I waited so long for Horizon Zero Dawn that when it came out on PC I wasn’t really interested any more. Probably will pick it up someday, but it turns out you can get by just fine without PS exclusives.

If a chihuahua kicked my ass I would tell that story at every party.

The first and last video of his I saw was this one: “You’ve seen the dystopian horror Squid Games where a crazy rich man uses his money to put a bunch of poor rubes through a series of deadly games for the amusement of spectators? Well now I, a crazy rich man, have used my money to put a bunch of poor rubes through a series of deadly games for the amusement of spectators! I couldn’t do the deadly bit because the laws don’t let me yet. No, I couldn’t say what the lesson from the show was. Probably ‘wouldn’t it be cool’.”

He’s got those dead eyes.

I always heard stuff like this about my generation, thought it was only a matter of time until we got our day and overwhelmingly pushed reforms. Never really worked out. Hopefully this time it will stick.

I remember when “I can tell because of the pixels” was a more lighthearted joke, and not “BURN IT!”

Fuck AI.

Random question: Do you guys leave your VPN on all the time? I’ve only been using it sometimes because I’m worried it will slow down my speeds for normal use.

I still can’t believe Brexit went through. When I first heard it was going to be voted on I had the same reaction as when I heard Trump was running for office: “No way people would vote for that. They’re wasting everyone’s time with this.”

I want to believe that the person who made it was using the quintessential space nazi to drive the satire home. But, you know, Poe’s law.

I think you’re just used to the lemmy(/reddit) crowd. Pretty much everyone I casually know has ads when they show me something on youtube. Every time I ask “Why not use an adblocker?” they reply either “The ads don’t bother me” or “I want to support the content creators”.

Doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll buy some swag or donate to creators I like, but I am not voluntarily watching ads.

That’s such a weird thing to say. Ads don’t show you things that are good, if they were better products they wouldn’t need to press you over it. I can’t think of a time where I found something cool I didn’t know about through an ad, short of movie trailers that I actively sought out.

For example, a few years back I found out that safety razors shave closer, give me less razor burn, and cost 100x less than cartridge razors. Which one of the two gets ads?

Seeing cheese foam as on option on a sweetened tea drink was weird, but I get it. Seeing it as the default for a strawberry smoothie was absolutely wild.

That said, as a tea lover I love boba places.

There was a while there where I was really into wholesome memes. People really don’t get what wholesome is. I started getting legitimately upset at what people thought was appropriate there so I had to block the communities.

If literal hell on earth was happening, and I was spending most of my real world time dealing with it, and there was nowhere I could go to escape from it and people exclusively talked about it all of the time, I would kill myself. We are allowed to stop talking about it sometimes.

Well, that was a trip.

The absolute worst is when people say “You can’t really blame them. That’s just how things are.”

Of course I can blame them! They did testing on focus groups to figure out just how intrusive they could be before an unacceptable percentage of people got mad. If they miscalculated and overreached and upset me, then my being upset is perfectly valid. Also true if they knew someone would be upset and considered it acceptable losses. This applies to all sorts of things and not just advertising.

The idea that if an action someone takes is rationally understandable then you aren’t allowed to be mad about it is so toxic and I hate it. I can understand why they do intrusive ads, they like money. But it affects me against my will and I hold them responsible, as I should.

The worst is when you’re still at work half an hour later than normal, and someone walking by sees you and thinks it’s a good opener to chat. “Oh wow you’re still here, huh? It’s usually just me etc etc.” I’ve had people stop to chat for 45 minutes and I’m just thinking “Do you think I’m still here because I don’t want to be at home?!”

Also, when I smile, people frown and yell back

One time I was cashiering at a grocery store on Thanksgiving, only one to show up. There was a huge line of people buying a lot of stuff each, so even though I was the fastest cashier, it was a losing battle. Still, I kept my smile on and engaged each customer while working my hardest.

Then some asshole ten customers away started yelling things like “This is ridiculous, why aren’t there more cashiers? Hey! I’m talking to you! Answer me!” Like I had any pull on the people who didn’t show. He should have been yelling at my manager who was hiding in the back.

Decide to ignore him since no good would come of it. Then I hear “Stop smiling!”, which was so abrasive it literally stunned me. I looked at the line to see who was going to tell him to calm the hell down, and every person there was nodding along like “Yeah, I can’t believe this cashier has the gall to smile when we want to make him feel small.”

And just like that, suddenly I was in no hurry. Slowed down to about 1/4 speed and just glared at each person with no conversation whatsoever. Rude guy gets up there and starts in on some nonsense and I tell him “I’m a highschooler. I don’t have to pay rent. One more word out of you and I walk out on this job right now. No one else is here to check you out, but security is still here to keep you from leaving with anything today.” Still clearly upset, but he shut up.

Relevant Travis’ Mango Cult animatic

Somehow my boss at my last job added a page break that didn’t show up when I turned on show hidden characters. It took me about six hours to figure out how to remove the final blank page. Online help forums were useless because he did it in such an unusual way. Looking back, even I think that surely I must have been mistaken because it’s too absurd that it would be that hard to delete a page, but I vividly remember turning on the hidden characters and getting nowhere.

I was going to say this is AI, but if you keep in mind that bottom-right is the first picture, left is #2, and top-right is #3, it tracks. It looks like they remade the frog between 1 and 2 and added sprinkles.