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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • We may not see many repercussions from this now, but when the unvaccinated grow up and the viruses have had a generation’s worth of time to spread - just wait till a pregnant woman gets mumps and has a profoundly deaf baby. Or their toddler gets polio and ends up spending potentially years in a hospital, only to be released with lifetime disabilities. I know 2 people with polio, and one who is deaf due their mother having mumps (pre-vaccine days). Their lives, and the lives of their families, was/is hard. I wonder what grandma and grampa, safely vaccinated, will say when their grandkids start falling ill.


  • I hate how these things are such deathtraps.

    I live near a military base, and the base runs a lot of nighttime training over the forest my house is in. It is not unusual for Osprey to literally hover over my house. They get so close that the whole house shakes, and the sound from them is so loud it covers up a normal-volumed conversation. It doesn’t bother us, but every time it happens I think of all the crashes 😬

    We can also hear the base when it has bombing practice! Sitting on our deck and hearing bombs going off is a surreal experience. I can’t imagine what it’s like to hear those in an actual war situation.





  • It’s one of the perks of the gig,

    I work with first responders of all kinds, and I can’t think of a single one who would call that a “perk of the gig”. Having one 24 hour shift with constantly interrupted sleep is taxing at best, and once you hit middle age it gets progressively harder as you get older. Throw in having to work multiple 24s in a row and the very real possibility that once you finally do get off, you don’t get to go home and rest, you have to go to your second (or third) job - usually one you own yourself, or one owned by a fellow firefighter/paramedic because it’s the only way to accommodate the crazy schedules - and play catch-up there. It screws with you mentally and physically, but given the piss-poor pay a good chunk of them make, it’s what’s got to be done.

    Also, I don’t know any cops that sleep on OT (I don’t have much exposure to that scenario), but a lot of the ones around here sleep on their regular 12s. If I see two cop cars parked together in a median or pull-off, and they are parked facing opposite directions such that their drivers windows are next to each other so it looks like they can chat easily, one cop is almost certainly asleep while the other is standing watch. They don’t adjust to the mandatory day/night shift rotations well.




  • OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

    Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!




  • I also hate it when it has a name that is a super common word or phrase. Our last 3 records management prograns at work have been like this, and their help fires are terrible to non existent. Good like trying to search the internet for information on the software with those common names. Even adding terms relevant to what the software does, didn’t help much.

    (Apologies if this is terribly typed, I’ve got an impending migraine aura that stayed right as I hit reply and have lost a good chunk of my vision. I can’t see most of what I’m saying.)



  • Sniper Elite 5, and I’m honestly pretty disappointed in it. The Sniper Elite games have always been my “comfort food” series. Nothing too complex, just popping some Nazis in creative ways when I want a no-brainer, relaxing night. Five, though… I don’t know. It feels so dead and way too easy, even after increasing the difficulty. I never change guns in this one because it seems to make little difference, and the guns are boring anyway. There’s no joy for me in the nut shots anymore :(