My new corollary: If your online e-commerce site asks customers to add a tip, even if $0 / no tip is an option, I’m not buying shit from you.

And the icing on the cake? If we had 13 months, essentially every month could have the same number of days, 28.

The main problem I have with USB-C is that the “U” is a lie. Always has been to some extent, but seems like it’s particularly true with USB-C. This is closer to that meme that’s like “There are 12 competing standards. We created a new universal standard to replace them all.” Except instead of there now being 13 competing standards, USB-C is a fractured mess so instead it’s like there’s now 20 competing standards. This cord supports passthrough power, this one doesn’t, but even the one that does only supports 20W so you have to have a special one to deliver 65, and that USB-C power brick only gives 15W, so you have to buy a special one that does 80W, and this USB-C port on my phone doesn’t support the USB-C to Aux jack adapter I bought, so now I have to buy a different adapter. It goes on and on and on and frankly I’m old and tired.

Not that I plan on going back to Wendy’s, certainly not any time soon, but is that $5 deal a relatively new thing and/or a national thing?

When I was a poor college student working multiple jobs and having to do a lot of driving to get from one place to another, Wendy’s was one of my go-to places. For about $4 I could get 2 burgers that had real, fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, plus a drink. I went to Wendy’s a year or two ago and the same exact thing was a bit over $11. For what it’s worth, if they had some kind of $5 special, I didn’t see it on the menu.

Taco Bell was the same way. Back in my college days, I could get a couple 5-layer burritos and a drink for $3 and some change. Last time I went and got that order, it was $9 or $10 and the burritos were missing a few layers, not to mention just absolutely gross.

Most national/international fast food places seem to have looked at the “good, fast, cheap” principle and decided the answer is D) None of the above.

Have they been getting by on inertia and nostalgia in recent history? I could be an incredibly unlucky person, but all my experiences with these places have just been bad, bad in the past 5 or so years. I excused it a bit during the height of covid, but there’s been time to work things out and they just haven’t even bothered.

I’m not exactly their target audience, since I rarely get food at fast food places, but as it stands, if I were going to get fast food, the whole Trump McDonald’s circus show has turned me off to that brand entirely. Burger King is a no-go after getting incredibly sick from their food. Taco Bell just completely gave up on themselves. Wendy’s is so expensive now that I can’t justify it anymore even as a guilty treat while traveling. I’d rather pack some ham sandwiches in a mini-cooler and make do with that.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

Every night in my DMs.

I see poo, I feel poo.

That is how I know you, go poop.

Far across the distance.

And spaces between us.

You have come to show you, go poop.

Near, fart, wherever you are.

I believe that the shart does go on.

Once more you open the back door.

And you’re here in my heart and my heart will go poo and poo.

You might be able to charge more for the eggs if you feed them to a civet cat first and then collect the egg laden civet cat shit and sell that as some kind of delicacy.

I asked ChatGPT and it said the answer is 255.

That’s how I met my partner. We both love dips. We could talk or not talk about dips all day long and then do it again tomorrow.

They’re minerals, Grostleton.

My baby insanity wolf self already does a variation of this.

When my conservative family and acquaintances give me gifts, I donate the gifts to charities or political groups that I know those folks would hate to support. Uncle Ben gives me a debit gift card? That’s going to Bernie Sanders and the ACLU. Cousin Jen gave me a digital photo frame? That’s getting sold and the money’s going to Planned Parenthood.

The fact that I repeatedly tell these people not to give me any gifts and yet they still do is the icing on the cake.

Peppers and cucumbers are the traumatic forced abortions of the plant world. Broccoli and cauliflower are the amputated sex organs of the plants that were cut from their bodies. Celery, brussel sprouts, and artichokes are severed limbs of plants. This is a literal mass grave of dead and dying vegetation, an alter to the horrific mutilation and abuse perpetrated on an entire kingdom of life by humans. A final act of humiliation before we condemn them to the hell of cooking and consumption. I doubt the spray mist provides much comfort.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

It just seems like nothing works the way I expect it should these days, and I’m happy to be wrong, but I don’t think my expectations are that high.

I make an appointment at the driver’s license office for 10 a.m., I kind of expect to be seen around that time, especially since they tell you to show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. Certainly, I don’t expect to have to wait 2 hours to be seen.

I go to the store to return an item that was missing parts, I don’t expect to be turned away completely because the “printer is down”. I have the receipt, can’t you just make a copy and refund the very small amount of money or let me exchange it?

I go to the bank to withdraw a few five and ten dollar bills, I don’t expect to be told “I don’t have enough”. I especially don’t appreciate being treated like I’m the first human in history to want specific denominations for a withdrawal.

I get told to return my internet equipment to any of your locations, only to be told you can’t accept that at your store. Why did the customer service person I talked to on the phone say any location, the company website have your location in the list of locations available when I filtered by “returns”, and my final bill state “return equipment to any location” if your location doesn’t accept returns?

I go to the doctor for a specific health concern (that unbeknownst to me is a red flag for a major problem), they give me a medicine that actually exacerbates said major problem without ever mentioning it or testing for it first. You’re the expert and professional, not me, and I guarantee if I’d asked about that major problem because I saw something about it online, you’d have made a snarky comment like “don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree” or similar.

And all of this, plus much, much more, in just the past month or so.

It seems like a lot of people are really quick to forget what the “rat race” is/was like AND many of them over estimate how well they handled it when they were in it. Unfortunately, my dad is one of the worst offenders so I have to deal with that kind of negativity more often than I’d like.

For my personal situation, it often helps to push back on the most egregious manipulation. When I was younger and more naive, I would let things go with no push back, and all the happened is the guilt trips became more frequent and more hostile. Once I started calling it out and correcting the details, it happened considerably less and I’m pretty sure he’s more apt to think twice before bringing those types of things up in front of me (though I know he still does it behind my back).

For example, I will remind my dad about things like “it was easier for you to visit your parents every week because they lived in the same town and not 2 hours away like you and I currently do” or “you were in your 20s and early 30s when you did this and that, but when you were my current age, you definitely didn’t have the time or energy for it”. Usually he’ll concede, at least for the moment.

I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can’t feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.

I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead but that looks like something my ex-bestfriend, Patty Henshaw, would have baked.

Just an opinion, but I feel like trouble was on the horizon for Target regardless of this DEI fiasco.

Of the major online general retailers, it seemed like Target held out the longest against 3rd party sellers. That was one of the biggest reasons I preferred to buy from Target. But they caved on that and somehow came out with one of the worst implementations. That decision really tarnished their brand for me.

Another factor that made me favor Target over the years is that their clothing offerings were pretty decent quality in styles I liked and affordable prices. But the last few times I’ve purchased clothes from Target, it’s been outright junk and Target should be ashamed. Either way, it turned me off from buying clothes there, and by extension, soured me to the brand almost entirely.

By the end of 2024 I had basically given up on Target, and I can’t help but think that all the issues I was having were systemic to the company. Feels like preemptively caving on diversity and equity policies was just another sign of the actual problem the company is facing (i.e. bad management and poor decision making).