TechyDad

That and the “Alpha Male” garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn’t about people.

Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.

At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).

It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.

I gave up watching a show (Smallville) because it was too much of a pain to find a tape to use in the VCR, make sure there was enough room to record my show without recording over something else, finding which tape had which episode, and watching the episodes while still leaving the tapes at the start of my wife’s recorded program.

Once the era of DVRs and then streaming hit, watching shows became SO much more convenient.

He was going to type filament, but it burnt out too quickly.

I was visiting my parents one year and found some old cassette tapes. I showed them to my kids and played a song. My youngest liked the song and wanted to hear it again. He was surprised when I couldn’t just hit “repeat.” Instead, I needed to rewind, rewind, rewind. Not far enough. Rewind, rewind. Too far. Fast Forward. Too far. Rewind. Too far but good enough.

When COVID hit and I was going to work from home, I was convinced that I’d hate it. I assured myself that it was okay because COVID would only last a few weeks and then the world would get back to normal. (Oh how naive I was!)

Once I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. My commutes weren’t that bad before, but now it’s just “walk up the stairs.” I don’t need to worry about traffic or parking spaces at all. I also don’t need to worry about people stopping by to chat when I’m in the zone. Yes, people can message me on Teams, but it’s easy to switch over and postpone dealing with them if it’s not important.

Even meetings are nicer. Most of mine aren’t on camera so I can get up and walk around my work area during my meetings.

I’m even healthier working from home. Previously, I’d bring a bunch of food to work to make sure I’d have enough and then snack all day. Now, I don’t bother going back downstairs except for lunch and for that I can take time to make a healthy lunch (salad or something).

My current job is now permanently work from home (my “home base” was moved and is now a 10 hour drive away so I’m DEFINITELY not commuting in). I’m not going back if I can help it. (If I were to ever leave this job, I’d make working from home a priority.)

My “favorite” (in hindsight only) popup experience: I was new to my job and was taking a short break from work to look something up on Barnes and Noble’s website. Except, I typed BarnesNNoble dot com instead of BarnesAndNoble. I was presented with the image of a woman sans clothing and it certainly wasn’t a book she was enjoying!

Obviously, I’m at work (and right down the hall from my boss). I do NOT want to be viewing this stuff now so I close the window. Except up pops another window with another woman definitely not reading. Close. Another one. Close. Another one. Close. Another one.

I actually started sweating because I was sure that my boss would walk in any moment and ask just WHAT I was looking at during work hours.

Finally, I managed to hit close before the pop-up script was able to run. We take pop-up blockers for granted today, but those times between the invention of the pop-up and the pop-up blocker were treacherous times to be online!

I have a cabled lawn mower also. I’m not going back to gas. Whipping the cable around is a small price over breaking my bank trying to pull the cord repeatedly until it starts, breathing in the fumes, needing to check the oil, and needing to buy gas to fill it up with.

Plus, there are battery powered mowers now. You plug them in to charge and then mow your lawn cord-free.

I always loved the school part of school (well, except for gym class). It’s everything else I hated. Especially between classes when a group of bullies would follow me making my life a living hell. If I had been able to compress my school day into just classes without gym class or any “between class” time, I would have enjoyed it more.

Instead, I mainly remember getting more and more paranoid that anyone who was laughing was laughing at me - all because my bullies thought it was fun to torment me.

I remember getting my first computer: A 286 with a whole MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking that there is no way that I’d ever fill up that 40 MEGA-bytes!

Now, I’m typing this out on a phone with specs that would have shattered my brain at the time - and my phone isn’t even top of the line. “Wait, your phone has 128GB of storage? Like 3,000 of my 286 computers?!!!”

I still remember passing by “the pit.” That was the section where the high school kids were allowed to smoke. It was outdoors, but they always left the doors open. I needed to pass by to get to class and hated the stench. So I’d hold my breath. But the crowds were always slow so it was a game of “will I be forced to breathe the stench, will I get by in time, or will I pass out?”

Yeah. If someone could give me $10 million, but I had to relive my 4 years of high school, I wouldn’t take the money.

I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.

In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.

Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.

I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)

I’m going to assume the “magical doubling” is totally legal and tax free. Meaning, the bank won’t come after me for the accidental deposit in a few days and whatever process added to my account also sent money to the IRS in my name to pay the inevitable tax bill. Obviously, my answer would be different if this weren’t the case.

It would make a small improvement in my life, but not much. I’d lock the extra money away in savings and likely wouldn’t touch it, but it would provide peace of mind in case things went south financially.

Last year, my father called me up to tell me that he saw a guy wearing a dress. He was obviously looking for a “This is surely a sign of the end times” reply, but I just said “So?”

My father then asked me if I’d wear a dress. I replied “it’s not for me, but I’m not going to judge someone who wants to wear one.”

I can definitely see “guy wearing a dress” going from “this is horrible and the guy should be arrested for such indecency” (what might have happened 100 years ago) to “whatever” in 100 years given how attitudes changed between my father’s generation (Boomer) and mine (GenX).

Heck, at one point wearing tights and high heels with a big white wig was the height of men’s fashion. Women, meanwhile, didn’t wear high heels or tights at all because those were “men’s clothing.”

So even if society doesn’t accept “men wearing a woman’s flowery sun dress” as normal, things might change so that flowery sun dresses are seen as masculine and guys who don’t wear them could be called various names.

I think it’s similar to what happened when left handedness was destigmatized. Suddenly, there was a sharp increase in the number of people saying they were lefties. It wasn’t that more people were becoming lefties. It was that more people felt free to be who they really were.

A trans person 100 years ago couldn’t really come out as trans. If they did, they’d likely face a violent response. So they lived their life in suffering - maybe not even knowing why they felt so different from everyone else and thinking that there was something wrong with them.

As being trans is destigmatized (and hopefully the anti-trans stuff recently is short lived), more and more people will “come out” as trans. It’s not that the actual number of trans people is increasing, but that trans people don’t feel like they have to hide who they are. Eventually, like lefties, the rate will level out and stabilize.

A hundred years from now, people will be referencing trans people instead of lefties when talking about the next marginalized group that’s being destigmatized.

If it was the early 1950’s, then: Black people and white people can use the same facilities. There aren’t “black bathrooms” and “white bathrooms.” There aren’t separate water fountains depending on the color of your skin.

Segregation was still around a mere 70 years ago.

The actor? Then who was vice-president? Jerry Lewis?

It was super easy, barely an inconvenience!

I left Reddit and jumped here. I admit that I look into Reddit every so often - mainly for a local subreddit - but 99.9% of my Reddit usage is now Lemmy usage.

For my Twitter->Mastodon jump, it’s not fair to compare. I had already basically abandoned my Twitter account before I ever heard of Mastodon. So it wasn’t really “jumping from Twitter to Mastodon” as much as it was “going from nothing to Mastodon.” That signup was easy as well, though.

I’ll admit that the “pick your server” step can be a little daunting. It feels like you’re choosing the most important bit right at the start and can overwhelm people, but it’s easy to switch later if you want. Smoothing that process out somehow would be my only recommendation.