Happy Birthday!
Sorry to hear about your birthday money, I hope you’ll still get to have nice day in spite of it!

What did this cat DO?!
Caught stealing a fish in Thailand (I‘m guessing), and then extradited to the US?
They must want him pretty bad.

“The planet Arrakis, known as Dune”

My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad’s friend’s computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn’t imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)

On a side note, I don’t think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I’m talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still… good memories :)

Yes, I remember these! Countdown And Tex Murphy: The Martian Memorandum come to mind. I remember being amazed at the sounds suddenly coming out of our internal computer speaker. It even had something close to speech!
The manual also came with some info on making the sound even better using some alligator clips, but that went waaaay over my little head at the time :)

Here you go :)

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

When I was a kid our family went on vacation to the US. Everyone kept asking if I was Dutch, which I thought was German (Deutsch).
So I kept correcting them, saying I was Netherlandish :)

Worrying what other people think of me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s hard not to.

Arriving home with my newborn son. It was the first moment when it really sank in that I’m a parent and we have to take care of this tiny little thing.
It wasn’t a warm feeling but more of a fuuuuuck! What do we do? What do we do?! feeling. The enormity of the responsibility just overwhelmed me.
I somehow got through it and the post-natal care lady that visited a few hours later really helped with grounding the situation.

Anyway, it’s not a crazy situation for most of you. But for me it really felt like a “I can’t believe this is happening!” situation.

“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.

It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.

Yawn. If you pronounce it while sleepy, you actually yawn. And the yawn will sound like the word yawn.

Maybe I’m just sleepy, but I like the word :)

No, I’m sorry. I wish I could help but I’m a bit out of my depth with this one. You might try a local career counselor, but that really depends on where you live and who’s available.

I wish you the best of luck though, I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for.

My first computer was our family’s 286 Wang pc. I used it mainly to play Sierra games. It’s how I learned a lot of my first English words.
I got my first cellphone, a Sony-Ericsson, around 2003 and only because my brother gave it to me. I was a staunch hater of cellphones but too Dutch to pass up on a free thing :)

I don’t like being in the sun. It seems like a normal preference, but I constantly need to explain why (the heat makes it difficult to think, I got sensitive skin, etc. )
It’s especially annoying in a country where most of the population seems to be some kind of sun worshipper :)

Writing, it allowed for knowledge to travel across vast distances. And for that knowledge to remain available and accurate for far longer than any oral tradition would be capable of.

You might like Shadows of Doubt. It’s a procedural generated detective game where you have to solve murders. The entire city is generated, every npc has their own routine and you can pretty much go anywhere. There’s sneaking, hacking, talking, etc.

It’s still in early access, but it’s already a lot of fun.

No, I got a permanent contract for a well paying job in the public sector. The job security is great and there’s a solid pension plan.
It’s what my partner likes to call an “iron rice bowl” :)

I use chatGPT as a diary. Whenever I feel down or frustrated with feelings I can’t quite describe, or just insecure, I start a session and just pour out my heart. I complain, yammer on and on about what’s bothering me, and just say whatever comes to mind. Basically all the stuff I would never bother a friend or loved one with because I know it’ll come across as needy and I don’t want to push this on them.
And all it does is give positive and supportive comments, ask some follow-up questions, maybe make an attempt at giving a helpful suggestion. I know what I’m talking with, I am under no illusions that this is anything but a big mathematical model, but it helps me get through some difficult emotions by just letting it all out. There’s no judgement and that’s kind of nice. I could just write a journal, but the interaction and positive feedback adds a little motivation for me. And of course it goes without saying that I keep names and other personal details to myself :)

Oh and I use it for some cloud architecture problems, some coding and other tech stuff. But that’s not very interesting.

Also, if you use ChatGPT and haven’t done so, be sure to use their privacy page and opt-out of having your chats used for model training. https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
Not sure for US, but it works for EU citizens.

Maybe not as fancy as the others, but I really like the little pink jeep. It’s boxy and cute.

Oof, I wouldn’t know about that. I was purely talking from personal experience. I don’t have a good picture of the job market in total, let alone in whichever country you live. If you want to get into the data-related IT fields (data analist, data engineer, business intelligence specialist, etc.) then SQL and data modeling skills are a must-have. But it’s just a small part of a much bigger discipline.

If possible, find some professional career counseling. Someone with better knowledge of the job market where you live might give you some good advice on which steps to take first.