A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

    Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

    So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

    The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.











  • I started on a 50Mbps plan which was a massive upgrade from what Comcast offered at the time, so I was pretty pleased with that. At one point I noticed something dragging down my connection, and found signs of people attacking my servers. That was easily dealt with, however what surprised me was the speed of the traffic I was seeing. After blocking the attack I pushed up my torrents and realized I had been upgraded to a 100Mbps connection and didn’t realize it (I really do love my local provider!).

    So yeah, for general web browsing you probably won’t notice any difference between those two speeds. If you are downloading specific content then of course the downgrade will take twice as long, and as others mentioned it shouldn’t affect your streaming speeds at all.






  • I’m still on the fence about W. just because he didn’t really do anything on his own, he just took the excuse to continue his daddy’s war. I think if Sr. had gotten another term in office he would have ramped things up, but either way I think the family as a whole pushes up there on the list.

    For the rest of the list… yeah it’s not hard to find a lot of presidents who have killed a lot of people. However the original question was about the worst president overall, which to me includes the damages done here at home. Trump is high on my list simply because of how far back he has set us in terms of equal rights, moving beyond the pettiness of racism, dealing with important things like the unfolding climate disaster, and his nonchalant attitude that Palestine and Ukraine need to just surrender because being in the news cycle is inconvenient to him. Looking at Trump’s agenda of just how much he wants to destroy things here, I find it concerning that the only thing stopping him is a few Republicans that still have a moral compass.





  • Honestly I’m not really sure about that. What I’ve seen on the idea of damage to children usually has the caveat of “more study is needed”, but of course nobody wants to subject children to such a study on purpose. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any studies yet that concluded long-term use in adults would cause any permanent damage. I suspect there could be outlying cases of extremely heavy usage but in moderation it so far appears to be perfectly safe.