Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.

Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

If the others suggested aren’t quite right for you, you might try looking for an interval timer app. These are generally used for fitness, but it seems to me that type of setup might do exactly what you want if you just set up a “workout” that has a single 30 min interval and repeats.

Or use a scale.

If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.

Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.

As a rule, non-essential insurance (including pet insurance) is designed to be a losing bet as you are paying for the average cost of an insured animal’s care, plus the overhead of hundreds of people’s wages.

Plus all the other business overhead, plus tidy shareholder profits.

Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

-High premiums

-Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

-needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

-Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

-Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

-high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

People use words in different ways. You will find varying definitions of propaganda. Some people will call any information produced by a government propaganda. Some people will only call that information propaganda if it appears to have a notable bias. Some will only call the info propaganda if it contains outright lies.

You seem to want to define propaganda as any information produced by a government designed to pursuance people of something. Most people are not going to be against that kind of information (or at least not strongly against it). I’m pretty sure most people that say they are against propaganda view propaganda as information that is misleading or an outright lie.

The problem here seems to be that you have taken the stance that propaganda simply means “persuasion”.

Yes. It looks like [email protected] is the community to post a mod request on. From the sidebar of that community:

• There is a community I want to moderate, but the moderators appear to be inactive.

Please email us at [email protected] or create a post in this community.

I would post and then email [email protected] with a link to the post to get the admins/mods attention.

They should not do this without checking where the bed is supported on the floor. Your method only lifts the perimeter of the bed. It is very likely that the bed also rests on the floor down the center line of the bed or at other spots within the perimeter. If they only prop up the perimeter of the bed, it is liable to collapse in the center.

Gradation, color reproduction, and gaming performance are also important factors. There are a lot of “mid tier” TVs (and even some of the “premium” TVs) that can produce really dark blacks, bright whites, and vivid colors, but…

• Gradation: Mid tier and above non-OLED TVs have local dimming and other features to improve blacks and contrast. They tend to have dark blacks and very bright whites, but their performance in between is important too. You will find that many of these tvs are hard to impossible to calibrate to get even gradation between black and white. This leads to muddy grays and “crushed” blacks and whites. Crushed blacks means that very dark gray appears black so you lose detail. Crushed whites means the same on the white end. Additionally, local dimming can lead to “halo” effects in which when there is a quick transition from black to lighter colors, the black area has a halo around it.

• Color: In my experience, the colors are often off. Youll get really vivid colors in certain tones and more muted colors in others. This can lead to a picture seeming to have a tint to it. Skin tones, which we tend to be more sensitive to, may appear greenish. These TVs will often have a “feature” to improve skin tones because manufacturers know that people notice that. This feature will try to correct green (or other tint) but tends to also influence reproduction of other colors.

• Gaming: many TVs have a “game mode” which reduces input lag to make gaming better. Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a video signal coming into the tv to be displayed on the screen. With gaming mode off, many TVs have input lag that is 70-100ms (100ms is 1/10 of a second). This amount of lag is very noticeable in any game that requires fast reactions. Gaming mode input lag tends to be great these days - often 10ms or less… but on a lot of TVs it comes with a big price: many of the TVs picture processing features get turned off. This can include local dimming, which means you end up with gray blacks and a muddy picture in gaming mode.

I purchased and returned three higher end tvs ($900 to $1200 for a 65” tv) from about 2019 to 2021 in an attempt to replace a 55” plasma TV from 2013. Despite the fact that the plasma was 1080p and had no HDR capability, the picture was way better than any LCD-based variety I looked at (note: LED, QLED, and MicroLED are all LCD tech). All of them were bad enough in one or more of the above areas for me to return them. Most notably, I game on tv and that is where the failures of these TVs really really showed. Finally, about two years ago, I dropped the $$ for an OLED (LG C2). This was a true upgrade and I am really happy with the picture and performance. Not to say there aren’t software issues, but it felt like a real upgrade.

You know how new towels don’t absorb water? It’s because there is some shitty fabric softener on them to make them feel really soft at the store. Wash them once or twice with vinegar (instead of laundry soap) to remove the softener and turn them into proper towels. The same technique should work for your cat.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova