Gerard’s geriatric generator image format

I hate being at my inlaws’ for an extended period of time (hours). My spouse hates being at my parents’ in the same time period. You can both have totally normal, comfortable nights at your own parents’ place but find the experience entirely foreign and unsettling at the others’. The type of soap, the number of towels, the default amount of noise, the temperature, the forced formal interactions, the TV shows, the time of dinner, the existence of any activity other than your usual quiet night in, everything. Not wanting to be a disturbance in someone else’s place. Being under a foreign set of rules. Just everything.

Do you feel normal sleeping over an aunt/uncle’s place? A friend’s parents’ place? A hotel? A hostel?

I lived WITH my inlaws for a year. Still can’t stand it. Grateful for the financial relief at the time, but still uncomfortable enough to keep me driven to in debt myself with my own place ASAP.

If that’s your takeaway, sure. It’s more about the 1939 invasion of Poland, the French/British declaring war the same year, the 1940 Blitz bombing of England, and 1940 Battle of France.

“America is the best! Nobody could match our manufacturing!”

Well no, you were just the only hevay industrial country that wasn’t bombed in the 40s. America didn’t rocket ahead through the 60s, they just helped kneecap the competition.

And for the god damn 10th time, Mexico and China didn’t take the manufacturing. They didn’t raid the US and deport Ford to them. Ford walked it all over very politely.

Whenever I’ve seen that, it’s usually in response to America taking the credit for saving the war despite “barely being there”. On the other hand, you could say adding the American force weighed the odds into the allies’ favor, so the swift end wouldn’t have happened naturally . On the other foot, America wouldn’t have built up enough arsenal to have that much effect had they not waited. And on your neighbor’s hand, America seemed to sit idly as they watched nazis be nazis because no no, the guy has some valid points

This sounds like a handful of people I know that believe food stamp programs are flawed and destructive to society. They same a handful of routine abusers and applied that as the norm. 9 people used the stamps appropriately and faded into a nonexistent memory, but the one person that returned food for fash and bought cigarettes and lottery tickets each time was the face they remembered

I believe the proper use cases for the candy bar folds are 2 groups: data-dense users that wish Blackberries and Palm Pilots stuck around or, alternatively, people with poor eyesight. I don’t think video consumption is the main use. Maybe Candy Crush XL or something though

Screen protectors are back in demand on these. I recently learned they’re it ended to be a wear item and are factory installed on the Samsung clam

Like the Aztek, I bet it’ll normalize and seem less obnoxious in a few years as the cars become more commonplace and other manufacturers follow the trend.

Yeah, it felt disingenuous as I built out my sample list when I realized my knowledge of supercars drops off around 2010. New corolla, old corolla, let the reader be the judge. Gonna go back and add some camrys.

I suppose I could have also included weights.
25 corolla is around 3000lbs, 2000 around 2400.
05 Murcie is 3600 while a 2018 Huracan is 3100.
Chiron is 4400, veyron is 4200
F40 is 2400, F50 is 2700
Ferr 360 is 3000, while 296 gtb 3200

Lincoln LS. Jaguar S-type chassis under a Lincoln-badged homework-copied E39 body. Not an M5 clone, more like a 540 knockoff. It wasn’t far off when it was introduced in 2000, but it didn’t improve nearly as much as it needed to over its 7 year run to stay competitive. At all. Common sedans were getting comparable in acceleration and luxury was an American translation of a base 3 series, but at least it has a sweet double wishbone suspension front and back. There’s a dozen stylistic differences over the model years and trims you won’t see because it’s not your car and you don’t look at it every day

I also don’t care about the hofmeister kink. It’s here or there. I like the little kick up you can see on the LS or 2010-2014 Mustang. It existed before Hofmeister did it to a BMW and is more of a BMW bro thing to mention than an absolute success in design. Audi doesn’t usually do it, looks just as mean.

Supercars are quite small. They have very low roofs and are often quite wide, so your sense of scale is thrown off.

2025 corolla: 182"L x 70"W x 56"H
2000 corolla: 174" x 67" x 55"
2025 camry: 194 x 72 x 57
2000 camry: 189 x 70 x 55
2004 murcielago: 180" x 80" x 44"
2006 gallardo: 169 x 75 x 46
2018 huracan: 176 x 76 x 46 2024 296 gtb: 180 x 77 x 47
2016 chiron: 179 x 80 x 47
1987 F40: 172 x 78 x 44
1995 F50: 176 x 78 x 44 Even the veyron, a sweaty potato on wheels: 176 x 79 x 47

Totally agree on the perception point. BMW looks nice because it looks like a BMW which is nice. They’ve carried a fairly consistent design language from year to year. Design overhaul in these brands are somewhat rare, but they’ll carry it across the lineup. Look at Jaguar when they phased from 80s drug lord to whatever the XF look is called. (edit: Ian Callum designs?)

The only thing I could say specifically to OP’s observation is it sounds like they’re always picking out the brands with squared bodies and condescending headlights. Mercedes might be pushing it with their jewel eyes, but there’s still a consistent air of importance around the bodies (please don’t mention the CLA). No nonsense, no happy eyes, defined body lines, chrome blended flat into the panels, stout wheels, and sportier rooflines (please don’t mention the 5 series GT).

Taste is subjective. I’m not a fan of how they rounded these out in this generation. I like them more when dressed up with sporty bits to add hard angles into this bloated design. But at least it’s not a Bengal 7? Still has his touch. Peak design was E39 for me. So much so, I own it’s American copycat that’s twice as reliable as an M5. But I’ll stick with the other person’s opinion: needlessly pretentious. You can describe all the lines that make it beautiful to you without being bringing such condescending tone about art degrees or classic BMW snobbery about a single car design being literally genius. You think it’s beautiful because you own it. It’s not the BMW I’d pick. But sure, yours looks better to me than whatever melted wax model they delivered in the latest design era.

Truck exhaust blows away. They can’t see it anymore. Contrails linger for a while. They can see that.

They can see planes. They can’t see inside planes. Therefore, they can imagine anything they want inside because they can’t verify it themselves.

The things they can’t see anymore are gone. The things they can’t see into contain the worst possible scenario.

And that litter box in schools things for the kid identifying as a cat? The story is ALWAYS about someone else’s schools. They can picture a different school. They can imagine the worst scenario in there.

This whole political ideology is an exercise in failed object permanence.

This is, unfortunately, the same observation I’ve made in all the chemtrail-beleiving people I know. I zig in discussion, they zag, I realize they’re taking small-scale cloud seeding operations as proof of both contrails being chemtrails and, often enough, humans fueling hurricanes for the leftist agenda. These people also tend to deny human ability to affect the planet’s climate. The underlying logical interpretation of these states’ bills is exactly why they’re upheld, meanwhile, their constituents are still thinking about contrails.

I can’t tell you which to do. The comments so far seem pretty adamant in saying don’t bring it up. So what I can offer is my experience for having done exactly what you think you want to do. Unfortunately, I don’t have any real feedback from the other side.

I had a girlfriend for most of high school. Things weren’t great, but I didn’t know better. We broke up abruptly somewhat shortly after graduation and I was an asshole without remorse. Both of us dated quickly and ended up marrying our next dates (though several years down the line). A few years after the breakup, I started feeling deeply upset about it probably monthly. I had avoided all the high school group meetups because I felt she was entitled to those friends more. But at that point, I was alone and didn’t have my own friends - just my girlfriend’s. I feel this was part of an overall feeling of failure. Low paying job, untapped career path, living with my parents, college dropout, and alone. I still thought about the high school girlfriend often. Not in a luatful or coveting way, just in a caring way? Is she OK, does she hate me, did I cause long term pain, does her family hate me, etc.

So one day, probably 7 years after the breakup, I messaged her. I said I was sorry for the way I acted and for hurting her. I said I was glad she moved on. It felt long on a phone by FB messenger, but it was probably just 6 sentences.

She said none of what happened mattered. We were kids. We didn’t know better and it wasn’t a serious relationship anyway and that it wasn’t a big deal. She then asked if I was OK. Twice. I think she thought I was at risk of harming myself. That was the end of the conversation.

I imagine appearing out of the blue and going straight to a painful period brought back some pain. It hurt me to hear her say years together weren’t important. I can hypothesize she was lying a little bit, either now to downplay it to me or earlier to herself. I can hypothesize I put depressing thoughts of us into her head for a while. I don’t know what effect I had on her from that moment.

But I stopped thinking about her.

I hate to promote causing your friend pain to release yourself, but I don’t know how else to do it. I can guess that was a symptom of my overall mental health rather than the cause of my pain in that time period. So before you do this to free yourself, I ask, are you feeling OK otherwise? Are you dwelling on other mistakes? Are you content with your trajectory?

My introduction was Xkcd when they hired a mathematician for the weather forecast, then replaced him with a linguist [rollover: and then a software dev]

https://xkcd.com/1985/

You know… I didn’t think about that because I don’t own it and haven’t touched it. Consider the topic fathomed. Seems like some people do just fine without the protector, but I was blinded with our hard glass designs. Thank you

Interesting. I did get some very mild scratches from keys on my pixel 7 early on. I didn’t think harder glass would come with less scratch resistance. Sure you don’t mean greater tensile strength?

I don’t have any stat points left to git gud :( automotive has fallen from beloved hobby to strictly necessity

I swear, most fucked up screens I see are actually temperate glass screen protectors. The cracked protector is proof to them the protector works. I take it as proof a thin piece of glass barely adhered to a flexible chassis is way more prone to failure than the actual screen. I had film protectors until I my pixel 3a. Surprise, screen glass is hard as… Glass.

(edit: see comment below saying it’s a wear item. Unedited comment still here:) I cannot fathom why my coworker continually replaces the soft protector on his Samsung flip due to failure at the hinge. . The folding phone. The one that only ever goes in his phone folded.