palordrolap

There are certain things that I have to avoid thinking about in order that I don’t enter a depressive phase or become suicidal. You are asking me to think about those things.

You are asking a hungry man with no legs to walk a thousand miles for food. “Grow new legs!” you say. “Find a way!”

You are asking me to beat my head repeatedly into a wall until I get through it. I have literally and figuratively bounced my head off a wall. Both made me not want to do that again.

Maybe you’ve got yourself out of this exact situation. Good for you. I am glad you managed it.

I am not you.

Strange how this is one of those cases where someone who is clearly incompetent to meet a responsibility must nonetheless meet it. I should maybe pick myself up by my bootstraps while I’m at it.

all I can advise is make sure you get that shit sorted out or cleaned out before you pass away

I know you mean well, and I hate to say it, but this is roughly equivalent to telling a depressed person to “cheer up”.

I’m well aware of the burden this would leave someone having to clear out my house, because I’m the one with that same burden right now. This is not the motivation someone in good mental health might think it would be.

Mental illness does not imply stupidity. I mean, I’m plenty stupid a lot of the time, but the two aren’t connected. And I can see the problem where a lot of hoarders can’t. And yet, if I was capable of fixing the problem, it wouldn’t have existed in the first place.

It’s not always about what it might be worth later. It’s often about what it’s worth to the hoarder right now, and how much anguish getting rid of it would cause.

People will develop attachments to the most bizarre of things. Even a straw and a plastic lid.

Source: I’m pretty much a hoarder. Thankfully I don’t develop attachments to rubbish and recyclables like the character in this comic, but I have far too many books, clothes, knick-knacks and household items that I can’t let go of. Many were gifts.

The books are the worst because I feel like they’re tainted by having been in my house. If they ever leave here, the best place for them might be landfill or incineration and that feels like a waste. So here they languish where they might have some use.

You can’t wash a book.

I had a clear-out 10 years ago - anything that could be cleaned up went to charity - and still have regrets about some of that. The next one probably isn’t going to happen any time soon.

This particular hillside isn’t in a preservation area or even an area that ought to be. It’s literally just lawn grass on a steep slope for the most part. If there were enough people taking the shortcut to cause problematic erosion, a desire path would be the first warning sign, and there isn’t one.

If the local authority thought it was a problem - the grass is mowed occasionally, so they keep an eye on it - I’m sure they’d put up signs threatening a fine for anyone cheating.

That said, I will bear what you’ve said in mind.

I once heard about someone accidentally pouring tea from a teapot into a mug with instant coffee in it rather than hot water.

Your laptop has the GPU equivalent of that drink.

JavaScript is in that set of “some” languages. Most of it ties back to C’s struct tm which zero-indexes months (0-11), weekdays (0-6), and the rarely used day of year (0-365), as well as offsetting years by 1900.

The odd man out, so to speak, is the date (or “mday” as it’s called there), which is in the range 1-31. One (Perl) book I own suggests that the zero-based ones are used to index arrays of strings and implies this one is different because it generally isn’t used that way.

But anyway, these are decisions made 50 years ago that still haunt us.

Oh! This must be the guy who was called out on that exact thing and it gave him serious pause before he was able to jump-start the bullsh-tting part of his brain.

I know a place that has switchback footpaths on the hillside. The gradient and terrain mean that it’s usually possible for anyone of rudimentary fitness to get down by taking a short-cut and heading straight down. Takes less than a minute.

Coming back up is hell either way. If you try the straight line, you need way more fitness than going down. It’s not a 45° slope, but it feels like one. If you take the switchbacks, it feels like you’re making no progress for far too long.

It might only be two or three minutes of strain, five or six for the switchbacks but it’s a real drag.

Well there are plenty of exceptions that might mean certain Gen Xers aren’t in the workforce (pervasive mental illness in my case), but the cut-off was 1980 - 45 long years ago - so we’re all middle-aged now.

Sure, the oldest end is still boomers, but I don’t think my statement was completely inaccurate.

Wait until you learn how months are numbered in some programming languages.

The clever documentation calls it “months since January”.

Skibidi Toilet was created by someone born in 1997, which is Gen Z.

Gen Xers are the older end of the workforce. Some might be lucky enough to be able to retire, but they’re not as well off as the Boomers.

Useful graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#/media/File:Generation_timeline.svg

Edit: for some reason, fedia.io isn’t turning that into a link, so it might not show up properly elsewhere. Copy+paste works.

Aldrin is a staunch Republican. He was going to vote GOP no matter what. To that end, he’d say anything to get them into the White House.

That said, he might have truly believed that Biden (who hadn’t yet stepped down) wasn’t any of those things.

As someone who is firmly in the greybeard mould, I ain’t shaving my legs for this.

Keep going. We may be homing in on how the number order was derived for a dartboard.

Relevant Sarah Andersen comic

It’s hard to be sure on the genetics front. There’s evidence to suggest there might be some weaknesses there, but then most of my ancestors and relatives who have had severe problems have all been smokers, and I’m not.

My weakest gums are weak precisely because I floss there more often.

Those locations happen to be where there’s a natural gap between teeth, they’re the first place food gets stuck and the first place I have to take a toothpick or floss to. Gentle as I am, that still takes a toll on the gum between them.

There’s also been a feedback loop of food getting stuck there making those gaps wider over time, meaning larger food getting stuck and more flossing. Over the course of a few decades, tiny movements add up.

The dentists I’ve seen are clueless what to suggest; suggesting I floss less would make their heads explode.

Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she’s still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she’s doing now.

Proof: You could create that potaturd as a plush and someone would buy it.