u/GWindborn

It's another awkward school romcom with Ian Sinclair as an unhinged narrator, but he makes everything better.

Coincidences happen all the time, but some stand out more than others. What are some of your weirder ones?

I've got a couple. My boss is retiring, so I got transferred to a different group. (And yeah everything is great so far, it's been a couple months now and I'm very happy.) My boss has the same fairly uncommon last name that I do. There's one celebrity with the last name, but I've literally never met another person outside of family with this name until now. And now my boss's boss has the same first name as my wife. It's like the universe is trying to give me less names to remember.

Decades ago, I went on a family road trip to DC. We stopped at Arlington National Cemetery and while walking with my dad, we made a random turn, walked a couple rows in, and stopped at a random grave. It was his name. He'd never been before in his life, so this was completely unplanned. It was a surreal experience.

Our silly, horror-loving 10 year old has recently gotten into watching anime with us. I made a similar thread about a year and a half ago so wanted to dip back in and get another pulse check. We've watched a variety of things, I'll try to make a short list of her favorites assuming if I can remember all the names lol.. (I know some of these aren't exactly kid friendly but we're okay with her seeing animated horror and reasonable levels of violence, she's very mature and handles them well so please no judgement there - she gravitates towards that sort of thing (just like her mother).)

• Dandadan
• Toilet Bound Hanako-kun (probably her favorite, we watched together and she's watching it again on her own)
• Spy x Family
• Kaya-Chan Isn't Scary
• Welcome to Demon School Iruma-Kun
• Madoka Magica (we watched the original on CR and just discovered the sequel series on Netflix so we started that too)
• Love Live (the first one, others are watchlisted, she's a big fan of Hatsune Miku and Teto and all that so this was a big one for her)
• Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle
• My Deer Friend Nokotan
• Alien Stage (know this isn't an actual anime yet but she's obsessed)
• There was also an anime with a tiny little girl in high school who had problems talking to people/only talked in a whisper? I forget the name of it. Edit: Aharen-san Is Indecipherable
• Editing to add that we have seen Delicious in Dungeon, Witch Hat Atelier, You and I Are Polar Opposites, and Kaiju Girl Caramelise

There's bound to be more.. I've tried getting her into things I really like, like Love is War, but she doesn't get the humor just yet. I'd love to show her Konosuba but I'm not ready to explain Darkness to her just yet. We want to get her into Apothecary Diaries at some point.

Outside of anime, she loves all the Glitch shows (HUGE Murder Drones and Amazing Digital Circus fangirl), KPop Demon Hunters, and a lot of video game playthroughs. She's also a big fan of things like Doki Doki Literature Club having watched the Game Grumps playthrough with us, other "kid friendly" horror games like Poppy Playtime, that Verity Minecraft thing that's going around, etc..

Open to any and all suggestions, I've gone over our original list and we're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Duodenal Switch in March 2025 - I had a normal 6month blood test yesterday and my blood sugar was low - 57, when normal is 70-179. I have a follow-up call with my doctor tomorrow, just wanted to see if anyone else had gone through something similar?

I'm a fan of "things". Be it bands, anime, hobbies, I show that fandom with stickers and pins. Not necessarily on my car, but on my water bottles, phone, backpack, clothes, etc. If you pull up next to someone and you can see they're a fan of something you're also a fan of, how do you let them know you see them?

Also, what's your fandom and do you have a "signal" to other fans? I love Dungeon Crawler Carl and if I see another fan in the wild I usually just give them a "Hi, Zev!" (IYKYK). If I see someone rocking a band I like I normally just give them the horns \m/ or a simple thumbs up.

I'm personally on Team Chub, but they don't seem to be very consistent with her look these days.

This came up in the weekly thread earlier, but it's not the first time - a red tag mentioned an apparently left-wing political commentator and I had no idea who he was. A few weeks ago there was another instance of a red tag calling out a left wing commentator (Hasan?) who I've never heard of with some fringe beliefs that I guess the right takes as what everyone on the left thinks. Other blue tags jumped in to say that they have no idea who he is or what he stands for either. Then you have right wing political influencers like Kirk (who I genuinely couldn't have picked out of a lineup until he was all over the news), then a slew of others - Shapiro, Pool, Walsh, Owens, Carlson.. It at least feels like the right is much more interested in these people than anyone on the left is, and they even seem to know more about the supposedly left-wing ones than most of the left.

Why do you think so many of the mainline political influencers are on the right? If you do listen to them, why? And do you let them influence your thoughts or beliefs? Where and how often do you listen to them?

I'd also be interested in hearing from other blues but that might be tricky given the rules. Just everyone do your best to play nice :)

Edit: Okay I'm feeling a lot better now in a very short amount of time, thanks all. I think I was over-worrying about the implications of a girl sleeping on a bare mattress (by choice!) surrounded by "stuff" LOL. I think I'd seen another post somewhere of a parent appalled at a kid sleeping on a bare mattress and it made me a little self conscious about it.

Reposting with more line breaks to satisfy an overzealous auto-mod!

Not looking for judgement here, just asking if anyone else's kids are similar. Our daughter is 9 and loves her "stuff", so when left to her own devices she will create a little nest for herself in bed. She's done it as long as she has been able to. I lovingly call her a little gremlin.

She gets frustrated with the fitted sheets on her bed because she keeps pulling them off in the night somehow, so she ends up on a bare mattress wrapped in a quilt using a stuffie as a pillow because she knocked her actual pillow on the floor, plus she's surrounded by a dozen or more other stuffies she's collected over the years, a big jug of colored beads that she uses to make jewelry, a bunch of others stuffies, maybe an open bag of chips she brought into her room, a water bottle, a squishy toy, a pad of paper and markers/colored pencils scattered beside her.. Like she's a little packrat living in a nest.

It's not as though she doesn't have places for these things! She just uses her bed as a work station for making art and bracelets and stuff, which she absolutely adores doing and is absurdly talented at, and she will nest into all of these things to sleep at night. It's weird behavior for sure but it's not hurting anything.

Does anyone else's kids do this? I feel so on edge that someone will see her like this for whatever reason and judge us for letting her do it when she is perfectly happy and content this way..

This is less a cry for help and more of a cautionary tale. I had my DS a year and a half ago, things are going great. I've had GERD for decades but it's been mostly better post-surgery. Last night I made the mistake of grabbing a snack too close to bed time of stuff I knew I shouldn't have eaten - a small bag of Chili Cheese Fritos. It was just one of those tiny ones that go in lunch boxes. No big deal, right? NEVER AGAIN. I sleep on my side or stomach (I know, not the best but I do it naturally in the night regardless of how I fall asleep) and about 1:30 this morning I had a huge GERD attack that left me gasping and spitting up mouthfuls of acid. ARGH it was the WORST! I take daily antacids too, but I've been doing famotidine lately just because we had it on hand, but Omeprazole is better for GERD symptoms. It took the better part of an hour to rinse the burning and taste out of my mouth and throat, get the Tums to kick in, and get comfortable, then even more time to actually fall back to sleep after all that nonsense. Plus I had to be up before 6am to get ready for work. Now I feel like I got hit by a truck and my throat still burns a little and I'm exhausted here at my desk procrastinating actually getting started. LESSON LEARNED.

My wife does pet sitting independently. It started with family and friends and then friends of friends and now she's advertising on Facebook that she's available. She doesn't work through any of the apps, she makes $25+ here and there for drop-ins, $100+ for overnight stays, etc. She might make a few thousand dollars over the course of a year but less than $10k. Realistically, does the government care? Or will they even notice come tax time? This is all cash and Venmo/Paypal payments. How do you even log that? What should we do going forward?

My daughter lost something important at the house and we have ripped the building apart looking for it. It's the pen to her drawing tablet, I've already bought a replacement but there's nowhere this thing could be, she said she set it down for a second and now it has vanished without a trace. It's been days now and we keep looking for the original. The tablet is effectively useless without it and she's a really talented little artist so her losing it was really distressing.

It reminded me of two other similar incidents - YEARS ago, she lost a toy magic wand from an obscure little UK show called "Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom" (or obscure to us in the US since I don't think it comes on normal TV). She was probably about 3 and we were watching the show and she was playing with it, and it slid under the sofa and - as far as I can tell - slipped into another dimension. I immediately got on the floor to get it and it was simply gone. Vanished without a trace. We tore the room apart. My wife and I both watched it happen with our own eyes. In her hand, under the couch, gone without a trace. 5+ years later, it shows up in her room. Zero explanation. We're absolutely flummoxed.

Another one is the dome to the ceiling light in our master bathroom. I took it off to replace a light bulb and set it in a basket of laundry to keep it cushioned and safe. Realized I was out of bulbs that were a proper strength for that bathroom, so it stayed down for a couple days. Got the right power bulbs, put them in, went to get the dome.. yep, gone. Wife has no memory of moving it. It has been almost a decade and it's never turned up. That light fixture is still domeless. A soccer ball sized glass dome doesn't just disappear.

Does anyone else's house also hold rifts to other dimensions where things slip out of our reality?

I'm on a \~9 year old gaming PC running a 1070 so doing the best I can here.. I have two different monitors of different size and brand but it's been fine up until the last 6 months or so. I'll game on the "main" monitor and occasionally click over into my secondary monitor for Discord or to look something up on the web or whatever and only just in the last few months the main screen will go black and freeze up for a few seconds, then show that there's no display connected, then correct itself. I can make it happen reliably if I go to certain websites with videos running in them (like the local news) or if certain ads pop up on some sites that play a video so I'm assuming it's something display related. Even when I close the offending page completely, once the cycle has started the main monitor will blink out every few minutes until I reboot. This has become a huge headache if I'm in the middle of something. Anything I can do here other than rebooting? Even just to determine what the actual issue is rather than just assuming. I know this PC is a little long in the tooth but I really can't afford anything else right now..

If it helps, I use Opera GX as my browser.

Running Win 11 Home, Inspiron 5680, i7-8700, GeForce GTX 1070, 16gb ram.. not sure what other information might be relevant.

I'm on a ~9 year old gaming PC running a 1070 so doing the best I can here.. I have two different monitors of different size and brand but it's been fine up until the last 6 months or so. I'll game on the "main" monitor and occasionally click over into my secondary monitor for Discord or to look something up on the web or whatever and only just in the last few months the main screen will go black and freeze up for a few seconds, then show that there's no display connected, then correct itself. I can make it happen reliably if I go to certain websites with videos running in them (like the local news) or if certain ads pop up on some sites that play a video so I'm assuming it's something display related. Even when I close the offending page completely, once the cycle has started the main monitor will blink out every few minutes until I reboot. This has become a huge headache if I'm in the middle of something. Anything I can do here other than rebooting? Even just to determine what the actual issue is rather than just assuming. I know this PC is a little long in the tooth but I really can't afford anything else right now..

If it helps, I use Opera GX as my browser.

Running Win 11 Home, Inspiron 5680, i7-8700, GeForce GTX 1070, 16gb ram.. not sure what other information might be relevant.

I'm on a ~9 year old gaming PC running a 1070 so doing the best I can here.. I have two different monitors of different size and brand but it's been fine up until the last 6 months or so. I'll game on the "main" monitor and occasionally click over into my secondary monitor for Discord or to look something up on the web or whatever and only just in the last few months the main screen will go black and freeze up for a few seconds, then show that there's no display connected, then correct itself. I can make it happen reliably if I go to certain websites with videos running in them (like the local news) or if certain ads pop up on some sites that play a video so I'm assuming it's something display related. Even when I close the offending page completely, once the cycle has started the main monitor will blink out every few minutes until I reboot. This has become a huge headache if I'm in the middle of something. Anything I can do here other than rebooting? Even just to determine what the actual issue is rather than just assuming. I know this PC is a little long in the tooth but I really can't afford anything else right now..

If it helps, I use Opera GX as my browser.

Running Win 11 Home, Inspiron 5680, i7-8700, GeForce GTX 1070, 16gb ram.. not sure what other information might be relevant.

https://trumpaccounts.gov for reference

My mother keeps bringing these up and on the surface, it doesn't seem like a bad deal. That said, I'm hopeless with money so there might be something I'm missing here. Have you set one up for your kids, or do you plan to? I don't have the cash to max it out yearly but I or a family member can definitely drop some seed money in and let it grow. Struggling to find a downside. Thoughts on these? Trying to leave the politics out of this one and keep it purely objective.

Edit: Should have clarified that we don't qualify for the $1k as my daughter is too old.

So here's the deal - I get a $300 yearly "wellness" budget from work that I never know what to do with. I bought a Pixel 3 and a pair of walking shoes last year and they're both in great shape. I wear my Pixel daily, zero complaints, so I don't really want to upgrade. I was considering getting an Oura ring but don't know what it would really tell me that my watch doesn't. Does anyone use the two in conjunction? I don't wear my watch to sleep for various reasons, but I might wear the ring just to get some insights. Thoughts?

I like complimenting people and generally being friendly to strangers, saying hello and good morning, etc, I feel like it goes a long way and can really turn someone's day around. I go into the office twice a week and sometimes I'll be making a coffee and a coworker or someone will come in and they just smell amazing. Would it be weird to voice that to them? Just a quick "Wow you smell really nice" or something. I know that's the entire point of perfumes but is that something that can and should be pointed out?

For some reference, I'm very happily married and have a daughter so I'm surrounded by nice smelling sprays and lotions and potions and all that, and I'm genuinely not trying to hit on anyone lol, I consider myself a very unthreatening guy who has always had female friends around. I just don't want to come across as some workplace weirdo and get a reputation for sniffing women in the break room.