUS WELCOMES YOU WITH OPEN ARMS” and a drawing of Jesus nailed on the cross. I’m like … wait a minute, is that actually a joke? Jesus’ arms are open because they’re nailed to a piece of wood?

And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.

Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a decent gig as a young professor, especially not in a field where you can’t bring in much grant money. Making even decent money in academia requires decades of seniority, and the really big bucks requires popular fame (a la Stephen Jay Gould) or enormous research grants that your institution gets to take 30% or 40% of.

I was in grad school in the '90s and went out drinking six nights a week (Monday nights were for studying, as best I can recall). Like 5pm to 3am drinking plus a bunch of weed at somebody’s house or apartment afterwards. These days I would literally commit murder to not have to do something like that even one night.

You must be fun at parties

This meme is even more annoying than SpaceX employees being ordered to cheer.

Even if they hear and enter the order correctly, the probably of exactly that ending up in the bag is still pretty low. At least the food service robots might get that part right.

My cursive writing is … cursive writing. I went to elementary school in the '70s when that was still being taught and I could not do it now with a gun to my head. All those capital letters like I and S and G that all look the fucking same.

This is why I always liked the “Butlerian Jihad” in Dune where people entirely banned “thinking machines”. Because there’s no fucking way humans would still be around in 10,000 years without something like that having happened.

anthropogenic climate disintegration

I like this better than the milquetoasty “global warming” or the even weaker “climate change”, but I prefer “Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating” because of the handy acronym.

Or they can’t fucking write. I’m a programmer and many of my colleagues over the years have been entirely unable to form a coherent idea into a sentence or paragraph. For a lot of them, that’s why they became programmers in the first place.

“This meeting could have been an email. That I accidentally deleted.”

Not to mention that Musk himself contributed nothing to SpaceX’s technical achievements. All he did was insist that the audio of their launches and recoveries include employees cheering maniacally - easily the most annoying aspect of SpaceX.

Tomo pomo (“see you tomorrow, postmodernist”).

All I need to be featured on a crime show is otherwise intelligent, educated people who type “u” in place of “you”. The only thing that can make someone seem dumber is a backwards baseball cap.

Don’t forget about Redmond! Some of the biggest programming fuckups I’ve ever met in my life ended up working for Microsoft, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

I used to work for a west coast tech giant. The UI designers always laid screens out on paper (literally paper printouts with a crude mockup of a mobile phone on it) and reacted with outright personal hostility to my suggestion that their designs be tried out on focus groups before being put into production. “Users don’t know what they want” was something I heard many times. The UX people always supported them, while doing - so far as I could tell - nothing whatsoever themselves.

Our apps got tons of one-star reviews, usually with comments like “I gave this app one star because you can’t give an app zero stars”.

I don’t think they’re Sackett Board as they’re much thicker and heavier than 1/4" and they’re not layered in any way. They are preformed plaster and they have sort of tongue-and-groove edges like modern ceiling tiles so that two edges are supported by neighboring panels so as they’re installed they only have to be nailed off on two edges. Installation must have been a two-man job, at least on the ceiling. The houses in my neighborhood were built as temporary housing for shipyard workers and were certainly never meant to last 80+ years, and yet here they all still are - only two of the original 320 are gone and they were torn down intentionally to make room for a baseball diamond. I watch these house inspector videos on Youtube and just laugh my ass off at what pieces of utter shit modern houses are.

The hat wasn’t a slouch hat unless that term is broader than I think. It was green waxed canvas with a small front brim and little ear flaps with ties. It even had a tag with the contract number and year on it, which confirmed when the house was built. I was going to wear it but it had a bunch of little moth- or other-critter- holes in it and I stupidly threw it away.