funnyletter

Seriously, what am I supposed to mindlessly read during lunch now?

Gonna go against the grain here and say: If you have allergies, get a bagged vacuum.

I have absolutely brutal allergies, live in a carpeted apartment, and have a dog (I'd say mistakes were made but honestly my options were limited except for the dog, who's worth it). Getting a Miele bagged canister vacuum was one of the better decisions I've made. If I vacuum regularly it really cuts down on my allergies compared to when I had a bagless Dyson.

I suspect if you have hard floors and aren't a walking allergy disaster it's much less of a big deal. At some point in the next ~year we're gonna get a house and I'm gonna rip out any carpet in said house, and then I'll probably get one of those cute rechargeable Dysons.

It federates with the servers that have some stuff I want access to on them, and it also has rules against being a huge douche. And it's supported by Jerboa.

That's pretty much it. Mix of convenience and what passes for my moral scruples.

Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer's website and ordered it from them directly.

The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can't even stop using Amazon if I want to!

One time I had a weird skin thing and was trying to look up whether I should be worried about it, and stumbled onto a bunch of shit about Morgellons Disease, in which people think they have fibers or parasites growing out of their skin.

I just had a weird ingrown hair.

I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".

Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.

I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.

I simultaneously miss AmITheAsshole and think that it's almost all either made up for karma farming or people shitposting to make some marginalized group look bad.

Or weird sex stuff. Definitely a lot of it is some person's weird sex thing.

My issue is even if that's true it kind of doesn't matter because it's making the people who are ACTUALLY racist/homophobic/name your bigotry flavor feel comfortable enough to be genuinely horrendous. Fucking with the Overton window like that ain't cool.

Oxford comma or gtfo.

TIL Beeper exists. Now I am on the wait list, and kind of sad I can't prepay for a year to skip the line.

Plus there are ads now that give you plague just by loading them, which is uniquely horrifying to those of us who are informal tech support. D:

Absolutely. Not using adblock is just asking to get malware, on top of ads being wildly obnoxious. And most sites are CRAMMED with ads to the point that they're basically ureadable.

I also subscribe to a lot of patreons and such because I want to support creators. But I'd stop consuming someone's content before I turned off my ad blocker, if they decided that was the hill they wanted to die on.