Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn't a big deal though cause it's not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.
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I remember L'oreal Kids shampoo commercials (like 25 years ago) very specifically showed kids happily wiping suds out of their eyes when "NO TEARS!" showed up on the bottom of the screen, clearly to exploit this misunderstanding
What kind of world do we live in where folks are disappointed that their next kid will be female? It’s dumb society has been crafted this way, stupid af.
I'm probably giving more credit than is due, but:
I don't think it's inherently bad for a parent to have a preference for their kid's sex. If a mother already has a son, I can understand her wanting her next child to be a daughter. Similarly, if a father already has a daughter, I can understand him wanting a son next. All parent/child relationships are special, but I understand parents who are particularly interested in cultivating a mother/daughter or father/son relationship.
Obviously no parent should ever be disappointed in their child for simply being one sex or the other; that's not okay. But I can understand a parent being disappointed that things didn't turn out how they had hoped in that regard.
Disclaimer: My father was very transparent that I was a last-ditch-effort for him to finally have a son after having 3 daughters. Thanks dad.
You could use PiVPN (you don't need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi -- this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).
I've used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.
"Octopus's Garden" by The Beatles seems apropos.
I've had moderate success by using a handful of quotes over the years whenever this topic comes up with friends or family.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden
This quote can substitute out the "free speech" bit for "gun rights" if you are talking to a gun nut.
"I like to close the bathroom door when I'm taking a shower. It doesn't mean I'm doing anything immoral in there, I just have the right to privacy." - Anonymous
A fair followup question when they say "why bother, it's pointless anyway," that might provoke some thought on their part is: "Do you ever make any effort at all toward a goal that is ultimately a drop in the bucket? Have you ever recycled a single plastic bottle? Covered the PIN pad when entering your PIN number at an ATM? Walked to the store instead of driven? Written a letter to a congressman? If so, why? The overall effect of your action was probably negligibly small in the grand scheme of things, so why did you bother to put any effort in at all?"
The answer to that question is: just because you can't get to 100% privacy/eco-friendliness/whatever goal it is you have, doesn't mean you can't put in some degree of effort to protect your rights, the earth, or hold your government accountable.
They don't have to ditch Google entirely in one day. That's ludicrously hard and even privacy advocates like myself can't do it easily. You take incremental steps when you are ready. Ditch Chrome when you have the bandwidth and get Firefox. Ditch Google search in favor of DuckDuckGo when you think you can deal with the different experiences. etc, etc. Everyone's journey is different.
Sounds like a winner to me! Hope it turned out as good as it sounds. (Sorry for the delayed reply, I think there was a federation issue and this comment didn’t appear to me until today)
Nice! I do love a good ham. Sorry for the delay, I think there was a federation issue and this comment didn't appear to me until today
Nice. Always comforting to have that particular chore over and done with.
I think that sounds like a good idea. And helping with the dishes is definitely always helpful. I'm sure they appreciate it.
Sorry to hear that. One option might be to ask them for one of their own vegan/gf recipes that they've made before, and make it for them so they don't have to. That's what we do sometimes in my family if we want to save someone some trouble
Nice. Might have to try out that cranberry-orange relish. Cranberry sauce rarely makes an appearance at our dinner table, but something like this might be more appealing
I heard that. Sounds like a rough week, but glad it seems to have worked out. I was sick last week and it made the lead-up to this week stressful cause I wasn't sure if I would recover in time. But I've been fine the last two days and have had to make up for lost time in getting everything ready. So far so good, though.
Nice. Can't beat some nice homemade bread. These look like they came out very well. The rolls are glistening
Damn, that does sound tasty. I'm not the biggest turkey fan, either, but that setup sounds like it could work very nicely. The cranberry-orange relish also sounds good; I've seen a lot of cranberry sauce recipes recommend orange ingredients (juice, zest, peels), so I guess it makes sense that a relish made of both is a good combination. Hope it all turns out good.
I haven't had to make low-carb sweets in a few years. Do you use something like Erythritol? I think that's what I used to usually use. Or occasionally Stevia, which I think was like a mixture of Erythritol and Allulose.
Sounds delicious. The juiciest turkey I ever had had been spatchcocked. I haven't done it myself, but I wanna try one of these days.
Hope the rest of the prep goes smoothly!
Nice. Hard to beat that.
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I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don't know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of "evil" versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I'll let readers make that judgement.
It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I'd never met before. Let's call him "James". I'm scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.
He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I've never met this guy before in my life. We're not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.
Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we've been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she "better not be at the bar" or "hanging out with her friends". He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.
After this harrowing trip, we're finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He'd light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don't have any problem with weed, but c'mon.
Each day when we were done with work, we'd pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. "What a kiss-ass," James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. "Old bitch," says James after she walks away.
Every night after dinner he'd be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, "Your friend's got a big mouth."
"Not my friend," I reply. "He's my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain't gonna hear me complain." Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.
On the last day of the job, we've begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we're about to pass and unilaterally decides we're gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some "maintenance" on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.
And to wrap it all up, he didn't pay me what we'd negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn't good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.
The silver lining to all this is I haven't seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.
Last time I donated to the FSF, they sent me an assortment of stickers. I dunno if they still do that. If not, you can also just buy stickers directly from them: https://shop.fsf.org/collection/stickers