$500/month = ~$125/week, but if you get two messages per week that's $62.50/message. Still a lot of money though.

According to knowyourmeme, this is a photo from a 2018 session of Japanese Parliament. The guy in the center is calling for a vote on a controversial bill, and a bunch of opposition party members are attempting to physically prevent him from doing so. Apparently this is a thing they do in the Japanese Parliament sometimes?

I'm job hunting right now and turning over a lot of similar questions, about how much I should be asking for.

A few years back I got over 80% by switching sectors - I was underpaid at a public sector job I loved, and switched to a private sector job in the finance industry and a higher COL area. Similar to you, they offered more than I asked for because corporate had specific pay brackets for that position.

I think your pay depends a lot on the specific area/tech stack you're working in and who you're working for. Some tech stacks just pay more on average than others, bigger corporations can usually pay more than smaller companies, and private sector will always pay more than public sector (but usually with worse benefits). You can check Glassdoor or similar sites to see what people with a similar title make at the company you're applying to, but that's only helpful at really big companies where there are enough employees reporting to give a good average.

The equipment usually isn't sized for adults. I barely fit into the swing set at my local park, and I'm smaller than average. Even though I can technically use it, it's very uncomfortable.

But besides that, as a grown man I'm going to get some very weird looks from parents if I waltz up to the jungle gym and start climbing with their kids. There may not be a law against it, but it's certainly not socially acceptable.

I recently wrote a tool to make my D&D games a little easier. It's a web app that lets you load up an encounter's worth of enemies and keep track of their health (plus extra stuff, like legendary actions). And it does the math for you, which is a huge weight off my mental load.

It would be neat to expand it with an API that lets you load in monsters from a database and calculate the encounter difficulty, but I'm in no hurry. I don't usually have a lot of energy to code on weekends now that it's my full time job.