think of the internet cred though. you may make 500k less a year but you can come up with a thousand zingers to reply with instead of calling someone ‘a re**ard’ like a barbarian.

don’t you feel good about yourself?

i’ve never been terrified of anything, except a fox. i watched that episode of x-files that featured the chupacabra and then encountered a fox out in the wild–you can imagine this loss of suburban innocence if you think hard about it and use your imagination. now, a typical fox looks nothing like a mexican goatsucker (maybe if it was bulked up with cans of goya black beans and had bigger teeth) but it put the scare into me because i had only encountered the occasional groundhog and stray cat at night; back then you didn’t see too many bums around.

one of those stray cats used to come around a lot and i named it ‘sugar’ because it was stark white and that song fly was on the radio a lot, the one by that band sugar ray. and after it hung around for awhile (i would leave out bush’s baked beans in a tupperware container because i felt bad) it became part of the family. i renamed it ‘yeti’ because i thought sugar was too homoerotic but that’s for another post.

“tech executive here, did you guys know i named my company after lord of the rings? i read it in high school…”

redditor: "holy shit guys, did you know tech executives were this smart? i was never into cuck porn before this post but now i’m a true believer.’

i thought i was paranoid for feeling this way. it if isn’t the obvious surveillance, it’s the security guard standing near the front or the employees scrutinizing you.

this phenomena is most extreme at stores like burlington/marshalls, where they’ll often rope off the entrance and have an employee dressed up like a swat team member to discourage criminal activity.

old man take: you used to only see this bullshit at stores in the worst neighborhoods and that only started popping up around the crash of 2008.

reminder that this image is how the future was always portrayed in sci-fi films other than the shitty dystopian ones like robocop.

the reality is that we just get ratty 50s-90s suburbs mingled with modern suburbs that couldn’t be bothered to leave in some vegetation (and that are built to lower standards), with the occasional cybertruck buzzing by (either driven by a guy with a beard who flips houses or the owner of a chinese run nail salon), on potholed terrain that your city claims it can’t fix despite OKing a bunch of casinos 10 years ago to raise tax revenue.

then when you go and buy a bag of doritos, now $6, full of air and with a quarter of the seasoning on the chip than there was 10 years ago. “at least the wildfire smoke can’t get in there,” i think to myself, as i swipe through tinder matches, all fat.

maybe this is a radical take, but i think it’s funny that they call someone ‘the border czar’ with a straight face and then he doesn’t even look like a hardass. he looks like some random fat dude that’s melting from age, wearing a likely expensive suit that gives the impression it’s an off the rack ensemble purchased at the men’s wearhouse at a steep discount.

a perfect symbol for america.

stop worrying about it. these people already lost.

dumb people have always bought crap. just because components are more expensive doesn’t change anything–a savvy computer user is always going to go for pre-built. i’d personally take out a loan before i bought a meta pc even if steep discounts are on the menu.

it also makes me think that all the conspiratorial talk is just talk. maybe all these companies are conspiring to raise prices so they can sell you garbage like this pathetic excuse for a pc.

but that doesn’t fit into the ‘all rich people are geniuses’ narrative. greed doesn’t require intelligence. even someone with an intense hunger and a 50 IQ is gonna try and put their hand into your burger king bag and swipe a fry or two.