February 2020 archive

29
Feb
2020

I’ve never actually mentioned this here.

categories: personal; word count: 746 words

With the exception of one individual that I am friends with on Facebook, I actually go to considerable pains to avoid friending people that I have gone to secondary school with on social media. Around the time that my ten-year class reunion would have taken place, I also went to concerted lengths to “lay low” on social media (again, particularly Facebook) in the hopes that none of them would attempt to reach out and contact me, seeing if they could get me to attend something — the answer would have been a polite but firm “no, and please do not contact me for these purposes again,” and I probably would have blocked the individual that sent me this message. (I also began perusing Facebook to see if any “Class of 2004” groups had popped up with my high school’s name in them to see if it would just be easier to block people that way, and was actually relieved to see that one had not. Other classes had groups for their ten-year reunion, though.)

I don’t actually see myself changing my mind on this whole “don’t friend any more of these people” stance.

At the end of my graduating year, I actually turned an on-again, off-again boyfriend in for making comments that he would bring his father’s gun to school and “shoot up the freshman class because they annoyed him”. The school found out that his father owned the exact make and model gun that I had told them he mentioned (which lent a lot of credibility to what I had told them), and after talking to him, were concerned about his mental state. However, his parents intentionally stonewalled the investigation by nearly immediately withdrawing him from attendance as a student with the intent to homeschool him for the rest of time that he would have spent in public school “so that this wouldn’t go down on his permanent record and ruin his life,” not even letting the school complete the investigation that they had been working on. This really bothered the school, because this was seen as an intentionally evasive maneuver, and they were right — they couldn’t continue the investigation, or do anything further about it, if he were no longer a student. All they could do would be to call the police on him if he did follow through on his threat and show up on campus at the end of the school year with the gun (and he had been clear as to when he wanted to do this, which was something else that I told the school). I was told all of this by the principal herself when she told me the results of the investigation and how this boy’s parents had intentionally stymied it. It was around this point that I just wanted to graduate and want nothing else to do with the school. I could not safely attend my own senior prom because this boy, obviously mad because all of this had gotten out, had told his friends that continued to attend school what had happened, and my safety at prom could not be guaranteed if I were to attend. The school’s literal response to that was exactly that. My safety could not be guaranteed…

I would find out more than a decade later as a result of some of Bub’s father’s friends being friends with the person that would eventually become his wife that due to the egregious oversight that allowed him to be withdrawn from attendance nearly immediately into this investigation that there being “nothing on paper” actually allowed him to join the United States military. That could have ended disastrously for everyone involved. I’m actually surprised that it hasn’t. Because the school couldn’t complete this investigation due to his parents withdrawing him really early into it, he was allowed to enlist in the military. That was appalling.

Like, his parents moved fast in how quickly they withdrew him as a student, and they made their intent extremely clear to the school even though they didn’t tell them why they were doing it. It was very evident.

But with all of the things that I had to deal with while attending school in this district, that being the absolute icing on the cake, is it really any wonder why I do not keep in touch with anyone that I went to school with (there being one exception, someone that attended the same school as me freshman year) and never will?

28
Feb
2020

Please stop making us pay twice, consoles.

categories: consoles; word count: 299 words

One of the things that I have really come to dislike about new-generation consoles is that now you have to pay on all three of them to be able to access online play. Before, the only one that you had to do this with was Microsoft, and it was a foregone conclusion that you would have to because it was this way from the start. After several years, Sony hopped on the bandwagon as well. But Nintendo held out for awhile, and I enjoyed being able to play online games for free on their consoles… at least until they finally hopped aboard the pay-to-play subscription model and went full steam ahead requiring that you purchase an online subscription to be able to access online play with the Nintendo Switch. And although their online subscription is much cheaper than Microsoft and Sony’s, the fact of the matter still stands that they eventually hopped aboard the bandwagon as well, and now all three of the new-gen consoles require that you pay for an online subscription to be able to access online play in addition to, well, paying for the Internet as well. So you’re essentially paying twice to be able to access online play to begin with, which I don’t like…

And I mean, this is why I am not a really big fan of MMOs that make you continually pay for a subscription.

When I game, I like to be able to do things at my leisure, and having the threat of a subscription to something that is going to expire at a certain time hanging over my lead looming actually kills my desire to want to play the game. It’s paradoxical. I’d rather pay for it once and get it out of the way if I can help it…

27
Feb
2020

Something that I will have to fix soon…

categories: personal; word count: 180 words

Our new laptop’s Wi-fi card doesn’t seem to be dual-banded, because it can’t connect to 5Ghz connections.

And I know for a fact that our router broadcasts both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, because I set both of those up when I was setting our router up for the first time. In a… rather peculiar twist, our microwave actually disrupts the 2.4Ghz signal if it runs too long, causing it to lag or even disconnect. So it might actually be worth looking into getting one of those USB dongles that you can set up to “take over” for the Wi-fi card that is actually in this computer, that way I can connect to both of those as needed. I will admit that I don’t know the most in the world about them other than the fact that they do exist, so I’ll have to do some more research on them.

Literally everything else in this house connects to 5Ghz except for this new laptop, though…

So I suppose I should really start looking into the most appropriate dongle to “upgrade” this computer.

25
Feb
2020

Well, I did a little bit of research here, and…

categories: personal; word count: 486 words

23andMe and Ancestry don’t seem to be the best at gauging relatives that you may have when they are only half-related to you. For instance, they may tell you that you have a first cousin based on the percentage of DNA that you share with them because that is the percentage of DNA that you would be estimated to share with a first cousin if that were a conventional relationship, but if that person is only a half-relative to you, that person may not actually be your first cousin… am I making any sense? Because in the case of my highest match on 23andMe, the “first cousin” that I have there, he is actually my biological half-uncle, which I was able to confirm because his daughter (who is actually my half-cousin if you want to get symmetrical about all of this) read the message that I sent him since she has access to his account and actually corresponded back with me. She’s also awesome, by the way. But getting back to what I had originally been writing about… I began looking into my two highest matches on Ancestry, which were more than 10%, which is statistically significant. That would normally put you in the ballpark of first cousin, but once I was able to find out a little bit more about them, they were so much older than me (not knocking you for your ages if you find my blog and read this!) that it was, and is, actually unlikely that they are both indeed my first cousins.

It seems more likely that they are my half-aunts (or my half-great aunts, but half-aunts seems more likely).

Given the gap in our ages, it actually seems more likely that they may be the biological half-sibling to one of my parents. And since both of my parents have, for all intents and purposes, an unknown biological parent of their own, I can’t immediately identify which one of those it might be by virtue of “the one with the unknown parent”. And based on the research that I have done, my two highest matches on Ancestry are sisters to one another. I did send both of them nice, polite messages when I found out that we were of the relation that we were… one of them when I got my own results back from Ancestry, and the other one when she came up as the high match to me that she did on Ancestry, because she is now my highest match. I can only hope that, at some point in time, I get a response back from either one of them, or someone on that side of the family. If possible, I would like to get to know them, because I’m under the impression that they had (or have, until they see those messages) no idea that I existed until now. And a lot of them are on Ancestry, too.

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