I said “Sortie” out loud for the first time the other day, and even though it was pronounced correctly I still interrupted my own story to repeat it with a look of disgust, thinking “Surely not!”
I spent over a decade thinking “God this sucks, but at least things will get better once the boomers die off.” The worst political blow of my life was realizing that the younger generation also lacked critical thinking skills.
A real rollercoaster going from “This is a chance to use that word, it fits perfectly!” > “Wait, oh god how do you pronounce it?” > “I think I nailed it!” > “Oh no, they don’t know that word and now I have to explain it like a pretentious jerk.”
First time I used “sortie” verbally my face immediately twisted with a “Is that how that sounds?!”
It used to be the time to buy TVs because they would get heavily discounted like 80% to make way for new stock. I got an xbox 360 for $50 on black friday. Kind of made sense, but I usually stayed home just to avoid the crowds unless I heard of a sweet deal.
I’m not super in touch with these things, but it feels like over the years the deals have gotten worse and worse. Now it’s like 10% off sales, or they mark stuff up 50% then give a price cut to balance it back to full price.
It’s bizarre to me people still get so invested in it. Like they have been wired to think “OK, time for the shopping day. We must go consume. Think of something to buy while I get my coat.” Maybe the deals are good but I’m just too disinterested to find out, idk.
I recently found a new shower cleaner that actually works for the first time, and it cleaned the heavy deposits from my weird local water on my tub in less than five minutes, which normally takes me half and hour or more of scrubbing.
I felt like a superior adult, started sharing the news with all of my fellow grown up children. Maybe some day I’ll identify a funny noise in my car as well and earn my real adult degree.
I used to be a long-time AT&T customer. One time I wanted a new phone after a long time of being the ideal customer, so I looked into making a new contract. Called their hotline and the rep said “We only do deals for new customers, but you can buy a new phone for full price. It’s no problem.”
It seemed weird to me. Shouldn’t the long term customer loyalty be encouraged? I’m not locked into a contract any more, so why aren’t you worried about me jumping ship for a better deal? I tried explaining this to the rep in different ways, but they were genuinely confused. I finally told them “Alright, I’ll just get a deal through Verizon.” and he asked “Why? I don’t understand. I told you that you could buy a phone at full price?”
Never used AT&T again. I haven’t tried the same conversation with Verizon, because I won’t really have many viable options left if I boycott them too. I hear lots of people say “Well you can’t really blame them, it’s a smart move!” which seems weird to me because the smart move they made was to alienate me in order to get new customers. Of course I can blame them. Me blaming them was the acceptable loss they decided was OK.
I was a backer of the first version of the Pebble, and by the time mine came in they had released a newer, better, cheaper version which made mine feel a lot less cool. Doubt I would buy one again no matter what they did.
I think people underestimate how hard it is to build a computer this small and this functional with off the shelf parts. I have a case that just has a motherboard, power supply, and SSD in it for video streaming and web browsing on my TV, and it’s almost as big as this. It’s a relatively high spec MOBO since I wanted to stream fames from my PC initially, but still.
I don’t have confidence I could make this myself at these specs.
My family was always open to anyone to visit as much as they wanted so my friends came over 95% of the time. Like the third time I visited one friend’s house his mom came in, looked at me, and gave a long sigh before saying “Again?”. She also made him stop what we were doing and immediately shampoo the carpet which his did nearly every day, I assume to get the smell of weed out.
Most families I’ve witnessed were dysfunctional, but I didn’t notice until my twenties.
Literally asked my dad like 50 times what he did for a living because I couldn’t process how “logistics” was a job.