Lucky escape! It shows how good these con-artists are at what they do, when you went in fully expecting it would be a huge scam, and still got talked into it!

My strategy these days is to never commit to any significant purchase on the spot. Car, sofa, whatever it is, they will always try to lay on the pressure and make it seem like it’s urgent and if you don’t get it now you’ll miss the limited deal, or someone else will buy it or whatever the trick is, but you have to stay firm.

My go to line is “I’ll take that away and think about it”- which gets me out of loads of trouble.

Slimy sales people have plenty of psychological tricks they weave into conversations to get you invested and ready to buy. They want you yourself even to be saying “Yeah that seems like a good deal!” because once you say that, they’ve basically got you - you can’t back out because you’d be disagreeing with yourself, and it’s human nature and pride almost that we ‘stick’ with our decisions.

That’s why never making a decision on the day is the strongest defence. It means you don’t have to be a skilled conversationalist who can spot all the sweet talk and see through the tricks. You’re totally free to get suckered and say “That sounds great!” but not have that become a commitment.

If it sounds great now it will still sound great after you go home and think about it, after all.

I’m trying to swear less. Or rather, to swear only where a swear is warranted.

My Dad has a habit of interjecting constant cuss words into everything he says, like “I was at the fucking supermarket right and then I’m just trying to find a fucking tin of beans…” and it’s just so unnecessary, to the point where the swears mean nothing because they are just peppered everywhere. I have to keep reminding him, “Dad, please tone it down a little”

And that’s an easy habit to get into but its exactly what I don’t want to be doing - swearing just as punctuation.

If a situation calls for a swear then I will swear quite happily, “Ouch, my fucking toe!!” and I’ll use the proper word. There’s no need to find childish swear-alternatives.

But I don’t want to sound like I can’t even stop it.

Being straight? Not a red flag.

Being a woman? Not a red flag.

Being Christian? Not a red flag either, unless you’re the sort of Christian who wants to force your views upon others who do not share them.

The only real red flag is that you said you “don’t understand” being queer. What is there to understand about it? Person A loves person B and that’s all there is to know. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then that perhaps may be the root of the issue, because it positions queer people as something alien.

Edit: Genuine advice - the key to being a good ally is internalised acceptance. You can’t be an ally if you see queer people as a different species, because even if you are “kind” and say “nice” things, there’s still a huge wall. You need to believe, truly, that queer people are exactly the same as you, and treat them exactly as anyone else - which ironically means no special treatment at all. Special treatment, even if it is seemingly ‘positive’ and well meant, is still strange and alienating.

The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.

“ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.

Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”

It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.

Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.

By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.

If it’s not broke…

‘matematician’

For what it’s worth, I’m with you.

I also work from home, and while I generally cook all my own meals and do meal prep at werkends, sometimes I have a bad/stressful week where I cave and get fast food like three lunches in a row.

I keep a grocery bag in the car and put the fast food in there to hide my shame.

It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.

When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.

In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.

Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up

Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change

So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.

Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.

I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.

Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.

A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.

A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”

No thanks.

Adding on to this comment, it is very often not possible to change your auth method.

If you use email to register, you can almost always change to a different email (same method) but you can’t change between methods, like from Google auth to Apple auth, or even to a different google auth.

You’d need to create a new account, and therefore lose all the data on your old account.

Always choosing email gives you the most control and most privacy, I’d strongly recommend it.

This is like the Minecraft crafting recipe for a Conduit

This is the answer.

Fan-made trailers of existing media can be really interesting, especially when they put a very different take on the presentation.

Example: Star Trek the Motion Picture in a more modern style makes that movie seem amazing.

Or Alien as a comedy movie

You’re right of course, it’s definitely down to simple lack of incentive, rather than some kind of conspiracy. But the conspiracy was a fun shower thought! :)

I was almost convinced they were keeping this broken on purpose, it’s been broken so long. Like, years long.

It was broken so long I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if news surfaced that Discord was taking back-handers from Microsoft under the table to keep it broken. With steam working so well on Linux now, broken discord streaming without actual working audio share was one of the last things that posed a hurdle for gamers ditching Windows.

(In the meantime, thank you Vesktop for your service <3)

Yes.

Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.

Ignorance is bliss

Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.

Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC’s hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.

DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.

Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.

VCRs.

Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.

But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.