I used to wrote mobile apps for a large cable company whose named rhymes with "bombast". At one point I got the gig writing their TV guide-type app for Blackberry. Nobody else at the entire company had any idea of how to do it since none of the built-in controls for Blackberry development (called "fields") could do anything like what was needed. I had a lot of experience with animation so I was able to do everything with custom-drawn graphics. I had a great time since I had zero interference from managers and I made the app do everything I always wanted a guide app to do. It could even change the channel for you on your own TV, not using IR (which Blackberrys did have) but sending the control signals through wifi to the Bombast servers. At one point, executives from RIM visited the office trying to convince large clients to continue developing apps for their platform; we showed them my app and they were blown away, saying "how is this even possible on a Blackberry?"

The punchline, of course, is that this was 2011 and Blackberry was plummeting rapidly to its doom. My guide was on the market for just a few months but nobody ever really downloaded Bombast apps (even for iPhone or Android -- their numbers were essentially faked for a bunch of reasons) so it died. I did continue using it myself for my own TV until Bombast sunsetted the API it used. That was a sad day for me.

It is insane to me that today, in 2026, the channel guide on my parents' cable box is so much fucking worse -- and slower -- of an experience than an app I wrote 15 years ago for mobile devices that were almost 10 years old themselves at that time.

That's what options are for!

I actually wonder if there’s a person to trace the look back to

Not a person, exactly.

"I'm gonna give you somethin' you can't take off."

donating over 6 billion dollars to fund investment accounts for at least 25 million children

$250 per child? Like, a week of daycare? Oh, investment accounts ... so two weeks of daycare in twenty years. Unless it's invested in AI, in which case zero weeks of daycare.

"It's cool, we're just here for the skittles. You can have all the reese's peanut butter cups."

Republicans really amped up the douchebaggery in the 1960s and they have only gotten progressively (pun intended) worse since then.

You're describing The Daily Show (and its various offshoots) which, while wonderful, have not fixed the country for the last 30 years.

I have a feeling that's how his oncologist treated him, too. "Well, you could just eat a lot of fruit instead."

Some school districts will train you for the CDL, and some even pay you while you're training (mine didn't at the time). My training didn't take very long because I already owned a used school bus and knew how to drive it, at least. You have to take four standardized tests (general CDL, airbrakes, passenger endorsement and school bus endorsement), have a driving exam, and take a 14-hour special school bus class (this is all in PA, at least). The standardized tests aren't super-difficult, but you do have to actually know the shit, you can't guess your way through it and hope to get a passing grade. I just crammed the free online tests over and over until I was getting 100% on them. I think it was maybe a month and a half between when I started my training and my first day on the job, but that was with not doing a whole lot each day. My district was (and still is) a weird combination of desperate need for drivers with a frustratingly slow pace of actually training people.

I have a class C. I wouldn't bother with a class B unless I actually needed it.

"I wish I could lick my own balls like Bob can."

My house had no insulation anywhere, just walls made of cinderblock filled with concrete and a basement. Ceiling was just plaster tiles (a weird old 1940s system that was intermediate between lath-and-plaster and sheetrock) with no insulation in the attic floor at all except for faint traces of what I assume was asbestos. I've spent the last two weeks putting in R19 fiberglass batts and decking the attic, absolute murder on my knees since the peak of the roof is only 5' tall. My heating bills have actually not been too terrible up to this point since the house is so small (650 sq. ft.), but I'm assuming that having at least the ceiling decently insulated will make a significant difference this winter.