Joined March 2011
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382 Photos and videos
Michael Bahr retweeted
Jun 12
During the press junket for Jurassic World: Evolution, a journalist took their entire interview time with Jeff Goldblum to have him read as Principal Skinner from THE SIMPSONS "Steamed Hams" episode, and it's amazing 😂👏
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Jun 9
Truly growing up and gaining an adult's understanding of the world means realizing that Weird Al Yankovic's most genius work was his originals, not his parodies, all along
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Jun 8
Correlation isn't causation, but it's not a bad idea to add the intel to your assumption set at least
Jun 8
It's the reality. I haven't been in my twenties for a WHILE, but I remember the dating wringer then, and the plain fact was that as soon as I was willing to get aggressive and edgy, dating success followed. Night and day. Never mind that it felt fake and performative.
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Jun 6
This is why everyone hates boomers right now. They truly don't understand that life costs too much for zoomers today, and you can't budget what isn't there.
Zoomers, by and large, don't have $500 discretionary every month. They aren't paid enough to have it, after covering the non-optionals. It is not possible to "make a budget" to create additional discretionary money where none exists.
Let's give the zoomer every possible high estimate, and they still don't have it:
Debt FREE (zero credit card balance, zero student loan balance, no car note).
$60k/yr pay (more than almost all zoomers make)
that's $5k/mo
that's $3400k take home after taxes, medical etc
$1400 rent ($2800 2br apt w/roommate)
$400 utilities (assuming no cable internet, but rather tethering to phone to save $$$)
$500 insurance, fuel, maintenance on 2014 Corolla with 250k miles whose days are numbered
$500 food (about $5.50 per meal, all meals eaten at home, no going out)
$100 household sundries/consumables from Costco
$50 (this is extremely charitable) ongoing clothing replacement
$50 ongoing furniture/other household items maintenance and replacement
We're down under $500 by a lot and we haven't bought a single calorie of food or drink outside the home (so no Starbucks), or had to pay a single penny for any emergency expense whatsoever (no medicine for example) and so on, and we've spent zero dollars and zero cents on anything recreational outside the home. And again this is requiring there be ZERO debt so no balance or interest payments.
AND MOST ZOOMERS EARN WAY LESS THAN SIXTY GRAND A YEAR. So for many of them, it's not even close to the shown equation. For many of them, it's "live with parents or you can't survive."
So no, zoomers cannot "just save $500 a month."
And boomers caused most of the inflated expenses of life through their decades of voting decisions.
The average zoomer absolutely is, because nobody taught you how to make a budget and stick to it.
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Jun 6
I forgot I was going to post photos of the wheel bearing replacements I did for one of my Civics. DIY-ers may find this of interest.
I found out replacing JUST the bearings on this 2011 Civic was going to require some specific tools I didn't have, such as a slide hammer or a bearing press (extractor). Given the relative costs involved, and the age, mileage, and value of the car, it made more sense to just buy 3rd-party entire knuckle assemblies with new bearings from Rock Auto, and my existing tools were more than enough... almost.
The process in general was, lift car, remove wheel, unstake the axle nut, pull brake caliper aside, remove rotor, and then the knuckle is ready to be unbolted from the control arms and suspension and replaced 1:1. Reassemble, torque to spec, and go. Youtube videos explaining how were pretty helpful.
Driver's side went fine, despite the axle nut stake being deep. I had a stake tool that clawed it open. On the passenger side, though, the nut was not having it. Nothing I did would get that puppy off. I had to stop by the garage where they had a torch running so I could heat it up and then breaker-bar it off. Finally success though. See the photos of that nut for how messed up it was by the time I got it off of there. Replaced with brand new ones and restaked.
Total spend on the job was under $300 in parts, my own labor, and a $75 tip to the garage for the brief use of their torch. (They have more than earned it from great quality repairs they've done for me over the years.) Most quotes for shop replacement were in the realm of $650 PER bearing including labor (but for OEM parts). If I had this issue on my 2023 Integra, I'd probably pay up. For this project car, nah.
I'm having to learn these jobs from scratch, mistakes and all, every time they come up, and even then the cost savings are significant. Cheaper by a lot than a local garage, cheaper by a mile than a dealership service center. In a pinch I'll pay a local indie shop. The trustable ones earn their price and are still generally reasonable.
I hope posts like this help demystify car repair a bit for all you normies out there looking for a way to get your transportation costs down.
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May 30
Heads up to coin enthusiasts. The one-cent piece or "penny" as 100% of normal people call it, was minted for circulation for the last time in 2025. HOWEVER, pennies DO appear in the 1776-2026 250th anniversary proof and uncirculated US Mint collector sets. The 2026 pennies will not be minted for circulation, however, so if you see one in the wild, grab it up, someone broke it out of a collector set. The More You Know(Tm)!
This is not the first time the mint has made NIFC (Not Intended For Circulation) years of common coins. Kennedy half-dollars have been NIFC in most years since 1987, appearing mainly or only in the collector sets. The 2025 proof and uncirculated sets are all way above normal market value because nobody knew at the time they were sold that it would be the last circulating year for pennies.
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May 22
If you're here off my car market post, welcome! I'm not selling anything. I try to post insightful things. I do follow back.
I'm not wealthy and cars are just my hobby, I have a great day job in freight management. So I limit my car purchases to what I can pay cash for, so I get very familiar with what's out there for cheap. It's a wild west out there.
I hope your week is treating you well!
May 22
I regularly buy, sell, refurbish, and collect cars. I also have teenagers who are new drivers saving for their own. The state of the used P2P market is that anything offered under $3500 is VERY sketch, and that traces directly back to cash-4-clunkers hard-deleting the bottom end of the used market. Yes, boomers, the market effect is still cascading onward almost 20 years later.
You can almost kinda sorta get a passable Honda or Mazda in the $6500 range in most areas. If you have a VERY trustable mechanic, you can get a $4k Odyssey and spend half a grand to have him sort it out. ($1500 if it needs the timing belt done, which it probably does.) Unless you jackpot somehow on FB marketplace that's the effective bottom end of the market for a normie buyer.
"Just buy a Toyota" everyone knows they are awesome so they don't tend to be sold used unless they are VERY thrashed or something very wrong with it. Only safe used path to a Toyota is CPO which is 4-6 years old and still $20k in most cases. Trust me I'd be buying up every Taco in town if they didn't keep showing up completely rusted through or with 5 accidents on the carfax. Because the better ones... aren't for sale!
"Just get a repo or theft recovery from the insurance auction" oh I assure you I am a copart FIEND and there's a reason most people are not. Bottom line is the average daily driving human isn't a car mechanic and can't buy a car and then restore it before using it. There are financial and practical obstacles that put this option out of reach for most.
In the simplest and most direct terms, cash 4 clunkers exerted permanent upward price pressure on the bottom end of the used car market. C4C is probably responsible for the $500 beater being a $2500 beater in 2026, and inflation accounts for it being a $3500 beater instead.
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May 21
The job sector with the most explosive growth right now is healthcare. When the boomers finally die off in sufficient numbers, oh man, is there ever going to be an economic crash.
I don't know, bookmark this if you like. I'd love to be wrong about it.
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May 18
Wait, is this uncommon? I realize not everyone is the archivist of their family, but between my parents, sibs, and me, we have a trove of records, and one of my side projects is cloud scanning it all.
Birth/death/marriage certificates since ~1850, military service records, title deeds to properties past and present, vehicle documents (I enjoy those more than my folks do) and so much more.
Many of our ancestors were poor, but we kept their silver coins, jewelry, silverware, and other durable keepsakes. And in some cases we have maybe one photo of the person, usually a wedding photo of a great-great grandmother and grandfather. If they passed before I was born, that's all I've ever seen of them.
If your family records were lost because of disaster or whatever, I sympathize, that totally sucks. But if not, why wouldn't you keep everything you possibly could, of your family history?
Fascinated to learn that some people assume, and who knows how pervasive that assumption is, that nobody would keep any such records, documents, or heirlooms. That's literally why "heirlooms" exists as a concept
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May 13
I have two sons, and I wanted them to have the freedom to pursue their life's path, without the pressure from carrying their father's name to "live up to" whatever I managed to achieve decades ago.
But we're Catholic so saint names were still obligatory. Gregory and Theodore.
May 13
Men naming their firstborn sons after themselves, don’t see that much anymore.
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May 11
This guy's gonna be president at some point if he keeps this up
May 10
I’m a big fan of Marco Rubio now—this is easily the best Catholic political speech I’ve heard from someone
video: CIT
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May 7
Men build, and men fight. Video games are mostly building and fighting simulators.
Women nurture. It is not an accident that video games with the "nurturing" mechanic are the ones that cross over most successfully with women. (Pokemon, MMORPGs, etc)
May 7
Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don't become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.
Men. Want. Power.
Men want to be able to *do* things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.
Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.
If yov doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It's very telling that this is even *possible*.
Women don't work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don't think I need to. If it's not obvious, ask an LLM "why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation". You'll get an earful.
Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.
It's not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don't really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.
I don't have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this - instincts are what instincts are and I don't waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.
But understanding what's going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren't doomed to fail.
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Apr 22
It's cool that for Mercedes-Benz vehicles, the C in C-class may as well stand for Cheap, and the E in E-class may as well stand for Expensive. Convenient mental shorthand
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Apr 20
I visited a gentleman one time to purchase some arcade hardware. In the hobby, we always talk shop and show off our collections.
This guy was legendary tier. To this day I've never seen another collection as awesome as this in person. It totally inspired me.
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Apr 12
I'm having an interaction with a guy who I don't think understands how GenXers were with movies during the '90s and '00s. Can I get any Gen X backup out there to others who did this kind of thing in the pre-social-media era?
I posted that we went to the movies every week, often multiple times. He fixated on the notion of this as an uninterrupted streak, which I guess is a fair literal interpretation what I said, but misses the point entirely (like that TV guide synopsis of Wizard of Oz that says it's about a girl who travels to a strange place, kills the first person she meets, and teams up with 3 strangers to kill again).
The continuity was absolutely real though. Movies are what we did. We went with friends, we took our dates, sometimes sibs or parents, etc.
Here let me dart-throw a month. May 2002. Thanks to Box Office Mojo I can see the releases that month. Here is everything I watched in theaters:
Spider-Man (at least twice)
The New Guy
Star Wars Ep2 (like 3 or 4 times)
Insomnia
The Sum of All Fears
So with multiples we've got 8 movie trips in a 4.5-week span, the month of May 2002. And these are all tentpole flicks, wide release big budget Hollywood work, not indie theater stuff that nobody went to.
How can it be that difficult to believe a GenXer would have gone to all those movies all those years?
We clearly would have missed weeks here and there in the dregs of January etc some years. But even still, not by much!
Dart-throwing January 1996, we definitely went to:
12 Monkeys (at least twice)
From Dusk Till Dawn
Black Sheep
So there we go in the worst month of the year for movies we still averaged roughly one theater trip per week.
(I dart-threw January 1997 first but that one turned out to be a bad example because Star Wars Special Edition came out and we went to that like 7 or 8 times for sure, including Thursday midnight and then Friday to run it back, so I re-darted to the year prior. But even not counting SW, in Jan '97 we went to Beverly Hills Ninja and Metro as well.)
Who all else lived in this era and can corroborate?
x.com/MikeValmike/status/204…
Apr 12
Who ever said anything about "breaking a streak?" I'm sure many weeks were missed, and were more than made up for by multiple movie weeks. Summers and Decembers would have 2-3 hype titles released every Friday, and the dregs of January might have nothing good that week at all.
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Apr 12
For a big enough title we'd see it 3 times in 24 hours. Thursday midnight with the hooligans, then Friday matinee with a lot of the same friends, and then Friday evening with our dates.
We used to vocalize along with the @HarkinsTheatres pre-show bumper, we knew it so well.
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Apr 12
If I had a chance to get precision-memory-wiped by the Men-In-Black flash pen so that I was a virgin for my present-day wife on our wedding night, I would take it with zero hesitation, and so would she.
Purity is such a precious thing and we all just cast it away.
Apr 12
Religion stole my entire sexual prime.
I didn’t have sex until my wedding night at 23.
I didn’t have a real dating life until my divorce at 28.
And I’m done pretending that wasn’t a tragedy.
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