On a long hike, pushed the whole ‘stop and set up camp’ thing way too late, so it’s already dark as I’m starting to pitch the tent. Start feeling really uneasy like I’m being watched, so I do a quick sweep of my surroundings with my flashlight - and sure as shit two reflective eyes become visible for half a second before the critter that owns them gets spooked by light and runs off. Couldn’t see the actual animal, just the eyes, but now I’m borderline shitting myself with fear, so I get in the semi-pitched-but-fuck-it tent and lay down listening for footsteps or something.

Never did hear footsteps, but about 20 mins later that little shit let out an incredibly loud and absolutely blood curdling scream… like, women getting actively murdered whilst screaming into a megaphone, kind of scream… right outside the tent.

Then nothing for the remainder of the night.

I get home and start searching the web for what the actual fuck that was: 99% sure I was being stalked by a cougar.

At the last hospital I worked at, a nurse was badly injured on the job for something totally out of her control. Probably shouldn’t give more details than that so I don’t dox her or myself.

Instead of giving her worker’s comp and helping her recover, the hospital fired her over some completely unrelated frivolous bullshit (along the lines of "a patient overheard you using profanity while talking to a co-worker). This was also like a couple months away from her becoming vested in their retirement program.

I’m just a tech, but it was abundantly clear that giving my time to that company would be an incredibly risky move - fuuuuck that. I put my notice in the next day.

I hope she sued the absolute fuck out of them.

This always cracks me up in the OR - in C sections, the mom is usually awake, so the staff in the room need to watch what they say. Baby comes out like a fucking chest-burster from Alien, covered in blood, that vernix gunk that looks like rancid cheese, and sometimes literal shit. Nasty goo aside, babies pretty much universally look like a hairless pug when the first come out.

Invariably, 2 or 3 nurses start doing the whole “Oooh she’s so cuuuute!” thing. I still can’t tell if they legit think it’s cute, or if they’re just really good at putting a show on for mom… cuz they look like something from a bad scifi-horror movie.

Cocks banhammer

Yeah a lot of those were communities that just appeared out of nowhere and spammed my All suddenly - which was likely just one person trying to get the ball rolling with a topic I’m not interested in. Whether that initial wave of content ended up attracting an active community vs just fizzling out, idk, but a good chunk of them are probably ghost communities now.

Another good chunk are redundant communities - like 5 or 6 if those blocks are some variant of “To my badass hero” which is the same poster that keeps making new communities for softcore black and white porn… I can only assume in effort to circumvent blocks like mine.

The number of real/active communities on my blocklist is probably closer to a couple hundred - the rest of just the result of content whack-a-mole to clean up short term messes.

I browse All pretty much exclusively. You can make it a decent feed, but it takes some doing…

Starbucks is among the worst. I tried grounds from a good variety of brands, all prepared with a normal coffee maker which another poster suggested is not actually a good way to brew coffee. They all fell somewhere on a spectrum between bad and REALLY bad. Didn’t go for the crazy fancy stuff - my favorite ended up being a hazelnut flavored whole bean from the bulk section of WinCo. Which is still my favorite, I just milkshake-ify now.

Coffee. I really wanted to be able to enjoy black coffee, cuz it smells so deceptively good, is cheap as fuck, and basically zero calorie. Except it tastes like concentrated dirt. Bitter. Acrid. None of the appeal promised by the smell makes its way to the taste.

Unless I acquire the taste!

Typically my coffee has a similar cream and sugar content to a milkshake, so I actually measured it out to get a baseline, then over the course of about two months phased down to just black coffee. …and over the course of two months, my coffee phased more and more into tasting like shit. But I tolerated it - eyes on the prize. After that, I spent another month drinking it black. At the end of that month, I finally accepted that black coffee tasted just as much like shit as it did on day one.

My coffee is back to resembling a milkshake… fuck.

I tried.

New hypothesis: there’s some kind of generic factor at play like there is with cilantro. That shit is delicious to some and absolutely vile to others, and no amount of trying to acquire it will flip that switch. I drew the short straw on that horrid plant, too.

Freeman’s Mind

Caffeine.

If I sell you a 2025 Ferrari then give you a 2011 Honda Civic, I broke the law and you got scammed.

Even if I take the unexpected step of sending you a civic-to-Ferrari conversion kit after the fact that makes the car I delivered somewhat comparable to the one I advertised, that doesn’t excuse the initial deception.

What they did was deliberate and dishonest - it’s awesome that they’ve taken (a shit ton of) steps since to make it right, but it’ll never be right.

Holding them accountable is not psychotic.

I wanted so badly to believe… so I did… cuz I’m a dumbass.

Idk who decides what in an indie studio, but whatever the job title, I’m talking about those involved in deceiving their customers… and there was a lot of that with NMS.

I was one of the fucking idiots that preordered No Man’s Sky. The devs have done a lot to make up for it, so I don’t really regret it anymore as it’s a decent game now, but at release it was so drastically bare-bones compared to what they advertised that if the legal system actually gave a shit about consumer protection, the staff of Hello Games would have served jail time.

But Sean was a charismatic little con artist, and he cut right past my defense. bUt ThiS gUy’S diFfeReNt!! Bruh I fuckin knew better than that!

Never bothered with putting a tree up, but I’ve always kinda wanted to steal this idea:

Another stocking.

Ad hominem

Flagrantly false. Gaza has been leveled since Biden left. Not leveled vs leveled =/= just as bad.

pre-loaded accusations

They’re called logical fallacies. The one you just used is called a false dilemma. If you don’t like me drawing attention to them, I’d recommend refraining from using them.

Whether it would have been a “lesser” genocide is unfalsifiable. We’ll never really know. But I don’t have the faith in it that you have. I’m not sure what a more competent genocidal administration would have done.

Correct. But I’m confident the Harris administration wouldn’t have taking the swan-dive that Trump’s did. Same with all the other evils he’s committed outside the scope of genocide: bad under Harris, worse under Trump. Given what we know about the two, that assumption seems pretty reasonable. If you disagree, well like you said, that comes to which candidate we have less faith in. For me, Trump is the obvious rock-bottom worst outcome, but I can’t compare to an administration that never happened, so speculate as you will.

Consider what many US Palestinians did: threaten to withhold their votes if Harris didn’t say there was at least some daylight between herself and Biden regarding Gazans. And she wouldn’t even do that much.

But that’s how you use the vote, if you use it at all. You use it as leverage. If the Democrats know you’ll “vote Blue no matter who” or “vote Blue no matter what,” then they’ll ignore you altogether, because you’re already in their pocket. You’ve made yourself irrelevant.

Half correct. Withholding votes won’t get their attention - we’ve seen that play out again and again. Democrats would rather lose than change. If you want their attention and real change, you’ll need to do things other than vote.