33/M
Interested in self-hosting, decentralization, and learning more about the fediverse.

I also do photography, but with digital cameras from the 90’s.

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • My recent ex girlfriend would take certain things we were about to do together (traveling, going to the spa, going to a particular restaurant close to my house, spending the day at a museum, etc.) and would just automatically assume that I had already done that same thing with some unspoken past ex of mine, and get preemptively sad, upset, and self-conscious that she wasn’t “the first”… What? Life isn’t all about firsts, why even get upset about that? So what if I’ve already done something before with someone else, I am still going to enjoy it with YOU right NOW. Maybe a lot of people do compare past experiences to current ones, but I don’t find that very fulfilling, so I just don’t. It’s a lot easier to just live day to day.


  • I’m in a similar boat. I love my car, I like driving my car, I like working on my car (Subaru BRZ), but if I had the opportunity to take the bus or the train to work, you bet I would. (I COULD, but because the routes are so ass-backwards, it would take me over an hour and a half to ride the bus 12 miles with 2 transfers)

    In the spirit of “Cars that SHOULD exist”, I’d love me an Autozam AZ1. I grew up playing Sega GT on the Dreamcast, and I LOVED racing that little thing… Or, for a slightly more practical but still tiny and awesome, a Nissan Be-1. I’ve actually been close to importing a Be-1 a couple times, but the ass-backwards laws that make it difficult to register and drive kei vehicles in the USA are stupid.

    Tiny cars are awesome. Big-ass trucks and SUV’s in the USA are getting out of hand (I’m sure we can all agree). Just this weekend, I literally exclaimed “What the fuck” out loud when a truck pulled up next to me and the tops of its wheel wells were right at the top of my driver’s side window. It was a relatively stock looking new Toyota of some kind and it truly dwarfed my car. I’m used to feeling small, and It might have been because they were passing me on a very narrow bridge, but it was the biggest truck (that wasn’t obviously made bigger) I have seen in a long time.


  • It’s been a few years now, and it’s not quite as scary anymore, more of a fact of life, my new normal. I’ve gotten some good mental tricks down for remembering people’s names, and I’ve had a lot of good practice lately with all the new people I’ve been meeting. The first time I meet people, I basically just tell them straight up that I WILL forget their name, and I’m sorry, and the next time we meet I’ll re-introduce myself, and it will take 3 or 4 tries to get it… And the re-introduction part of it really seems to help. I’ve been meeting a lot of people from Discord lately, and adding a username on top gives some other “hook” to catch, especially if it’s a particularly funny username, which seems to help to add something more memorable to recall.

    The places and things part has been relatively solved by me just keeping daily itineraries and lists when I have stuff to do, and long-term lists of things to remember. I’d never had to do that, so once I got over the initial “Well I Shouldn’t HAVE to!”, it just became part of the routine and works fine.

    Nothing seems to be getting significantly worse, so I’m not spiraling down into some hellhole of non-recollection… I kind of see it as similar to losing a finger or something. Relatively minor, changes how you interact with the world slightly, but nothing earth-shattering.


  • I used to have a spectacular memory. The very first time I got Covid, though, it all went to shit. Maybe it’s also just because I’m getting older, but I definitely feel like that original brain fog never went away.

    Weirdly, it’s not ALL of my memory that’s shot, it’s only proper nouns. Names of people, places, or things. I will forget the names of people who I’ve been working with for 3 years, the new brand of coffee I really liked when I’m at the store trying to buy more, or the name of the store I need to go to after work even if it’s something obvious like Harbor Freight (Like I know I need to go buy a torque wrench, but where had I researched and decided was the right place to buy one?).

    Numbers, facts, figures, physical properties… those all stick like glue. I can look at a machine at work, take it apart, then come back the next day and put it back together right without taking any pictures or notes.

    I’ve started using a notes app on my phone and that’s improved things a bit, but it’s really irritating when I am sitting trying to remember something and it just will not come to me. I’d never experienced that in my life before, it’s a little scary.

    I’ve talked to a few other people before who all have similar selective amnesia like this after Covid, but with various different things that are easily forgotten. I find that really interesting and feel like it could hint at how different brains store information in different ways/places. People’s names were always what I’d call the “most difficult” for me to remember, but I never had THIS much trouble with it, and the places and things were never a problem before.


  • Way back in the before times of ~2012 or so, I had 2-door 2001 Chevy Tracker, the fun one with the soft-top. I loved that thing, the ability to drive top-down without having a big-ass jeep was exactly what I wanted.

    I had bought it from some lady who had owned it since new, and had just moved from the desert out West in the USA to the Northeast USA. The paint was absolutely nuked from ~10 years in the desert sun, there was barely any clear-coat left on it. The underside was spotless, though, no rust at all, which was unheard of for a car in the Northeast. It had some of those very 90’s “swoosh” decals on the side.

    I was navigating through a parking lot, and some guy apparently decided it would be a good idea to zip right through between 2 parked cars to cut from one aisle to another, and bonked right into my passenger side door. It was a low-speed impact, no airbags, just a decent-sized, but aesthetic dent on the door. This was my first ever traffic incident, even though I’d been driving for a decade already, I had no idea what to do besides swap insurance info.

    A couple days later, I get a call from a body shop saying that I need to bring the car in to have it fixed. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, nobody else had reached out to me, I didn’t have any contact from the other guy’s insurance, and I hadn’t filed a claim, because I didn’t care about the dent (there were already other dents on it from many years of regular use). Well, I was somewhat more young, and definitely naive, so I dropped it off where instructed, and didn’t really get a lot of good information from the front desk guy at the shop. A week later, I get a call “We’re having some trouble finding the decal on the side of the car, would it be ok if we just didn’t replace it?”

    So it turns out that they had taken this beat up old thing with nuked paint, replaced the door with a door off a donor vehicle, re-painted the donor door perfect shiny brand new black, and then BLENDED this perfect shiny black into the fading scuffed original paint all around the door.

    I have no idea how much this cost, I never saw any paperwork, they just handed me the keys and I was off… I should have requested a pay-out lol. It honestly looked worse with the obviously mismatched door and the blended paint.

    Here’s a before pic, I can’t find any good ones that show the aftermath or even the original dent.

    I ended up accidentally running it out of oil summer of 2017 after some catastrophic computer thing cleared all the mileage data somehow and I forgot when the last oil change I did was… It lived for another 2 years with a little tick in the top end until one day it spun a bearing and was toast. If I wasn’t a renter and had a garage and extra space I would have kept it and tried to fix it as a project car, it was just so much fun, but there were enough other things wrong with it that it just wasn’t worth it with my limited resources. I ended up selling it with a spun bearing in 2019 for almost double what I originally bought it for in excellent condition in 2011 lol.

    I bought a brand new Subaru BRZ to replace it, and that’s what I’m still driving now. Very different vibe. I miss the Tracker sometimes. I went from Forza Horizon 5 to a real-life version