Having just read a comment about someone who actually went through the process of having a kid by employing stuff like cycle and fertility tracking, scheduling both sex and abstinence, as well as other not-fun stuff, your comment made me think of taking the kink to an extreme, where instead of lots of rambunctious boning, it was a couple nerds doing intense and fruitless science to find the optimal way to impregnate someone that was impossible to impregnate. (Unless they start looking at the mating habits of bedbugs, but that’s a third, separate, entirely unhinged thing.)

I mean, I’m pretty sure I know which interpretation you meant. But brains are weird and I’m sleep deprived.

As someone who isn’t going to have kids and doesn’t want them, I still get the growing old alone concern.

It’s not that I would have wanted children to take care of me, but that I don’t trust the social safety system in the U.S.
Even if things are going well, it’s still a terrifying proposition. My first job ever was as a dietary aid at a mid-level retirement home, and while some of the people there were thriving (namely the folks who somehow managed to go into the home with their partners), the majority were a study of what happens when the ability to live exceeds the will. It was a formative experience.

That’s why I’m in therapy and desperately scared that between neurodivergence and trauma, that I’m not going to be one of those really social old people with friends everywhere that care for them and keep them company. Although I think it’s not a given that kids will automatically be there for you as you age, I can see the appeal of doing what you can to hedge your bets. It’s a terrifying world out there, and we only have each other.

Her name is Juniper! We mostly call her June Bug, though.

I’m not sure if I’m sharing the link the right way, but here’s Juniper and her big brother.

Work took a meta turn today.

Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.

We recently adopted a kitten that was fostered before she could be adopted out by the local animal shelter.

To say that she’s the best, most lovely, and well adjusted cat is an understatement. We have two dogs and a year old one orange brain cell cat (who is also very sweet, but he comes on strong).

She walked into our lives utterly fearlessly. She purrs so loudly at the slightest affection. She wrestles with our other cat, who is 10x her size. She’s getting confident with the dogs - she’s currently sleeping between my wife and our velcro heeler, touching both of them.

We’re really grateful for her, and for the love and care that was given to her. Although we adopted her from a local shelter, we know the people that fostered her, so we know she was found eating trash with her littermates in a neighbor’s yard. She was just a street kitten with no mom before she got scooped up and shown all the love, which we see every day.

It’s hard, sometimes unforgiving work, but not unnoticed, and not without impact. Thank you for caring.

Different than the person you responded to - as an adult I’ve lived in 3 states, in metropolitan areas, and the rule has always been that you must show up to exactly the polling location assigned to you. People at that location and that location only have your name on a list that they use to verify your voter registration.
In one of the cities, you could go to the election clerk’s office to receive a provisional ballot that would be counted only if they verified that a ballot was not cast in your name at your assigned polling location.

Oh, and the assigned polling place moves almost every election.

Editing to add: You often have to know what ward you represent, because the ballots can differ by ward and they combine several wards into one polling location. If you don’t know your ward (and the election folks aren’t nice), you have to wait in line for each ward until you accidentally find the person with your name in their book. (Each book represents a ward.)

It’s too socialistic by the standards of capitalists and has been run out of most cooking schools. It’s occasionally taught as an ‘alternative’ recipe, but for some reason, despite rendering a better pizza, it’s never widely adopted.

I think the joke is that might be AP style pizza.

In the U.S. milk comes in half gallon and gallon measures, which look like your 2L and 3L containers, respectively.

Sometimes you will find milk in waxed paper cartons, but that is not the norm. (It’s very common, however, for dairy products that are often bought by pint and quart — typically half and half, heavy cream, or coffee creamers.) Our fancier non-dairy creamers tend to be in tetrapaks or cartons, with less expensive (or at least distributed in higher volumes) creamers in plastic bottles.

That’s totally fair. For some reason that just flew past my head while thinking it through.

I completely missed the water and the curtain because I was distracted that she kind of looks pregnant and focused on trying to figure out the meaning with that.

How were they being a dick?

Edit: Bah. Never mind. I see they made that comment multiple times.
I support properly characterizing people, and highlighting that someone is adding in misspellings while quoting others is fine to me (because it’s insulting and portrays the quoted more negatively than necessary - we should avoid that and let folks stand on their actual words). But repeated verbatim statements without elaboration… Does feel dickish.

It’s okay! You can buy an upgrade to use a stainless steel milk tube! 😒

It also has you pour coffee syrups into a little plastic dispenser so you have to clean that, too.

It appears there’s some sort of cleaning mode where you let the machine heat water into to a specially shaped tub that fits across the drip tray, where you also stick the siphon end of the milk tube. But it looks like the dirty milk water is ejected into the drip tray tub, so your wash starts off with clean boiling water before beginning to reuse cooled, dirty water.

Also, what’s the wisdom on encouraging customers to keep dairy at room temperature? You know people are just going to forget the dairy container on their counter. It’s like they tried to stand out but all their features add more complexity and failure points than solved problems.

I’ve been manipulated by people who do it on purpose, and it really screws with one’s threat response. (Especially if the manipulation occurred during formative years.)

I have to make an intentional effort to coach myself through these situations to have an appropriate level of empathy. It’s really fucking hard not to sound like an asshole sometimes - and really easy for others to misunderstand me because they don’t have the same frame of reference.

I hope that if I’m ever in the papers for abandoning my morals, my oaths, and all dignity in egregiously stupid ways, that my wonton and clear law-breaking is characterized as defiance.

“Oh, no, your honor, I wasn’t breaking all those laws! I was defying them!”

It can be pretty annoying. We wind up creating extranet sites or using other services. (We have some ftp-like file services that work for us.)

Yeeeaahh… At my org our default security policy for all of our site collections prevents sharing outside of our domain, and requires managed devices to access our SharePoint.
To share things outside of our org via SharePoint, a site collection with a different security policy has to be created, and only admins can control the sharing. We can only share with people who have some sort of identity service that can federate with ours.
No user is granted above contribute access, and sharing is turned off. (People can share links, but they cannot change the permissions of an item to share it.).
Theoretically it’s possible that a SharePoint can be created that allows public access, but to my knowledge we do not do that.

OneDrive files cannot even be downloaded by external parties (although they can be viewed in the browser!), and Teams workspaces are also not accessible externally unless by special circumstance.

I would imagine the federal government is… well, hopefully at least as locked down as my work.

You don’t accidentally publish the list.

At very large organizations, sharing files easily is a pain in the ass. The available tools are usually tied to your Active Directory, which means you have to know who you’re sharing with, or at least have some idea of what permission groups allow what access.

To share documents appropriately, you still have to do the hard work of finding out who and what permission groups you should be sharing with, even if that means coordinating with other IT teams to make sure you understand their permissions structures properly.

Or you half-ass it, and put the document somewhere public and hope the link doesn’t get shared beyond your control (or found).

I guess I’m saying it’s not intimidation, accident, or resistance — just laziness and stupidity. Both of which are not unfamiliar ground for this administration.