See the thing is, there are these alien eggs in a pool in a locked pool house. These old folks break into the pool house and swim with the eggs. Swimming with the eggs make them feel rejuvenated.

The old folks don't think too hard about what the eggs are, why they're there, or why swimming with them feels good. At one point, full of moxie, the old folks try cracking one of the eggs open.

Spoiler alert: it turns out the old folks are stealing life energy from injured aliens inside the eggs. Some of the aliens die. Soon after, the pool is closed permanently and the surviving aliens escape the planet.

This ends up being an unfortunately handy metaphor for all kinds of things, these days.

@catsalad Yeah, kinda like that but with more old people dancing and egg cracking action

I feel like that movie installed a permanent neurosis in 10-year-old me. To this day, I'm often like "hey this is fun" followed by "wait, who am I hurting?"

Between that and the Swamps of Sadness from The NeverEnding Story (1984), my pre-pubescent brain was just chock full of whimsy.

@lordbowlich Oh dang, I forgot about Unico and just read the plot summary on wikipedia. That's rough!

@miskatonicstudio oh, that effect is rad!

Also that thing where I promise something will be done this week, and I don't make any progress for half the week, feeling bad about that.

But, also kind of assuming I'll do that thing again where I suddenly get a week's worth of work done in one day. Yet, also, fearing the times when that doesn't happen.

@Macross Yeah, I kind of personally pessimistically assume that myself. But a lot of folks try scraping, then are surprised when they get yelled at. Sometimes they're too big to care (like OpenAI), but sometimes they're not yet big enough to ignore it @lordbowlich @mfinkle

@Macross My experience of aging has so far mostly been "this shit again? :blobrollingeyes:​" and "huh, that didn't used to make that noise" @lordbowlich @mfinkle

@c0debabe @jbaty my wife got me this “Park Sloper Senior” wallet a few years back, so I always have a pen and a field notes in my pocket.

Only bad thing was when airport security mulled over confiscating my fountain pen on one trip because they didn’t seem to understand what it was? 🙃

http://onestarleathergoods.com/theparksloper

@c0debabe @jbaty also my library card is far less cute 😔

@jbaty Oh yeah, works great for me! The keys are all I need to get into the house and my workshop, so I just carry wallet and phone.

I almost wish I could reduce it to just phone, but I still like paper & pen too much and don't trust IoT door locks at all 😅

@c0debabe

There are a few places I really admire where I think I'd like working - but they don't do remote work and I ain't moving out of this house in this city for any reason short of a natural disaster (especially in this economy), so 🤷‍♂️

(smashing the monkey's paw with a hammer to keep that finger from curling)

Like, "come live in a noisy overpriced closet so we can huff whiteboard markers in a poorly ventilated conference room all day and ✨collaborate✨ and afterward you can stumble back to your 36 inches of open plan workspace and dissociate with your noise cancelling headphones for an hour"

haha no get bent

Was that too specific? It's been awhile since I worked in an office on a daily basis.

I dunno, maybe the marker huffing is what makes the magic happen at some of the places I seem to think I might like

@socketwench oh no, I am so so sorry to hear this. :hug:​

Ughhh, I hate the newer YouTube layout. I feel like I have years of muscle memory trained to scroll down to see the comments (however inadvisedly) and now I stub my brain on other videos I don't want to see

@unaminhkavanagh That Muse poster behind you is neato! Also this reminds me I really need to try Pomodoro again to break up my distraction cycles 😅

It's also annoying because, like, the boxes to view notes on the video or comments on the video are clickable - but the thing doesn't happen there, where you click.

Those boxes don't expand or move or whatever, instead they summon a sidebar over to the right.

And, sometimes, I don't even notice that sidebar because it's so far away from where I clicked. And, because I'm wearing multifocal glasses, that side of my very wide screen is blurry. 👴

But, me being an old man shouting at clouds aside, why is it a good idea to link a user action in one focal area of the page to feedback in a far away region of the page?

@wohali I'll have to check that out... I've mostly ignored alternate frontends and extensions, just because I expect Google will do their level best to break them all

(but then again, they're breaking their own stuff so 🤷‍♂️ )

@JoYo jokes on us, LLMs don't learn anything either

@futurebird I do think perhaps you have a different attitude toward ants than many other folks