My middle school required all shirts to be tucked in and they meant ALL SHIRTS. They went around making kids tuck in sweatshirts. It was dumb. And also racist because it was the 90s and the rule was made in response to baggy clothing being popular especially amongst black kids, so they considered large untucked shirts to be gang related.

1. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
2. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
3. Blockchain, because it’s a scam that is rapidly disintegrating.

No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn’t know what I did or didn’t like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don’t like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.

The other thing that’s been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don’t need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don’t find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don’t have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I’m not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn’t work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).

Yeah the second-worst burn I ever got was from steam when I was opening a pressure cooker.

The first-worst was from accidentally touching a soldering iron.

Someone asked a question about work-life balance during an all-hands meeting and the CEO laughed at him.

A couple weeks later my entire location started eating lunch together and discussing our job searches.

Gonna go against the grain here and say: If you have allergies, get a bagged vacuum.

I have absolutely brutal allergies, live in a carpeted apartment, and have a dog (I’d say mistakes were made but honestly my options were limited except for the dog, who’s worth it). Getting a Miele bagged canister vacuum was one of the better decisions I’ve made. If I vacuum regularly it really cuts down on my allergies compared to when I had a bagless Dyson.

I suspect if you have hard floors and aren’t a walking allergy disaster it’s much less of a big deal. At some point in the next ~year we’re gonna get a house and I’m gonna rip out any carpet in said house, and then I’ll probably get one of those cute rechargeable Dysons.

Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer’s website and ordered it from them directly.

The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can’t even stop using Amazon if I want to!

One time I had a weird skin thing and was trying to look up whether I should be worried about it, and stumbled onto a bunch of shit about Morgellons Disease, in which people think they have fibers or parasites growing out of their skin.

I just had a weird ingrown hair.

I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.

Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.

I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

Plus there are ads now that give you plague just by loading them, which is uniquely horrifying to those of us who are informal tech support. D:

Absolutely. Not using adblock is just asking to get malware, on top of ads being wildly obnoxious. And most sites are CRAMMED with ads to the point that they’re basically ureadable.

I also subscribe to a lot of patreons and such because I want to support creators. But I’d stop consuming someone’s content before I turned off my ad blocker, if they decided that was the hill they wanted to die on.

I once washed my smartwatch because I put it in my pocket while I bathed a pet. D: Fortunately it was pretty waterproof because it’s intended to be wearable while swimming, and apparently a high-efficiency washing machine isn’t worse than swimming.

At least it was clean after, I guess…

Can you borrow the dog and see if it leads you to hidden jerky?