At any point that I’m about to make a post online and I realize that the emotional energy required to continue engaging is more than I’m willing to commit to this particular discussion, I just bail. No reply, no downvote, just peace out. It’s really not worth it.
I had a “career” class in highschool where they setup a mock budgeting exercise in the library, and we were supposed to visit the grocery store, pay bills, invest, etc.
Instead of using our chosen career like every other class exercise, for this one you were just given a card with your life details on it and you had to work with that. I literally took one look at my card and said to myself “this isn’t going to work.” I was a single parent of 3 kids and my income was something like 2k/month. I knew I wouldn’t have enough money to even make it through the entire exercise so I asked my teacher, who created the cards, what I should do. She just pointed me toward the first expense and said “go do that, then do that” like re-explaining the sequence I was supposed to follow without acknowledging that I was going to run out of money in just a few minutes, so that’s what I did.
I did like 1/4 of the exercise, ran completely out of money, and then stood around for the rest of class while other students decided what they were going to do with their leftover funds. For whatever reason, at the end of the exercise, the teacher asked who ended up with this or that card, and when I pointed out what I’d gotten she was like “yeah that was the worst one” and that was all that was said about it.
I guess it actually was a pretty good lesson on how America deals with poverty.
The A.V. Club used to do a series where bands would come on and choose from a list of songs to cover. As the season goes on, the list shrinks and the covers get more exotic. You can search “av undercover” on YouTube to watch through the back catalog of old seasons for some pretty great covers. I don’t think they do it anymore, but it ran for several years.
This isn’t exactly the same thing, but Matthew Fox played a paratrooper with no lines in World War Z. This was after Lost, so he wasn’t an unknown by any stretch. He originally had a bigger part, but they changed the entire 3rd act in reshoots and his role was reduced to basically nothing.
Any content that was produced with the primary intent of making people angry.
Problem is that’s really hard to identify unless you know the original author’s intent. Just because it makes someone angry doesn’t necessarily mean it’s rage bait, but if it was explicitly made with that goal in mind, that’s what I would describe as rage bait.
This is my main apprehension when it comes to pursuing a CS career. I already have an undergrad CS degree. I got it right before LLMs were even a thing. I know I’m rusty, but I have pretty strong fundamentals. I was already working in IT as a student so I stuck with that and all the jobs I’ve had since college have been fixing broken shit for someone else. Part of me would like to make software engineer money, but I hear employed programmers talk about the soul-crushing monotony of staring down a bottomless ticket queue and burning up their passion for creativity on fixing annoying issues with software that someone else wants them to build and I unfortunately already know EXACTLY what they’re talking about. I’m so fucking sick of ticket queues. I understand the utility. I get why they exist, but goddamn it’s such a sisyphian way to organize a workflow. It never feels like I’m actually making progress.
I’ve been unemployed for the past few months and I’ve just started getting back into coding for fun and for the first time in forever I can feel what drew me to programming to begin with. Every time I had the “what’s your major?” discussion with a fellow student, I’d explain that the reason I was pursuing programming is because I like making stuff, and programming seemed like an obvious way to seriously level-up the kinds of stuff I can make. I usually got weird looks for this answer because I suppose I was expected to just say “money.”
Using the skills I’ve developed for something I’m passionate about and applying them to a goal that I’m either completely indifferent to or actually opposed to does not sound like a fulfilling career to me. If I spent all day on an annoying software bug, I’m not going to want to keep doing software after I get home. I already know this because I didn’t want to do troubleshooting when I got home after spending my whole day doing that. I had all-but completely stopped making things for fun because the hurdles I’d run into in my hobby felt too much like work. I’m only just getting back into it now because I haven’t been working for a while.
Part of me feels like I should at least try programming as a career, but I have a terrible feeling that I already know what it will do to my mental health.