Those are pretty ladies and cute outfits! Hope they drink sufficient amounts of water and stay hydrated, else time may not be kind to their skin.

Enjoy a burger how you want, or not, I could hardly care any less as long as you’re not hurting anybody with your lifestyle choice.

Personally, I just don’t like cooked pineapple very much. It’s a pale imitation of fresh in both taste and texture. Pure disappointment, and I’ve got enough disappointment in my life already, don’t need anymore on my pizza or burger or tacos or spaghetti or upside down cake or colada.

Thought you were going to say “in the butt”, but then you said “In HELL.” and I assume you don’t refer to the butt as hell. Right?

Like my ole grandpappy used to say “If I cedar, I breed her.”

Right hand to baby Jesus, I thought Kmart was basically no longer in operation, when did it become a programming language for nerds?

I was just thinking “I need to burn some music CDs for when I travel”, just in case.

I went on a car trip earlier this year, but forgot my bluetooth to aux adapter. I tried to buy one while I was on the road, but places were sold out, didn’t carry them, or they only sold them via online orders.

As luck would have it, I still had some old CDs I’d burned 20ish years ago sitting in my glove compartment! I honestly did not expect them to work because they’d likely spent at least the last decade+ in that glove compartment, enduring extremes of heat and cold. They were scratched to hell and back and I had always heard that they degrade and become unreadable after a certain amount of time, even under ideal storage conditions.

Luckily for me, though, they mostly worked. I think there were a couple of songs on one disc that skipped a bunch, and everything else played fine. I rediscovered a few great songs from my youth that I’d not heard in so long that I’d practically forgotten about them.

Removed by mod

I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.

Not going to lie, there’s something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I’m not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it’s akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t experience any of that. Made me feel like I’m either deficient or they’re delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I’d just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.

My closest biological family is mostly in the tolerant to supportive range of things. Nobody’s perfect, obviously. Extended family is a mixed bag.

I’m actually not even sure what supportive means or looks like in this context. There are definitely close family members who don’t make me or my sexuality feel like I’m any different and who I can unmask around. Most people are probably more in the “tolerant” range, where as long as I mask up, don’t talk about it, and there’s no controversy, they’re okay with it on the surface. Still better than my pre coming out days when I had to hide everything, mask around everyone, and completely avoid certain situations entirely.

All in all, things aren’t bad. The worst I typically have to endure is having my partner called my “mate” instead of the terms they use for unmarried heterosexual partners, being told that Christians are the most persecuted group in the USA because of course gay, trans, and racial minorities have it so much better than them, and frequently having to “agree to disagree” on just about every topic related to trans people for simply existing. Fortunately, no physical violence or threats come my way, I don’t really use the social media platforms they do so I don’t get to see the worst of their thoughts, and they’re free to talk about me behind my back just the same as I am free to forget they exist except for a couple hours every other year around the holidays.

My new corollary: If your online e-commerce site asks customers to add a tip, even if $0 / no tip is an option, I’m not buying shit from you.

And the icing on the cake? If we had 13 months, essentially every month could have the same number of days, 28.

The main problem I have with USB-C is that the “U” is a lie. Always has been to some extent, but seems like it’s particularly true with USB-C. This is closer to that meme that’s like “There are 12 competing standards. We created a new universal standard to replace them all.” Except instead of there now being 13 competing standards, USB-C is a fractured mess so instead it’s like there’s now 20 competing standards. This cord supports passthrough power, this one doesn’t, but even the one that does only supports 20W so you have to have a special one to deliver 65, and that USB-C power brick only gives 15W, so you have to buy a special one that does 80W, and this USB-C port on my phone doesn’t support the USB-C to Aux jack adapter I bought, so now I have to buy a different adapter. It goes on and on and on and frankly I’m old and tired.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

It just seems like nothing works the way I expect it should these days, and I’m happy to be wrong, but I don’t think my expectations are that high.

I make an appointment at the driver’s license office for 10 a.m., I kind of expect to be seen around that time, especially since they tell you to show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. Certainly, I don’t expect to have to wait 2 hours to be seen.

I go to the store to return an item that was missing parts, I don’t expect to be turned away completely because the “printer is down”. I have the receipt, can’t you just make a copy and refund the very small amount of money or let me exchange it?

I go to the bank to withdraw a few five and ten dollar bills, I don’t expect to be told “I don’t have enough”. I especially don’t appreciate being treated like I’m the first human in history to want specific denominations for a withdrawal.

I get told to return my internet equipment to any of your locations, only to be told you can’t accept that at your store. Why did the customer service person I talked to on the phone say any location, the company website have your location in the list of locations available when I filtered by “returns”, and my final bill state “return equipment to any location” if your location doesn’t accept returns?

I go to the doctor for a specific health concern (that unbeknownst to me is a red flag for a major problem), they give me a medicine that actually exacerbates said major problem without ever mentioning it or testing for it first. You’re the expert and professional, not me, and I guarantee if I’d asked about that major problem because I saw something about it online, you’d have made a snarky comment like “don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree” or similar.

And all of this, plus much, much more, in just the past month or so.

It seems like a lot of people are really quick to forget what the “rat race” is/was like AND many of them over estimate how well they handled it when they were in it. Unfortunately, my dad is one of the worst offenders so I have to deal with that kind of negativity more often than I’d like.

For my personal situation, it often helps to push back on the most egregious manipulation. When I was younger and more naive, I would let things go with no push back, and all the happened is the guilt trips became more frequent and more hostile. Once I started calling it out and correcting the details, it happened considerably less and I’m pretty sure he’s more apt to think twice before bringing those types of things up in front of me (though I know he still does it behind my back).

For example, I will remind my dad about things like “it was easier for you to visit your parents every week because they lived in the same town and not 2 hours away like you and I currently do” or “you were in your 20s and early 30s when you did this and that, but when you were my current age, you definitely didn’t have the time or energy for it”. Usually he’ll concede, at least for the moment.

I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can’t feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.

MY new Tesla? Doubt it. Considering I’m unemployed due to this clown administration and I don’t tend to upgrade much of anything, let alone a vehicle, unless/until the old one no longer functions.

For me, there’s a uniquely difficult to find and ever changing line between not caffeinated enough to notice and “oh my god why is everything buzzing now I can’t think straight” when it comes to caffeine. Doesn’t matter if I’m drinking coffee, tea, or any other caffeinated drink. One sip too much and suddenly my ears are twitching uncontrollably, my heart is racing, and I can’t focus on anything productive. One day a cup of coffee is the sweet spot, the next day it’s two. Day three a glass of tea will throw me for a loop.