I am a man and I chose my deodorant because to me it smells like fruit roll up. I’m not a shill, so if you’re curious, it’s this kind:

Visited a friend not long ago and they tried to prepare me for the dog to hate me.

“Don’t take it personally. He’s like that with everyone. He’ll warm up to you eventually.”

Me and this dog were immediately friends as soon as I walked through the door. Within 30 minutes, he was chilling in my lap and soaking up the attention. Within an hour, he was laying next to me on the couch and partially resting his head on the cat which was so unheard of that my friend had to take a picture because they said their partner would never believe it. Apparently the dog got along with the cats like… well like cats and dogs, but my presence got them to all chill out and just hang on the couch. I absolutely felt like this pic.

Would be pretty cool if we could build a crowdsourced network of these that do basically exactly what flock does, but just to keep a constantly updated public database of the location of all cop cars, hopefully with the ability to associate cars to specific officers with names, photos and badge numbers.

We could call them “drove cameras.” A drove is a term that refers to a group of pigs.

Gotcha. Thx for the explanation!

Sure, but backports are a thing, right? The new Wolverine game “requires” a console firmware version of like 13.40, but you can download a backported version of the game that runs on 4.0. I don’t have a ps5, and I don’t know how any of that translates to emulation, but I’ve got plenty of ps4 games that “require” a higher firmware version than what my console has, but I can play them because they’re backported. The current ps5 jailbreak works on firmwares as new as a few months ago. Backported ps4 games have been a thing for years, and from what I can tell about ps5, that doesn’t appear to have changed.

I was able to find it by following the mobile app instructions. Mine was pretty boring. It had stuff like “Likely lives in (city where I ship my orders)” and “Likely favors (brand of thing that I’ve bought multiple times)”. I guess the most invasive thing is that it guessed I live alone, or rather that I “likely has one adult.”

There’s a Walmart near me that I just never bother going to because like 80% of the non-grocery items are locked behind plexiglass. There are 4 self-checkouts and 2 employees assigned to just stand there watching people to make sure they don’t shoplift. They’ve made shopping so hostile that it barely makes sense for it to be a department store at all. Might as well just go back to the old model of telling the employee what you want and then they go get it for you.

I got a random $50 on paypal yesterday from “President Trump’s FTC” I guess because I had 1 free month of prime in like 2018. Since when has anything like that bothered putting the president’s name on it? I couldn’t even find anyone else talking about this online other than articles about the settlement specifying that some people will receive up to $200, and I expect every single payout will have that dipshit’s name on it somewhere.

I had very specifically stipulated a hybrid arrangement when I started. Apparently I didn’t get that in writing anywhere, but the vibes were good and I didn’t expect them to back track on that (foolish on my part). I was leaving a fully remote position for the role, and the fact that I’d be earning more money was the only reason I agreed to some time in the office.

They tried to force me into the office 5 days a week, and I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to do that. My manager was fine with this, but their boss was insisting on the schedule change. They fired me and I recently learned that they are now on their 3rd attempt in 6 months to hire a replacement. The person currently in that role does less than I did and they’re paying them nearly 20k more.

Oh well, hopefully about to land a new job with better pay and back to being fully remote. Honestly by the time they fired me, I was just glad to get the hell out of there.

The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.

The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.

I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.

I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.

I always saw it as a medium adjacent to flat gaming, not a substitute or upgrade

Yeah I’d say that’s about where I’d put myself these days. I probably still play a bit more VR than traditional flat games, but I’d agree that now I see it more as different way of doing basically the same thing instead of that first year where I was convinced I’d never go back. The opportunity to give away some pretty sweet gifts was also a big part of why I gave away the consoles. I didn’t think I’d miss them, but I eventually came back around and repurchased some older ones for myself. Nothing from current gen though.

I guess the fact that I was never much into using VR for virtual displays just surprised me a bit because of how otherwise obsessed with the medium I am. I’ve done it several times, and while it works well and I don’t really have anything bad to say about it, I just never went back after trying any particular game once or twice. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I traveled a lot or had to compromise with other people on who gets to use what screen. The thing that’s got me the most excited these days is all the VR mods of classic games that keep coming out. One of my favorite things to do in VR is to finally be able to experience a game I already love from that new perspective.

I’d be interested to hear if you’re still doing this a year from now. I’m a huge VR nerd, to the extent that when I first got VR in like 2019 I didn’t have even the slightest inclination to play anything non-VR anymore and I gave away my consoles. I didn’t go back to any flat-screen gaming for over a year. The meta quest has actually had multiple ways to do pretty solid remote desktop for years now, and I also have a dongle that lets me connect any HDMI source and play on a massive virtual screen. I’ve used these things a couple of times, but I always prefer just using a normal screen or TV. I have a headstrap that makes my VR headset very comfy and I have no problem playing for hours at a time, but for flat screen gaming, I don’t want to have to wear something on my head. I’ve seen many people expressing excitement for using the steam frame this way, but I have to assume it’s mostly people new to VR and they probably won’t stick with it, but maybe I’m wrong.

I’m picturing one of these bipedal robots carrying a ripped, dripping garbage bag all the way through the house, hobbling along in that slow, wobbly gait they have, struggling with the doorknob for 5 minutes and eventually arriving at the sidewalk bin 20 minutes later to deposit a soggy mostly empty bag and then spending the rest of the day attempting to gather all the trash from the ground in this mysterious trail of garbage that leads from the sidewalk all the way back to the garbage can.

This comment reminded me of a cherished Little Joel video.

The first night I owned an air fryer, I tossed in some shitty frozen tater tots that had been in my freezer for way too long, and they came out so delightfully crispy that I cooked two more servings.

I realized immediately that this would be a problem. It’s a bit too easy to make delicious stuff that’s pretty bad for me. I nearly made myself sick of wings within like 2 weeks. That was a close one. Fuckin love wings.

This is one of the things that I’m pretty satisfied with and grateful for in my life. No romance, currently no job, not much I’m excited about on the horizon, but I’m very happy with the friendships I’ve cultivated with other dudes. I just wish we all lived closer together. A handful of us do a semi-regular video chat where we check in and see how everyone’s doing. We hold space for emotional vulnerability and support each other however we can. We talk about issues with life, family, or sometimes just shoot the shit and have a regular chat about whatever we’ve been up to.

When people talk about holding your male friends accountable for saying sexist things or reinforcing typical toxic bullshit, I feel very fortunate that I just don’t have friends like that. I like to think I’d call it out if it happened, but I just never have to hear that kind of shit from my friends and I don’t think I’d cultivate a friendship with someone who’s comfortable saying that kind of stuff.

We’re all in our 30’s at this point and some are starting families. I don’t get to see everyone as much as I’d like, but any time I get to spend around them always feels so restorative. I’ve never been shy about expressing my true feelings and I tell each and every one of them that I love them. I used to really enjoy making my more guarded friends squirm with an “I love you,” but it doesn’t really work anymore because now everyone is just as comfortable saying it as I am.

I wish every dude could have guy friends like this. There’s a lot of cultural baggage that makes it harder than it should be. I appreciate the question because I often struggle with feeling gratitude for the things in my life that I’m most thankful for. I spend too much time in a negative headspace, but I’ve got a good bench of bros I can lean on and I need to appreciate that.

I have a bit of a reputation among my friends for missing pretty basic stuff in games. My best guess is that I replay a lot of older games that I already know everything about, so it’s kind of a reflex to just ignore text that pops up on the screen. This is how I end up several hours into a game being unaware that there is a block mechanic.

Completely unrelated YouTube video I just felt like sharing.