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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • There was a movie about Lucy and Desi that came out sometime in the late 1900s.

    It was being advertised heavily on one of the over the air television stations that we would watch on our cathode ray tube television that picked up signals from a type of antenna called rabbit ears. Back in those days, they’d sometimes have voice over commercials where they’d talk over the end credits of a show or movie, and apparently sometimes they did that live (I guess)?

    Family and I are watching a show and when it ended, they did the voice over thing talking about the Lucy movie. The announcer started out strong but totally fumbled a line, something along the lines of “join Ducy, Lesi, and little Licky”. I just know we all heard it, we all busted out laughing.


  • I definitely miss the cached pages. I found that I was using the feature very frequently. Maybe it’s just the relative obscurity of some of my hobbies and interests, but a lot of the information online that shows up in search engines seems to come from old forums. Often times those old forums are no longer around or have migrated to new software (obliterating the old URLs and old posts as well).



  • The conservative folks I talk to always, always, always bring up the price of eggs and the price of gas when they are talking about how bad the economy is these days.

    I’ve heard “Groceries have doubled in price.” many times. Obviously I can’t prove that’s not true for them, but then I ask what items that they buy regularly have doubled in price? The answer: “Eggs”.

    Okay, so what else, I know that eggs alone do not make up your entire grocery bill? “Everything”. That’s pretty much all I get.

    Even if they can tell me a few more things that have doubled in price, it’s basically going to be outliers or things I know for a fact they rarely/never buy. Like when it comes to the eggs, they’ll make claims like “eggs are $10 a dozen”, but when pressed about it, you find out they’re talking about the gourmet premium brand that’s always been way more expensive than the cheap ones and which they’ve never purchased in their entire lives.






  • Where I live, the indoor smoking bans started in the early 2000s. Before then, people that went to bars and clubs ended the night smelling like cigarette smoke whether they themselves were smokers or not. Sometimes even eating out at a restaurant would leave you smelling like a smoker. Back in those days, though, I was still so used to it that dealing with it was second nature.

    For most of my life the smell didn’t really bother me, but I’ve found that within the past 5 years or so it does.

    As a child, I guess I just grew up with it, so it didn’t bug me much. I hated being teased about it at school, which was a regular thing. I also used to hate how the tar would build up on the walls of our house to the point where it would form tear-like patterns. My parents kept an otherwise reasonably clean and tidy house, but for some reason THAT didn’t bother them, so periodically I’d spend a few hours scrubbing our walls to get rid of the stains and cut down on the smell a bit.


  • My parents ,much of my family, as well as most of their friends smoked indoors, in their cars, and even in restaurants. Despite living in near poverty for parts of my childhood, they chain smoked cartons of cigarettes a week. Must have been expensive.

    I wish I could say that they stopped smoking, but no. The worst part for them isn’t even the fact that they know that it has taken at least a decade or more off their lives. It’s the realization at how much they are missing out on near the end of their lives and how difficult it is living with debilitating health issues from smoking. They simply cannot do what other people their age take for granted.

    And to the title of the post: Yes, I was the kid in the car while my parents chain smoked cigarettes. Sometimes they rolled the windows down, though I’m not sure if that was better since it meant the ashes and red hot “cherry” would inevitably come flying back in and smack me in the face.




  • I found it interesting that Trump claims if he wins the election, he’ll have the Russia / Ukraine conflict resolved BEFORE he even takes office. I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s how I interpreted what he stated.

    If that’s the case, then it seems like he could choose to end the conflict at any time. Why doesn’t he just end it now? Save countless lives. Minimize injuries. Prevent suffering. Save money. I’m sure that’d change some voters’ minds if he did it. Might even win him the election.

    Yes, this is a rhetorical question. I have no doubt that he can’t actually end it without basically giving in entirely to Russia.



  • I recently joined WTF and based on the list of the instances this place is federated with, my assumption is that’s the basis for the WTF name. So, maybe something like this could be useful for choosing an instance that’s not 1/2 filled with bat shit insane posts by default rather than requiring significant and immediate curation (i.e. blocking stupid shit like hexbear and ml).



  • Are you finding that the assistance it provides has gotten worse over time? When I first started using it, it was quite helpful the majority of the time. In truth, it’s still pretty decent with autocomplete, just less consistently good than before. However the chat help has truly gone into decline. The amount of unfounded statements it returns is terrible.

    And the latest issue is that I’ve started getting responses where it starts to show me an answer, but then hides the response and gives me an error that the response was filtered by Responsible AI.

    Glad I’m not directly paying for it.