When I was 13, I decided I wanted to learn piano because I heard Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and became obsessed with it. I already knew how to read sheet music from performing in choirs since the 3rd grade, so I just had to figure out where middle-C was on the piano and pluck out the rest of the keys from there. It only took me 2 weeks to completely decipher and memorize the Moonlight Sonata, without any instruction or lessons.

I was a natural at the piano, and I taught myself more complicated pieces over the next handful of years. My wife is super jealous of my skill because she had to take 4 years of piano lessons for her music college degree, and I, without any formal lessons, can play better than her.

Fast-forward a few decades. I haven't been around pianos for so long, I've forgotten most everything I learned. I just bought a fancy electric piano at an estate sale (normally costs $5,000; family was willing to sell it for $240!) and I'm excited to play again, but I've been afraid to just sit down and figure out where my skill level is at now. Gonna be a lot of hard work just to get back into it. And I'm old now, so I'm hardly the impressive "teen piano genius" I used to be. Now I'm just an old guy who might remember how to pick at a few simple songs on the piano.

Getting old sucks. Especially if you don't keep up your skills. You're special if you have great skills as a kid. But if you're old, people just assume you've had a lifetime of practice. And that's if you kept up with it over the years.

Dude! I had this exact alarm clock when I was a kid!

I'm 40 now and use my phone as an alarm clock. I haven't had a dedicated alarm clock in like 15 years now.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he'd be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn't believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know... he didn't learn his lesson.

She serves as a distraction, so other Republicans can get away with things that seem tame compared to the drama she's stirring up. It's just misdirection; otherwise, Republicans would've ousted her themselves for hurting their party.

Remember when Mitch McConnell was in the news constantly for deliberately halting progress to serve his party's goals? We don't even hear about him anymore; not since Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert took center stage in the shitshow.

Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.

To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.

We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.

But the girls' presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada's legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.

They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they're just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman's autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.

In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I've never looked at it the same way since.

America.

Personally. I don't consider it a vacation until I'm cut off from everyone and everything. Let me relax in peace for a while, without distractions.

I was gonna say, you guys get YouTube ads? I'm still blocking them, so I'm still a target for Rick-rolling.

It's actually a mistranslation from Swedish to English. It's supposed to say waterproof.

My wife and I were stationed in Germany for a couple years with the US military. Her only experience with a foreign language was some classes in French in high school, which came in useful since we were stationed near the French border. But while we were living in Germany, we decided to learn some German so we could get around easier.

We took a trip up to Berlin one week and my wife was trying her best to speak to a vendor in German, but she was really struggling. The vendor decided to switch to French instead. Apparently, her German had a heavy French accent, since that was the only other foreign language she had practiced. She was able to finish the conversation in French.

When I lived in Germany for a while, my wife and I took a train across the country one winter to Munich for the Christmas markets. We stayed in a hostel and walked the streets, enjoying the various stalls. I'd never heard of Glüwein before (hot, mulled, spiced red wine), but it was fantastic! It was an amazing experience and we didn't have to worry about parking lots or figuring out public transportation. Everything was within walking distance and we ended up touring all of Munich on foot.

I wish the US would get off its ass and get some high speed trains set up. We just need to keep oil and auto dealers out of the discussion because they keep shutting it down. Like Musk's "Hyperloop" project, which he proposed to stop legislation from approving high speed trains, but then intentionally did nothing with, so we just don't develop trains to replace his Tesla cars.

I wonder if this has anything to do with my Starlink connection dropping out in the middle of the night. Maybe a handful of the lost satellites would've been passing through my area in the night.

Several times in the night, between 2 and 4 AM, my connection blips for a few minutes. Which is normally not a big deal, but I'm a night owl and usually awake all night. Plus it interrupts any online services I have running overnight, so I've lost progress on projects I'm working on throughout the night.

Meh, Starlink is just a temporary fix anyway. I live out in the countryside, where I've been lucky to get 20-30 Mbps speeds for years. Starlink brings high speed Internet to my home (100-200 Mbps speeds), but it's been kind of unreliable. And their single public IP address for my entire network messes with my home servers that require their own independent IP addresses, so I can't run any of my online services from home. Not without buying a dedicated VPN server out on the Internet somewhere that I can route my traffic through.

Thanks to Biden's high speed Internet initiative, I'm finally getting a dedicated fiber line out to my house. Gonna take at least a year before the local ISP wires my region, but once that's in place, I'm throwing out Starlink.