lol no, silly, they don’t give you free money for that. That’s just the demographic they compare everything to as a baseline :)

It obviously depends on the establishment in question, but you get free shit for being a veteran, teacher, healthcare worker, firefighter or other emergency worker, stuff like that. Or a senior probably, they get tons of free shit, too.

I’ve been to a casino exactly one time in my life, and it was earlier this year. Went for the cheap hotel.

I did not spend any money at the casino, but I did get $15 free for being a certain demographic of new customer. I played that, won $158, cashed out and won’t ever do it again (unless I get more free money, anyway).

I’m sure what they wanted by giving me a win on the last $2 (it’s all controlled by cards, they know what my demographic is, and that people in it are likely to be depressed and on the poor side, and thus potential gambling addicts) was for me to keep playing to try to score more, but what it really did was point out dark patterns and make me wildly uncomfortable with the whole situation…

And this is why I’m sterile.

I don’t want to be here, and I sure as shit don’t want to do that to someone else… plus I don’t want to take care of some miniature asshole version of myself; I’m bad enough to deal with.

That’s like one of the super grindy JRPG titles I have (100 hours or so to get through the story). To get all the achievements, you’d have to play through an absolute minimum of 9 times, because you need to kill the end boss without taking damage on each difficulty level, and they unlock as you go. But you’d actually be grinding bosses for ages trying to get them without taking damage…

The game was ok, but I honestly can’t see wanting to play it twice let alone 9 times… there’s definitely a reason almost nobody has those achievements…

The middle is what relationships between the two top extremes ends up looking like, for both.

(I’m just speculating for fun here)

Based on the sash, this is a woman celebrating a birthday or bachelorette. Due to the pattern on it I’m leaning toward birthday, as bachelorette sashes tend to be solid white.

She’s probably hammered, having been day drinking since 10AM (that’s what those sashes are for; to give lunch goers a clear visual warning sign.) and based on the shadow line and assumed time of year (I’m just assuming it’s not northern California in winter, but it might be) that is probably like 4-5pm, so she’s been drunk for a solid while, probably in the sun.

So very drunk, good mood woman gets an idea that twerking poolside (very possibly to no music or music played off a shitty phone) is the way to keep the party going (a shockingly common sort of happening at those two categories of sash-wearing events). And for that one guy, far far too old to have any shame left about being a creep, she’s absolutely right.

This makes me wonder, though, if those dumb attention seeking sashes exist outside of the us (baseball hat in background seems to indicate US)… I’m sure they must in some form, but I really sort of hope it’s just here that people are so self absorbed as to think a birthday or wedding is a free pass to be a public disaster. (Also there used to be a trend of wearing a sash so strangers would staple money to it, but thankfully that seems to have died…)

Aww man I’ve never been to a two-floor+ Menards :( none of the ones around me are (they do have the lumber loft but that hardly counts).

Now I feel like I’m missing out.

I like to just say “That period isn’t relevant to my work history, is personal, and I won’t be discussing it further.”

I’ve learned through many shitty jobs that any company that brings it up is one I probably don’t want to work for anyway. If they feel they have a right to know what I’m doing with “non-productive” periods of time before I even work for them, what other boundaries will they want to cross if I don’t meet some unspoken arbitrary metric? But if they accept that answer and move on, I consider the question a yellow flag rather than red.

I vote absentee, as do most of the people I know, and after 2020, none of us are mailing our ballot back. We are taking them to the in-person voting areas and dropping them off with staff.

In 2020, there were reports of ballots being dumped, and so far there have been reports of drop boxes set on fire and stuff… it’s hard to trust, because of republican stooges seeding chaos, and enough of a pain in the ass to fix if it gets messed up that we aren’t taking chances.

Edit: seeing to seeding

Consider getting a toaster oven the next time your toaster dies.

I’ve had mine for like 15 years now, use it all the time, and it’s still chugging along despite being $25 new. They are built a lot better than toasters because they are made for multi-purpose use, and the heating element is much more robust. Plus no springs to fail.

I know that doesn’t help the overall problem, but it might solve that one problem :)

I’ve played other stuff, it all makes me a bit mildly queasy for a few min while I adjust and goes away.

Skyrim was intense violent nausea, and it got worse as I went. Whole different ballpark of motion sickness. I’d love to be able to play it but realistically I’ll probably never be able to get past that.

But it’s also not a game that was made to be VR, where literally everything else I’ve played was, so even with tunnel vision set to max during movement it was just too much texture, too “close”, and too fast.

You should try it if you haven’t, see if it makes you sick :) I’d be curious, if almost nothing else does.

That’s what I said about Skyrim. First person immersive world seemed perfect for VR.

It makes me violently motion sick, though, like to the point where I barely made it through the opening cart ride, and had to stop after 5 min of free movement. :(

Having textures race past, and feeling like you are in or barely above the ground due to the floor texture not having adjustable height to account for depth perception, while “moving” is super uncomfy, imho.

I’m super with you about wanting it, though. I’m desperate for VR to be immersive like that, and not vomit-inducing.

No you weren’t being unreasonable. They absolutely weren’t trying to help you out of the kindness of their heart, they were trying to seamlessly get your info by just keeping the conversation moving, and not asking if you -want- to sign up, to which yes or no are the only answers. When they ask for your number it’s weird to answer as though they asked a yes or no question, and that’s intentional.

I’ve worked retail, I was trained on canvassing sales (just trained, I quit before I started because it was super shady tactics I wasn’t comfortable with), that tactic is 100% intentional to get the info without you thinking about it. Some places even give bonuses if the employees sign up a certain number of people. Nothing altruistic about any of it.

When you don’t follow their script they get confused… because it’s a script. Not because they think you are mad; they don’t care about you as long as you don’t yell at them. You are just nameless face #545 of the day.

Whenever someone asks for my number or email I smile and tell them “oh, I don’t have an account with you, and I really don’t want one, but thank you all the same.” It’s direct and maybe a bit rude to some people, but they typically apply whatever discount anyway, and if they don’t, meh.

If they ask for zip code or address, I tell them they don’t need it, and with those I will get rude if I get pushback. This includes when I call for product support or something and just have a question. “No, you don’t need to know anything about me to answer my questions, and I won’t be providing it unless I feel you need it, regardless what you think or what your system says.”

That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)

Shit I haven’t thought about these sort of weird semi-horror books in such a wildly long time. I used to go out of my way to find somewhat morbid stuff like that (not to be edgy, but because I was reading prolifically, and ahead of my age group, so it was a whole new paradigm).

Thanks for the reminder :)

Is that the one where

(spoiler to be nice cuz if it’s the one I’m thinking of it was actually pretty good)

I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper

Nor archive.ph, which appears to be the same site? Idk how that works. Definitely not a site anyone should go to, though.

There was some legit talk among the wealthy a while back about how to control their slaves servants… and the idea of bomb collars was floated…

I can’t find the article at the moment (I’ll edit when I do because I’m still looking but my app tends to crash if I wait), but this is all totally on the up and up and it’s really fucking depressing that there are so many articles now about doomsday bunkers for the ultra wealthy… like they could have just pumped that money into fixing things but they don’t want to… sociopaths.

Edit- found it faster than I thought!

https://archive.ph/l3Djh

Bonus round - you have a heated mattress pad, set to 3 (or whatever is perfect for you, I’m a 2-3 with my pad), and enough pillows around you to give you that snuggly feeling (for me it’s 3, but there are an additional 3 supporting pillows to allow the 3 comfy pillows to do their job optimally)

And your cats/dogs are all cuddled against you. Because warm.

Good luck.