Man, whatever happened to good old-fashioned 5 and 23? Does the Illuminati mean nothing to people any more?

a single ultra light-skinned freckled black woman with a super bouncy afro

Ah, you mean the one black friend in the group of pretty white women?

Elephants are an endangered species!

Sigh (unzips).

What about dinotiddies?

Edit: I just realized how dumb that statement was lol.

I wrote a web app for a client back in the late '90s that is still in (heavy) use at the company. It was actually a “Classic ASP” app and they kept one old PC around to act as the server for it for a couple of decades (they eventually replaced that with a virtual machine and the app is still going). The output is straight HTML + CSS so they’ve never had any problems using it with progressively more modern browsers. Ironically, this app is a front end sitting atop an unbelievably clunky mainframe application that dates to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe application is still running as well.

My first coding experience was as a kid on punch cards (and I’m not even 60 yet). This was in the late 70s and I had an older neighbor friend who was in high school but taking some classes at the local university. The intro programming class that he took still used punch cards on mainframes (though this was being phased out even then) and my friend sort of Tom-Sawyered me into helping him with his homework. It was actually kind of fun to sit there punching the holes in the cards, and then we’d take the stack of cards over to the CS building and leave it in his mail slot, and then a few days later you’d get a giant stack of that old green- and white-striped computer printout paper deposited there with the program’s results.

It’s interesting, it really taught me to check and recheck my own code extremely thoroughly and carefully before “running” it, rather than pumping out some slop quickly and relying on the compiler and/or the output to identify any problems. Because with multiple days between submitting the code and seeing the results, you really had to make sure stuff was working from the get-go. In my career as a programmer, I subsequently ran into many similar situations that required basically just your own eyeballs to make sure the code was right. When I was writing Blackberry applications circa 2010 (!) for example, RIM’s utterly fucked-up developer environment meant that the delay between starting to compile an application and having it running on a test device could be 30-45 minutes or more (if it finished compiling at all) even if I’d only made a single one-line code change. So I had to get back in the habit of very carefully writing a lot of code before attempting to compile, and making sure it was going to work correctly just by inspection.

Next you’re gonna tell me gold is psychoactive!

My brother and sister-in-law homeschooled their kids for a while, which was a bit out of character for them. It turned out they were actually sending them to a private school that was technically “home schooling” because the parents taught the kids at home one day out of the week using school-provided materials and the kids were at the school the other four days. That one day a week allowed the technical “home schooling” designation and also allowed the school to use non-state-certified teachers (with the added bonus of being able to pay them hourly and only for four days of work a week). And all of this was only marginally cheaper than normal private schools. My bro and SIL eventually realized how shitty this was all around and moved into a good school district - which was way cheaper than private schools.

I’ll try that. Fuck you.

So anyway … what ever happened with that CEO caught groping his HR director at that Coldplay concert?

I don’t even know if I want to rent to someone, that’s a whole other set of headaches.

I live with my elderly parents, taking care of them until they move into a nursing home or worse (although I’m not sure death is actually worse than a nursing home). In the meantime, I bought myself a small house nearby that I’m renovating and I plan to move there after I close out my parents’ house. I’m genuinely terrified of renting it out after having put so much time and effort into it. A lot of people rent in this neighborhood and I’ve seen firsthand what some tenants do to places.

But if I do rent it out, I’m a shitty scumlord? I’m a better person if I don’t rent it?

I’m the product in the sense that poo is the product of the intestines.

I had to move to a Mac because of iOS development. Now I’m stuck with a Mac because the fucking thing refuses to break.

“This fucking paycheck! What am I going to do with all this money?”

I majored in Anthropology in college. I should have done Misanthropology.

If I was a hacker, I would just get a job as a night cleaning person at corporate office buildings. And then just help myself to the fucking post-it notes with usernames and passwords on them.

No, I’m saying that if you didn’t have union-negotiated healthcare, the $700 you would have instead to spend on health insurance would only get you an extremely shitty private plan. I know this because I currently have great union-negotiated healthcare but prior to that I had the extremely shitty private plan.

I was radicalized in the '80s. Nothing has surprised me since then.

$700 in health insurance

Ah yes, the plan with the $10,000 annual deductible and they drop you if you ever file a claim of any sort.