ragebutt

In my town (in America) there is literally a lidl and aldi across the street from each other

I like to imagine the staff get into fights

Way back in the days of somethingawful Lowtax, the admin and owner who was a spiteful shithead, would do a similar trick for sites that criticized him

He would register an account, show up, and chat everyone up. Act in on the joke. Eventually he would post a blank 1x1px image hosted on the somethingawful server in one of his comments. Then, he would view the logs that accessed the image. If any somethingawful members had an IP that matched the log they would be banned

For the young folks who didn’t exist in that era: this was pre Facebook and social media. SA was one of the biggest forums and most importantly it was also $10 to join, plus add ons like search, avatar, etc cost etc. would be like reddit costing money to join and then banning you because you posted here about how much reddit was shit compared to the old days

He got 3 Supreme Court justices and an insane amount of court stacking done. He didn’t get everything but he got enough to set the stage for today

Republican “mavericks” are because every once in a while one of them develops a conscience. They get a gay kid or something. Democrat “mavericks” are theater: sinema and fetterman were always class traitors. Anyone looking into their history for even 30 seconds will see that clearly. They are promoted by the party to ensure there will always be some dissent, to make sure there will always be someone that can act as a heel. That way if something like right now is happening they can take the fall. Or if democrats get a commanding lead, they can take the fall again like when sinema and manchin had the role. “Oh sorry, no healthcare, student loan reform, minimum wage increase, etc for you!”

ACA was a joke. Admittedly the pre existing conditions bit amongst a few other regulatory changes were long overdue and very helpful. But ultimately the individual mandate with no financial support was toxic. People who didn’t have insurance weren’t not buying it because they thought it was fun not to. They couldn’t afford it, they were struggling. By forcing them to with penalties for not you created a generation of angry people. Not only did you not fix healthcare; you were financially punishing them for being too poor to buy into the system that you failed to adequately reform. But the increased signups thanks to this penalty system were great for the private insurance industry lobbying buddies that helped influence this bullshit

50 years from now democrats will be remembered for being absolutely spineless at best and more likely for being power hungry and owned by corporate influence

Almost like the democrats are a party designed to give working class voters something that feels like representation but is purposely sabotaged with malicious actors so that no meaningful progress can be made

Funny how the gop doesn’t have a fetterman, manchin, Lieberman, etc blocking project 2025, supreme court confirmations, post 9/11 bullshit, etc. and somehow manages to always get their agenda pushed through

Funny how the gop comes into office and smashes their agenda through where a single person will derail the democrats. “Oh this thing that will benefit all workers?? So sorry, Krysten sinema said no…” but then elon musk and trump dismantle the government in like 2 months and the democrats are like aw geez.

This picture was a horrible reminder that animal crossing for the GameCube basically took up an entire fucking memory card. But at least they gave you one with the game to make up for that

Still didn’t use that slot

Good thing they’ve invested heavily in infrastructure across Africa and Southeast Asia. When things begin to look dire they can open up immigration

Inertia. Why did kings exist for so long?

You’re seeing the end result of “boycott” problems right now though

They will simply take your money. They will pay you increasingly less, tax the little bit they pay you increasingly more, and use the money from the taxes they forcibly take from you to launder your money right back to the oligarchs. Why do you think musk is destroying shit? Why do you think they are pushing to privatize everything? That last little bit of power you have, to vote with your wallet, will become increasingly meaningless

Just keep in mind that pulling the anode cap of a crt is genuinely lethal electricity. Like you can get zapped pretty bad by a power supply cap (you should get in the habit of discharging these too) but generally unless they’re seriously big caps you won’t die. A crt can kill your tho so make sure you discharge it correctly. That’s why I say watch a video on how to do it, there are plenty of them and it’s much better to see what to do than follow a text description. Keep in mind that sometimes you have to discharge 2-3x (not usually but sometimes, and never hurts to be safe). You’ll see a spark and hear a pop. You can get a tool to discharge but an insulated screwdriver is all I ever used

Macs of that era are a pain. Good luck. Check capacitors of course, replace battery, reset pmu. That era of mac you can get a service manual which is nice, get a meter and you can trace reference voltages thru power supply and logic board. Flyback is notorious in those imacs so look at that (same as above, check for burn, crack, loose, smell). 68kmla.org has a lot of great repair info on that era

I mean that’s how it was for me in America in 1998. Walking around and cursing and talking about sex all the time and listening to korn and eventually like slipknot and shit. Skating and hanging out at whoever had a n64 (or eventually sega Dreamcast) and parents that didn’t stay at home

Then the Walmarts came and put mainstreets out of business, they developed housing in big tracts away from anything so you need to drive 20 minutes to get anywhere and legally aren’t allowed to build any kind of business near a house inside of it, and the far right thing happened here too (kind of seeing the end game right now).

It’s persistence too. The language exchange is great to hear, that’s huge.

I’m much better now from daily chats with my Japanese friends. That’s really what was missing from the many, many, many years I spent before imo. I would study flash cards and eventually Anki decks once that was a thing, I would have practice conversations here and there with other weebs or in class during the brief period I had that. But for the most part I just read manga, which isn’t really all that challenging (usually), and I would listen to anime while reading subtitles. It was so passive

But now it’s the study daily instead of when I feel like it. It’s chatting every night with my friends and having them be like oh no, it’s actually もう一つの, not もう一つ. Or it’s “so-reh” or whatever I’m saying wrong. The constant feedback is essential

It’s embarrassing to say how many years relative to how poor my skills are haha. Like if I had genuinely kept my practice up this whole time I would be a near native speaker

Started in high school, like 2001. Lived in a small town so was self teaching via instruction online and help from the somethingawful adtrw dc++ hub and what eventually became 4chan

Took a some classes in college but didn’t minor or anything. Did get a chance to go to Japan at the end of college (around 2007ish) though. My Japanese was pathetically bad, despite having spent 6 years at this point. I had a somewhat decent vocabulary but I had a mix of: didn’t practice grammar enough so I couldn’t speak with any kind of confidence, didn’t practice speaking enough so when I did actually speak I was often unintelligible, and I was a huge weeb so I kept saying cringe shit

That was a pretty disheartening experience (still loved Japan though) so then I basically didn’t practice for a few years. At this point I was starting my career and then went to grad school so it fell by the wayside

Then I started to pick it back up in like 2016 but mainly to read manga. I was done grad school by then so I finally had some time again and started to brush up again, but passively

Then covid happened and I reconnected with some people from Japan I knew. They wanted to work on English, I wanted to work on Japanese, so we’ve been doing that. Now I’m realizing that was 5 years ago and my speech still sucks

God I’m so depressed now