Jimmycrackcrack

I kinda like it. I guess it helps that in my part of the world it's absolutely blazing hot in summer. I love that, but with the intense onslaught of sun over that period, by the time winter rolls back around it's kind of a welcome change. I also just look way better in winter clothes so it's nice to feel better about my appearance for that portion of the year. I also find that it's way easier to warm yourself up when it's cold than to cool down when it's hot. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big wuss so all summer I'll whine and moan about it being soo hot and then immediately complain about being freezing in winter, but on balance I think I find the discomfort of my region's winter a bit easier to deal with than its summer. I also like not being completely covered in a layer of sweat as well. I don't especially care a whole lot about when the daylight hours appear, I'm as happy being out and about at night as I am in the day and appreciate either for different reasons so if more of my waking hours are taking place in darker periods of the day then I'm just appreciating those for what they are just as I also appreciate all the bright and sunny hours. I would say that as someone who has trouble sleeping when it's too bright I definitely prefer it when the sun comes up later and doesn't wake me up. It probably helps that I'm hardly an outdoors-man so it's not like much if any of the things I'd actually do across a year are really curtailed by the mandates of the season, though I guess I do miss the beach. Besides, like a lot of people, I work indoors so a good chunk of any given day is taken up by a minimum 8 hours of work usually starting at 09 so when the weather is absolutely beautiful and sunny and clear I'll see it for about 20 minutes out the car window before going in to a building with the blinds drawn and the air-conditioning on until I emerge at what is then evening hours.

what's the last step do for you?

It does seem like it'd be pretty cool, though much rather them than me lol. I think shoving an rpi inside though would really betray the implicit spirit of the project. That would just be "can a raspberry pi run linux when I put in a plastic case shaped like a children's toy?" The answer would pretty obviously be yes. People are saying the processor in it means it probably couldn't run Linux which would make it a bit of a non-starter but there apparently other OSs that could be made to run on that kind of processor and that'd be cool to see.

I loved Reddit Is Fun. I've been using Connect for Lemmy because it seemed very similar to me. I wonder if I should try boost out.

Haha almost sounds like my style before refining this skill, although maybe not that extreme.

I think it's a particular skill to phrase requests for help in such a way to list as many relevant steps that you tried as briefly as possible and judiciously decide not to mention all the steps you've tried tempting though it may be. I had for a long time in the context of tech support questions written very long help requests because I was so afraid of getting a glib response to try some extremely obvious thing that takes 5 seconds and would definitely fix some well known easily solvable issue but not the harder more obscure issue I was experiencing that happened to have characteristics of that simpler issue.

I learned though that the longer your request is the less chance you have of receivingany help and if it's a captive audience who are required to help you, the more chance you'll have of them getting rid of you by deliberately misinterpreting the issue by focussing on any random part of the very long description (could be the opening sentence, could be something several paragraphs in) and pretending the request was all about that. They'd hone in on steps I described taking to try and fix the issue I wrote the help request about in the first place, re-contextualise those steps as a different, unrelated help request and then give an unhelpful response on how to solve that issue that I was never experiencing to begin with. More innocently, long lists of what's been tried also just make it harder to understand the problem when someone is trying to assist by virtue of the sheer volume of text produced and how boring and tedious it becomes for them to read. There's also another issue in being too fixated on listing what's been tried which is that, although the whole idea is to filter out responses that involve solutions that have already been attempted, often it transpires that you didn't actually attempt the solution in the right way and something dismissed as ineffectual actually would have worked after all. Sometimes it's actually better to let people suggest something you already tried and anticipated they might suggest, just so you can double check that you actually really did try that approach properly and didn't have a faulty understanding of how to apply it.

That said though, obviously I try to make sure to include the things I'm very confident I don't need to try again to show that indeed I've worked on the problem and have tried the more obvious solutions already.

When I was 14 I tossed a piece of packaging for the chips I was eating on the ground. I don't know why I did that, I'd been so against it as a good little kid, I think my mind was just experimenting at the time with whether I really needed to give a shit about this anymore. Probably some kind of "edginess" I was cultivating perhaps. Anyway, some middle aged teacherly guy picked it up in front of me and put it in the bin. Then he gave me a statistic about how our city was the "nth cleanest in the world and we should keep it that way". I was by myself but kinda scoffingly shrugged it off as he walked away to show I didn't care what he thought. But being called out like that and feeling that hot flush of angry embarrassment and being forced to pay specific attention to my actions instantly and dramatically recalibrated that drift in my values on the issue of of littering in a permanent way. It wasn't because they made an especially good point, in fact I didn't find the statistic particularly compelling I mean of all the reasons to do the bare minimum of decency that seems like one of the worst, like it's some sort of competition or something. Nevertheless it was just a reminder at the perfect moment that no, this isn't going to be acceptable even if there's no obvious consequence and you shouldn't start to feel okay about this.

The fact that the guy was kinda lame and had such middle aged dad and teacher vibes about him I think made all the difference, there wasn't an angry confrontation, but it was still firm. He backed off and walked away straight after he said his piece rather than giving me the chance to turn it in to an argument where I might feel rebellious and victorious about it, he just calmly left me to stew in the fact that whatever bravado I might have put on for him, he didn't care and I was going to have to reckon with why I ever thought this was going to be a good habit to start.

I bring this up because maybe if you have the opportunity to you actually should say something, though obviously carefully and not too aggressively. Sometimes it makes a difference even if by their response the person would appear to indicate that it didn't.

Oh come on you juicy dangler, you're not going to tell us the word and acronym?

I'm not quite sure why I ever used to have such an objection to it, it's great. Particularly nice if it's charred corn.

Maybe it's being a product of my environment but there are so few things that are currently private that I would want to have to do publicly. I don't generally really want to contend with other people or shared facilities more than I have to. I definitely don't want communal bathing. I can stomach public transport, which is already a thing, but then I tend to spurn it where I live more often than not because of the lack of viability and convenience. I guess I would say I wish that where I was specifically that transport was more communal than it is now. I don't see how it really could be though because of the nature of where I live and the lack of density and the bad urban planning that led to everything being very spread out, but it'd be nice.

I could only make a few pages in to the first chapter, it was hard to read, very, very detailed, which should be a good thing but I found myself losing track of where we even were or what the scene was about for all the detail. Once they started describing the buttons on the coat of one of the characters and how it had been the fashion some years prior at some point in the 19th century to wear them that way... I gave up. I'd like to try again some time but I can't see myself experiencing it differently. Curious about the 7 years in the making Soviet film adaptation, but its also 7 hours long.

I care, usually not very much, but somewhere above zero. It's good that they actually have something to talk about which therefore gives us something to talk about. Holidays overseas are a bit easier than kids because there's some relatability there but whatever they're talking about it's usually more the person talking about it that's interesting more than the thing. You're already friends, so you already enjoy their insights or way of talking about things and you've probably been there for a fair few of their important life events so it's nice to hear about the latest ones and how that's shaping then today as others shaped them before.

Because I don't have kids and wasn't on their vacation for me there is a natural limit imposed on just how interesting it can be hence saying I don't exactly care a whole lot, but it's usually at least enough to make sharing a beer more satisfying.