oh man, I could have written this post myself. my book club had the exact same meltdown over 'Where the Crawdads Sing' and honestly, I get it. like, the main character in that one basically lives alone in a swamp as a kid and turns out totally fine with no real trauma showing? people got so mad when I said it felt like a fantasy version of surviving neglect. in my experience, when a book gets super popular, people take any criticism of it personally, like you're attacking their taste instead of the plot. your point about the lives hopping around with no price tag is spot on, that's a real flaw in the storytelling, not you missing some deep message.

Yep @ivan462, I've seen the same thing. Had to fix someone's mess from no notes once.

My buddy Dave tried one of those $250 stud finders on his living room wall last month and it kept beeping at a spot right where he wanted to hang a shelf. Turned out the sensor was picking up some old metal duct tape from a previous HVAC repair that was completely flat against the drywall. He ended up using a rare earth magnet he had from an old speaker and found the studs in about 45 seconds flat. Now the fancy sensor sits in his garage collecting dust next to the half-empty can of paint he swore he'd use up.

Hang on, is everyone acting like a tagline is some revolutionary safety device now? I've been running boom trucks for fifteen years and I'll take a good spotter over a rope any day if you ask me. Maybe I'm wrong but it sounds like a little bit of an overreaction to me.

Whoa, I'm not so sure about that one! I get that raising prices can filter out cheap clients, but sometimes $10 an hour is all a small business can afford when they're just starting out. A friend of mine runs a tiny bakery and she paid $15 an hour for her logo because that's what she could scrape together. The designer was patient and only did two revisions because they set clear boundaries from the start. I think it's more about how you manage the process than the price tag alone.