My tendency to get walked all over. Recent events made me realise that I need to get a lot better at putting my foot down and telling people when there’s a problem.
To cut a week-long story short, my NYE plans to do pub karaoke (which I planned nearly a month in advance) got hijacked when another friend group decided to make alternate plans to go to the club and make one of my close friends cancel on me. This led to me being pressured by another close friend into cutting my original plans two hours short so that my friend group could all be together at midnight. Of course, the other group making the alt plans all pulled out on the morning of the 31st Dec, leaving me and my three other friends with tickets to go to a nightclub that I didn’t particularly want to go to.
I don’t like clubbing. Nightclubs are overcrowded, loud to the point where you literally can’t hear anybody and have to yell at the bartender to even order a drink, and they make me feel isolated. I also feel insecure about my physical attractiveness and jealous due to my inability to pull.
Botched NYE plans aside, 2023 definitely ended on a good note. I went from working in a crappy purchase ledger job, to facing layoffs, to escaping redundancy by finding a much better internal role that has honestly felt like a culture shock to me.
You could do what Mike Bloomberg did in 2020 and try and buy your way into an election. Then again when he spent $500,000,000 on his campaign that got him no where.
Be fair, he also spent a couple hundred million dollars buying seats for the Dems so they’d push his favorite policy of disarming the plebs. He slipped up and said it and there should still be a YouTube video up with that exact moment recorded for posterity, though I know YouTube has taken down a lot of them.
His deadpan monotone delivery. His ascerbic wit, constant roasting. Steady & intimidating And he never broke or laughed (that I’ve ever seen). A bit of a writing & comedic performance genius in my opinion.
I didn’t really know much about him until fairly recently, I remembered when he died and everyone on Reddit was mourning him and I had never really heard of him, but lately I’ve been binge-watching Norm Macdonald clips on YouTube and oh my gosh I’m captivated by him.
kind of similar sense of deadpan captivating humor as Nathan Fielder who I also just recently became aware of and I’m also currently mesmerized by.
Try this compilation okay he’s not absolutely the best comedian to ever grace the planet, and some patience is required to hang on to listening to him until he builds up to the joke, but I just like his personality he is so calm and deadpan, I don’t know why I’m making a post about him but blah blah blah
It’s really hard to explain, because really, he’s not that funny, but I find that hilarious!
Like the moth story, or Uncle Frank in 'Nam, he just creates this awkward tension where you know your listening to a joke, but this guy is saying just such depressing or horrific shit while keeping a slightly goofy tone. You expect a punchline around every corner, but he just keeps dragging you in, and you’re wondering how this terrible story is going to be funny, and he hits you with a mediocre punchline that any third grader could have seen coming a mile away, but he’s built so much tension and sucked you into this story and you couldn’t see what was right in front of you the whole time.
He’s not telling a joke, he’s playing a joke on YOU. That could be part of why people either love him or hate him. As long as there’s no harm, I’ll be the first to laugh at a joke played on me, but I know there are others that don’t appreciate that at all.
If you didn’t like his Weekend Update bits they were some of his best stuff IMO. You might also look at his guest appearances on Conan O’Brien, he regularly cracked Conan up.
I’m the latter. Currently I’m having to use an inflatable bath in my wet room which can only be emptied via a powerdrill-powered water pump into a hose pipe and into the toilet. It’s not ideal, ha
Yeah, I feel like hot tubs are great only if someone else is maintaining it for you. So either go somewhere and pay to use it, or own one and pay someone to keep it running well.
Just looked him up on YT. First two bits were “there are too many deserts now” and “Norm doesn’t know what metaphors are”. Not offensive but super dated. He was probably very funny in his day.
I literally made 15 10-inch crepes for my family this morning. Using 2 pans it took about 30-40 minutes. Made some raspberry sauce before getting the crepes going. All told, the whole process took less than an hour and was awesome.
I grew up making crepes, or whatever the Mennonite equivalent is, and it’s one of the easiest things in the world to me. I have a ziplock full of crepes in my freezer right now.
Honestly? Ramen. There are way too many ingredients that all needs to be cooked differently, and even the broth itself is a nightmare amount of effort for what you get at the end.
I spent 2 days cooking my first ramen broth, the tare, the marinated eggs and the garlic oil. It’s definitely a case of tripling the batch and freeze it because it takes a lot of work regardless of the quantity.
I don’t know if there is anything special about Ramen broth, but once you get used to the process, homemade bone broth is absolutely worth it.
I get pork knee joints from the Asian market, bake them at about 400 for an hour, and simmer on the stove top for a couple of days. That broth is my winter staple.
I’d say a lot of my favorite Asian dishes follow this pattern. Most of them are pretty challenging to recreate due to the amount of ingredients and types of cooking involved. Guess there’s a reason they taste so good
I made homemade General Tso’s and it is absolutely worth the effort. The recipe I used stayed crispy for days even with sauce on it. I could control the flavor. It was so good.
You can kind of use a simplified method to get a good broth with a pressure cooker, because from what I read, the key to getting something good seems to be a sustained hard boil with lots of collagen and fat on the meat.
They should come out super crispy but still very juicy on the inside.The one drawback is that it takes a total of 30 mins and you can only make as much as fits in your frier. You really want to have only one layer of wings and not have them laying on top of each other. My frier is fairly small so it’s not something I can make for a whole bunch of people.
I got a deep fryer that goes on the countertop and has a temperature deal. The lid fits over the basket so I don’t have to get anywhere near the oil when it’s hot. When I’m done frying, there’s a temperature-sensitive mechanism to drain the oil into a box below to store it until next time (it can be reused a few times). The part that holds the oil when frying gets wiped out and tossed in the dishwasher. The only thing I really have to deal with washing is the heating element. It turns deep frying from absolutely not worth trying to deal with the mess/temperature/hot oil/cleanup to something I’m willing to do more than once a year. Don’t let your fry dreams be dreams!
My favorite video game as a kid was called Red Storm Rising, based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, and played on a Commodore 64. It put you in command of a submarine facing off against the Soviet navy. Graphics were very basic, but it had a very intelligent engine that lead to needing to use real strategy to win.
Man, I read these comments and I can relate to so many of them. But honestly, this year, nothing. We’ve recently moved to an area that’s more healthy for our family. I have a partner who’s not abusive. My kids and myself are getting the mental healthcare that we need. It’s snowy outside! We have a Christmas tree and presents! It was not amazing; there was nothing over the top or spectacular. But there was nothing bad. Damn, that feels nice.
That’s about how I feel. I know I am blessed and that makes me happy. I don’t take it for granted.
Sorry 😔😐 that someone down voted your comment. That’s not very holiday so Spirit like lol… But I think almost half the comments on here always have at least one downvoted so don’t feel bad 😞
Disneyland was charging $1850 for five people for one day at Disneyland and one day at California Adventure, genie plus (some kind of fast pass replacement), and then has the gall to make some rides ineligible for the genie plus and instead you have to pay $28 a head for the fast pass. Why can’t we just wait in line? Why did the mouse feel the need to monetize every single interaction in the whole park? As great as the design is in Disneyland, definitely left a sour taste in my mouth knowing that a poor family has an objectively worse experience than a rich one, especially on Christmas. Some rides had a 90, 120 minute wait.
The fun part is that not only do you skip the line with Genie Plus but also the folks letting people into the ride will legit let an entire stream of Genie Plus payers in before letting someone who waited in line go. With the old fast pass system they were really good about alternating lines if there was a line for both fast pass and genie plus
Last time I went to Magic Kingdom in Disney world, the park was IMO legitimately too full of people. Seemed like every single space was wall to wall people and every ride, even the shitty ones was like a 3 hour wait. And it wasn’t even a holiday or a peak season time. Just a miserable experience. Feels like they just need a daily cap or something on the number of visitors because there’s definitely a point where it gets too full to be worth it for anyone.
Maybe if we stop teaching our children that the most important thing in life is to have more stuff than your neighbors, it will stop being part of our nature.
It’s absolutely disturbing how avidly people seem to want to ignore that inconvenient truth…
“The people will own the means of production”. Except it’s never once worked out that way.
“Everyone will be happy to go to work, because it’s for the good of all”. Except it’s never once worked out that way.
“Nobody will ever have to worry about basic needs”. Except it’s never once worked out that way.
Socialism has historically consolidated both power and wealth just as reliably as capitalism has, and frankly, I don’t buy that the impetus behind the growing advocacy for socialism even is actually equality… I think it’s a desire to have more shit, with less effort required to get it (and that sounds sketchy, and I think people are generally averse to stating it openly due to this)
I personally think the most likely means to achieve that is ironically the capitalist system we currently have, with a huge boost to the economy in the form of universal basic income.
Give literally everyone $50k/yr. Period. Even musk, the zuck, bezos… Everyone… The people who don’t want to do jack can sit around and enjoy the product of labor that will inevitably be increasingly provided by automation, out of necessity. The dream of the 1960’s, of having robots do everything for us while we sit around at the park, will come to fruition finally, because while we’ve had the ability to do it, we’ve not had any means of paying our bills while sitting around. UBI would provide that, and “the capitalists” will have the incentive to automate because there will be less labor available.
Of course, we’re talking about a massive spike in income tax here… But we’re also making the labor far more valuable, by way of rarity. Harder to find workers, so you pay them more, and even with the increased taxation, even a modest salary reflects economic advantage over a nonworker. The guy that used to make $50k/yr is only making $25k/yr if we slap a 50% tax on him, but he’s still putting $75k/yr in the bank, aint he?
I think “socialism” is the wrong direction. 180° exactly in the wrong direction. Unless by “socialism” people are actually advocating the “advanced welfare” Nordic approach…
“it will never work in practice” says the person using the internet who can drive down the paved road to the community credit union, or indeed one of the banks that was bailed out by the government before going to the library, posting a letter, and then goes to work the next day in which they are required to be efficient in their job in order to make sure other people’s work isn’t affected, and must not break the law while at work, laws created to preserve the health and wellbeing of society, themselves and their colleagues, meanwhile while at work their trash is collected and sent to a public refuse center, spends the weekend at the local state park, which is subject to pollution laws, and indeed even has the temerity to vote in a democracy and is allowed to participate in the stock market without owning a business or a warehouse of goods, experiences freedom of movement across a union of states (one might even call them United States, and one formed as a socialist revolt against Monarchism and the capitalist imposed taxes without representation, and later held a civil war around the socialist ideal of abolitionism).
They may even express sentiments such as “food waste is bad”, “pollution is bad”, “I enjoy watching TV, reading books, listening to music, and/or participating in sports” and “I can change careers and do something different to what the family business is”.
All of which are socialist ideas that clearly don’t work in real life.
Socialist ideas is to move away from the idea of private ownership. Everything is owned by the “people” in collective (which in practice often means the state). You don’t own your cellphone, your computer or your shoes. They’re all provided to you by the “people” (the state).
The roads in your example are paved by private companies in a competitive market (often funded by tax money). They may have been selected by the state to do the work at an agreed price. Next time some other private company might do the work because they compete with even better prices. This process is not socialistic.
that is one very strict definition of socialism, which is not a monolith. Nor is there any agreed Purity test of what is or is not socialism
… with that in mind - following your roads example still
if roads are paid for, described, prescribed and constructed / maintained by private companies as you say - why is the government involved at all? Isn’t it more accurate to say the government owns all roads (in the US- due to eminant domain- all land) and contracts private companies to build them
companies only exist by the express permission of and after registration by the government, and we can argue who holds the most soft power, but the fact is if you fuck up bad enough the government will disband your company for you
the existence of a market does not mean socialism is not happening: in reality, the “profit incentive” of capitalism is also tempered by the social contract of socialism. In my post I was careful to give examples of the social contract that outway pure profit incentives (ie you can’t build a factory in a national park)
I would say the process of agreeing to do something in exchange for money is neither (/unknowably) capitalist or socialist (or neither or both) without further context.
why can we only critique “full on” socialism? (what does that even mean) and yet capitalism with democratic-socialistic elements is treated as if it’s “full on” capitalism?
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