I read this article earlier in the week about how Biden’s policy on the Israel-Gaza war may hand the election to Trump, and the last sentence has really stuck with me.

The president’s aides have reportedly been “keeping him in a bubble” regarding voters’ unhappiness with his Israel-Gaza policy. If this Michigan result isn’t what bursts it, then they need to step in and do it themselves.

While phrased in the context of this specific policy, it’s this political bubble in Washington DC that needs to pop. I’m astonished at how close this election is. We all know what Trump’s about. We’ve seen this before. Joe Biden cannot seem to get out of the way by either stepping down or pretending to be the communist antifa leader the right will paint him as anyway to securing a victory for anyone NOT Trump. Instead he’s content to let us slide into a second Trump Presidency.

I have believed since 2015/2016 that literally anyone else against Hillary or anyone else against Trump would have won in a landslide. No one really liked the candidates. Trump appealed to voters because he promised to go to Washington and stick a thumb in the eye of the establishment. It wasn’t Russian interference. The populist message has always done so well regardless of political party because we all see how broken the system is and candidates like Obama, Sanders, and even Trump capitalize on that message to win hearts and minds. Whether or not they actually follow through is secondary (sadly). At this point no one buys that Joe Biden is a “man of the people” regardless of how many Amtrak trains he rides.

But then we’re left with even comments here arguing “Trump would be worse” with the implication being “Biden is bad, Trump would be worse”. And I get it. This well and truly sucks that it looks like we’re going to have two of the oldest Presidential candidates fighting it out yet again from the major parties. I’m fortunate enough to live somewhere that won’t ever go for Trump, so I can vote my conscience instead of having to pick the least bad option. Others can’t make that call though.

All that to say it’s all frankly exhausting and terrible. I think everyone has to decide for themselves how existential of a threat Trump is and vote accordingly. I’m open to the argument that Democrats at least have some amount of shame and can bow to pressure. The conflict in Israel-Gaza is going to be a real test of how they pivot and actually meet the voters where they are.

Shitty, because we’re potty training.

Luckily the kiddo is doing better more than not, but we’re having issues with daycare. They said they would “follow our lead” on what we’re doing, how we want to approach this, etc…but the reality is not that. And I get it, they have 15 kids to manage and you can’t have someone pooping their pants and not telling them about it, it’s more just our own frustration that the teachers/admin said one thing and we’re seeing another (and never sat down to map some of this out). A lot of our frustration would have been solved if they said how they do things and we could adjust to their style. This is really the first time we’ve been disappointed in our daycare, it’s been fantastic otherwise ever since we started with them.

Plus the poor kid fell in the toilet at school last week because they were playing too much/not paying attention (not at all shocking to me TBH) and has been terrified of the school toilet ever since. The upside is at home over the last weekend, we’re calling it one and a half accidents in 2 days, with several longer outings/trips in there.

In non-bathroom news, work slogs on, child #2 is shockingly imminent for us, and I’m mad at my wife for introducing me to The Traitors because I’ve had a blast watching it and I’m not usually a reality tv person.

100%. And going down that path you can start to enter into the whole “OK, so all companies are bad or do bad things, but I also need to be a functioning member of society.”

I can hate what Shell/Marathon/BP are doing to the environment but I also need to make sure my car gets me to work. Google or Apple can enact terrible policies I disagree with but generally speaking I have to deal with them to have a cell phone. Easier when we’re discussing a piece of artwork (not a core need in life) but it’s where my comment about a system that incentivizes “bad people” really came from.

So I think my moral philosophy is actually closest to show The Good Place now that I see it written out!

First off, the kagi news is a bummer. I’ve really liked it and picked up a subscription mostly because of some buzz I saw around here, but seeing this news is a shame and setting up some red flags in my mind.

But to answer your question, I think I personally have a couple ways I approach this…

1. If the evidence someone is transphobic, racist, etc…is from a long time ago (eg someone is digging up ancient tweets to prove someone is some sort of “-ist” today), I tend to give them more grace because people should be allowed to change. I know I didn’t have great views on some of this stuff when I was younger and it’s easy to forget these celebrities/people in power are fallible human beings. I’ll take their response to unearthing these views as a sign of whether or not they’re worth supporting going forward. If they’re regretful and seem like they’re trying to do better, I’m good. The kagi creator seems to not pass this standard for me.

2. If it’s something I want to use/consume and it could impact more than just the individual. JK Rowling is a good example of this. I’d struggle to want to buy any of her books again because I see a clearer line of sight from my purchase to her pocket. But something like Hogwarts Legacy, which I knew I would enjoy and my wife would love, and is made by many people with a passion for her world, I’m OK with it. The line to Rowling is a lot blurrier and impacts people who don’t have a say in what project(s) they work on.

It’s also easier to ignore or skip smaller scale things like an indie game from a deplorable developer vs. the next Marvel/HP/insert your beloved franchise game from someone equally deplorable. None of this is ever perfect and time and attention are finite resources for all of us. If Harry Potter is how you need to unwind because it’s your favorite thing, more power to you. It’s not my job nor anyone else’s to police the things you like or make you feel bad for liking them.

We should all do our best to try and support good people in a system that incentivizes bad people and give ourselves some grace when we (seemingly inevitably these days) find out those people were actually scum.

Anyone have good advice for making friends in one’s thirties? Online or IRL?

Assuming you’re cool with meeting up with strangers in person, meetup.com was a good way to find people of like minded hobbies (like board games). You’ll get a wide range of folks depending on the group itself but it can be helpful if you’re trying to “refill” your own social needs at least in the beginning and hopefully make some friends as a result. Helped me out of a rut when I found myself alone with no friends far from home!

Piggybacking on the awesome response you have above here…

I’m classic ol’ middle management for someone just like yourself. My team is comprised of individuals where they’re in their first IT job and/or first professional job. A lot of my job when they come onto my team is to make sure they have the support they need via coaching from my end or connecting them to the right people to help them answer when I can’t. I try to keep the communication line open and stress that they can ask ANY question/there’s no such thing as a stupid question/etc…because everyone has to learn somewhere sometime regardless of seniority.

You need help defining scope and objectives basically to try and right the ship for the customer. If your firm can’t provide you the right support, specifically your direct manager talking to the customer to pull this info out of them, you can try to broach this with the customer’s Project Manager. Let me tell you though that bringing this to the PM is probably going to be an uncomfortable conversation. They’re likely to then going to question what you’ve been doing this entire time and you’ll lose some trust with them in the short term. Based on what you wrote here about breaking down as a result of this pressure, a hail mary pass might be the right answer and just get the lack of progress out there. Then you can hopefully get some structure/plan/goals to build up going forward.

Your manager really SHOULD be the one handling this on your behalf and a good manager can probably pull the requirements out of them w/o making it super obvious that you’ve basically been spinning your wheels. If you feel like your manager can’t/won’t provide that support, bringing it to the PM might force their hand to get involved.

Echoing a lot of other comments here, find something new. Job hunt on the side. It sounds like you’re not going to get the support you actually need so start working on an exit strategy. Having been in your shoes at one point, this reads very much to me like one of those things you’ll learn from and know what questions to ask next time because of how strongly this has impacted you. We all have these kinds of stories or situations and they help shape our gut feeling of what to say and when to say something if it’s off. Happy to help out if there’s a way I can as well!

Of course! One thing I’ll mention since you said you have a Steam Deck: I split my “want to plays” into a Steam Deck and PC category (some games may be Verified/Playable but I’d rather play them on the PC, others may be unsupported but ProtonDB says they’re fine). When I got my Deck, I did a pass through my Want To Play list on the Deck itself with DeckyLoader and the ProtonDB Badges plugin to determine if a game I wanted to play was better there or the PC.

To add on to starting and stopping games at will, take some time to just organize your library of games too! I have mine sorted into several categories…

• Forever games that I’ll come back to over time
• Loved games that I may come back to should the mood strike
• “Next Up” games that I want to play soon
• Games I want to play eventually
• Games I’m done with, either I played it for 10m and I wasn’t interested or I finished it and got a resounding “meh”
• Zero interest games or duplicated games (ex: the original version of a game when the remastered version was given for free and is in one of those other categories, free VR versions, etc…).

It takes a lot of focus and work at first, and a LOT of flipping between the page in your library and the store page to see if you want to play a certain game. I axed stuff pretty liberally and at different points in my life, I’ve gone back and pruned that list of what I want to play and see if I realllllllly still wanted to play it. I also found organizing my library a bit of that kind of “mindless enjoyable” that you can just get into a flow state to go through.

Once it’s done though, when a new game gets added to my Steam Library, I can immediately “triage” it into one of those categories because it’s the only thing not categorized. It’s taken my library of what is now almost 1300 games acquired over 15 years and given it some more structure. Of that list, today I have ~250 in some version of “want to play”, ~400 in some version of played, and ALL the rest in that zero interest/duplicate category.