What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

Time: 0600 hrs.
Mental State: Almost falling asleep on my laptop

I get a call from my "random cousin" with whom I haven't spoken in a looooong time, and he says "Hey, Good Morning ! I can't connect to my WiFi from my Windows laptop running Windows 7. Can you help ?.."

That moment when you TRULY believe in the person who developed the "Network Diagnostics" utility on Windows and ask the "random cousin" who calls you up at 6 AM to try it...

And he sends you this screenshot after some time ...

And then you have to wake up and pinch yourself to see if you are in a dream...

Long sleepless day ahead...

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

We had a Christmas party at work. We did a traditional white elephant gift game. I stole some larping swords from one guy, somebody else stole them from me, and another guy named Bilbo stole them and ended up with them.

After the party I am at my desk. Bilbo comes over with the swords and gives them to me. He said, "You looked like you really wanted these." I said thank you. I was really touched by that gesture.

Bilbo had tried to get golf balls during the game and lost them. So I went to the store at lunch today and got him a 12 pack of Titleists for $25. I don't golf, but people I work with say they are good. I left these on his desk. He comes to me later and says, "I cannot accept these. It is just too much money." I said its not too much and explained I was touched by his gesture. He tells me to take them back and get something nice for myself. Which is another nice gesture. Bilbo said when we get back from Christmas break we can do lunch.

So I am a bit baffled. Did I cross a line I shouldn't cross? Is Bilbo just too nice? I was really hoping he would enjoy this. I get it. We are coworkers and not family. I truly respect and like the guy.

Anyway, I am unsure what to do with them. I didn't really want to take them back. I tried to give them to another guy I work with and he wouldn't take them either. One talked about paying for them then decided he didn't want them. I have more shopping to do so I can take them back then. It kind of weirds me out to say $25 is too much money. I can hardly go a day without spending that much on a couple of random small things.

Thinking about including a file that is named: pleasedontdelete.cpp into the codebase. Don't include it in the project and put vague references to things in the code. Put variables that could be misconstrued as being related to bitcoin or some other cryptocoin. Put lots of comments saying: experimental.

Got a weird growth on my finger. Tried cutting if off with a razor blade. Now it is a stinging bleeding growth. Is not getting bigger. Just seems like a weird callous.

Found out gdscript has threading. Now I understand why Godot went away from Python. They actually wanting to do shit like threading. Every time I look into the gdscript library I find new gems. I mean it has a xml stuff in there. Found that today too.

Probably going to make a simple custom editor for a game I have been playing. I built a prototype a few years back on a weekend. Played the game again and now want it. I originally used Qt and C++. I think I will now try to make it in Godot.

I have been moved around the building as they move offices around. Now back upstairs instead of downstairs. Currently alone in a huge room that had cubicles. I am the only cube left. It feels like Davy Crocket at the Alamo. YOU WILL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!

The joy when tools do not have machine parseable output.

I'm looking at you SBT. My favorite pile of poo.

Remove the logging level from each line, then trim the line, then stab around inside the line with regexes, fishing for a possible match which hopefully is right...

Then stripping scala information like the object type, cause yeah...
A line can be for example "[info] Vector(File(...),File(...))" where info is the log level, Vector the wrapping sequence type, File(...) the wrapping element type and the string inside File(...) what yours truly needs.

As this is lot of shitty shabby string stabby stabby, we need to add a fuckton of boiler plate validation cause who knows what we just murdered.

To make it even more fucked up, a multi project project can produce different output for the same key.

:-)

Yeah. So we need to fix that too.

By the way, one can set log output to unbuffered in SBT.

Then the output is in random order :-)

Isn't that fun? Come on, you wanna poke that pile of shit, too.

The SBT plugin way is by the way no alternative, as I need a full Java environment for execution.

Which brings me to the last point:

For fucks sake, writing CLI applications in Java is so much bloody boilerplate code.

There's ugly and then there's the "please kill me" kind of level.

50 lines just to write a basic validation of argc / argv with commons cli.

That's 6 lines in python. Not kidding. :(

I currently hate everything.

Moments where the job sucks: When you have to hotwire two electric cables with high currency by giving both cables the blowjob of your life.

Update: for those of you who know cougar woman/ my self proclaimed "work mom" in my previous posts (bitch who keeps stealing my lunch), yesterday she really tipped me over the edge. So I'm fucking hauling ass on my sprint work because I had to take over another team member's tasks (because he "doesn't have time" for it being prod support but all I see him doing is shitposting at his desk) and someone from another team asked the cougar a question about something. she comes up to me all demanding like "HEY you, you got the worksapce open?"
I was like um... no I don't. I'm working on the other application.
and then she's like "Look at my laptop and show him". Okay bitch let me just drop everything I'm doing to help a random person. The fact that she commanded me instead of just asking me pissed me off. Not even a single sign of "please". I'm tired of her truly. She is a snake. Even to her friend on our team. Every time he's out she's like "hey where is _____? huh why isn't he here??? hmmm" in an instigating way to remind everyone that he might've taken off for no reason. When I was too sick to volunteer at an event she organized in the morning on Saturday, she asked me the following Monday, "oh did you drink too much? lmao. a spiteful, grudge holding bitch for sure

So this is truly something random. A dude I work with randomly slapped my ass today. It was around other people. I simple looked at them and said, "I feel uncomfortable." He started saying: "We need to get uncomfortable..." I said: "No, we don't." I am pretty sure he meant this in jest, but I hope I made it clear it will not happen again.

I am not comfortable with people randomly touching me. I don't care if you are male or female. Keep your hands off. I will shake your hand at work. I don't understand what would make someone think slapping your butt is okay. He is older than me I think. In his 50s maybe.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

Got a phone call from a scammer claiming to be my Cell Phone Provider saying “Congratulations! You just recieved unlimited calls and messages for a year, now to win this please give the 4 digit pins given to you” then I recieved a 4 digit pin and warning label not to give this message to anyone else. I then noticed that this was a scammer, i got his probably fake number and I tried to mess with him by giving random codes, he then noticed that the numbers were fake in the 5 try.

I truly feel bad for this idiot and just call him a scammer and end the call...

random:
let iSuck = "I'm really new to this, "
let reallyBad = "I truly have no clue about what I am doing."
console.log(iSuck + reallyBad);

Been going through the family stash of old Wild West type novels (you know, cowboys and cattle drives and six shooters and gunmen and rivalries and all), from authors like Louis L'Amour, JT Edson, and Oliver Strange. Because Texas appears so frequently in these books, in my mind's eye the protagonist often looks suspiciously like AleCx04's avatar with a hat and gun rig. And horse, of course. And speaks like McCree from Overwatch.

*shrug*

Random learnings/realisations/hypothesis:

i have found a sense of happiness in weird symbiotic environment : being rich in a poor environment and live with a poor-but-secretely-rich lifestyle.

i call it the "sheep-hoodie" lifestyle: being a wolf in a herd of sheeps but not with a sheep's skin glued to your body. rather a hoodie so you can be a friendly wolf , ferocious wolf and a friendly sheep whenever you want to.

my 1 group of friends are in a sheep phase : struggling in their life , crunched on money, not saving a lot or focused on savings and stuff. At least that's what shows up from their discussions. however when we are together, i see that we are always supporting each other, and sharing resources/helping each other while having fun

my another group of friends have a wolf lifestyle:
they are insanely rich, if you want to party/do something with them at 'their' level, you gotta have a lot of cash to burn . they are wolves because they know how to sell their stuff, whom to sell and how to retain the info for success. i don't enjoy much with them as their solutions to life problems end up with something that involves a lot of money than effort.

So my lifestyle is to earn like them, but live like my broke friends. they think that am earning 20% of what i earn now, and am also in lots of debts and family crisis. someday my lie is gonna burst when i buy expensive stuff lol

--------
#2
i have realised that i have an OCD for silence and psychotic reaction to noise . for me ,
Silent Environment >> sex >> any relationship.
I might react so aggressively to noise while trying to focus that i may end up breaking the closest of relations with anyone

--------------
#3
thinking of having 3 twitter accounts just to fix the problem of devrant not saving content of dormant accounts :
- professional : an id where i will share my professionally stupid questions, achievements, debates etc
- personal/partial-anon : an id where i will share my personal thoughts and stuff. it might also include devrant screenshots / embarrising content that i make here
- true-anon : a full anonymous account for my(some) extreme thoughts, trigger content and explicit researches

my current twitter feed is a mix of first 2, but making 2 seperate accounts might give me more freedom(the level of devrant) to express myself than what i do now (as my followers are also interesting people but mostly related to tech)
guess i should move my tech content there than my personal content.

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#4
making an early opinion about something should only be done to research for truth/content/conversion/hype . final opinion should always be made after you trust something with a research. for eg, initial opinion of Elon Musk was he being a bad guy, but now after seeing his crazy ideas and approach towards twitter, he looks like someone who can truly make it a money minting machine.

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#5
A simple perception towards making money as not being a bad thing does wonders at a management level and life .
liberal opinion of twitter layoff and later changes were emotional and blaming, but thinking from a business approach, his company partners(and whoever he likes) now have special golden badges to feel like VVIP and have an orgasm, while he gave a dummy melon to every person on earth to pay for feeling like a VIP and have an orgasm.
a brilliant tactic to make money without anyone calling the minting of money as BAD. genius

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#6
was randomly checkin Insta, saw an ex-collegue share a random deep thought quote, and i realised that i might have known her for just a week or 2 in college, but she had a very nice nature.

However, she was the daughter of a very rich ass dad and had almost everything in life. she gave a bit spoilt(for me) look, like someone who did ciggs or drink, but her talks then and our chats later just on chat gave me a very nice hustler vibe (the type of people i like: hustling and professional)

I indirectly asked her on a date and she agreed. so, this is something very interesting for me, as i am hopelessly single and full of judgemental opinions/ strict rules. share your tips and notes on how to have a successful date, and stuff that one must NOT do . much grateful if you do not come under rule 29 of internet and share your POV