This reminds me of the time in my early teens when my mother described herself as a recreational drug user and I said "If I woke up, went kayaking, had breakfast, did another little quick kayak before getting ready. Got ready for work and had a quick kayak, went to work and then kayaked on my lunch break, kayaked on the way home, spent most of my afternoon kayaking, so much so that I forgot to pick my kids up from school until really late, and then went kayaking all night and had to kayak one last time before bed to sleep well, literally fucking nobody on this entire planet would describe me as a recreational kayaker." which she thought was hilarious, and to be honest kind of was.

She was good in other areas.

The same one who spent the first hour or two of each LAN trying to convince each of their friends to stop playing random shit / playing by themselves while everyone is copying the game we were going to play in order to try and prevent finally getting to the last person and the first half of the people being "over it and wanting to play something else" only for the cycle to re-start.

Also the same one threatening all of the friends leeching random shit from each other that if they don't wait until at least most people have copied the game that they'll receive physical harm.

Also the same one that loves the bittorrent protocol almost as much for non internet reasons as they do for internet reasons. Hosting all the games we were going to play on a local tracker/seedbox at a LAN absolutely fucking changed the game entirely. That and getting a layer 3 switch and tagging/prioritizing torrent traffic over everything else.

But Cho Chang was super smart and a ravenclaw and focused on her studies! Just like a good model minority! You've also got the totally not problematic Seamus Finnigan who constantly explodes things... The banking... goblins... The totally happy slave elves... Uhm... You know... and some other stuff...

It's manly as fuck to look like a complete incompetent dipshit because you refuse to read the instructions about anything instead of striving to better yourself and be a reliable, competent, knowledgeable person, and unless you break something trying to use it or while putting it together you can't declare yourself the expert because you're probably a woman actually.

I enjoy mocking those people by curiously asking them which masculine markers they think society is lacking and then each time they throw one out, point out like a shitty debate bro how much they themselves don't hit any of the markers they assign to masculinity. Like mocking the tacticool burger ops mall warriors for being unable to make it up a flight of stairs.

All joking aside this is only good if you do it to their face and not really in general, because making fun of people for their physical condition or performative gender roles is shit and bad, but making bigots hate themselves is in fact cool and good and those fucks need to be bullied. The problem is most of those dudes (at least here in the rural US) also do have like 5 guns on them at any one time probably chambered safety off "In case shit hits the fan" so like, take that as you will. Then again odds are they'll negligent discharge into their own leg or their finger won't fit inside the trigger guard, so...

<3 Keep your head up comrade. As shitty as all the Tech Bros / STEMlords can be and as much as the backlash like this is (somewhat deservedly) also aimed at them I do wish it was easier to both celebrate their reality check while also not celebrating joblessness for anyone, as well as being careful about keeping structural critiques aimed at structures so it doesn't splash damage our comrades so much. It will bounce back, because our whole fucked up system is designed around that (only to crash again, yay) but I believe in you and it's not wrong to keep pushing even if, or especially when things look dire.

That being said, I do see why critiques of structures can be applied to those that uphold them and I know it's not the intent of anyone here to do either of the two negative things I mentioned so this isn't some kind of scold post for OP or anything, just that I empathize.

PSA: For anyone experience this all the time at night, but especially when it's rainy/wet. it is most likely their dipshit headlights... buuuuut you should also get an eye exam if you've got the opportunity to do so. I know that's extremely out of reach for a lot of folks but if you can, you should.

It's extremely common for halos, streaky/blurry lights, etc. at night to be early or uncaught indicators of eyesight conditions like:

• Astigmatism
• Glaucoma
• Cataracts
• Keratoconus
• Etc.
   

The good thing is pretty much all of those are extremely treatable and not a big deal especially when caught early. There's also the possibility that it's literally none of that shit, but if it's been more than a year, get your eyes checked anyway. You need to be able to see to aim at fascists.

Again, there's almost a 100% chance it's the headlights and just rain and lights being shit at night, but, as has happened to two of my friends, you can also maybe find out it's your eyes being weird shapes and they fix it real easy and it's literally the difference between not being able to drive at night and being fine but occasionally struggling.

Plus on the off chance it's Glaucoma, you really wanna catch it early.

Literally any time I get confronted for wearing a mask I just tell people (while slipping in small clearing of throat sounds) that I am currently positive for COVID, but we can't live in fear any more so I'm just trying to infect as few people as possible while getting back to normal.

As soon as they start freaking out at you because they now are able to conceptualize a hypothetical because it involves them personally, start repeating their disingenuous questions with the same tone that insinuates that they're a hypochondriac like "What are you so worried about? It's way less serious now." etc (it will 100% actually make them madder because now the hypothetical person whose safety is being dismissed is them) and once they're pissed about it you can start shaming them for their anger and ask why the fuck they mask shame people trying to make (literally any, even if only token) effort to protect themselves and others if they're so fucking mad about it when it personally involves them.

I bounce between that and making extremely belittling jokes about 9/11 (it helps that I'm a non American in America) only to completely dismiss their indignation and tone policing afterward by comparing the months where we losing more people per day than 9/11 because dipshits like them were too selfish to literally sit on their fucking hands and wait for the situation to slowly be brought back into control instead of making it worse, and asking why they can dismiss dozens of 9/11s and I can't dismiss the ONE that convinced them all to go a on a 20 year mass murder spree.

So I guess tl;dr: extreme hostility.

The rock seems like an asshole with a good PR team but I mostly base that on him being a whiny baby about Vin Diesel who seems kinda ok with a bad PR team, as well as crying about Dave Bautista daring to want more out of life than "Big angry dumb man used to wrestle but now same movie over and over".

John Cena seems like the best bet for us tbh. Filmed himself shopping in Chinese markets during the beginning of COVID to show "Wet markets" and the hysteria around them is literally just xenophobia for what we'd call a butcher or deli or fish market or whatever, and how it's nothing but harmful to whip ourselves up into frenzies over shit we don't understand.

That being said he also continued to put his foot on his mouth over and over again during that time by accidentally repeating silly shit or referring to Taiwan as a country, but also seemed genuine when apologizing and honest about it being a matter of him phrasing things indelicately or generalizing with terms that only made the situation worse for everyone. I dunno, this is all shit I'm pulling from several years ago memory and it seems like a fever dream. It's possible I just made it all up on the spot from delusions/dreams.

Almost worth the risk of unmasking near these people.

My favorite strategy for when people ask why I'm wearing a mask is to cough (fake obv, but I try to make it somewhat believable) and tell them I currently have covid but felt like going out anyway.

It's great because people you're not forced to keep interacting with try to get away from you ASAP with a (hopefully) newly rediscovered and more appropriate fear of covid, and people you're forced to keep interacting with will get indignant or angry and then you can clarify that you're fucking with them and if they think covid is that fucking serious that they're now mad at you, WHICH IT IS, then they should STOP FUCKING MASK SHAMING PEOPLE AND MAYBE WEAR ONE.

Nah nah, a better way to put it is """Holding both the contradictory beliefs and screaming endlessly in a time loop forever about how you're going to make them face the fucking wall for their crimes but also in this one instance of a completely different situation that is unrelated in almost every fuckin way they aren't automagically the enemy (any more than usual for being capitalist fascist pieces of shit just like yesterday when we weren't currently at 'active' war) because our even worse capitalist institutions say so while the entire world gaslights you into pretending a country that was shooting LGBT people in the street for being "removed" or whatever during their most recent coup/revolution/fascist takeover is actually the "Pro-LGBT war 'team' that you need to support by sending direct military aid today by calling the number on your screen now, that's 1800-RATHEOMARTIN" (despite all the articles and videos of their 2014-2020ish journalism literally being living proof against their current talking point and even popping up in the related articles for modern puff pieces about the new heroes-in-swastikas until you're convinced you're living in a simulation where you just loop the previous wars arguments over and over and over again every day forever.""" is what half of being a leftist actually is.