God damn. Mark Twain is over here talking about the internet. I started hearing about the internet when I was 13. So I can remember a world without the internet, but it still feels like it’s always been there. Same thing with CallerID. Imagine cell phones without callerID.

Hell for that matter, I can remember NOBODY having a cell phone. I remember car phones. A landline style phone installed INTO your car. But it still feels like cell phones have always been around.

Sadly, I remember a world before school shootings. Yeah, imagine if the whole year there were 0 school shootings. And 0 the year before that. And 0 the year before that. Then in 1998, Columbine happened. Those 4 kids were pussies! They claim they did it because they got bullied. I went to school in a place where on any day, for no reason at all, you could be in a fist fight. It was just a rough school, with a bunch of hormonal angry tough psychopaths. I’ve seen videos of them interviewing the survivors of Columbine. The impression that I got was that their bullies were rich preppy boys who tie their sweater around their waist because it might be a bit nippy on the golf coarse after school. If THAT guy can bully you, you deserve to be bullied. If those 4 kids at any time in their life had balls, and just punched a prep in the mouth? 27 kids would have lived to see 1999. Including themselves. And people say violence isn’t the answer…

Usually these make me feel old. This one doesn’t make me feel old. This one makes me have an existential crisis. Because 2100 sounds like it’s going to be filled with just this dark dystopia of hatred and anger.

And 1950 had racial lynchings, and Japanese-American citizens, who had full citizenship as a legal born citizen, had just gone through the past few recent years of being held in camps, and worked, in terrible conditions, all because their parents came from the wrong country. It had governments actively trying to brainwash their citizens into being patriotic and thus easier to control.

I look at the past, and look at the future, and it makes sense why we are where we are. This is what humans are. Humans are the worst people. It’s not going to get better. We’ve thrown shit at ourselves for so long that now we’re all a bit dirty and smelly. But also an elephant is trying to use your body as a poop knife, so it can break up the shit in it’s butthole, and take an even BIGGER shit on you. Like 80lbs of shit just falling on your head.

That’s where we are right now as a society, because we’ve paved the way to get here.

This makes me feel old. I came from a time when schools didn’t have public shootings, and so bullying was more accepted. I CANNOT imagine for the life of me, even if it had been possible on Windows 95, anyone willingly sharing the fact that they do this.

If ANYONE in 6th grade showed off something this pathetic, they would be on the ground clutching their gut, which had just been punched so hard that they are struggling to breathe.

The end result is that people understood common sense that it’s not admirable to be pathetic and weak. So people would show off themselves getting better and stronger.

I feel like all that bullying 30 years ago made a lot of kids better for it, because it forced them to at least ATTEMPT to stand up to me. Even if I laid them out in the end, they learned not to be a loser.

And now, we’ve had decades of not encouraging bullys. THIS is the end result. THIS is what these insecure cowards turn into.

Now I’ve never seen OP, but I’m willing to bet he COULD be going out and getting pussy for real. It’s not hard. I am not a good looking guy. I’m not rich. I don’t have a sports car. I don’t have a mansion. What I do have is a confidence in myself instilled into me at a young age that I can do it. Where “it” is an interchangable variable that applies to most things.

You know how I got that confidence? By being a fat pathetic loser 8 year old who got bullied. Until I hauled off and just decked my bully. Who was bigger than me. You get a reputation as the kid who knocked out the kid 2 grades above him. Then you start believing in yourself. You start pushing your own limits. You start kicking your own ass. You toughen up. You take on the world, and win. And women see that confidence. The VAST majority of women are attracted to a man who knows he can do it.

You know how I got my first girlfriend? I called the girl I had a crush on. Straight up asked her out.

She said no. I’m not her type. Fair enough. Because if a woman says no, there’s no sense in insisting, or getting mad.

So I called the other girl I had been talking to. I said “You wanna go out?” And she said yes. We dated for 4 years until I learned she was a narcassistic psychopath who trapped our cats in the closet all day while I was at work, after dropping them in freezing cold water. I was not ok with that. You hurt animals, and you’re a damn monster. BUT! It was a relationship that failed not because I was weak and keeled over. It was because I happened to choose the wrong girl based on information I didn’t have. It happens. Not every person on this planet is a good person. Her parents failed her in showing what empathy is, and how to be a strong woman who can handle life. So, that was a dud, but life moves on.

Now rewind that story. Imagine I just stayed in my moms basement, and ate cheetos, and tried playing video games all day in a dark room crying that woman wants me. Do you think I’d EVER get a girl? Her or otherwise? Fuck no! If that version of me existed, afraid to be bold, afraid to take life by the balls, I’d be some lonely dweeb 40 year old virgin without the humor of Steve Carell.

So to OP, I’ll say this. I see life has failed you in a spectacular way. You should have been beaten as a kid by other kids, and weren’t. You should have had the chance to beat your bullys, but couldn’t because of school policy and anti-bully culture. Life failed you. You have no confidence. That needs to change. Go look in the mirror. Take a good long look. Do you enjoy seeing the person who stares back? No. We see you the same way you’re seeing you. So you need to change that. Nut up, and go join a gym. Take a boxing class. Get hit in the face. Take it. Again. Again. Hit back. Be the person who’s burried underneith all your insecurities. Fuck those insecurities. You have no room in your life for insecurities. Work out until you hurt. Jelly legs where you’re so tender that walking is hard. Jelly arms. Do it again tomorrow. And the next day. Do it about 4 days a week for 6 hours.

Be better. Improve yourself. You’re lonely and insecure? Yeah, that’s because women see you being gross and not worth talking to. BE worth talking to. It only gets harder as you get older. You can spend your 20s sleeping around, but you better find somebody by 30. Because after that, it is slim pickings unless you want a girl with like 5 kids by 3 different men but she’s insisting you go bareback. There’s a reason she collects so many checks. You wanna be next?

Or do you want to avoid that now by being a better you?

Because this? This is sad.

We get it, you still wear JNCO jeans.

ITT: I learn that despite never even attempting to fix a car ever in my life, I’m a natural mechanic.

There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother where Marshal tells stories that happened to him. Then the rest of the gang try to guess if he was a kid or if he was an adult but drunk in that story.

Your story would be great for that game. Maybe you were a toddler. Maybe this was how you ruined Thanksgiving 2024.

I can’t use the bathroom unassisted either. Big shout out to gravity for being the force that allows poop to come out of my butt, and not float around the house until you open a window, and it just happens to float outside.

But then outside there would be just a mess of poop and other debris just floating around the city all willynilly.

Boy I sure do love the combination of indoor plumbing and gravity. It’s been at least 40 years since I held a human turd. If I ever did. I don’t know. I would have been a toddler, and don’t remember.

Make sure you also read the part where I reply to my own message. Turns out Lemmy DOES have a character limit.

But the story all comes together in the end.

So I get up and I lift my matress off the frame, now holding it 6 feet in the air. I can vaguely see the pulsating, but it’s mostly gone now. That’s when I see it.

My Wii which was 5 feet away from my bed, and at ground level, and was behind me when I was looking under the bed, was pulsating blue around the disc slot.

Well it turns out theres a feature if your friend sends you a mail to your friend code, you get the mail, and your wii pulsates to notify you. Even if the wii is off.

I abruptly turned that feature off. Then I smoked a bowl, because I needed to calm down. That was an ordeal!

Ok, story time!!!

It’s January 2007. The Nintendo Wii had just released a couple of months earlier. They are IMPOSSIBLE to find right now. I’m frantically searching every store, calling asking when they expect restocks. Nobody is taking preorders, because each shipment is laughably low numbers. Every store just says “be here when we get a shipment” “and when is that?” “We have no idea. Maybe in 5 minutes. Maybe in 5 weeks. They will sell out instantly.”

So, I’ve called hundreds of radioshacks, walmarts, best buy, gamestop, sears, target, local game shops, if there was a store within 50 miles, I was calling weekly since November when gamestop fucked over my preorder.

Then one day, I call best buy, again. “Heeeeey…just wondering if you might have any info on any Nintendo Wiis?” “Ah, maybe.” “Maybe? I’ll take a maybe.” “Well, you didn’t hear this from me, but this Saturday overnight we’re expecting a shipment. A big shipment. They usually only send 5-6. We’re being told this shipment may even be bigger than our launch day shipment. We’ve cleared warehouse room that should hold 500 units if needed. We don’t know how many we might get. We may get 0. But, we have reason to believe we’re getting a big shipment which will be put out Sunday morning.”

OOOOH MYYYY GODDDDD!!!

Now the thing about January weather in Cleveland in 2007, is it was cold. Stupid cold. I’m talking like negative 10F. So I figured “I’m going to use the weather to my advantage.”

Have you ever seen The Christmas Story? Where Ralphies brother was wearing so many layers that he couldn’t put his arms down? I literally know what that feels like. I was wearing every pair of pants I had. 55 T-shirts, 13 hoodies, and a jacket that I couldn’t even zip up. A pair of gloves. 5 scarves. A full face ski mask. 2 hats. And like 30 pairs of socks.

Yeah. I rocked that shit hardcore!

Because Best Buy opened on Sunday morning, at 10am. I went and stood in line at 8pm Saturday. There were 6 tents ahead of us. Literally all night I was worried they’d only get 5, and I was 7th in line.

I should have brought a tent. I didn’t have a tent. But these guys went even harder than me. They had a extention cord running to a light post which had an outlet. That extention cord ran into their tent, to a 12 outlet APC.

They had inside their tent, a 13 inch tv, a vcr, a small light, a little mini fridge, and probably some other shit I didn’t know about.

Outside their tent they had a small electric grill that they were cooking brats on.

And that’s when I heard them in their tent say “which movie do you want to watch?” And they said “Jurassic Park!!!”

My ears perked the fuck up. No, you don’t understand. I LOVE that movie. I have watched 5 bad Jurassic films in the theater on opening day because I love that first movie. I have seen it literally hundreds if not thousands of times. I know every scene. I’ve watched the dvd extras. I watched those same extras on bluray because I thought they might include more extras. They didn’t. I know every single line by heart in that movie. It is an OBSESSION.

So them watching it, I couldn’t see the screen. But I could hear it, and that was enough for me to watch the movie if I closed my eyes. And so for roughly 40 minutes I “watched” my favorite movie. I was cold. It was 2am. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I couldn’t eat or drink because I had no plan for using the bathroom besides “don’t”. I had been out there for hours at this point, but all that said I was in my happy place. I was watching Jurassic Park! And they started the movie at the begining. Classic. So roughly 40 minutes in, the film has been building to it. It’s the quintissential Jurassic Park scene. The most infamous scene in the entire franchise, and I know I’m biased, but I feel it’s fair to call that scene one of the all time great scenes in cinematography history. Every frame perfect…as long as you ignore the one shot that shows the fence ending abruptly making it essentially useless, and also as long as you forgive the convoluted way they failed explaining where the sudden cliff comes from where you think the T-Rex just broke out from. The scene shows that she broke out from an area a few feet to the side. It’s hard to catch, and yes I get where the confusion comes from. But technically it’s not a mistake. It’s just very poorly illistrated. The fence is a total mistake. But the cliff isn’t.

YES I AM OBSESSING AND GETTING OFF TRACK!

Point is, we’re 40ish minutes into the film. The T-Rex scene is just starting. And that’s when the guy in the tent says words that still anger me, confuse me, offend me, depresses me, and triggers me. He said…“Oh, I’ve seen this part. It’s just a dinosaur trying to eat them. Lets fast forward to the good parts”.

WHAT?? WHAT DO YOU MEEEAAAN??? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???

He then fast forwarded past the scene. HE FAST FORWARDED THE T-REX PADDOCK ESCAPE SCENE!!! THAT’S THE MOST ICONIC SCENE IN NOT JUST THE MOVIE, BUT THE WHOLE FRANCHISE!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE YOU UNHINGED PSYCHOPATH!!!

I was sitting there just wondering if I could somehow call a psych ward to come evaluate him. Because honestly, who does that??? That’s like masturbating, and then 1 minute before you cum you just abruptly stop, and say “that’s enough”.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m getting myself worked up over something that happened 18 years ago, and I’m sure he doesn’t remember. But I’ll always remember.

deep breath

So anyways, the store opens up. At 8pm I was 7th in line. By 10am there are literally thousands of people in line. 95% of which have zero chance of getting a Wii. I’m still not certain if I’m too far down the line, but it’s a chance.

My friend made a bad joke, which wasn’t funny, and I don’t remember the joke per se. What I do remember is, the basis for the joke was a low effort pun to assosiate the word “Wii” with male genitals. And I boo’d him. So he said “I’m sorry.” And I said “No no, you have to appologize to EVERYONE!”. To which he made his bad joke actually funny by spending time walking down the line, and individually appologizing to each person standing in line. 99.9% of which have zero context or clue what he’s talking about. He just walked up and said “I’m sorry if I offended you. Do you accept my appology?”. Most people just said yes, but if they questioned it, he said “I made an unfunny joke about the Wii, and now my friend has made me appologize to everyone.”

Pretty sure he made the joke at 7am, and he was still walking down the line when the store opened. People who weren’t even in line when he made the joke got an appology because by the time he got to the end of the line, it had grown. He already had a Wii since launch. He was just coming to hang out and get drunk outside a best buy in the middle of the night. Oh, yeah, he was also plastered by this point. We drank straight vodka all night for warmth. So he wasn’t worried about the doors opening. These people just see this beligerant drunk coming up and telling them he’s sorry.

At one point the cops showed up, because what the hell is going on? A random line of people that wraps out of the shopping plaza, down the street, and down several streets. I heard they were at one point blocking traffic, because the line went through a crosswalk and just stayed there. Blocking the road. But I never saw it personally.

So when the cops rolled up, they asked “what is this?” And me being drunk, I did my best at being funny. I yelled out “It’s the dvd release party for Sleepless in Seattle 2: Restless Nights!”

Crowd loved that joke. I also remember something where the crowd was saying something, and then somebody else yelled to add onto it, and then somebody else added on…and I don’t remember that exchange, but I remember I added on “AND A HOT PLATE!” which is a simpsons reference, that made the crowd laugh. I was feeling good.

So then the store opens, and I got my Wii, and brought it home. I set it up. I played for hours. I exchanged friend codes with the friend who hung out with me. And eventually I went to bed that night.

Now, are you wondering why I’ve told this long neverending story that doesn’t seem to go anywhere? Well, I told you to bear with me, that it would all tie together in the end to relate to your comment, and we’re getting to that now.

So I’ve been up for like 30 hours at this point. I go to bed. I fall asleep HARD. It took almost an hour just to take off all those clothes, which was a workout in itself for someone already exausted.

And now, I’m in a dream state. I’m in my room, laying down on my bed, but my room is pulsating blue. Completely dark room, which now is pulsating blue. The walls, the floor, the air, it’s all just pulsating. And I’m very aware I’m this is not real life, but I’m totally lost why the room is pulsating.

So I start getting out of bed, to try to search for something. And when I go to stand, I IMMEDIATELY fall on the floor. I had no strength. My legs were jelly, and the fall made me aware of one thing. This wasn’t a dream. I never feel pain in my dreams. This was real life, and I likely had a head injury now, and couldn’t stand. The room is also still pulsating, and my brain is just dead. I layed on that floor falling in and out of concious for about 20 hours. Eventually it was dark in my room again, and I had slept enough that I could stand, and my brain was functional enough to think. I pulled myself up, and could not for the life of me understand why the room was just pulsating this blue light. The walls were just blue. The ceiling was just blue. My brain was now functional, snd I said “turn the light on. See what happens” so now there’s still a mild pulsating effect, but it’s just under my bed, not the whole room.

So I get down on the floor, and cannot understand what is causing this. I’m looking under my bed, nothin. I see no source. I am so confused at this point.

…I don’t know what you mean by “moe”, and based on context I feel ignorance may actually be bliss in this case.

What if he’s not complaining?

Leave it to Matpat to take an issue that nobody knew was an issue, and then overanalize EVERYTHING!!!

getting shot at

“Here! Take this! It’s a bulletproof vest!”

gets shot in the arm

“OW!!!”

“But it is, ya know…a vest…”

Ew! That’s nasty! What if some girl meets you at a coffee shop, and wants to suck your toes??? You just gonna have nasty toes that “dirty shower water has run over them, so it’s fine”??? She’ll never want to deep throat your foot with that attitude!!!

I bid $2.

gives The Pantser the finger

“Wear a condom”

“Okay.”

“That’s a candy bar wrapper and a rubber band…”

“SAME CONCEPT ASHLEY!!! GOD!!!”

I just remember reading about it every few years. They’ve found several earth like planets. One I read about in 2014 said it was so similiar to earth that they unofficially nicknamed it “Earth 2”. They found another earth like planet that same month, but it’s size was so different that they made the joke it couldn’t be Earth 3, but based on size it might be Earth 5 (with the joke being the planet was like 2 earths combined).

But our technology was good enough to see the planet is green and blue, indicating life. But our technology wasn’t good enough to zoom in to see what that life looks like. But we know it’s out there.

Well…we know for fact that other planets exist with life. We don’t know WHAT life. It might be a bunch of animals that are similiar to cows or birds. But we know the planets exist, and they have living vegitation on the planet, which would indicate other life.

We just don’t know what.

A scenario where the two are equally stable would look like a zombie apocalypse or similar.

Dude. We already had that. It was called 2020.