I’ve been using cannabis for years and I love it. I am generally careful when it comes to developing dependencies. I check myself every once in a while and I don’t self medicate or pretend I’m taking it for pain or sleep or whatever. I take it because I like being high and I’m not ashamed of it.

I am worried about long-term effects. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s really freak me out and it would suck if there turned out to be a link there. But there’s a good chance something else will kill me before I get there and I’m not sure I want to give up something I so thoroughly enjoy just to live a little longer.

I tried taking a hiatus in January. I read about mental clarity coming back and feeling more rested. I felt none of those things. I also didn’t feel any intense cravings or withdrawal symptoms. Just boredom and dissatisfaction with life in general and I don’t have a lot of hope of that changing with or without weed.

CAPITALISM

Everything must be monetized. Education, art, healthcare, food and water, it all must be profitable or else there is no incentive for it to exist. Oh, you need it to live? Then hand over your wealth! What, you’re looking for free handouts? Nah, either pay up or go die in a gutter.

I work at a mid-tier B2B tech company. I specialize in frontend but am otherwise a full-stack engineer.

My big project over the last two-ish weeks was building a demo environment for one of the company’s products. It involved:

• Updating some configurations in our backend to ensure the database can store the information for the demo sessions.
• Writing a class to represent these demo sessions, acting as an interface between the database and runtime environment.
• Building sets of endpoints so that our products’ frontend can interface with the server.
• Building a system on the frontend that regularly syncs with the backend on the state of the demo session and provides it to the UI.
• Building a pretty UI that shows the user the current state of the demo session and lets them update it.
• Writing unit tests to ensure every individual component of the system works as it’s expected to.
• Manually testing the system as a user to ensure it’s all working together as expected.
• Writing a summary of my work and submitting it for review by my coworkers, discussing and applying any feedback given.
• Deploying my work to production and confirming it’s all still working as expected.
• Praying to every God that there is no bullshit issue I missed somewhere and will have to take accountability for later.

Along the way, I got several other smaller tasks, like updating logic in one of our algorithms, adding internal tooling so that the customer service team can stop bugging engineering to fix things and just do it themselves, hypothesizing on the sources of random bugs and updating documentation. In between all that, I’ve got meetings to discuss random other bullshit.

Still lots of coding, but at this point in my career it’s more about knowing how my company’s systems work together and how to take an idea and turn it into usable software.

If society jumped off a bridge, would you also?

I used to get so much enjoyment out of video games. I could play for entire weekends. Now I sit down and play for an hour or so and start to get bored.

It is inevitable that an opposition would form against you. You either let the movement continue to gain traction and risk unseating you or you use your power in a corrupt manner to silence them.

Personally, no. You’re barely an adult at that point. If you have the privilege of a disposable income at thirty, splurge and enjoy yourself. Treat yourself to new experiences.

You will read this first

And you will read this last

And then you will read this

Then this one

Did I do it right?

Just scrub them out with a pipe cleaner from time to time you’ll be fine

First, people need to accept that we exist within a culture of overconsumption that directly contributes to climate change. Sacrifices to common conveniences will need to be made before we can make any meaningful change.

I’m not saying this is all on the individual. Corporations contribute tremendous waste. But they do so in service to society’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. We all need to learn to live with less.

Notice your default behaviors and take a moment to consider whether they serve you. They might, they might not. You may want to change them, you may not. Just be intentional about how you conduct yourself.

• Sword and Sworcery
• Starbound
• Outer Wilds
• Mirror’s Edge

And what if it’s undefined?

Or the basketball-sized spiders

So many. To list some that aren’t in the top comments:

Foxhole - This one gets to a point where it becomes an obligation. It feels like work that I’m not getting paid for. And still I’ll easily get sucked into defending a town or advancing a front for days on end between periods of burnout, checking statuses at work and staying up way past my bedtime, decimating my sleep schedule and productivity in the process.

Don’t Starve Together - My partner and I took a week off and were supposed to go camping but we ended up playing this too late the night before we were supposed to leave. We woke up really early to pack the car and it took about five minutes for us to go, “nope, this ain’t happening”. So instead we spent the entire week locked in our apartment playing DST from the moment we woke up to the early hours of the morning and living off of our camping provisions.

League of Legends - I played a lot of LoL back in its early days. My dorm had awful internet so when I came home for the summer it was pretty much all I would do all day every day. It brought out a bad side of me. Losing felt awful and winning was never satisfying enough. I’ve been clean from LoL for over 10 years now. Sometimes I still think about downloading it but I’ve so far kept the strength.

Meh, I actually know how to code without the help of AI and my knowledge in computer science is minimal. A lot of people assume you need to be good at math and whatnot to be a software developer but in reality it’s like the difference between being a construction worker and having an engineering degree.

Edit: I’m a senior software engineer for a big tech company. Y’all down voting me are either over-inflating what software engineers do on a day-to-day or undervaluing what construction workers do.

We’re hardly even three months in… We’ve got a loooong way to go before even the midterms.

Unlike Amazon and all the other giant tech corporations?

I just go directly to the company’s website and go from there. Usually it’s the same price, on rare occasions it’s a few dollars more but to me it’s worth it not to do business with Amazon. I’ve passed up on buying things entirely because they were only available on Amazon.

In fact, over the last couple years I’ve been transitioning from buying online to buying from small-business brick and mortar stores. Sure it’s less convenient but it’s also less wasteful, it keeps resources within my local economy and I’m buying a lot less junk that I don’t really need.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense on phones. But for whatever reason the disconnect between the trackpad and laptop screen really screws with my brain. It’s like if you tried to drag the scrollbar and it went in the opposite direction you’re dragging it.