Animals go where the food is.
This is why ants invade homes and create nests out in the yard. This is why spiders set up shop inside your home and mice scurry in the corners.
If you don’t want animals like insects and rodents in your house, eliminate all possible sources of food. While some will always work their way in, the lack of food will mean they’ll always die quickly or leave just as fast as they came.
If the chest freezer has the ability to turn off the “frost free” functionality, do it.
Every time you open a freezer, moist air from the outside gets pulled in, and that moisture freezes onto the walls and contents after you close the door. Over time, this leads to a significant build-up of ice that can impede the freezer’s ability to cool and your ability to remove items in there (it starts on the walls, works its way to the centre, engulfing packages it encounters).
That “frost free” feature is the freezer literally letting the interior defrost so that the ice that has built up on the inside walls can sublimate away. Problem is, both ice and food defrosts, which means moisture has the ability to migrate out of the food yet remain trapped in the packaging, “burning” the food and making it inedible by drying it out.
And because water has a high specific heat, this freezer burning process accelerates as the food dries out - food that is meant to be moist but has dried out can freezer burn faster than food that is still moist, because it takes a lot more energy to melt ice than warm up dry foodstuffs.
By turning that feature off, you have to choose one cold day every year (where it is at least -10℃ outside) to empty out the freezer and carefully chip all that ice out (which could be once every several years if you open the freezer only once or twice a month), but the benefit is that any food in there will be good so long as it never defrosts before you use it. You could chuck in a vacuum-sealed hunk of meat, and it could still be edible two decades down the line provided it never had the opportunity to get anywhere close to 0℃.
If there is no option to turn off the frost free functionality, then your best bet is to adopt a tracking system (spreadsheet, app, whatever works for you) that can effectively tell you what’s in the freezer and how long it’s been in there, allowing you to rotate stuff back out of that freezer in time for you to eat it before it becomes freezer burned.
Henry Cavill.
Look at women’s reaction to him, and tell us we’re wrong for wanting to include physical stature into our personal goals.
So okay, maybe a Schwartzenegger physique is too much. IMO, it always was. But Cavill has a moderately achievable physique that brings out the fangirls in droves.
And there are plenty of other swole actors who do the same. Hugh Jackman, for one. Sam Worthington. Vin Diesel. And I could drop hundreds of names, here.
Man you are wound up so tight
And too much of this world is painted with the same fucking brush, when that’s the worst possible thing that can be done.
Too many people taking too many cognitive shortcuts, refusing to dig deeper or acknowledge details and differences or even accept facts and evidence over their pet ideologies because it’s too hard for their pablum-fed goldfish brains to handle.
So I push back. Sometimes a slap in the face wakes people up when nothing else does.
personal insults
Oh, yes. Because criticizing someone’s lack of real-world experience - with context - is so very much like trying to shame a person into silence by attacking their character instead of their argument.
Like, apples and oranges are the same species, no?
Nuance, due. It exists. It’s a real thing.
Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.
Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.
The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.
And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.
They’ve circled so far around they aren’t even on the right anymore.
I’ve seen women in their 30s and 40s engage in it.
It’s not restricted to higher ed or younger ages in the least.
I’m now in my fifth decade, and no longer care to be around that kind of drama anymore, so over the last decade and a bit I have taken pains to distance myself from those social circles that engage in it.
If you get mocked for rejecting a woman, you’re either still in school, or need to get some better friends. Because no sane, rational people would ever think less of you for who you do/don’t date.
Tell me you have never been next to an in-group of women when one of them have been turned down, without saying you have absolutely no clue about inter-female dynamics and discussions.
Like, holy flaming ignorance, Batman. Do you walk through life completely blind? Or have you never just observed women, especially when they don’t know (or don’t care) that another man is within earshot?
Yes, not all women, but holy hell certainly a fair majority of them.
Men reject women all the time, with no societal repercussions.
The only possible conclusion I can draw: you have never rejected a woman, nor seen a woman be rejected and - more importantly - witnessed the aftermath once the woman has returned to her in-group.
In my several decades of being an adult I’ve seen plenty of vicious whisper campaigns that targeted not only the man, but also any other woman he was even mildly friendly towards.
And it’s directly proportional to how high a social status the man has. So maybe you’ve not personally experienced it because you have an extremely low social status? Like, double-wide-trailer low? IDK, I’m just trying to understand how you’re missing trivially-observable real-world evidence.
People change all the time though.
…And? So what?
Actually, let me rephrase that: So fucking what??
Any decision made comes with consequences. The decision to close the metaphorical door to preserve self-respect and mental health comes with consequences. And conversely, passing someone over because you think you can do better also comes with consequences when you discover to have been unable to actually do better.
My problem is the prevailing societal sentiment that only women have the right to say “no”. That only women have the right to close and bolt the relationship door. That men have a duty to accept a woman’s attentions no matter what, and especially if she had rejected him previously. And that he becomes a social pariah, open to mockery and vicious reputational attacks if he says no or keeps that metaphorical door closed himself.
Sorry, that’s not how “equality” works in any way, shape, or form. That’s anti-male gender bigotry, plain and simple. There is just no other way to spin it.
Sometimes I see the gender wars between you two feels like the moden day equivalent of cointelpro.
And some people just read waaaayyyy too much into things. Then there are people like you, who read the entire room wrong.
Asshole behaviour and systemic gender bigotry deserves being called out. That’s all I did. Nothing more. There is only one person who lashed out here, and it wasn’t me.
There was an unspoken rule for Gen-X
I am of that generation… solidly middle GenX.
Where I believe I run afoul of Millenials and Gen-Z is where I remind folks we just didn’t have a lot of girls who were just friends… we considered this a fantasy or just waiting.
While even GenX had its fair share of these, the one thing I have seen in younger generations is an explosive increase in “Beta Orbiters”.
Unfortunately, this behaviour of giving attention, time, and resources - also known as simping - to a woman who has no intention of reciprocating in any fashion whatsoever, is likely screwing with several generations s of men, and is likely fuelling the rise of so-called “Incels”. Especially since the lack of reciprocity and fair play from what they provide is one of the fundamental “violations of trust” that men perceive. These young men need to learn how to shut metaphorical doors and ignore the women who have no interest in reciprocating and who will only string them along as “useful dancing monkeys”.
Incel behavior
Ah, there is that ad hominem I was expecting to crop up at some point, seeking to publicly shame me into silence.
And it’s a perfect example of intellectual bankruptcy, where someone is so bereft of a counterargument that the only tools left to them are those of shaming and ridicule. It’s feelings before facts, of a rage-consumed person so desperately intent on furthering their anti-male gender bigotry simply because that man exercises equal rights.
Because isn’t that what women have been fighting for over the last century? For the ability to say “thanks, but no thanks” and the ability to permanently close a metaphorical relationship door for whatever reason she deems personally appropriate?
Or is it “rights for me, but not for thee”? Is it that men simply do not have the right to say no, and do not have the right to permanently close that metaphorical door?
C’mon, this is the platform where you can let your anti-male gender bigotry shine! Don’t be shy! Be the flaming hypocrite you were meant to be!!
IMO anon’s statement about body count was badly phrased, but it makes sense for me under limited circumstances.
For the last few decades, my opinion has held firm on a simple philosophy:
If I never ask out a woman I’m interested in, and they date guy after guy, then I have nothing to complain about. They never knew about my interest, and so they were never given the chance to accept or reject my interest. There is no way in hell that I could hold their body count against them, and I have only myself to blame for not stepping up and asking them out when I had the chance.
But if I do ask a woman out, and they clearly and immediately reject me in favour of someone else, then I am obviously not an interest for them. They have clearly and unambiguously rejected me, so what standing do I have to not believe that? You can’t get a more sure sign. If they then rack up other relationships, each and every one of those is another nail in the coffin of any potential relationship. They have made an explicit statement that I am of far less desirability than other options, and that door closes permanently, and gets barred and locked for good measure.
Because if she comes sniffing around again, then it is screamingly obvious that I am not her second-best, third-best, or even n^th best option… I am her backup-backup-backup plan that she is “settling for” because all of her better options ran out.
And at that point… thanks but no thanks. That’s a path down which I have absolutely no desire to trod, because down that path lies doubt and second-guessing that can only poison me, my mental health, and my happiness. If she had no interest in me when I asked, then I will absolutely trust her for having told me the complete truth, and I will hold that truth as unchanging, unimpeachable gospel.
Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.
Instead, they played political bullshit, Obama blinked, and as a result, America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.
The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history. Had his position been filled with a left-leaning Justice, especially a young one with many decades of life left, much of America’s Fascist changes could have been opposed.
As it is, the SC has become a rubber stamp for whatever the current Fascist/Authoritarianist regime wants.
I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.
It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.
Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.
The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.
The last free-to-run version of Sketchup is from 2017, and ironically you can download it from the official website, you just have to dig for it. It isn’t immediately available, and they try their best to sell you the latest version.
A rationality check for you, specifically, from a purely biological standpoint:
For a woman, peak fertility occurs between about 16 and 28. After 30, fertility starts dropping more and more rapidly every year, with pregnancies after 35 being classified by the medical system as “geriatric pregnancies” due to their age-related risk.
By the time most women hit 40, they need to put forth up to 30× the effort to become pregnant as they would have when 18, and by 45 most women are considered by the medical system as being functionally sterile.
That’s not to say that women cannot become pregnant after the age of 45, it just becomes highly unlikely without many tens of thousands of dollars of medical assistance.
Natural pregnancies after 45, and without any medical assistance, really only happen to women who have - ironically enough - been pregnant for most of their adult lives, because pregnancy pauses the natural cycle for up to 9 months. This pausing of the ovulation cycle prevents eggs from being expended, and pushes back the decline of fertility by up to as much as a decade if full pregnancies occur often enough. However, since this means carrying a full pregnancy to term each and every year from the teenage years onwards, I seriously doubt that any woman would willingly reach for brood mare status just for a longer fertile window.
So if you have any desire to have a child safely and easily, now would be the time to do so.
Your husband, on the other hand, is likely to continue being fertile until the day he dies. The only risk he faces is a significant rise of mutations in his sperm (starting in his late-40s) that can lead to rates of genetic diseases and birth defects in his children that directly correlates to his age. As in, he ought to be motivated to act soon, as well, but has far less pressure to do so than you do.
Damn, that’s promotional material that SanDisk would probably not want to have.