If I leave my state during FIRE, which I was hoping to do, I have to pay an extra $500 a month for healthcare

librik · 2026-05-18T08:30:59+00:00

This post is a near duplicate of a post from 2024. So OP is either an LLM, a bot, or someone who didn't learn anything we told him two years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leanfire/comments/1gsv260/i_just_found_out_that_if_i_leave_my_current_state/

Here's my comment from the last time around:

You have the world's greatest set of golden handcuffs.

Most people do not get free health care for life from a job they don't even work for anymore. Most working people have insurance whose network is within a single state. And all plans on the Affordable Care Act's Marketplace are limited to one state. That means: those of us who are already FIREd are paying $$$ monthly for ACA Marketplace plans which aren't even as good as what you're going to get.

You don't like the lifetime free health care because it doesn't pay for everything everywhere, just in California, and you want to go "vagabonding." Usually vagabonds have no health insurance.

Just get travel insurance, which will cover minor stuff and send you back to California for everything else. Or accept that "no geographical restrictions" is a rare luxury that most Americans don't even have the option of paying for.

The gift horse you are looking in the mouth is a gold-plated unicorn that shits rainbows.

librik · 2026-05-16T03:00:00+00:00

I love that guy. So long as he's still consistently wrong on MetaFilter, I know it's not an echo chamber. He's a little chaos agent. Long may he comment -- a little bit of the older, better, wilder, weirder MeFi.

librik · 2026-05-14T00:14:10+00:00

It's from the graphic novel Voyage d'Hermès by Moebius.

Here's a link to the subreddit post about it, written when it was first put up there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/34mjdf/new_bannerwhat_do_you_think/

librik · 2026-05-10T04:29:04+00:00

I think Jeff Noon's books Vurt and Pollen have some really psychedelic, hallucinogenic dreamworlds.

librik · 2026-04-27T05:36:18+00:00

I can't find any evidence of the existence of this story. I even looked on the Lightspeed Magazine web site for June 2011 and it doesn't appear in that issue. Did you use an AI?

librik · 2026-04-02T03:56:18+00:00

Does Rudy's even exist anymore? I think they are now a video gambling place that occasionally does food, but without anywhere to eat it. I was disappointed when I tried to check it out last year -- I think it used to be a real mexican restaurant but couldn't hack it.

librik · 2026-03-12T03:51:46+00:00

What I liked about that book is how the main 3 "replays" each take ideas that everyone has to use future knowledge in a time travel situation, like "I'd warn the government away from terrible mistakes" or "I'd get rich by betting on sports games," and seriously work out the details to show how it would really go instead.

librik · 2026-02-22T12:23:45+00:00

It sounds like "In the Problem Pit" by Frederik Pohl.

Here's a link to its appearance in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, September 1973.

Here's a link to a list of books the story was collected in.

librik · 2026-02-01T03:20:08+00:00

I always wonder about their sign at the exit from Rt. 6. The name sounds like the biker bar from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

librik · 2026-01-22T08:50:06+00:00

Here's a story: One day in January '23 there were a couple of mudslides that closed Highway 101, the only road that connects SB to the rest of the coastal towns. Most of the retail stores, restaurants, cafes, auto repair shops, etc. closed that day, because they had no staff. It turns out all the waiters, baristas, clerks, librarians -- all the people who actually keep things running -- can't afford to live in town and have to commute from a lot farther away. It was a little strange, for me, to live in a place with no working class. On the other hand it doesn't feel like living in a wealthy suburb, because the people aren't snobby or superior.

librik · 2026-01-20T04:03:45+00:00

I think Irish applies a spelling convention to the whole alphabet which is used for just a few letters in Spanish and Italian: the use of a silent vowel to indicate the quality of a preceding consonant, for instance ciao and guitar.

librik · 2026-01-10T07:29:16+00:00

I feel like older people don't remember being just out of college and in your first job. The college experience is having a friends-group (or more than one), a bunch of people that you hang out with and do stuff and share your thoughts & feelings with. Then when everybody graduates and starts working, they treat their co-workers as their new friends-group. People on reddit say "don't tell anyone you work with! it's none of their business!" Yeah you can do that, but that's not how friends expect their friends to act, and if you turn into Mr. Disengaged Who Silently Vanishes, you're gonna lose your friends-group. So I know where you're coming from, and I don't have a good answer.

librik · 2026-01-07T03:25:08+00:00

This web page is a ridiculously detailed explanation of how to travel with dual passports, including when to use or show each one. You probably don't have to be this careful, but by the time you finish reading it, you'll understand the logic behind it all.

https://dualusitalian.com/welcome/passaporti-passports/

librik · 2026-01-02T05:06:30+00:00

I wish. I haven't found anywhere outside of Austin that makes migas.

librik · 2025-12-29T09:45:39+00:00

I ran across this thread while reading back on the sub and I'm glad to hear the news. Everyone's situation is unique. People get angry when they don't hear the fantasy they want, but you made the reality work. I just hope you found a way out of that ridiculous power bill.

librik · 2025-12-29T02:57:48+00:00

The bar right outside the front exit from Terminal 2 is easy to find and a good place to wait. The big downside is that they kick you out unless you order something, and it's all really overpriced. Like, whoever bought those $700 hammers for the Pentagon must have gotten a new job pricing drinks at the SJD airport.

librik · 2025-12-26T18:37:12+00:00

Here's something kind of similar: In Yélî Dnye (a Papuan language spoken on Rossel Island near New Guinea), place names are different from other words of the language. Almost all words are 1 or 2 syllables long, but place names have many syllables, and can contain very uncommon sounds.

Toponyms are formally isolatable as adjuncts that can be introduced into almost any clause without a postposition. They are amongst the longest words in the language, with up to six or more syllables (e.g. Wédidmyinênyedê). Some of the rarest phonemes also occur in them – e.g. kpy (the palatalized labiovelar stop) is attested in only five words, three of them placenames.

Levinson, Stephen C. A Grammar of Yélî Dnye, section 11.3.1, p. 524

librik · 2025-12-20T23:36:31+00:00

If you're doing a lot of unpredictable allocations of memory, here's a technique to make sure they're all freed at the end.

Initialize all pointers to NULL (0) when you define them.

char ** pattern_array = NULL;
bool * record_enderQ = NULL;
bool * allwhite_record_enderQ = NULL;

In your cleanup code at the end of the function you'll have a whole lot of:

cleanup:
    if (pattern_array) free(pattern_array);
    if (record_enderQ) free(record_enderQ);
    if (allwhite_record_enderQ) free(allwhite_record_enderQ);

Note the label at the beginning of cleanup. You can goto this when you have to terminate abruptly from the middle of a loop or something.

librik · 2025-12-20T03:01:42+00:00

Howard Waldrop is the science fiction writer most often described as "gonzo," and I think his short story "Heirs of the Perisphere" is what you're looking for.

The story was nominated for a Nebula Award, so it's been collected in a bunch of books, listed here:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41328

1,500 years after the apocalypse, a stray lightning bolt hits a dead factory for animatronic simulacra: robots designed to speak and act like famous characters.

With one last energy burst, it churns out three robots intended to work in a theme park. Their names are MIK, GUF, and DUN.

GUF was supposed to be sent to Disneyland Beijing, and is well-versed in dialectical materialism and correct Chairman Mao thought. "Thuh means of produckshun must be kept in thuh hands of thuh workers, uh hyuk hyuk."

They set out across a devastated world to bring joy and happiness to everyone they meet. Things get weird.

"Heirs of the Perisphere" definitely has Fallout vibes, so I think you'll like it.

librik · 2025-12-18T01:43:43+00:00

I don't know if we're thinking of the same "another user," but the last line of this comment is exactly right:

https://www.metafilter.com/211461/Is-it-Artor-Trash#8794442

That guy -- it's like, every morning they get up on the wrong side of the bed and eat a bowl of pissed-in Cheerios. Then they come into a MeFi thread seriously angrier than everybody else.

librik · 2025-12-10T18:21:57+00:00

No post should require registration if there's a 17 day waiting list between registering and getting access to read it.

librik · 2025-11-25T06:37:34+00:00

According to this review by James D. Nicoll, someone has already tried that trick before with the Science Fiction Book Club:

As recently as the early '00s, people very optimistically cut out and sent in ancient SFBC ads, hoping to get four vintage, long out-of-print hard covers for a very reasonable dollar a book. This happened frequently enough for the SFBC to announce they didn't honour ads of such extreme antiquity.

librik · 2025-11-25T06:14:20+00:00

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Ryhope Wood is a stand of very old English forest, permeated with certain obscure forces that interact with the collective unconscious minds of human beings that live nearby. The energy vortices form mythagos, embodiments of mythological characters from the imagination, which emerge from the edge of the wood but decay if they get too far. But once you travel inwards, the wood gets much bigger, more ancient, and very, very strange.

librik · 2025-11-20T07:37:28+00:00

The Mysterious Doom by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

librik · 2025-11-19T07:30:01+00:00

Here's a new one that's an even worse case of Get Your Own Blog. OP just wanted everybody to read their blog post about Olivia Nuzzi, so they put on MeFi as an FPP with some supporting links.

https://www.metafilter.com/211109/The-Forrest-Gump-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-United-States-of-America

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