bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
bolido_sentimental
6d ago
That's actually what I myself did, and for that reason.
It's not a bad life. Very high skill/earnings ceiling too.
bolido_sentimental
6d ago
I've known several people who have made good careers out of just supporting EHR systems like Epic and Cerner for hospital systems. There are entire companies that do only that. Feels like one of those careers that is moderately protected by regulatory requirements as well.
bolido_sentimental
6d ago
Observe and Report from 2009 got mixed reviews, was not a box office smash or anything, but the climax of the final chase scene is one of the only times I've ever been in a movie theater where everyone organically stood up and cheered and yelled. The entire movie is "holy shit that's fucked up." One of the last big mean/shock humor movies from the "Vulgar Age," and somehow it really worked. At least when I was 19.
bolido_sentimental
17d ago
A Time of Gifts and its sequel by Patrick Leigh Fermor are very good. Author walks from Rotterdam to Istanbul in the 1930s.
bolido_sentimental
29d ago
Currently reading Jane Austen's Persuasion for church book club. (Everyone can pick the Austen novel of their choosing; this is in observance of her 250th birthday. I've previously read Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey and enjoyed them a lot, especially the last one.)
I'm about 1/3 of the way in and I have to say, she has not really got me to care about the characters much yet. Anne seems a decent girl, but I don't know why it's so impossible for her to move on from Captain Wentworth, for all that he's very charming and everyone likes him. As we meet people like Charles Hayter and Captains Harville and Benwick, we repeatedly see that there are plenty of nice men around. Eight years after my first relationship, I never thought about it anymore.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
"I am not as brave as my wife."
This was a red flag to me. I think this entire fundamental question comes down to the fact that your wife has to respect you. If your wife respects you, she will accept your saying no to things without pique; indeed she will take into account whether you'd be interested in going to something before she even asks you to. I'm not saying you need to "dominate" your relationship or anything like that - as the other commenters note, you should always be looking for opportunities to make your wife happy, even if it inconveniences you greatly; that's part of what you're signing up for.
If seeing your wife happy is a priority for you, you'll gladly do all kinds of silly stuff that's not for you; and you won't think about the cost to you. Many are the hours I've spent loitering in quilt shops for this reason, lol. But I also know that if I tell her no, I'm not going to thing X or Y, it'll just be accepted. I feel like if your partner does not respect you, then she'll have an expectation you'll go along with what she says no matter what, and if you don't she'll feel justified in being mad about it.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that.
I do that. That's exactly what I do, along with the ad-free streaming service from the library. I would recommend this to everyone. I actually dislike ads enough that I avoid all the stuff you're talking about in here. I stopped watching sports because the ads were too obnoxious. I think there are in fact many people living this lifestyle, but you would only know about this by meeting them or asking about it.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
I was there, but I was lurking then and I'm still lurking now.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
I was definitely thinking it was from a ladder fall.
This is only very lightly related, but I've actually talked to Justin Murphy in another context: In 2021 he tried to set up an arranged marriage agency in which he and his partner would receive profiles and information, and then try to pair people up with each other. The Tweet below describes his process; it was also discussed in an UnHerd article. The site was arrangedmarriages.co; looks like it's not up anymore.
https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1697354879482630370
I was single in 2021 and actually signed up for this. I then had a couple of calls with him and a lady that was working with him on it, but it didn't lead anywhere - I never got paired. Their process didn't seem to be very effective in finding out what the involved people were like and what they valued. Still, I though it was a cool idea at the time, in the same vein as date-me docs etc. - kind of cringe at first glance, very not Lindy, but I thought it was neat that someone was trying something different to fix a part of modern life that seems to only get worse and worse. (I later got married by just meeting a local gal and dating her normally.)
He also runs this other entity called otherlife.co, which is a sort of private study-the-classics forum: "the Other Life community [will] focus on reading the greatest works, deepening our reading and writing, and continue cultivating genuine high-signal exchange across online and IRL events. I remember it was taking off around the same time as Urbit and other similar things. It appears he's had some modest success with that.
Anyway I certainly don't share his attitude about kids and productivity, although I imagine it's just a "lottery of the talents" thing - I have a lot of fun with kids, and outside of my 9-to-5 I'm not trying to change the world especially. But I did find him to be an earnest person who was doing his best, and I read the tweet in the OP as being more of an honest, "I don't think I'm supposed to feel this way, but I do, and I feel bad about it." I felt bad that he got piled onto, because I think he's sincerely trying to grapple with the way a lot of modern techie people are acculturated with regards to what their working lives are supposed to be.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I wonder if say, the Estate of Dashiell Hammett still exists in some form, and if they have to plan for the cessation of royalties from The Maltese Falcon. And if so - were they going to some great-grandchild all along? Or some trust? Do the estates of famous authors just continue for decades?
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
For some reason, my wife gets a lot more ill than I do from the same illness - when she catches my cold or flu, she is ill for longer and with worse symptoms. I think there is also an element of tolerance - I lived alone for many years prior to our marriage, whereas she never lived alone, so I am quite used to soldiering on when I'm sick as I had no alternative; when she is sick, she is instead used to going into full rest mode to recover.
I also wonder about the effect of overall physical wellness. My wife, while she has a healthy BMI, is not a consistent exerciser and has relatively poor strength and cardio; whereas I have always exercised regularly so I can hike, play tennis, etc. I have read anecdotally that this does influence immune response.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I have to wonder who would've won an actual primary, if Dave Yost or Jim Tressel stayed in the race. I honestly would not expect Ohioans to pick Vivek if a real primary happened. Very frustrating to not have a proper choice.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
That's actually a cool fact, I appreciate it.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
We have the OG Bing Crosby White Christmas vinyl on repeat here. I can never get enough of "Faith of Our Fathers" for some reason.
Christmastime can also be a great gateway to a lifelong Glen Campbell obsession. Be glad if you are not having a Blue Christmas.
2025 has actually proved to be the year I stopped playing video games entirely, and it's basically directly because of this. I haven't logged into Steam since last spring. It's "exit vs. voice" again: if you can't change it, you have to leave it. If other people create things and I don't like them, my recourse is to avoid them. We can only control things we create ourselves.
It's not that I don't object to this situation - of course it's depressing and I wish it weren't this way; but on the other hand, nerd culture basically kicking me out has freed me up to do so many other things with my time. If video games had remained everything I wanted them to be, I don't know that that would actually be a good thing for my life. I honestly don't miss it anymore. For every hour I spent marveling at an incredible story, there were probably 100 hours of hacking my brain with the simulated feeling of achievement.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis: that there was a window that was previously open for white men to participate in these culture-making activities, which has been closed artificially. Of course it was never the case that everyone could e.g. write for The New Yorker - there were always too many people who would like to. But the premise before, and the ideal for which we should aim, was that whoever could do it best could get the role, regardless of their identity; and now identity is an impassable barrier.
Previously, the parental advice would have been: "It's great if you want to try and become a journalist, but try and build some hard skills as a fallback plan because it's hard to get a job in that." Now it's, "Don't try to become a journalist at all, the field is actually closed to you."
I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.
Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.
I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
Don't underestimate the classic hot water bottle. A very Lindy solution.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Worth noting that after 2020 redistricting, TN-7 now contains a big chunk of Nashville; a city which itself has seen significant in-migration from more liberal areas in recent years.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
My actual escape plan if I can't take it anymore, is to run away to Wilmington, Ohio; which is a completely unremarkable town except that it does have a (tiny) Lutheran church of my type. It is interesting how that is a real consideration I never thought of as a youth.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Mingo Junction is where my mind goes. It's not scary or anything, but it's so empty it's like the Cairo (IL) of the valley.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
I actually love the Wheeling/Weirton/Steubenville area. I go up there at least once a year, and I always have a great time. It's pretty bombed out but there are actually fascinating, intelligent people trying to build in the ruins; you can spend your whole day just striking up conversations with people, and it feels like everyone is happy to tell you about the history, or some new thing that's being tried. I think something beautiful is going to come from there sooner or later.
For those that have been - Raven, the huge bookstore cat at BookMarx apparently passed last year; but they have at least one and possibly two new ones.
I've done all of these and it really depends. If you get to a high enough skill level with AWS or Azure or something, you can kind of write your own ticket. However, until you reach that skill level, it's just you vs. every mid-level cloud engineer in the world. You have no geo-moat at all.
Network + cloud is a strong combination, as integrating cloud resources with on-prem networks is very valuable and also kind of arcane unless you have experience in both. AWS offers a cert that's just for this. (https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-advanced-networking-specialty/) It's a hard test, I had to take it twice to pass, but it's worth a lot when it's needed. However, like anything else, the material will barely even make sense until you have a couple of years working with the stuff.
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