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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My last picture in my saved images folder is a snip of my screen. My prompt got featured on Prequel Comic! Finally, after like, 10 years of submitting commands and I just happened to check for updates and saw my name at the top.

    I kind of regret that specific prompt getting picked now though, because I thought the spider character was on an elevator traveling downwards, but I went back a page and realized that it was a camera/animation trick and they weren’t actually moving down. And yet, the artist still picked me for some reason anyway. Whatever, I’ll take it!



  • I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, but it’s really not worth it to go to these fast food places anymore even if you do like the food. I remember when, speaking to my friend, we would go to BK in high school and get a couple of “buck doubles”, because Burger King used to run a promotion where you could get two double cheeseburgers for two dollars. It was honestly a great deal. Then the shrinkflation kicked in and over time the size of the food became smaller and smaller. Then, the actual currency inflation hit, and fast food companies used the increased price of beef, chicken and other such ingredients as an excuse to gouge the hell out of their prices. Now, if I were to go to BK and get my usual fare, I would be lucky to leave paying less than $16. For like, $4 extra (not including tip) I could go to the Chili’s across the street and get an actual restaurant quality burger, and a side, and a beverage and be more than satisfied.

    These fast food places are completely off their rocker if they think these prices are reasonable. Inflation is going down, so we as consumers need to stop buying their shit so they can’t justify keeping prices so insanely high. McDonalds and other fast food places are the biggest bulk purchaser of raw ingredients, so you bet that they have an insane amount of negotiating power to convince farmers and ranchers to supply the stuff they need for below market rate in bulk quantities.

    If you are really craving that unique fast food flavor that you can only get at your favorite chain, let me tell you, there are YouTube channels with copycat recipes that can be made quicker and cheaper than the time it takes to drive to the nearest chain location, order, pay, get your food, leave, and come back to your house to eat it. And they taste almost the same or better in most cases because you make it yourself so you can add as much of the flavorful stuff as you want.


  • I can imagine the raucous laughter behind me as I exit the bank, fist clenched in anger and face red with embarrassment, after explaining to the loan officer that I needed $20m to purchase an LNG tanker but also that I have never been a sea captain, don’t know anything about natural gasses, and have no supply chain for acquiring or selling the product that said tanker is meant to distribute.

    Nah, I’m good. I’ll stay poor.



  • If your manager is telling you that you are doing a good job and has no notes on your performance, but telling the higher-ups at the company or other management level employees something other than exactly that, it’s no longer an issue of respect at that point. Your work environment is toxic.

    Start seeking other positions. Take your time and interview carefully - remember to ask good questions that will help you get an idea of whether or not it would be a place that you can enjoy working at, or at the very least tolerate on a day-to-day basis.

    If they ask you why you are quitting, wait until your exit interview to spill any details about your manager going behind your back. Do not accept counter-offers for continued employment (retaliation is very likely if you do stay) and don’t bother trying to hash out any grievances with the person conducting your exit interview (their promises are almost never backed up by action, just hot air to get you to stay and trap you where you are). Walk in there confident knowing that you committed to changing jobs over this.



  • There was an occasional reddit repost that I remember seeing a few times about a guy who invented a “suicide helmet” specifically to avoid the prospect of botching his own planned attempt. It basically was a bunch of shotgun shells wired up to a detonator and fused into a hardhat. The level of planning and makeshift engineering that went into it was astounding, and the dude explained it all in his suicide note. It worked. On one hand I can see how someone who is determined to die but afraid of pain would want to make sure the process was instantaneous and extremely lethal, on the other hand, it’s fucked up to think about how much the guy must have dwelt on the idea of killing himself, knowing it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment opportunity where he shoved a gun in his mouth like most people would have done.





  • Good point on the ethics issue. Youngsters these days don’t know what hard games really are. Games used to be diabolically hard, design holdovers from when quarter-munching games moved to home consoles and every game you paid full price for was essentially a gamble on whether or not it was going to be good or even playable, but finishable was almost not a consideration back then because it was pretty rare to actually ckear a game from start to end.

    These days to think it’s important and walk a line between challenging and entertaining not just for the sake of capturing a larger market share of players, but also to avoid bad publicity from having a game be too difficult to o complete.


  • Some kids adopt an edgy political identity as a form of protest or rebellion. I can see this being the case here, especially if your whole family is particularly left-leaning. Kid wants to feel like he has an autonomy over his own decision making and that he’s not just a carbon copy of you or his siblings, so he becomes a contrarian.

    As a teen I was also taken in by extremist political ideology on 4chan, but the thing that snapped me out of that is, surprisingly enough, my curriculum at school focusing heavily on critical thinking and problem solving as essential skills. That’s unfortunately not something that can easily be condensed down into a gift-sized package. I’m sure there are some books out there that can help, but I worry that it might be too on-the-nose or that he might just not like reading much to be interested in dry subject matter like philosophy or political science.

    I kind of agree with other posters here that taking a family trip somewhere, maybe not explicitly as a gift for him, but as an experience for all of your children, will expose him to stimuli that drastically differ from the way he currently sees the world, which is influenced by a nonstop stream of fearmongering propaganda and a lack of perspective of what a world outside the town or city he grew up in actually looks like.