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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • A little old school here, but Tom Petty and the HB were always fantastic live, I got to catch them several times.

    I also once was socially-dragged to a Sheryl Crow concert at the Ryman, and even though she’s not usually my thing, that show was fantastic. She had a bunch of folks from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra playing with her band that night, and I’ve never seen a group of classical musicians have so much fun. They really made it an unbelievable show. If you’re ever there and can catch ANYTHING at the Ryman, do it… the acoustics are absolutely insane.

    My favorite concert story was that we went to a “Best of the 80s” concert in Indiana in the late 90s when I was a teen (bands that performed included Wang Chung, A Flock of Seagulls, and a few one-hit wonders I’m struggling to remember right now). At the end, the promoters took the mic and apologized to everyone that the show was ending a little early, the closing band, Missing Persons, couldn’t make it. My friends and family I was there with laughed our asses off the entire way out of the arena, but it didn’t seem like a single other person there got it.



  • Middle age guy here (if I live out my family’s typical life expectancy).

    I try not to worry about death, as it’s something I can’t change. Doesn’t mean I’m ready for it to happen tomorrow, just that I realize that it’s going to happen when it happens and isn’t worth wasting thought on outside of preparing affairs for it once it gets closer.

    I’m not religious, but I’ve had an experience (and others have had experiences, such as out-of-body NDEs where the details that they witnessed in places and circumstances they shouldn’t have been able to see were later verified by others) that indicate to me that we continue on somehow after death… it’s not a nihilistic void.

    But even if it were one… that’s not so bad. You wouldn’t perceive stimuli, you wouldn’t notice time passing… the unbelievably long mass of practically eternal time between your death and the death of this universe would be the blink of an eye for you. And if scientific theories about Poincare recurrence of the universe are correct, then eventually you’ll go trhough life again from the same starting point, none the wiser that you didn’t exist for an unfathomably long time.

    In short, try not to worry about it. You can’t change it, and once you get there, there’s either something or absolutely nothing afterward… and you’ll be fine either way.

    Edit: spelling


  • If you’re doing them, any time before the deadline from here is fine.

    If you’ve got complex stuff going on and are using a tax service or accountant, I’d say the best window is the back half of February through the first half of March. This misses all the people on the front end who rush to get them done the femtosecond they have all of their documents, and also misses the people on the back end scrambling for the late-season rush.





  • My personal target is 105% of the performing mark, when I’m in a churn and earn job somewhere that I don’t want to promote.

    That wiggle room is enough to keep me above the performing mark if there are any productivity impactors outside of my control that my company refuses to adjust for (that has happened to me in jobs before), and it also keeps me off of bottom-performer lists when layoffs roll through. And it’s barely more than the bare minimum. Win / win / win.



  • You could argue that no one is ever truly remembered. Even people who are mentioned in history books and have their specific deeds remembered and preserved…

    …within a couple of hundred years, there are no other humans left alive anywhere on the planet who personally knew said famous person. No one who knew them on any personal level, any more deeply that the handful of cold facts written down about them on record.

    We are meant to be forgotten. Just another thing we have to come to terms with regarding our existence.



  • Person who had an alcoholic / addict father here. Speaking from my experience in what I saw in his world growing up. Both him, and in his world of helping / sponsoring others during the last couple of decades of his life whilst sober and recovering.

    For some people… an intervention can actually cause them to see the severity of the issue and be the catalyst for a motivation for wanting to change. It is a very small percentage, though, and it sounds like you’ve already tried or are already past that point.

    Sadly, for the overwhelming majority, most alcoholics / addicts have to hit a rock-bottom epiphany experience (which will vary person by person) to get them truly into committing to recovery. Nothing that anyone else says to or does for them is going to flip that switch.

    They have to flip that switch internally themselves. Once they do, they must also realize that every single day is going to be hard, and they will need to stay motivated.

    My dad once told me that even after being sober for almost two decades, he still had somewhere between 3 and a dozen serious cravings a week that he had to work himself away from. It gets easier to talk yourself down over time, but… the brain wiring was changed in addiction, and the temptations themselves never go away. Staying sober is a life of constant vigilance. You have to be committed, forever.

    Like for everyone afflicted, I hope your friend reaches that point sooner rather than later and moves into recovery. Best of luck to them.



  • How did everyone die? Assuming that you were the rich person or the indentured servant of a rich person, it would depend on that for sure.

    Was it a horrendous, highly contagious mega-pandemic that no one is immune to, and you survived because you billionaire-bunkered the moment that news reports started to hit? I’d think you could resurface sooner rather than later, and there will be places you can travel to that aren’t really contaminated by the dead (like places that had low population before the outbreak).

    After a few years, you could branch out to wherever (not that any single place is really that much better than others in a nearly empty world), likely the plague will no longer be virulent among the dead. You could quickly carve out a decent life for yourself, though you’d better get self-sufficient fast, without the support structures of the old world being there to do everything for you.

    But if it was nuclear apocalypse? You’re going to be bunkered for a long time, with little company. You’d likely end up envying the dead.