Here to talk about fighting games, self hosting web apps, and easy weeknight recipes.

My mastodon account: @tuckerm
My blog: https://tuckerm.us

  • 2 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Books - Do you prefer Paperback or Hardcover?
    3·
    4 hours ago

    If it’s a new book and one that I think other people may be interested in borrowing, I’ll get the hardcover for the extra protection.

    However, there’s a used paperback store down the street from me that has a whole bunch of heavily used paperbacks for like $1 each, and those have definitely been dominating my collection lately. Sometimes I’ll just pick up a dozen of them. That little store is one of those treasure troves of unexpected things, even though when you find one of those treasures, you might need to flip the pages carefully to prevent it from falling apart.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is an event that altered you in some way?
    42·
    6 days ago

    It was during “outdoor school,” a week long thing you did in sixth grade (age 12) at my school. You stayed in these really cool cabins that were like 100 years old and spent the week learning about nature. It was fun. Very classic summer camp type of environment.

    Also, other schools from the area did it at the same time, so there were a bunch of unfamiliar kids there. Two of the kids in my cabin were from another school, and they perfectly fit the stereotype of “edgy, bad 90s kid.” Super baggy JNCO jeans, spiked hair with a ton of gel, etc. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, watch any teen show from the 90s. They’re in it. Oh, and they said everything was lame. And gay. The cabins were gay, nature was gay, the camp was gay, your glasses were gay. You were definitely gay. That’s why you thought outdoor school was fun: because you were gay. The JNCO jeans kids were way too cool for outdoor school.

    I should mention that I was a huge nerd. I mean, I still am, but I was, too. JNCO jeans kids were way cooler than me.

    For the whole week, we kept hearing about “the night hike,” which was when you would go on a hike, by yourself, in the dark. The camp really played up the night hike, like it was going to be this big coming of age moment for us. You need to be responsible on The Night Hike. You need to stay sharp on The Night Hike. You’ll be a man after The Night Hike.

    On the last day, it’s time for the night hike. Each cabin walked as a group up a hill. At the top, you would then walk back down a trail on the other side of the hill, one person at a time, waiting about a minute after the previous person had gone. I happened to be after the two JNCO jeans kids. (Yes, the night hike was gay.)

    When it’s my turn to walk down, I realize that this much-hyped coming of age moment is going to be…no big deal whatsoever. The trail is a very gradual slope with a few turns. It’s paved, for Pete’s sake. You could even see the lights from the cabins after the second turn. And the moon was bright enough that I wouldn’t even need my flashlight. This pivotal moment wasn’t going to be pivotal at all.

    After less than a minute, I heard someone on the trail in front of me say, “H-hey, who’s there?” It’s one of the JNCO jeans kids. He’s just kind of standing there on the trail. He didn’t get very far.

    “Um, it’s Tucker, from the cabin,” I said.

    “Oh, cool,” he replied. “Um, I guess you’re walking faster than me.” He said that like I had caught up to him, which I guess is easy to do when the other person is frozen. “Want to walk down together?” His tone was way different from what it had been the rest of the week.

    “Sure,” I said.

    I don’t remember what we talked about. Probably what school we went to and that kind of thing. The whole walk only took about five minutes total, so it’s not like we talked about much. But I remember thinking to myself, “The guy that talked tough this whole week…it’s because he wasn’t.”

    So yeah, The Night Hike. Ended up learning a thing.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Do you think the world would have been a better place if there were no religions?
    51·
    11 days ago

    This is a hard question. I think that we would be better off if more people adopted secular worldviews. But throughout history? I don’t think we can simply say “what if there were no religions” – we’d have to be completely different creatures for it to have gone that way. But I do think we’d be better off if we were that kind of creature.

    It’s interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion. I’m no anthropologist, but as far as I know, every civilization to have ever existed has formed one. Forming a religion is as natural as forming a language. Clearly, it’s a thing we do. Lacking an explanation for our questions, from “what are rainbows?” to “what happens when we die?” we will apparently just fill something in. Everyone did it.

    For us to have not formed religions, we’d have to be more comfortable with uncertainty. We’d need to have been better at accepting that we don’t know some things, and we can doggedly look for answers, but we shouldn’t insist that we know something before we really do. And I think our species kind of sucks at that.

    If we were better at accepting uncertainty while still pursuing answers, we’d all be better off. And maybe, as a side effect of that, we wouldn’t have formed religions.

    When Og and Bog saw the sun come over the hill one morning, and Og was like, “Hey Bog, how do you think that happens?” Bog should’ve said, “I don’t know. Maybe someday, someone will know.” Instead, Bog went off on some real bullshit, and now here we are.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)
    17·
    13 days ago

    I once had a job in an office building that was shared by several different businesses. One of them was an accounting firm that seemed like an incredibly boring place. And I swear, every time two guys from the accounting firm passed each other in the hallway, they had to say to each other, “You having fun yet?” or “Are ya workin’ hard or hardly workin’?”

    It must have been a requirement. Literally company policy. I heard it so many times in just a couple years, there’s no other explanation. Like, if you didn’t say it, the manager would ask to see you in his office, and he’d be like, “Hey Phil, someone tells me that you and Dave passed each other in the hallway, and neither of you said ‘you having fun yet.’ Now you know we like to have fun around here, and ‘you having fun yet’ is part of our company culture, so I’m gonna need you to make sure that you say ‘you having fun yet.’ It’s for fun. And we like to have fun. It’s mandatory.”

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is something people you encounter at your job say that makes you want to scream? (Job, person & quote)
    33·
    13 days ago

    Job: cashier. Not my current job, but definitely the one that racked up the most irritating quotes.

    Customer: “Now, don’t you try to double scan my items. I’m watching you.”

    I heard this one constantly when I was a cashier at a grocery store. At first I assumed that they were kidding. After all, it’s such a stupid accusation to make. It was only after about 100 elderly people had said it while staring daggers at me that I realized they weren’t kidding.

    I assume there must have been a news report in the 1960s about store clerks charging you twice for an item and then taking the extra cash, and a certain kind of person had been paranoid about it ever since. Except this wasn’t in the 1960s, it was the 2010s, and such a scam couldn’t even work anymore. The cash register isn’t just a lockbox like it was in the 60s, it’s a computer and it knows exactly how much money should be in it. And if it has less than that in it when your shift ends, you’re screwed.

    Plus, you’re paying with a credit card, Gertrude, how am I supposed to steal your shit when you’re paying with a credit card?

    I think the thing that made it so irritating was the fact that they are willing to whip out this assertive, domineering attitude at you based on information that hasn’t been true for about forty freaking years. They have a mistrust of other people because they don’t know how the world works anymore, yet they think they’ve outsmarted you.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world•New Feature to Highlight journalism on Mastodon
    16·
    1 month ago

    This is very cool. I’m hoping 404media.co and aftermath.site do it – those are two independent sites that I’ve subscribed to after hearing about them on the fediverse. Seems like most of 404media’s writers are on Mastodon, at least.

    I also like that this feature creates the ability to have a known link for an author across multiple websites. With that, you could show posts that link to any other article by the same author, regardless of which site the article was published on. So then you can see all the threads of discussion about all of the articles that particular author has written.