This was me with beer. Gave it up over 15 years ago, as what was making me feel shitty about it was putting out the recycling bin filled with beer bottles and cans… and realizing just how much money I was spending on something that was doing nothing good for me. Stopped drinking in 2009 and don’t miss it a bit. Saving a lot more money as well…

Just got to have a wand like Bellatrix Lestrange’s then.

No politeness there…

The extremely gullible ARE the joke.

No one technically DID say anything, because it was a film set prop.

I’d have a field day with anyone losing their shit over this and thinking it was a real thing, by showing them the film it came from…

Damn… I wish I didn’t remember my dreams. Usually they involve me trying to clean a house where the rooms constantly change. That, and my car always seems to be turned on it’s roof.

God only knows wht I keep coming back to that weirdness.

Fry that fucker up till it’s nice and golden, add some HP curry sauce and crack open a beer. Almost like Leberkäse…

Heaven. Will take all anxiety away.

…polite the environment…

Do they give it a sincere “Good day to you!”?

No, they won’t. You’ll only get a new car if the vehicle is new (within 5 years and under a certain mileage) and still being paid off, because then the financier/lender is still in the mix. Lenders can and will aim their own lawyers at the insurers.

This is the way.

It’s hard though, to just get liabilty on a car if you’re still making payments on it.

It’s gotta be 100% yours with no payments or liens on it.

Then you can go for a nice high liability policy. I’ve always bought older used and just gotten policies to cover OTHER people I may accidentally hit. No collision - If i’m not paying attention and slide off the road into a rock… that’s on me.

I also would add glass and theft to that liability policy. The glass coverage saved my ass a few years ago when I caught a rock behind (what else?) a dump truck.

Sweet Mother of Pearl!

Now waitaminit!

I like mothssesses.

Best favorite animal!

I do my backups manually.

As I have run unsuported Mac installs for the last 20 years, I started a long time ago, automatically partitioning my OS drives and making storage volumes to work off of.

The storage volume in the computer will have subfolders for the type of data - music, video, photos, etc.

When my storage volumes fill, I will pull my latest backup drive out of storage, hook it up then go into each storage subfolder, sort by date and add everything that’s newer than what’s in the backup drive. (which is actually how Apple’s Time Machine backups work - incrementally sorted by date - but I’ve had this method since the start, so I just stuck with it)

I just make sure to take note of how many files/folders I’m adding to the backup drive and note what it has at the start, then at the end, as a double-check of it all, before I clear the storage drive on the computer. (I did not do this and lost almost a years worth of music rips, waay back in 2003. Rebuilt the music I lost then iTunes threw a wobbler and lost the library for me. FML…)

The longest backup will ALWAYS be the initial one if you’re dealing with a first time backup. The rest, once you work out how to organize your files, is academic.

What I’ve found is that your tastes will change, you grab content you think you’ll want to hold onto forever… and then years later, you realize it’s low-bitrate, low-resolution, too pixellated… whatever… and you decide to delete it.

With the software doing the backups for you - it’s too easy to just let it rip and go have dinner while it works and you end up with files that you’d otherwise get rid of. Part of being a data hoarder is not keeping everything forever. There’s a ton of garbage online. Tastes change as you get older… You want to curate that shit so you can keep what’s most important - like family stuff.

And really good porn.

Yikes. Before you dip into any of the self-hosting, take and get a WD Gold drive - from Western Digital directly (wd.com) - do NOT go through Amazon or NewEgg or any third party merchant. Send in the warranty that goes with it and register the drive (this is for covering the off chance it’s a DOA unit) Then get a good quality enclosure to pop the drive into and take your time and back up EVERYTHING onto that new HD.

Don’t use an SSD.

You want a spinning platter drive, as this is backup only, so once it’s full with all of your content, it gets dated and labeled and popped into a drawer for safe keeping. If you have countless terabytes of data, get more drives and swap them into the enclosure, date and incrementally fill. A fine tip sharpie to note what’s on the drive is fine, or if you’re obsessively anal about it, make a spreadsheet with that info… If your drives are kept dry and stored with care they will last for DECADES…

The truth if being honest here - I’m a data hoarder and most of the stuff I’ve tucked away since I first came online (in 1999) is now on drives that I maybe spin up once a year. I used to have the notion that it was critical that all my shit was accessible all the time and I ended up dropping money on networked storage… and over time, realized that as long as I knew where the files were, DID have the most important stuff - family photos and scans - tucked away not only in long term storage, but on multiple drives in multiple machines, (home, work, laptop) it was okay not have it served up instantly.

Just reading your post made me go cold inside - I can only imagine what you were going through until it got sorted. From a bonafide old school data hoarder… Please, back your shit up locally. Use enterprise drives.

Then sort a self-hosting soultion.

Jazz 2.0 just dropped

LOL!

That or Progressive Acid Folk.

Bwahahahah!

Wait until it dies and earns it’s “angle” wings!

(…am gonna let myself out now… )

Dad joke for coders? Ooooo… you!

This is SO true for SO many familiess. Intergenerational social swing is a real thing.

If you’ve got way cool grandparents that are the exception and not that rule, it’s critical that you spend time with them - as adults.

I got decades with my grandparents - both children of the Great Depression - and I learned SO much from them. (Who’d have thought that budgeting and housekeeping and living with little money to spend would be a critical skill in 2025?)

Truth is, they raised 9 kids and none were bigots or judgemental at all (I had awesome aunts and uncles) and I think that all my cousins that spent time with them picked up on their kindness and generosity and knowledge…

A 56 y/o half-brother that I would do almost anything for and a step-sister that… well… whatever.

Yikes! Y’all gotta eat better if your poop scrapes are cementing themselves to the bowl…

Damn!

This is it exactly.

And I kind of like that there are no total upvote/downvote stats tied to our accounts.

Prevents karma farming so it disinclines the behavior to rage-bait or post controversial items for attention.

(Remember u/unidan? Guy karma farmed hugely and eventually got rumbled creating some brouhaha over the difference between crows and jackdaws. Absolute stupidity that got the better of him…)

The content is more the focus here…

Thing is, those are guardsmen. Probaly are called up and pulled from their families to end up in Chicago… All for the benefit of a deflecting old fuck that doesn’t want us to remember that he’s likely on the Epstein list for doing the dirty to underage girls.

This is the EXACT thing we’re supposed to forget. Epstein.