What We’re Told

It’s weird what men are told we “must” be like vs. what most of us are actually like.

We are told that men think about sex seven times a minute and that all we care about is sex. Reality: Even when I was an adolescent or young adult, I thought about sex like once or twice a day. It varies, but most men are fairly similar.

We are told that men are rapists by default, that only society restrains us from our base urges. Reality: I’ve never even had the slightest desire to rape or assault anyone, even in situations where I absolutely 100% could’ve gotten away with it with guaranteed zero consequences. Most men are about the same; only a small percentage of men commit the vast majority of assaults.

We are told that men have no capacity for empathy and that only women have empathy and care for others. Reality: Men and women are probably about the same here, though women often seem to have almost no empathy for men (as men experience it anyway) because they feel they must be this way to keep away the creeps (even though it makes creep interactions the only ones you’re likely to have).

We are told that we should “open up” and “reveal our feelings.” Reality: Nearly all the time, this is used against us by romantic partners or by family. It’s extremely predictable. So we do not.

We are told that any approach of any woman anywhere at any time for any reason is harassment and always undesired. Reality: Most normal women are fine with a polite approach and taking a “no” for a no.

So men are told constantly how horrible and undesirable we are and regardless of that accepted and routine degradation, we are expected to “man up” and act like robots. Is it any surprise that there’s a huge male mental health crisis and that many of the core tenets of this sort of “all masculinity is definitionally toxic” liberalism is being rejected of late?

Sock It To Me

Yesterday, I hit a really important and extremely difficult-to-reach milestone for the major project I’ve been working on since July 2024. It’s taken me around 1,000 hours of actual labor time to hit this waypoint. This is the project I am doing completely by myself that normally a team of 8-10 people would be undertaking.

And no one said congratulations or thank you or anything. No one acknowledged it all. And that kind of sucks, since what I am doing will directly lead to $2 million+ in revenue.

At least they compensate me insanely well as management realizes they’d have to hire 4-6 people to replace me. I will have to let that fat paycheck be my consolation.

This Time

Depression is now baked in. It is gonna happen.

It just remains to be seen how bad it’ll actually be. Pretty damn bad is the way it’s looking.

Forum Up

Every single one of the forums I used on the early internet are all gone. No trace. There was some cool stuff on those that should’ve been saved. All of it should have been, really.

And the BBSes I dialed into in the mid-1980s aren’t even on the lists that claim to be “Every BBS Ever,” much less archived. All lost now.

Bring Back Design

Late ’00s/early ’10s UI design was so much better than the boring bland designs of today.

This is more than just opinion too. Back then, software and OSes were created based on actual long-established design principles and were tested pretty extensively with real users in near-real-world scenarios.

None of that happens anymore. It’s all fake telemetry, MBA/designer vibes and feelings. Nothing is tested. Well-known and well-established design practices are tossed out the window as “outmoded.” Absurd movements like flat design where what is clickable is concealed have overtaken all, leading to unusable interfaces where the most important actions are hidden all because it looks better to some MBA who sees it for seven seconds on a PowerPoint slide while gronked out on ketamine.

And the hamburger menu is a design travesty.

Design from when the user was centered — rather than advertisers, MBAs and designers — was thus far superior.

Jurassic Snark

That’s actually a novel and accurate observation.

It’s why I require that all my partners can fly unaided and can fight two full-grown T. Rexes at once.

Right Change

That is true. My partner is the only one I allow to change me, because I adore and respect her. I trust her judgment and value her thoughts. If she didn’t change me and vice versa, we wouldn’t be doing it right.

For instance, she’s made me much calmer as a person and I’ve turned her into quite the little smart-ass.

Verse

Allowing in a lot of unattached young men, often from countries with quite backwards/Western-averse cultures, is a terrible, terrible idea. That’s not racism. That’s just reality.

Four Consul

Someone from my former side gig (who is also a friend of mine) contacted me good-naturedly complaining that they’d had to hire four different consultants to do what I used to do by myself, and in far less time. On a project that’s still not done after weeks, that I used to handle in a few hours.

So that was nice.

Steppin’

Something I always try to impress on junior team members is to not skip steps in troubleshooting. Even when you “know” it couldn’t be something, check it any-damn-way. Especially since if you’re troubleshooting correctly the first few things you try should be the simplest, most obvious and the quickest. To wit:

1) Is it plugged in?

2) Is it powered on/started?

3) Is there a DNS entry?

About half the time when my juniors can’t solve something, I come behind them and try the easy initial things it definitely “couldn’t” be and fix the issue.

Most people just do not have minds suited for troubleshooting I guess.

Moniturd

Actual conversation I had today at work (on Slack, paraphrased and condensed to remove company information and for clarity):

Them: (User) has an ongoing issue that needs to be resolved and hasn’t been fixed by your team.

Me: Ok, what’s the ticket number? I looked through the queue and didn’t see anything from that person.

Them: They haven’t put in a ticket for the issue.

Me: No worries, did they let anyone know to it was a problem so we could enter a ticket and work on it?

Them: No, they mentioned it to me [their manager] and said no one had fixed it yet.

Me: So there was no ticket and they didn’t let anyone know about the problem?

Them: No, but it still needs to be fixed as it’s been broken for a while and it’s causing them to miss meetings. Isn’t your team monitoring things?

Me: We have monitoring in place for all infrastructure, but we have no way of knowing about anything being non-functional if it’s never reported. We do not monitor every single bit of functionality of every application on every single computer out there. That’s just not possible.

Readers, the “broken” thing was that the user had turned notifications off for Outlook and forgot or didn’t know how to turn them back on. And then never reported it or even Googled the issue. Ain’t no monitoring in the got-damn universe would ever catch that.