Watermark710

The bacon ones are so fucking bad. Way too much fake smoke flavor.

One of my guilty pleasures is frozen White Castle sliders. I get stoned, eat a 16 pack in one sitting, and then go to sleep.

I used to get them at a local gas station back in like 2005. They were 99 cents, and you could microwave them right there in the store. They weren’t good, but it’s a cheap and quick way to get ~800 calories in you.

I used to work in a prison (I was a civilian kitchen supervisor, not a guard), and I encountered a lot of gang members from a variety of gangs. Kitchen jobs are highly sought after by inmates, because not only are they among the highest paying jobs an inmate can get, but the job also comes with essentially unlimited food. Normal inmates walking down the chow line would get 2 pieces on fried chicken day, but some kitchen workers would down a dozen or more. I say that to say: The gang members I worked with were on their best behavior so they didn’t risk losing their sweet gig. All feuds were on pause in the kitchen. Gang members who would otherwise be at each other’s throats were laughing and joking with each other, playing Spades during breaks, and eating at the same table. They all treated me with respect, and I didn’t have any issues.

The ones who didn’t work with me, genpop inmates, well sometimes things got very violent. I saw more stabbings/slashings than I can count on both hands, and I didn’t even work there very long.

Whoever runs the social media for my town posted an AI generated image of a dog pissing on some flowers with the caption “Don’t piss on the begonias.”. When I called it AI slop, they responded by asking me if I expect them to train a dog to piss on flowers just for a picture.

Like, the concept of not posting a picture of a dog pissing on flowers didn’t even occur to them.

Living in the USA seems harrowing

It depends heavily on where you are in the US. I grew up in a crime/poverty stricken area, and gun violence was pretty much a daily thing. But the town I live in now has literally never had a single act of gun violence. We all have guns, but we use them for target shooting and hunting. Moving to the woods from an inner city was like night and day. Growing up, if I heard gunshots I knew that someone was getting hurt/killed. Now if I hear gunshots, it’s just the neighbors practicing for deer season.

They’re only real if you’re a journalist. The random sheep who pre-ordered them are never gonna get theirs. Mark my words.

ridiculing her for going to a barbeque and just getting beans (and other sides).

Then that person doesn’t understand how it works. See the tray closest to the camera? Pretty much nothing but meat. Can’t fit the sides on there, so they go on a separate tray.

Like, fuck that lady, but she didn’t go to a BBQ spot and just get sides. The huge pile of meat is right there.

Zandi Holup is a pretty “new” artist who sings a lot about “struggles or over coming demons”. My favorite song of hers is “Gas Station Flowers”, the official video for that song is intense. She releases pretty much nothing but bangers, IMO (not a fan of “Mary Jane” personally, she kinda missed the mark on that one). “Go Find Less” is another great one, straight up feminist anthem. “Dirty Wings” is a good song as well.

There’s a reason her nickname is ATM, and it has nothing to do with money.

TIL that congress has to approve what the UFC spends their money on. The UFC is footing the entire 60 million dollar cost.

It was 36C where I live last week. If I didn’t have AC I’d be dead. Luckily, we’re only looking at ~30C this week. But I’m still gonna be running the AC.

My chickens eat more mice than my cats.

There are a lot of people who destroy their bodies and shorten their lives for less than a multi-million dollar paycheck. I don’t blame the players, I blame the system that leads them to this end. A poor kid who is good at football can pull their entire family out of poverty by taking a few blows to the head. It’s not an individual’s fault for choosing that.

From the article:

None of this is illegal as currently constituted, because the permit that was written does not require monitoring for the things the independent lab found.

No law is being broken. This may be terrible, but it’s legal.

Seriously. I saw that it was a space for women, and since I’m not a woman I blocked the community so I don’t accidentally comment in a community where I’m not wanted. If the ladies need a space to vent, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Where I live, we don’t have trains, only buses. The last one is at 6:30pm. The first ones are ~6am. Honestly though, the only people taking the bus here are either too young to drive, or too old to drive. But our bars are open 24/7/365. If you don’t count the COVID lockdowns, my local bar has been open 24/7 every day since 1987.

Depends where you live. I am nowhere near a billion, but together my wife and I have a mid 6-figure income, and we’re in a LCOL area. I haven’t worried about money in over a decade, almost 2. If I lived in a wealthy coastal city, I would have to worry about money a lot.

is rent actually that bad in the US?

Short answer: Not really, but sometimes.

Much longer answer:

<rant>

You can’t take the USA as a whole. There are studio apartments near me for $600/mo, and you can get a 3 bedroom for $1200 easily. You can scrape by on minimum wage here (it won’t be fun, but you’ll survive). If you get one of the “good” jobs, like at the Amazon warehouse, you’re living large on that $20/hr. Even better if you have a partner who also works. I know a couple who both work full time at the Amazon warehouse and they don’t have any kids, so they’re DINKs, and their rent is less than 1/6th of their gross income.

But I’m in a very low cost of living area. My friend who lives in a wealthy coastal city pays $5400/mo for her 3 bedroom with a beautiful view of the San Fransisco bay. The cost of living varies wildly by location.

My sister-in-law wanted to move closer to my wife and I, so she could see her niblings more often. I gave her a check for $10,000, and took her to a foreclosure auction. She now has a two bedroom house, with a nice (but not huge) backyard, and she left that auction with enough money in her pocket to renovate her new house a bit. No mortgage, she owns it outright.

I bought my huge house, sitting on acres of land in 2009, right after the crash. So it’s not a typical result just to be clear, but I paid $40k, and spent another $20k fixing it up before we moved in. $60k, all told, to fully own a house and a ton of land. I have a creek running through my back yard, and I can stand there and fish whenever I want. I’ve got woods on my property, great for hunting. My property/school taxes come to under $1200/yr total, so my “rent” is about $90/mo. Between my wife and I, we made $560k last year, so we’re in the bracket where we don’t worry about money at all. Our essential bills come to about $30k/yr, the rest gets saved/invested, with a bit going to fun stuff.

You can’t do that where I grew up. Condos (basically an apartment you own instead of rent) in my home town go for literally millions of dollars. The cheapest place I could find doing a quick Zillow search was $499k. The good places go for 4-5 million bucks. And holy shit, the taxes are high.

The USA isn’t so much a country, as much as it is 50 smaller countries in a trenchcoat. You know how annoying it is when someone says “Do Europeans really do [thing]?!?!?” without mentioning the country? That’s basically the same situation as asking “Is the USA really like [thing]?” without mentioning the state.

Some of us grow/hunt/raise most of our food. I harvested and butchered two pigs yesterday. That a lot of almost free pork. Some of us shop at Erewhon, where a single imported Japanese strawberry can cost you $20. They have $100 melons. They sell a half gallon (roughly 2 liters) of water for $26. I get my water from a well, and it’s basically free.

The coasts may as well be a different world entirely than the flyover states. I moved to a flyover state because I knew that my life goals were incompatible with living in a coastal city.

</rant>

We also don’t know when this quote came out.

We actually do, the answer is “never”. It’s from a satire site called Clickhole. She never said this.