A friend of mine had an alarm clock with big rubberized wheels on it that would drive around the room as it went off, so you had to get out of bed to turn it off.
That lasted a few weeks before he grabbed it and chucked it as hard as he could against a wall while still half asleep, then went back to sleep.
IIRC, people have previously reported that Windows 11(?) switched their default browser back to Edge after installing an update.
It really depends on where you live and the kinds of bins you have. I keep my bins in my garage because we get snow (used to get snow? Climate change and all that), and there are times when I can smell even just the normal household garbage inside the house. I also live in a duplex, so my entire downstairs is a single large room with a kitchenette off of it, meaning that when the garbage cans stink, they stink up the entire downstairs of the house.
I think the cans the town uses just don’t have a great seal on them, as I’ve heard other people complain about similar issues with the smell, and my parents even have a separate small can they keep outside specifically for their dog poop that they toss into the actual garbage right as they take it out to the curb so it doesn’t stink up their house.
Luckily, I’ve never had the issue of people tossing their poop into my cans, but I’ve heard tons of people complain about it. People not picking up after their dogs at all, however…that’s a different story that’s so bad around my neighborhood that multiple people have installed signs about it.
I surely don’t know what you mean. They’re to keep the raccoons out! That’s why they’re on a piece of velcro, so they’re removable!
Sarcasm aside, absolutely. Even if you wouldn’t get in trouble for people hurting themselves by going into your bins, you could probably get in trouble for messing with town property or something. It’s just the kind of thing I immediately think of after growing up with stories of “Let me take care of that for you” about a guy who’s probably doing 30 to life for prostitution and selling heroin/whatever else the Hell’s Angels get up to.
Oftentimes, these kinds of people don’t bother to check if the bins have already been picked up or not, so you get a bin that smells like dog shit for the next week.
Your friend sounds very creative, I’d personally go for gluing a piece of velcro to the inside lip of the handle with razor blades on it. Of course, I’m also not an engineer, just somebody whose grandfather was friends with the #2 Hell’s Angel for a state who would ask if he wanted him to “take care of” problems like that. The old razor blades and broken glass in the root ball trick worked wonders when somebody was repeatedly stealing the shrubs out of my grandfather’s pots.
Many people do this after the bins have already been emptied, meaning that for the next week, you have to deal with a bin that smells like dog shit.
Not “tyrannic” yet, but Project 2025 is 3 months away.
The best a resistance group can hope for is being damaging enough to choke their enemy little by little while also being hard to root out without causing collateral damage. Because what are AR-15s or whatever else you can get your hands on going to do against the army’s helicopter drones armed with sniper rifles and 360 degree cameras that can detect a target within milliseconds in a kilometer radius just through the reflection on their eye.
As George Washington once said, “A bunch of farmers armed with guns will never win against a trained army.”
Flowery words coming from someone who now lives in a tyrannic monarchy.
Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.
Also, another of my favorite quotes:
I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.
Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.
Optimism, realism, and pessimism.
I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:
I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.
Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.
The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.
Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.
There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.
I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.
Big Carrot is coming for your stew
If you’re watching something on TV, record it and watch it later instead of when it airs. Even starting it 15 minutes later would probably let you fast forward through many of the ads.
Just a lot of pressure.
I’ve seen this reported in other countries as well, and it makes perfect sense. If you’re already at risk of being deported just for existing, why would you do anything to put yourself at higher risk.
I disagree that Armstrong didn’t approach that situation in good faith. I think he meant every word he said. Armstrong was a caricature of American Individualism and a diehard fanatic. If you watch his speech now, there’s a lot in there that sounds familiar to modern politics. Including “they’ll make America great again!”
He’s a villain who comes off as a “might makes right” true believer. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical strength, underhanded tactics, cleverness, or sheer endurance. So long as you win, you make the rules.
He believed that the strong should squash the weak, while Raiden believed that the strong should protect the weak, and they both used violence to enforce their beliefs. In his eyes, neither of them were right. Who would decide the rules merely came down to which of them was stronger.
Raiden is Armstrong’s beliefs made manifest. From surviving as a child soldier up to the very moment that he kills Armstrong, he’s enforcing his will on the world around him through his strength. A shift in perspective, which side of the sword you’re on, and Raiden’s justice becomes the same as Armstrong’s oppression.
This is the danger of a true believer of “might makes right.” Because even when you beat them, you didn’t prove them wrong - you merely played by their rules and beat them at their own game. Your might made you right, and nothing more.
You should listen to Senator Armstrong’s speech from Rising and ask yourself if he’d get votes in today’s political landscape.
I think he’d have a noticeable percentage of the voting base of America.
I think Facebook had an advantage in originally being targeted at college kids (I think you even needed a school ID to make an account originally) before becoming open to everyone. This meant that the userbase was a little older than that of most social media at the time and it worked as a way to stay in touch with people after you graduated. Then, when they opened it up, it became a way to stay in touch with family as well, which got the parents onboard with something that they had just considered a fad before, like MySpace.