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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Totally get that. I used to be that way; somewhere along the line I decided that I would not allow myself more than three WIPs at a time, and I’ve mostly been pretty disciplined about that, and it’s helped. I make a lot of sweaters for myself so when people learn that I knit, they know to ask me if I made what I’m wearing, and the answer is often “yes.” The ones who are also crafters just admire the work, but the ones who aren’t start telling me I should sell (big lol) or that they’d pay me to make them one. If I charged an hourly rate, it’d probably mean upwards of a thousand bucks for a single sweater, but they have no concept of that.

    Anyway, I hear you on the learning new stitch patterns and then getting bored. I mostly knit while in meetings or watching TV these days, because it got easy. I had to learn something new (sewing) to stretch my brain because knitting wasn’t doing it anymore.




  • Regarding stickiness, perhaps it’s because the internet is ubiquitous now. Fifteen years ago, those of us on Fark and Digg and Reddit came to the internet for a lot of things. Notably, we kept in touch with friends that way (MySpace and Facebook) and in particular, we got our news that way. My parents were incredulous forever and still kinda are that I “don’t watch the evening news.” Now everyone uses it for everything. The big difference is that the early adopters are naturally more open to change because they adopted something that was a change. The rest of the population was slowly pushed into it. Now they don’t want to leave the sites that they’re used to (e.g. Reddit and Facebook) because they aren’t that open to change in the first place.




  • It’s been a long time (my kids are 8 and 10) so I’m sure features have changed but I figured I’d chime in with my favorite baby monitor feature. Not all of them had it but I found it invaluable.

    I think ours were Samsungs? And they had a “vox” feature. Essentially, if the room was quiet, the monitor screen and microphone would turn off. If there was a noise, it would pop back on. (In this way, it’s different than an audio-only monitor which I presume is on all the time.)This allowed me to sleep (when sleep was available…rarely with our first) and be awoken when needed. I was way too sleep deprived for Nest Cam alerts on my phone to actually get through to me, especially since they popped up once; if I missed it then, it wasn’t going to keep nudging me.

    That said, the monitors themselves were cheaply manufactured junk, and not inexpensive. I liked the vox feature enough that when the first one started having problems with the antenna, we bought a second one and immediately taped the antenna down. Hopefully you have better options out there these days.




  • I would agree with this, but I would add something. If you ever get to a point in your work where you have ownership over your tasks and production and aren’t just a tiny cog in a big machine, it can be really fulfilling (at least as much as any paid job can be). I speak with experience only coming from the non-profit side though, so I’m sure a lot of people may not feel that way about corporate jobs. So if you have experienced that kind of fulfillment, and something changes (either your role or your workplace or your manager or whatever) and it’s not fulfilling in the same way anymore, it can be really frustrating, even if you could feasibly fill your time with personal stuff.

    Also, sometimes being forced to be somewhere chafes when you’d rather be out in the world or at home. Napping, hiking, checking out a book at the library — hard to do when you’re stuck in a specific place.


  • I guess what I meant was, they were so aware that we were lamely going as fast as we could (not very) in the slow lane that they managed to move over in plenty of time even when they were going way (way) faster than us and had to merge into other traffic. No one ever seemed to get stuck behind us unable to pass. I chalked it up to their very high awareness of our very shitty car, lol.