Archive - Icons - Previous 12/28/25 OMG. There's only three days left in the year. Holy shit. How. This entire year was basically a blur. A very nerve-wracking, painful blur. I want to hope next year will be better, but I feel like everything's been wrong since about 2018. Defintely after 2020. Christmas Eve's shift was mostly slow, but the few customers there were really entitled. "I need this done before Christmas day!" "Can't help you there." "But why not? Don't you care?" Bro, you're the one who came into the store five minutes before close. What were you realistically expected anyone to do? That's your problem for being an entitled dumbass. We have another lady who wanted something that we didn't have much left of, because it was a sale thing for the holiday. She needed just slightly more than we had, so when we said we don't have anymore, she was screaming "But I NEED that much! It can't be less!!" And then she stormed out of the building. With nothing. I swear some people do shit like this specifically to cause a scene. They're not looking for help. They don't even want the thing they are screaming about. They want negative attention. They want to ruin someone's day. That's it. That's why it's best not to react to those kind of people. They wanted the negative reaction. A blank one isn't fun. Same principle as dealing with trolls. The only way to deal with a troll are: block, "ok"/neutral expression, or be bizarrely nice/friendly to them. They enjoy any other reaction except those three. IRL drama llamas are the same way. For block, you can hang up on callers or if you have the power, tell them they have to leave, act unaffected by their yelling, or again, be weirdly friendly. It confuses them. Another that works well is "here's our customer support phone number, they might be able to answer your question better than me!" Sorry to the phone people, but that is their job anyway. And they also have the magic hang up option at all times in their arsenal. When it comes to holding on to thoughts about this stuff: if a customer comes in hostile, gets irrationally angry or aggressive, and will not accept any alterantives or solutions to their problem, they do not want a problem solved. So, in these situations, there was never anything you could do and you are not at fault. It's always them. I don't think much on them, beyond wow, another dumbass person who lives like that. I think the most at this point, it's more just sad to me. Imagine spending your time like that. What a waste of a life. Farmer's market coming through again with those cheap fruit and veggie prices. Had to get a tire replaced this week. Took out a big chunk of money for that. Poor tire. Anyway, I'll be making quite a few meals this week that will serve as food for more than one day. I stopped making chili for a while because it was getting expensive with the "extras" I put in my version (like to load up on extra veggies added in for a big nutrition bomb) and the cost of both meat and fake meat, but since we've been going to this farmer's market, it's so much cheaper I can make my big pot of chili again. I checked and their tofu is much cheaper than other grocery stores nearby too, so if I get priced out of meats, there's still that. My wife said something about me being so excited about my own food and I never thought about that before. In my head, it's "yay I get to eat chili" and not "I get to eat my chili recipe prepared by me". I don't even think about how other people make chili at this point. I have my own version of Three Sisters stew at this point too that I would probably be like "what the fuck" if I ate someone else's version. (But to be fair, there's hundreds and hundreds of versions of that). Got a ton of potatoes too, for baked potatoes. I find when I'm sick, I can eat those even though mashed potatoes makes me sicker. I'd been avoiding them for a while because they take so long to cook outside of the microwave no matter how you do it. I've gone back to the microwave method. It's the quickest and the potato comes out the fluffiest. There's literally no upside to any other method of making them. What the fuck. We got some cole slaw too. They sell them in big tubs and then I make the dressing for it at home myself. I never realized until this year how incredibly easy it is to make. Or that all the cole slaw I ever had was with creamy cole slaw dressing, because that's what everyone in the south pretty much exclusively puts on it. Haha. Christmas Eve, I grabbed some Taco Bell for the first time in a while because a few people at work had it for lunch and I wanted to try the thing they all said was delicious. Regret. Messed up my stomach. And it wasn't even that great. It was expensive for what it was too. Watched Perfect Days. It was alright. Didn't get the big life changing whatever about it, nor the weird absolutely disturbed vitrol some people have about it either. It was a slice of life kind of movie about a pretty average old dude. I don't think I'd rewatch it any time soon, but it was a peaceful journey. I thought a lot of the movie was pretty on the nose with it's Buddhist themes, complete with him having a wealthy background and "throwing it all away" to live in a simple, minimal, routine life. Maybe it's because I'm a former Buddhist that I was just thinking about it more than most people over here. IDK. I also think some young people would benefit from talking to older people every now and then to see what they actually get up to. I've been thinking a bit on "connection" since watching it, and I feel like a lot of young people in the west have a very narrow idea of what it means to connect with someone in a meaningful way and what even is "meaningful". I feel like this is a big part of their "loneliness", but I'm still thinking on it. I may write something about that later when I've given it more thought. 12/23/25 Yesterday, I got an old ipod touch. Our building recycles some things, but ipods aren't included in that, so it would've gone in the trash. We usually rescue some items from the recycling bin that we can't actually have recycled (or at least not recycled by the company we work with, I'm sure the ipod can definitely be recycled by someone) if it's possibly useable still. I've gotten a cassette player as well. It wasn't working, but most of the parts in it were still good. I'm keep it around just for that, spare parts. The other two ipods I found were an original ipod and an ipod mini. They were both legit fucked, but it was worth a shot to see if they might still be useable. The ipod touch though was in really good condition. After doing a recovery, it was working just fine, no iTunes needed, just Finder. It's a fourth gen, so the internet basically can't really work on it. That nixes a lot of its features, but the sound quality is good and it's kind of nice to have the old notes app. It feels nostalgic. When I got my first proper smart phone (technically, many flip phones were smart phones too, but people don't tend to think of them that way), it was an iphone. The ipod touch basically is just an early iphone without the phone part. You can really see how the iphone can about. I miss this size. Phones are way too big now. The ipod touch is a really good, compact size. The touch screen makes it superior to the older ipods. We should've stopped here and kept these things separate. If phones had stayed only having the very minimal internet useability my old Motorolas had, I feel like the internet landscape wouldn't have changed quite the way it did. I'm still working on transferring more music over. The ipod touch has 8GB of storage. One of the other ipods I messed with had 30GB, which is insane. I see lots of people online talk about how much storage they need for music downloaded or how many billion songs they totally need to stream and it's just absurd. You don't need all that. You're not really listening to that much music and actively enjoying it. You are full of shit and too lazy to curate your experience. Music files don't even take up much space, even as ALAC/FLAC. It's that wendigo thinking. Gotta eat everything. IDK I always changed out my music every now and then for my "active" listening and left everything else stored somewhere and not due to any space issues. IDK, maybe I really don't "love" music the way other people do. I'm not a music person. I can't imagine at all genuinely loving over a hundred different random songs and wanting to hear them all in some random order because I just love them all that much in that moment. Now that I've got both an ipod and a cassette player, all I really want to get now is a proper tape deck for recording music onto cassette that was never on cassette to start with. Still need to do more research on that. It's hard to find this sort of information anymore. So much "discussion" is just on Reddit by idiots and bots. I miss forums. Lately, whenever I see something stupid on Reddit that annoys me, I just remember it's probably a bot or a troll farm posting solely to make me angry. Looking through their comment and posting history usually makes that pretty obvious. I've started to be able to pick up on the ways bots attempt to ragebait. Likewise, I'm pretty sure most of the popular subreddits are just bot posting factories to test stuff. I've watched so many threads fully repeat themselves at this point. Most of the comments and everything. I'm convinced all those trope-related communities are being used to train AI on writing books by feeding them information about character and plot tropes with examples of what makes those things that thing. Those threads repeat a lot, just like all those ask-blah reddits or am I the asshole/overreacting type ones. There's been ore completely fake videos getting posted on Reddit lately too. I'm not sure how many people are really there. Lemmy's already screwed. Lemmy and Blue Sky definitely have tons of bots there already. I've been thinking a lot about this old Tedtalk with Jaron Lanier about how to remake the internet better. And I really am starting to agree with the idea that more things should be intentionally locked behind paywalls. Free is easy for bad actors to manipulate. I might go back to paying for Kagi again. The quality of free search engines is so bad. You know, reverse image search is basically a dead concept at this point? It was amazing years ago, and now it's not really a thing at all. I know we can't all pay for everything, but we had solutions to that back in the day, Someone else basically sponsors a whole group of people underneath them. A patron if you will covering for others with similar interests. Livejournal and Dreamwidth let people gift paid time to other people, and I personally got loads of pay time from DW for helping with some spam-related issues back in the day. Free doesn't work for most things. Free is why Adobe is still better than every alternative that's come out (no matter how much someone who edits a photo once a year claims otherwise) and why all Linux distros still look like confused kindergarteners designed them. If there's no incentive to make a living off of something, people will in fact, generally, not work as hard at actually making something good and the person using the service likewise literally has no leverage to demand it ever improve. I keep my own writing free on purpose. I don't care. But I know most people don't work that way, and if I had to live off that, I obviously wouldn't be giving it away for free. You can't get professional, high quality shit out of people doing something largely as a hobby or a side project. People need to eat. Most of their time will thusly be spent on whatever they need to do to eat. At the very least, people should be supporting free projects via donations when possible. In theory, I've always liked the idea of something being free and very open, but in practice, it's shit. Forums that had boards locked down from public view had better discussions. Gatekeeping is useful. Especially in this age of bots and AI scraping, we probably should be erecting more fences to keep corporate fuckers out. Rich people love when something is free. They'll exploit every drop out of it because it costs them little to nothing to do so. And then once they've gotten what they want, they will happily charge you for something. Better to cut them out from getting in from the start. But also, having been online a long time and been in a lot of spaces that promote free this and that, I've always ended up getting a bit of an ick feeling after a while. There's this general sense of entitlement. You should provide the cool, really amazing free thing and you're bad if you want to eat soup for dinner and ask for a couple bucks. Some people are poor and can't afford to spare a dollar, so you'd be classist if you don't offer it for free! What? You have bills. That's not my problem! It pretty much goes like that. We don't live in a money-free world. That'd be great if we did, but we don't. If something is actually great, you should be willing to pay for their work. If that means you can't have all the things, all the time, so fucking what? People deserve to be paid what their worth far more than everyone else having a million things always available to them without givig anything back in exchange. I'm not gonna say what I usually say here, but if you've read my other entries, you already know what I'm getting at. In addition to that, I've been thinking about making a page of how to unfuck your internet experience. Some add-ons, programs, and habits, stuff like that. I may just do that at some point. Not that anyone here reads. But maybe one person might actually. 12/22/25 Yesterday, I came in to work on a day I'm usually off to do stuff for a different department. I was told I didn't even have to wear my uniform so I could be sort of incognito to customers. And despite this, and not bothering to have a radio, uniform, badge, or anything on me that made it clear I even worked in that building, I think I had actually had more customers bug me about shit than when I wear a uniform. A few of those times they might have guessed from what I was doing, but there's no way they could've known some of the other times. One of the times I got stopped to help I was just walking to the bathroom. And it got me thinking, are there people out there asking random ass people at different companies with no identifiable info on them to suggest they work there in general and just assuming they'll be correct? That's too absurd, right? Wrong. Today, I overheard the following exchange between two customers: Customer A: Excuse me, could you help me with (product)? I need help picking one out. Customer B: Um, I'm sorry. I don't work here. I don't really know much about that. Customer A: Could you help me find someone who does? Customer B: I'm sure if you ask one of the employees they could help you... So, yes, in fact, people really are out there asking random other customers for help. Maybe this is off base, but it got me wonder. Are some people so consumer-brain/deep into main character syndrome, that they literally cannot comprehend that the majority of the people they encounter out in public are other consumers and not employees? That the entire world is not existing to serve them? I feel like this ties back somewhat into the whole "a sizeable portion of the population, so long as they were not included in it, would be okay with slavery". I need a thing, you random person who doesn't work here must help me get my item because I'm important! Those people really were just getting lucky they happened to pick someone who was actually an employee. What the fuck is wrong with people. I've heard from one of the managers say before she's gotten more questions asked of her out of uniform than in uniform. That seemed ridiculous. That shouldn't be. But then I lived it. I've helped a customer on my way toward clocking out and then clocked out, was out of uniform and carrying my bag out with me and had a customer stop me from leaving because they still need help. I"m not even supposed to be helping much with that department. But damn, you see I'm clearly leaving. Why do I need to help you off the clock? That's not even getting into the asinine shit people bneed "help" with. 95% of customer issues would be solved if the customer themselves stopped, read signs around them, and then followed them. Another manager made big signs for certain customers who come in for a particular service and are the dumbest motherfuckers who have ever walked the earth. They will not read any signs we put up. He made bigger signs and I really doubt it's going to help. I used to work somewhere else where I needed to direct people to certain locations as part of the job sometimes. Idiots will never read a sign. They refuse to read. People who aren't idiots will read the sign and not need much of any help getting anywhere. But idiots demand you help them with tasks you have gone out of your way to make as simple as possible. This makes me wonder. Is it all learned helplessness? If they stay dumb about something, then they can make someone help them with the most asinine shit! I wonder if this level of stupid and entiteled is common everywhere or if it's just the US. I remember in 4th or 5th grade, one of my friend's mom wanted to read one of my Harry Potter books. This was when the books were first coming out and starting to really get some buzz. She wanted to see what all the hype was about and what the kids were into. So I let her borrow whichever book she asked for and she took two months to read it. Not because she was busy. She was actually struggling to read a book aimed at eleven year olds. I knew early on it was possible for kids to have a skill or two that could be at or beyond the average adult, but that it was just uncommon for that to happen. But it was in that moment that I realized some adults can be behind children at basic skills without having any disabilities. (She didn't have a disability. She just never bothered to learn to read well and drop out of school young because teen mom. Rednecks don't put their kids in night school or distance learning for pregnancy. They just force them into marriage and nix their education.) I didn't say anything rude about it or anything. I was mostly just in shock. I had a college reading level at age 9 but this adult had problems reading a Harry Potter book. It blew my mind. But after she struggled with it, she gave up reading any more of them. I don't think I ever saw her read another book. Her and her husband didn't really buy their kids books either. None of their five children had books. All three of the girls dropped out of school at their mother's pushing due to teen pregnancies. The mom, the mom's sister, and all of the daughters between them had all been forced on birth control by their mom's from the first week of their first periods and all ended up teen moms. Turns out forcing pills on kids and not even teaching them how to ensure they're taking them properly isn't a good way to avoid teen pregnancy. They had a lot of video games though. I remember they had more video games than I did and about as many VHS tapes. But no books anywhere. She took initiative one time, struggled, and just gave up. Really sad. I felt bad for her. Her family and the education system around her clearly failed her. I understood that as a kid. But as an adult, I actually feel less sympathy. She had five kids by that time, one of them in middle school already. She should have tried to educate herself more, for the sake of helping her own kids have a better potential future. But she just did exactly what her mom did and got the same results. Her own mother was also a teen mom who dropped out early and her grandmother likewise. This was a multi-generational thing. It was wild, but that's how rednecks often are. She didn't potty train her kids until the state legally required them to be. Which at the time was apparently age eight. See, the schools won't let you enroll your kid unless your kid is potty trained, but you don't technically have to enroll your kid until they're eight years old or would be eight at the start of the school year. Something like that. So she'd wait to potty train them until they were eight years old. Apparently, her own mother did the same thing, waited until the state said she had to send the kids to school and they had to be potty trained. And the grandmother apparently also did the same thing. Their house smelled like piss all the time because of this. I don't think my parents are all that brilliant, but my mom potty trained me well before I was a year old and it only took a week...Same for my brother, one week. Why would you need eight years...Her kids weren't talking until about age five as well. There was no effort to teach the to talk until they were getting "about school age" and would "need to". Again, several generations of this. So bizarre. I was having conversation with full, complex sentences by nine months. I know might be a little ahead of the curve but surely your kids should know words beyond "no" and "want" by age five...A few times I was at this house, I cooked dinner for the mom because she didn't know how to cook much. Their dinners were usually ramen (somehow also not cooked right??????), hot dogs, spaghetti (mushy slop), or delivery pizza. That was many of the lunches and breakfasts that weren't microwave stuff. She was a housewife. So many redneck housewives have zero domestic skills. And thus they teach none to their kids as well. Makes me wonder how many people I encounter on a daily basis that are that level of just...not functioning intellectually. Having no basic skills. I'm sure a few of the non-sign readers are actually illiterate people. But I just can't excuse that. Unless there's some actual disability at hand, there's no excuse to stay illiterate. We have so many learning resources, many of them free. Why would you not want to learn to read? Slaves were out there learning to read in secret, but you've got people these days just willfully refusing to learn or get better at reading. Just choosing to be uneducated. I can tell a lot of people don't really like reading much anyway. Anyone who has been on Neocities for a while knows one truth: sites with lots of graphics on their layouts, cute layouts, or just a lot of pictures in general get way more clicks than pages of mostly text or neutral looking layouts; and also that that most followers of a site don't actually read what's on the site. That's why about every few months you get a public freakout of a clustered group of people realizing some user named terfygrrlfuckmoids whose site will be like "i'm a big terf and proud of it" because the people having a freakout didn't actually read anything on the site. They just saw a cottagecore layout or some girly pixels and hit follow. Probably also why so much of Neocities is basically empty. I'm being generous here, but excluding obvious resource type pages where someone's intentionally got a bunch of shareable images posted, if you took the majority of the rest of the content on Neocities and stripped out all the images, how much would actually be left after that? How much meat is really on those bones? It's not a lot. I joke a lot here that no one reads this, but let's be real. Almost no one is reading this. A chunk of the people who clicked this page at any time were just looking at Denji and Power. Some might have looked at the icon. The longer I've been on Neocities (since 2015), the worse this has gotten. I can tell just from what I updated on each of my sites vs the traffic. It's so hilariously obvious how to get lots of followers and views here. Post lots of images. Have little text. Make the images as much of a clusterfuck on the page as possible. Probably also why you don't see many of those dorky internet manifestos anymore or intentionally super minimalist designs. Ain't nobody reading that shit. Need jangly keys. I worked in education for about half a decade. Sometimes I peak into the teacher subreddit. And I remember again why I pivoted entirely away from education and academia in general. The system itself does not want people to learn, and wants them to view not having to learn as a viable path through life. This is all probably going to get worse going forward. Help me, I can't be assed to read or use my brain. Help. Please do all the steps of this thing for me. I had a customer once beg me to show her how to change the brightness and default sounds on her phone for her. I don't work with phones. Why can't you just google this shit? Oh, that's another favorite. "What is this address of this location". IDK, why don't you try reading it off Google Maps, which is where you got our phone number in the first place because no one uses phone books anymore. I had a co-worker who has now left, who when customers would ask for verbal directions to places like we should all know where everything in all the nearby counties are, would ask the person to get out their phone, would open up Maps, and type in the location and pull up the directions on their phone. Same with phone numbers. He'd take their phone, open Maps, put in the location, and show them the phone number there. "And you just call that number." Most of these customers would get embarrassed when he did that. As they should. They had the power to find that information on their own. I just don't understand why people want to be like this. It seems like such an empty life to live. 12/20/25 Updated the Childhood Fears pages with a new layout. I've been meaning to do that for a while, but I couldn't figure out how I wanted it to look. I like how it came out. Also made an icon reference page for the Log here. Slowly making this blog into LJ/DW, but in complete isolation. Modern web is trash though. Again, it's that needing to cater to several sizes all at once instead of just a few sizes. We're not working around a square or a square and a wide rectangle. Now we gotta include long, skinny rectangles too on itty bitty screen but also make it look good on a wide, gigantic screen and okay when the window is partially open on that wide rectangle. Oh, and don't forget mobile on landscape too, another itty bitty screen but in a different direction. And nothing actually works well together. Eventually, I just went with images to get the look I wanted and it's still slightly wonky at a few weird sizes of the browser on desktop (slight off spacing), but it looks fine on mobile, fully extended on a browser, and a good portion of the in between sizes. So that's fine. I really just wanted it as reference anyway. Could have copied how DW does it, but I hate how it looks when you shrink things down and the text just starts all moving downward. It looks so ugly. Originally, I was just going to try and straight up replicate the ancient LJ look, colors and all. But, thing is, LJ is pretty ugly looking. DW at least let you do custom icon pages. So, I just went that direction. Using an image has several disadvantages as well, but who the fuck is looking at this anyway? Me even bothering to make it look okay on mobile is more than this needs. I'm sure this has zero readers LMAO. 12/18/25 Found out the CSM movie was out on streaming earlier this week. You know what that means. Screencapping time. I'm definitely going to make more icons from this. I have enough icons I'm using here that I could make a fake LJ (or perhaps DW) icon page. Probably would go more for DW, since you can do custom ones over there. I'll need to come up with how I'm going to do it, since I need to keep mobile in mind. It's great that we can see so much of the internet on our phones, but damn, is it limiting for design. There's the computer design that's what actually look good, and then working backwards to strip all the nice design back out to some bland, minimal bullshit. Ah well. I guess that's just how it is. I can't even remember what LJ looked like on a flip phone, but somehow I read my friends page on that and typed up entries there. Lengthy ones even. Gotta press a number button three to four times to make one letter. And then I'd hop on AIM on my phone too. For just sending messages, alphanumeric beepers were definitely superior to flip phones until they had the ones with those slide out full keyboards. I miss phones having proper buttons. I saw some old really early iphones recently and even those with the few buttons on them just felt more responsive and better to use than what smart phones ended up becoming. Preferred the size then too. I don't want a giant phone. I miss the itty bitty phones that could just slip in your pocket. When I was a kid, a lot of shows had these tiny laptops and I figured we'd move to that for on the go computing stuff, not move our computers onto our phones. Or, you know, we'd keep things on PDAs but the phone would stay separate for commmunication. But that's over now. I see people post about switching to dumb phones, which is just hilarious to me. So many jobs require damn apps or doing something on your phone at work. Even at my last job where we had to have our phones locked up all day, we had to call out through an app because eventually they got rid of our call out line. And if you didn't use it, no call no show, boom, fired. You couldn't put in for PTO without the app either. Or look at your schedule. Or switch shifts with anyone. Everything was in that stupid app. My current job, I have to keep an app on my phone too. And the one I worked briefly in between those two? Another app. That app was how we clocked in! I really want to know what kind of people are lucky enough that they've gotten jobs to avoid all this. It seems like more and more jobs just come up with reasons why you must have a phone for some stupid app. And my university always has professors, department heads, mentor, etc contacting me and expecting quick responses (at a rate they don't response to me back at half the time, of course) and I need to use a specific app to access that on mobile. So if they start bothering me, I gotta quickly contact them that way and edit any stuff in my dashboard that way too. I swear to god they always wanna contact me when I'm at work for some reason. My bank stuff? Pretty much trash on the computer, works best on mobile. Because of course. I kind of miss having a dedicated digital camera, but why bother? My phone takes better pictures at a cheaper price than the majority of "affordable" cameras. And damn have those fuckers skyrocketed in price. There are cameras out there that are 15 years old and now cost more than they did when they launched, and are now significantly more expensive than a slightly old smart phone with a camera that's leagues better. To get an actually better camera than my phone, I'd have to spend thousands. It's more bang for my buck to just get a phone with a good camera and sync the pics to my computer, then do the proper editing/adjusting on the computer. I thought about getting an old dedicated music player, but can I justify that when my phone can handle storing all of my music? I actually used to keep some music on my old flip phones too. I'm not going back to CDs. They were the worst of everything. The players were cumbersome, weird shapes to lug around and too heavy compared to a cassette player or an mp3/flac player. The sound quality can easily be matched by a digital file on a phone. They aren't as aesthetic nor have the nice sound of a vinyl nor the quirks of cassette sound. They're the worst of everything. I'm not going to vinyl either. I want something to move with me. Most people who buy them don't even listen to them. You're shitting up the world with more unused plastic. At least use it! I've started collecting cassettes again. I have a good enough cheap player, but I plan on getting something better to record from eventually. I only buy FLAC files when it comes to digital music. There is something nice about being full disconnected from everything with a device that only plays music. I listen to music a lot on my computer through IINA too, which honestly for both music and video, is so much better IMO than VLC. (Not that VLC is shit, but it feels dated in a bad way design-wise and I definitely noticed better picture quality when playing through IINA with some files.) Which is weird because at this point in my life, I don't care that much about music or film, though I did mostly enjoy going to the theater again after ten years of not bothering with it. I wish going to the movies wasn't so expensive though. And those seats, so bad. But the pretzels. That giant pretzel. I should post a picture I took of my pretzel here at some point. It was huge. So beautiful. Work continues to be bullshit. The district manager is complaining about the dumb company metric thing being low. The one thing they hyper-focus on that all the customers fucking hate, but everything else is good. But because this one thing is bad, they've been threatening all our staff should be fired. Yeah, sure, just retrain a whole new crop of people when you rely on your current staff to train new people and can't seem to keep anyone. But you know, wendigo logic doesn't make sense to rationally thinking people. So, it's whatever. The end goal of companies these days is to destroy them and loot what you can in the process. They don't really care about the metrics. If we succeeded at that, they'd find something else to complain about, because that is what they do. It gives them joy. I need to get more qualifications and look into how to be a freelancer for my field. I'm sure there will be complaints tomorrow that I called out today because I was sick. I was sick yesterday too, working through a high fever and so sick to my stomach I couldn't eat much of anything, dizzy all day. I'm not killing myself for a wendigo. I need at least one day to recover. And they need to hire more people, not stack even more responsibilities on a tiny crew. But they're not going to change, so I'm not thinking about it. Once that rot infests a place, it will always stay that way going forward. That reminds me. The guy they promoted who doesn't know how to do shit is really getting pissed off at how little training he's gotten. They haven't even show him how to take in orders properly. Our old guy who used to do this job, supposedly he might come back. They're really, really desperate to get him back while telling us every day that he's totally replaceable. This is what happens when mediocre people get in power and kiss ass to wendigos. It all goes to hell, by design. We'll see if this guy lasts or not. I wouldn't be surprised if he quits and goes back to his old job. He can't do that job right now due to some physical issues. But those issues will go away. The other girl they hired called out again. Not because she was sick like me, but because she was hungover and wanted to get some beauty related stuff done. And here I am worrying about calling out while actually sick. Here I am working days actually sick. *Sigh* On a positive note, my new shoes can in the mail and they fit. I walked in my old ones enough to get holes in them. It was getting really bad in the days before the new shoes arrived. Poor shoes. They put up with so much. I really like the design of the new ones. I hope they last a long time. Now that I don't work at that old job anymore, I don't have to replace my shoes every 3-4 weeks. (Though shoes are designs to last less miles than they did back in the 90s and 2000s, which were also less than the 80s and less than the 70s...) I'm never going back to normal width ever again either. Extra wide forever. My toes can finally moe freely. Not going back to regular socks either. Toe socks are so much better. Less sweat, less smell, no toe jam anymore, better movement for my toes. I don't know who regular socks and shoes are designed for, but it ain't my feet. 12/13/25 Haha, where to begin. So much work drama. Let's begin at the top. Many months ago, one of the managers left because he went to a different building to try and help fix the mess a building manager who used to run our building is making at the new building who should've already been hired for physically assaulting customers and employees and illegally singing up customers for random things and making fake orders in our system to boost numbers. He's presently doing that at other building even as of this week. Anyway, that guy left to try and make things less bad there. (It's not working.) His replacement was someone moved over from the just newly appointed district manager's old store and a buddy of said guy. District manager was also already incompetent and pretty much no one liked him already. He's gotten a bigger ego since the promotion and become even more a shithead. Anyway, he moves this guy over to replace the competent guy we had before. The new guy immediately comes in with the attitude he is destined to take current building manager's job soon. They're about the same level as incompetent, but current building manager is at least friendlier and less likely to get on your case about minor shit. (He is a liar though. All three of these fucks are constantly lying to make themselves look good or other people look bad.) We have a very competent manager and a competent manager of a specific service who both hate the new guy. Assistant manager quickly bails and gets a better paying job elsewhere at a lower stressed place (good for him, miss him though). Manager of specific service would like competent manager who left's position and wants to have me promoted to his old position because I have the qualifications for it. District and region manager are on board with at least his move, less so whether I can be moved to a different department. But anyway, his promotion is basically guaranteed. Except not. So building manager says he has another potential candidate to interview as well and wants to give everyone a "fair shot" at the position. Turns out the other candidate is building manager's friend and the guy does not have the qualifications for this job. Everyone finds out, new manager makes a big stink about how biased that is and district manager requires the new manager to do the interview out of fairness. The guy is not hired, but the manager of specific service nearly quits over this. New manager then, out of nowhere, comes in with another potential candidate, interviews her himself, and hires her on the spot in the interview. We learn after the interview she is a longtime friend of his. We learn later he is sexually interested in her. MORE ON THAT LATER. Manager of specific service informs everyone he is quitting and they have until X day to find his replacement. Again, he suggests I take his place since I have the qualifications and have no problem working with those types of customers. (Before I was moved to a different department, he was already training me.) The building manager, the new manager, and the district manager are then in agreement that they will not move me and do not even acknowledge I have any skills in it. Begin to start trying to gaslight me about it and others that I have no idea what I'm talking about, even though I often have to go over there and help them with said thing anyway. New girl starts immediately higher pay than most of everyone who's been there a long time. She's nearly fired in the first week because the district manager cannot verfiy much of anything on her resume and finds she has a pretty lengthy criminal record, including offenses as recent as four months prior to her being hired. None of this was disclosed. The new guy BEGS them to hire her anyway. He suggests she can even take over some of the duties of the guy quitting AND some of my duties. She's kept on, but cannot take over any of my duties because you need a clean record for my job. She quickly proves useless at the other service as well and cannot correctly pronounce common brand names for that field. So they still need to fill that one quitting guy's spot. They pick some dude who has no past work experience, no certifications, and no college degrees in said field because the new manager guy just liked his vibe. I saw the resumes he dumped. At least three were fully qualified for the job. In fact, it seemed he mostly tossed the applications of qualified people in general, coming up with weird ass reasons why some people couldn't even be brought to the interview stage. But this guy was cool. We learn he thinks they could be friends and that was a big factor in hiring him and that both that manager and the district manager are in agreement that "anyone could do that job with a few hours of training anyway, no certifications needed!". They announce a few employees to get some training (but no promotion) to "help" new hire with his job. I am informed I do not need to be trained nor should I be helping. Quitting manager finally leaves and doesn't bother informing them of what services he finished before leaving his final night because he doesn't give a shit about any of them anyway and the information, for anyone who was trained on it, is easy to find and easy to continue if necessary. He answers few calls after leaving, none to the new manager. Customers are already angry their stuff isn't done the day after he leaves. The new manager guy, as usual, starts spouting off confidently incorrect information to customers and telling them wrong prices for services (because he doesn't understand what is included in each service) and he claims to have done things he has not done. The new hire is even less about to do anything. He'd already been pushing off stuff to be from week one. Day two, they're panicking and quickly arranging training sessions at other stores because the new guy really doesn't understand anything and neither does new manager guy or the new girl he hired. Day three and new manager is asking other employees to finish his work. Day four and he's asking me to finish it and deal with angry customer calls about his own fuck-ups. New hire still hasn't gotten much of any training yet. The same week as this fuckery, the new girl tells us about new manager guy sexually harassing her at a local spot and him trying to get her to cheat on her SO. He also has an SO, which she is aware of and confused why he would cheat on her. He tells her he doesn't really care much about her anymore anyway, so it's fine, she should just cheat or break up with her boyfriend and they could be together. She's grossed out and already had no interest in him. He tells people at the local hangout that they're on a date, which she has to refute repeatedly. She didn't even invite him to hang out with her. She had intended to hang out with other people there. He keeps touching her while they're there and getting too close, trying to get her to come home with him, and other weird shit. This continued into work where he starts hovering over her, getting really close, and touching her a lot while continuing to make advances at work. She reports him to HR for sexual harassment. Building manager has a talking to with him. It's been weird between them every since. It becomes clear he didn't just hire her because they were friends. He was hoping being her boss could lead to getting with her. I had suspected something might be going on with them. Multiple people wondered, because of how much he was already hovering over her and being kinda weird with her. But I guess it was one-sided and she didn't pick up on the stuff until he got really, really weird about it. She herself, other than not being competent in that one service and disqualified from the one I do, is just not that great of an employee. Calls out at least once a week for hangovers because she gets drunk every single night. Sometimes it's two or more times a week. She doesn't even just take a couple hours off and come in later. She'll take off a full shift for a hangover. The other new hire, besides having no qualifications, is just generally lazy. We once counted him taking 12 breaks in a 3 hour time span. Two of which were twenty minute bathroom breaks. In addition to his allotted two 15 minute breaks that he extendes to twenty to twenty-five minutes (he usually take like 4 or more of these a day and hopes no one notices) and always stays twenty minutes over his lunch breaks too. We soon catch that he's vaping during these times, or smoking. Sometimes, he smokes in the car with new girl. It becomes quite obvious he ALSO trying to get with her. (Even though she's nearly double his age, lol) She is obviously to this shit, somehow. IDK, maybe because she's fucking half-drunk every day. She even let's this guy smoke alone in her car and let's him hang onto her keys for a while because he's "just a kid". I'm about half-convinced she knows these guys are trying to get with her and she's just playing dumb to see what she can get out of it. Because it's hard to believe a woman her age, with a criminal record, who also has a teenager herself, cannot pick up on what's going on around her with dudes. But IDK. Since I won't be getting that promotion, I've decided to help as little as possible with that other department. And that's pretty solidly made it clear to me this location and company is not something to move forward with in the long-term. I plan on staying for at least a full year's worth of time though. That looks better on a resume. And my one year there will roughly line up with around when I should finish off my master's. So it'll be a good time to start looking elsewhere and moving on anyway. I'm not really mad about it. This is still a better job than my last two ones, in terms of stress and toxicity. The dumb drama is kinda funny to watch. And I kind of get a kick out of people being like "oh I'm sorry did we ask too much labor out of you, you're not tired are you". You could not tire me with any task in this building. LOL. Some people have no clue what actual hard labor feels like. At my last job, by the end of it when the work was really stacking up because they were downsizing every department and making people do the jobs of several at once, all of which were already hard manual labor tasks, I went from doing 14-18 miles a day and going up the distance of Stone Mountain in terms of ladder usage to averaging about 24 miles a day and averaging go up and down Stone Mountain every single day. And that was mostly on metal catwalks and cement with nearly all of that being running at top speed. My lunch break basically disappeared and I was doing around 11 hours of this shit a day in a building with no heating or air conditioning. Whatever it was outside it was inside, or in the summer, ten to fifteen degrees hotter. People would faint all the time and that was before things got bad. "Are you tired?" LMAO. You cannot make me tired. Honestly, the physical labor wasn't even why I left the last job. It was the ever increasing ignoring of labor laws that made everything much more dangerous (someone was getting seriously injuried every week) and being constantly screamed at for "not working hard enough". I like being pushed to my limits of labor, but not while someone's telling me I'm a piece of shit. Fuck off. I had to leave that place. I was starting to get the thoughts of tossing the building manager off a catwalk directly into heavy machinery. And I knew I was more than capable of being able to lift his lazy ass. Had to get out of there, man. What a piece of garbage. My last day there, he physically threatened a female employee among several other fucking bullshit things. But I think that was like the real nail in the coffin for me. Time to go, cause if I stay, it ain't gonna end well for him if he gets to threatening me or trying to her anyone in front of me. I just can't be there anymore. I don't want to go to jail. I don't think I've ever felt that level of rage for someone else I've worked with before. But it's hard not to when you're whole team is being worked harder and harder and getting seriously injured while this jackass finds new ways to shrink the team and make the job more dangerous and tells you it's because you suck. I had a concussion when I left that place and even that wasn't what made me leave. In retrospect, that's pretty fucked. Fuck that guy. He was trying to get people fired who got injured too, among other fucked things. There's more I could say on that, but damn it could be it's own page there's so much fuckery. And it was all in such a short period of time during a very sudden change in everything in the building. It wasn't like that when I started. But anyway, the current job is dumb with dumb customers and dumbass managers. But they're harmless kittens in comparison to that shit. I'm just watching the bullshit from afar at this point. It's kind of entertaining how incompetent a lot of outwardly confident people are. Watching them stumble into stupid, easily avoidable situations is amusing. And I'm not bitter that I've been side-lined, because that's just how these kinds of people are. It's not a reflection on me. Incompetent people who get in positions of power have the same MO. Promote other idiots, especially ones who glaze them constantly. Keep actually competent people beneath those people who can be used to get things done. Have all the upper idiots get the credit for the actually competent lower employees until the idiot management does enough big fuck-ups that even the skilled lower people just cannot keep it afloat and it crashes. The upper idiots are usually already rich people, so they move to a different company and do it all over again somewhere else. There's no point in kissing ass to this kind of person, because they always crash whatever they touch and once they're in, things generally stay fucked like that. It's best to just look elsewhere for places where competent leadership exists. A competent leader will promote competent people, because they know what they're doing. So, it's good that I've learned pretty early in this place isn't gonna work out. Saves me from wasting time and the skills I have learned here can be used elsewhere. There's no loss. I've gotten a break from physical labor too. I watch some of the other people in the store stress so much about impressing these idiots or how the building is running, and I just don't give a shit. It doesn't matter. That extra effort isn't going to get them anything but more work with no reward for it. One of the managers has bought into this bullshit so much she gets angry at other employees not kissing the company's ass. We had someone recently have a family member die and they were the ones who had to set up all the funeral stuff too. They took a week off to deal with everything, the funeral, closing out accounts, and all the other after death related duties you'd expect. They come back and their normal off days are the day after that. The building is short staffed those two days for some reason (would be the new manager's fault since he took over the building manager's scheduling duties) and she's calling up this employee like "well you already had a week off, you should come in on your off days to help us out" like they took a vacation or something. If they did both their off days, that'd also put them at working eight days in a row after having to deal with the death of a family member and the stress of all the legal/funeral stuff as well. The new girl agreed it made sense to do. The employee did not come in those days and had to call out another day (for more legal issues to sort out) and they were furious with this. How dare this person...attend to the normal expected duties of dealing with a person's death instead of coming in and working! They were actually mad and said it was unreasonable. This is disturbing behavior to me, but I've seen it so much. Much like when I'm dealing with bizarre customers who say I don't deserve a lunch break and shouldn't be mad about them trying to get me to work off the clock either, when I see shit like this from managers and from what I saw at my old job, I stand by my assumption. So long as they are not included in the group, a significant portion of humans would be okay with slavery. Even death is not a good enough reason to not work some shitty job for a few hours. Because we're short staffed to save the company money so any time even one person takes off it's a catastrophe. That's not my problem! That's the rich man's problem, and the rich man doesn't see it as one he needs to solve either. If they could, they'd gladly replace us all anyway. LOL. I don't care to put in extra effort for that. I'll come in extra hours if I wanted more money. But just to "help" because you're "short-staffed"? Hmm, sounds like an issue you should take up with someone higher about why you have so few employees. That manager who said that has come in many days hours before her shifts were scheduled to "get ahead" of work. So dumb. She doesn't even enjoy her job either. At least I liked running around at top speed and sliding down ladders climbing down the sides of and onto machines to fix shit. I got some fun out of that one job. This lady doesn't even like what she's doing, but comes in early to do more of it and she usually stays over past her scheduled time to keep working because what if it's not all done in time. I'm never going to dedicate myself to any company that doesn't give a fuck about me. Just dumbass behavior right there. She is getting paid for all that, but you know, unless I really needed that money, I'm not bothering with that shit every day. They cut her off on some of those days anyway, because the district manager has limits on how many hours max they can schedule people. So her trying to get ahead of work usually just gets the building manager in trouble for having too many hours on the clock that week. She's actually making things worse and making her department look less competent because they can't get it done in the scheduled hours, but she thinks she's helping and making herself look more devoted. *shakes head* Well, that's her problem to figure out. I have Christmas off this year. And since I'm off on the weekends, I'll just have Friday and then I'm off again. Almost a three day weekend, like how Thanksgiving almost was. My plans are to do absolutely nothing. I think I have to work New Years Day though. That's a bummer. At the old job, I had that day off too. Oh well. 12/06/25 It's really hard for me to grasp that it's the final weeks of the year. It doesn't feel like the end of the year. It just zipped right by. Time feels like it moves so much faster post-2020. I have no idea why. What a shit year it's been too. Haha, I feel like most people aren't looking forward to next year either. Nothing feels all that hopeful right now for anyone, except morons. But that's how morons are. They get excited about shit they should be terrified of and angry about shit that's not a big deal but their too stupid to understand that. The weekend's already over. The week feels too short. The break feels too short. I'm tired. I left my last job because of how much it was destroying my body and months later, I'm still tired. Am I just going to always be tired until I die? I don't get it. I'm doing much less physically and mentally exhausting work, but I feel almost the same level of exhaustion. Maybe nothing feeling hopeful is part of it. I tried out Affinity. I have now deleted Affinity. That shit was ass. Adobe alternative my ass. I'd rather use Photo Impact from 2007 than whatever that shit was. I am the #1 GIMP hater on the planet. That is some garbage shit and nowhere near close to a replacement for anything Adobe unless you only edit things so lightly practically any program in existence would be good enough for you. But goddamn that is a better Adobe alternative than this crap. And it used to be paid? Fifty bucks or something? Holy shit. I'm glad I never purchased it. It doesn't even feel finished. What a joke. Updated to Tahoe. Yeah, still not regretting letting go of Windows. I have no idea why everyone on Reddit and Twitter are bitching about Tahoe. It's barely noticeable, mostly aesthetic changes. TBH, it's kind of underwhelming, with how much I've seen people raging about how "different" it is. You can change most of the shit back too. I don't think it even messes with the dock when you upgrade. You have to go into the settings to change things. I've actually been on the beta for the phone and tablet for a while and TBH, I miss when it was more in your face. I liked it. Now, it's a much more minor change and you still got people screaming at the top of their lungs. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if some of these people are paid by Microsoft and the rest are just "something changed I hate it now" kind of people. Anyone saying they like it or are just indifferent/confused why everyone's freaking out are getting called deluded Apple fanboys. Apparently, if you are unbothered by something you are a deluded fanboy. I've noticed the Mac-related subreddits on Reddit lean very anti-Apple in a way that seems strange. Just go to Windows or Linux? IDGI. I also learned a lot of people use the default software on Mac. So weird. The default player looks different!! Okay, I'm going to keep using IINA and remain unbothered. What made me think some of these people are paid Microsoft people though were the complaints that Apple isn't doing enough with AI and is "behind" and you can use the computer just fine without any AI features turned on! OMG. Imagine, using a computer without AI. WTF. Speaking of AI shit, I've noticed a ton of pro-AI comments all over Reddit in general lately. I don't think a single one of those people are real, outside of the few who are developers trying to peddle their latest AI bullshit. I'm definitely no Apple fanboy. Apple products reached their peak many years ago, same as Windows did and the current leadership is trash. But goddamn, I'm not going back to Windows unless something really drastic changes and I'm not going to Linux unless Mac gets really, really fucked up. Because Linux has remained sub-par trash all of my life, and I've been following Linux from day one. Linux distros are like GIMP. It's good for people who do mostly nothing. I keep waiting for it to have really good software on it. Still waiting. Sigh. It's like I'd love to ditch Adobe, but no one has yet to make something better to replace everything Adobe. Not for anything beyond a baby beginner level anyway. I love the GIMP promoters like "well yes it's not as good, but it's good enough for most people" and when you say you are the person who needs that more advanced stuff, they just repeat "it's good enough for most people". If you won't address intermediate level, you're not gonna get professional level anything and you'll never get mass adoption. And that's not even getting into the bullshit the weird ways Linux distros can get fucky and attempting to solve any issues. Any time I've gone to experiment with Linux for a while, I always am left so deeply underwhelmed by the experience. If shit with Mac goes south, fuck it, I'll be on Linux. But I'll have to make my own version at that point. Haha, maybe I should start working on that at some point just in case. Maybe the GUI might look nice for once. But right now? You couldn't drag me to Linux for anything outside of a VM. Definitely not as my main OS. I don't give a fuck what distro. I miss the early 2000s. That was the peak for internet and computers. And no, it's not nostalgia clouding my head. There was far more effort put into everything back then. And we weren't quite yet at the dystopia levels of surveillance we are now. I miss LJ. I miss GJ. Little person sites. Weird shit on Limewire. Neat computer and phone designs. You could even find TVs with some style, if you wanted to look for one that did. I guess that's part of why the Tahoe thing really confuses me. We've been stuck in this cowardly dullness for so long. Taking any major chances with design, even if it ends up not being the greatest choices, shouldn't be seen as terrible. We should have more companies taking chances with ideas (and of course, listening to feedback after that as well). I'd love to see an era where tech actually looks interesting again and does interesting things. All we've got rigth now is AI spyware. I don't want this day to come, but if it does come to it, I can guarantee you any Linux distro I'd be making will be loud as fuck. But god, please don't make me have to do that. Update: Oh, I forgot to talk about Obsidian. I've tried Obsidian a bunch of times and it always was a failed venture. The community is definitely mostly pretentious doofuses, so that always sored things too. Tried it again today because I was looking for something to organize worldbuilding stuff in and IDK, something was just different this time. I have a lot I need to transfer from my poor brain into text. I started with a note about dragons because I figured that'd be quick and I was working on Luke's stuff again. And it's over 2k right now, not finished yet. Dreading getting to selkie and fairies. I should probably make a proper timeline in there. I'm going to test how it is writing fiction there. If that works well enough, I might ditch VSC for the most part. At least for that sort of thing. Currently, I have my Obsidian using the Rose Red theme, which reminds me of the old Bloodlust theme on Trillian Astra. I miss Trill. Good times. 12/04/25 Why was today so garbage? It's been a pretty garbage week in general though. It's Christmas time, time for everyone to be an asshole. Lady came in today. I'm helping a different department because I have no appointments scheduled until after lunch and I'm about to go to lunch anyway in a few minutes. I'm busy with someone at the moment. She insists across the building I need to see her. I say I can see her after lunch because I'm about to leave for lunch and when my lunch ends, and that I can see her as soon as I get back. She claims she has an appointment. She does not. I have no appointments until after lunch and I tell her that. She claims she does, calls me names, and claims she's going somewhere else and how ridiculous it is I won't see her because she drove so far out (why not make an appointment then?). I just say okay and continue helping the person I was already with. About to then clock out for lunch, she calls the store and demands to speak to the manager of my department and starts threatening if she doesn't talk to someone she's going to come in and cuss us all out and start a fight (what). Haha, that's me. I'm the person in charge. Hello. She tells me I'm supposed to see her because the online booking thing says we can take walk-ins. (Admitted she did not have an appointment and lied earlier to try and trick me into seeing her). I say yes, we can, I can take her outside of my lunch break. I can't take her during lunch. She says she came in before my lunch (literally just a couple minutes before) and I explain I cannot take walk-ins that late in. That extra time after is for appointments already in process. It's not an instant process. I need enough time to actually go through the process and I have extra duties I need to complete before going to lunch in addition to that. At the time she came in is outside of even the window for scheduling an appointment. She claims she came in earlier. I remind her she came in at a much later time than that and repeat again, there needs to be enough time to actually complete the whole process. I'm not skipping my lunch break to work through her walk-in. She then claims I'm not allowed a lunch that long and the website says my lunch is shorter. I repeat again, I have responsibilities before going to lunch and also need enough time to complete the process. She came in with too short of a window of time for me to do that. Then she hung up on me. Finally, I got to go to lunch after that and had to rush through the stuff I usually do before lunch. And that was just one of many bullshit events for the day. It would take forever to list them all. It's like every person who came in today was an absolute moron or a raging asshole, or both. I'm not even fully convinced that lady wanted to get anything done that day. Oh no, you have to wait? You're already here. Go to lunch like me and we'll meet back up. But she was already angry as soon as she came in. With people like that, who are raging but don't get anything accomplished, I always wonder how many of them are really angry and how many of them are bullshitting and are just making a scene because they enjoy making other people's lives hell. Like the anger is just a ruse. It's about causing drama and feeding off the drama. What a boring life. I also stand by my opinion that a sizeable portion of the population, so long as they thought they would be excluded from it, would be totally okay with enslaving a large portion of the rest of the population. When the lady first thought my lunch was just slightly longer than it really was, she actually got mad that my lunch was that long and that it was ridiculous for me to have that long of a lunch. Even with her misunderstanding, that would've put my lunch at still well under an hour. 30-60 minute lunches are...completely normal and standard in most places. It's perfectly normal to expect a service with my hours to have a lunch break anywhere in that time range. How dare my lunch be longer than she found acceptable! (And it wasn't even.) Imagine just telling someone you're already screaming and swearing at that you think their lunch break should be shorter. Earlier in the week, one of the managers got screamed at so much the manager started visibly shaking and that made the person scream at them even louder for having the audacity to "pretend" to be afraid. That manager also got screamed at on the phone this week too. Merry Christmas. I was thinking about how that Knitting Cult Lady has talked about both Disney being a cult but also "single family cults" (abusive families) use Disney as this tool to excuse all the bullshit abuse before it. "If you just did so and so right, we could go to Disney World". You know, that kind of thing. I feel like Christmas is also that for a lot of abusive people too. If you just did so and so right, we could all have a Merry Christmas, and of course, because you didn't, it's okay that I'm going to make it hell instead. And those people just do that to everyone. It's okay. It's all for ˜Christmas˜. They have to do that, so it'll be perfect. My parents did that every year. Treated everyone, especially us but also people working during the holidays, like monsters and every year from as early as I can remember until a few years past when I was eighteen, I was always told how I ruined Christmas for everyone. Some years my brother also got to share the blame as well. They would even blame being cruel to cashiers and other workers we encountered on us causing them to "have to" make a scene and so really, we were the ones who "really" hurt those people. Christmas is like the best time of the year for abusive, terrible people. They can do all kinds of asshole shit and people, because Christmas, will excuse it more than they would any other time of the year. Because most people in the west have gotten this particular bit of brainwashing. The perfect Christmas must be had, and it's okay to do normally bad things to get it. Even atheists seek it out while telling me songs about "our lord and savior Jesus Christ" is secular and normal to hear in every store for a month and a half. I'm so done with this shit. At least tomorrow is Friday. Can't wait till December ends. 12/01/25 It's a new month. I've created an archive page and moved all of November's entries over to it's own page. I think I'll be archiving by month going forward. If I ever really want to get very LJ-y, I might make each entry have it's own page at some point. I don't know if I care enough about that. If I bothered with that, I might add a comment feature here, but I'm pretty sure no one is reading this. So it'll probably just stay how it is right now with the monthly archive and no comments. I need to go to bed. Start of the work week again. The weekend isn't long enough. The work day is too long. Haha, what if I made a mood theme. I doubt I would, but if I ever did one of those again, I'm changing the dimensions and the moods. 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