cobysev

For the record, this was while I was serving in the US military. I had a military doctor, and we were used to being yelled at when we made mistakes, so his reaction wasn’t too surprising to me. What shocked me was that he was so calm and quiet before that moment. I didn’t see it coming, and it took me a moment to process why I was suddenly being yelled at.

A couple decades ago, I got a call from an ex-girlfriend who said she just tested positive for Chlamydia and recommended I get myself tested, just to be safe.

I went to my doctor, who had a bunch of questions about my sexual health before he administered the test. One of the questions he asked was, “do you use condoms?”

Of course, the answer was “yes,” but for some reason, my mouth defaulted to the word, “no.”

I was about to correct myself, but out of nowhere, the doctor screamed in my face, “Are you STUPID?!” I was so stunned by his sudden outburst, I froze on the spot.

He them proceeded to lecture me on proper sexual safety, half shouting at me. It was too late to fix the mistake; I felt like he’d think I was backpedaling to stay out of trouble at that point. I resigned myself to sitting through a lengthy, angry lecture.

By the way, I tested negative. My doctor was genuinely surprised. I was not.

The first two are part of the reason I can’t sleep at nighttime. It’s finally quiet, no distractions, I can finally sit down and focus on that project, and… why’s the sun coming up?!

Fortunately I’m retired so I can sleep whenever I want. I typically sleep through the mornings and am awake all afternoon, evening, and night.

United States of America: We’re made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we’ve hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn’t call them “states” until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were “colonies” before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

Google Maps is convenient, yes. But I’ve been trying to de-Google my life recently, and finding alternative map programs has been difficult.

I was using OsmAnd~ for a while, then switched to Organic Maps. Just recently, I’ve switched to CoMaps, since Organic Maps started including affiliate links and could potentially be harvesting user data to sell.

It’s always a struggle, trying to find free open-source software (FOSS) that provides a reliable service without collecting your information.

EDIT: As part of my de-Googling, I’ve been trying to find software through F-Droid instead of the Google Play store, since Google can potentially track my apps and their data usage through their store. CoMaps is available on F-Droid.

I guarantee this update didn’t drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn’t turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. “Patching Tuesday” is an unofficial but well recognized “holiday” for IT folks. It’s not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don’t have to work through the weekend.

Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it’ll pop up on Tuesdays.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

“…Are you crabs yet?”

I was born in the early '80s. The 2000s picture was what my McDonald’s always looked like throughout my childhood. I’ve never seen a McDonald’s that looked like the '90s pic.

The 2020 pic shows current McDonald’s, but they changed to that sometime in the mid-2010s.

Toothpaste isn’t a disinfectant. It’s just good at breaking up the gunk on your teeth while brushing. If you don’t rinse your toothbrush well, or if you don’t brush that often, bacteria can grow and thrive on the brush.

I only use Lemmy. Fuck Reddit. And this is from someone who spent over a decade using Reddit religiously. I dropped them during the whole API scandal. I had been growing more and now dissatisfied with Reddit and that was the last straw.

The only mainstream social media program I use is Facebook, and I don’t really use it anymore. I only keep my profile because I’ve met people from all over the world who I stay in touch with through Facebook. Plus all my childhood friends and family members are there. But Facebook (and Meta as a whole) is garbage and I have a bunch of tools to prevent them from feeding me garbage content and recording my data while I’m trying to keep up with my friends and family there.

I have a Bluesky account, which I don’t know what to do with. Twitter always felt like social media for celebrities; there wasn’t much going on there for us normal people. I created a Bluesky account just to get away from Twitter, but I don’t have much to post and none of it gets attention from anyone, so I just feel like I’m talking to myself. I don’t have anyone really interesting to follow there either.

I also use Discord to stay in touch with my closest friends, on a personal server I built. That’s pretty much it. I don’t trust any other social media programs. So Lemmy is my main source of news and content.

Ugh, this is my mother. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 37 years old. She still doesn’t believe I have it because I was “normal” all throughout my childhood. But I spent my childhood running everywhere, climbing everything, and on the verge of tears if someone made me sit still for 2 seconds. My grades were awful because I couldn’t focus on the teacher in a classroom environment, and all my life, I’ve had the worst time processing auditory instructions.

I see some of the same ADHD symptoms in my mother as well, but she refuses to acknowledge she has it. She just thinks she’s highly productive. She has no clue that her productivity is boosted by a need to constantly be doing something.

She’s retired in her 70s but still needs to be involved in her community, running organizations or helping with local events. She can’t just sit still and enjoy retirement.

I just passed 40 recently and I was aware David Letterman had a gap in his teeth, but I didn’t know people joked about it. So it took me a moment to realize this was targeted at him specifically.

Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”

I had this problem learning Norwegian.

• “And” is “og”
• “Or” is “eller”

Everytime I see “og” in a Norwegian sentence, I immediately want to translate as “or.” It keeps tripping me up! “Eller” feels like too many letters to be “or,” so I keep translating it as “and” instead.

Reddit wasn’t immediately known as the “front page of the Internet.” It took time to build up a reputation and tons of content before it started to get noticed and promoted by search engines.

Lemmy is the same. It’s small now, but with enough content, it will eventually become a reference point like Reddit. Every little bit counts.

Thank you. As a former IT guy, I’ve been trying to keep my family away from Apple products. They’re way overpriced for their limited and locked down functionality compared to everything else out there.

My dad had Parkinson’s late in his life and my sister replaced his Android with an iPhone, specifically so she could give him this fitness tracker. He spent the last few years of his life struggling to figure out a new phone, and we could never get the damn app to work anyway. He fell all the time and it never once reported it.

I spent 20 years in the IT field and getting my computer-illiterate family to consult me before buying computer tech is like pulling teeth. I offer them free consultation and support all the time and they just go out and buy spyware-riddled junk on their own. They only come to me when their stuff is no longer useable.

My sister finally stopped buying iPads… only for her to go and buy Amazon Fire tablets for her kids. I had to go in and lock them down because they were constantly shoving ads into every function of the tablet. Her kids kept trying to buy games because they were constantly being advertised to them. And guess who left their credit card credentials on the tablet?

My apologies, /rant.

Always. I spent so much time beating the game, might as well sit through the credits. Sometimes developers hide interesting things in there. It’s not like a movie where I can fast-forward to the credits anytime I want, so I might as well check it out while it’s there.

At worst, I’ll just let them run while I distract myself with something else. I don’t need to be staring at them for the whole run. But I’m nearby and ready in case something interesting shows up.

The first time I beat Metal Gear Solid 4, it was late at night on a work night. I had stayed up late because I really wanted to finish the game instead of waiting until the next evening. I was so ready for the credits to roll so I could sleep!

Little did I know, cinematic cutscenes kept popping up throughout the credits, changing the end of the game! If I had just turned it off as soon as credits rolled, I would’ve missed the true end to the story.

Also… the credits and cutscenes at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 are 90 minutes long! I definitely didn’t get enough sleep that night. But it was worth it.

Oh man! I had no clue what the program was called. We used it way back in my kindergarten/1st grade days, so I’d long forgotten the specifics. Thank you! This is exactly it.

What’s all this newfangled content being posted as old? My first computer had Windows 3.11 that you booted to from a command prompt. It was an amazing graphical upgrade from the command line computers. Now you could actually see what you were doing on the screen instead of typing commands and hoping a document would print with your data.

Before that, I used Apple IIe computers at school, with their solidly green command line interface. I remember being taught how to program instructions with those computers. You had a “turtle” (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.

Whatever content is in this meme, it all released long after I grew up and became an adult. You young whippersnappers.