Random non sequitur posts catch-all thread

On the kitchen table right at this moment:

  • My roommate's MacBook Pro
  • My MacBook Air
  • My roommate's iPad Pro
  • My iPad Air
  • My roommate's iPhone 6S
  • My iPhone 11 Pro

ME TO MY ROOMMATE: We're such Apple whales.

I thought of something my grandfather, who passed away many years ago, said about family gatherings today. He said that you start out as one of the little kids excitedly running around between everyone’s legs then you are one of the adults talking about their lives with the other adults then, before you know it, you are the old man sitting quietly in the corner.

Higgledy wrote:

I thought of something my grandfather, who passed away many years ago, said about family gatherings today. He said that you start out as one of the little kids excitedly running around between everyone’s legs then you are one of the adults talking about their lives with the other adults then, before you know it, you are the old man sitting quietly in the corner.

In all seriousness, I can't wait. Sounds brilliant.

I've been accused, on Wikipedia, of being one of Tammy Wynette's daughters and/or connections. That's not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd write.

Ride that pony, Ms Wynette!

Maybe the accusation is justified and ancient?

halfwaywrong wrote:

I've been accused, on Wikipedia, of being one of Tammy Wynette's daughters and/or connections. That's not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd write.

Twice a week this happens to me. I mean, who hasn't been?

On Imgur I'm always accused of just being a vote miner's daughter...

I started a new Twitter account for when I'm at work, basically a burner that follows all the places I need to be following and won't have the amount of NSFW sh*tposts my regular Twitter does.

Anyway, it's interesting to see how the algorithm works early in the Twitter experience, because it's infuriating. If you like a post about a particular topic, Twitter then will serve you 100 posts on that topic.

I liked ONE post about She-Hulk and my feed was just annihilated for an hour. And I follow 120 mostly news-y accounts!

My favorite is when I tweet "@company is a complete disappointment, I will never use their product again," and then for the next week twitter's "who to follow" sidebar suggests following @company.

No I take that back. My favorite twitter thing is when it inserts a video ad into a video attached to a promoted tweet - i.e. a video that was already an ad. So basically Apple paid twitter a bunch of money to show me an ad for BMW, or whatever.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Occasionally, I'll see people complaining about the "YouTube Face" many creators put in the thumbnail of their YouTube videos, in no small part because it's such an obvious, repetitive thing.

But I was unsurprised to read recently that they've done the research, and it works. Like, people can complain about it all they want, but creators do it because there is a large, measurable difference in engagement when your thumbnail has you pulling some gurning face and when it doesn't. If anything, it's the audience's fault, the creators aren't forcing it, they're just following what the audiences want.

I just need to understand WHY DOES THIS f*ckING WORK.

Interestingly, YouTube recommended this to me today:

I will probably beat soul hackers 2 this weekend. I will start new game plus enough to save at a good spot but I rarely replay whole games right after beating them.

Steelrising comes out on the 8th.

I may end up buying spiderman to play for 2 days and you can't stop me!

Tom Cruise is a lunatic, and I say that as praise.

Though I read the book almost 20 years ago, one of the moments I remember most from Yann Martel's Life of Pi is the scene where Pi catches his first fish, and just can't find the resolve to kill it. He ends up wrapping the fish in rags before breaking its neck.

I was confronted with a similar situation a week ago. I was out jogging and, as I was about to turn to go back to the building where I live, I noticed a seagull on the ground. I ran next to it, but it did not fly away. Instead, it tried to move, but just could not. I found that weird, but did not give it too much thought.

About an hour later, as I was going out to get to the bus stop, I saw the bird again. I looked at it a bit more closely, and I noticed that it was in a very bad shape: it's right wing was almost torn off, and its left leg looked broken and could barely move. My guess is that it was hit by a car but somehow survived.

Somebody had clearly seen the bird too, because they left a small bowl of water with some bread in it. The bird was pretty far from it. I moved closer, and I saw the bird try to move away from me. It moved into the entrance. My roommate, who was with me at the time, suggested I move the seagull on the grass, which I did. (And yes, I used hand sanitizer after.) I brought the bowl next to it, so that it could drink.

All through the afternoon, I could not stop thinking about that bird. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was no way this bird would ever fly again. The damage to the wing was too great, I don't think it could even move it. It was probably in pain. All this time, my thinking was that I would have to kill it so that it would not suffer pointlessly.

By the time my roommate and I got back, the bird was gone. No trace of it remained. I don't know what happened. My guess is that security saw it and took it away. Or maybe a dog walked by and attacked it. I don't know, and I will probably never know.

One other thing I will never know: Would I have killed it? I'm not sure. Maybe, like Pi, I would have had to wrap it with rags before breaking its neck.

One fun thing I learned on that day: Seagulls are very, very light, despite being fairly big birds.

In Akron, a starling got into the house somehow. Our only guess at the time was that it had found its way in through the chimney. The cats had gotten to it. It was half dead. There were three of us in the house. I was seemingly the only one who realized it had to be put down. Nobody else would do it, so I took it outside and broke its neck with a shovel.

That one was easy, though - starlings are an invasive species. The one that sucked was when I found a cat in the side yard after getting home from work, looking kinda guilty. It ran away when I got close and there was a mostly dead squirrel on the ground where it had been sitting. I had never seen a cat go after something as big as that squirrel, so I can't be sure it was responsible for its injuries, but it had labored breathing and was bleeding. There are a million squirrels in that town, but still. Squirrels are cute. But there was no saving this poor guy.

Amazed by the number of morons arguing that Stan Lee, the man who helped make Stripperella, would be turning in his grave because of recent episodes of She-Hulk.

Honestly, one of the things I most enjoyed about late-career Stan Lee was that he was here for just about anyone who had a big enough paycheck.

I want to start a podcast where we discuss, in excruciating detail, fictional magic systems.

We'll call it....

Manasplaining.

IMAGE(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/829908288602505221/1017237471081279488/dad_joke.PNG)

Jonman wrote:

I want to start a podcast where we discuss, in excruciating detail, fictional magic systems.

We'll call it....

Manasplaining.

I'm in!

If its weekly you can dub it Semanasplaining...

fangblackbone wrote:

If its weekly you can dub it Semanasplaining...

Semensplaining is a VERY different podcast.

The Navy's Seamenpodcast was thick with information.

I was looking for something I haven't seen since I moved in 3 years ago, having no idea where it was, and I found it in the first place I looked.

bobbywatson wrote:

I was looking for something I haven't seen since I moved in 3 years ago, having no idea where it was, and I found it in the first place I looked.

I trust that you also found it in the last place you looked.

Also, in the only place you looked...

Sometimes it's nice to get reminded that me from three years ago and me from now both think in similar ways!

Was reading the latest scuttlebutt about the new Overwatch character, and was reminded of how I find it and other "hero shooters" (Apex, etc.) incredibly confusing, because they have these characters and a meta about them being characters and having backstories and motivation and personalities but the game itself ignores that entirely in favor of "run around and shoot the other team."

Not arguing it's bad, but it's weird to wear about these titles primarily through fanwork, as I do, and then watch the game and realize there's nothing there plot or character-wise in the actual game.

EDIT: Also realized that, despite only having watched clips of it, I think Breath of the Wild is one of the best games ever made.

Prederick wrote:

Was reading the latest scuttlebutt about the new Overwatch character, and was reminded of how I find it and other "hero shooters" (Apex, etc.) incredibly confusing, because they have these characters and a meta about them being characters and having backstories and motivation and personalities but the game itself ignores that entirely in favor of "run around and shoot the other team."

Not arguing it's bad, but it's weird to wear about these titles primarily through fanwork, as I do, and then watch the game and realize there's nothing there plot or character-wise in the actual game.

That's a lot of games, though, hero shooters just take it to an extreme. Like, the concept of a "cut scene" is profoundly weird if you think about it. When you go to the movies, it doesn't pause every 15 minutes so you can play a little game of Tetris. So why is it normal for video games to periodically pause your interactive experience for a tiny sh*tty little movie?

They're not all sh*tty little movies! I cried when Aeris died! and I had just turned 38!

(I stg if anyone takes this seriously)

"Why does my knee hurt?" I wondered, while walking around on soles that had worn unevenly by almost half an inch.