Another parent on one of my kid’s team has a ridiculously huge Cadillac. It’s the size of a Suburban. She has one kid and not planning to have more.

She made the mistake of making a backhanded comment about how my wife and I drive older cars to our faces. We have a 2014 Camry LE and a 2015 Lexus ES 300h. (Mine and wife’s respectively)

So I asked her what type of contracting work she does. She looked at me with a bewildered expression. I went on and said; “well you drive a big work truck, I assumed you did construction or something.”

The look she gave me could have melted steel.

Just to be clear, I have a great deal of respect for the trades. She however is married to money, not terribly bright, and looks down her nose at just about everyone. So I knew that would hit a nerve with her.

Given:

You lack the capacity to experience imposter syndrome.

Nail a few of these idiots with sedition charges and suddenly the rest might be interested in checking their sources. Even those in the so called “main stream media”.

Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Service Model”. It was excellent. But be warned, if you’re looking for military, adventure sci fi with snarky AI’s this will not be your cup of tea. The author takes on modern societal issues in the setting of post collapse human society. Yes, I’m aware of the dichotomy there.

If you do want snarky AI’s and adventure, then I recommend the following series:

“Backyard Starship” series. I think it’s up to book 17 so far and the quality of the books have stayed pretty consistent. The prequel series “The Peacemaker Wars” is also pretty good.

“Expeditionary Force” The quality does NOT stay consistent in this series and quite frankly, it’s not very well written. However, it’s like Lofthouse cookies, a lot of mediocre ingredients come together to make something great. I am a die hard fan of the series and highly recommend it if you want something that just removes you from reality for a while.

Gen X’er here and an older one at that.

My two idiot older brothers, one of whom is an Oathbreaker… Keeper…what the fuck ever, are voting for that fucking asshole.

A lot of my fellow classmates of my highschool graduating class are also voting for him. I went to the same school, came from the same town had a lot of the same experiences. How the living ever fuck are they so bamboozled?

It’s absolute insanity and it is not going to end here.

Trump supporters should not be hauling garbage.

They should be hauled off AS garbage.

I was getting ready to leave my girlfriend’s apartment. We had gone out for a walk and ended up having dinner. It wasn’t a formal date or anything, we had been together, officially, for nearly 6 months by that point.

We hugged and just kept hugging. Not petting or getting frisky, just holding each other and enjoying each other’s company for the final few moments of the evening.

It just came out, I said “I love you.”

She tensed and was silent for what felt forever. Long enough to start thinking I just either ended our relationship, or caused serious damage.

Just when I was about to disengage from her, she relaxed looked up and gave me a very very nice kiss and said; “I love you too.”

At the time I lived nearly 20 miles away from her and I do not remember the drive at all.

That was 21 years ago. We have two teenage boys now and happier now than we were back then.

In case someone wonders why I didn’t stay with her that night, it was a weeknight. We both had work the next day and she had an earlier morning than usual. The following weekend we spent the whole time together.

The interesting thing is the engine is running just fine. I changed the plugs about 60k ago and put in Iridium plugs, or whatever…They were the OEM recommended. All filters have been changed on the dot according to the manual and I’ve always used OEM or better.

The car sits in the same spot in a garage and it has never leaked anything. So the oil is definitely being burnt.

I haven’t paid attention to the coolant level other than making sure the level in the overflow is good. I had a car that blew a head gasket before, so I know the symptoms for that and I don’t see any of them with this engine. That car was an 85 Pontiac Sunbird. I haven’t owned a GM product since, because of it.

The plugs actually look OK when I pulled them out. Coils are the originals.

The main thing is I’m trying to make an intelligent decision between dropping a bunch of money on this car for new PCV, shocks/struts and a few other things and getting another 60k to 80k out of it. Or dropping a whole lot more on another car.

Thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it .

It’s burning a quart about every 1500 to 2000 miles. Otherwise it runs fine.

Unfortunately, the endoscope I used does not take screenshots. So that was taken by my 15 year old with a mobile phone of the endoscope screen.

The car is a 2014 Camry LE made after the rule changes, so it has the electronics of the 2015 model year. I bought it with 7k on the odometer.

Oil changes were done by a Dealership until about 120,000 miles, when I switched over to a locally owned place that specializes in Toyotas. The dealership’s own mechanics, two of them plus a CS person, all said not to do oil changes any shorter than what is in the manual. I tended to do them between 8 and 9K thinking the pure synthetic oil would be OK. I’ve not used synthetics in any of my previous automobiles and religiously did changes at 5k.

There is definitely vertical scoring and that area of the cylinder wall is shiny.

All 4 cylinders show the exact same pattern, although 4 is a little worse.

I’ve a few minor issues with this car, not mechanically related. I’ve replaced all 4 door locks once and one a second time. It’s eating headlights now for some reason. The original headlights lasted for 130,000 miles and all the replacements die after about 5k of driving. I’ve used high end Sylvania and Philips. When replacing them I make sure I’m wearing nitrile gloves, on top of being sure nothing touches the glass, to make sure no oil gets on them. I may go with a lower line bulb thinking that the high end versions run too hot for the projector enclosure. I’ve also gone through every ground I can find on the car and cleaned it and made sure it’s tight. Checking with a multimeter, the bulbs are getting proper voltage.

My wife had a 2003 Camry for 17 years and it is probably still on the road, she traded it 6 years ago. I bought this 2014 Camry hoping to drive it past 200k, but it will not be seeing that kind of mileage. Overall, my car has never felt as well built as my wife’s 2003.

54m here who is neurodivergent.

Yes, I can have a conversation with a stranger, but that was not always the case. It took years of practice to get to the point where I could be in a group or one on one and actually contribute.

The issue is, it takes SO much out of me. Where the people I’m interacting with have nice processing centers in their brains doing the bulk of the work for them in carrying the conversation. The processing centers that deal with social interaction are inactive in my brain and I have to actually think about everything going on. Which is a lot of energy to spend on conversations that really have no actual merit, other than just being social.

Think of it this way, do you remember how much energy you had to expend thinking on the last difficult test you took at school? That’s how I feel after social interactions. Because I have to do virtually the same amount of thinking in that setting, that most people use on a Physics exam.

Even with my wife and kids, I have to take breaks from them. While the years have given me habits and known behaviors that I don’t have to think about with them and keep our relationships healthy. I still have to do a lot of active processing to interact with them.

It sucks, but it is the way I am and always will be.

TIL!

I’ve lived in Wisconsin since 2006 and did not know that.

Thank you!

Wisconsinite here where the badger is native and the mascot for the University of Wisconsin is the Badger.

This meme is inaccurate.

The American Badger will also remove your kidneys and sell them on the black market as well, to support their meth habit.

As a parent myself, might I suggest using that as her middle name.

When we named our two boys, we chose classic yet timeless names for their first, but did have some fun with their middle names. (and NO, they are not named “Ben” and “Will”. My god, I actually know 6 families that have two boys with those names). That way, we got to name them something fun, but they had good classical first names they could go by through out their lives. Our boys were born during the height of what I call the “din” period. Where a lot of babies have names that ended with some derivation of “din”, “dyn”, “den” or something along those lines.

There is a very good reason why there is an entire subreddit on that other site called “/r/tragideigh”.

To me, this is one of the most fully realized female characters in science fiction (at least):

That’s awesome.

You mean when it becamse “Fargate” or “Starscape”?

I really liked Ben Browder and Claudia Black in Stargate, however it was really jarring and took a while to get used to.

LOL… I don’t think I’ve seen that scene…aaaannnd not sure I want to.

Thank you for the update though.

You have to watch a LOT more than that!

Some other references:

2001 A Space Odyssey

Looney Tunes (An entire episode was dedicated to the Coyote and Road Runner). That show had numerous other references too, including an appearance of the Enterprise itself.

Dr Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. (Dear John and Hi There for instance)

Dark Crystal

Dracula

Star Wars

There are many many more. The entire show was one big reference to something else.

One of the more esoteric Star Trek references was the aliens urinating. In Star Trek, no one pees. The only time any time of shower/rest room is shown in the entire franchise is in ST:TMP when the Ilia drone appears on the Enterprise. There might be a scene in ST:TOS where Kirk comes out of a door with wet hair and a towel around his shoulders, but that’s it.

About the only franchise/movie that I cannot think of a reference in Farscape is Stargate.

My kids made a better choice: