Is there a name for this video artifact effect in this image? I’d love to see a bunch of this.

It reminds me of the early 2000’s digital satellite television. Any time the signal got blocked a bit by the weather, the on-screen content would do this. Very trippy. Later on when cable tv in my area switched to digital, I noticed it happening there, too, but nowhere near as often as in satellite. Now that over the air is all digital where I live, however, I almost never see this happening anymore. I guess it’s not a thing that happens as much with modern encoding formats.

In two different cases where I’ve disputed part of a charge/order, the credit card company returned the money for the entire order like you said. I was surprised they did that, and didn’t realize that was the norm.

On the one hand, I never wanted anything I extra that I didn’t deserve. On the other hand, both times this has happened to me, the companies at fault really, really went out of their way to deserve it. Not necessarily scam level deserved it like this hotel’s smoke detector scam, but still.

To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.

The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.

However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.

People hoping that are likely ignorant of what AI actually is. It’s incredibly unlikely that AI “ends”, at least not if/until things get really bad on a societal level to the point where our species loses its ability to produce and use technology altogether.

Dozens of accounts, yes. But probably only like 3 or 4 real human people if we’re being generous.

This is a variation of an idiom that goes something like “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will think it’s stupid”.

But as someone who used to raise killifish, I actually found out that there is at least one species of fish that can climb trees.

Howdy “relative” neighbor.

I’m also in the southeastern USA and I’ve driven by the peach more times than I care to count.

Is failing. Has failed. Same difference I suppose.

A broken clock is right twice a day. At least that’s a saying in my part of the world.

There’s already a term for this, it’s called moonlighting.

Every full-time salaried job I’ve ever had prohibits moonlighting, and specifically calls it out in the employment contract I’ve had to sign when starting the job.

Having said that, I am unemployed directly and entirely because of Donald Trump. Although I have no plans to return to work in the immediate future (because I was privileged enough to be in a position where I was able to save for a rainy day like this), when I return to work I am considering doing this.

As long as I’m making my deadlines and producing quality work, my employer should not give a crap whether I have other jobs. Period. I’ve spent my entire career so far working with bosses that tell me I’m family, but treat me like dirt and discard me at the very first sign of an economic downturn. They are all the same. So, when you treat people like disposable cogs, don’t be surprised when and if those cogs fit a variety of different machines.

Oh, that’s awful.

My uncle also had very few allies left in this world, he was just the embodiment of an asshole to pretty much everyone. My dad and aunt were the only people that would even bother to try to communicate with him. Fortunate in some way, they’d talked on the phone the day before my uncle passed, and he agreed to let my dad stop by to drop off some food the next day. Meaning, he’d been dead less than 24 hours before my dad found his body. Otherwise, it very well could have been weeks or longer.

But the house? Total loss. My uncle had become a trash hoarder. Fueled by depression, but also by his beliefs that the government was tracking him (and would go through his trash if he were to set it outside). My dad and my cousin tried to locate some family memorabilia like photos and things, but they gave up. The house was literally bulldozed and the remnants hauled away, it was in such bad shape inside and out.

Welcome to mental illness. Many people are perfectly functional, yet still deeply sick.

I had an uncle like this. He definitely held it together okay-ish (though that’s up for debate) for most of his life. But the conspiracy bullshit was a consist sign that he was not well.

And then when his wife passed, he also lost his ability to be functional, so the sickness took over entirely, eventually even took over his body. Nobody could help, not even his children.

To a certain extent, this is why I am trying to stick with a mission driven career, choosing opportunities that I feel actually make some small part of the world a better place. Granted, yes, I’m ultimately doing the job because I need the paycheck since I prefer to have food, shelter, and some degree of freedom/control over my life.

Not everybody has that luxury, though.

And expecting people to play pretend all day as though it’s anybody’s life dream to be typing up OBMC reports because that’s their passion in life and that the people they work with are family and that the ultimate goal of being the dominant player in the disposable widgets industry is for the greater good of humanity – yeah, whatever that’s just subversive mind control games. Glad some people can live in that and deny reality, but for the rest of us, you want me to work, then pay me.

Nah, USB DeezNuts

My current “provider” is an NP. I like her, she’s personable and does the basic stuff well enough. I can understand having her do the basic annual physical type stuff for relatively young and healthy people.

But, for one of my recent visits, they scheduled me with a doctor instead (dunno why), and the experience was honestly almost night and day for the better. Granted, the way my health insurance works (ugh USA), the NP visits only ever cost me a flat amount, perhaps $45 for the copay. The doctor’s visit cost me the $45 copay, plus additional coinsurance down the line that I got billed a couple of months later because the clinic apparently charges two different rates depending on whether you see a doctor or not, I guess?

On the one hand, I didn’t like it that much when it came out. It’s not that I hated it or hated on it, just wasn’t my thing. Mario games were far superior platforming experience all around, in my opinion.

Graphics for the time and platform were great. If you weren’t there at the time and your frame of reference is modern (32-bit or later) graphics, of course they suck. But that’s hardly fair or objective, when it comes to understanding why they were well-regarded AT THAT TIME.

But, I’ll add this: A number of my friends’ kids were introduced to 8-bit and 16-bit games first, in lieu of exposing them to toxic modern phone/tablet games. And the SNES Donkey Kong game(s) were/are amongst the games that the kids enjoyed and played the most. So, there’s something to that, if you ask me.

I barely made it through the great recession.

At one point, I was down to my last $500 USD which didn’t even cover the rent coming up due in days, most of my calories were coming from fruits and veggies I was literally collecting from the wild, looking at eviction, and with no job prospects when I was so desperate that I begrudgingly accepted the worst job of my entire life (so far).

I fought my way into a better job and career over the years, but continued to live like a dude who was only a month or two away from homelessness. I did not take extravagant vacations, wear high end clothes, drive a flashy car, own an expensive home, eat fancy meals, buy lots of “toys”. Aside from electronics, almost everything I owned was second hand or gifted to me. People constantly made judgemental comments about my lifestyle, clothes, car, and so on.

By the end of 2024, I was almost at the point of feeling financially secure in life, considering making some big upgrades to my lifestyle.

Then in 2025, I got laid off after more than a decade from a company that religiously referred to its employees as family. No warning. In fact, up until that point, all we were hearing was lies (ex: we’re doing okay financially, we planned for this sort of thing, etc). I had 10 years of top scores on evaluations, 10 years of impeccable project work, 10 years of raving reviews from my peers. And yet, when the least little bit of financial difficulty reared its ugly head, I was cut in the first round of layoffs.

Fortunately for me, I sacrificed and lived quite frugally over the years, so I just don’t give a shit about the job market right now. I’d love to have a job, I feel like I’m basically living off of money that could be my retirement, but at the end of the day fuck Trump and the flailing Trump economy. If I have to go 10 years without a job, it’s going to suck, but I’ve got this.

On the other hand, I feel horrified for many of my coworkers who got laid off at the same time, and for the majority of people in general who have lost their jobs because of Trump and his sycophants. Most of them either didn’t get a chance to prepare or didn’t have the foresight to prepare the way I was privileged enough to do.

I bought a handful of cheap / deep discount games during the Summer Sale this year.

One I wasn’t sure about was BIOTA. Turns out it’s been more fun than I expected for such a simplistic game.

I’ve also been playing Blasphemous. I really like Metroidvanias but these “souls like” style games are irritating to me. Still, it was cheap and I can appreciate the aesthetic.

I’m looking forward to having more time to play these games, as of yet, it’s been like 20 minutes here, 30 minutes a few days later, so it’s hard to make much progress and enjoy them with such limited time to dive in.

I told my neighbor’s dog she was a good girl so she went back home, picked a giant bouquet of daffodils, and then personally delivered them to me at work that afternoon.

And if you posted that story on certain social media sites, you’d get thousands of upvotes and fawning comments from people who seemingly believe your fake as shit story.

So I support this image, because it feels like a nice, polite degree of mockery on this trend. And at least it’s not as dangerous for the critters as sticking poisonous flowers into the mouth of the family pet for social media clout.

In my part of the world, there are at least a dozen+ culinary and/or medicinal mushrooms that are distinctive and easy to identify (even by casuals like me). These don’t really have any dangerous look-a-likes that also grow in the same area. I stick to those and those alone. Granted, even at 12 or so species that I can ID, that’s probably like a tiny fraction of the number of different species that exist in this area.