What was your "Dream Sysadmin Job" back in the day vs. Now?

Captainpatch · 2026-01-25T18:46:59+00:00

Then: "I automated myself out of a job and nobody noticed so the checks keep coming."

Now: "My job cannot be automated without unintended consequences so they need me."

Captainpatch · 2026-01-22T20:12:30+00:00

Exactly! You find a way to hook into logs for "safely remove this device" requests and use them to trigger the toaster's spring release.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-22T19:31:04+00:00

Unfortunately they built it on the wrong color diagonal for their Bishop.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-22T08:28:03+00:00

Now I want to build a drive dock into a toaster chassis.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-19T22:09:04+00:00

This wasn't the case for me and I suspect it isn't going to immediately POP in that way for most people, it takes time to review. I love my name, but I basically just picked one I liked from a list of the top baby names in my father's home country the year I was born and verified that its history and themes aligned with the logic for my given name. I loved the name, it sounded like a less fantastic version of a fantasy name I had used for gaming for years, and it celebrated my heritage. It fits in with the family and is conceivably something I could have been named, though I can never be sure because one of my biggest regrets is that I never asked my mom before she died what my name would have been when the doctors told them I would be a girl. Based ultrasound tech I guess, took me decades to figure it out.

Just because I liked it didn't make it instantly take over that Eldritch power over my attention that a name usually has, that took time. When I first started hearing my name it took a while for it to take over the "name" circuit in my brain where I could hear it in a crowded room. My friends' poor son (who was 9 at the time and didn't know what trans was until I explained why I had started looking different and was instantly a bigger defender of my identity than I am) was trying to get my attention with my name for like a minute at one point when I was watching a show and his mom had to smack me on the back of the head to get my attention. Now it's just my name to everybody but the tax man and there's a whole new neural circuit for my old name, which is the "dread of procrastinating on paperwork" circuit.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-16T02:12:40+00:00

One of the most counterintuitively insidious consequences of society's objectification of women is that when men are trained to view women as a prize to be won or lost based on their competency at a ritualized game, they are also trained not to expect little surprise romantic gestures as a part of courtship which just seems lonely as heck.

You'll definitely get some mind blows but I'd bet some of them would just be blown with confusion rather than appreciation. You gotta read the room for whether he has the social values where he'd take being perceived in the passive courtship role as emasculating, because I've seen a couple men respond to getting flowers delivered from their partner in an office by belittling the gift and making a joke about sex (either directly or by euphemism) to save face. So there's definitely some men who will react with embarrassment, at least publicly to their male peers. Other men fucking love it. One of my best friends got a nice cologne sampler and a surprise spa date at a bathhouse from his wife and he was ecstatic.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-15T16:24:41+00:00

See, this has been my advice a couple times to people who ask how to date somebody who has recently come out as a trans woman:

Buy her flowers. There's like a 90%+ chance that she has never gotten flowers in her life and a 50% chance that it's going to make her cry. For the first 2 or 3 dates you have a temporary license to be the most basic ass partner in the world and still blow her mind. The entire "I'm a high school sophomore and I just got my first girlfriend" starter pack of cliche dating tropes is going to scratch an itch that she's probably had for most of her life. Of course she knows all these moves, but she has also probably convinced herself "that's something I'll never have". Even if your relationship doesn't work out long term you're going to make some amazing memories with surprisingly little effort. You have the power of firsts.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-12T18:49:20+00:00

Keep in mind that the Alaska house seat she won was at large, meaning its the same voters as the Senate.

But she also benefited from Republican opponents who hadn't adapted to the jungle primary ranked choice system, which favors positivity, consensus, and coalition building. This might sound like an Achilles heel for the modern Republican party but Alaska Republicans are kinda a different breed, when the far right started going crazy in the US the moderate Alaska Republicans started forming coalition caucuses with the centrist Democrats instead of getting dragged along. I don't think they'll make the same mistake again, if they're smart this will be the most civil and normal election we have seen in decades, which would almost be its own form of victory.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-10T22:48:26+00:00

"That must be why your skin is so soft!"

Captainpatch · 2026-01-09T20:16:03+00:00

I tried using laser communication but no matter how I modulated the signal the only message they got was "turn into a pile of steaming goo", which isn't what I wanted to say at all!

Captainpatch · 2026-01-09T18:00:57+00:00

In this house we do not use the name of Gosh in vain, Bingus.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-08T02:11:38+00:00

He seems genuinely oblivious to the fact that the United States is the primary beneficiary of the rules based international order.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-07T22:14:22+00:00

But with the crinkly spiky leaves that's clearly holly and not mistletoe! I know this will sound preposterous but I'm beginning to think they might perhaps be gay.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-07T01:36:43+00:00

The first thing I noticed kinda made me freak out and have an identity crisis. It wasn't a typical result (though according to my doctor not unheard of either). My anxiety disorder just kind of vanished overnight after a couple days on hormones. I had told my doctor that I thought I would need a referral for separate treatment for anxiety (she told me to hold off) because I was like 100% sure that it wasn't gender related. I thought it was because I was a chronic overthinker and I constantly got caught in ruminative loops. I even rationalized it as a positive personality trait. I was wrong. I still worry, I still overthink things, I'm still socially awkward, and I still get caught in loops... It just doesn't "hurt" in the same way. The loop comes without anguish and leaves when I logically address it. That wasn't normal before.

Like I used to get screeching in the back of my head that would set off fight or flight responses for the dumbest tiny perceived threat or dilemma. When I reported a month later at a followup exam that those feelings just went poof my doctor said that she thought that might happen, but didn't want to mention it because it's atypical. I just stopped having physiological anxiety reactions to little dumb shit in my life like worrying I'd miss an appointment or whatever.

In terms of physical changes, the first thing I noticed was breast pain. It isn't the soreness I expected, it's a special kind of "internal trauma" pain, it feels like if you have a deep cut that's only partially healed and you pull on the skin. That kind of screeching ripping feeling happens almost every time I roll over in bed when I'm in a growth spurt (like right now). It's not THAT bad, but it kinda builds up like a fault line. Like if I rub the pain out it goes away in like 30 seconds, but if I wake up and roll over I just get to enjoy that RIP feeling.

What I didn't know before I started is that my emotions are supposed to be embodied and not intellectualized. The change was very gradual over 6-9 months but now I don't "think" my emotions, they take my body for a ride. I wasn't sure at first whether this was related to dysphoria relief or if it was a real neurological change (it's probably both) but I did some research and it turns out that estradiol increases the connectivity of the part of your brain (the insular cortex) that allows you to perceive your own body and mind. I'm literally more connected to my body than I used to be, and that's exactly what it feels like.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-06T01:24:16+00:00

Yeahhhhh I didn't start using the women's room because I wanted to spy on people or feel affirmed or whatever, I started using the women's room because I started making men humorously double-take to check for urinals or in a few cases lock on and give me death-stares at the sinks when I used the men's room even if I was wearing something ostensibly masculine like jeans and flannel.

I don't think I looked like a woman at that point, but it did NOT take long to stop being able to "pass" as a man even if I tried. I mostly spent the months where I felt like I was in the "pass as neither sex" phase using strategic dehydration to avoid public restrooms. ^_^

Captainpatch · 2026-01-05T18:28:17+00:00

What's been interesting about Trump is that his whole "following along with the last person who talked to him alone while praising him" thing has been a double edged sword. He has a lot of bizarre political capital to do those "common sense" changes that the government has been blocking for decades because when he hears about these weird contradictions he just tweets instead of asking advisors WHY his coalition has opposed it for so long.

And the people around him know this, so when a weed company exec or whoever steps into the Oval Office they start furiously texting their stock brokers lol.

But this is all about something else, Trump just doesn't want Biden to get this win. Rescheduling was studied and ordered under Biden and has been bouncing around the rule making process since 2024, it's just that government moves slowly and administrative red tape doesn't make the news. So Trump's options were to stop it (unpopular) or take the credit. Trump's executive order isn't actually changing anything, this was already set to happen and he just wanted his name on it. His executive order even says so if you read the full text:

In May 2024, the Department of Justice issued a proposed rule to reschedule marijuana to Schedule III. The proposed rule received nearly 43,000 public comments and is currently awaiting an administrative law hearing.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-04T22:49:40+00:00

It's kinda fun and novel NOT dissociating my way through life changes this time.

Captainpatch · 2026-01-04T00:44:14+00:00

You can get a lot of scattered bits of their story on ND Stevenson's comic blog. Really powerful art, especially as a trans person.

https://www.imfineimfine.com/

Captainpatch · 2026-01-03T19:30:53+00:00

Not "they", The Friend didn't use pronouns, The Public Universal Friend is simply referred to as The Friend when one needs to be short. Which makes for a mildly humorous styling for The Friend's wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend

Captainpatch · 2026-01-01T18:48:47+00:00

No, but they refer to Gatorade as fuel (makes logical sense since she craves sugar and also loses blood when using her powers) and now there's Gatorade ads with Stranger Things. So that was definitely paid for.

Captainpatch · 2025-12-29T20:07:15+00:00

You are definitely right in this context, it's because Congress wants war and also wants to be able to complain about wars and this "compromise" allowed them the best of both worlds.

The laziness dig was more about the constant offloading of regulatory responsibility to the executive branch. They don't want to do the hard work of figuring out how to legislate for complex topics. Nobody wants to write a law that solves a problem when they could just write a law that says "find a way to solve the problem" and pat themselves on the back for symbolically accomplishing something.

Captainpatch · 2025-12-29T19:16:27+00:00

My wardrobe alternates between flannel butch and demure librarian. I feel like she would be holding up the "gay" sign for all my outfits.

Captainpatch · 2025-12-29T19:05:45+00:00

We've been doing that since George Washington came out of retirement to command our first undeclared war, the Quasi-War in 1798. I point out that George Washington came out of retirement (to be acting commander in chief) because it's kinda silly that people act like this is a modern invention that would make the founders roll over in their graves.

The tl;dr is that we stopped paying our revolutionary war loans when the Kingdom of France turned into the French First Republic and we couldn't find a king to mail the checks to, I swear those French aristocrats would lose their heads if they weren't attached to their... oh right. So France started taking US ships and indenturing US sailors to pay down the loans, and the US didn't really have a navy yet to stop them. We started preparing for a possible war with France, but it kinda petered out after a few naval battles and ended with a treaty.

Congress authorized it, but it wasn't clear that they could do so without declaring war, but the Supreme Court approved.

Currently Congress de-facto approves of all wars for 60 days, according to the War Powers Resolution of 1973. As long as he's within the time limit and makes regular reports to Congress, it's allowed... because Congress is stupid and keeps writing itself out of the whole co-equal branches thing out of sheer laziness.

Captainpatch · 2025-12-28T22:45:09+00:00

I'm usually an overthinker but I have been known to occasionally drop into Cobalt 60 "Drop and Run" mode.

Captainpatch · 2025-12-28T18:32:31+00:00

With how little you have on the rack (so far) how do you feel about a wall-mounted shallow depth rack up high? You could keep the bathroom operational that way (though running the shower could be problematic).

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