clearly a landing pad for alien anglers

aww, goods and services… I wanted money.

explain how!

I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

this and the “train tracks out of nowhere” pasta are my absolute favorites, they never get old

You are repeating a story designed for the rubes.

Trying to shame conservatives like this doesn’t work. They’re actively proud of being gullible, stupid, victims to their celebrities. It’s their entire identity. They see this and think “hell yeah, you don’t want me repeating the story?? I better do it harder anyway!” - it doesn’t matter that you are actually saying “btw this makes you look very dumb and gullible”, all they heard was “i don’t like this”, and since you’re The Enemy™, they love what you don’t and hate what you do, and they double down on whatever it was, to Win Harder™.

This is why they’ll often seem to take self-defeating or self-contradictory positions, and if you point that out, they take it as winning against you twice (instead of proving themselves wrong) and go straight to calling you a loser and patting themselves on the back.

imo, it’s a semantic attack, and it’s been very effective. art, drawings, paintings, animations, movies, shows, music, poetry, books, code, games, any free human creative venture: it is all suddenly (and falsely) insinuated to only be possible when placed inside a “platform”. you and I may know this isn’t true, but most people could not defend against this hostile idea or simply could not identify it as such, and now falsely believe human expression is only “real” when it’s inside a company’s ad-filled self-reinforcing skinner box.

I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it’s so easy to be a villain.

sweet, a quantum immortality tester that prints money.

He’s an incoherent idiot.

so, he’s someone most of his followers can directly relate themselves to

same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can’t, I reconsider how much I need it. I’ll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won’t boot? switched.

probably. this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.

most of the time they’ll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it’s functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.

if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv’s solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on “totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv” on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.

The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.

everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.

“Menu prices will rise!”

nothing a bunch of two-bit con artists MBAs hate more than an informed mark customer.

The actual good businesses run by good people will not suffer by this. only those that relied on duping their customers.

I’m not even talking about those people or those scenarios.

you call them the extreme scenario, but they are the norm. this kind of scenario is the average reality for a massive number of Americans. it might not be “single parent with a flat tire”, but there are thousands of ways people get stuck in a rut with only credit as a lifeline, and it’s getting more and more common, and it’s rarely something that could be foreseen or mitigated against. that’s how our society is constructed now. desperation is the norm. it’s profitable.

that is what this trend reveals. the ones who buy more than they need on credit they barely qualify for are the minority. the desperate are the majority.

you’d think you’d take some personal responsibility over your ignorance on the matter before loudly asserting that desperate people need to just pull up on their bootstraps harder and stop whining near you.

I have reached the age where I find gags like this - and the massive cringe effect they inflict on young folks - fucking hilarious.

i’m comfortable with my fate. who ever really needed hair on their head anyway?

ding ding ding

this is your reminder. 5 hours overdue, but here nonetheless.

but for real, your phone can do these things.

there are always the people in every horror movie who think that if they deliver their friends into the open drooling maw of the monster stalking them, they’ll get a reward.

the “reward” is usually at least as bad as their friends’ fate. it’s just narcissism really. they think they’re more like the enemy than they are like their friends, so it would be natural to spare them. but they’re all just meat to the monster.

trump is just a shitty xenomorph. small hands instead of small mouth, and substantially less physically threatening. I think they both probably have the acid blood though.

FUN!!!

Your tone is condescending as fuck, so I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply because you’ll undoubtedly just shoot insults at me too, but… I live in 2024. I work in tech, too. I almost exclusively use paper as a note taking, problem solving, and brainstorming tool. Digital tools simply don’t compare in my eye. There is an inherent freedom of immediate expression and a special mental retention value that comes with pen on paper that I have tried and failed to sufficiently replicate on a computer despite attempts of great effort. I’d definitely prefer if I could instantly backup and organize and search and sync without a scan+tag process, but it’s all inferior to me. The most capable people I work with also have a shockingly common tendency (>65%) to share this preference, too. I envy the others’ ability to work purely digitally, but do notice how they spend substantially more time and effort in “administrative overhead” with their digital knowledgebases in comparison to my analog squishy world, to just end up producing similar overall output.

so if you’re regularly annoyed (1/4), angry (2/4) and spiteful (3/4) about being forced to participate in this exploitative system designed to bleed you dry until you die, you’re ok still… but if you try to do anything about it (by arguing with or defying “authorities” in any way) you’re an insane person that needs to be locked up and given drugs? cool. that’s really convenient.

so if you’re regularly annoyed (1/4), angry (2/4) and spiteful (3/4) about being forced to participate in this exploitative system designed to bleed you dry until you die, you’re ok still… but if you try to do anything about it (by arguing with or defying “authorities” in any way) you’re an insane person that needs to be locked up and given drugs? cool. that’s really convenient.