What's something you just learned, that you should have known for a while?

Don't mess around with partitions on your disk when it's past midnight, you're extremely stressed, and you don't have (easily accessible) backups.

That if they stop loving you, they won't start again no matter how hard you try.

Permanently Deleted

I found out that I could disassemble my vacuum's dirt container further so I can clear it out easier. The container has a big plastic tube that runs through it and I've been squeezing my hand around it to grab clumps of pet hair that get stuck. The other day while I was trying to clear the container, the plastic tube fell out. Turns out I just needed to twist and pull the tube. I've had this vacuum for 8 years.

If you are a dude sit down to pee when you are home.... feels weird for like a day but it is fantastic. No more trying to aim on the middle of the night while trying to close your eyes, no more rouge pee stream, just a like moment to sit and relax.

When using Google Maps for driving directions, you can swipe left and it will show/speak the next upcoming step. I had no idea about this and I've been using Google maps for ages.

"Making ends meet" i use to think it was, "Making ends meat" like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.

There is no animal called "cow".

Cow is a term for females of multiple species.

The animal that gives us milk is called cattle. Female cattle are cows. Male cattle are bulls.

I always thought cattle was a synonym for livestock, but it is a species of animal.

This summer I found out I’m autistic. I’m 60 years old.

I’ll interpret “just learned” as in the last year or so

Lifting weights is good for you and you should do it
Running is only bad for your knees if your form sucks, your shoes suck, or you overtrain. Done correctly it’s good for you in basically every way.
Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.

You never know how far you'll go to save a pet until it happens.

With UEFI bios you no longer need a boot menu like Grub for choosing an OS to boot. You can just use the boot menu of the bios.

(You still need Grub for booting Linux, but no need to show it for long seconds just so you can select Windows from it, if for some reason you have a Windows installed too.)

That West Berlin was an enclave deep within GDR, completely encircled by the Berlin wall. For some reason I thought that Berlin was right at the border between FRG and GDR with the wall splitting it in half.

At 4 AM this morning I learned there was a smoke alarm in my office. Also that the beep it makes when the battery is dead is loud as fuck. Loud enough to wake me from a dead sleep in another room.

Economics. I never understood it that well having taken two years of high school classes for law and government, then watched a single Economics Explained video and understood so much that I hadn’t understood before.

I realized too late in my life that friendships of any kind or flavor all have a lifespan. This can mean anything, five minutes in line at the movies, childhood into high school, a semester of college, or your whole life.

Context: the friends I’ve (m35) had since childhood and into my adulthood have slowly and silently withered away due a multitude of reasons but mostly because we each have things going on in our life and those had taken precedence over cultivating and caring for our friendships. Sure we text for holidays or birthdays, but it all feels hollow compared to what we had together for literal decades.

“Conifers” comes from “Cone” as in Pine Cone

“Mammals” as in Mammary glands

Those are the two that come to mind but there have been several more in the same vein of these as I rapidly approach the conclusion of my fifth decade…

I just learned that in the sky there are things called contrails, and they are made by machines that fly high above us called aeroplanes.

PBR is made with sulphury water and that's why PBR farts smell so bad. Beer made from good water doesn't give you wicked bad farts! never again

The actual rules of Scattergories. I had no idea that the rules I grew up with were not the actual rules, and the actual rules make the game much easier.

That Russia wasn't the aggressor in the Cuba missile crisis. They were responding to the US installing missiles pointed at them from Turkey and Italy.

I'm reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. One of the things he talks about is how snap decisions (quick emotional reactions to stimuli) are so fast because they skip over certain parts of your central nervous system. This is why these decisions are often unwise/unreasonable; they skip the part of your brain that does logical reasoning. This is necessary for fight/flight decisions but not great for emotionally-charged conversations.

In retrospect, this seems obvious.

My wife just informed me a few days ago that most dicks do not curve up to point at the ceiling... mine does.

I'm 40. How did I not ever know this?

Adhd

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Some men feel emasculated by the idea of sitting to pee. Really guys? I wonder what goes on in the privacy of their bathrooms, when they’re pinching the proverbial loaf. Do they stand up to pee and sit to pass? Of course not. :: Sitting to pee is what you do if you want to keep the toilet area clean. You can be a big strong man and still be a sitzpinkler.