“Can’t find a better man.”

I lived in Daytona years ago. One day I noticed a new store had appeared in a strip mall near my house: they sold nothing but Super-Whippers, plastic whisks that sold for $1. They had two display racks in the window, one with white Super-Whippers and one with black. They were never open and there was a hand-written piece of paper taped to the door that said “sorry, we’re closed. If you want a Super-Whipper, the nail salon next door has some.” The store was less than a thousand feet from three dollar stores and a Publix, all of which sold plastic whisks.

I thought I had never seen a more pathetic example of a money laundry, but perhaps Daytona is just filled with really cheap husbands.

No, that would have been an automod ban – and perfectly understandable.

My cat Martha somehow became “Muffin Sweetie”.

I missed AskHistorians for a little while when I left, but I checked back recently and it’s clear that all the interesting history questions were asked and answered years ago. All that’s left is “what if Hitler had three balls instead of one?” over and over again.

I got banned for racism … for making fun of Vogons. They’re not even a race, and more importantly, they don’t even exist.

I have severe osteoarthritis in one knee and one shoulder. As of right now, I’m still able to bicycle 25-50 miles a day, but I’m terrified of eventually reaching a point where I can’t do any sort of cardiovascular exercise. I know that I’m going to swell up and die in a very short time.

I think you really only get an “endorphin rush” when you’re just starting with exercise and you over-exert yourself to pain levels.

500+ extra calories is a lot of exercise

And it’s like one cream-filled donut on the food intake side of the equation.

everything I know about Objective C seems awful

Yeah, I transitioned from C# to Objective C around 2010 and I agree with your assessment entirely. It’s just horrendous but I did get used to it. The thing I hated the most was the header files, just an absolutely useless fossil left over from its C lineage.

CE… was a wird alien no one know exactly what to do with it

Windows CE had the portable device market absolutely locked down circa 2003 – not including Blackberry which had all the smartphone market, but CE had everything else. And then MS just said “fuck this market completely” and gave up.

My favorite thing about CE was that Microsoft unironically referred to it as “WinCE”. It just doesn’t get better than that.

Windows Phone was great, and developing apps for it with C# and Visual Studio was easy. I don’t understand why they didn’t at least try to push it just a little bit harder. It would have represented such a tiny fraction of their overall development budget. But they just completely gave up on it.

Hell, even RIM tried harder than they did to keep their shit going.

My god, imagine a world where all software is produced by OEMs.

As a programmer, my world changed when Windows 95 came out, what with being 32-bit and having an extremely powerful (if difficult-to-use at first) low-level audio API, since I mainly wrote software synthesis and music composition apps. I have not given two fucks for anything that has happened since 95. Quite amazingly, that audio API has remained in existence, unchanged, all the way until today. 30 years of not having to change what I’m doing at all has been absolutely amazing. That shit even worked, without modification, for Windows CE (Compact Edition) and Windows Mobile, so I was able to make versions of my software synthesizer that ran on shitty smartphones from 2005. It worked on Windows Phone as well, albeit it quite uselessly.

I remember an episode of Little House on the Prairie from my childhood. Pa has to get a job at the quarry, and he and a buddy are put to work drilling holes in the rock with a long metal spike and a sledgehammer. One of them has to hold the spike in place while the other bangs on it with the sledge. How the spike holder still had any fingers attached at the end of the day is beyond me. That shit traumatized me.

I recently rebuilt a big chunk of the interior of my house. I used to be good with a framing hammer but osteoarthritis has left me able to do maybe 4 or 5 swings with it. Fortunately, I discovered decking screws for this project. I just feel sorry for anybody that has to demo this shit in the future.

For financial balance, they would need to talk to Europe’s poorest 20 million men.

Not totally relevant, but: that little tub of Philadelphia cream cheese is like $8 nowadays. What in the ever-loving fuck? And yet you can still buy a brick of that shit for $1.60. Trying to get cream cheese out of that folded-over piece of foil is certainly annoying, but it’s worth paying 5X as much to get it out of a convenient tub instead? Make it make sense.

In my programming career (which started in the '90s) I went from private offices with doors to high-walled cubicles to low-walled cubicles to desks in an open office, and finally to an open office plan where you didn’t even have your own assigned desk. The last two steps were working from home (yay) and getting laid off (not as yay).

the little guys

I don’t think landscapers like being called this.