Huh, this post reminded me that I haven't seen anything from Spamcat in a while. Just checked to see if they have any recent postings and it looks like they really have a thing for caked up Gholdengo now.

Not my thing, but hey, someone somewhere probably loves it.

I had someone tell it to me straight - that the reason I was getting side-eyes and laughter behind my back and why girls wanted nothing to do with me was because I was an awkward dweeb.

At first it kind of hurt my feelings, but it kind of woke me up to the reality of the situation and I began to not only notice how other people saw me, but I started examining myself and my own actions in a more critical light.

Most of the time it was me behaving inappropriately in the given situation. Everyone else walking to their next class? There's me Naruto running down the hall. You get the idea.

I had to learn to identify the behaviors that people were critical of or found off-putting, and learn the appropriate behavior to emulate. Eventually, after I learned the correct response to any particular social situation, it was less about knowledge and more about confidence. I was lucky to make some well-adjusted and confident friends in high school who helped me learn what it was all about. I didn't fret about talking to random people anymore, I could carry on a normal conversation for at least five minutes, I developed "normal" hobbies and interests (but crucially I kept my old ones as well, they were just not the first things I would lead with when talking to people), and in general I just mellowed out a little and developed the skill to be able to read a room and know how to deal with certain people.

tl;dr - someone talked to me and told me I was an awkward kid, but they also did their best to help me identify and fix the things that made me weird and unlikable.

Stockton is in California. The person above was making a joke.

I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one who finds AI coding to be an almost futile exercise. I spend more time talking to the damn robot trying to get it to fix problems than I would if I had just done it more slowly and deliberately in the programming language I am familiar with, or just circumvented the automation effort and done the task manually. All three seem to take about the same amount of time.

The perfume/cosmetics section of a department store (Macy's, J.C. Penny, etc.) Typically located near shopping mall gallery entrances to force people to walk past it to get elsewhere in the store.

It's less common to see stores intentionally laid out this way these days, I think.

The #opentowork banner is the cherry on top of this beautiful post.

Wow, that's actually quite cool. Change will come from the ground up, imo. Good for them learning a better system. In another generation or two they will probably be the ones to spearhead the effort to do away with the old Imperial system entirely.

I've noticed that once comedians "hit it big" and can live off of the royalties that their specials generate, their comedy tends to go way downhill and they start using future performances as almost soapbox-adjacent platforms rather than writing actual jokes that people find funny. They don't need to write funny material to live off of anymore, they can just ride on their fame and sell out venues wherever they go, so it becomes more of a speaking gig rather than an act.

Like, I remember sitting down during the pandemic with a few friends to watch one of Chappell's new specials and it was just him ranting the whole time, there might have been one or two jokes in there, but I think that was just his personality coming forward and not any conscious effort to deliver a setup and a punchline. It was such a letdown, because we were set for a night of comedy and it was just an angry rant with serious undertones.

Maybe just anecdotal, but that's how I see it going for a lot of famous comedians - not all of them, of course, but a lot of the household names from the past two decades have gone this route rather than segueing into showbiz like comics from the 90's era.

I don't know why the U.S. gets shit for using the system that our colonial overlords forced us to use in the first place.

The only reason we're still using it today is inertia. If we gradually tried phasing it out we'd have a lot more people on board with officially switching over to it versus the "ripping the band-aid" method of doing it all at once and causing culture shock to a bunch of ignorant Americans who haven't done math since 8th grade.

Did I get transported to the Epstine Universe? I swear it was always the Epstain Files!

Let's get those numbers up.

It's not too late to stop the machine. We just have to refuse to feed it.

This is quite a common occurrence for regulars who order delivery like pizzas often enough for the staff to take notice and even get on a first name basis with the delivery driver. If they expect an order for a large mushroom and sausage to come in every Friday at 7pm sharp and it's not there, someone usually checks on them just to make sure they are okay.