I wouldn’t change anything, but I would be far less stressed that everything would work out just fine.

Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.

Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.

I don’t mind discussing politics or religion, even though I don’t repeat myself in the same discussion and don’t engage with trolls. However, I absolutely never discuss my family, my personal matters and my racist views.

I paint and draw, purely as a hobby. You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap some people have. Brushes they use only once in a lifetime, for one specific element. Special colours they also get to use only once. Pencils they don’t even open. Get a basic set, familiarise yourself with it, stretch it to the full extent of its capabilities (that’s mastery), and then upgrade to a higher quality version of what you have. No single-use novelty tools and materials.

There may be dozens of us who still remember Captain Future. I used to get in trouble in school for doodling his space ship in my workbooks.

Americans also expected me to leave a voice message instead of sending an SMS when I didn’t reach them. That was quite a culture shock for me.

I haven’t used Photoshop; learned basic photo editing in GIMP (as a poor student, I appreciated a powerful, free editor). So, no complaints about the UI from me. If anything, I’d probably bitch about the Photoshop UI if I ever used it.

One thing that concerns me a little, however, is the third-party integration with Nik Collection. The second version, which I’m still using, was provided for free by Google. They later sold the software, and the new company commercialized it. I found it difficult to track down the v2 installer, so I’m now keeping it on multiple backups, in multiple locations, as one of my most treasured software possessions.

Geocities. A platform where anyone, regardless of technical skill or any design sense could go wild about their passion.

I insist on slippers. I tend to bang my toes or, even worse, catch my toenails on all kinds of protrusions (from stairs to skirting boards). I run a lot, so I keep my toenails very short, but it happens quite often, and slippers are the best way to prevent it.

Mother’s Day? Really? That’s quite surprising. Why is that?

Can’t argue with that. I never really paid attention to Paddy’s Day while I was in the US, so all I have to go by are the news reports (which may be a bit sensationalist).

As a Dubliner (Ireland, not one of the many Dublins across the pond), I must say that Americans are really weird about Paddy’s Day. We have a large parade in Dublin and smaller ones in smaller cities, and then those of us who have kids ho to family fairs, and the rest for a pint at the local. We leave the city centre to the tourists who get shitfaced on overpriced, prepoured Guinness for no good reason. And even though we did some weird things with our river (the time in the slime), we never dyed the Liffey green.

If it was taken by a cell phone, chances are that the exif data would have the GPS location.

Slovak: “Boha ti jebem” literally translates into “I fuck your god”. Unsurprisingly, it’s a curse you tell someone who pisses you off.

The Slovak Prime Minister also likes to say “Do psej matere”, which literally means “Into the dog’s mom”. The English equivalent would be along the lines of “For fuck’s sake”.

Offended? I’ll be really happy! It means that I’ll get to meet all my family again, even though some of them were proper twats.

Agreed. I used to be the tech support for my family members. Everyone I switched to Mint Cinnamon stopped calling me. (That’s also when I realised my relatives never call me to share good news or to ask about me.)

Excellent points. I’d just add one more: user friendliness. The average user prefers to click on an icon on their screen, rather than open a Web browser and either type in the URL or access bookmarks, which tends to be rather clunky on a phone.

My only symptom during Covid was that I slept very poorly for 2 days. I only took a test because I’m an avid runner, and after a run on the second day, my watch dropped my VO2 max by 10%, which was highly unusual.

Since then, however, I noticed a certain aversion to alcohol. I can’t get a buzz from drinking anymore, but I get a headache a few hours after even a single drink. I’ve been already down to a drink per week, thanks to no social life during Covid lockdowns, so this is not a big loss.

Unless you are expected to engage with others on social media, you can circumvent them by creating a blog under your name. Tailor your essays to the crowd you want to appeal to - family, friends, potential employers - and publish a few articles every year.

That’s essentially what I’ve been doing. I used to be on Facebook (left a while ago), and I’m still on LinkedIn (due to its toxic positivity, I’m not engaging there, just keeping my CV up to date). But if you googled my name, the first few pages of results would be my blog articles, my Flickr profile and a few other things not related to social media. This also gives me far more control over what I want people to know about me, and how that information is presented.

Fluffy. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a killer robot and name it Fluffy. My parents never got me one, so once I hit midlife crisis I got myself a cleaning robot and named it Fluffy. At my age, I appreciate clean floors more than seeing the blood of my enemies.