Then we learned that if you wanted to get the right answer from people … all you had to do was confidently post an answer, any answer, especially if it was wrong … and so many people would jump on you so fast to tell you how stupid you were and give you the right answer.

… and you also had to tie an onion on your belt which was the style of the time.

Enjoy and celebrate any time you have together now, for as long as possible and as much as possible, if you get mad at one another, screw it all, apologize and talk and work through it as quickly as possible … because in the end, it feels like no time has passed at all.

Might as well be … you have no idea of the sadness I feel. I am completely normal, I go about my work and I do the things I always did before … on the outside everything is perfectly normal. Unfortunately, my mind, my thoughts and my perception of the world has changed … I no longer feel the same sense of joy and happiness of doing things … I always go back to thinking of the person I lost and how she is not here any more … it’s pervasive and deep. I feel like someone has draped a big heavy wet blanket over me and it hangs on me all the time. And yes … the colors of the world don’t seem to be as bright any more … they don’t fill me with the same awe and happiness they once did. They do cheer me up but it’s like lighting a tiny candle in a deep dark cave.

I’ve lost lots of people in my life … my brother, my aunts and uncles … friends from my age group, friends who were older, friends who were younger … my grandparents … both my parents … and I’ve handled all those with a lot acceptance and understanding … I lived through them with my wife who supported me through all of it … but this … this is like having your soul removed and you feel like you are operating your body like an empty vessel. Life feels very mechanical now … I go about doing things like I always did but everything is without meaning now and I constantly wonder why I am doing anything.

Enjoy every moment with her. There will be times of differences, arguments and disagreements … work your way through them and if there is ever any bad feeling, always go back and apologize … none of it matters. The greatest things that hurt the most right now are the memories of how I wanted to win arguments and got angry and mad over some stupid things. No relationship is ever perfect, you will miss out on things you like or want to do … but the same will be true for her … both of you will lose on certain things because you both want to be together. That is all within reason too … if either one of you is outright abusing or taking advantage of the other and the relationship is completely lopsided, then you got to leave that situation. Otherwise … shrug off any bad feelings, always go back and talk through them, no one is keeping score or racking up points … because in the end, all you will ever miss is being with that person whether in good times or in bad.

Enjoy whatever time you have together because if you think you have years or decades to be together … in the end, no matter how long it lasted, it feels like no time has gone by at all.

My wife of 30 years died a few months ago and I’m having to adjust to life without her.

Life is freakin weird now … I feel like some kind of ghost that doesn’t exist … I feel like a big part of my life died with her and at the same time I feel like I’m alive but not fully … I’m alive but not fully … I feel like part of me disappeared but I didn’t die … quite honestly, sometimes I feel like a ghost that didn’t fully cross over and I’m stuck in this life until I can move on.

I have a ton of supports, family and friends, work and things to do and I keep very busy with stuff … but all of it just doesn’t mean much to me any more.

And family and friends keep telling me I have all the freedom in the world to do whatever I want … but you know what? … life is no longer enjoyable when you don’t have the person you want to share everything with. I had so many plans and things I really, really wanted to do … but now it’s all meaningless and pointless … I have no real enjoyment for many things any more. Even turning on the TV to watch something, anything no longer really thrills me and I watch something for a few minutes, my mind wanders and I have to go do something else. I go online and it’s the same thing, I read part of something and I have to move on to the next thing … I play video games and I can’t concentrate on it for too long.

About the only thing left to me now is riding my motorcycle but I can’t even do that because the weather is still too cold here in northern Ontario … so I can’t even enjoy that.

And in the meantime, I have to watch the world burn … life is just very strange for me at the moment.

How about instead of trying every complicated stupid way to regulate users and especially children … you regulate and control companies and corporations instead.

Wow … I think AskJeeves was the first major search engine I relied on when I first started going online. That and ‘Dogpile’. I remember a friend of ours bugging me to check out a thing called ‘Google’ at the time.

Are you sure you’re in the shower? … or at a rowdy German Octoberfest and covered in urine?

runaway infinite consumption at all costs … aka … cancer

Xmas version 2025.12.25 just got released … next incremental release is 2026.01.25, which will work its way up during the year to the final annual version of 2026.12.25

Generally the fediverse on lemmy, piefed and mastodon for me … lots more out there and it’s fun to explore new branches and directions of the fediverse and the communities of people they attract.

It’s daunting, challenging, confusing and complex … but that’s the beauty of it … it feels like wandering around and exploring the early social media internet from the early 2000s and this strange feeling that its going to become a whole lot more as time goes on.

There are still plenty of websites and even news websites that either avoid this or break reader mode to prevent people from using it.

If all you want is to read 5000 words of something you were looking for … just display those 5000 words and nothing else.

We don’t need graphics, pictures, images, blocking, ads, pop-ups, videos or any other suggestions … just give us the content, it’s all we want sometimes.

Of all the people in the world that need or should have it mandatory to have round the clock public surveillance … it should be our political leaders

They claim to be working for the people … yet the people never really know what the fuck these leaders are doing

We did a little tour on our own into Germany one spring, about 20 years ago. It was only a few days, we didn’t have much money and we absolutely didn’t know what we were doing. We rented a car and just started wandering. It was just at the point of technology where GPS was still new. We didn’t have any so we just started driving with a shitty map and no clue.

We had done some traveling in other countries before and we had met several famously obnoxious German tourists. We had partly expected to meet equally arrogant Germans in their home country.

Instead we met the most open, kind hearted, brilliant people ever. Everywhere we stopped, we’d meet three or four locals who were more than happy to give directions, recommend restaurants, bars, tea shops and sites to see.

At one point we met a truck driver who gave us a ton of information and showed us a driving route on a big format ringed binder map book. When he was done talking, he left the book. We told him he was forgetting his book and he said we could have it as it had detailed updated map info of the entire country. It was an expensive book and I knew it, so I told him not to give it away. He insisted and said he didn’t mind.

I still have that map book on my shelf and whenever I see it, I think of that trip and all those people we met.

Totally loved Germany after that.

Guy in the bathroom stall: … I use Mac!

Guys and gals pissing in the hallway, lobby, parking lot, bushes, behind the building and inside the office: … we use windows 11!

My favorite part to that is to discover something for the first time, fall in love with it, think it’s the most amazing thing ever … then realize that it’s ten years old and everyone got excited about it a long time ago.

But it also means I don’t give a shit anymore and I just enjoy watching things that make me happy and interest me, instead of trying to chase after the latest fad.

Friend of mine in southern Ontario labels his

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+1 for Christmas Vacation

We watch it every year