I was watching a video on the recent achievements in the Tetris community, and my mom came up and watched over my shoulder for a bit. There was a moment in the video where the narrator was talking about the moment Blue Scuti reached the game's killscreen for the first time. Years of effort, countless hours of practice, chasing something that people thought was literally impossible for decades, and then he fucking does it. This is a seriously cool and inspiring story, right?
"Does he get paid for that? You can't spend that much time on something if you're not getting paid."
Are you telling me you literally can't imagine wanting to do something just to do it? That you can only imagine spending effort if it's to chase a cash prize or a wage? That you can't imagine the desire to just... be the best at something, or achieve something before anyone else? I love that woman but a lifetime of being in the system has burned out a critical part of her brain - she can't imagine having a job and not spending all of your free time sucking up to management for a promotion, she is exactly the person all of the "hustle grindset" bullshit influencers and motivational speakers try to turn you into, and i swear to god if she hadn't worked for the government her whole life she would have gotten in on the ground floor of an MLM and made a shitzillion dollars.
It's so fucking depressing.
People tend to jump on me whenever I mention it online and say I'm going to get people killed by saying it's pretty safe if you respect what you're doing. My main defense is that every single death I've ever read about was from people using microwave transformers, which you could probably find videos showing the power difference. The microwave ones almost immediately set the wood on fire and will make huge arcs when the circuit is about to close. I've actually gotten brushed by the leads using a neon sign transformer, which run at almost half the voltage of the microwave units when I first started and it doesn't feel great, but you're not going to get fried unless you maybe held each of the leads in a separate hand and created a circuit through your body. The way I do it is setting nails in the wood and then make no contact with the wood while keeping my finger on a kill switch.