When my friends talk about what books they’re reading and it comes back to me I just joke and say “oh I largely read non-fiction”.

I read every manual, decision tree, process document, whatever lands in front of me.

RTFM is life

I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.

Same, it suited me quite well and I feel bad saying I missed it because so many others, including some of my own family and friends, suffered. Now that I’m back in the office 5 days a week, I lose >2 hours a day with my kids. I had my own parents say “i don’t get why you’re complaining, we got by before COVID” while refusing to acknowledge it’s different because one of them stayed home with us, while my wife and I must both work to survive.

I grew up in a religious conservative family. These and other experiences drove me to the left in a big way. I see now that thinking we can solve systemic issues with individualism is bullshit. I want a world where my wife or I could stay home (or some communal solution) to raise our family right rather than having a bunch of latchkey kids and being stuck doing chores from the moment we get home until the moment we lie down. Some people say “well that’s how I was raised” but it isn’t right.

Now that would be a funny headline.

No sadly COVID lockdown isolation did them in. I’ve never seen minds and bodies decay so fast. I have another friend who developed full-blown psychosis from it too, and at this point it looks like he’s never coming back. The lockdowns were harder on some people than we were/are ready to talk about I think.

When my wife’s grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn’t work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it’s what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.

They used it without issue until they died.

Sweden and Canada have pretty high rates of gun ownership and don’t have this problem. That said American school shootings are not as common as they are made out to be, there has been a lot of statistical fudging to make it look so much worse than it is.

What all three countries do have are problems with gangs and they’re only getting worse as poverty drives people to crime. America has it worse because it has more poverty, but we will all catch up soon enough.