2007 Toyota 4runner

I have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies and am an avid DIYer, so I need something with room for gear/lumber/etc. a roof rack to strap on my kayak or other bulky gear, a trailer hitch to tow small trailers or put a bike rack or basket on to carry a cooler and such when there’s no more room in my trunk, and some space for friends and/or my dog. Some ground clearance is nice for when I find myself on shitty deeply rutted dirt roads, and 4wd for when I drive onto the beach to go fishing. I’m also an essential worker (911 dispatch) who has to be able to get to work in the snow, and I work a weird shift that sometimes has me commuting before plows have been through.

I don’t really go “off roading,” I’m not going out looking for mud and Rocks to go driving over for it’s own ŝako, but I do sometimes, in the course of whatever else I’m doing, have to drive off the road.

I also sometimes camp in my car, and it’s nice to be able to fit an air mattress in the back, it’s a bit tight but it works.

It’s also the used car I could afford when my previous one got totaled on me.

My previous cars have been roughly the same sort of midsized SUVs- 2000 Isuzu Trooper (I really loved that car) and 2007 Chevy Trailblazer (it did everything I needed to but I was less of a fan, nothing in that car was quite where I thought it should be) so I’ve kind of dialed in that that’s the right size vehicle for me.

Ideally I’d like to have a small EV for most of my daily commuting and errands, and then a (small) 4x4 pickup truck for when I need it. Something like the old ford rangers (the new ones are bigger than I need) with an extended cab (not a full crew cab, just some back jump seats) and a 6 or 7ft bed. The maverick shows some promise, I’m hoping they add a midgate when they refresh it in a couple years.

But I don’t have the parking space or budget for 2 cars, so the midsize suv is kind of the compromise I’m stuck with.

My family has always had good luck with Toyotas, and I like my 4runner well enough, if I had the budget to be picky and needed a car, there’s a good chance I’d be looking at 4runners, though unless my financial and parking situations get better my next car will probably be whatever 10+ year old midsized SUV comes my way when this one goes (still going strong though, slowly inching up on 200k miles and still no major issues)

I listen to some metal among a lot of other music, wouldn’t really call myself a metalhead but I have a lot of friends who are

I’m in my 30s, been a lot of metalheads in my friend group since middle or high school, don’t really see that changing any time soon. Overall I like metalheads, under the gruff-looking exteriors most of them are big marshmallows, and overall pretty intelligent people.

There’s a handful of assholes, racists, some people whose main interest in metal is that they like to be too rough in the mosh pit, etc. but the majority of metalheads I’ve met hate their guts. And like with all subcultures, fandoms, etc. there are some who are annoying pretentious pricks about it but are essentially harmless.

It’s more of a habit than an addiction.

If I have pretty much literally anything else going on, I don’t tend to think about or miss the internet.

But if I don’t have anything else going on, I’ll probably reach for my phone or end up on a computer pretty quickly without even realizing it

I’d like to skip Christmas, I get nothing out of it but headaches. I don’t enjoy the family get togethers (individually or in small groups my family is mostly fine, but all of them at once is too much) I don’t want anything that can reasonably be asked for or given as a present, and I don’t have any space for the useless junk I’ll inevitably receive.

What I need/want is money. I’m not struggling, but I have projects and things I’m saving up for and whatever they’d spend on gifts if they feel like they need to give me something I’d much rather them just give me the cash or Venmo me. They’re not going to gift me a new heater, deck, washer/dryer, paint for my living room, etc. the best I can hope for is some gift cards to Lowes, home Depot, etc. and inevitably the cards will all be to different places so I can’t even use them all on what they’re intended to go towards, and there’s a good chance that once I’ve saved up enough I’ll get the best price at a store I don’t even have any gift cards for, so they’re going to sit around collecting dust because I’ll never remember to grab them when I need to go buy a box of screws or something.

Just give me cash.

The only reason I don’t have such a drawer, is an overall lack of drawers in my house, don’t really have one to spare to be a junk drawer.

Which is a damn shame because I could really use a drawer to throw some miscellaneous odds and hands that don’t have any other designated place to live.

I try to avoid the site like the plague, have never really attempted to use it, and when the internet inevitably dumps me there is my search for something I’ve never found any value in it.

But I think the idea is that it’s supposed to be sort of a brainstorming tool.

Think back to the days when physical magazines and catalogues were more of a thing. When you were planning or designing or working towards some goal you might gather up a bunch of clippings, pictures, articles, recipes, your own notes, sketches, and doodles, etc. and pin them up on a cork board (sort of a “vision board”) or maybe put them in a book or folder or something so they were readily available for you to look at for inspiration or reference as you go about your planning.

I think that’s what Pinterest was supposed to be. Sort of a place to save all your little inspirations and reference pictures for whatever project or goal you have in mind.

And I kind of suspect that for that purpose it does its job well enough (though I don’t really get what benefit it has over a folder full of pictures and word documents, spreadsheets, etc. saved to your computer or phone)

And I guess maybe having a platform where you can share that sort of virtual vision board and get feedback on it and see what others are planning is maybe useful for some people’s creative process.

But it’s also kind of like glimpsing into someone’s personal notebook full of their illegible handwriting, half-finished sketches and doodles, and made-up shorthand. It probably makes lots of sense to that person, but since you don’t know what was going on in their mind when they put it together and it was never edited for someone else to make sense of, it might as well be the ramblings of a mental patient.

And since most of the rest of us only stumble onto Pinterest in search of a source for something - a place we can buy something, the recipe for food, an article or the context for a picture, a how-to guide, etc. it seems like a total waste of time because most people only share the picture and a couple quick thoughts or hashtags or whatever, it’s basically useless.

I’d say there’s one narrow exception for people who espouse Nazi views in order to infiltrate and undermine the Nazis.

That’s outside the scope of the question though.

I had to buy a handful of components so I guess it counts

Built my first PC recently. Mostly it’s my wife’s old components after a few years of upgrades stuffed into a new case, but it’s new to me. Pretty much just had to buy the case, a hard drive, PSU, CPU cooler, and a couple fans.

It’s not a powerhouse by modern standards (though it was pretty beefy for its time when my wife first built it) with a pre-ryzen amd CPU, and a 970, but it’s still running most of what I’ve been throwing at it (it helps that most of my steam library is 10+ years old)

We’re a little short on space in our house, nowhere to squeeze in another desk for a computer so I built it in a HTPC case and I’ve been gaming on our 70" TV with surround sound with our hue lights synced up to it, and it’s been pretty sweet, and astonishingly it hasn’t burst into flames from being crammed in my entertainment center with limited airflow.

It’s nice to be back to PC gaming, and I’m having almost as much fun tinkering with it and getting everything set up how I want it. Still a couple more tweaks to make, gotta figure out how I want to set up KODI, need to get a decent wireless keyboard and mouse, maybe a couple more controllers, find a way to enable HDMI CEC control so I don’t need to fiddle with the PC and receiver volume separately, etc. and then maybe some more upgrades when budget allows

My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.

My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we’ll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.

He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he’d lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren’t even out of living memory, we’re barely a handful of generations removed from them.

The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children’s shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they’d take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.

There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.

This is true, and I did think about mentioning that but decided to keep it brief because once I start talking about trusts I’d find myself out of my depth pretty quickly and probably open up a rabbit hole of other financial strategies I’m not prepared or qualified to go down (and also to keep my comment at a more readable length)

But since we opened that can of worms (and like I said, this is getting out of my depth, so there’s a very real possibility that some or all of what I have to say after this is wrong, so take it for what it’s worth)

We also don’t know how much money we’re talking about here. The line between qualifying for benefits and not can be razor thin sometimes, and while we might assume that we’re talking about 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars or even more where a trust would absolutely make sense, we might actually only be talking about a couple thousand bucks, maybe not even enough to afford a couple months of rent depending on where you are, but potentially enough to fuck up someone’s benefits depending on where some government bean counters drew the line. It might be difficult or impossible to find a financial institution willing to act as a trustee for such a small amount, and there may not be any individual they trust to fill that role, and once the lawyers and such are paid there may not even be much left over.

There’s also the possibility that the parents are counting on the sibling(s) to sort of act as trustees without putting it in writing. We don’t know what their relationships and personalities are like, or what conversations they’ve had with their parents that maybe OP isn’t privy to. There could be an understanding there that they’re getting everything so that they can continue to provide for their disabled sibling after the parents are gone, and OP hasn’t been made aware of that (some people are really uncomfortable talking about this kind of stuff and avoid it even though they really should) or misunderstood what the intention is. That of course depends on the siblings being trustworthy and generally having their shit together well enough, which isn’t a given of course and their situation could change drastically.

There’s also the possibility that a trust is exactly what’s happening and OP either misunderstood it or just plain doesn’t like it. A lot of people out there are pretty clueless about financial matters. If the siblings were named as the trustee (it’s often not a good idea to have the trustee be a close relative, but that’s neither here nor there) I could see some people viewing the situation as “they left all the money to my siblings” because they’re not getting a big one time payout and the money has to go through their siblings in some fashion.

Again, I’m talking all in hypotheticals, there are countless “ifs,” “ands” and “buts” here, we don’t know the specifics of OPs situation so we can only speculate.

I don’t recall ever hearing that specifically

Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there’s a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn’t really to be taken literally, it’s more that once you put something online it’s out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can’t really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

But back to what you’re saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

There’s a lot of redundancy in the internet, there’s no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it’s millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that’s left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

I think it’s also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.

My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.

There’s no complicated inheritance situations in my family, if you have kids everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don’t have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.

So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn’t have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents’ all to himself.

We’ve already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent’s house, I’ll sign over my third of our uncle’s house to her, and she’s happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)

We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw

There’s no one size fits all answer here, it’s going to depend on how much money, how severe the childs disabilities are and what their care needs are, and what other sort of inheritance might be on the table ( for example one child gets the money and another child gets the house)

If the child is able to live on their own, then yeah, it’s a dick move and the parents are just playing favorites and being ableist.

If they have significant care needs- nursing home, psychiatric treatment, home health aides, visiting nurses, etc. then there might be some logical arguments to be made. If they’re already qualifying for some sort of government assistance then a large windfall of cash could potentially disrupt those benefits since they now have too much money to qualify.

That can be a real headache to navigate, they may need to arrange all new care for themselves, maybe switch doctors, find new housing, etc. which may be a lot for them to manage depending on the extent of their disabilities, and unless that inheritance is incredibly large it will probably run out at some point and leave them in a position where they need to navigate the system to get back on those government benefits, which is often no small feat.

So there could potentially be situations where it’s better for them to not leave them money and cause significant disruptions to their care and living arrangements.

This is all totally hypothetical without knowing the specifics of the situation. There’s a million different things to consider here and everyone’s situation is unique, and at best we’re getting one side of this story and don’t really know what the parents thoughts and reasoning are since we haven’t heard in directly from them (and it could very well be that their reason is just as shitty as it appears on the surface, I won’t discount that possibility)

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but I am so fucking ready for it.”

She’s a Malinois, and as far as her breed goes, she’s probably just about the laziest one in the world, which still puts her high in the running in the list of most energetic dog I’ve ever met.

I’ve never seen her walk when running or jumping was an option, she gives 110% to everything she does, even if it’s just running up the stairs to go to bed. I’m fairly certain she has never touched half of our stairs because she pretty much just jumps from landing to landing.

My aunt and uncle hosted an exchange student from China.

He was a bit of an awkward weirdo, I kind of got the impression he was somewhat wealthy, seemed nice enough, just weird, and didn’t seem to have much interest in experiencing anything American except for buying clothes and such that I guess we’re more expensive in China.

After a few months, they noticed their cat walking funny and got him checked out, and found what looked like burns on his paws, and they weren’t sure how it happened.

They checked their security cameras, and saw the exchange student holding the cat to the hot stove.

Sent him packing really quick.

People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t. But my wife likes Christmas so I do. I’m an atheist, she’s Wiccan, we were raised Catholic and vaguely catholic-ish respectively.

We do a real tree, if I’m gonna go through the trouble I’m gonna do it right. It also means I don’t have to haul the damn thing up and down the ladder to my attic every year, I just strap it back onto my car and haul it over to my friends house for our next bonfire.

We do a string of lights around our porch and put out a garden flag and that’s about all of our exterior decoration.

My wife also puts out a few interior decorations inside the house, stockings by the fireplace, etc.

My dude, what the actual fuck are you on about?

“Know your enemy” isn’t a saying about peaceful turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor, forgiveness bullshit

It’s about knowing how and why they fight so you know how to defeat them.

You can’t and won’t win over every individual Nazi or klansman and make them see the light, but each one you do is one less enemy on their side and one more ally on yours, and my talking to them you get a better understanding on how to beat them.

If you didn’t think people can change, you probably wouldn’t spend as much time arguing with people on the internet as you do. Not really much point in doing that since you’re not going to change their minds after all.

But even if you genuinely don’t think people are capable of improvement, I think it would still be worthwhile in a “know your enemy” sort of way.

I have a friend who worked at a convenience store in an area where the KKK still has a decent presence. The local grand wizard or dragon or whatever ridiculous rank he had took a liking to my friend (it should maybe be noted that my friend is practically a caricature of blond, blue-eyed whiteness.) I wouldn’t say they were friends, it was more than he was on the clock and couldn’t really afford to lose his job by telling some racist fuck to pound sand, they didn’t keep in contact outside of work, neither of them changed each other’s minds about anything (my friend is now engaged to a black woman) but they did have some fairly in depth and civil conversations about race and society and such.

I can’t say for what Mr Pointy Hat’s takeaway was from their talks, but my friend’s overall impression is that the klan guy was kind of stuck. He kind of seemed to know that the world had changed around him, and that maybe he was in the wrong and there was no place for someone like him anymore, but he was unable and/or unwilling to change himself to adapt to the new world and to different ways of thinking than he’d been brought up with, so the kkk was kind of his way of carving a safe space for himself out of the world where he knew how things worked and where he had some sort of value. And his hatred towards black people and other people different from himself wasn’t really that they should be killed or enslaved or treated poorly, but that he didn’t get why they needed to be part of the same society as him, sort of like if they could just all go off and live in their own countries he’d wish them the best in their endeavors.

I’m not saying that’s at all a good philosophy, I find it absolutely abhorrent, but it’s also more nuanced than I would have otherwise thought a klansman would be capable of.

I also won’t say that my friend necessarily had a perfect read on this guy, it could very well be that he totally took the wrong things away from what the guy said. And even if he did hit the nail on the head, with a sample size of 1, you can’t exactly extrapolate that to say that the rest of the klan or other racist shitbags feel the same way.

But I do think there can be some value in talking to some of these types of people, maybe not befriending them exactly, but building some sort of mutual understanding might help get some of them onto the right path before they end up too old and stuck in their ways like that guy.