It cracks me up how true this is. I managed a theater for a while so on weekends after close (1a-ish) the managers on duty would go unwind at the nearby WH, got to know the staff there and they’d be vocally profiling people to us as groups were coming to the door. One time the cook made a dick shaped pancake for one in our group, but cut off the end and sprayed a bunch of ketchup all over the plate. They were good people, some of my favorite.

Friend of a friend’s basement flooded so friend and I are gonna go help demo and see how far we get on putting it back together. Sunday will be for soccer and gaming and general lethargy

You’ve got a few options

I installed Mint this past spring and fiddled around with it briefly every once in a while but I’m not a tech guy so there was a little bit of a learning curve on stuff like getting a second monitor to work, stuff like that. I’m sure you’ve already found out that there’s TONS of documentation and forums for questions, it’s just a matter of feeling kinda dumb for a little while as you troubleshoot. I switched over to Mint full time a few months ago and haven’t looked back. I’ve still got Win10 on an extra hard drive just in case but I think more and more of reclaiming that space for Steam now, I don’t miss Windows at all

Helping a buddy replace some windows tomorrow and then sizing up someone else’s flooded basement to see what all needs done. Beyond that I expect it’ll be nothing but the remastered Age of Mythology

And no recipe? Or at least type of cheddar and quantities of it and the jalapeños? I used to make an Asiago habanero bread that turned out real well

Enjoy the Mammoth caves! I went as a kid and it was a lot of fun. If I remember right, though, the humidity only gets worse in there… It certainly is a big change going from dry heat to the humid summers of that region, but depending on how long you’re there it can do wonders for skin and hair so hopefully you get to at least enjoy that perk for a little bit

I was pleasantly surprised by it too, glad I ended up giving it a shot. Turned out to be a deeper movie than I was giving it credit for even if a lot of tropes still showed up throughout

I upgraded mine but haven’t talked to the wife about including her yet because the family plan is for up to 6 so it’d be cheaper to just buy two individual subscriptions, she doesn’t really care enough to justify that much extra cost. Hopefully Proton adds another plan or two for groups!

I’ve noticed the battery life reduction as well on my iPhone but no more than I’d expect from any other vpn, but it still goes all day unless I’m using my device a lot more than normal

I was able to select a preferred hub prior to the new HomeKit architecture, however long ago that was released. Now that I’ve been stuck expecting HomePod minis to process my security camera activity it’s been so frustrating. I sent Apple Feedback well over a hundred submissions complaining about it, called tech support a few times for good measure on top of that. (“I’m doing my part!”) I’d go unplug all the HomePods to force an AppleTV as the hub but then within a day it’d be right back to a HomePod.

You aren’t the only one feeling that way, just put yourself in a position to meet others. Start going to meetups of things that interest you, or, at the very least, engage with others on things that interest them and you’ll usually find common ground eventually. It can feel difficult and awkward, but everybody struggles with that when they first start to put themselves out there. Just persevere, you’ll find people.

This is what I’d do as well, paint will be a lot less effort and a whole lot easier to touch up as it gets used. Plus the kid can paint their own patterns or emblems or logos or whatever on it

Same. If it were just up to the wife and I we would’ve simply gone to the courthouse and signed some stuff but we decided on a ceremony because it was “important to our families” and did things more traditionally than if it were only the two of us. We would’ve had a lot more fun with the whole thing if we could have just realized that the day was for us and about us and should’ve been done our way.

It’s both fun and frustrating learning how to operate it.

This should be emblazoned somewhere in the initial Linux setup. I’m not in tech by trade, just a hobbyist nerd, and playing with Linux is like if a soulslike game were an OS. I had a terrible time figuring out how to get both monitors to work but eventually did and that felt like a huge win when it finally happened. Had an equally bad time trying to figure out how to install some game software but finally got that sorted and it felt like another big victory. But I still dual boot for now because some days I’m just not ready for the heartburn of dealing with my own ignorance in Linux

I’ve also remained a Christian in spite of evangelicals. I think the worst dredges of those kinda people are really only focused on having more and looking better than others, so we’re back to the zero sum game. They don’t want to change to better reflect the Jesus we can read about in the Bible, they just wanna be garbage during the week and go spend an hour or two on Sunday mornings listening to someone tell them that they’re okay and that God loves them. Not enough pastors have the stones to tell their congregants that sure, God loves them, but that’s not a license to be a real prick to everybody they view as “lesser” than them. Maybe someday the voices behind the pulpit will grow a spine and call for accountability, but they definitely aren’t saying it loud enough

It’s a religious reference used in the Bible, emphasizing the obedience of sheep and the stubbornness of goats. I don’t think I’ve ever had sheep cheese but I know I don’t like goat cheese so I’m gonna call that part a draw. Goats are absolutely better climbers though!

There’s a real cognitive dissonance there. Their version of Christianity takes a back seat to politics because they’ve been told all these visions of grandeur about how “Jesus is coming back” and how they are the “sheep” and all those godless liberals are the "goats. They’ve been trained to look for reasons to feel persecuted even if they don’t come directly out and say it, even if they don’t realize it themselves. There’s a real “us vs. them” mentality in a lot of those types of churches and they’ll gladly go rub one out to stuff like where Jesus said to his disciples in one of the gospels that if people aren’t for him then they’re against him. Nevermind that one of the other gospels says the opposite. A lot of Christians I’ve come across just have this persecution fetish where any slight inconvenience or call for accountability from pretty much anyone (because their church won’t take them to task over things) turns into a ‘righteous’ cry to their lord about how the godless Philistines around them are normalizing oppression and sodomy and trans rights or whatever and these holy little Christian’s are the only beacon of hope in society even though they insist on treating anyone who isn’t like them like absolute garbage. I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, hopefully people smarter than me chime in. But conservatives treat equity in a community like a zero sum game, you know? If poor people are given a hand up by the government then it’s interpreted by these (at best) middle class Christians as an affront to their hard earned money. They worked for their income but “these filthy poors just get handouts at MY expense?” You can tell by their actions that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus regardless of how they try to present themselves. They’re full of crap and they deserve to be treated as such.

Source: Grew up in a very conservative farming community, did all the church stuff, then moved away and found myself.

Also, I know I abused quotation marks but my bad on any grammar or spelling errors or general incoherence. I treated myself to vodka for dinner.

LegoMasters started in the UK, right? I’ll take that or the Aussie one over the crap they tried making in the US. I’d rather watch the incredible things people can do with Lego instead of pretend to enjoy the showrunners’ poor attempts at a weekly emotional tug job

Steam’s been fantastic! Problem for me is that some of the battle.net games aren’t on there. If there’s a way to download those somewhere and run them through Steam that’d be incredible. I didn’t even think to consider searching around for that possibility. I’ve seen people run Diablo 4 on their Decks so it’s clearly possible, I’m just still learning how to troubleshoot Linux and I’m trying to be extra careful since their OS doesn’t have much in the way of guardrails to prevent dummies from nuking themselves