Dame Maggie Smith was a gem in everything she was in. Her performances elevated every piece of media she performed in. I would watch movies just because she was in them, and I never regretted that. Today is truly a sad day. Rest in peace. She gave the world countless masterful performances and now the curtain has closed.

Erm, not arguing that this lady is middle class, but dog insurance cost is not remotely relevant to that lol. I pay that for my dog and make less than 6 figures. My dog is just really important to me, and our last dog cost us thousands and thousands of dollars on vet bills. I’m not going to be blindsided dropping $5k in a day on vet bills again. Our dog has insurance because it seems like the financially responsible thing to do, especially when your dog is extremely active and engaging in sports that it may be injured doing.

Does your car have an AUX port by chance? Mine was the same with the Bluetooth limited to calls, but with a $20 adapter on Amazon I converted my unused AUX port to Bluetooth audio. Aside from that ONE thing I love my car and am thrilled to have this solved, especially so cheaply.

100% agree. I’ve been using Kagi for a bit over a month now and I love it. My one and only complaint is business hours can be harder to find - I have to actually click into their website for it. That’s it though! Everything else is dramatically less painful in my opinion. I don’t need business hours frequently enough for it to matter though, and if needed I can use Google for that one thing.

Kagi has been a breath of fresh air

I’m not fully de-Googling, however I have been migrating things that Google does badly over to other services. Kagi for search was the latest, and admittedly hardest mentally for me to do. Not because the search engine itself isn’t fantastic (it is), but I’ve been using Google since its inception when I stopped asking Jeeves or Hotbot. Just feels weird to jump ship, but I’m so tired of how bad and enshitified their search has become that I just can’t do it anymore.

I actually have a Proton acct already but only use the VPN. Sounds like it’s time to look further into the other offerings.

We just finished Prodigy, and are in the middle of Dr Who. Soon we’ll start up House of the Dragon 😊

My husband and I don’t watch TV together a lot, but Sunday nights are the one night a week we set aside for it. I often find myself looking forward to Sunday evenings when we get to catch up on our favorite shows and hang out. It’s also typically the only night of the week I eat ice cream, so it’s an extra treat.

I’m usually busy enjoying my Sunday evenings and don’t even think about the fact that the weekend is ending.

I find it funny that this is what they’re up in arms about, not the happy little threesome. I saw it and was shocked that NBC actually aired it, because that’s just much too controversial for we puritanical Americans to handle.

As you said, you took on the responsibility and obligations of parenthood when you chose to have children. Part of that is considering their interests when exercising your vote. While I don’t have children, I don’t agree that you have more skin in the game as you put it, than I do. I, as a human being and citizen of this country, want to see it succeed and flourish not only now, but long after I am gone, for generations to come. My family, friends and loved ones are all considerations when voting, as well as what I think will be best for society as a whole. It’s why when local votes come up for school funding, I always vote in favor of increases, despite having no children of my own benefitting from it.

Every adult makes life choices, and has various considerations for how they think the world should be, and what will improve it. The personal decisions you make and how you live your life should not afford you more or less votes than anyone else.

Absolutely this. There IS a scenario in which I would love a “smart” or “AI” fridge, but it’s gotta be damn impressive to even be worth my time.

It needs to know everything in my fridge, how long it’s been there and it’s expiration date, and I want it to build grocery lists for me based on what is low, and let me know ahead of time that I should use something up that’s going bad soon. Bonus points if it recommends some options for how to do that based on my tastes. And I want to do this without having to manually input or remove everything.

But we’re still SO far from being able to do this reliably, let alone at any kind of acceptable price point, and yet fridge makers keep shoving out dumb fridges with a screen on them and calling them “smart”. I hate it.

Moats were cool until I learned that toileting holes were often positioned such that the urine and feces wash down into the moat. I’m gonna have to take a pass on that lazy river…

My big wool cloak is my absolute favorite winter garment. It is unbelievably warm and cozy, blocks wind better than any other coat I own, and as an added bonus I can wrap someone else up in it with me to keep THEM warm.

I am unabashedly the cloak girl. Bring back cloaks!

There are reasons why a business might actually need or benefit from having a single family dwelling in a way that aligns with their business. For instance a local theatre company owns two large homes here so that when traveling cast come for shows they have somewhere to house them without spending exorbitantly on hotel rooms for weeks at a time, and the cast get a more comfortable stay. The homes are typically occupied at least a portion of each month, and everyone involved benefits.

It’s reasons like these I wouldn’t want to put a total and complete ban on businesses owning single family homes, but in my opinion there should be a reasonable business justification for it and it needs to be very limited.

Not really. I haven’t looked into why it caused the issue it did. Presumably it is not actually intentional by MS, and there is some conflict going on that’s causing it. I’ll eventually get around to trying to let it install that update again, but life has been busy :)

Unfortunately that “oh but he’s so cute I can’t help it” crap bleeds over onto those of us responsible owners too. Golden puppies are adorable, and everyone wanted to let him jump on them when he was little. I would stop it at every turn, but it was a constant fight with him and other people trying to fix it. So what I’m saying is, screw those people. They make everyone’s life with dogs hell. -_-

I recently had to roll back a windows 10 update because as soon as I installed it all of my startup programs stopped starting up at launch. As soon as I removed it, the problem went away.

No Microsoft, you cannot ruin my Win 10 experience to coerce me into migrating. It’s gonna be a long annoying fight.

I love dogs and think they’re fantastic roommates, but I definitely get where you’re coming from. Most of the negatives of dog ownership can be fixed with proper training, but most people are too damn lazy. I often find myself annoyed by other people’s dogs as well. The only one of your listed problems I have to deal with is the personal space one (Golden retriever), and it’s as simple as saying “Go to your place” to solve/prevent it.

All that said, no dog, no matter the size or temperament, should EVER be left unattended with a small child, let alone an infant! Even with zero aggression dogs can hurt small children by smothering them or knocking them over. It’s as simple as buying baby gates to prevent it, and I just don’t understand why people let things like this happen :(

I taught my dog weave poles and he loves them!

Yes but on the other hand, some dogs can and do regularly slip out of collars. My golden has always been very anxious and has slipped his collar a number of times because he gets scared and backs up unexpectedly and suddenly he’s collarless. I use a slip lead now because he cannot back out of it. Animals are not dying because of vets using slip leads, this seems like a ridiculous reason for a regulation like this. Animals can choke themselves on a normal collar just as easily.

Dog training/sports.

Here I am thinking “I need to get more active and it’ll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link” (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)

Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I’ll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25…? k…

Rally Novice acquired…fun but… Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? …sure whatever

Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let’s do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that’s not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment… I’m officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I’m more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol

We’re having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They’ve spent a literal fortune on that dog. It’s absolutely mind boggling.