Some additional context:

This was 99-00. There was no war. Both of my grandparents served in ww2 and Korea to gain US citizenship. My dad came up in the Vietnam era when all his friends were getting drafted (aka forced to go to war). He tried to enlist but was blind in one eye, so they didn't take him. My brother would have enlisted if it weren't for a really bad skateboarding injury.

If I were good at football, it would have been university coaches knocking on my door. I was good at something the military was interested in, so they tried to recruit me to enlist.

I was 18 on 9/11/01. And my first thought was that Bush would take us to war, I'd get drafted and I needed to plan my escape to Canada. This was scarier than being recruited. I just wanted to play my bass guitar and smoke my marijuana in peace.

I've used slackware more or less exclusively since the late 90s. It's been my daily driver since I deleted my windows XP partition some time in the early 00s. It's really all I know. Sure, I can find may way around a .deb based system when I have to. I'm also likely to apt install something, say yes to 50 dependencies, brick my system and have no idea what did it.

I love to tinker, and I love to learn. There's no shortage of either in Slackware, and that's why it's not for everyone. And I don't mean that in an "i use arch btw" way. I'm an intermediate user at best. I ask for help way more than I provide help. Lucky for me I've made some good friends in the Slackware community over the years.

Me in the 90s and 00s: yarrrr!

Me in the 10s: it feels good to be legit

Me in the 20s: YARRRRRRRRR!

I'm 40 now and have been in recovery for over 8 years. A lot of people in my old circles never stopped partying, and many of them aren't with us any more. I feel like I see a new tribute popping up every couple weeks on social media. More of my friends are dying than my parents' friends.

What should we have learned? I'm out of the loop.

How do you know that the money I saved on hardware isn't going straight to games that I can stream to it from my desktop over steam link?

Think of the quarterly profits, won't someone please think of the shareholders?!?

/s

Ahoy!

Get that downvote finger ready!

Arch.

I know it's what all the cool kids are using, and I keep trying to like it, but I just can't get into it. I'm a slacker for life.

Obama tried to do a similar move through an executive order near the end of his second term. My job at the time scrambled to give me a raise just above the proposed threshold. I declined and said I'll take the time and a half. Ibwas routinely working 60+ hour weeks at that time. Trump repealed that order early in his term, and I didn't get that raise. I left that job a few months later.

I remember when Mancow got waterboarded on the air. He completely changed his tune and said it was cruel. Even a broken clock is right twice per day I guess.

If you call heads 100% of the time, you'll be 100% accurate on predicting heads in a coin toss.