I would prefer Sriracha (shout-out to Underwood Ranch specifically) but to each their own.

Sure. Here’s a song a friend wrote with me and then I recorded in Audacity. I didn’t realize just how very Andrew Bird it is until much later lol.

Pro-Creation

TL;DR: it’s been the hardest and worst influence in my mental health at pretty much every point in my life.

We moved a lot as a kid and my parents fought a lot. Why? Because my dad was in the army because there just wasn’t economic opportunity otherwise. I still have some psychological scarring regarding food security, and I’ll have something akin to a panic attack if I eat something that tastes anything like Berry Berry Kix because we bought like a pallet of it when it was on sale one time and it’s all I had for months.

When I graduated high school in 2007, I didn’t attend the ceremony. Why? Because I needed to work. I didn’t want to be economically trapped, so I worked as much as I could so I could pay for community college and then transfer credits to a 4 year school and hopefully get some kind of scholarship based on my good grades. While in community college, that plan changed drastically because of the 2008 recession. I managed to complete my 2 year degree though, thankfully.

In 2013, my mom died. She was 51, almost 52. She was very sick in a country that doesn’t take care of the health of its people. She drank heavily from the stress of money being tight, and she smoked since a very early age, so I can’t squarely blame capitalism entirely for her early death, but doctors weren’t interested in helping somebody who was already so far gone that her death would hurt their statistics. In any case, this launched a deep depression in which I stopped finding joy in any sense of artistic expression or productivity for a long while. I stopped caring so much about whether I was alive.

Soon afterwards, while I was already at a low point, I had a boss that was extremely abusive. I learned what gaslighting is. Nothing I ever did was ever worth an attaboy, but not getting screamed at became the reward I would seek. Basically Whiplash, but with chefs instead of musicians. My employment prospects were extremely limited, so I was stuck there. I strongly considered escaping it in the only way I had control over it all, but thankfully opted for a hail mary risk that happened to pay off; I quit and took a temp job scrubbing toilets.

It’s a long story, but that led step by step to my current job operating a combined cycle power plant at about $130k/year. I met a lovely woman in July 2016, married her in September 2020 (despite the covid of it all), and we just bought our first house yesterday. Despite my eventual successes in life, I still bash this economic system because I knew that ultimately I just got really lucky. But this isn’t the ending. I wouldn’t be surprised if housing crashes again at some point and it turns out that we shouldn’t have bought. Idk, we’re just doing our best here.

I could talk for hours about how profit motivations and economic struggles caused people to clamor for returning to school and work at the peak of the pandemic, which caused a million preventable deaths, but that barely moves the needle in terms of my personal mental health. I was an “essential” worker, which really just means “expendable” but I had already come to terms with that by then. It would be more appropriate to talk about how the music industry changes have impacted my interest in making music since I know it’s astronomical that it could ever even be a hobby that pays for itself, let alone make a little extra through gigs.

I hear from people when I cook or play music or engage in other hobbies and interests that I should (paraphrasing here) find a way to monetize that. These things are my escape from capitalist hellfire. They are the pressure relief valve. Why in the fuck would I invite that vampire into my safe haven? I’d much rather give my music away or give away cooking tips. I don’t want to cater your fucking wedding. I don’t want to track how many listens my mediocre music might get on Spotify. I just want to create.

I make money at work and I make happy at home.

I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.

I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said “he’s arrogant for naming that after himself.” She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don’t bother to diversify their information sources. It’s so goddamn frustrating.

RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It’s the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that’s just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren’t fast traveling. You aren’t doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It’s a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It’s a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It’s a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It’s not a rootin’ tootin’ spaghetti western adventure; it’s an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it’s wasn’t a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it’s wholly unjust to label it a “bad” game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It’s successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be marketed as “GTA but ___” because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They’re 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that’s where the similarities end.

If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There’s a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.

Anecdotal, but from what I’ve seen from the few stores I know about, they either have a donation program set up where somebody picks stuff up and takes elsewhere (probably homeless shelters and hospitals?) or managers let employees snatch stuff up before it gets to the trash can. Most employees are pretty fucking sick of the food after working there a few months, but neighbors and workers near the location always appreciate a bag full of free goodies once in a while.

For anybody just casually interested but with lesser needs than OP, I bought a 65W supply to replace a phone charger I forgot at a hotel and I’ve been very happy with it. Don’t just buy a single port replacement if you fuck up at check out like I did lol. Here’s what I bought: https://a.co/d/2TKDE2G and it’s $40 right now.

It has 3 ports total, 2 USB C and 1 USB A. The only issue is that it doesn’t come with cables, so I also bought a 3 pack of 2m USB C to USB C cables. No complaints.

Excellent question. Idk, I can see indirect sex work like camming or porn still happening because that could be connected to a desire to perform for an audience. Maybe less prostitution but I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t go away completely.

At least that’s a consistent viewpoint. What I despise is demonizing sex work but not exploitative labor practices. It’s totally illogical to me that people will pride themselves on working 12+ hour days, skip breaks, come in on days off, work nights and weekends and holidays, etc but look down on people who have an OnlyFans or whatever. I don’t really understand criticizing one without the other.

Personally, I don’t give a shit about sex work. If it were fully legal and workers were protected and everything, I still don’t know that I would pay for it, but I sure as shit wouldn’t fight to take that choice away from others. It just wouldn’t really affect me. Same thing for access to safe drugs or abortions. I’m not going to advocate for other people to not have choices in their personal freedoms, so I guess I’ll fight for people to have access even for things I’m not that interested in for myself.

Yes

Unchanged. Still gonna vote for her. I’m more enthusiastic now that she picked Walz over some of the other finalists though. I’ll probably buy some campaign stickers now in addition to voting.

Thank you for ending your 2024 campaign, Joe Biden. That was hero shit. That humility and duty to something bigger than himself is exactly what made him so much better as a leader than trump ever could’ve been. Joe has earned his retirement, and there’s a part of me that hopes that he becomes the first former president to die of badass causes, flipping his Vette doing a buck eighty or something lol. But not for another couple decades.

Imagine using somebody’s wage as a metric for determining their value, and using low wage specifically like it’s an insult… on lemmy.

Bro, you’ve made it abundantly clear that this place just ain’t for you. Twitter won’t censor your embarrassing beliefs; maybe go there instead.

If anybody came to c/memes for a laugh, it is unfortunately one more step to check the profile of OP to find the real joke here.

Dude has a vendetta against people knowing the potential bias of media sources. Gee, I wonder why that might be 🤔

Removed by mod

Not trying to push you into doing anything you aren’t comfortable with, but a lot of people could really benefit from having a real source get info on this from. I know it’s not your responsibility to educate us, nor are your opinions necessarily representative of everybody in Palestine, but most people just believe whatever they see on mainstream media. And generally, that means bullshit like fox news way more than Al Jazeera or BBC or NPR or whoever has the least biased news these days.

If nothing else, please keep educating your friends and anybody else in personal circles. If enough people do that, the info will hopefully trickle out to enough of the rest of us to generate outrage in order to influence real change in terms of support for Palestine. Cheers.

Haha, brilliant. I’m still running my 5a, so that sounds kinda crazy to me.

Yes, Biden clearly showed signs of losing his mental acuity. I didn’t really believe it until I saw it in the past couple of months. But a lot of conservatives weren’t really articulating acuity, they were saying he was too old.

Age in general is a concern to me as well because these old fucks don’t understand how different the world is now compared with 30-50 years ago. Wealth is also a concern to me because wealthy, privileged people haven’t struggled like average Americans have and/or do. Congress needs more people like Katie Porter who understand what it’s like to make difficult home finance decisions and be thankful that there’s even any semblance of choice involved.

Yes, I was fully on board with Sanders in 2016 and 2020. I also liked Warren. One day in the future, maybe Buttigieg or Jeffries. It’s exciting to speculate on all of the rising, younger Democratic stars.

I have my issues with Kamala Harris, but I think that she’s probably the best person to run against trump in 2024 especially with only 3.5 months (which sounds like plenty of time to pick anybody to me, but I’m not qualified to assess that). She’s not my favorite, but I’m more excited about her than I would’ve been for Biden.

My only real concerns for Harris running are what the media spoonfeeds to the gullible masses and what the October surprise will be this time. There’s a part of me that wishes Biden would resign just to take away the talking point of “trump has been president and she hasn’t; is she capable of running the country?” Plus we would already have had a couple months of a woman running the country before the election, so people could see that that’s not an actual thing to be concerned about.

I never said to fall in line. I said to look up bullet points on what Project 2025 is, look up who is for and who is against it, and get to the polls. I didn’t even say who to vote for. Everybody voting will result in the will of the people, and as somebody who likes having a democracy, that’s what I’m advocating for. I have my own opinions about which party is more pro democracy, and it’s probably pretty obvious to anybody who is paying attention to politics, but I was intentionally vague so that people can come to their own conclusions based on “doing their own research”.

But I guess for you, telling people to inform themselves and vote based on factual information makes me an authoritarian. Cool.

For those who struggle with math, that means that Biden is less than 4 years older than trump. The people criticizing Biden’s age and not trump’s as well never actually gave a shit about Biden’s age. Look forward to those same people making up bullshit reasons that Harris is less capable than trump. They know they’re full of shit, but it’s not about making sense, it’s about trying to obfuscate what’s pretty clear so that independents and undecideds give up, get frustrated, get confused, and/or get demotivated so that they either stay home or vote 3rd party. There are only two viable parties in this bullshit first past the post system; one of them wants Project 2025 and one of them doesn’t. Look at bullet points for what that is and then get your ass to the polls. It’s that simple. The only people trying to convince you that it’s not that simple are the ones who don’t want you to look at those bullet points because it’s pretty obvious whether most people are for or against that playbook. It’s damning.

Maybe they should’ve looked into that tech instead of obsessing over hydrogen cell tech…