Half-Life 3: The Adventures of Gordon Freethread

February 21, 2022 9:35 AM

Who has two thumbs and is not sure without looking which one he uses to hit the spacebar while he's typing up a new Free Thread post? This guy! [Imagine me pointing at myself with both the spacebar and non-spacebar thumbs]. It turns out it's the right thumb, btw. Anyway, come on in and chatter about whatever!
posted by cortex (164 comments total)

have fun watching the wall of boxes, with english subtitles
posted by pyramid termite at 9:38 AM on February 21, 2022 [10 favorites]

have fun watching a human fall for a lantern fish's trap
posted by dhruva at 9:47 AM on February 21, 2022 [10 favorites]

The name should have been "Guybrush Freepwood".
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 9:58 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

cortex, did I miss the joke, or do you have trouble telling your left and right hands without looking?

I do the "L" and "⅃" thing with my hands when thinking in English, the one that makes the L is Left.

When I am thinking in Spanish I do the OK sign with the tips of the index and thumb touching. You get "b" "d". The one with the d is the derecha
posted by Dr. Curare at 10:18 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I continue to worry about my pup struggling with separation anxiety. It could be worse, I guess, because she isn't howling nonstop and can't chew through walls, although she did manage to lick open one of her two crate latches (!). Half the problem is not when I'm gone but when I'm home and she's upset because MOM. MOM. MOM YOU'RE NOT LOOKING. I'm actively working on it and I know it's a pretty normal problem, but it feels lonely.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:19 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Before computers took over everything, I could tell my right hand by the handwriting calluses.
posted by Dr. Curare at 10:19 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

i'm scared
posted by Philipschall at 10:25 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I do the "L" and "⅃" thing with my hands when thinking in English, the one that makes the L is Left.

I've never understood that. Can't you just as easily make an L with the right hand, by turning your palms up?
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:28 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've never understood the "L" thing with your hand because I know which is left and which is right. I'm wrong about 75% of the time (in all languages - except on a boat (wtf?)) but I am sure in the moment that I'm right.
posted by From Bklyn at 10:34 AM on February 21, 2022

My typing teacher is having apoplexy over the idea of not splitting the spacebar duties across both thumbs according to which hand typed the previous letter. It was never easy for me, but a quick check of the wear marks on my computers says I'm doing ok.

In other self-check news, I still have my "school callus" on the right middle finger. Computers haven't completely taken over my life I guess!
posted by traveler_ at 10:35 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

When I am thinking in Spanish I do the OK sign with the tips of the index and thumb touching. You get "b" "d". The one with the d is the derecha

A friend taught me the same thing in Hindi, except it works even better because left is baayen and right is daayen!
posted by a car full of lions at 10:36 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have been touch typing since I was 15 which is a Very Long Time and started with a manual typewriter (I had to literally use a lever to return the carriage, and the huge thing went "ding!" ), so I have long since forgotten which finger is for what. It is not typing, it is a sort of sign language, and if I thought about it, I'd forget how to do it. I've had people stop and stare at me when they hear me typing, it sounds so strange and fast. One guy shouted at me once when I was typing, because it bothered him.

And now I have autocorrect and type with my thumbs on my phone while I'm out walking in full sunlight, which means I send more things with errors in them than ever. I have created an auto-text that says "auto correct is opinionated" to send out, I do it so often. The most recent one was "tact" for "react" and heaven knows what I actually typed.

But every day, I write in my journal with a fountain pen. I have many beautiful fountain pens and a number of pretty inks, because I leave a trail (metaphorically) of writing behind me wherever I go and it might as well be beautiful.
posted by Peach at 10:41 AM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I do the "L" and "⅃" thing with my hands when thinking in English, the one that makes the L is Left.

This always made my daughter give a sigh of exasperation because she had trouble remembering which way the bottom of an 'L' goes for the exact same reason she had trouble remembering which way was left.
posted by straight at 10:42 AM on February 21, 2022

Listening to the last movement of Harmonielehre this morning, an amazing and audacious symphony from John Adams, composed in 1984. Hugely influential, too, just big, gorgeous music. Hope someone else enjoys it.
posted by LooseFilter at 10:46 AM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

My parents moved in the summertime, when I was six years old. We moved from a place that had Kindergarten which wasn't free, so my parents didn't; to a place where all my new first grade classmates had been in the Kindergarten class the year previous. Not only was penetrating their social web difficult, they'd also learned some key concepts in K which my first-grade teacher assumed everyone now knew -‌- like the difference between Left and Right. Took me a long time to master that.
posted by Rash at 10:49 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Does anyone remember Typing Invaders, if that was what it was called? I had to learn to type in middle school in the 90s, and there was a pretty fun BASIC game where words fell to the bottom of the screen and you had to type them correctly to “shoot” them. Little words were fast, big ones were slower.

i’m scared

Bill Wurtz is a fucking genius.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:51 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

My typing teacher is having apoplexy over the idea of not splitting the spacebar duties across both thumbs according to which hand typed the previous letter. It was never easy for me, but a quick check of the wear marks on my computers says I'm doing ok.

Monkeytype has an option to enforce opposite-hand shifting, if you really wanna be hardcore.

I think I tend to only use my right hand, my left hand is basically good for two or three fingers at best, after 20 year of professional-like typing. But since it takes me more time to edit my thoughts than to type them and I'm not doing stenography, eh?

My current keyswitches are both super heavy compared to what I was using a few weeks ago, I'm not sure about them yet. I'm also testing out a five row keyboard to see just how annoying not having a grave/tilde key actually is. $115 with house branded Kailh Box Jades? Sure, why not. And my other keyboard has Gateron Kangaroo Inks - I'm torn on whether or not I like the distinct click or just a bump in the stroke. Thankfully I'm not in an office any more, although I still have to mute myself on calls, otherwise the mic pics it up surprisingly well. I should try some heavier linears for the luls, but standard Reds are too light for me, I tend to get a lot of smearing.

Way way back in Free Thread One or Two someone said how much they liked Chvrches Screen Violence, so I finally got around to giving it a good intentional listening months after release, and I think it's pretty good. My only complaint is that a lot of the album sort of feels like the same sort of song (structurally? sonically? hrm) just re-done a few ways. But that might just be me getting older and not memorizing the song titles like I used to when I was a kid. Or just a consequence of the band sort of sliding into comfortable habits and not writing a song like Tether on the same album as Under The Tide, it's hard to say.
posted by Kyol at 10:58 AM on February 21, 2022

Oh man, we were playing Mice and Mystics with some friends last night and I had the hardest time figuring which player was left of the active character. (player to the left rolls for the minions) Never been an issue for me in the past, but something about this game has me sitting there 54 years in not able to figure it out. I blame weekend brain.
posted by calamari kid at 11:02 AM on February 21, 2022

> A friend taught me the same thing in Hindi, except it works even better because left is baayen and right is daayen!

This also works for remembering which side to put a Bread plate and a Drink at a formal western style dinner place setting.
posted by WaylandSmith at 11:02 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Without looking, I'd guessed that I used both thumbs on the spacebar, probably the left more than the right. But then looking at the wear pattern on my old work computer clearly showed that I use the right thumb more often - as I then confirmed while typing this comment. Yay, evidence-based science!

My problem is using the left-pinkie Shift when I ought to be using the right-pinkie Shift, such as when typing capital S or A. Still working on fixing it. I didn't even notice it until a few months ago when I started getting painful left-pinkie strain, after many years of that bad habit.

Countess Elena, I messed around with what I think was a similar typing tutor program during the same time period, except it started out with single characters falling, then character pairs, then difficult triplets that required you to rapidly move fingers between keys (ex. j7j). Then in round 2 everything happened faster...

Also, I hate hate HATE clicky keyboards!! Can't stand 'em, even. I much prefer quiet minimal-feedback keyboards. Fortunately my new work laptop has a lovely buttery keyboard, unlike it's not-necessarily-clicky-but-still-clunky predecessor that I loathed for the entire 4 years I had to deal with it. ...Come to think of it, I wonder if the terrible keyboard led to the pinkie-strain...
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:16 AM on February 21, 2022

I never really learned to type properly, and once when I took some time to look at how I was typing, noticed that I typed the same letter three times in one sentence using different fingers. So the idea that you use only one of your thumbs for the space bar is foreign to me (I just realized I used my index finger once in typing this post.)

It does mean that I can carry my laptop and type one-handed almost as fast as I type with both hands. But it also means that I definitely do not type "normally".

That said, probably >75% right thumb.
posted by grae at 11:20 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Protip: travel light.

Tashkent is only a few hundred kms form Dushanbe, no biggie right? This is the first time I have had to move the whole family (wife and 2 boys and me) all in one go, overland. What a saga.

1. Wife demanded an SUV sized car instead of a larger van, and I was really surpised we fit with all of our stuff... double stacked boxes and suitcases on the roof rack.

2. The closer to Tashkent border point means a really mountainous road in Tajikistan, so we went around the long way, about 14 hours to the border point closer to Dushanbe.

3. Most cars here are on natural gas (propane?) so the range sucks, and we had to stop to fill up maybe every 2 or 3 hours. The lines were terrible, at least half an hour every time.

4. Last 70 km to the border was on a non-metalled road, sometimes at a crawl... last fill up was some remote station at dawn, with a guy living there tending the pumps. Power went out just as our fill was completed.

5. If you are from the West, you are probably imagining us driving across the border with all of our stuff, right? Nope, this is a 99% pedestrian only crossing, special VIPs and the UN etc. can drive but not little people like us. So our shit gets unloaded and put onto a porter's cart, then rolled maybe 200m to the customs point. The Uzbeks need to make sure you are not smuggling drugs (LOL, coal to Newcastle, wrong direction) so everything needs to be hand carried, put through airport style security... this is us LEAVING the country! The guys are pawing through the wife's jewellery, asking how much money we have, if there are any weapons... FFS man we are LEAVING your country, kind of the wrong time for scrutiny like this, no? Oh shit what's this a drone? That is illegal in Uzbekistan! Well, they let me bring it in and now I am leaving, so...?? After a bunch of phone calls the drone is returned to me.

6. So passports stamped, everything back on the cart, whew all over right? No way, you have now left Uzbekistan and are in the liminal no-man's land with another 200m cart trek... but wait, guess what? The Uzbek porter will only go halfway! And now, for the next hour, our shit is in a pile, on te road, directly at the Uzbek-Tajik border, while we are held ransom by the new Tajik porters that have come out to meet us...

Luckily my brother in law has a close connection in the Tajik foreign service. When we showed up for the Tajik airport style customs check they were all "ooh" and "ahh" and "extra charge beyond 50kg" until we made the right call and dropped the right name, after that smooth sailing.

I am here in Dushanbe, Metafilter! Hello!
posted by Meatbomb at 11:23 AM on February 21, 2022 [38 favorites]

I can never keep it straight: is it eat to live, or live to eat?

Anyway, I spread some leftover arugula pesto on some some leftover sub-par Wegmans cheese pizza and it was delicious.

Also, a friend sent me a text about a German going into a restaurant, and asking for silverware thusly: "I need some food weapons!"

This reminded me that the French use the phrase "Batterie de cuisine." Which is literally, "kitchen artillery."

And so I came up with this quote, which you can use wherever it merits:

"Every meal is a battle. And in every one I have been victorious."
posted by valkane at 11:24 AM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

From Brklyn…

On a boat, one side is Port and the other is Starboard. It’s easy to remember which is which. At the wheel, you steer with your right hand and you hold your bottle of port in your left.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:25 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also, port wine is red, which your face will be when you say "left" on a boat.
posted by valkane at 11:28 AM on February 21, 2022

On a boat, larboard is left starboard, and port is larboard? Right!
posted by sixswitch at 11:36 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Every meal is a battle. And in every one I have been victorious."

Unfortunately, desserts are my Waterloo.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:40 AM on February 21, 2022

I decided not to go with "custard's last stand"
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:40 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

another free thread finds me heading out the door to go running. 10k today.

i hope am inspiration to us all
posted by glonous keming at 11:41 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Although having thought about it a bit on my walk just now, perhaps my track confusion with Screen Violence is due to Apple's Music Player (as distinct from Apple's Music Streaming Service and Apple's Music Store) goddamn falling into shuffle play every time you stop paying it a moment's attention.

I'd like to round up whoever's responsible for both that and whoever's responsible for the modern UI disaster that is turning on the reverse lights on cars for "path lighting", making it impossible to tell who's in reverse and intending to back out and who just left their cars 10 seconds ago and send them to a very special part of hell so they might understand why they've done something Very Bad.
posted by Kyol at 11:44 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

cortex, did I miss the joke, or do you have trouble telling your left and right hands without looking?

Neither, but I wrote the post text awkwardly; it's not that I can't tell while I'm typing, it's that I can't recall with certainty before commencing which one is going to spring into action. I've never had any left/right difficulties that I can recall, but a lot of typing is very very autonomous at this point and trying to reason about the various quanta of the process out of context is tricky!
posted by cortex at 11:55 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would like to blame the person in one of these threads recently (I think), who said even though LoTR Online had been around for ages and maybe it would be a bad idea, they decided to try it anyway and said it was fun. And that put a little idea into my head which turned into downloading it and trying it also, and it is fun. But it may be very, very bad for keeping the apartment at its bare minimum of cleanliness and also may cut into my recent hard-won painting practice. I tell myself I will only use the time I was already playing PvZ 2 and Topsoil. Also, I'm not doing any of those quests where I have to kill the little animals minding their own business.
posted by Glinn at 11:58 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, port wine is red, which your face will be when you say "left" on a boat.

Unless you're on the Great Lakes, where "left" and "right" are correct nomenclature and those other fancy terms are for the salties. Oh, and unless you're on a ship which is emphatically not a boat, unless it's the sort of ship that does get called "boat" like a submarine. Basically just accept that you're a lubber until the crew schools you on their version of correct.
posted by traveler_ at 12:06 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Girls and Panzer Anglerfish Dance
Why? Go back to the first 2 comments.
posted by evilDoug at 12:06 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I learned to type almost 40 years ago when I was 13/14. Took the class because I was computer nerd and figured I should learn now that it was available. Think I was the only boy in the class, there might have been one more. The IBM Selectric whacky-ball things. Managed to get 4th place in state competition (Future Business Leaders of America). Sadly only made top 10 on the computer thing, but the test was for PC and I and our schools used Apple so I sorta had to just make good guesses at some things. I pretty much haven't been for too long of a time without a keyboard in front of me. Pisses me off to no ends watching coworkers hunt-n-peck (gah).

We did the whole "can't tell left from right" thing a while back. Started in an Ask thread about tattoos and ended up a Meata. So tread lightly, or maybe search for it.

Drove myself silly because I had been watching this Japanese anime Parasite where a guy gets an alien virus thing that takes over your whole body (and it morphs) but he catches it early in his arm and stops it long enough for it to have to stay in that one arm. The alien is sad and annoyed at being a failure but it opens up a mouth in his right hand and starts talking to him. The guy names the alien 'migi' (right in Japanese). So I got the bright idea to pretend both of my hands had their own personalities. Lefty and RIghty are argumentative assholes and comedians and got me so cracked up I thought I was going crazy and just had to go to bed and hope they stopped by morning.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:19 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

On a boat, I learned it as "port" and "left" having the same number of letters.

I am a stretch-shift typist and a right-thumb spacebar'er. Space isn't ever a problem, and shifting wrongly is really only an issue in the dreaded "%^&" zone. I think 'ctrl' is the bigger problem since every keyboard has to have extra Windows keys and fluff like that clogging up the ctrl-alt simplicity of yore. Maybe one of those fancy BYO-Keycaps keyboards can give me a simpler typing experience.

Anybody who likes Chvches should check out Aereogramme if they haven't yet, one of the guys's previous band.
posted by rhizome at 12:20 PM on February 21, 2022

Listening to the last movement of Harmonielehre this morning, an amazing and audacious symphony from John Adams, composed in 1984. Hugely influential, too, just big, gorgeous music. Hope someone else enjoys it.

I don't get a chance to tell this story often, and I'm not into the groove yet with work, and maybe someone will get a kick out of it, so here goes. It's about one of my favorite moments listening to music. There is a moment in the last movement "Meister Eckhardt and Quackie" where there's this monumental swell, shift and resolution. You've been listening to tension building upon tension for a really long time, and then the plane lands and you can finally exhale. My first time listening to Harmonielehre, I was on a train heading south from Seattle to Portland, sitting on the west side of the train, which is the scenic side. If you sit on the east side, you have a lovely view of muddy hillsides and trees for most of the ride, but on the west side you get an expansive view of various permutations upon the Pacific Ocean. And I was just tripping and overwhelmed by the scenery (almost literally tripping, as I had eaten a brownie or two and was on the border of an alternate universe), and swimming in the incredible orchestral music in my headphones, and almost losing my shit from all the beauty and tension, and then the train rounds a corner and I suddenly see the enormous cooling towers of the Trojan nuclear power plant as the music finally hits that crescendo and resolution.

It was a moment. The best part, though, is that even without the train and natural beauty and brownies, I've almost been able to recreate it through listening to the music. It's really a wonderful work.
posted by vverse23 at 12:47 PM on February 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

I never learned to type correctly. I use index and ring and thumb on the left (not the middle one). I use index, middle and thumb on the right, with the ring finger participating some times. There is little consistency, either hand can hit the middle columns of the keyboard, depending who is closer.

I love typing words that have letters clustered on one side of the keyboard, my hands do crazy stuff. For example, I recently typed "acidic" multiple times in a document. It went like "A"(left ring) "C" (right index) "I" (right ring) "D" (left index) "I" (right ring) "C" (left index) SPACE (right thumb). Try it.

The hands don't change position much, and using different fingers for each "C" means that the left index finger moves one position while allowing the right hand to keep the fingers in the exact same position and just "rock" a little bit to hit space with the thumb.

I don't decide which finger goes where, the part of my brain controlling this is not accessible to me.

I type slower and with less accuracy than many people who type for a living, but it has worked so far.
posted by Dr. Curare at 12:47 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I might make an AskMe about this but I'm having a really chaotic time at work so uh just keep me in your thoughts I guess. I thought I actually had a question or even some kind of coherent complaint but I guess it just sucks. If you work along side ux designers please just be nice to them and trust that when they say "We have to provide a way for the user to tell us this, we can't read their mind or guess" they are telling the truth & not just maliciously adding more clicks because they're secretly The Joker.
posted by bleep at 12:49 PM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Unless the sense is quite bereft, the port is passed towards the left.

Source: a tipsy professor.
posted by Hermione Dies at 1:03 PM on February 21, 2022

Virgin Hyperloop ends their plans for passenger vac-trains amid layoffs. Gee, who could’ve seen that coming?

I can touch-type at a reasonable speed, but hand synchronization is occasionally a problem for me. EG all of the left-hand letters in a word might be typed before all the right-hand letters. It’s a rbepolm problem.

Spacebar is given over to my left thumb. Lefty gets a lot of use because I was an ambidextrous child. Nevertheless, the nuns at school drummed it out of me.
posted by Monochrome at 1:06 PM on February 21, 2022

Maybe one of those fancy BYO-Keycaps keyboards can give me a simpler typing experience.

The phrase you're looking for is WKL - "winkeyless", but they're pretty rare. I mean, I saw more 7u "Tsangan" space layouts (where ctrl/win/alt are differing widths) for sale in a quick search than I saw any commercial WKLs. I know they exist, though.
posted by Kyol at 1:06 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was an ambidextrous child.

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:28 PM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

I decided not to go with "custard's last stand"

BTW, this method of telling a joke by informing people you didn't tell it is known as "deleting your jape and having it too."
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:36 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I need to figure out my relationship to crafts. I am in the middle of expending a lot of effort trying to figure out how to house in my impossibly small house a collection of yarn, fabric, and associated sewing and knitting tools and supplies, as well as other various crafty crap, all of which has been untouched for several years now. Do I like crafty activities or do I just like thinking of myself as a person who likes them? Does owning this stuff make me happy or does it feel like a burden? Would I rather have the stuff or the closet space? Would I be happier if I forced myself to get started on a project and then maybe I'd get absorbed in it? I used to be a creative person and enjoyed it but it that absorption feels out of my reach now. Is there a way to get it back? Do I need it back?

Have you ever just said forget it, I'm obviously not going to be a creative person ever again, and gotten rid of all your stuff? Did you later regret it?

Or have you had a long creative drought and then gotten back into the groove? What happened?
posted by HotToddy at 1:39 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I am a two thumb typist on my phone, but I’ve gotten a Bluetooth (seriously, why didn’t they go with BluTuth?) keyboard for my iPad, and, because I made the mistake of getting a Dell laptop, another Bluetooth keyboard (full size, with number pad) for use with the laptop.

Seriously, it’s a 17inch laptop, and I should have just gotten a desktop, but I’m always convinced I’ll be moving, even though we’ve lived in this house for 13 years, but this laptop’s keyboard is crammed into the same space as a 15inch laptop, rather than spreading out and taking up some more space.

That it’s a Japanese keyboard doesn’t help, with all the little keys for changing the language settings, but for some reason, they made backspace the smallest key on the keyboard. Clearly they expect excellence or something.

I was a terrible typist in high school, but coming of age at the dawn of email, then using it while living overseas as pretty much my only means of communication, I managed to get pretty good at it, to the point that Google’s autocorrect can’t seem to keep up with my typing, which can get pretty frustrating when using Classroom and such for work.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:47 PM on February 21, 2022

blootoof
posted by glonous keming at 1:51 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

The easiest way to remember your port from starboard is 'there's some red port left in the bottle', with the red being important if you boat at night, the red navigation light being on the port side (so you can tell which way a boat is heading when all you can see are the lights).

I learned to touch-type about 20 years ago and it has made my life so much easier that I did my best to make sure my kids learned also, with mixed success. Thanks to this thread, though, I just discovered that I never use the right shift key, which explains why some capital letters always feel awkward. Pretty even thumb on spacebar use, though. Two thumbs is the only correct way to type on a phone and I'll fight you if you disagree.
posted by dg at 1:56 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm still a relatively good touch typist, which is how I learned to do it in high school (which, I eventually figured out, was to facilitate typing at speed, much beloved by the secretarial pools of yore and required by many entry-level clerical jobs, and of course the cause of repetitive stress injuries among many clerical workers). One thing that I have to look at the keyboard for, though, is that Duolingo has just gotten Klingon, and I'm taking a break from German (I really need to stop faking it and learn German grammar properly) and trying tlhIngan Hol, and it uses the apostrophe to denote glottal stops and there are a lot of glottal stops in Klingon; reaching for the ' key with my right pinky, I sometimes overshoot and hit Enter instead, which submits my answer before it's complete/correct. Today is a bad day for typos!
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:02 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hot Toddy: Well, I've never gotten out of a craft groove so I can't speak for that, but it sounds like you might be what Barbara Sher calls a "scanner," i.e. someone who takes up with a hobby for awhile, enjoys it/learns all about it, and then moves on to the next thing. If you have a long history of never picking up the things again years later, you might as well pass the objects on to other crafty people/Goodwill. If pandemic isolation didn't get you back into crafting, maybe nothing will :P

Also, think about what happens if you get rid of it. Would you miss it or notice if it was gone from your house tomorrow without your knowledge? If you pick all that stuff up and put it into a pile of Things To Get Rid Of, and then don't immediately get rid of the stuff and leave it there for awhile, does it bother you to know the stuff is there? Or will you never miss it? Think of it that way.

Also, you can certainly buy more yarn or whatever if you change your mind later.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:08 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Blessings of Mavis Beacon upon all.
posted by clavdivs at 2:11 PM on February 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Spacebar is given over to my left thumb. Lefty gets a lot of use because I was an ambidextrous child. Nevertheless, the nuns at school drummed it out of me.

The Devil's Spacebar has contributed to many derails through the centuries, and soon to be a Tom Hanks motion picture.
posted by rhizome at 2:13 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I saw West Side Story in an empty theater on Saturday. I remember seeing the original as a teen and again in my 20s and thinking how far we as a society have come. Seeing the new one has left me feeling like society hasn't changed any all, and has mabye gone backwards.
posted by Dr. Twist at 2:16 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Have you ever just said forget it, I'm obviously not going to be a creative person ever again, and gotten rid of all your stuff? Did you later regret it?

No. But I have done repeated very severe destashings, and have not regretted it.

When I go through my yarn, for example, a few categories emerge:

1) I still love this and I know what I would make with this, or I can imagine at least one or two possibilities that I genuinely like.

2) This isn't great quality, or it was given as a gift by someone who doesn't really know my tastes, and I was never going to put it to great use.

3) I got this with a specific project in mind but I no longer want to make that project and the thought of making something else with it doesn't really fill my heart with joy.

4) I used to like this, but my tastes changed.

5) I really like it but here is a mismatch between what I have and what I want to use it for, and it's nontrivially difficult to resolve that mismatch - for example, it's great sweater yarn but I have two balls and I would need 14 balls to make a sweater, and maybe I can't even get that yarn in that shade anymore. Or I bought 3 balls intending to make a scarf, but it's too scratchy for scarf yarn and I'm not going to buy enough to make a sweater. (I don't mind if sweaters are scratchy, you can just put a long-sleeved T-shirt under them.)

Category 1 stays. Categories 2, 3, and 4 go. Category 5 can stay... if I can figure out something that I genuinely want to do with it without buying 12 more balls of yarn.

I tend to cycle in and out of hobbies, but the thing is, my first and second and third dives into knitting were so dramatically different in terms of what colors and textures and garments I wanted to make that I almost had to start from scratch in terms of buying yarn.

Once I gave a person I didn't like about $200 of very nice yarn because I knew I wasn't going to use it. I hope she had a good time with it. I don't regret it. (And look, do I regret spending way too much money on yarn that I never used? YES. OF COURSE. I am not actually so rich that I am okay with dropping $200 on yarn I don't end up using. I was making under $20,000 when I gave away that very nice yarn. But like Marie Kondo says, you can't undo that regret by letting it sit in your closet forever, so you've got to thank it for being beautiful and colorful and fluffy and giving you five minutes of happiness when you bought it, and then you let it go.)
posted by Jeanne at 2:16 PM on February 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

If there was anything in my high school typing class about operating the space bar with alternating thumbs, I rejected the concept so thoroughly that I don't even remember any attempts at teaching it. Right thumb only on my space bars, identified by the one shiny spot on that side on literally every keyboard I've ever used.
posted by fedward at 2:22 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Back in the dark ages, girls were not allowed to take drafting in high school. I was advised to take typing instead so I could get get a nice job as a secretary. Being stubborn and loathing the idea of being steered into the pink collar ghetto, I refused to take typing. Later, in college, I learned the error of my ways and took a typing class. Before the class, I could eke out 20 wpm hunt and pecking. After the class, I could type 8 wpm and still made a lot of errors. Turns out, the part of the brain used for learning repetitive motions is missing in me. Can't dance, can't play guitar (even with years of trying) and got asked to leave a Tai Chi class because I was unable to learn the forms, even with one on one help.

I got my degree in fine arts and ended up being the signmaker for a food co-op. When computers came along, I was good at using them even though my typing was for shit. Cut and paste is my best friend. Anyway, just because I wasn't bad at learning new computer programs, I ended up being the editor of the newsletter and later on, the webmaster. I still can't type and now I don't see so good so making lengthy comments takes me forever. I'm gonna type for one minute and see how many words I can input in my tired, retired way. Nineteen. Hrmph, not much slower than in my prime!
posted by a humble nudibranch at 2:25 PM on February 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

My left hand is the one that’s had to be restrained (in public!) a couple of times by my right hand because it wouldn’t stop doing something my mind was telling it to stop doing, and which has choked me in my sleep a couple of times during dreams.

But it's also the one which snatches things out of the air that I've dropped or knocked off a table, including a very expensive and custom fabricated single crystal cylinder of precisely doped ruby which sporoinged out of a piece of apparatus I was holding up to the light, and which would have been shattered or chipped badly by the concrete floor I scrabbled around on for most of a minute looking for the carcass on before pain in a left knuckle alerted me to the fact that my left hand was fisted around something hard that fortuitously turned out to be the cylinder of ruby.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, I’ve never really learned to type.
posted by jamjam at 2:27 PM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

OK, if this is all about typing...

Mrs. Hall, (of Hallmark), was my middle school typing teacher.

And I refuse to pay attention to which thumb I am using for spacebarring, and YOU CAN'T MAKE ME START TO NOTICE!!!

Dammit...
(mostly right)
posted by Windopaene at 2:41 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

If pandemic isolation didn't get you back into crafting, maybe nothing will :P

Hmm, good point.

it sounds like you might be what Barbara Sher calls a "scanner," i.e. someone who takes up with a hobby for awhile, enjoys it/learns all about it, and then moves on to the next thing

I am a starter but not much of a finisher. My seeming inability to finish projects has been making me unhappy since I was a child. I have a very clear memory of feeling bad about my 8-year-old self for not finishing a crewel project and yet not having the stomach to finish it. And I say "stomach" rather than "desire" because I did kind of have the desire but I just somehow couldn't. I think this same issue is plaguing my relationship to crafty activities all these many decades later. I have zero insights as to why this might be. "Scanner" sounds so benign for what feels like a moral failure but maybe that's all it is? But I want to get lost in a project! I have in the past and it's fun!
posted by HotToddy at 2:48 PM on February 21, 2022

I decided not to go with "custard's last stand"

The name of an actual ice cream establishment down the (Jersey) shore in Ventnor (near Atlantic City).
posted by desuetude at 2:56 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was shopping online for guitar stuff and I saw 'guitar gloves' that you wear to stop your fingertips from hurting. Bullshit, I thought to myself, this is a trap for noobs who haven't developed the callouses yet and are too naive to realize there's no such thing as guitar gloves. I've played for thirty years and I've never heard of such a thing. I couldn't imagine how you could even play with a glove, it'd sound terrible.

I don't trust the reviews posted on the retailers sites, I usually search for a youtube unboxing. I found out that guitar gloves are absolutely real. This guy explains why he needs one, and yes he can play rather well with a glove. He has a form of RSI called focal dystonia, a neurological disorder which causes paralysis and muscular seizures. Really common with musicians, particularly pianists and shredders. Even sax players can have this happen to their lips, though I'm not sure what kind of glove there is for that.

Even after thirty years I'm still learning. Focal dystonia sounds like a nightmare, imagine putting all that practice in, only for it to backfire like that.
posted by adept256 at 2:57 PM on February 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

there are a lot of glottal stops in Klingon

Sounds like an especially tricky driving test.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:01 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

another free thread finds me heading out the door to go running. 10k today.

I was similarly athletic! I went for a walk in the park after physical therapy today!

....In other news my knee hates me now!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:09 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I got my manly man to do a 10-minute barre class with me today and although he was never disrespectful before, he definitely has a whole new respect for it now.
posted by HotToddy at 3:24 PM on February 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

HotToddy, I had a similar experience going to Pilates with my wife some years ago. I was the only guy and am in decent shape but 10 minutes in I was like “what devilry is this? There’s no muscle that does that!” and I was sorer than I’d been in a long time. That shit was HARD. Also I realized that doing body things in real time as an instructor calls them out is not something I am good at.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:46 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Heh, after physically checking for shiny spots on my space bar, it turns out I actually use my right thumb exclusively. Some confirmation bias obviously crept in while consciously observing which thumb I used.
posted by dg at 3:48 PM on February 21, 2022

Today is the 35th anniversary of the day I met me wife, which is a weird thing to remember, but for some reason I do. I have no idea about the date I proposed marriage. Anyway, there is a blog post if you want to see me in all my 1987ish. Fun story about the tux I'm wearing in the photo. I wore it the previous night to a different formal dance with a different girl. 2 formals in a weekend with different dates - peak college dating LOL. That would be my last date with anybody other than my wife, though.
posted by COD at 4:19 PM on February 21, 2022 [9 favorites]

My right eye is slightly cyan-tinted relative to my left eye, which is slightly magenta-tinted relative to my right eye. Apparently this is normal in people, since the eyes don't get the exact same distribution of things in them. But I can't remember which eye is cyan reliably (I *think* it's right), so this has been of little use with remembering which side airplane lights are bleen on.
posted by Callisto Prime at 4:45 PM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Or have you had a long creative drought and then gotten back into the groove? What happened?

I oscillate between periods of heavy creative output and periods of drought, and honestly the droughts would be much bigger and more spectacular if I didn't have a bunch of different creative outlets I cycle between aperiodically. For the last couple of months I've really been droughty and heavily aware of the all the art-making ideas I could in theory be working on or getting enthusiastic about but have failed to do so. Currently clawing my way back into action with some painting and blockprinting in a mix of natural "oh, actually, hmm" idea enthusiasm and a fair amount of just cussed bull-headed making myself work on shit.

I usually enjoy working on shit once I make myself get going; getting going is hard and I have a hard time convincing the I Don't Wanna part of my brain that I will in fact be happy once I get back in the groove. And it's not an infallible rule: sometimes I force myself to get my ass in gear, and I work on a thing or try a new things, and it goes poorly and I am very frustrated and have to sort of go back to my rut and get another running start when I'm able.

People tell me I'm creatively prolific and they're not wrong but I still feel every one of those droughts as a guilty absence. I guess I say this to be clear that it's not a matter of Not Being Creative After All or anything; brains are weird and they lie, enthusiasm cycles are normal and happen and can be really unpredictable. It's absolutely okay to just be done with a thing and let it go, but there's also no rule about when you have to give up and declare you're done with it.

Which is to say, to your followup:

"Scanner" sounds so benign for what feels like a moral failure but maybe that's all it is? But I want to get lost in a project! I have in the past and it's fun!

It's not a moral failure. Creativity isn't Calvinist, and it's not a job and it's not something you can disappoint the universe about by being in a drought on or finding you need to look for a new thing on. I've spent my whole life getting excited about a new shiny thing every couple months or every couple years, and I've got a lot of abandoned hobbies and projects to show for it, but I've also found a lot of things that bring me recurring joy. Scanning, to use that metaphor, isn't indecisiveness or artistic faithlessness or any kind of moral dereliction; it's a method for finding happiness and joy in new things, and it's great and people should do more of it instead of feeling tied down to whoever they thought they were supposed to be creatively because of what they did or liked a year or five years ago.

I feel you so much on the sense of guilt about not finishing stuff, but it's not important. It's really not important. Finishing your taxes is important because the IRS will come after you. Finishing a creative project is like finishing a book: great if you're enjoying it, an unnecessary slog if you're only finishing it out of obligation. Creativity is like thinking; we all have thoughts we follow through on, and thoughts we cut short because, nah, that's not it.

I really like Jeanne's breakdown of the textile deep cull process as a way to tackle the more practical guilt of stuff you're not using taking up space, and I think that ties into a good way to think about getting back into that stuff if you want to: go through it and think about a project or two in specific that you have a frisson about, something that you do wish you'd get back to in a genuinely enthusiastic (not guilty) way. Keep the stuff for making that, and ditch the rest if you want to make space. Or just bring that stuff to the top if you're not gonna cull right now. But collapse "this entire creative hobby I've abandoned" down to something much more manageable like "this one small project I'd like to tackle" and it'll be a lot easier to try and get back to it. Or find out that there isn't any of that frisson about any of it and you are ready to move on to something else, which is absolutely okay too.
posted by cortex at 4:45 PM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Anyway, there is a blog post if you want to see me in all my 1987ish.

oh my god you adorable babies
posted by cortex at 4:46 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've had to move suddenly, with 5 weeks notice, in the winter, in a pandemic. Because my landlord, who lives in a gated community in Palm Beach, decided he had to sell my 1-bedroom apartment in Connecticut RIGHT NOW, rather than in 3 months when the lease is up. I've been moving for the past 4 weeks and am in the home stretch (pardon the pun) and I gotta tell ya, this is the longest February I can remember in ever. During one of the moments when I wasn't curled up on the floor with anxiety and nausea about the additional $700 per month that I will now be paying, I added up all of the times I have moved since I graduated college in 1989. I came up with 17. I've moved 17 times since I was 22. My average apartment stay is about 5 years.

I decided not to go with "custard's last stand"
The name of an actual ice cream establishment down the (Jersey) shore in Ventnor (near Atlantic City).
Also the name of an ice cream stand I used to go to in Winter Park, FL as a child.
posted by sundrop at 4:47 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I learned to type when I was about 7-8. We had an Apple IIc with Master Type. You were a blocky spaceship in the middle and letters or words coming at each of your 4 sides. If the word hit your, your shield was destroyed. Lose all 4 shields you were dead. There was a hard mode where you had to hit the spacebar after each word.

I use my right thumb almost exclusively on the spacebar. I use my left pinky almost exclusively on shift.

My brothers came over yesterday to start clearing out my dad's stuff. And all the shit my mom saved over the years. Greeting cards. Gift tags from Christmas gifts. Balloons. Banners made with PrintShop. So Much Stuff to Recycle Now.

I also made the cobbler recipe posted on the green. It was delicious. I used some peaches I froze last summer. Also, my wrists are very weak because trying to pour the butter from a hot iron skillet into the batter was very difficult.
posted by kathrynm at 4:55 PM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

If it were 2008 I would say I should start a blog of people's pictures of their unevenly worn spacebars. Maybe I should just start a twitter thread.
posted by cortex at 5:06 PM on February 21, 2022

I am an Old, so learned to type in summer school, between 9th and 10th grade - on a manual typewriter. Because of that, I’m a heavy pounder on the keyboard. All the younger people in my office typed so quietly, I could tell they’d grown up with electronic keyboards.
posted by dbmcd at 5:32 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

i too, mechanical typewriter (and piano with funny action): very heavy typist. 'specially when i really get going at the speed of rant.
posted by 20 year lurk at 5:36 PM on February 21, 2022

That prom pic is magic! Art is a hard job.
Haiku
Concentric circles
Where a mosquito quivers,
The bright koi rises.

(I finally got up to 71 WPM typing my masters. Procrastination is a great type instructor.)
posted by Oyéah at 5:39 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Or have you had a long creative drought and then gotten back into the groove? What happened?

I had a couple droughts that might have actually been presbyopia (old eyes get stiff). Fine handwork but also programming- I didn’t realize how poorly I was focusing on the screen because I could read prose, but apparently languages with less redundancy were just that much harder.

When they come back it’s nice, especially getting lost in them. I got slightly worse at everything though. Phooey.
posted by clew at 5:43 PM on February 21, 2022

When I took typing it had just been renamed Keyboarding. None of us called it that without an eyeroll.
posted by jocelmeow at 6:14 PM on February 21, 2022

It seems utterly bizarre now to recall that I went off to college with an electric typewriter.
posted by scratch at 6:18 PM on February 21, 2022

No more bizarre than how excited i was to buy my first electric typewriter that had a one-line memory and a 16-character screen!
posted by dg at 7:16 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I never could figure out how people managed to type on manual typewriters. Doing the carriage return by yourself was fine, but holy crap all the ones I used required a ridiculous amount of force to press the keys.

It was nice not to have the constant hum of motor in the pre-1980s electrics, but ow my fingers and wrists. The Panasonic daisy wheel job my dad got a couple of years before finally buying an AT clone was soooo much nicer. Not only did it have the correction tape, it had a single line buffer like dg was talking about! I think it even had macros and some other nifty features, but I was too young to care that much.
posted by wierdo at 7:48 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I learned to type in high school.
Our typing teacher was Miss Pool, a young, small, fierce woman with short, dyed-red hair. Miss Pool was the self appointed uniform police. She used to pull on girls' eyelashes to see if they were wearing mascara, usually resulting in pulling out some of the lashes.
We had this sort of dance with her, to demonstrate uniform compliance: lift hands palm forward to demonstrate that your nails aren't long enough to show over the your finger tips. Kneel on the floor to demonstrate that your skirt is just the right length. (Not a problem as you can always roll it up at the waist the minute her back is turned, shorter always being better)
She used to march up and down between our desks and rap us on the hands with a ruler, can't remember why.
I was always on a manual typewriter as only the girls who were the fastest at typing got to use the electric typewriters, which created a sort of self perpetuating speed hierarchy in the class because it's so difficult to type fast on a manual.
One of my favourite things about that class was when we did the music exercises. Miss Pool put on a record of marching band music, and we all had to type in time. An entire classroom of manual typewriters in sync with music.
CRASH CRASH CRASH THUMPA (Spacebar) CRASH CRASH THUMPA PING KADJOOM (carriage return) while Miss Pool marched up and down with her ruler.
Also, I loved standing in the corridor outside the classroom, all those typewriters together sounded like the roar of a waterfall.
Writing this reminds me of all the ways I used to dodge the school uniform code. Wearing black tights instead of navy, and certainly not the shade of off-navy the rich girls used to wear (only available at Stuttafords).
Stapling the hem of my skirt instead of sewing it. Allowing the lining of my blaser (which was bright purple for some reason) to rip into shreds which would waft pleasantly if I let my blaser flap open. Replacing the laces in my shoes with a big keyring.
Wearing a silver chain and crucifix under my shirt even though jewellery was not allowed, because I was a Goth atheist. They did not make me take that crucifix off, mistaking me for a Christian.
(I knew I was an atheist. I only figured out I was a Goth in retrospect.)
posted by Zumbador at 8:00 PM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

OK, fine. My typing story.

One Christmas, my parents asked me what I wanted from "Santa". I was twelve and a little old for this Santa BS but OK. I said I wanted a typewriter. There was an inexpensive Royal portable on sale at a nearby store, and I thought it would be great. My folks tried to talk me out of it, asking me if there wasn't something else I wanted. But I persisted and said that this cheap typewriter was what I really wanted.

So, come Christmas, I unwrapped my gift, a $20 typewriter. Hooray!

My brothers, however, received motorcycles. Like, expensive motorcycles. While my parents made me feel like shit for asking for a typewriter.

The thing is: both of the motorcycles were sold for parts within in few months. My typewriter, however, sustained me through college and into my first job.

I'm not bitter about this. No. No. Not really. Yes, a bit.
posted by SPrintF at 2:16 AM on February 22, 2022 [10 favorites]

SPrintF: when my brother graduated high school, he asked for help joining his friends on a vacation in St. Maarten, and that was his graduation present. ....When I graduated high school, I got a camera.

No clear memories here of my typing classes in high school - but I was still playing piano at the time, and I think that ultimately helped with my finger flexibility so I picked typing up pretty quick. Then years of secretarial work followed; the last time I was tested for typing speed it was at 120 wpm.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:56 AM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Have you ever just said forget it, I'm obviously not going to be a creative person ever again, and gotten rid of all your stuff? Did you later regret it?

One reason I found KonMari so helpful is that it helped me untangle identity from things. What helped the most with forgiving myself for wasting money and time on projects that would never be finished is the idea that some things came into my life to be half-finished. It served a purpose in a certain moment in time, but that doesn’t mean I need to hold on to that half-finished sock forever.

I used to feel bad that my life was a graveyard of abandoned hobbies and now I don’t. I got rid of all my yarn when I moved, no regrets, and even though I haven’t touched knitting needles since March 2020, I think I may try a sock again, maybe? Deciding not to do something for a while doesn’t necessarily mean stopping forever.

One the subject of typing… I’m much, much slower than other people my age because I played FreeCell while everyone else apparently spent their time in the computer lab playing the typing game. If I still had FreeCell, I’d still be playing it.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:18 AM on February 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

I took typing in Ontario in 1986 which I suspect is right around the time it became "keyboarding I" although we still did a lot of old school exercises like preparing invoices and reports with tables of columns of aligned numbers. Half the semester we used OOOOOOLD mechanical machines, but halfway through the school took a shipment of shiny new olivetti electrics so I got to do both. They had memory functions and an autocenter function that of course we were forbidden to fool with and of course we fooled with endlessly. The teacher (terrifyingly named miss mcilwraith, and about 80 years old) would listen for print speed that was simply a bit too fast and run up and down asking who was using memory. Eventually she would just randomly stab the memory dump key and if it spat anything out we'd get thrown out of class...which among other things meant I had to work out how to clear the memory from the last class.

The last time i tested myself I type between 60-70 wpm. I *THINK* I use both thumbs to hit the spacebar although heavily favour the right. i also learned a while back when using someone else's split ergo keyboard that I always cheat over the centreline with my left hand to hit the letter "y".

When I was in grad school there was a conference app that needed to be typewritten and word got around that I knew how to load the old selectric in the printer room; I eventually unplugged it and took it into my lab so i could load paper for people without being too badly interrupted.

AAAAaaaand because I know this is not just meant to be a typing thread: once upon a time a fake doctor in kansas made a boodle of dough by inserting pieces of goat testicle into human scrotums to "restore virility". Somebody wrote a book about it. Someone else made a documentary about it. They are both great and you should seek them out.
posted by hearthpig at 5:29 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I learned to type in 9th grade on an IBM Selectric II from Ms. B***** whose "a, a, a, space; semi, semi, semi, space" still echoes in my mind.

I have been known to type nearly 100 wpm though so I cannot be too mad.

I went to a party on Friday night featuring showtunes at the piano, pink wigs, and (a reasonable number of) beautiful people, and it felt like Before Times. So lovely.
posted by wellred at 6:23 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here out of nowhere (except for the HL3 reference in the title) to make a bold claim of support for new indie games that are not centered on hyperactive violence. Games like Sable and Spiritfarer are amazing works of art that place the alpha gamer in a world where empathy, trauma resolution, and active listening (even meditation!) solve quests faster than HK pistols and machine guns.

Not only that, but both Sable and Spiritfareer are absolutely gorgeous to look at and listen to - both are done in a lush animated style with soothing, deep electronic/acoustic soundtracks to explore their open worlds with.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 8:59 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

At some point my dad brought home an IBM Selectric II from his office to replace the family's old Smith-Corona, and on the very rare occasions I needed to type anything on it my sister would yell at me for typing with such force that I bottomed out the keys. Thus well before I could actually touch type I learned how to press the keys just hard enough to actuate the switches.

In non-typing news, today is my regular allergy shot day and I usually ride my bike but I've got vertigo so I'll be taking transit and hoping the platform doesn't spin too much when I switch trains. At least my vertigo is never as bad as my dad's, whose BPPV was only diagnosed after he fell out of a chair and started vomiting. I have to assume he already had symptoms like mine at my age but he was such a stoic that nobody knew.
posted by fedward at 9:16 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

My dad brought home his first work computer in 1995- I was 6, Sailor Moon had just premiered in Canada, and we had THE INTERNET. It was terrible internet, and it was easier to use a text-only broswer in order to avoid spending ten minutes waiting for a .jpeg to load but it meant I was a proficient hunt-and-peck keyboard user by 7. I got an old Commodore 64 from a neighbor the next year, and spent hours and hours and hours on it. By the time my school introduced typing in 2000, I was averaging 140 WPM because I Had To Know So Many Things. In order to pass the class, I had to learn how to use the home row and the space bar properly, which my still-small hands struggled with until recently. Goodbye, hunt-and-peck typing, hello slower WPM.

Speaking of typing- I've used a gaming! keyboard and mouse since college and thanks to a Metafilter post two? years ago about how women often struggle with tools built for cismen, I looked at my set up with new eyes. I now use a super cheap, tiny mouse from Target at work which is perfect for my hand size, and stick to the small laptop keyboard instead of plugging in a full size one. My home set up has a 60% keyboard and the smallest gaming mouse I could. Putting the new and the old side by side was very enlightening, and in the two years I've had them my carpal tunnel has all but disappeared. I'd been using what I thought was an ergonomic set up, but surprise! Not for me. I'm still hunting for a smaller xbox or playstation controller.

My first job, in the year of our lord two thousand and seven, still used typewriters on a daily basis for various tasks like filing, pay checks, etc. Totally blew my mind.
posted by Torosaurus at 10:29 AM on February 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Thank you to everyone so generously sharing their wisdom on creativity. Using your advice, I culled half of the fabric and have resolved to liberate all of the yarn. I realized that my plans for projects with these materials were all hatched during a difficult period in my life so they are heavy with emotional weight and I’ll be happier if I just let this particular stuff go. The more I think about it, the righter it feels.
posted by HotToddy at 10:33 AM on February 22, 2022 [11 favorites]

Oh, prom dates.... Senior year physics class and a giggle of girls asks "you're not going to the prom are you?". Nope. "you don't have a girlfriend or anything?". Nope. Hushed whisphers. "you and you are going to the prom." There's a girl in the giggle without a prom date and in that southern Appalachian town a girl doesn't miss her senior prom experience like that. So I made a bit of a snarky remark that my previous girlfriends had beat me up and dragged me off. So the girl waltzes over and punches me in the gut rather hard. OK, we're dating for the next couple months and going to the prom. She's promzilla, her show. So we do. But the worst part is that it took me like three days to realize that she was the older sister of this other girl that I had double dated with my friend and his date only once.... We ended up parking at a park (natch) and my friend and his date went out to sit on a picnic table to talk and left me and date in the back seat. We went from zero to frisky in sixty seconds. When friend and his date came back they were shocked I tell you shocked.

Twenty and a few years later the three of us are having brunch at a Cracker Barrel because we're all back in town at the same time. I explain the reason why of the backseat date (my second girlfriend the previous summer, long story) and not doing that again, and the OMG of prom with older sister thing. My prom date says "you should have tried, you'd probably have gotten lucky." Then I remember that at the end of prom night when I was taking her home nobody was there and she'd locked herself out so I naturally broke into her house to let her in, then left.

On my list of things to do if/when I ever make it back home for a visit is to get a good phone scan of our prom photo.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:38 PM on February 22, 2022

When I graduated from high school my dad said he'd give me a car. Being a tree hugging hippie, I requested a 10 speed bicycle. I rode it with abandon. In the fall I went away to Austin for college. My shiny was stolen 3 days later. So, I retrieved my 40lb childhood Huffy to ride at school. It didn't get stolen until my last semester. Years later I rode a 25lb recumbent and carried a 20lb set of chains to lock it up. Now I ride a 4 wheel wheelchair. So far, no theft attempts.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 12:55 PM on February 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oh, are we on prom stories now?....

I blew off my junior prom because a) single and b) shy. But my BFF convinced me to go to the senior prom, even if I was going stag; one of our other friends and her boyfriend wanted to rent a limo, but only had a scant amount of money, so they were trying to round up singletons to share the expenses. So it would be me, my BFF, the happy couple, one other girl, and a freshman boy who was the friend of a friend or something.

My BFF even made the following suggestion to sweeten the deal:

* the mother of the girl in the happy couple was making her a new prom dress, so she would be loaning her junior prom dress to the other girl.
* The other girl would therefore loan her junior year prom dress to my BFF.
* This meant my BFF could loan me her own junior year prom dress.

After an emergency visit to her place to try on said dress, I said yes - it fit me perfectly, the color suited me fine, and I could even go without the crinoline she'd used so it would look a little different. So I was all in - I just needed to by the prom ticket and a corsage for myself, and I was sorted.

I got a little caught up in the John-Hughes-movie fantasizing of it all by the time prom night rolled around. But the first couple hours kind of killed that off....

* The "limo" we'd ordered was just a guy in a bigger-than-usual sedan, as opposed to the stretch limo thing I'd envisioned.

* Our prom was in a convention room at the Hartford Hilton Hotel, which was decorated to look like....the convention room at the Hartford Hilton Hotel.

* The dinner they made for us had clearly been previously frozen, because some of my own food was still frozen in the middle.

* My BFF had had dental surgery; she'd known ahead of time and reached out to someone to get her a chocolate milkshake instead, but when we got there the kitchen was totally ignorant and was also out of chocolate ice cream so they gave her vanilla instead.

* At one point I decided I was going to try flirting with the German exchange student I'd been sharing a Spanish class with, but when I went over and said "Hiiiiii, Ingu" in as sex-kittenish a voice I could manage, he simply nodded a hello and then helped a very pretty girl into a seat next to him, kissing her cheek as he did. I just turned around and walked away as casually as I could.

* My period started somewhere during the second hour there, and the only vending machine they had in the bathroom there sold condoms. Fortunately I was rescued by someone's prom date who walked in and saw me standing before it in shock, and opened her purse and said "oh, you need something? Here," and handed me a tampon. I didn't recognize her from school, she may actually have been an angel who manifested for me in that moment.

....Basically the John-Hughes-fantasy of the perfect prom was getting dismantled and knocked down for me at every point, until about halfway through when me and my BFF were sitting in the hotel lobby and playing Name That Tune with the Muzak. After a few minutes of that, I turned to her and said "Sue, this sucks."

She turned to me with her wired-shut jaw and answered, "'Esh, ih oesh."

We collapsed into helpless and hysterical giggles, and then decided fuck it, we were going to make our own fun and started following our friends around with cameras, taking blackmail photos (one of my favorite photos of my other BFF from that night is of her dancing with her then-boyfriend, looking over his shoulder at us and sticking out her tongue). BFF and I found the other single girl and the freshman boy in the crowd and tried to get the photographer to take a photo of all four of us, with the boy sitting on the wicker chair they'd gotten as a prop and the three girls all posed around him like Charlie's Angels. They kicked us out, and then each of us took turn dancing with the freshman boy because why not. Basically we were all causing low-key mayhem for the rest of the night until the final dance, when all four of us threw arms around each other and tried to waltz to "Stairway to Heaven".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:06 PM on February 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

My school didn't have junior and senior proms, just a prom. My date and I and I think two other couples first went bowling in our prom finery before showing up at the dance. She and I are still friends today.

My only other prom story is that my current band's first gig in 2009 was, in fact, a junior prom for an all-boys boarding school and a neighboring all-girls school. Suffice it to say, the crowd was much less familiar with our repertoire than we had anticipated, but the chaperones dug us. We've since played at least one wedding gig for students who saw us that night.
posted by emelenjr at 1:53 PM on February 22, 2022

I'm not sure what stage this is on the Becoming Very Old chart, but right this minute, I am very excited about robusto cheese, which is a thing I previously did not know about. It's a combination of parmesan and gouda and it's got some of the nutty, salty flavor of a Parmesan with the butterscotch flavors of an aged Gouda.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:09 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Last year my wife picked up a cheap and not particularly great film scanner so her sister could scan in some of her family's old slides and film. In the interest of learning how it worked so I could provide tech support and a knowing shoulder to cry on because I expected it wouldn't be very good, I dug out all my old black and white negatives from high school and scanned all of them to put up on the internet.

I sort of did it on a lark - I had a ton of negatives I'd never printed and my darkroom style at the time could best be described as "haphazard", but there were a lot of fairly salvageable pictures from all the drama productions I was crew for and a bunch of pictures from the junior prom afterparty I went to with my girlfriend at the time. Absolutely nothing from prom itself for whatever reasons, just a bunch of kids hanging around the local mall's food court before everybody bailed out for wherever they went that night.

So I scanned them, gave them all just the slightest pass to try and make them as consistent as modern photo editing could, and uploaded them to flickr before dropping a link in the facebook group for that class.

You wouldn't imagine how many people were surprised that I still had so many pictures from back then (like what, you people throw away pictures after a while?!?), but it was kind of fun for a week or two as people got word about them on the grapevine and joined the group to comment.

(And no, the scanner wasn't very good. I mean, it was good enough for the negatives, but if they were in any better shape, I'm pretty sure the scanner would have been letting the images down instead of it being a horse race for last.)
posted by Kyol at 2:47 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Prom stories? Why not. It'll make me feel less crap.

I only went to my senior prom because I wasn't able to go as a plus-one the year before, due to a humiliating breakup. So I thought that if I didn't go to prom at least once, everyone would talk and I would somehow lose at high school. I was the kind of teen who was the center of the known universe.

As such, I was a theater kid, and I asked a drama teacher to let me borrow a dress from the props closet. It was an Edwardian two-piece with leg-of-mutton sleeves on the jacket, in solid green lamé. I fixed up some of its problems, and together with a puffy shirt of my own, it was lovely, and as a fashion joke, reasonably funny. The thing about costumes, though, is that they're not meant to be worn offstage. And the thing about my sewing is that it's terrible.

They bused us to the prom location, and as soon as I shifted to get out of my seat, the jacket ripped open at the closures. I couldn't have fixed it, even if I'd had a sewing kit, because the fabric had simply come apart. I was still decent, but the effect was ruined. I sulked all night, holding it closed with my arm, until a chaperone came and chatted to me for a while. She was really kind, and I hope I was as appreciative as I am now for her attention to an obvious nerd.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:15 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Prom story: somehow, I completely blanked on how to eat a baked potato at the prom dinner (n.b. I was perfectly sober) I found myself contemplating the potato on my plate with a rising degree of panic, looking at my cutlery like a visitor from a distant planet. I think I had to actually ask someone what to do. It's even more odd in that potatoes are not something that's counter-intuitive or complicated to eat (like, say, lobster) and I had certainly consumed plenty of potatoes without incident up to that point in my life. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful evening. I later learned that my prom date went from being a vaguely Jesus-y late era Phil Collins enthusiast (we were not a couple) to a dyed hair punk rocker in college, which was kind of funny.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:32 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Our prom was in a convention room at the Hartford Hilton Hotel, which was decorated to look like....the convention room at the Hartford Hilton Hotel.

If it helps, Empress, your prom took place in the cover art of one of the best albums of the 1990s.
posted by gauche at 4:34 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

I just spent 45 minutes going down a math rabbit hole, convinced that my job wasn't giving me enough vacation time or they weren't adding it on to all the paychecks they were supposed to. Turns out I legitimately earn a lot less of it than I thought I did and I feel SO FUCKING STOOPID. There's no way I can be kind to myself on this, I'm just STOOPID. I just canceled a bunch of vacation days I had scheduled so I wouldn't top out because I am not even close to topping out any more and why waste the days to sit around doing nothing. And I note that they just raised my vacation time...by 2 more hours a month. Why did I think my dumb dyscalculic ass could argue with a computer. At least I figured this out before I sent the complaint email and made myself look even dumber, so there's that, I guess.

My prom story: I off and on dated the guy I went to 3 proms with. Junior year he more or less volunteered to go with me--he was a guy I knew in a club and he went to a lot of people's proms--he said yes after I asked and then said "you know I have a girlfriend, right?" Hm, nope, but I assumed she didn't care and I didn't hear anything about the girlfriend again until it was time for his senior prom, by which point they had broken up and apparently she was quite pissy about it. I don't know what went on there and I never knew her anyway, but apparently he asked me because I wasn't afraid of her. After THAT we got interested in each other, but he was going off to college, so it ended up being off-and-on and not much went "on," though I did take him to my senior prom and the "on" went on again for awhile.

Things more or less drifted off due to college, of course, as these things do, but at least I managed to get dates a few times in my life. He also taught me how to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue, which has continued to be a vaguely useful party trick over the years.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:44 PM on February 22, 2022

I'm late to this party, but I'm ambidextrous although my handedness has solidified as I got older. I eat left-handed but throw right-handed. I write left-handed but mouse right-handed. ...And on and on. I somewhat randomly decided what hand would be performing a task out of a mix of stubbornness and accepting the mores. At this late stage in my life my handedness is set (albeit random) and I often have to do the 'left makes an L' hand gesture because I still do not know left from right. When I was younger and in formation I would clench my left or right hand in preparation to face: there's a split second between commanding "left" or "right" and "face" that gives you a chance to get it right. Otherwise, demerits. Lots and lots of demerits.
posted by jwest at 6:09 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Finally remembered to check, and apparently 55 years later I still use both thumbs for the space bar equally.

I’m doing a sort of February NaNoWriMo with a novel I didn’t actually intend to write. I’m up to 42,000 words. As usual with first drafts, I try not to look at it too closely so I won’t start tinkering.

I think I’ve convinced my spouse with stage 4 cancer that he can’t live on Ensure Plus alone because it is causing him stomach problems.
posted by Peach at 7:18 PM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Do people know what I mean when I mention needle ice?

It's one of several interesting wintertime ice and frost phenomena that are relatively common here in Southeast Alaska and every year I fail utterly when I try to take a photograph showing a large area of the delicate ice crystals that, under certain conditions, get extruded from freezing ground or wood. Today I didn't even bother trying to take a larger shot but these snapshots from my phone will at least illustrate the scale..
posted by Nerd of the North at 8:31 PM on February 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

My SO tells me that she gets needle ice from our freezer on the regular when she sticks a cup of water in there to freeze. I only saw it once, though.

At the last place, the freezer's trick was a very long window to get supercooled water. One time it froze on the way down my SO's throat. After that I was a lot more persistent at making sure it had been vigorously shaken before handing it to her.
posted by wierdo at 1:30 AM on February 23, 2022

This is a tiny bit of a vent, a tiny bit of sour grapes and a tiny bit of a "this was the right thing to do, right?" reality check:

So for a while I was in a private "Hygge life" group on Facebook. I liked the tighter-than-usual moderation: everyone had to play nice, everyone should be supportive. It was 99.9% pictures of kids and puppies and tea and books and pretty views out windows. Every so often someone would timidly ask how to redecorate a living room to "make it more hygge" and there would be some advice, and every once in a great while someone would post some idyllic farm scene and ask "why did we move away from this" and there would be gentle pushback about how farm life wasn't all idyllic anyway.

But then THIS morning, there was a post about "Detox teas for a flat belly" with the note that "since we're all drinking tea anyway..." I rolled my eyes a bit - then saw that it was THE ADMIN OF THE GROUP who posted it. I left a polite, but stern comment: "I was surprised to see this, but even more surprised to see who posted it. I've been enjoying this group, but now I'm wondering if the whole thing was a ruse designed to sell us things."

And I appear to have been kicked out of the group, mere minutes after having posted it.

Honestly the "hygge" flogging was starting to get a bit old - it was pretty, and looking at pretty pictures of things was cozy in winter and all, but it's not anything I'll miss all that much.

But that was scammy on the admin's part, yeah?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:02 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Detox anything is scammy, with a few rare exceptions that would involve you already being in a hospital.

On a completely different note, is it normal to be annoyed after buying things? at&t is rendering my phone useless shortly so I bought a new one, but for the first time in my life I'm not the least bit interested. Maybe it's just the lack of a headphone jack, maybe it's being forced, or maybe it's that I still actively like my 3.5 year old Nokia 7 plus, but either way it's eating at me. Do not like.

Funny thing is that I used to love getting new phones. Grumble.
posted by wierdo at 7:19 AM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had someone to come and do some cleaning/ decluttering, but then I asked about vaccination, and, No, you can't come to my house unvaxxed. Really bummed about this.

In my high school, if you were in college prep, it was assumed you wouldn't need to type. It has hampered me in many ways, but I never stick with practicing.
posted by theora55 at 10:13 AM on February 23, 2022

EC, solidarity. I got kicked out of a FB gardening group this week for (politely) pushing back against some anti-vax promotion (like, actual fundraising) from the admin that came straight out of the blue. I had a momentary WTactualF reaction, and then realized I'm better off. Not my tribe.
posted by vers at 10:47 AM on February 23, 2022

EmpressCallipygos, that is absolutely scammy and you're better off without people like that in your life.
posted by dg at 12:26 PM on February 23, 2022

Honestly the only thing I regret about being booted from that "Hygge" group was I didn't get the chance to see how many other people said "hold up, why is the admin posting ads in here now".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:51 PM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

You probably wouldn't have gotten to see it because the admit probably booted them out ASAP too!
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:11 PM on February 23, 2022

Yes, hearing anything "detox" in the popular culture is a sure sign of a scam. Also, "superfood." You did good EC.
posted by JHarris at 5:42 PM on February 23, 2022

I've been wondering how to do this, and I think a free thread might be the perfect place to ask--

Do you remember any old, Web 1.0 websites that are still going and good? If so, I want to hear them, I'm building an Old Web megapost. My cutoff year of creation is 2005, although exceptions can be made. Just random sites aren't notable enough, but good sites that are still up but not updated, and only available via Wayback Machine, may be good. I'm still thinking about scope and how much information to provide on each link. You could MeMail if you don't want to clutter this thread with them.
posted by JHarris at 5:45 PM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

oh man, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy baybeee
posted by cortex at 6:03 PM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Universe of Discourse : Another test for divisibility by 7, blog, a bit mathy sometimes, rather diverse topics otherwise. Pretty much bog standard web 1.0 (probably still using the same setup since 2005). Lots of random interesting stuff.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:48 PM on February 23, 2022

Thanks! I will add them to the pile. Looks like Bad Astronomy started in 1996 and stopped updating in 2006, although its copyright is 2008. (That is okay for the still-alive list.) Universe of Discourse's first Wayback entry is 2005, Wayback's first snapshot is what I usually date by if other information is unavailable.
posted by JHarris at 10:07 PM on February 23, 2022

Wiby is a search engine that only indexes Web 1.0 or “smol web” pages.
posted by Monochrome at 9:03 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

404 Page Found is a blog showcasing various Web 1.0 sites. The blog itself stopped being updated a few years ago.
posted by Monochrome at 9:13 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey, can I ask a dumb question that doesn't possibly seem worthy of an actual post? Why can't "the kids these days" Google search? I'm serious. I just got out of a meeting where they are seriously discussing getting a chatbot for "first line questions," i.e. one-off easily answered questions that could really be answered by just typing "how do I do x" into Google, because we get clogged email boxes just with "how do I do X" and that's IT. Like, you could have solved your own problem in ten seconds instead of waiting for days or weeks for an actual human to find your special email in the pile and literally copy and paste a link in. But young adults are just...not doing that. Why?
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:44 AM on February 24, 2022

I guess I would say that in my life experience outside of e.g. MetaFilter people and my various Very Online friends, I don't feel like not-young adults have every been very good about that either. People have been asking first, searching second for fuckin' ever, basically, and doing otherwise mostly feels like the exception rather than the norm outside of very specialty contexts.

Doesn't help that Google kind of sucks shit for a lot of queries compared to how it was ten or fifteen years ago, but my gut feeling is that's secondary.
posted by cortex at 9:47 AM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I agree with cortex. I've been in IT for...er, well, let's say "at least 2 decades"...and have found that many (if not most) people, period, aren't good at searching and just want someone to hold their hand and provide an answer. And in the majority of those cases, telling them to 'just search Google for "X"' is fruitless.

When I first started in IT in...er, well, let's say "pre-2000"...I was part of a team that was replacing a bunch of electric/electronic typewriters with a company-wide minicomputer based "office automation" system (imagine a proto-equivalent of MS Office). At the time I saw what appeared to be an age-related divide in how employees greeted the new system - people under 30-35 or so were generally positive and excited about it, people over that age generally didn't like it from the get-go. But since then I've found that the ratio of tech-savvy to tech-ignorant people has stayed roughly constant, with no relation to people's ages. I don't guess that will ever change.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:05 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

My BFF's daughter turns 16 tomorrow, and when I asked how it was going teaching her how to drive, my friend said that she had expressly told her daughter that "me and your dad will NOT teach you, it is your responsibility to look into how to sign up for the driving lessons at school". And she said she did that PRECISELY BECAUSE it would also encourage her daughter to learn how to Google things for her own self as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:11 AM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Sylvan Esso's "Free Love" remains a stunning and wonderful and comforting album, if you need some intimate electronic pop in your ears.
posted by cortex at 1:43 PM on February 24, 2022

My BFF's daughter turns 16 tomorrow, and when I asked how it was going teaching her how to drive, my friend said that she had expressly told her daughter that "me and your dad will NOT teach you, it is your responsibility to look into how to sign up for the driving lessons at school".

That's how my family did it. Except, they didn't tell me to sign up for driving lessons. And my school didn't offer them. And I couldn't afford independent instruction. And so I didn't learn to drive until I was nearly 30.
posted by JHarris at 3:14 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Er, here's a more cheering comment! wilby is pretty neat!
posted by JHarris at 3:15 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

My parents tried to teach me how to drive, after paying for driving lessons. But both them and the teacher screamed at me and scared the shit out of me so bad that I didn't get my license until age 32.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:34 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was lucky enough to not have any real trauma associated with teenage permit-having bits of driving, but I ended up just really not needing a car for a long time and so only got my license at some point around...30? It was pretty much a "this bus ride sucks and we can finally afford a car" situation. I've gotten very comfortable driving in the ensuing decade+ and it's weird to remember having for so long not basically done it at all.
posted by cortex at 3:36 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

(Ah, it's not wilby, it's wiby)
posted by JHarris at 3:46 PM on February 24, 2022

I took driver's ed in high school, but was too young to actually do the road stuff. I had been driving go-karts, cars, trucks, tractors, bulldozers, backhoes, cranes from the time I could reach the pedals. Gramps was an old long-haul trucker way way back. Somewhere I have a picture of him standing on an overturned truck with his hat (natch) and puffing a stogie. He taught me how to backup up using only the side mirrors (got me a point knocked off for not turning around), and how to back up with a trailer (boat). It was so ridiculonculous that I (well, my aunt) had to find and pay a road instructor to get that little piece of paper.

Didn't actually get a car until my father passed away when I was 22. He taught me how to shift left handed when he broke his arm (not sure how he managed by himself).
posted by zengargoyle at 5:45 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Second Gramps story... He used to talk about going up a big hill so slowly that he'd prop the gas pedal down and get out and walk beside to stretch his legs or take a piss. This was probably like 1920s old timey stuff.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:50 PM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Gah, I'll have to pick and choose and do some editing.... I went looking for pictures.... Found a few pictures that my sister sent me. Some are old Gramps pictures from his funeral, y'know the ones we picked out to put on display. It's a woman standing on top of the wrecked truck (Granny maybe), several pictures of them going way back (Granny was cute, lol).

And my prom picture, and one of me as a small boy with the dog. Most if not all were scanned in a hurry.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:16 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the topic of people asking questions when they could easily search... I teach online so I'm constantly having to come up with diplomatic and non patronising ways to phrase "you could Google that" or "the answer is in the notes I just gave you".

Yesterday though, a student asked me the following: "You told us what width and height the image should be, but not whether it should be portrait or landscape."

* face palm *

More seriously, I find that mostly when people ask easily googled questions they are choosing to ask a human over googling because a human can reassure you that you are on the right track, and also provide context and advice you didn't know you should ask for.

It can be frustrating from the answering persons side, but I have to keep remembering that for my students, this is all new to them and pretty intimidating.
posted by Zumbador at 9:28 PM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Do you remember any old, Web 1.0 websites that are still going and good?

I ran across this one in the wild recently while researching kitchen appliances. Since I am considering an induction cooktop it is actually relevant and useful despite looking like a relic of a bygone era.
posted by Nerd of the North at 9:42 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

going up a big hill so slowly that he'd prop the gas pedal down and get out and walk beside to stretch his legs or take a piss. This was probably like 1920s old timey stuff

One of my grandfathers was proud of having driven coast to coast of the US without touching the brakes. Probably 1930s, could have been either a car or a truck.
posted by clew at 9:53 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

... they are choosing to ask a human over googling because a human can reassure you that you are on the right track, and also provide context and advice you didn't know you should ask for.

Wise words, Zumbador, and ones that I find I need to remind myself of more often the longer I've been in this biz. I got into it because I honestly enjoy helping people with tech stuff, but as the years mount up the questions sometimes feel more tiresome and my patience more threadbare.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:30 PM on February 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

I'm with Zumbador and Greg_Ace, we live in an age where it's very easy to deride someone as stupid or silly from an on-the-face reading of a situation, but where there are, sometimes, good reasons. On Twitter, I constantly see people dunk on others, and sometimes it's justified, but sometimes you're not getting necessary context.

And, really, we're all stupid sometimes, myself included, about some things. You can easily decry the darkness, and, truthfully, there's a lot of darkness out there (there's a ton of willful ignorance), but sometimes it's light you aren't able to see.
posted by JHarris at 10:48 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

(Not that there aren't a lot of people who should go to Google first all the same. But maybe they're used to information being handed to them, or they just felt like they should speak up in class, or are worried about misinformation, or....)
posted by JHarris at 10:53 PM on February 24, 2022

So, I went out on the front porch to check on the puppies next door, and because I had heard a strange set of noises. The noises were there and they seemed to be a large man sobbing his head off or some such thing. I am friends with my duplex neighbors, so I text the man to ask if they are at home, no answer. So, I text the wife to see if she is home, she says no, but he is. I ask if he is OK, are they OK? "Why" she asks, and I tell her I am hearing a sound I can't identify, and maybe it has nothing to do with whatever is up over there. She cuts in laughing, she has just called her daughter and she can hear what I can hear, which is her husband wearing a VR visor and boxing in the living room. She says "He is exercising, or exorcising if you prefer." We are laughing because on my end it sounded like vigorous, heartbroken, sobbing, like a heart attack. So I said I would add it to the catalogue of strange, but not dangerous, local sounds.
posted by Oyéah at 11:19 PM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

And, really, we're all stupid sometimes

Not me! I'm smart and perfect, as every single astute flawless comment I've ever made on Metafilter clearly attests.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:50 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

You smelled "ass toot" wrong.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

a human can reassure you that you are on the right track, and also provide context and advice you didn't know you should ask for

And the perfect teaching response recognizes this but gets the asker a little bit further towards being able to work out more of this for themselves. Or even for other people.

Not that most people *want* anything like the Socratic method or Polya's approach when they think they "just want the answer".
posted by clew at 11:42 AM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I try to put "how to work it out for yourself" into StackOverflow answers, and it frequently gets really annoyed responses in the short term, but some of them get liked long past the time I think the answers themselves are useful.
posted by clew at 11:43 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Just a guess, but maybe people browsing old StackOverflow posts are there not to "just get an answer" (those folks are more likely to simply start a new post rather than bother searching for an existing one) but to learn more about the topic, in which case "how to work it out" answers would be instructive and welcome.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:10 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

While we're talking encouraging people to find the answer to things on their own - I recently found myself scrolling through the old thread about Bean Dad and it's....interesting comparing that to this.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:22 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Huh, I wouldn't expect anyone to be browsing SO at all, especially not seven year old answers. I assumed they were actually having the "how do I?" problem and the search function got them there.
posted by clew at 12:42 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

The job I really really wanted got reposted as still available, but now as an on-site position. The recruiter said they're talking with other candidates and will keep me posted as they learn more.

:/

I know considering the state of everything it's not the biggest loss, but I still feel kicked in the gut and fucking terrified of not being able to find suitable work.
posted by Space Kitty at 12:43 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Commiserations, Space Kitty.

If a desirable job opening *exists*, there's a higher chance that there are at least TWO such job openings, and I hope you find the other one and accept it just in time to turn down this one.
posted by clew at 1:01 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Bleah. I am ready for the workday to be over already and I have most of 2.5 hours left to go.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:35 PM on February 25, 2022

I totally get that. Lately our workload has been through the roof, and I'm usually ready for the work week to be over by about mid-morning Monday. :\

Fortunately, after far too many years at my current job (better to suffer the slings and arrows than deal with job hunting as an over-50), my new manager told me today that the company is recognizing that they could put my full skill set to much better use by pulling me out of the customer support ticket queue never-ending firehose to focus on training and documentation. That could happen within a couple weeks; fingers crossed it'll actually come to pass and bring my Sisyphean* torment to an end! Then, assuming it does, I can show them that they need to give me a raise....

*Sisyphus rolled a firehose uphill, right? Or did I mix my metaphors?
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:48 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

That sounds like a freaking miracle and I am so happy for you!
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:41 PM on February 25, 2022

Thanks, it feels like one!
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:03 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Solidarity Greg_Ace! My own promotion became official yesterday (as in, they finally sent me the official letter with the offer that I had to sign to acknowledge and accept it) and hoping that's some sign of a more overall vibe for others.

My birthday was yesterday, and I hadn't made any plans because a) Covid, and b) I'm 52 and not really prone to "yay let's do a big party" any more anyway (I'm more into Mardi Gras than my birthday these days), but my office does these in-house happy hours once a month, and this time they had some kind of cheap karaoke on hand as a thing to do, so I just went to that and listening to two of the engineers yell their way through "I Fought The Law" was just about perfect.

We're back down in a cold snap this weekend, and between that and the kind of thinking-about-your-past you do on your birthday, I've decided to try to make some classic New England-style baked franks-and-beans, and maybe even do the brown bread in a coffee can thing. We had this on occasion when I was growing up, but Mom would reheat stuff from a can, and I'm going to try making it from scratch, thankyouverymuch (or, more like, "thank you Rancho Gordo for sending me the right kind of bean").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:46 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

the imagery of this vid could be divisive in the Ukraine war thread, so I'll just drop it here instead. Best Make Love Fuck War anthem of the millennium so far.

MKLVFKWR

that time Public Enemy and Moby hooked up.
posted by philip-random at 8:28 AM on February 26, 2022

Happy birthday, your highness Callipygos!

Yesterday, I was at a 75th birthday party. There was a dance competition which was won (as predicted) by an 88 year old. There was a lot more than that too, and I left the party at 4 AM, feeling elating. When I woke up at 10 AM, it was spring. I walked the dog in the park, where the ground was covered with all the early spring flowers: snowdrop, erantis and crocus.
posted by mumimor at 2:52 PM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

We have pretty much finished the sets for Urinetown and they are amazing :)
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:21 PM on February 26, 2022

I gather you're practically wetting yourselves with excitement?
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:39 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

We are fortunately OK, but lots of people in our region are in a world of hurt at the moment. Relatively, of course, things are not as bad as other parts of the world right now, but there are lots of people suffering and likely more to come over the next day or so.
posted by dg at 2:53 PM on February 27, 2022

Two posts that are worth rediscovering, but I didn’t bother to post for Doubles Jubilee:

2008: No Man’s Land
Children map the no-go areas that blight their lives.

2007: Forensic Genealogy
with a bit of Sheboygan history provided by the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, they found that the photograph was taken on May 5 or August 10 at 4:52 pm. They narrowed the possible years down to 1867, 1872, 1873, 1878, or 1879.
posted by Monochrome at 4:50 PM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Grand Rapids!
posted by clavdivs at 5:43 PM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Needing to express some frustration apologies in advance.
Why are all my siblings so set on ignoring the plain fact that my father will soon not be able to live alone anymore? To the point of actively arguing against my attempts to set up any damage limitation. We should be helping him to move on to a new stage of his life by believing he's capable of it, not preemptively limiting him because we don't believe he can accept the need to use a walker etc.
He's already fallen more than once and my siblings tell me this is evidence that he's surprisingly resilient because he's not hurt himself seriously yet!
It makes all the not that great things we have to face seem to be * my * idea because I'm the only one discussing those issues with him eg I set up a living will for him, etc.
I mean ultimately that doesn't matter as long as those measures are in place but it kind of sucks.
End Rant.
posted by Zumbador at 8:07 PM on February 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

From what I recall of caregiver support group back in the day, it's almost always only one sibling who ends up doing all or most of the caregiving work. Sounds like they do not want to. And probably won't until forced to.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:34 AM on February 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Since Doubles Jubilee has expired, I will just point out here that there have been a surprisingly large number of songs in Klingon posted here, and perhaps one of them will brighten someone’s day in these dark times. My favorite is still Kiss Me.
posted by mubba at 3:48 PM on March 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey, how about a new Free Thread.
posted by cortex at 8:49 AM on March 3, 2022