The Friday Five for 27 October 2023 – https://thefridayfive.dreamwidth.org/121019.html

1. Which website do you go to more often than any other?

Technically gmail because I have my inbox always open in a tab as well as my phone. Other than that, probably https://www.yle.fi which is the national news site and Reddit which has both fandom subreddits and subreddits which talk about Finnish news.

2. Which website have you stopped going to, that you used to go to a lot?

Livejournal.

3. What is the weirdest or most unusual website you have bookmarked?

I don’t think I have either types bookmarked. Others may think some of them are weird but I don’t!

4. If you shop online, which online store do you buy from most often?

There’s no one single online store I buy more from than any other. They are divided by product category; here are a few of my most used (but not necessarily more than a couple of times a year):

https://www.lumingerie.fi is the only shop I buy bras from.

https://fountainfeder.de/ is a shop I buy a lot of the fountain pen/ink stuff from and only one I buy ink samples from since Brexit. But it isn’t the only shop I buy fountain pen stuff from.

Amazon UK and Amazon DE are the two I use the most for buying DVDs & Blurays and calendars/yearly diaries.

https://www.yliopistonapteekki.fi/ for things like vitamins and cosmetics when they’re in a good sale.

5. Which online store do you browse but almost never buy from?

I browse Etsy a lot, and while I do buy from there, compared to the browsing, it’s a tiny amount.

Friday 5 for October 27: Lessons – http://f.riday5.com/2023/10/27/friday-5-for-october-27-lessons/

1. What were your high school teachers wrong about?

I quit high school after three months and was absent most of those three months, so I’m answering this based on my primary/comprehensive school and the first year of vocational school (the first year was general education, the years after that were for training in vocations).

The teachers were completely wrong when they said that when the baby boomer generation retires, a mad number of jobs will open up and we will have no problems getting a job if we’re even half way decent at what we do. They were so totally wrong.

Instread of steady jobs, there was a serious depression which started in 1990. Companies went under and unemployment was high. If you graduated to a profession during the depression or in the years immediately after it, what those people got were temp and part-time jobs at best, unemployment at worst. In the public sector jobs did more and more of cuts and offices, libraries, hospitals etc. run on minimal staff and people are only hired when it can’t be avoided to this day. In the private sector the same, but the service industries such as restaurants, shops etc. only hire part-time and only bosses are full-time. And everywhere technology has taken over human work, so a lot of people who aren’t cerebrally minded are unemployed because simple jobs don’t exist anymore, and they are not up to reading to be engineers, doctors or coders etc.

2. Which high school subject (or specific lesson) turned out to be more useful than you expected?

I think history. I’ve many times been grateful for the general education I received about varius countries, their histories and their relationships to one another, and what ideas, events, sentiments lead to various historical upheavals. It’s made following international news much easier when I know at least something about Russia’s history, or Hamas or Israel or whatever.

3. From which high school courses do you remember most and least?

I remember history the most, I think. Just because I loved learning about Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. Least – Chemistry and Physics. I feel like I never much learned anything, or at least don’t remember much. Mostly I remember there being too few work stations and boys dominating them, so whenever we got to do experiments/see something work, boys got to do the thing and girls watch from the side :/ You can’t really learn well when you don’t get to do stuff yourself.

4. How many of your high school classmates are you still in touch with?

None. I didn’t like school, and only had “school” friends, not ones that I wanted to spend any time with outside school. Of my real friends, one was in the same school as I but in a different class, and the rest went to a different school.

5. Which specific songs bring you back to specific memories of high school?

Not song, but band: Duran Duran. And not school itself, but rather singing Duran Duran songs after school with my friends, and doing my homework while listening to WIld Boys and Save a Prayer.