Phone bill - no choice
Internet bill - no choice
Insurance - no choice
World of Warcraft - sue me
Costco membership - worth it
VPN - worth it
I don’t pay for any others. Paid for lifetime Plex for the convenience of not needing to pay for a website domain like I would for jellyfin, and self host my own music, tv, and movies
Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn’t earn enough over the year
That’s kind of what we were thinking, too, which is why we went with it. We are a family of six, which means that we’re always going to buy big quantities of stuff somewhere; might as well be at Costco.
3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
But they don’t though. They are only seen drinking alcohol at the end on Christmas Day. Literally, there’s only a few scenes that even feature the parents, and none of them until the end include alcohol consumption.
I miss the silver plastic era of AV equipment. Like in the mid-to-late 2000s when every TV was made of silver plastic, and it had that set of composite jacks under a flap on the front, so you could temporarily plug things in, like when your buddy brought his PS2 over. There was a button near the channel and volume buttons that switched between inputs, and it didn’t take a digital act of congress to figure out which setting would get it to display on the TV.
Now everything is a black rectangle with bullshit software and almost two HDMI ports in the back, except one has the sound bar plugged into it, and the labels are stamped into the black plastic and not painted on, and with the shadows behind the television you can’t read them. And it doesn’t work when plugged in anyway. Its easier to just not have friends so that you never have to plug other electronics in. Stare at your phones alone.
Because then you can use the ARC protocol to minimize the number of remotes. The TV will pass volume controls through the HDMI port and the sound bar will adjust volume.
So just don’t use the built in software. I don’t have any of my TVs connected to the internet or use their built in OS. I have a couple of Apple TVs plugged in and run everything off that. Never even set the things up beyond plugging them in and switching to HDMI 1.
There’s also the Chromecast TV if you use Android.
If you use a separate smart tv device like those, then the only thing you need to care about on the TV itself is resolution, refresh, and number of ports. Or if you want to spend a chunk of change then you can look into things like OLED. But the separate devices make the TV OS irrelevant.
My personal TV is a Samsung commercial display unit; it isn’t Roku or Tizen or whatever else. It’s still very much a computer though, it still has a network port and keeps pestering about connecting to the internet and registering it and all that shit.
You just finished 17+ years of education and invested a small fortune into yourself. If that isn’t enough for a career with a living wage and the possibility of advancement, what’s the point?
The point is to lock you into indentured servitude. As one of my favorite psychology professors likes to say: “The administration has figured out how to pick the pockets of students’ future earnings”.
Government pumps a bunch of “money” into the industry, and I put money in quotes because it’s the student who’s responsible for it. The government’s part is making it guaranteed that you get that loan. Oh, and also making that loan immune to bankruptcy.
That drove the price of college up enormously. So then you’ve got 18 year old kids signing papers to take on five or six figures of debt they can’t escape. These are people who’ve possibly never held a job, maybe never paid a bill in their life or taken a loan, being given automatic approval for huge loans.
It may not have been “designed” to do this, but the end result is a looney tunes style conveyer belt saddling people with huge debt, and in the process making college administrations very rich.
I mean, isnt this a thing in comedy, where you can make the jokes of the one being funny have more impact by contrasting them with a super serious character? Scrooge is already a normally quite serious character, and the muppets are known for their antics, so leaving the comedy to them and acting serious makes a lot of sense.
Yea, the term is a “straight man” although this is slightly different in that the straight man is usually allowed to acknowledge the antics of the comedic characters, where-as Michael Caine treats the comedy as done straight.
I guess it would be a sub-category of straight man though, not a different thing to itself.
Fans of Brooklyn 99 will recognize Captain Holt as the straight man in the show, which is made hilarious since he is a gay man. He is the gay straight man.
Even in season One he was more about being funny because of how “not comedic” he was. And that went out the window fairly fast and he was just as zany as everyone else. Ironically, in a lot of the earlier episodes, Peralta served the role of “the straight man” because the ambient level was so absurd.
A better Braugher example may be House where he mostly existed for House to bounce off of
Which is funny in itself because in previous Hugh Laurie roles, such as Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, he was the funny guy to Atkinson and Fry’s straight men
It’s not exactly the same, but I can vouch for StreetComplete being an incredibly good/similar game. You walk around the real world, and the app points out missing data in OpenStreetMap that you can fill in easily. You get the dopamine of a number going up, help dethrone proprietary map dominamce, and get some good excercise in in the process.
Admittedly I was in my very early 20s, not a teen, but I legitimately helped* a woman through her divorce on WoW and then once they separated drove 3 states away to have the best sex of my entire life.
Great memories.
Edit to add asterisk: by “helped” I just mean provided a necessary shoulder and ear; obviously I did not provide advice on a relationship I was very much not a part of
“No one:” represents something coming out of the blue, completely unprompted. It’s definitely getting overused, but that’s just an inevitable part of the lifecycle of a meme.
a phrasal template used to mock people who strive to attract attention and tend to provide unsolicited opinions, as well as for observational humor.
I think its original usage in mocking attention seeking was funnier. It’s basically generalized into any observational humor though, which is when it becomes unnecessary.
That makes sense to me where it would work. The memer would have to have an accurate sense of humor instead of just scatter shooting the phrase all over the place, but that’s difficult, so we end up with these. Thanks
If they curved the tick instead of some angled dash nonsense there would be no mistake. Thus an angled top on a 1, rather than curved, should be a punishable offense
I do, but dependent upon context. If there is no risk of confusion with a capital I or lower-case l (though I tend to write the latter with a slight rightward curve at the bottom), then yeah, it’s just a basic vertical line.
This is a thousand percent more than I thought I’d ever write about my penmanship. Welp.
My underlined 1s look like my 2s when I write with a marker. It’s a problem I didn’t antisipate that arose when I was trying to distinguish my 1s from my Is and ls.
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