It’s Lemmy. We’ve got to have at least one “America Bad” comment per thread, no matter how irrelevant.

Java. It’s familiar, it’s the one I use most at my job, and I’m not in love with any other language enough to choose something less pragmatic.

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said “T-Rex” were lame, but “Iguanadon” would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said “Pachycephalosaurus”, which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren’t anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided “fuck it” and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate’s degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it’s the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven’t looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

Ugh, yes!

I feel like there’s kind of an unspoken social pressure to be more or less non-chalant about most conversation topics. Like you’ve gotta know that someone is cool before you can let your guard down and show that you really care about something without it coming across as off-putting for whatever reason.

But not politics! Caring a lot about politics is responsible! And if you’re to a point where you’re already talking to someone about politics, it usually feels like that pressure to be chill has already passed anyway.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.