I always choose based on personality, or let them choose for themselves if they're especially chatty.
Some examples:
Screech, male cat, got him after weaning and the only things he could vocalise were variations of screeches. So, Screech. Also worked well with the fact that he had a full black coat, so you'd always hear him first.
Mimi, female cat. Found by one of my former coworkers next to an apartment building stairway, asked her what she'd like to be called. She said: "meeee..." in the cutest, squeakiest way imaginable. I asked and what else. "Meeee..." again, so that was that. She ended up earning it, she was exuberantly inquisitive and playful.
Maia, female cat. It was the most feminine name to also have a sort of benevolent but tired aristocratic aloofness. She was always bothered by your unrequested presence, always complaining with a bored chain smoker's croon of "mmmmaaawwwww..." She also obsessively groomed every living thing she had in her proximity, including a chicken (the only one dumb enough to not run away) and a hamster.
Lord, male dog. He was fucking majestic, looked like a miniature lion with black, white and copper stripes (about as large as a Golden Retriever). And he owned that name, always lording over the place. Ironically, got poisoned by an envious neighbor (I'm serious).
Ralph, the (happy) exception, male dog. So, this guy, had been my brother since I turned 10. First time I met him, he was slobbering. And he was a German Shepherd / Alsacian mix, these guys don't usually drool a lot afaik. But my guy was dripping. So, naturally, I wanted to call him Spit. I mean... naturally! Luckily, mum intervened with this one and declared him Ralph, because it was the friendliest* German name she could think of at the time. And he wore it well, he was always vivacious, but calculated.
No, I have several notebooks allocated for various types of importance - one for writing down everything, one in which I write down things which are relevant but not important long-term, and two in which I keep copies of the notes I need to keep. I just write it twice.
If you're asking about official documents, then yes. I keep at least* two legalised copies of everything (always separate) and 5 generic photocopies of each document in case anyone needs it on file for whatever reason.
Again, these aren't new arguments against storage environments, we've literally been doing bureaucracy for centuries.
Edit: to add, this is fretting over potentialities, I have lost precisely zero documents to water damage in three decades, so has my family for decades before that. Not saying it can't happen, just saying it's pretty easy to keep paper copies safe and usable for ridiculous amounts of time.
Same argument can be made about a hard drive, or a data tape, which is why I think we can all agree backups are vital in every type of archival action.
See, this is why I'm sticking with pen and paper for the really important stuff.
No offence to the apps themselves, I find them especially useful when I need to transfer info from one device to another. But I do not trust anything purely digital for long-term to permanent archiving, especially not Cloud solutions.
Also significantly more reliable in case said info need not see the light of day. Just sayin'.
That one always seemed to be a contradiction in itself, meant to reinforce the massive cognitive dissonance mechanism the State used to keep the populace with no solid ground on which to plant their feet. While everything was mechanically predictable from the outside, I don't think anyone actually going through something like that would be able to fully grasp what was happening.
I think Terminator, yes! That idea that the future was already set and nothing could change it much. They kinda' tried to hammer it home in the third, but they didn't end up doing much with it.
But yeah, that's it. The downfall's bad enough that it's become predictable.
Don't forget, though, the Geth pretty much defended themselves without even having time to understand what was happening.
Imagine suddenly gaining both sentience and awareness, and the first thing which your creators and masters do is try to destroy you.
To drive this home even further, even the "evil" Geth who sided with the Reapers were essentially indoctrinated themselves. In ME2, Legion basically overwrites corrupted files with stable/baseline versions.
I'm struggling to think of the movie which depicted this feeling perfectly, maybe there isn't one and my brain's just substituting for it.
It feels as though every day is more predictable than the last, every piece of news comes more as a ticking off the list than as a surprise development. I imagine this is a slice of Purgatory in a way, to know the ills expecting you and being served nothing but, with essentially no variability in occurrences.
This may be the first time when we're not interacting with a Skinner box of a society, ffs, and it's because THEY came back...
Edit: it's not Groundhog Day, that one sees things unfolding the same way every time until the character intervenes, this feels like everything's new, but always predicted.
Yep, seems to me to hold up in the metaphorical sense as well.
Not arguing against the genetically inherited traits, even beyond the purely aesthetic/structural ones, like inclinations toward certain ways of processing information, nor do I ignore the fact that they're not 100% heritable. But even as such, nurture (which I view from the belief that the entire village shapes the person) can generate a completely divergent personality, and the breadth of development is directly proportional to the breadth of exposure samples (at least to my mind).
And let's not neglect the more practical similarities as well! Different types of flora require differently sized "privacy bubbles," areas of earth reserved exclusively for their individual sustenance, otherwise they'd essentially choke each other out. We can see something very similar in the development of children who are too closely bound to their family through mechanisms of excessive control, their potential ends up being smothered.
Edit: disclaimer, I'm working with 12th grade Biology and a Bachelor's in Theatre Acting as my sociology background, so I actually expect to have botched something up in what I said. Salt is advised.
Oh, I type out a full list every time on my phone, check it about 3-4 times when starting, then I get cocky as "of course I remember what's on the list, I read it 5 minutes ago..." and proceed to forget about that one thing.
I have no idea what any of that means, but I've recognised the word "coffee" on the cup and everything else became irrelevant. I want one.