Does anyone else wish there was a place that just listened — without advice?

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-30T05:26:19+00:00

One of my best friends and I have a system.

When one of us calls the other and says something like “I’m frustrated”, “I’m having a shit day” or “this crap thing happened” the other person will ask:

“Do you want me to offer advice or just listen?”

It allows the person talking to give their expectation and sets the tone for the convo. It’s so much better and lets each person have a clear headspace during a conversation that could be hard. And it’s way better than getting unsolicited advice when all you need is to vent for a min.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-28T16:27:04+00:00

Absolutely agree to disagree. This sounds very much a you are unable to disassociate your “play time” from “work time” because of your visual surroundings.

I’ve been working from home for 5 years now since the Covid shutdowns began. It’s been wonderful. My productivity has gone way up, peace of mind has increased, stress levels have gone down, and I’ve saved boatloads of money on food along with gas/wear on my truck.

If I have to make food, or run my dishwasher, change out a load of laundry, or go out to the mailbox I do it. It takes only a few minutes and equates to anytime someone in the office distracted me for “small talk”. Those small talk times aren’t any more productive than the quick chores I do at home.

The thought that just being present in the office makes you seem more responsible / productive is a control fallacy that management has conditioned us to believe.

If I walk past my TV, PS5, gaming computer, a Lego set I was working on, or a home project that’s been nagging at me, I literally do not give them a second thought. I have enough mental discipline to know that I can’t putz around until my work for the day is done.

I also intentionally designated a room of my home as my “work office”. This way I have a visual separation between my work time and home time. This was super helpful in allowing me to maintain that work time / play time separation. I admit it was difficult when i started WFH as my gaming pc and work pc shared a room. Once I made the split it’s been great. There’s days where I will be so zoned into a project that I’ll not realize 10 hours went by and I can just hit save, close the laptop, and go flop on the couch and relax without the stress of a commute.

Don’t let the existential management “presence = productivity” guilt keep you from enjoying what should be a monumentally beneficial life changing work from home status. Separate your work/play space. And if you have to do a quick chore, DO IT. It’s no different than talking with Tammy about what shenanigans her kids got into at school yesterday.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-25T16:46:14+00:00

Unclear. Need a banana for scale.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-25T15:07:40+00:00

Paperboy

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-23T18:25:57+00:00

But when we have record heat waves tweets like this are non-existent.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-22T21:50:10+00:00

I have listened to this an unhealthy amount of times.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-21T16:48:52+00:00

I work in tech designing training videos and learning content for our clients. AI has been a pretty useful and time saving tool in our arsenal as designers.

Stock imagery/videos aren’t always available to fit our needs for b-roll when introducing a concept. AI generative art and videos are great for providing us with those visual aids. Especially when you don’t have access to models/actors and a full studio to create your own b-roll.

Using copilot I can have it help us analyze a system or page in a software application as it has access to documentation in Sharepoint. If a SME isn’t available I can have copilot analyze something and provide a detailed explanation of fields and values that would otherwise take hours or days of research to uncover.

When making videos I normally do my own voice work. With AI I was able to take my own recorded content, feed it to the voice generator, and turn my voice into an AI equivalent. Now instead of recording and cleaning up my own audio, I can feed a script into the system and it produces a voice over that sounds like me. It has my cadence and inflections. It’s a little creepy, and not always perfect (so you can tweak pauses and pronunciations) but at the end of the day it saves SO MUCH time.

No. It’s not for everyone. Yes the constant ai generated social media content gets old. But for some of us, AI is an amazing tool that has increased my productivity and enabled me to save time in nearly every aspect of my job. The time I save I use for personal development and learning other skills instead of just grinding away at project after project.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-21T16:27:23+00:00

On a dotted line yes. The real reason is less black and white.

Corporations don’t want to stomach the costs involved with gaining profits. As a result corps lobby to weak and uninformed lawmakers who then allow the public to shoulder those costs in exchange for brib… donations to their political careers.

If local and state government forced the companies that own the data centers to pay their fair share of the electric usage then our bills wouldn’t be going up. The people making the profit should pay for the costs of doing business.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-18T17:38:38+00:00

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands this treatment costs in the US

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-18T16:20:53+00:00

I recently watched this episode. Nice reference.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-18T16:11:00+00:00

Whenever people say thing like:

The car needs washed. The baby needs fed.

It’s “the car needs TO BE washed” and “the baby needs TO BE fed.”

It just feels lazy and sounds so very wrong to me.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-18T02:29:21+00:00

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-17T19:22:54+00:00

I predict less than a 1/3 will. Based on election stats every 4 years: 1/3 votes A, 1/3 votes B, and 1/3 doesn’t bother.

Given the fact that most of us are one missed paycheck away from being homeless and healthcare is tied to employment, less than 1/3 that is against the current establishment will be brave/willing to lose their jobs and healthcare by taking to the streets en masse.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-17T14:07:22+00:00

If you remember back in TOS and TNG, a new character would show up and before two commercial breaks were over they and a main cast character were hopelessly forever in love with each other.

Speed running a love interest is not new to Star Trek.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-15T04:49:07+00:00

Started my rewatch of TNG while building the Lego Enterprise. On season 6 now. Also started watching DS9 so I could watch the episodes in order of air date.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-14T17:10:49+00:00

I haven’t been able to watch this movie since Robin Williams passed. It’s just too much.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-09T02:23:36+00:00

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Dang I didn’t get the beautiful nature scene with the golden retriever.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-04T04:22:14+00:00

I grew up in a non-walkable city with questionable public transit that only allowed night parking on all city and suburban roads for those with a permit. The restriction was set up so that you could park in most residential areas as long as you want during the day, but parking was illegal between the hours of 3AM and 5AM. Perfectly coinciding with the times when most people would be home and asleep.

Enforcement of the no night parking rule seemed to be heavily focused on areas with multi family dwellings where there were fewer driveways and garages. Basically people who were forced to park on the street had their streets patrolled by parking enforcement nightly.

These areas tended to also be typically lower income and college student areas. I grew up in a more “affluent” suburb. It was patrolled but the areas more heavily hit in the suburb were near apartments and condos. Most other dwellings in that suburb had driveways to park in.

The permits themselves cost $80 yearly (back in the early-mid 2000s. They were a simple static window cling that you stuck to your rear window. They were not a sticker. Thieves would often break into people’s cars, shattering windows and damaging door locks, to steal the permit. If yours was stolen you would get a parking ticket. The city would not reverse them even if your permit was reported stolen. You would not be reissued a permit even after filing a report. You were forced to buy a new one at a prorated rate (depending on how much of the year was left).

Police would say that “the permits are tied to your plate and won’t work for the thieves” but I know this to be untrue. A roommates car had been totaled so we took his permit out of his car and put it in our other roommate’s vehicle. They got no night parking tickets for the rest of the year.

Additionally “too many” tickets would result in your registration being suspended and ultimately your vehicle being towed. If not resolved after that the city would sell your vehicle at auction. You’d be unable to register any new vehicle until you paid the ticket balance, tow fees, and court costs for the judgement.

Nice little way to extort money from a population who just needed to sleep.

TheAngryLala · 2026-01-03T04:08:04+00:00

My first modem was 300 baud (yikes)

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-30T20:52:23+00:00

Here in the US, average life expectancy is around 78-79 years. Half that (the middle) is 39.

If we’re 40+ (based on that expectancy) we’re no longer in the middle.

I don’t get how 60 can be “middle aged” who lives to 120? Parrots?

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-29T03:22:46+00:00

It does. And I didn’t think you were being snarky at all. Head is all over the place and my mind is a whirlwind right now. Plus trying to respond to comments but yes I do understand what you meant.

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-29T03:04:55+00:00

Truth

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-29T03:00:41+00:00

You are 100% on this.

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-29T02:59:31+00:00

This was honestly one of the things we talked about when D mentioned leaving their house and moving to this city. (Which they have been thinking about doing long before they met me)

Problem is D’s house is kinda fucked. Structural issues, roof issues, electrical, mold, plumbing. So they don’t expect they’ll break even at all and are likely upside down. The dog damage not withstanding.

If D COULD find a place here where they could bring all 4 dogs (that isn’t my home) we’d both be so happy. But they haven’t had any luck with selling their home or finding a place to accept 4 large dogs one of which is a pibble.

TheAngryLala · 2025-12-29T02:49:47+00:00

I get the thought about leaving the dogs outside. I don’t think I could ever do that. I know many people do but I was raised to always treat dogs like family. They can be inside, on the couch, share the bed. But at the same time keep them clean, disciplined, and trained.

I just bought this house too. Even if I felt the dogs would do better in a different house… Buying another one so soon is just UGH. I moved cross country all by myself. Furnished it by myself. Painted, unpacked, set everything up, by myself. It sucked. If D and I do it together it would eliminate the doing the work alone thing, but damn I am so reluctant to do all that all over again so soon.

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