I was amused, not pissed off. If you had attempted to emasculate me by calling knitting "woman's work" then I'd have to go Shaolin monk style on you :P

You know, I'm a pretty skeptical person. Until I started participating in this forum I had no idea that jedi mind tricks could actually work. So let me practice some more...

(waves hand)
This is not the sewing machine you're looking for. You can go about your (manly) business. Move along.

The disadvantage to working for a company who owns around 25% of the market it operates in is that there's not much growth to be had, as people are afraid of locking themselves or causing a monopoly position. This lack of growth though leads to freezing the available budget to last years level.

Now, the main issue with this is that, basically, there's the same amount of money available to the same amount of people. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, each year you're evaluated based on your performance. This means that that some people need to get promoted, and in turn earn more. All of this with the same overall budget as last year. So yeah, this in turn means that some of the eployees will have lower salaries compared to last year, despite the company doing well (maybe too well).

I just hope I'm not one of the unlucky ones. God, I hate performance review week.

Jaw Malposition... Great... :(

It feels wrong to ask for it but is there anyone who could spare some encouraging words? I mean the surgery itself is dangerous... And im scared to death. I hope braces will be enough...

Everything's gonna be alright...

Now seriously - I hop you can get a away with braces - I kind of can feel with since I am a severe case of nosocomephobia.

Sometimes a way to deal with the anxiety of something like surgery is to involve yourself in the details that you can control. For surgery, that can come from making certain you do all of the pre-op stuff that the doctors assign you. For braces, make sure you take care of the daily maintenance stuff that the orthodontist / oral surgeon tells you to do. The point is that you feel like you have some direct control of the output by doing your part.

If it comes to surgery then I suspect you might be on a liquid diet for a period afterward. Just remember that margaritas are liquid. ; ) (but don't really do that - alcohol has a blood thinning effect, and they'll likely tell you to avoid such things for a while)

Best of luck, and keep us posted.

Well my appointment with the orthodontist is on the second of february. And... i have been a thumb sucker until my late teens... which is a little bit awkward... but it also means, that the upper jaw is deformed. my lower jaw has been pushed back over the years so there is a good chance, i'll have surgery. and i'm over 18, so my health insurance isn't going to pay for my braces.

Moving house. Stress.

Trying to sell the flat getting a buyer then buyer makes an ass of the purchase forcing me to put flat back on market.

Moving to a town with myself, 3 of my cats, and me and my other half appear to be "friends" after 2 years. Yay fucking yay. My bank balance is fuller than it has been in many years and all I can think is the lesson I learned as a child, which is that money doesn't solve shit when it comes to problems, love does.

You might look at it another way, in that having that financial cushion means less stress on relationships. So while money might not solve anything, at least it avoids the problems that come from not having it.

Good luck with the move.

I'm sorry to read about your situation, are you sure there are no places you can go or programs you can turn to, even just a loan?
:( Man I'm sorry to read of this, and to find out on here of all places. I'll be around on steam more if ya need to chat.

Nope...had my appointment. and the whole thing is critical health wise, since my condition by far exceeds the minimum requirements to be considered health threatening. that means braces for a year and if that doesn't help, surgery.

Why the indie devs are f*cking with every game distribution platform (even with GOG) but never with steam? What's so wrong with Desura for example - it provides the indie devs with quick and easy way to the market and how they repay that - advertise their games for the greenlight and when they release on steam they totally forget about every other distribution platform they were accepted first! How ungrateful, just see the countless games which are updated on steam and absolutely forgotten on Desura. How am I supposed to respect indie devs when that happens?

Edit 1: Actually just saw my rant on one game's desura page had some echo and the dev decided to update the game! Finally after like 7 months and 5 patches (2 major) but hey better later than never!
Unfortunately I think that game is not the only case -> GOG games version variations

God damn it. Again some yet-to-be-fixed critical Adobe Flash Player vulnerability, which some web page ads are already exploiting?

No link because I just read some Finnish web article on it, where the Finnish cyber security officials are recommending even uninstalling Flash Player, until a fix is available.

Are Java, Flash etc. designers so incompetent that there are such problems, or is this just the way it is, and always will be? Is it impossible to design those things to be fully secure, they will always be insecure in different places? Or is it user's fault somehow?