i would constantly knock the jars on the ends off

nothing is really random

nothing really - I’ll buy myself a few gadgets, but I honestly dont need more things.

the most scared I’ve ever been was when I almost died at 8 years old.

growing up I was rather accident prone - the summer between 1st and 2nd grade I was at a friend’s birthday party & he had a fun idea that we should all ride our bikes to the lake. I had recently gotten a new bike and it had hand brakes, previously I had only used backpedal brakes & in retrospect I probably shouldnt have been riding it yet. on the ride to the lake I took a wrong turn and the bike landed in a rut on the side of the road which launched me into a barbed wire fence (back peddling fast af but, eh, no brakes there). got a really nice concussion (mid-80s, no helmets) but when I fell onto the barbed wire, it ended up ripping a good bit through the top and outside of my leg, through the fat layer and into the muscle (which was fortunate because the major artery is on the inside of the leg). the wound was only about 3 1/2 inches deep and 6 inches across but when you’re 8 years old your legs arent that big to begin with.

when I came to my friend’s mother was understandably losing her shit, driving at rally racing speeds to the local doctor, ~10 miles away. my blood was splattered everywhere on the passenger side of the car and she was screaming at me to apply pressure outside of the giant fucking hole in my leg. honestly thought I was going to die - the memories are pretty hazy after that but mind-shattering trauma will do that.

modern medicine and 150 intramuscular and about the same in dermal stitches saved my life. 35 years later and I still have 100% nerve damage on the outside of my leg above the knee to about mid-thigh. never been that scared since - once you’re forced to confront your own mortality everything else is really tame in comparison.

lands of lore: throne of chaos. tried for a couple years to beat that in the late 90s but eventually gave up. fun to play, not fun to advance

it’s easy enough to lie your way out of persecution - church officials do it all the time (it’s dogma).

because we know what happened in the 1500s - with a little bit of foreknowledge about when comets and whatnot are going to occur with some basic modern chemistry or engineering know how, you could easily set yourself up as a prophet/philosopher-king. seriously, easy-mode reincarnation.

picking a future year just increases the likelihood of being an Elysium style factory slave. pass

are we reincarnating into our reality or getting isekai’d into a fantasy setting? not sure i’d pick human unless I’m getting reincarnated into our subjective past (say 1500s or so). if I had to prepare (and was even prepared for it, at all), I’d memorize basic biology/chemistry. maybe when comets and other astronomical events are supposed to occur.

that is an excellent analogy.

carl’s jr double western bacon cheeseburger. the onion rings are the deciding factor.

as an aside to that, my favorite burger of all time was at a restaurant close to where I worked ~13 or so years ago. small burger/diner joint, a real “greasy spoon” slice of americana. they had a triple cheeseburger on their menu (served on a ciabatta roll) and I would always get that with two sides of bacon (more bacon than ordering their bacon cheeseburger), then fold the bacon on top of the burger. the bacon came from a local source, it was amazing. probably a 3000+ calorie burger. that was the best burger I’ve ever had, and it wasnt an “official” menu item. sadly, and somewhat ironically, the kitchen had a grease fire and the whole place burned down.

that is suitably depressing. I wish I had an answer but your “solution” is rather expedient… yes, you could rehome them but an individual shouldnt have to shoulder that burden, that’s a local government issue. but, without animal control enforcement…

titanic. just dont like it

to a certain extent, a wooden structure is just a bunch of wooden spears stacked in a specific way. anyone who can figure out hand-axes and spears can build a fence or a house. homo erectus or whichever genus it was werent idiots.

i’m not really sure we can reliably re-envision how something could have been without being influenced by how it actually was - and that’s especially true for anyone who was directly influenced by it. just about every single kind of job in our society has some aspect that was directly changed by the internet, or by technology derived from globe-spanning interconnected networks. we’re several generations of technology deep now.

you have to keep in mind though that the mass commercialization of the internet didnt evolve in a vacuum - for example, without the technology to mass archive large amounts of data on optical disc formats in a time when the average connection speed to the internet was limited by your PSTN dial up modem, there would have been no ability to rip music from CDs. sharing music on the interwebs was just an evolution of the mix tape, but it was the commercialization of music itself and the fact that no one wants to pay for something that they dont have to that directly led to P2P networks/piracy.

in a certain sense, the FOSS/linux movement is as old as the internet (possibly older), but to a certain degree its mindset is much younger as well - rebelling against the older generation’s hegemony (apple, ibm, microsoft, etc) by striving to offer free options - though nothing is truly “free”.

i was raised vegan, in the 1980s, when it was neither trendy nor particularly easy to do (health reasons coupled with the fact that my mother hated touching raw meat). the most prominent food memory I have is one thanksgiving when my mother took it upon herself to introduce us to seitan. if you’ve never experienced the joys of seitan, made from scratch, in the essentially pre-internet days where it was difficult to get a recipe that wasnt either awful or untested (presumably someone came up with the recipe but they must have been suffering from chronic mental illness), then you havent lived. after eating it, I too was wishing I hadnt lived.

seitan is wheat gluten - you make it like you’d make bread, but then you cover the dough with water and leave it alone for a day or two, then strain out the gluten. the resulting mass is then shaped and cooked. it looks like a pre-cancerous mass in shades of brown, and has the consistency of a fibrous sponge - when you’re struggling to choke it down, it’s like eating old chewing gum that has no flavor, or a nice lump of gristle without the beneficial nature of gristle. it’s foul beyond belief. anyone who actually enjoys it should be prescribed meds & involuntarily committed to the mental ward.

I love my mother but what she created in her kitchen for that thanksgiving dinner was a crime against man and god - an unholy marriage of allegedly healthy food (on a day that revels in unhealthy overconsumption) and abdominal malaise. I was raised to eat what was set in front of me - it’s polite manners, and it compliments the cook - but I really just couldnt do it and my stomach was rebelling. I was in severe gastric distress. since my folks were health freaks and they had any number of naturopathic/quack-science remedies for common ailments, I was prescribed charcoal pills (used to treat food poisoning - yeah, let that sink in). after an hour or so I became nauseous and then began projectile vomiting chunky, partially digested seitan and stomach bile that was black as night - similar in many respects to that scene in the Exorcist. it went everywhere, and the smell…

anyway that’s my not-so-fond childhood food memory.

I started using the internet in 1992 and it was a much different place - rather ugly, dreadfully slow and basically impossible to find anything except by either direct intent (knowing the exact URL you wanted to go to - browser software was crude, at best) or sheer accident. search engines didnt exist - and wouldnt until 1993 or 1994, I dont really remember when I was first introduced to that concept. wikipedia and indeed the whole notion of a wiki didnt exist. social media didnt exist, unless you count “online chat” via BBS’s, but I dont (closed networks like BBS’s arent “the internet”). streaming media was still years away.

much of the technology we rely on that ties into the internet didnt exist. there wasnt a lot to do on it - I mostly played MUDs, checked email via pinemail and browsed newsgroups (hobbies and porn). people looking back at those early years before the overwhelming mass commercialization of everything have a tendency to see that time in a positive light - but the truth is that without the ability to sell ideas on/about/using the internet, it wouldnt have been widely adopted except in educational settings, and only for information storage/retrieval.

which feed? the one you curated by subscribing to various communities, or the “all” one?

that site is a goldmine. posts about the power of prayer killing satellites seem to be relatively common

that site is wild. post from yesterday:

"

German government takes two children from families to feed to reptlians.

This is why you have guns everyone. Please keep praying to Father Ohm, Mother Azna, the galactics and the blue avians, and the angels for this to stop NOW!

"

note to self: dont handle bat shit