They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I’m just giving them the nickel.

I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It’s expensive, but it’s also pretty great. We’re actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.

I didn’t discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we’re sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.

If you have reason to believe someone is in mortal danger, your response shouldn’t be to mail a letter giving them 30 days to respond.

You send police to the scene where they secure the potential suspect and make sure there’s nothing going on.

Last time I got pretty deep in, but it became impossible when the chess notation rule required Cs and Ds, making it impossible to stay below the roman numberal sum limit.

I top-mounted it to my A1-mini and it does just fine. I’d imagine the full A1 should be alright.

I’m really, truly not trying to be flippant. But welcome to the first taste of adulthood. What you plan for your life and what your life becomes are very different things. I am not who I expected to be. I am not in the career I expected. I don’t have the same interests I expected, and I only have like 2 friendships from my high school days that I’ve really maintained.

But the thing is, none of that is necessarily bad. I enjoy my job, but as a high schooler “municipal development” wasn’t a career to dream about, even though it can be very satisfying.

I have different friends and interests, but they’re not worse. It’s just that the world broadens as you age.

You can’t really know who you are until the training wheels come off. That’s where you’re headed by the sound of it. Is it scary and stressful? Absolutely. But when you come out of it you’ll be the person you are, not the person somebody expects you to be.

The 20s were an amazing time where everything in my life got flipped around more than once. Now that I’m a few decades past it, I can better appreciate how much I grew in that time.

I also miss having a more cooperative body.

Bioshock.

I don’t think there will every be a more satisfying twist for me. The twist was about me, the human playing the game, and only works because of the nature of the format.

It was perfection.

Correct. And I appreciate that. A couple wanting a religous wedding should know that the pastor that’s blessing the union supports them.

In this case it is. All 50 states are required to perform gay marriages as of June 26th, 2015. The ruling took immediate effect nationwide. Clerks were having to hand-edit marriage licenses to allow for same-sex certificates because within an hour of the ruling people were showing up at courthouses to get married in states where it had been illegal.

Churches aren’t required to perform same-sex marriages nationwide, however.

All 50 states are recognize gay marriage since Obgerfel v Hodges in June 2015.

According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the statement “Homosexuals should have the right to marry” in 1988 (first year the question was asked).

In 2004, it was 30%.

In 2022 it was 67%.

Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to speak.

We’ve made remarkable progress in a very short period.

I mean - they’re just being more honest about it than EA and Activision.

Are the devs volunteers? Yeah, the publishers take a lot of money, but if the games are all being pirated then the devs could get 100% and still make less money.

I see like 10 a day. I work in an enclave city for the uberrich where the average new home being built costs what I make in a century (and I make pretty good money money), so we’ve got lots of them.

I’ve seen a bunch getting paint jobs. The matte black ones look like what scifi Nazi gestapo would drive, but all of the paint jobs look better than the bare metal. There’s a brushed-gunmetal one that I think is a pretty attractive compared to the rest. The vehicle is still ugly, but it’s less-ugly with a good paint job.

You can drive all you want on private land without having a license or insurance or registering your car. Some states even have tax-free fuel (especially diesel) you can buy for ag equipment, since the fuel tax is for maintaining roads.

But when you use public roads you have to follow the rules and pitch in towards their maintenance.

At least you’re not just throwing away money like those of us who have seen rent double in 3 years.

Doing the lawn after dark seems so unwholesome. Which is annoying because I could use a 25° drop in temperature.

I’m 1900, life expectancy was 47, children worked instead of going to school, and the global literacy rate was 20%.

We should definitely go back to that.

What moved us from picking berries and killing animals with pointy sticks is specialization of labor.

That’s good to hear. Go ahead and tell him that I need 2500 board-feet for my house, that it needs to be free, and I need it by tomorrow. Also, there’s another 1.5 million houses being built right now he needs to support, so he may want to ask a few neighbors to help out.

Or would that require a commercial-scale operation involving millions of acres of maintained forests, logging operations, mills, and distribution that costs billions of dollars and employs thousands of people?