Same.

There’s a song by the Armenian band Ladaniva that’s just a few lines about a mountain home with a table that sits under a fig tree for the season. It’s relatively vague imagery with beautiful haunting vocals. Makes me ugly weep every time. No idea why. It’s the only song that has ever affected me like that. But there’s something about the idea of just a homey, simple life and how gar away that is that makes it seem all the more important.

Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.

I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.

Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.

The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.

Not at all. Trying to exist in the modern world is exhausting.

The world now is an attention economy. What you have of value that everyone wants is for you to see just one more thing. Click just one more link. Smash just one more like and subscribe button. Respond to a text immediately, otherwise you might be dead. All of these things exist in a space where they assume the world is only you and them in that moment.

It’s really important that people start to learn how to unplug. Even just for an hour or two a day, exist in the world where you control the stimulus. You can go for a walk and leave your phone at home. Or turn it off.

Also consider seeing your phone to greyscale during certain times of the day. It helps as well.

Well, there’s always me after 3 whiskeys.

Greece. Food is usually good, but spice is a totally foreign concept.

And Mexican food in Greece is hilariously bad. Like they can’t even Google a picture of nachos?

Once years ago when I used to smoke, on was visiting Ghana and people were literally yelling at me for smoking in public. It’s illegal to smoke in public in a few African countries at this point IIRC.

Ugh…Just laying on that couch… Can’t defeat natural causes with a wooden stake.

The gut punch was Gina Torres, and Zoe not being allowed to grieve and be with Wash.

I watched Serenity again a couple years ago, and it was just as harsh and abrupt as I remember it. It’s a hard emotional jab at anyone who has ever loved a partner that’s a part of their everyday life.

Depends on the origin, but a freshly fermented and dried whole bean from the farm is like light drugs. Your heart skips a beat, you inhale, you smile, and life gets noticeably better.

Finally, my tax dollars going to things I want!

“Let me check for the address and a map in this phone book.”

Well, I’m here now. So there’s that.

You’re welcome. /s

There’s a few other categories to consider.

Of small niche subs I’ve moderated, there’s maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.

I saw on a couple of the sub’s metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.

A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you’re comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.

And let’s not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There’s likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.

As for actual malicious bots posting, it’s likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don’t mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.

Friend of mine said this when JP 2 came out. Ruined the whole series for me after that.

The first one had some of the plot from the book. Everything after has about as much plot as a porno where instead of butts or dicks or boobs, it’s screams.

The color blue is not for rent, they’re giving that shit away.

If a company is publicly traded, then all leaked individuals are given 50.1% controlling stock in the company, split among the victims with new stocks created for them, with unclaimed stocks held in a trust controlled by anyone that did respond to claim stocks. They can sell the stocks, or drive the company into the ground out of spite. Maybe even both.

Companies not publicly traded have 3 months to make all code used, trademarked material, and patents open source in perpetuity, and 1 year to convert their corporate structure into a non-profit.

Regardless of the size of the company, the CEO, CTO, and board must eat their weight in fried bugs. They get to pick the type of bug from a list of 5 options, and any seasoning they want. Live streams of the bug eating will be monetized and the proceeds given to orphans, under the title of “It’s not a bug, its a feature.”