I had a pair of speakers (studio monitors) with rubberized plastic on them that did this. It was truly maddening. My guess is it’s something plastic/rubber like that. Your phone case is a good suspect, have you taken it off the phone and inspected it inside and out?

Customer: "I’d like a double cheeseburger with no cheese. "

Employee: “Execute Order 66”.

Agreed.

grunting noises

After a recent renovation, our new exaust fan is much quieter, and it kind of bugs me. It is nice to be able to leave it running longer, though. The old one was too obnoxiously loud to leave on after you finished a shower.

It takes different forms, but one horrifying example is smuggling people in from poverty-stricken countries and forcing them to be sex slaves. People with no resources that have very little chance of rescue.

Someone with water spray bottle should have been in the dystopian design meeting that came up with this horror.

“No! Bad! No!”

spritz

I would try local library first, then your local Discord community, and then maybe Nextdoor.

I know Nextdoor can be a real shitshow of paranoid street watchers and bad political takes. But I have found it very helpful when it comes to stuff like this (and getting recommendations on local services / shops in general). Be sure to say you have the STL and are willing to pay a reasonable amount for help with it.

Bosses like that think every problem can be solved with “better motivation” and a “can-do attitude”. They are the main reason everything sucks. You can’t pep talk failing infrastructure into fixing itself, you dumb mother fuckers.

The other thing you mentioned: not having close friends and non-professional relationships. I think that’s very true. A lot of people are isolated these days. And many friends will keep you at arm’s length. They are happy to hang out. But if you start to open up too much, they will start to avoid you. Anything that smells remotely “clingy” is a big no-no. They’d rather look at screens than engage in real talk.

I appreciate you bringing up the money aspects. I have often felt the same way about the ubiquitousness of “just do therapy, bro”. That it’s just another sad aspect of late stage capitalism. It’s my understanding there’s not nearly enough providers to go around, yet the aggressive marketing continues. Because of course it does.

I don’t know if this is true or if it’s just a trope. But I’ve also heard that the field attracts people who usually need help themselves. Not that all therapists are “broken”…but that there’s a percentage who are. So on top of finding an available one at all, you hope you land a good one. Hopefully that’s just a BS stereotype.

I’ve heard people call these mental health days. At least to friends. Probably not to bosses. It’s good to take one once in a while (if you can) and just chill. I occasionally do so.

I’ll never forget my younger brother saying that in NYC people consider it really weird if you’re not in therapy. I didn’t comment, but that kind of bugged me. I’m all for de-stigmatizing therapy, but that made it sound like it’s some kind of flex to tell people you’re in therapy…?

Thanks for bringing this up. I double-checked to make sure mine are still deleted.

Of course, nothing is truly deleted. I’m speculating they’ll train AI with our deleted content anyway.

Hmm, I thought top left was Orgasmo, top middle was Ermagherd, and bottom left was Gas Station Shelob

It’s essentially these two things. And it’s easy to see from any political map that these divides line up really well along rural vs urban areas. People who live in cities have learned how to live together and tolerate each other (even if they don’t necessarily like each other). People in rural areas think of themselves as the ‘backbone’ of the country because or our early agrarian and later industrial development as a country. And in many ways, they really were. Farmers, miners, factory workers, etc.

But time has left them behind with factory farms, overseas production, robot factories, renewable energy, etc. They blame “the other” for their problems. The “other” or “the enemy” in their minds is often “big city” people with darker skin, or “academic pinheads” or “government bureaucrats” or basically anyone but themselves. To them, hearing news about something like climate change or same sex marriage is an “attack on their way of life and traditional values”. They haven’t learned how to adapt or take proper stock of their situation. They only know how to lash out at “the other”.

If rural people would calm the fuck down and gain some perspective, they could see that they have a lot in common with working people in urban areas. For example, we’re all being fucked over by greedy corporations and a tiny number of people with way too much money and power. But those same powerful elites do a masterful job of pitting all of us working class slobs against each other. This both amuses them and keeps us divided so we don’t build the guillotines. The country being ever on the brink of civil war is very much intentional.

And of course there are guys like Steve Bannon, who is like a comic book villain. Guys like that really do want to see it all burn to the ground so it can be rebooted in some fantasy world where “bitter old white males like me rule again”.

It is messy. Requires careful handling and procedures. Stinky, too. Best to do it in a garage or shed. Some people build ventilation systems and tent it.

This is very cool.

I have printed a few functional things with my resin printer. Like some pieces I designed in Blender that I needed in order to make some minor repairs to stuff around the house. Was really fun using calipers to measure, come up with a design, and puzzle it all out.

It’s much easier than modeling for games or animation, because you can make objects out of multiple overlapping simple shapes, and don’t have to worry about mesh geometry. The slicer will just convert the layers into 2d slices.

And I’ve made some custom gifts, too. Put people’s names on things, stuff like that.

But 99% of my prints are miniatures for tabletop gaming.

Personal: Google. I just dump everything in as an event, no real organization. Really useful to remind me to do things like swap out batteries, filters, car and home maintenance, doctor appointments, etc.

Work: I put everything in the Outlook calendar except for time off, which goes into Teams. Hate them both. If it’s just a dumb little reminder thing, I make sure it’s marked as both private and not busy. I’m sure my boss can see it anyway, but I don’t want to make it look like I’m blocking off my availability for no good reason.

Holidays: I refer to whichever dumb calendar is already open.

I sometimes still write things on a nearby notepad or even put post-its on my monitor. They don’t stay there for very long, but sometimes it’s nice to have a physical / tactile element in play.

It’s poser bullshit. They think holding a weapon makes them look like a badass, even though almost anyone can do it.

Google is very annoying at times. I’m fine with constantly trying NEW stuff out but I hate it when they break (or make worse) popular stuff that’s widely used and people have come to depend on it. I feel like Microsoft is the absolute worst in this regard, but Google is really up there, too. I wish there could be a sea change where the “culture” (or whatever it’s properly called) shifts back towards putting a lot of value on reliability and resilience and less on gee-whiz crap. I don’t think it’s likely to happen, but I can dream. I’m old enough to remember when people really demanded this from their vehicles and that’s why Japanese cars started kicking American carmakers’ asses.

I’m convinced that almost all of the frustrating shit that corporations dump down on us comes from weekly staff meetings where some suckup climber just wants to tell the boss hey look, we did a shiny new thing! A thing nobody wanted or asked for. Line must go up.