I won't make the obvious joke, but I'll let Gowron make it for me.

My husband also does MtG so I’ll probably need to learn that too.

You and your husband might really enjoy Dominion and its many expansions. It's sort of like a game of Magic, but you're building your deck as you go.

The cards are pretty, but I still don’t know where you get the mana…

Mana comes from lands; there's usually one at the end of every booster pack. On your turn, you can play one land card for free, so your ability to cast spells grows as the game progresses. Different colors of land give you different colors of mana. Of course, because it's Magic, it gets crazy pretty quickly: there's two-color lands, three-color lands, lands that turn mana into a different color, lands that you can use to get abilities, lands that turn into monsters, monsters that act like land...

My wife and I play Commander (popular variant with special rules and more randomness) and the pre-constructed decks that come out for every set are pretty solid. You get everything you need to play, and you can swap cards out if you want.

The damn screen door is broken. I have to buy a new piston for it because my daughter opened it all the way to its maximum angle and set the lock on the piston rod. The piston cannot extend further. The lock will not budge. I guess I'm heading to the hardware store over lunch to get a new one because even WD40 and a series of increasingly desperate tool choices won't unstick it.

Got to work this morning and had to fill out e-cards for teammates. I actively hate doing this because my mom used to stand over me and scream every time I wrote the wrong thing in any letter, greeting card, or thank you note I ever wrote. As a result, I spend a lot of time overanalyzing and it takes over my brain until I've completed it.

One got married and I spent a long time convincing myself not to write "have fun together and never break two laws at the same time" or "don't go to bed angry and never argue with your clothes on." The other was an active impediment and left the team. I already had to say something nice about them at the meeting last week (effectively "remember when you weren't working on my project? that was awesome") and this feels unreasonable. I went with "have fun on your new adventure" because there are pleasing overtones of May You Live In Interesting Times in it.

I guess we could combine star trek with that other space set they released this year but yeah. Star Trek in MtG feels weird, and this is coming from someone with a Ninja Turtles deck.

On the other hand, we have this comedy gold:

___

"But by all means, keep shitting up the codebase with Claude..." -- the same managers, probably

Thank you. I started by making the face the cat in this thread is making and worked backwards until I had something I was willing to post.

Like watching a mime dig for change in a wrinkly leather sofa.

My therapist successfully talked me down last week and while I was still stressed, I wasn't a paralyzed, twitching mess for the week. I had a boring thing to do last night so I poured myself a glass of wine and did it. I avoided news sites until the texts started coming. First one was a buddy expressing cautious optimism and a desire to not jinx things. Second one was the same buddy, fifteen minutes later, yelling BLUE WAVE.

So that was nice. We even elected a nice firefighter with a ton of lefty endorsements to the House. I met him at a debate during the primaries and he was the only one that didn't make my flesh crawl. Apparently that is not a ringing endorsement for neurotypicals but it's damn near a badge of honor from me.

That looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

My wife and I are not good with holding back presents. Or keeping secrets about presents.

Same. As soon as I buy something for someone, I want them to have it. And then there's a month of horrible uncertainty where I overthink whether they'll like it, whether it was enough, and (in the case of people I'm not close with) whether I've already given them one.

Japanese chef guy is two for two; I made his mushroom recipe and they turned out exactly like the video. I'm neurotic when I cook, and seeing every step laid out with all the mistakes I could be making is really helpful. I grilled some overengineered hamburgers and made mushroom Swiss burgers with them, which turned out to be the best hamburgers I've ever made. So gg, strange masked internet chef. I think I'll try his shrimp next.

Second point still stands.

Once again: source?

Once upon a time the junior dev’s job was to clean the mainframe and type up the punch cards.

Source? Because I worked for a utility that used to use punchcards. I actually had a card reader and paper tape drive behind me in the server room where I worked. The old timers would come in and reminisce because it beat working, and none of the guys I talked to let "junior" devs touch the punch cards.

Imagine if they let the new guy waste a bunch of cards to put the machine in an unworkable state, or fuck up the punches from someone else's code, or -- and this was a very real problem -- drop the entire box on the way to the computer. The cards were srs business and the concept of "junior" didn't really exist because computing was a brand new field.

No profession is safe from stagnation.

Yeah, yeah. No profession is safe from short-sighted leadership taking a short-term gain instead of growing their talent either. That's not something to celebrate.