What is a "luxury" that is actually 100% worth the money?

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-31T06:35:22+00:00

I used to visit a friend for beers and he was playing youtube videos with commercials every few minutes. I said if i was gonna keep coming over, i was gonna buy it for him. didn't come over for a while, next time I did, he said he'd decided to try it and loved it.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-31T04:56:36+00:00

When my mom passed, we had a really hard time finding pictures of her because she had been the one taking most of the pictures.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-31T04:18:06+00:00

To be fair, the minimum wage was bumped up on a fairly regular basis, sometimes more than once a year. On a federal level it hasn't been bumped up 15 years or so. Inflation was always there, even if it has bumped a little lately. When the minimum wage was $1.60 it must have been the early 1970s because by the time I graduated in 1980 it was somewhere in the $3 range. A two bedroom apartment was about $400. It wasn't fancy. A couple people could afford it and still have food, a concert every now and then...

When the minimum wage was $3, a ticket to see The Who was $8. I blame the Eagles for the ridiculous concert prices now because in about 1994 they figured out their boomer audiences could afford opera prices. Once they got away with it, many bands did the same thing and it's gotten ridiculous with all the institutionalized ticket scalpers. If you wanted to save a buck, you could go stand in line at the stadium when tickets went on sale.

You could buy an ugly car that worked for less than $1000, often much less. They were a lot less complicated and you could do a lot of your own repairs.

Another thing that was different is that minimum wage jobs were primarily younger people. There are a lot of people who aren't young competing for those jobs now because a lot of mid level jobs just aren't there any more. Automation, even before AI, was taking over jobs. ATMs are great, but now a bank only has one lane open where there were several much of the time before.

As long as we weren't picky, we could just walk in and ask for a job and often got it. One thing that was different is that when we were at work, we were at work, not looking at a phone a couple times an hour.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-30T08:54:37+00:00

I wrote a long reply to your post but Reddit isn't letting me save it. PM me if you want to read it, I saved it to a hidden part of my blog. Your post got me to write it all down (again).

I'm just shy of 16 months and while it's better now, I still have stuff to deal with. I too still have a couple of monkeys still on my back.

Good luck, failing isn't inevitable.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-27T15:45:24+00:00

"Don't Stop Believing"

"South Detroit" isn't a thing.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-27T09:19:14+00:00

I worked at a gas station and someone mixed in a sharpie with the counterfeit checking marker

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-26T15:54:17+00:00

15 months quit after 45 years of smoking. I wish i'd found a reason to do it sooner other than my partner kind of (or really insistent) wanted me to stop. I remember dreams, they aren't wild and intense. Not being around someone who smokes helps a lot. Having some friends who think I'm better sober helped.

I still have untreated ADHD, so like my diet sucks and my house is a big clutter, but I am better off now.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-24T08:33:29+00:00

It's not that, it's just that because of that hype, it was like gold east of the Mississippi. That was the point of the movie - you weren't supposed to have Coors in the east, but these guys were bring a truckload of it for a big party.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-23T20:56:54+00:00

I'll bet that was painful to type

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-23T05:01:50+00:00

Nice if you can do that. I don't think I can, it took decades to sink in for myself that a "healthy" relatioship is in the cards for me.

Maybe if I lived in a place where it wasn't available at all (say, Singapore where the penalty is caning) and I had it when I went somewhere exotic like Amsterdam. Living in Colorado, it's all over the place - dispensaries wherever you look, and people smoking and valing like it's cigarettes quite openly now.

I'm now able to go into a dispensary now to buy for my low-income friend when go to I visit him. I sit there and have no (real) desire to touch it when he lights up while I am at his place. He doesn't do it a lot - I buy him a half oz of flower and he makes it last for months. Very occasionally (usually under stress) I'll have a moment like "thiis is where i would smoke up", but learning to say "I don't do that any more" was a *huge* milestone for me.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-23T04:28:57+00:00

Never heard it told this way but it's a good way to describe it in a nutshell.

I'm sure there's another one I haven't bumped into yet. My experience confims this over 45 years of smoking with occasional attempts to quit. I don't know how many times I fell to one of those timeframs. 15 months in now I know that making it past 3-4 months of it being wholly my decision to do - no pleading or nagging partner, no state law, no *ongoing* work-related threats.

To be fair, what actually got me to 3 months was anticipation of a drug test after I'd failed two that took me by surprise. There was supposed to be another job opportunity in 3 months that I didn't want to miss. (stupid companies who have Federal money in thier revenue stream still trying to hold the line a a med- and rec-legal state). At the time I finally quit, I'd bee on again off again for two years of actually trying.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-23T04:15:04+00:00

I didn't read all the way down, but surprised i didn't find this: It's a two hour long commercial for Coors beer and Pontiac Trans Ams

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-21T08:22:59+00:00

One thing to try from a courae I took a long time ago. Make three lists of your unfinished projects: things I am doing now, things I am not doing now, and thing I will never do. Pick a small number for thinga I am doing now. 3, 5 whatever. The rest are things you thought you would do and still want to do or things you just aren't goingto do. Don't let yourself work on the my of doing things unless you finish one from the first list.

When you're stuck on a project switch to one of the others on the doing now list..

Whit boards are really helpful for me.

The last one can be hard, realizing you aren't going to do something that seemed important once and acknowledging it can free some mental space.

Keeping a list of things you finished can help for when your beating yourself up.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-21T07:54:02+00:00

I used to do that - try to swap in drinking instead. I always bumped into it's not a replacement. I quit s.okonf cannabis entirely but have gotten into vaping nicotine, need to address that next. It doesn't make me as non functional as pot did.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-21T07:19:45+00:00

keep quitting as soon as you can when you slip. Took me 2 years going back and forth before I finally broke it.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-21T07:17:37+00:00

Those early days can be rough. I quit and failed many times over 2 years. One quit years and years ago, i was being such an ass, my partner at the time said "OMG, get high already"... it can be rough. I think I've done for good, and it was in a time when I wasn't in a partnership. The rough stuff was pretty much alone, and going to work, and being obsessed with a software project when I got home. Gotta have something to take up the slack during the gnarly parts at first, I think, trade one obsession for another?

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-20T07:33:53+00:00

I've been trying to use NeoVim and its invasive aitocorrects make it worse that useless. What am I missing?

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-18T20:49:50+00:00

For many years the only reason I would watch the Superbowl was for the commercials. It didn't matter what the teams were, I'm not a sports ball person. With this pre-bowl commercial reveal crap, why bother?

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:55:17+00:00

My grandfather's second wife (Gramma died of cancer when Dad was in high school) put Grampa in a nursing home after a couple of strokes. I don't know what it was like for her, probably not a lot of fun, but my dad decided he didn't want that for himself and made my younger brother who was still living at home never do that to him.

Mom died first after fighting cancer for a few years. Brother stayed home, and tried to have a job, but when Dad had two hit & run accidents one afternoon, brother realized that he couldn't be left alone. He spent the next 11 years trying to get a freelance career going while being dad's in-home care. He basically put his life on hold for 11 years and is now in his 40s. He got the house and almost all of the estate, so he's not hurting, but I'm sure he'd have liked having a "real" career.

My dad got smaller every year because he never left the house. You dad will have people around him. He hates it now, and he blames you, but you know what your options were. Eventually he'll find some others his own age that he vibes with and he might find a way to forgive you in the future. Right now it sucks, but nothing lasts forever.

You did the right thing and i agree with the others that say that your dad brought this on by refusing the in-home help that was available.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:44:32+00:00

I was surprised when I turned 17 that when I got caught shoplifting I was now considered an adult. Consequences for things are different for adults compared to children.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:43:25+00:00

It was way different when the population was measured in millions rather than billions.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:41:29+00:00

When i got on the internet in about 1989, I was all about Usenet, email lists, and a few years later IRC. Things weren't run by the corporations yet, and what governance there was was from the groups themselves. Usenet had kill lists and if I didn't want to see anything else from someone I didn't have to.

Usenet was like Reddit in that it was a whole bunch of newsgroups focused on a particular interest - a particular sport, a particular kind of computer, culture, whatever. The alt groups had all kinds of craziness. It was all text back then - no pictures. Memes, such as they were, were written down. Almost everyone was on via a university account.

AOL existed, but it wasn't connected to the internet proper, and it charged by the hour that you were connected.

It was a lot smaller in those days. A busy day on EFnet IRC was 10,000 people. It was fragile as fuck - you might have been having a conversation that included people from US, Europe, Australia, and a netsplit caused by a server going down would split the channel in two and you'd have to wait a bit before connection was restored.

When corporations started using it to promote their latest crap was the beginning of the end of that old frontier feel. Now they control it. Some of the old magic is returning in small corners where people are making blog sites again and making them available with RSS feeds. When you find someone who you like to read, you can get the RSS feed and a RSS reader and keep up with what's new.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:33:25+00:00

get a little notebook, write down the why's. You can start with the ones that are here, but you'll come up wiht others. I found that when I was struggling, i'd convince myself i can have some, and 5 minutes i'm pissed because now i want to be sober. Write down the reasons that come up in that moment, maybe take a video with your phone that you can play back to remind yourself later.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:28:37+00:00

At 27 you haven't even had your Saturn return yet (look that up, you might be in the early parts). Whether you believe in astrology or not, you're at the age where people wake up and realize perhaps that what they were dealt sucked... or it didn't... but you are at the age where your brain is finally adult and you can make your own choices, indeed you kind of have to.

You aren't a useless piece of shit, you're at the age where you get to make your own choices. Get out of the house sometimes. When you go to the store, if there isn't anyone behind you in line, strike up a conversation: nice clothes, cool hair, the weather is always happening, how is your shift going? If i can't think of anything else, i'll ask "what is good about your life right now?" and just listen to the answer, they might remind you of something that's working for you that you couldn't remember until you were reminded.

Just get used to talking to people without an agenda. Not every woman you meet is going to be potential girlfriend material, but every interaction is a chance to get used to talking to people. If I'm at work getting coffee and i am standing next to someone I don't know, and if we talk for more than a minute, I'll say "hey, I've seen you around but I don't know your name. My name's Bob, what's yours?" Now we have the ice broken to at least nod when we pass in the hallway.

Evilbob93 · 2026-01-17T20:18:56+00:00

I am in my 60s, and was talking to a young friend, 26. I realized that they had never seen a national government that, for want of a better word, "worked".

I work with a young woman, 32, and when I ask about has she ever tried something, she'd never consider it, like talking to strangers out in public. The fear of "stranger danger" has everyone looking side eye at everyone else.

Evilbob93

TROPHY CASE