I’m pretty much in the same boat, 720p looks fine to me in the vast majority of cases, and while I’m not great at going to my eye doctor regularly, the last time I had my vision checked it was fine, and it was right around the time I was shopping for a new TV and upgraded from 1080 to 4k, and still had a 720p in my bedroom.

If I looked really hard at them, I could tell the difference from the 720 to the 4k, but truth be told, I’m just not scrutinizing the picture quality of my TV that much.

I have a friend who used to work for a big time tech company with lots of defense department contacts, one of the sorts of companies where if he talked about his company helping the government read peoples emails and track you online and such, you couldn’t really be sure if he was joking or not.

He no longer works for that company, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t joking by the way.

I’ve been fortunate to know a lot of really smart people in my life, and I like to think I’m not an idiot myself, but this guy is hands down the smartest person I’ve ever met and it’s not even close, he is scary smart.

And he made insanely good money while he worked for them, and the kind of shit they did on the company (and by extension, the taxpayers’ dime,) was insane, they were regularly flying out to Vegas and putting it all on the company credit card.

So yeah for a talented person, there is really damn good money to be made if you can get security clearance.

My sister and I joke that we’re hermit crabs moving into each other’s shells

My grandmother died, my sister moved into her house

My mother in law moved in with her elderly mother (my wife’s mom and grandmom) to take care of her so my wife and I got her house

And for our next shells, my sister is eyeing my uncle’s house (he has no kids of his own, so it’s split between her my cousin, and myself in his will)

And I’m eyeing my parents house.

My sister and I have an agreement that we won’t make any move to try to claim the house the other wants.

And as for my cousin’s share of my uncle’s house, he can either have my sister’s current house (which we think would be ideal, it would get all 3 of us into the same town and he has some special needs so it would be nice for us to be close by if he needs anything) or she’ll buy him out of it with the money from selling her current house.

This of course hinges on my parents and uncle staying reasonably healthy and financially secure, if they end up as vegetables with a nursing home draining all of their assets or decide to blow all of their wealth in Vegas or something the whole plan could kind of fall apart. Looking at family history and their current health, age etc. though we think things are pretty much on-track.

I keep a CB radio in my car. It’s nice for keeping in contact with friends in another car on long road trips in places with bad cell service, and sometimes you can get useful traffic/road condition updates from truckers.

I also thought it might be nice to just kind of listen to the trucker chatter on long drives alone to stave off boredom and loneliness. Unfortunately, it turns out trucker conversations are rarely worth listening too, at best it’s usually stupid juvenile babbling, but there’s usually at least one lunatic ranting about politics and conspiracy theories.

Back when I still made an attempt to listen, there was one guy in my area a lot who was particularly unhinged.

This was back around 2014 or so, there was another ebola outbreak in Africa somewhere

And this guy was absolutely convinced that Obama was behind it somehow.

Funny thing about that, I remember a whole lot of conservatives being worked up about that outbreak, sure it was gonna become a pandemic. Some of them were even panic-buying masks. Weird how less than a decade later suddenly none of them wanted to wear those masks.