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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Honestly I thought it was appropriate. Aang, a freaking teenager, has an entire mini arc about the moral canundrum of having to kill someone while the fate of the entire world rests upon his shoulders. They also established how strongly it was against his religion to kill anything, and that he’s a vegetarian.

    Obviously it was a copout in that they can’t show a character being directly killed in a spectacular enough fashion for a series finale on a children’s show, but ultimately weakening the big bad evil guy and taking away all of his power, politically, physically and emotionally. That’s a great place to end it and so very in character for Aang


  • This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight

    Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die



  • I have mixed feelings on this front. On one hand, a locked down computer encourages either extreme compliance (so no learning how to do new things) or encourages the kid to figure out a bypass which might be far worse than if they had an unmanaged computer to begin with.

    Right now my oldest isn’t reading yet so I have controls primarily to enforce a time limit particularly for dopamine-heavy media apps, and to prevent how much she can accidentally do by clicking without a clue of what she’s clicking on and just clicking the colored button. I’ll play it by ear for how much control is necessary to ensure my kids can develop to be the best adults they can be. The one thing I’m not looking towards is that my oldest is only about 4 years away from the window where I’ll need to have “The Talk” with her, because many men in this world suck.



  • As a kid I was effectively given unlimited screentime, and that definitely shaped me into adulthood for better and for worse. My wife has severe insomnia so she often sleeps until 11am, and my 4 year old always gets up around 7:30am so before she started school we setup an old phone with a managed google account with a 2.5 hour screentime limit, and a 30 minute limit for the YouTube Kids app (grandma got her hooked on YouTube of course so no putting that cat back into the bag) to encourage more enriching content (I preinstalled the PBS Kids apps, as well as a number of age-appropriate games) She’s at an age where she’s extremely impressionable and without locking things down will end up installing things by clicking ads or watching weird stuff she probably shouldn’t be watching.

    In the near future my plan is to gift my 4 year old an old ewaste laptop I acquired off a friend and a Minecraft account since she’s really been getting into Minecraft when she gets to play on my or my wife’s computers, and I’ll probably play it by ear for when to raise the parental controls, but right now she’s simply not ready for unrestricted internet access. I probably won’t limit screentime on the computer other than telling her its time to do something else when she’s been on the computer for too long, but we’ll play it by ear.


  • We had a discussion of employee email address formatting and how to handle collisions in a workplace that hires many, many immigrants. One idea that came to my mind (but wasn’t voiced for obvious scope/feasibility concerns) is to do firstname+nickname+lastname so [email protected] displayed as John "Brickman" Smith then during the onboarding process users can select from a list of approved and not-yet-assigned nicknames (I imagine a webpage with a search bar and a “regenerate” button then it shows a list of 10 or 20 nicknames they can select from) and pick something that they like and thinks fits them. It would add some whimsy and worker empowerment but also still prevents interesting situations like someone selecting an inappropriate nickname








  • Meh my “conspiracy theories” just aren’t exciting enough because they tend to be too grounded in things that are actually likely in the real world and explaining weirdness in what is presented to the public with a guess as to what happened behind the scenes, like that the sonic movie was a joke pitch that somehow got greenlit so then they had to actually make the movie and to try to make it decent