My company switched up retirement plans and they held a seminar to explain them. The person running the seminar said that we should be putting 15% of our salaries into retirement.

Nice idea, but if I put 15% of my salary into retirement, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. I’m not living extravagantly or anything (buying something for $20 for my enjoyment seems like a splurge to me). Still, whenever I seem to be getting on a better financial footing, life throws me a curve ball. Need new hearing aids ($3,600). New a new dryer ($750). Might need a new car soon.

So either I need to be paid a lot more, I will be working until I’m 90, or I put away the money and go deep into debt but can retire. (Just kidding. I’m nearing 50. I likely won’t have enough to retire. Maybe when I’m 80.)

And his followers will excuse it in one of two ways:

1. It’s all fake. They’ll claim that the Democrats swapped the real list for the released “fake” list and that the real list has Biden’s name, not Trump’s. Their proof? Some YouTube video linked to from a Facebook post where a white guy wearing sunglasses in his truck says he saw the real list with Biden’s name on it!

2. Trump was undercover. They’ll claim that Trump was actually working undercover to expose these people. Being on the flight logs “proves” that he was only there to spy on these people. Why? Non-specific Excuse! Therefore, Trump’s name on Epstein’s list is actually a good thing and they support him more!

Meanwhile, the rest of us will scream in frustration.

Yes, they did. Before that, LEGO also released blind bag minifigures for Steamboat Willie and Minnie Mouse. I’m currently designing a LEGO MOC to display my figures with a small rendition of the Steamboat Willie boat. (I purchase my parts used from BrickLink to reduce costs.)

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I’d have put that thing on ASAP.

Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that’s totally apart from the safety issue.)

I needed Unicode symbols for a story I’m working on. (I want to use them as “magic runes” so I could type them into a document, but without using the standard “runes” that are typically used.)

Shape Catcher let me draw what I was looking for and then get a list of Unicode characters that matched that drawing. It’s not exact so if there’s no perfect Unicode match, it will give you ones that are close. This actually turned out to my benefit as I found shapes I hadn’t considered but which worked nicely for my uses.

Hey, I may feel old, but I’m not THAT old! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Back when I was in high school, a friend of mine introduced me to his friend. This kid, knowing that I’m Jewish, started to go on a rant ending with “the only thing Hitler did wrong was not finishing the job!”

Him saying that me and my family should be killed for the “crime” of being Jewish… Well, offended seems too light of a word. I blew right past offended and landed in ANGERED.

Now, usually, I’m a pretty relaxed guy. I typically don’t get angry even if I should. But this made me want to punch the guy right in his Hitler loving face. My friend had to hold me back.

(And before anyone asks, this wasn’t the kid being “edgy” or trolling me to get a reaction. He actually worshipped Hitler and thought he was a great man.)

I’d say that my wife is boycotting Hobby Lobby despite crocheting a ton, but that would imply that she’s shopped there in the past. Still, we’ll occasionally pass by one and laugh about how we’d never go in there.

Not a customs officer, but over a decade back I had job duties that involved posting photos of babies online. The parents would give their consent, maternity would snap the photos, and I’d put them on the website (complete with the option to order prints).

One of the babies was named “Secret Angel.” First name Secret, middle name Angel. That girl would likely be in her teens or early twenties by now. I still sometimes wonder if Secret had any trouble with her name given how much kids can bully other kids for the slightest thing.

For the longest time, I wanted to see the Percy Jackson series adapted. (I’m not counting those movies!) Thankfully, it is and the first book/first season will be coming out in December. I hope they are able to expand to the entire universe that Riordan made. There are so many stories that would be great to see.

If all you consume is news and social media – which have incentives to show the most extreme views, events, and content – you’re going to have a distorted picture of the world as a 100% awful, dangerous place.

Especially with social media sites that have algorithms. Did you view a thread slightly longer because it was on a scary subject and people were arguing about it? You’ll see more of that. Did you get angry at another post and decide to reply to correct them (possibly using ALL CAPS)? You’ll get more of those.

Repeat again and again until the only posts in your feed are the ones that raise your blood pressure and make you want to scream.

GenX-er here. I grew up thinking that any day nuclear weapons would fly and obliterate us all. Coping with “one political party wants to turn the country into a Christian Fascist state” is easy by comparison.

With the nukes, I had no say in the matter. The USSR could have lobbed nukes at us at any moment and the best I would have been able to hope for would have been a quick death. (Dying slowly from radiation poisoning and starvation would be much worse.)

With the Republicans, I can vote and encourage others to vote. I can work against it. Yes, I’m only one person. I’m not going to topple their efforts myself, but thanks to the Internet, I have plenty of people helping me to thwart their plans.

And its sister shows Amphibia and The Owl House. (Though I’m still upset that The Owl House wasn’t given a full third season.)

ZScaler. It’s supposedly a security tool meant to keep me from going to bad websites. The problem is that I’m a developer and the “bad website” definition is overly broad.

For example, they’ve been threatening to block PHP.Net for being malicious in some way. (They refuse to say how.) Now, I know a lot of people like to joke about PHP, but if you need to develop with it, PHP.Net is a great resource to see what function does what. They’re planning on blocking the reference part as well as the software downloads.

I’ve also been learning Spring Boot for development as it’s our standard tool. Except, I can’t build a new application. Why not? Doing so requires VSCode downloading some resources and - you guessed it - ZScaler blocks this!

They’ve “increased security” so much that I can’t do my job unless ZScaler is temporarily disabled.

It’s no Reddit… And thank goodness!

I think normal died around this time in 2019 for me.

To give some context, in Judaism Rosh Hashanah (which coincidentally just ended) is the new year. There’s a superstition that whatever you do on Rosh Hashanah will be a reflection of the upcoming year. For example, if you nap you’ll have a lazy year.

Anyway, that year, my younger son and I were at Temple for services. We noticed someone sitting behind us who seemed odd, but didn’t think much of it. At some point, he left so we focused on the service.

Midway through the service, my rabbi suddenly shouted NO with the same force as Gandalf addressing the Balrog. Then I saw why. The “odd guy” was running down aisle shouting happy new year to everyone. He was wearing a t-shirt. And ONLY a t-shirt.

He reached the front and tried to get up the stairs to where the rabbi, cantor, and torahs were. Only, my rabbi clotheslined him back down the stairs. The ushers rushed in and dragged him off. My son was smart and looked away. I wasn’t as smart and got “visual confirmation” that he wasn’t wearing anything below the waist. It was only for a moment but it burned into my brain.

So remember how I said “how Rosh Hashanah goes, your year goes?” I joked with my wife later that hopefully this wouldn’t mean we were going to have a crazy year.

Then 2020 hit.

Only I think this got stuck somehow and now EVERY year is crazy.

Forget Switch sized. I’m still impressed with Phone Sized. My first computer was a bulky 286 with a full megabyte of RAM and 40MB hard drive space. (Yes, megabytes for both of them, not gigabytes.) I thought that there was no way I’d ever fill up that hard drive.

Now, the phone I’m typing this on is orders of magnitude more powerful and it’s a few years old (and wasn’t even bleeding edge when it was released).

And the worst part of those days is when you feel like it’s wrong of you to complain. After all, you just had a series of minor bad incidents happen to you. None of them are THAT bad.

Meanwhile, one of your friends has multiple cancers, your wife’s mother has serious medical issues, your son’s allergies are so out of control that he can hardly breathe… And you’re going to complain that you had a few minor things happen?

Um… Hypothetically speaking…

I love that movie. I showed it to my boys. When Paul Reuben died, they didn’t remember him from Pee Wee Herman (which we somehow never got to showing them). They remembered him as “that farting guy on Mystery Men.”

(He passed gas near a gypsy and tried to blame it on her. To take her revenge, she cursed him. Since he smelt it, he would forever be the one that dealt it!)

Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.

At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).

It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.