This morning I drove to the post office going 38 mph when the speed limit is 35. Last week I checked my phone at the social security office when the guard was distracted. Next week, who knows what depravity I may commit.

I blame Stephen King. This Maine place sounds like a miserable monster, vampire, rabies, ghost, and alien infested shit hole with 3 weeks of spring, summer, and fall combined.

For unknown reasons, this song has been a brain worm for me for like the past month or so. I cannot explain why. Like sometimes oldies will play in a show or movie I watched, so it makes sense why I’m suddenly thinking about it. But this one? I think it just popped up on its own. And now to see it in a random comment on Lemmy — WILD.

Does grunge / alternative rock still exist as a genre in any significant way? It never even occurred to me to look if there’s still new stuff coming out in that style.

I like to listen to oldies from time to time, when I’m in the mood. However, it’s usually just a temporary phase from time to time. Though I find it funny that someone mentioned “Semi-charmed life” in another comment because that song has popped in my head a number of times in the past month or so for no discernible reason at all. Sometimes when that happens it’s because I heard a song in a movie or TV show, so that makes sense, but I don’t believe that applies to that song.

This is what I hate about going on vacation. I never know how many kimonos to pack. General guideline is 3 per evening, but it seems like every trip I always end up having to rewear a garment at least once.

Is there a name for this video artifact effect in this image? I’d love to see a bunch of this.

It reminds me of the early 2000’s digital satellite television. Any time the signal got blocked a bit by the weather, the on-screen content would do this. Very trippy. Later on when cable tv in my area switched to digital, I noticed it happening there, too, but nowhere near as often as in satellite. Now that over the air is all digital where I live, however, I almost never see this happening anymore. I guess it’s not a thing that happens as much with modern encoding formats.

In two different cases where I’ve disputed part of a charge/order, the credit card company returned the money for the entire order like you said. I was surprised they did that, and didn’t realize that was the norm.

On the one hand, I never wanted anything I extra that I didn’t deserve. On the other hand, both times this has happened to me, the companies at fault really, really went out of their way to deserve it. Not necessarily scam level deserved it like this hotel’s smoke detector scam, but still.

Cryptanthus

It’s interesting that now the narrative is that all these words are being censored due to advertisers.

By my memory, at least some subset of these terms was being self-censored because they were triggers or considered offensive for other readers / users of various sites and people were trying to protect others by avoiding words that upset them. That’s what I was told about words like rape, suicide, and profanity like fuck, bitch, etc. At the time when I was first noticing a strong trend towards self-censoring, most of the sites I was seeing it on had little to no advertising, particularly not from major brands, so this while that may be the reason for the trend to continue, I’m not convinced that’s why it started or how it became widespread.

To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.

The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.

However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.

People hoping that are likely ignorant of what AI actually is. It’s incredibly unlikely that AI “ends”, at least not if/until things get really bad on a societal level to the point where our species loses its ability to produce and use technology altogether.

YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LITTLE I CARE ABOUT PUSSY THOUGH

Dozens of accounts, yes. But probably only like 3 or 4 real human people if we’re being generous.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this.

Granted, if I had a dime for every article I’ve read in the past 5 or 6 years spelling out the signs of impending economic doom, I could easily buy a tank of gas for my car.

Having barely survived the aftermath of 2008 myself, it does stress me out to realize that it could happen again and soon and worse. I’d like to think I’m better positioned to handle things now, but as they say in France, shit happens. And it’s stressful knowing that other people will have to go through what I went through and worse.

It’s also unfortunate that official data makes things sound stable(-ish), but on the ground and admittedly in my own little bubble, people are not so optimistic. Manufacturing plants have shut down, people are getting laid off left and right, budgets are getting cut to bare bones, all while prices on daily things like food and energy have spiked.

On the topic of the title: In my own case, I didn’t even pay all of my debts, all it took was to pay off my student loans. My credit score dropped 30+ points from that and has never recovered since.

And to all the liars who said some variation of “it’s just a temporary drop” … You are liars. That is simply not true, at least not for everyone, and you lied. Maybe consider stop giving advice about things when you’re clueless.

And to anybody who might consider listening to those clueless liars, please note that a whole lot of the advice you might read from people online is coming from clueless liars.

Okay, I’ll end my rant there.

This is a variation of an idiom that goes something like “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will think it’s stupid”.

But as someone who used to raise killifish, I actually found out that there is at least one species of fish that can climb trees.

That’s a spicy meat-a-ball.

Howdy “relative” neighbor.

I’m also in the southeastern USA and I’ve driven by the peach more times than I care to count.

Is failing. Has failed. Same difference I suppose.

A broken clock is right twice a day. At least that’s a saying in my part of the world.