jimmux

Two movies that usually appear on lists like this, but I don't see them: The Fountain, and The Fall.

Ah, Summernats. I used to work at a servo in Canberra. That time of year was nuts.

Usually I was the only staff on site, but we'd have four staff on for nats. One would basically be handling the car wash exclusively. Two would be constantly restocking food and drinks. We'd get a shipping container of extra stock dropped off to keep up.

The bus home would have to go through a cloud of tyre smoke, and half the passengers would get off at the north side brothels and strip joints.

I never actually went to the festival itself, but I feel like I got most of the experience.

Car theft is more likely to be acted on than any other kind of theft, in my experience, but it still has to be convenient for them.

One time my car was stolen, I knew it had only just happened so they were certainly still driving it near my home, and the police just said sorry, we'll let you know if it turns up somewhere. I called back a few minutes later when I remembered that it's on a car share program so I can track the location via GPS - that got them interested, and I stayed on the phone giving updates while it took them only 20 minutes to make an arrest.

The same car got stolen a couple of years later, when I wasn't able to track it live. I located it myself, and they just turned up to do a few minutes of forensics then left.

They're definitely understaffed. When I went to the station to do a report there was only one constable in the building, even though it was a time of day/week when they're extra busy.

There was something about the infinite emptiness that struck an emotional chord with me. That's gone now, for the better overall, but I'm glad I experienced it.

There's a messed up kind of logic to it.

Spending big on something nice is one level of status symbol.

Being able to waste money on something shite is on a whole other level.

I'll still think you're a dumbarse, though.

Thanks for confirming I'm not alone in this, and sorry you've experienced the same.

People tend to think marriage breakdowns happen for obvious reasons, like infidelity, laziness, just losing interest. It's scary to think that you can tick all the right boxes but it can all fall apart anyway, because we as individuals can fall apart.

We need to do so much more for mental health support.

There were no obvious reasons. An accumulation of life factors, like deaths in the family and job insecurity, led us both into a detached survival state, and her survival instinct is to run. There wasn't much warning, and it happened when I was away for a family event.

This hit me so hard that I bet everything on giving her space to see what she was missing and find the way back. That turned into years of no contact. When we did eventually get in touch again, it was clear that I made a mistake. Life had not been easy for her. We had both likely been going through some kind of breakdown, not knowing the other was experiencing the same.

We're now very close again in a lot of ways. I think it's fair to say we're more honest and trusting with each other than anyone else. We've both grown and matured significantly.

Unfortunately, distance from her family, and I sense some guilt over the whole thing has made it hard to fully reconcile. Now we're on opposite sides of the world. She's still struggling but determined to tick off some big life goals. It's no secret that I would go back to our old life together in a heartbeat, but having so much already weighing on her makes it difficult to even think about relationships.

I'm not sure what the lesson is there. I guess it's about remembering to look out for our own mental wellbeing, because without it we can't fully look out for those we care about.

I was a very well behaved kid, but somehow got punished multiple times for absolute bullshit reasons.

I think the most inexplicable was when I had changed schools. My old school was strict about sun safety. Hats were expected every time we were outside. The new school was the opposite, not allowing hats to be worn indoors at all, because they were only worn by rebellious kids or something.

I still wore one at lunch out of habit, and because I burn easily. One time I was going from one outdoor area to another, and had to pass through a covered walkway. It would have been 2 seconds under cover, but a teacher saw me. I got detention and my hat was confiscated.

Good thing you didn't use British English, then.

Simon Peyton Jones is about as big an expert on programming languages as you can get, and he's on the record as saying Excel is a functional programming language.

I'm on the cusp of X and millennial, so I've been around plenty of both.

Some X's have done well for themselves, but those without a bit of luck and assistance have mostly had to give up on big dreams of housing security and family.

Millennials have had it tougher, but many of them still got there, with a bit more luck and assistance.

It's been a long decline, with the concentration of capital making it harder for most of us every year. The generational divide is just another distraction from class warfare.

I tried a bunch of Fireforks, and found bugs I couldn't live with in all of them - until I tried Floorp. It was last on my list because the name and icon are ugly so I assumed it wouldn't have as much polish as something like Waterfox. Turns out it's got sensible defaults and works very well, with better performance than vanilla Firefox, so I'm happy.