“I had no idea pod casts we so popular”

I’m sorry… what? The small child across the street from you has been running like four podcasts for the last two years, and your dog is getting ready to start his third one next week. Statically, you are running at least two of your own, apparently without even knowing. I’m recording my ninth episode this week, as I type this. This episode brought to you by Squarespace and Manscaped…

Approximately 437,445,319,335,083 of those.

As someone who has “won” the games (that aren’t actually games) and claimed the prizes a bunch of times, I’d advise you just ignore them. The fish/farm/etc games, and the popups that claim free items, anything else. Close them, and just buy whatever you were going to buy. Unless you have a lot, I mean a LOT of people that are willing to sign up for temu as a first time user, using you as the referral, the only way to complete those so-called games is to spend around $800+ to earn your way to conspiring the game and claiming the free prizes. Prizes that if you pay attention, you could simply bought outright for somewhere in the range of $5-20.

And the stuff with the spinning wheels and whatnot, claiming this or that percentage discount, you’ll get a cheap item for free(something that you could have bought for $3-4 max), but only by adding it to an order with a predetermined number of other items, which have had their prices dynamically increased, and will actually cost you more than if you had simply purchased all of the same items but by searching them up and just adding them to your cart normally. If you add some items to your wishlist, you’ll start to see those items being offered to you in these supposed deals and discounts. You will also notice that if that item was $5 when you added it to your wishlist, the “deal” page might be showing it to you with a crossed out $50 price, and a new amazing discount price of let’s say $9(I call this the J. C. Penny method). I tend to keep a large wishlist, with items that sit there for months while I decide if I’ll get around to buying them or not, so this kind of fuckery with the prices sticks out to me a lot.

This all exactly the same for when they had the cash back deal. Place an order, and they credit your account with, well credit, that you can spend on more stuff. The more you spend in the order, the higher the percentage of cash back. But as before, the prices of the items you buy to earn that cash back are getting fucked around with dynamically, and increased as you shop. Not only that, but they change the way that you received the cash back. It used to be that after the order shipped, you go to a certain page and cash out your earned credit, and it is then available for use. Then they started placing limits on how much you could cash out per day. And then the last time I had used it, you instead only got a few cents per day, and you had to keep opening the app every single day and manually claiming those few cents. And if you forgot one day, you just lose that credit entirely.

Ask of this is to say, I absolutely promise anyone reading this, the games, deals, discounts, or whatever else they are promising you on temu, are absolutely, in no uncertain terms, not worth your time (even if you believe your time to hold no value), and will cost you more money than if you had simply purchased the items normally through just searching for what you want and adding it to your cart. Back when temu was still pissing away ass-loads of money to get people onto their platform, you could legitimately get free and/or heavily discounted items, as well as decent amount of cash back/credit. But that’s is no longer the case. They got the massive number of users they wanted, now they are looking to actually make money from them.

The only reason I but anything on temu at all, where I would have bought it on AliExpress previously, is that temu will usually get the items to me between 1 and 2 weeks, while AE still often takes several weeks before the seller even THINKS about shipping the order, and then often an additional 3-4 weeks minimum for it to actually arrive. I had some stuff that I needed a bunch of, and they only had a few in stock on temu. So I ordered them all, then ordered more on AE right after. The temu ones came in 6 days. The AE ones took 2 and a half months. And before anyone asks, the identical item on Amazon was more than triple the price. Most of this stuff tends to be.

Chili powder, salt, and black pepper.

Victor.

Republicans don’t want this, because while they like to claim “blah blah spending this, spending that”, it’s not actually about reducing spending, it’s about punishing the poor(and a wide range of minorities, obviously). So the fact that giving MORE people access to healthcare would cost much LESS money in the end, means fuck all to them. Their only goal is maximizing the suffering of anyone who ain’t them, and convincing their base that someone else is the cause of all of their troubles.

Democrats meanwhile, have no interest in doing this either, since most of them aren’t even remotely progressives(whether they pretend to be or not), and like the Republicans, it doesn’t do much to line their pockets. As long as they can keep everyone just fucked over enough, while pretending to support progressive policies, the can keep pointing at the Republicans as boogeymen, saying “look, see what the right wants to keep from you? Better vote for us, or you’ll get trump again. ThIs iS THe mOSt imPOrTAnt elEcTIon oF yOUr lIfe.” But as soon as you vote them in, where does all of that support for those progressive policies go? POOF Never to be spoken of again, until next election, because they didn’t ever really support such policies in the first place.

So sure, I’m not going to go so far as to say that both sides are the same. Because clearly one side at least isn’t trying to bring back literal Nazis. But make no mistake, even if you have to vote Democrat to desperately keep MAGA out of power, the Democrats are not your friend. Democrats are not leftists. The are center right, at best. It’s just the Republicans have completely lost the plot, and ran so far to the right, that everyone else looks to be left by comparison.

Few months ago I switched to an iPhone 15 Pro Max after being on Android for years. I think I briefly tried an iPhone 6s back in the day? For maybe a month and gave up. I only switched because I happened to be able to get the phone without having to pay anything down, and the one good thing I’ve always heard about iPhone is the camera. Going to be honest, I despise iOS as much as I remember. Navigating around is a nightmare. The number of times I try to use the android back gesture, only for nothing to happen, is in the dozens of times per day. The fact that there is no dedicated back button or gesture, unless a specific app graciously decides you get to have one(in the most inconvenient location possible), is obscene. Back on Android, not only do I get said feature, I can tweak and customize it to my liking. And for that matter, I can do the same to pretty much the entire UI. The nearly non-customizable UI on iOS is infuriating. The fact that I can’t seem to predict which volume is about to be adjusted when I hit the volume buttons is even more infuriating. As is the phone’s insistence on not switching audio devices when it should. Or refusing to connect to Bluetooth headphones or other devices automatically, constantly forcing me to going into the settings and do it manually. And just countless other things I absolutely hate about this thing. The only thing I have found to be an improvement is the battery life, which after a full day is still at 90% when I am ready to go to bed. But that’s only because I just don’t touch the phone anymore. I check an email or two during the day, and the phone otherwise just sits in my pocket untouched. Switching to an iPhone is probably the single biggest technology-related mistake I’ve made in years. And that’s coming from someone who is running Arch as the only OS on my gaming laptop, and owns multiple VR headset and AR/XR glasses.

I’m glad other people seem to like their iPhones, but I absolutely despise this thing, and oh my god am I desperate to get the hell back onto Android at the first opportunity. I got this through Boost Infinite, so I’m hoping that when it’s time, they’ll let me “upgrade” to the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Which is the phone I wanted to begin with, but they were conveniently only advertising the iPhone at the time, so I didn’t know they had other phones.

Moral of the the story is, if you tend to do any customization at all when you get a new Android phone, you’re probably going to hate iPhone. If you tend to just log in your email account and use the phone as it comes, you might fare better. In either case, do what you have to, to get your hands on a borrowed iPhone and spend some time with it before even considering making the switch.

• The Regulation podcast
• 100% Eat
• Red Web
• Tales from the Stinky Dragon
• The Podcats
• So… Alright
• Cortex

Yes. Yes it is. I had a single Windows install that was my main system. I eventually decided to semi-switch to Linux, and passed that SSD through to a VM, along with the GPU and half of my USB ports in order to continue running that Windows install for gaming and Adobe stuff. You just have to keep messing around with the config of the VM, and look up info about getting your UUID from Windows to add to your VM config, so your Windows license/activation will keep working as is. There are guides and info for all of this if you Google around. Don’t remember exactly where I found those guides, as I ran that setup for about year and then switched that Windows install back to bare metal, and it has been about another year since then. I do remember that I got the same boot issues as you when switching back and forth between bare metal and VM, and I had to run the Windows boot repair tools to get everything working. Trying looking into that.

I watch anime professionally? I guess I’m writing anime reviews now, or something?

Crocs. Fuck your ugly, very gross-looking wannabe sandal. And why the fuck do they always look like you just pulled them from a landfill, and marinated them in toxic waste?

• Decades-long crippling social anxiety
• Money

• Rusalka
• 2LDK

Beheading kings.

Because here in America, when they take my money, it’s to give away to oil companies and weapons dealers. Not to give us all health care and affordable housing.

I don’t say it because you are, in fact, not welcome. I finish interactions with customers, even when they say thank you to me, by saying “thank you, have a nice day”, as my non fireable version of “I’ll thank you to kindly fuck off now.”

Basically anything here: https://www.youtube.com/@leolego

Unsweetened cocoa powder in my chili. I’m not sure how common/uncommon that is, but everyone I’ve ever told looks at me like I’m crazy, right before asking for a 4th bowl. At least Alton doesn’t think I’m crazy.

When I was 7, I got brought to the school library and told to pick a book to read over the summer. I picked The Hobbit. I got told no. I Insisted. Read that, then moved on lotr. I then read those I don’t know how many more times over the years. As far as I remember, those are the only books I ever bothered to read more than once. Not counting listening to the audio books at work, as well.

MusicBee, Stardock Fences, obligatory Adobe mention, all VR everything (unless something has changed recently, I haven’t looked in while).