I can feel the difference between 71 and 73 in my house.

At 73, my kids room is uncomfortably hot. At 71, it has a perfect chill for sleeping.

Collect 3,000 cells in this wide open world to collect your skins.

Buy 4,000 cells to get this custom pirate skin for your character.

I don’t really want to play adversity Olympics with you but since you insist.

My parents were on food stamps and going to food pantries when I was a kid. Father was an absent alcoholic and drug addict. I myself struggled with heroin addiction in my teens and 20s and ended up ruining my life - or so I thought.

I managed to climb out of that hole (using Obamacare and the support of my family) to find a whole new perspective on my life.

I was angry, bitter, nihilistic, and selfish. I was obsessed with how bad and unfair the world is, and it gave me every excuse to keep buying bundles and nodding into oblivion.

Once I got clear of the horrible opiate withdrawal and paid back the considerable money I owed - once I stopped wanting to overdose and kill myself - I realized how nice it is to be able to take a walk on a warm day and just check out the birds. I realized a cup of coffee and a sandwich is a blissful experience, especially when shared with a friend or loved one.

When I think about the eternity I will spend in non-existence after I die, I know that I have very limited time to enjoy this strange and beautiful trip I’m on. I know this little blip would be the envy of the non-existent. If ghosts were real, I bet every one of them would kill to come back and just feel the sensations of smell, taste, touch, and sound. Or to look at something pretty.

Like dude, I’ve had parts of my life that were fucking miserable. Please don’t tell me it’s so easy. I’ve just decided to enjoy it and practice gratitude. Whatever happens to me, I remind myself that it’s better than going through opiate withdrawal on a plastic cot and wishing I was dead while everyone was disgusted with me.

Life, on average, is much easier now than it’s ever been. The wealthiest men alive didn’t have access to basic over the counter medicine that we have today. If you die of some horrific disease tomorrow, you’ve still had a higher quality of life than most of the richest people who have ever lived.

You know why my ramblings about the beauty of life sound so corny? It’s because a lot of people have realized it before. Because it’s so often said that it sounds cliche. There is a reason so many people have come to these conclusions.

My advice to you is to touch grass. No joke. And if you don’t want to touch grass, go watch a movie that makes you feel awe. Go read a book that moves you. Otherwise you’re going to have your eyes opened on your death bed and wish you had lived differently. Happens all the time man.

Bidet attachment https://www.amazon.com/Bidet-Non-Electric-Mechanical-Attachment-Self-Cleaning/dp/B00P2XZDGG

And I grew up with window unit air conditioners. They kept a couple rooms cool no problem.

I don’t see how I’m talking out my ass.

I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It’s a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.

Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don’t. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you’d have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.

The world isn’t perfect but it’s better than it’s ever been in most ways. Even if we don’t survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I’ve already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It’s all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it’s really beautiful despite the miserable parts.

The United Nations military makes their final push to destroy the Indo-Soviet Federation’s last stronghold on Mars.

As UN autonomous airships enter orbit, bay doors slide open to release thousands of cargo containers bearing a single warning sign:

SELF-REPLICATING DEVICE.

Right, and it still saves the studio time and money on other recording costs. That would be the way to do it.

Imagine what their demographics would look like if they also started a war and killed their young people though.

Not saying they won’t do it, and they do currently have an excess of young men specifically, but a country with a population problem isn’t in a great place to start a war imo.

I teach lower income students and they love technology as much as the rest of us. They usually opt for used electronics and a lot of them are getting scammed into buying secondhand enterprise rigs that are converted into shitty gaming PCs, but don’t worry, you made some nerd’s day.

Holy shit.

^sometimes, ^we ^need ^dark ^humor ^to ^make ^it ^through.

Here in Northeast USA I never see kids outside. And my students are brutally honest that they don’t go outside much. They admit to mostly sitting on their phones and playing video games. Even my competitive athletes say they don’t play outside. It’s crazy.

Where are you located if you don’t mind my asking? I am in the American East. I know this is a post in the European community, but my original comment seemed relevant since developed Western nations in North America and Europe seem to be facing a lot of the same issues.

As our online lives grow, our real-world connections shrink. I’m a teacher, a fairly young and tech-savvy one. I say that so you know I’m not coming at this like an old and out-of-touch boomer who hates technology.

Our kids do not know how to communicate as well as they used to. They don’t hang out in person, they don’t roam around town and make friends with the local kids in their neighborhood, they don’t play outside beyond highly-structured and competitive sports, and many have ZERO real-world friends.

I spend a lot of time online. Online friendships are great and can be super important for many people. That said, I don’t think it’s super healthy to only have online friends. I know many kids who literally do not interact with a single real-world friend ever. It’s all discord and video games.

I myself find that I only have one real-world friend when it comes down to it. Sure, I love my coworkers to pieces and I have my wife’s friends to some degree. But me alone? One friend. And yes, I do somewhat blame the degradation of real-world communities for that. Gone are the days when children were raised by “the whole village.”

When people feel their needs aren’t being met by mainstream political parties, they seek answers in the fringes.

This is frightening and seems to be happening all over the Western world. Personally, I think people are struggling with the social disconnect brought by technology, with the smaller family sizes required by economic and climate conditions, with the simmering dread brought on by climate change, and an increasing rage as the struggling middle and lower classes are inundated with daily news of billionaires engaging in frivolity, waste, and/or crimes against the most vulnerable members of our society. People are becoming cynical and angry. They don’t see the future as bright.

In a situation like that, people seek alternatives to the status quo. What could be more attractive than a political view based on returning to old times? They want the return of economic security, stronger family units, more disposable income for leisure, and all the other real or perceived benefits of times past. They think that getting there will require us to embrace the other things we are trying to leave behind - racism, sexism, perhaps even war and genocide in some of the more extreme fringes.

We can see it globally in the left wing too. This is where the terms conservative and progressive really shine as being good descriptors. Conservatives want to go back to the glory days. The more extreme they are, the more willing they are to embrace the worst parts of our past. Progressives/liberals want to move forward. The more extreme they are, the more they are willing to try radical new things that sound like fantasy or science fiction. Progressives are often willing to upend massive social and economic structures to try new things. I find myself in this camp, and sometimes I step outside myself and admit that I have some pretty extreme views. I once told my conservative uncle that I would absolutely be willing to eat my food in pill form, edit my genes so I could live forever, change my brain chemistry so I could be happy all the time. He was shocked and said those things were inhuman and evil.

I don’t believe that we can convert people back to the mainstream unless the mainstream starts to meet their needs. Nations with hungry, lonely, and unfulfilled people are probably good breeding grounds for revolution, in my opinion. Unfortunately, revolutions aren’t always good. Bad actors often take advantage of instability.

The uptick in solar activity that has been weirdly increasing at roughly predictable rates every year since the rise of industrialization?

Can’t let a bunch of train virgins take away my Ford F-750.

I think the issue is that these service providers are more than capable of providing “unlimited” data, but choose not to because they can make a lot more when people inevitably go over their limit. The salt on the wound is the fact that ISPs usually have no competition. They usually have a monopoly on the area in which they operate.

Where I live, we have unlimited data that only gets throttled if you use a truly absurd amount (like if you’re constantly pirating large amounts of 4k movies or something). No caps or unexpected fees. Overall, I always felt like I had it pretty good, and I still think that…mostly.

The funny part is that my ISP had competition move to town recently. I kid you not, the week before the competition officially started up their service, my ISP sent a letter saying they were doubling my Internet speed for no extra charge.

They were trying to show how awesome they were but really it was the biggest slap in the fucking face. You’re telling me you were overcharging me that much for years?

Another issue is that advertising, which you never asked for, makes up part of your monthly data usage, as do routine and unavoidable downloads like security updates, video game patches, etc.

To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven’t seen doesn’t look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.

YouTube though. It’s functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.

For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.

I said this in another thread - I bet they’re going the YouTube route and are going to start allowing content creators to make money.

Might sound good on the surface but it’s absolutely going to shred what Reddit used to be. Goodbye discussion forum and hello new social media.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.