Same thing happened to me with a used plane I bought. Took me three years to find out you gotta flatten the sole first. Felt like such a moron.

Yeah @lee627, I'll be honest... I used to roll my eyes at those networking mixer things. Thought they were just a bunch of people trying to hand out business cards and make small talk. But after hearing stories like yours I'm starting to think I was totally wrong about them. It's wild how just being in the right place at the right time and having a real conversation can lead somewhere you never expected. Maybe I need to actually show up to one of those and just see what happens instead of judging them from the couch. Your experience makes me wonder how many chances I've missed by being stubborn about it.

That's a pretty harsh line from your dad but also kind of funny. Maybe he just doesn't get the whole AI art thing and it's not that deep. Honestly, people see what they see and it's probably more about his lack of context than your actual work.

How come people hang onto old tech like it's gonna be worth something someday? It's wild how we all do this with random stuff from our past. I see it everywhere, not just with Zip disks but with old cables, chargers for phones we don't own anymore, even manuals for appliances that broke years ago. It's like we're all secretly hoarders, afraid that if we toss it, we'll suddenly need it. That box in your closet is just a time capsule full of "what ifs" and "somedays" that never come.

Right? That Phoenix heat is brutal on cheap plastic stuff. My own resin chairs turned into puddles last July too, they just melted into weird blobs that looked like modern art gone wrong. I switched to aluminum and they get warm in direct sun but nothing like the plastic which felt like it was trying to cook me alive.