I prefer spelling it with an ‘e’ so I always do that (probably because my name has two common spellings, one with an A and the other with an E, and mine is the latter).

But if forced to identify which is which color-wise, I’d say “grey” has cool undertones while “gray” has warm undertones. Really no reason to think that, but it’s right in my brain.

Requesting one small caveat to your thinking: your friends with chronic health issues (physical and/or mental) may bail more often than others but still love you.

My partner has lost friends over them thinking he uses his migraines as an excuse to not show up to things. They feel hurt because he bailed one too many times for them, and he feels hurt because they diminished his disability and didn’t believe him. It’s hard to see the additional toll it takes on him.

(I also have my own chronic issues but thankfully have been able to suck it up often enough to not have it come in the way of friendships. Sometimes he and I are intentional about making sure at least one of us attends something even if we both feel like shit in order to not alienate people we care about.)

If you expect the average person to be able to understand an algebraic equation better than the existing system, then I’d suggest you get out of your social bubble and meet more ‘average’ people.

In my job as a Product Manager, I make specialized software for internal users in my company. Watching people use it can be so painful.

An example: Look at dashboard view > memorize client name > go to client view > type in client name to search > click to view the client

When they could have just clicked to view the client from the dashboard.

After I finish cringing, I just take it as learnings for how to build/design better in the future.

I had someone send me bullet points in Teams… except they weren’t bullet points or even carriage returns. It was just 50+ spaces at the end of the line to make the text go down to the next line in her view.

She was also a right-click copy/paster.

Ctrl+shift and L/R arrow keys also selects entire words, and up/down selects entire rows. No more taking your hands off the keyboard to select text!

My favorite that I can’t believe not everyone uses is ctrl+backspace to delete a whole word at once. Totally butchered typing something? Start over quickly. Need to delete most of your sentence? Delete it in just a few taps.

At one point in my childhood, my dad made the comment, “Women don’t know compass directions.” I took offense to that and made a point to learn them to prove him wrong.

I felt vindicated in high school when he was coming to pick me up from a friend’s house and said, “I’m at the gas station. Do I go left or right?” I told him there were several gas stations on the way, and asked which direction he was facing to figure out which one he was by. He couldn’t tell me and finally hung up on me in a huff.

Ah, interesting callout; I can totally understand why that is a turn-off. My sister recommended the book to me so I didn’t give the title any thought.

The story is definitely about that trope, and mostly turning it on its head. It’s about the women, with the underlying theme that they are what they are because of men but they own who they are and their future.

I hope if you give it a shot that you enjoy it as much as I do!

Deliberate in what way?

Oh, I may have a book (series) for you! The Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss. It starts with Mary Jekyll—the daughter of Dr. Jekyll—and expands to find Sherlock and Watson, a daughter of Hyde, Justine—the woman made to be Adam Frankenstein’s bride, and other women left in the path of various men who tested the limits of humanity. It even talks about Shelley’s book and why she might have written it as she did. The second book expands into the wife and daughter of Van Helsing.

I’m about 75% of the way through the second book and have been loving them. They’re very post-modern though, with the characters somewhat frequently interrupting the narrator to discuss the way the story is written. I love that sort of thing but know it’s not for everyone!

Hey, I know the person who made this meme originally! (He got a kick of seeing his work spread around.)

I’ve had mine since before I started driving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed in my late teens I had a lot of freckles on the left side of my body and very few on the right, and I didn’t start driving until I was 22. I did spend 2 years in high school with a much darker tan on my right arm from hanging my arm out the window of a boyfriend’s car with no AC, but still have more left-arm freckles.

Great examples. The most valuable use for me has been writing SQL queries. SQL is not a part of my job description, but data informs choices I make. I used to have to ask a developer on my team all the questions I had and pull them off their core work to get answers for me, then I had to guess at interpreting the data and inevitably bug them again with all my follow-up questions.

I convinced the manager to get me read access to the databases. I can now do that stuff myself. I had very basic understanding of SQL before, enough to navigate the tables and make some sense of reading queries, but writing queries would have taken HOURS of learning.

As it is, I type in basics about the table structure and ask my questions. It spits out queries, and I run them and tweak as needed. Without AI, I probably would have used my SQL access twice in the past year and been annoyed at how little I was able to get, but as it is I’ve used it dozens of times and been able to make better informed decisions because of it.

Thanks for the clarification on your intent. I understand (and appreciate) skepticism; however, I took your original comment to be a dig rather than helpful criticism, but your clarification here helps me read it more positively.

Someone else commented and used words that aligned with my intent behind the comment, which was just to leave open the door that there are nuances I may be uninformed about. But I recognize I could have been more explicit about what research I had done to maybe establish a little more credibility.

Thanks for responding with such a level head!

Ah yeah, in both cases I’m referring to they were saying the gerrymandered districts meant their blue votes for president didn’t count. I agree that the apathy strongly affects the overall outcome!

In one case, I tried to correct the perception by saying basically when I said here (popular vote determines the state’s allocation of electoral college votes), and I was “corrected” by my acquaintance that the president race is determined by electoral vote, not popular vote. 🤦🏻‍♀️

True, some states are too extreme to ever flip. Then other states like Texas or North Carolina are perceived as firmly in one camp, but they might not be if everyone actually voted.

Exactly what I’m trying to help counter! In just 24 hours I heard two people I know from Texas mention that the presidential vote was affected by gerrymandering. I did my research to confirm that was wrong and have been trying to help fix that false belief since then.

And what you’re saying now is, “What you said doesn’t align to what I think, so I’m sure you’re wrong.”

So here’s proof:

Of the 50 states, all but two award all of their presidential electors to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state (Maine and Nebraska each award two of their electors to the candidate who wins a plurality of the statewide vote; the remaining electors are allocated to the winners of the plurality vote in the states’ congressional districts). (source)

Ok, fair point, lol.

That’s precisely what prompted this post: conversations with friends in Texas who said their presidential vote didn’t count because of gerrymandering.

I agree districts are fucked, but that doesn’t affect the electoral college outcome. Texas is leaning more blue every year and getting everyone who feels like their vote doesn’t matter out and voting anyway is the first step to changing it. (One example source

The state has 30 million people. Of those, 8M are in the Dallas area, 7.5M are in the Houston area, and about 5M between San Antonio and Austin. That means over 20 million of the state residents live in one of the 4 largest metro areas which are all majority blue.

Yet only 11M voted in 2020. National average turnout in the 2020 election was 66% but Texas was less than 40%, and it’s because of the exact sentiment you called out.

I’m from Texas (but don’t live there now) and I know how disheartening the voting season always felt. I want to fight the perception I’ve heard now from multiple people in Texas that their vote for president doesn’t mean anything, because it absolutely could if everyone gets out to vote.