I think my current pixel 7 pro is probably the nicest looking smartphone I’ve owned. Prior to this it was the LG G3.

Back in the day I had some Motorola TracFone that looked a lot like a razr that I also thought looked pretty cool.

When my family switched from TracFone I got a Samsung Rogue which I also really liked, but I also remember wishing that my parents had waited a couple months so that I could have gotten my personal pick for the sexiest smartphone of all time instead- the original Motorola Droid. I eventually ended up getting the droid 2, which was, IMO, a fine successor to the droid, but just not as sexy.

Best is one of two

First was a couple who are more like friends-of-friends. I like them, they’re cool people, but I’ve never really hung out with them except when we’re part of a group of mutual friends, so I was actually a little surprised to get an invite to their wedding.

But anyway, I booked a hotel room with a couple of those mutual friends. Did a little light pre gaming, and hopped on the shuttle bus to the venue. The ceremony was nice and short and it was a nice venue.

Then we head into the area to have dinner, and find our assigned seats, and we’re a little shocked when the bride and groom joined us at the table instead of being off at their own private table somewhere. They said they wanted to sit with their friends, so they did, they were of course off talking to various friends and relatives a lot, but they definitely carved out a nice chunk of the night to eat and sit down and eat and enjoy their wedding. I’ve heard a lot of stories from people getting married where they say they never even had time during their reception to actually eat, that’s always sounded terrible to me and I think they felt the same way. Food was amazing as well, I had just about the biggest slab of prime rib I’ve ever seen and it was cooked to absolute perfection. They even came around offering seconds if anyone wanted them.

A big part of how I knew them was because we were all part of a large group that regularly went to a music festival together, and as you do at a festival, we all tended to get belligerently drunk. Apparently part of the reason I got an invite was because of that, in their words they paid for an open bar and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth, and they knew the whole music festival crew would be up to the task.

We were all on our best behavior, but we were all definitely pretty hammered when we boarded the bus back to the hotel to continue our party at the hotel bar.

We slept in way too late to grab breakfast at the hotel, so most of us made our way to a nearby diner to grab breakfast.

All in all just a really fun day with good friends, good food, plenty of booze, and a nice casual wedding.

The second contender for best wedding is actually one I officiated. Years ago I got ordained online from the universal life church, and never really did anything with that. I’m not religious, it’s just a fun little thing to be able to say that I’m a minister.

My buddy apparently remembered that. We were in scouts together, he was a couple years younger than me and sort of looked up to me as a mentor and we’ve stayed good friends. So time comes for him to get married and he immediately says he wants me to do the ceremony, and I of course agreed.

This dude has a way of finding really cool stuff, and somewhere in his adventures he finds a cave. It’s open for tourism by appointment and the entrance is through the owners’ basement. He gets to talking to the owner, and apparently it had always been her grandmother’s (who originally owned the house/cave) to have a wedding there, but no one had ever approached them about that. Since he was looking for a wedding venue he jumped at the opportunity. They also charged a ridiculously low price for it (I think they initially said like $50, he gave them like $500 and even that is fucking peanuts to pay for a wedding venue)

The wedding ceremony itself was pretty small, there’s only so many people you can cram into a cave at once, but more people were invited for the reception. I came up with what everyone seems to think was a really good script for the ceremony, even if it was a little hard to read in the dim light of a cave.

The reception was at a brewery, and the food was mostly a buffet of fancy pizzas, all really good, excellent party food. Again, everything was really chill and low-key.

The worst was my brother in laws wedding. He’s a good dude, but if I hadn’t married his sister I don’t think we’d have anything in common with each other.

His (now) wife’s family is fairly well-off and have a really nice vacation house on a lake in upstate New York where they go a lot. So they had the wedding up there.

Even before the wedding, it rubbed me kind of the wrong way that neither my wife nor I were ever asked to be in the wedding party. Not that I had any particular burning desire to be in it, but that just kind of seems like a normal courtesy thing. Until that point I know that I had figured he’d be one of my groomsmen when my wife and I actually have a wedding (COVID threw a monkey wrench into our plans and we ended up doing the courthouse thing, so I think we’re planning to do a big 10 year anniversary in a couple years)

The place is about a 6 hour drive from where most of their friends and family live, and for the rest of them it’s even longer. It’s not convenient to any sort of a major city where you could easily take a flight or a train or something to save yourself some of the driving, and let’s be honest, no one really wants to take time off for a wedding so most people were driving up 6 hours on a Friday, doing wedding shit Saturday, then driving 6 hours home on Sunday. They didn’t seem to understand why some of their further-flung relatives RSVP’d that they weren’t coming.

The hotel they reserved a block of rooms at is what some people might call “charming” or “rustic,” but personally I’m more inclined to call it “a crappy old house where everything creeks, none of the doors seem to close quite right, and the bathroom fixtures haven’t been updated in about 50 years.”

It was also August, and it was an outdoor wedding. Fuck that shit, it’s too damn hot to be outside for a wedding.

And I’m pretty sure the reason we weren’t in the wedding party was because they needed someone to babysit his/my wife’s grandmother. She’s got a pretty bad case of dementia, and was just really lost and confused the whole time she was there. She lives with his/my wife’s mom, but if course she was going to be busy with wedding stuff all day.

My wife drove us up, so I didn’t have my own car there. The entirety of the town we were in was about 3 block long, and mostly touristy shops selling stupid knickknacks I had no interest in. We were in a nice wooded area, and I’m an outdoorsy dude, and I pretty much spent all day looking at the mountains surrounding us thinking how much I’d rather be hiking than wandering around this crappy town.

I also normally work night shift and had turned my schedule upside down for this. I think my wife assumed I was going to sleep in, so when I woke up at a pretty reasonable hour (9-ish) figuring we’d at least be able to grab breakfast together before we got stuck babysitting her grandmother, she was nowhere to be found. She’d gone off to get breakfast with her dad (who was really pretty much the only other person there I knew, and he’s a really cool dude, I was looking forward to spending some time with him, we don’t get to see him very often)

So that left me by myself with no way to really go anywhere, and no one around I wanted to hang out with. A pretty crappy start to my day which put me in kind of a bad mood.

No really good food options in that town either- a crappy pizza place, a bar that’s just like every other mediocre bar in a touristy town, and a little breakfast and sandwich shop that was trying really hard to be cool but had nothing particularly exciting on the menu. Your best option was to drive about 15 minutes to the next town and eat somewhere there.

And of course we still got roped into all of the wedding picture bullshit.

The wedding and reception were nice enough, aside from it being too damn hot, food was ok but forgettable (my brother in law and his wife have just about the most bland palates imaginable, no surprises there) if it had been somewhere closer where I could have just attended the wedding and went home that night I probably would have left with an overall fine impression of the wedding except for feeling a little snubbed about the wedding party.

But it was absolutely not worth 12 hours in the car, the cost of a hotel room, and spending most of the day either by myself or babysitting a senile old lady who had no idea what was going on.

But at least now I don’t have to feel obligated to have him in my wedding party and I can free up that spot for someone I actually like.

It was both best and worst since I’ve only lived in one apartment in my life

It was actually a pretty nice apartment, I might still happily be there if they hadn’t kept jacking up the rent every year.

But I had some complaints

The kitchen was ridiculously tiny, and one of the cabinets couldn’t open all the way because it hit an overhead light fixture. We actually pointed that out when we first viewed the apartment (it had recently had some light renovations and that was obviously an oversight) and to their credit they installed a smaller fixture before we moved it. It still got in the way and the cabinet didn’t open 100% but it opened wide enough to get anything you needed in and out.

The bathroom vent fans definitely shared ductwork with other units, and someone along that vent liked to sing in the shower. We also occasionally heard her yelling at her kids. We didn’t mind that so much, it’s kind of part of living in an apartment that sometimes you’re going to hear what your neighbors are doing, it was usually more funny than anything, but it was a little weird the first time we heard someone singing from our bathroom.

The people above us liked to vacuum at like 10am on a Sunday. Not too unreasonable I suppose, but I worked night shift and it could be a little annoying from time to time when I was trying to sleep

They also had some kind of water leak one time that fucked up our ceilings a bit, and it also leaked right into our circuit breaker causing some electrical issues. No serious damage done though, and again they were quick to repair it.

When we moved out, our roommate discovered that the window in his room was leaky, which had caused some mold and water damage in his room. He never noticed it until then because of how he had some furniture placed along that wall.

There really wasn’t any decent spot to have any sort of a proper dining table, at least not if you also wanted to have a couch and a TV, so we pretty much ate off the coffee table or folding tray tables the whole time we lived there. (The apartment was actually fairly spacious overall, it was just sort of laid out weirdly)

Most of the time their argument is that they want me to have something physical to open/unwrap, so bank transfers aren’t going to be any more attractive to them.

Read, watch TV/movies/YouTube, play video games, take the dog for a walk, work on one of my many hobbies that I’ve been neglecting, see if any of my friends wants to do something, take a nap, listen to music,

And if I get really bored, there’s probably something I’m supposed to be cleaning or some other chore that needs attention

“home” by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic zeroes

it’s gotta be just about the most banal, saccharine, faux-folksy bullshit I’ve ever heard.

And it certainly doesn’t help that when it came out I was living at home still and my sister played it to death.

Philly: A cheesesteak, hoagie, or Italian roast pork (with broccoli rabe, roasted hot peppers, and sharp provolone cheese) sandwich, and a citywide special (traditionally a 12oz PBR and a shot of Jim Beam for $5)

Yuengs & Wings (which rhymes) would be another solid choice

For the kids, maybe a birch beer and a soft pretzel

I’ve given 2 strangers strangers a jumpstart in a parking lot at night over the last year or so. I suppose technically those people I helped know about it, but I haven’t been going around bragging about it to anyone (until now I guess)

Currently, which US politician is serving as president?

Also if we want to split hairs, the presidential election was 7 months ago, but you specified “this last election”

Which for about half of US states means a 2025 primary election. Not to mention all of the non US lemmings who might have had more recent elections in their own countries.

And I sure hope none of them voted for Trump because he wouldn’t have been on any of those ballots.

Yes, but I work a weird schedule with more days off than most (but slightly more hours overall because I work 12 hour shifts) and I’m on night shift, so lots of time to myself after my wife goes to bed.

My work is also pretty chill about what we do with our down time, and there’s usually plenty of it on night shift so I’ve been known to bring my switch in with me and play it at work on occasion

No kids, and we’re both kind of homebodies (my wife moreso than me) so we’ve been known to game together on occasion too.

Streetlight Manifesto- 3 times

Genuinely don’t know and don’t like 911 since police are involved.

911 dispatcher in the US here

This will vary a lot from one jurisdiction to another, I can really only speak to county I work in

But while in theory every EMS call also gets a police response, probably more than half of them the only action the police take is to tell us “not responding unless requested”

And if they do respond, a lot of time they don’t do much besides sit at the end of the driveway with their lights flashing so the ambulance can find the house easier.

Things like overdoses, assaults, shootings/stabbings, psych emergencies, cardiac arrests, etc. they do of course show up to because they may actually need to do something.

And if you live in a bigger city or rougher part of the suburbs, sometimes they may even take their sweet-ass time getting to those.

And if you live in a rural area, there’s a decent chance you’re covered by some part time or regional police department, or state police/county sheriffs who are stretched way too thin covering a huge area with maybe 2 or 3 officers on duty at any one time, they’re probably not gonna show up in a hurry if at all either.

Like I said, it varies a lot, some towns in my county I can count on police being there before the ambulance (whether or not they actually do anything once they’re there in a different story) and in others the cops don’t give half a fuck unless someone is actively dying.

If you do find yourself calling 911 though, for the love of God, don’t tell them you don’t want police on your medical call, I swear that might be the most surefire way to make sure they do actually show up in a hurry. If that ends up in the notes of the call it makes the cops think you’re hiding something or I don’t know, planning to jump the EMS squad or something, some cops can be pretty panicky, paranoid weirdos like that, or sometimes just spiteful.

It’s complicated.

In most of the US except for a handful of states, you can legally own a silencer, there’s a couple extra hoops to jump through, but nothing too dramatic. Most law abiding gun owners in the US could probably get their hands on one legally if they cared enough to do so.

In other parts of the world, laws are kind of all over the place ranging from totally unregulated to totally illegal. I haven’t done a deep dive on this myself, so this is all 2nd or 3rd+ hand hearsay so take it for what it’s worth, but I’m told that some places regard them as almost a safety (hearing protection) or courtesy thing so you’re not making too much racket with your guns.

There are two types of people in the world

There are people who want to socialize with their coworkers, bond with them, have friendships with them, etc.

And there are people who just work here, man. They show up everyday, spend 8 hours doing their job, collect their paycheck every 2 weeks, and don’t want to spend a moment more than they need to at work and or think about their job or coworkers on their days off.

Field trips, team building days, etc. are great for the first type of person, they’re torture for the second.

I’m the second type of person. I don’t, overall, dislike my coworkers. I’ll joke around with them, I think they’re mostly all nice and decent people, maybe even above average. But at its core, the nature of my relationship with them is that I get paid to work with them, and that is plenty enough reason to be friendly (though not necessarily friends with) them. I don’t need to go get a beer with them after work, or go bowling or whatever with them to build a bond with them. My bond with them is that if I do my job and they do their job, we both get paid and can go do whatever the hell we want to do off the clock, either with each other if they’re one of the rare people who manage to make the jump from being a work friend to being a regular friend, or separately if all we really have in common is that we work together. I have plenty of friends and hobbies and such that I don’t need to seek them out at work, and I prefer it that way, my professional life and private life don’t really need to touch.

I don’t want birthday cards from my coworkers, I don’t want to contribute anything to the office Christmas party (I work for my county government, I really don’t think we should even have an office Christmas party) and when they’re taking up a collection for a coworker who is sick or about to have a baby or whatever, my only thought is “how 'bout they just pay us enough that we don’t have to do this?”

So if it’s decided that I don’t need to work for a day, I’d rather just be home. Or have the option to go in and work to get caught up/get ahead on my work in exchange for overtime while all the type-A, middle management, people-people, chatty Kathy, office gossip, busybody types are out of the office doing whatever.

I certainly don’t want to come in on my day off to deal with any of that. Those days off are the reason I work, so that I can enjoy the rest of my time.

Two particular examples I recall that ground my gears.

I used to work in a warehouse. The company used to do two Christmas parties, one for the office staff, one for the warehouse employees. Usually the office staff would get treated to dinner at a restaurant after work. For us warehouse people, they would usually get us a catered lunch. Never anything particularly special, but at least I didn’t have to pack a lunch that day. One year they decided that they’d take us warehouse plebs out to a nice steakhouse for dinner. I declined. I was busting my ass all day in a warehouse, I’d be gross and sweaty and want to go home to shower and change after work. I had time to do that, we got off at 5, and the dinner wasn’t until I think 7, but after dealing with almost an hour of rush hour traffic, and being tired from working all day, I really didn’t want to get dressed again and go back out. And to top it off, I was one of only like 3 people in the warehouse who spoke decent English, and the other two were 2 or 3 times my age, and one was my boss. The rest mostly spoke Spanish, and they were nice enough, but I couldn’t really have enough of a conversation with them to even determine if we even had anything in common to talk about, much less actually talk to them about it. About all we could manage is “hey, can you go grab this box for me?” or showing each other funny videos and laughing.

To me that sounded like I was going to spend a couple hours sitting mostly in silence with people chatting in Spanish around me.

And of course, they were paying for food, but not for drinks. If I’m going to a nice steakhouse, I’m going to want at least a beer, glass of wine, or cocktail with my dinner, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay anything out of pocket to attend a work function.

I also really don’t get the appeal of a steakhouse, don’t get me wrong, I like steak, but I can make a steak with some sides as good or better as any steakhouse at home for half the cost. Steak isn’t complicated.

My boss was surprised I didn’t want to go. I’m surprised that anyone wanted to go. I’d rather they have me a few bucks to order some pizzas, grab a six pack, and stay home with my wife (who was invited to this as well, I asked her if she wanted to go, she felt the same way) watching Netflix.

The next one is more recent. My current job has been on a big mental health thing lately. We have to do a mandatory training thing a couple times a year, usually it’s pretty bullshit, but at least there’s a thing veneer of “,you need to do this to keep your required certifications, even if none of it actually applies to what we do”

But this last time they decided to do a “wellness retreat”

Which consisted of us mostly sitting in an auditorium listening to about 4 different speakers talking about mental health, suicide prevention, fitness and healthy eating, etc. and a guided meditation thing, doing a middle school science class egg drop experiment as a team building exercise, and a Cornhole tournament. We had to provide our own lunches, and they had therapy dogs visit us, not really giving any presentation or anything just kind of there and we could pet them during our lunch break.

Half of the presentations felt like I was watching an ad for these people’s businesses, and the other half were just boring rehashes of things we’ve all heard a thousand times before interspersed with some sad stories.

I had to give up my day off for that. I wanted to flip a fucking table when they had the nerve to mention work-life ballance. And half of us are night shifters, and they never schedule any of these things overnight, so it was downright insulting when they talked about how important it is to get enough sleep.

And I don’t even want to play Cornhole when I’m drunk with my friends I actually want to be around, I really don’t want to play it with a bunch of coworkers totally sober.

I got overtime pay for it, but I gladly would have paid that much out of my own pocket to skip it.

If you want to surprise your employees, let them leave early (with pay) on a Friday, hand out gift cards for takeout or a movie or something, buy them pizza, or better yet, just give them all a raise or a bonus. If they want to go hang out together and bond, they can go do that with their extra money after they leave work early on a Friday, maybe invite them to join you for whatever you’re doing. If they don’t, they can go enjoy life on their own terms.

I had one of the earlier model iPod Touches, maybe 2nd Gen? It was the first one to include Bluetooth (if memory serves, and it may not, I vaguely remember at launch Bluetooth that was disabled and I had to jailbreak it to use it, pretty sure Apple eventually enabled Bluetooth with a software update)

Around that time I’d also gotten my first job and had purchased a new laptop for myself, and sprung a little extra to get one with Bluetooth.

I saw the future, I was sick of wires and dongles, I got a Bluetooth mouse, a pair of Bluetooth over the ear headphones, and for my iPod I went to Best buy and got a pair of rocket fish “earbuds” (it doesn’t feel right calling them earbuds, since they were connected with a rigid band around the back of your head, but that’s what they were calling them) and sprung an extra couple bucks for the warranty because why not.

Those earbuds were a piece of crap. They worked fine, but they weren’t rugged enough to deal with everyday life. Getting knocked off a coffee table onto a carpeted floor was enough to break them.

So for a couple months it became almost a weekly ritual for me to go back to best buy to exchange them, until they just stopped stocking them and gave me my money back.

In those days, there weren’t many options for smaller profile Bluetooth headphone, you could get bulky over the ear models that were never really my thing, or you could get a mono earpiece. I’m pretty sure that those were literally the only model I could find at any reasonable price point.

It actually kind of soured me on Bluetooth headphones until fairly recently, and honestly if my phone still had a jack I’d probably still be using the Shure 215 earbuds I bought after that.

(Also, if you’re in the market for wired earbuds, I’m no audiophile, but I do not regret getting the shures one bit, they definitely sounded better than the Skullcandy buds I upgraded from back then, and they are damn-near indestructible, there may very well be better, cheaper, and more rugged earbuds out there, but for the $100 or so I spent over a decade ago, mine have gone through the laundry a couple times and had just about every other kind of abuse you could imagine inflicted upon them and they’re no worse for wear, and the wire is replaceable if that ever gets fucked up but I’m still on the original)

Yeah, it is probably largely dependent on the parts of the internet you inhabit, I can’t see it coming up in gamer forums outside of maybe in-depth discussion of piracy laws, but it’s definitely something I’ve seen around the internet as long as I can remember (my family got online in the mid-lato 90s, I feel like I first encountered it in middle school or early high school so early 2000s-ish.

But by that point it was pretty well-established, it wasn’t hard to google what it meant at that time.

People have been throwing that kind of disclaimer on online comments so long that they came up with the abbreviation “IANAL” back in the 80s or 90s, back when the World Wide Web was either not even a thing yet or brand-spanking-new and Usenet was king.

There are, frankly, a whole lot of absolute morons out in the world.

Sometimes those people are the ones asking for advice, sometimes they’re the ones trying to give it.

Some people who will take anything you say at face value, won’t verify any information for themselves, won’t do any research, etc. and if they follow your advice and screw up they sometimes like to lug litigious about it.

And when they’re the ones giving advice, they’ll confidently state stuff that is just flat out not true and sometimes dangerous.

Hopefully you can see at least some of the ways those could be a bad combination.

Personally when I make those kinds of disclaimers, it’s because I’m

1. Looking out for myself, I don’t want to get sued, I dont want some asshole to harass me or dox me or ruin my reputation or anything because they followed advice I gave because they thought I “sounded like I knew what I was talking about”

2. I’m looking out for the other person. I’m not a professional and I know it, I’m warning them that they should only take my thoughts or advice for what they’re worth which may not be much, and there’s a real chance the person I’m talking to is an idiot.

I also feel like it kind of invites someone who does actually know better to come in and correct or add on to what I’ve said, and I always welcome that sort of learning opportunity.

And it can sometimes be a way to slip in a little humor if you slip in something like “I’m no octopus psychologist” or something when you’re discussing the behavior of an octopus. (To the best of my knowledge, "octopus psychologist is not a real job, and that’s why it’s humorous, at least to someone with the same kind of dry humor as me)

I kind of think of myself as “prepper light” I keep a small stockpile of food and supplies around, have at least general plans for most emergencies that might arise, like I live close to a nuclear plant so I know the evacuation route I’m supposed to take from my home if something ever happens there, what radio station is going to have information, etc. I know what I’m doing if we lose power for an extended period of time, etc.

But I’m not devoting a significant amount of my time to it. A few minutes or hours here or there, a little casual research, the occasional “roughing it” camping trip for fun and practice

But most importantly, I have friends. I’m a pretty all-around capable guy, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When it comes to fixing cars, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, more advanced construction, plumbing, gardening, etc. I’m kind of clueless. But I have friends who are really good at those things. If shit ever really hits the fan in whatever sort of “end of the world as we know it” sort of scenario you might be imagining, none of us are going to cut it long-term by ourselves, but with all of our various skills put together we might just stand a chance.

And also I like those people, I want to make sure they make it through it with me.

US

My situation is a little fucked up because I work 12 hour shifts, but PTO is based around 8 hour days because that’s what most employees here work and they haven’t made any special exemptions for us. These numbers are going to be based around 8 hour days because I don’t feel like doing the math

Vacation time- 10 days for new hires, and you get 5 additional days at 5, 13, and 19 years, so assuming I stick around for 19+ years I’ll have 25 days. You can carry over up to 15 unused days to the next year

5 personal days, no carryover

Sick days accrue at 1 day per month, so essentially 12, with unlimited carryover,

1 personal holiday

Certain things like perfect attendance, coming in for overtime, etc. can earn you “flex time” which actually is usually awarded in 12 hour increments.

I’m kind of bad at using my PTO. My schedule is kind of wonky and I work less days overall than most people and tend to just slot most of my vacation plans into that. If I plan things right I also only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend. I don’t tend to take a lot of elaborate vacations, 3 day or less trips are kind of my norm. Every couple years I’ll do something a bit more elaborate and take a week or more, but more often my PTO tends to get used for other things besides going on vacation. I have a week coming up that I took off to paint some rooms in my house for example.