• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • How much easier it’s gotten and most of what you download nowadays is exactly what you’re looking for. In the 90’s/00’s, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener “What the fuck are you doing?” At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I’m probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.

    I think with torrenting, there’s a certain amount of trust that’s inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there’s 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn’t be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don’t pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don’t know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it’s not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it’s better to be safe about that stuff.






  • Not a doctor and just talking out my ass, but I’m assuming part of it has to do with patient workloads and dealing with insurance companies, they’re just not incentivized to really take any time with patients, just get 'em through the visit, check whatever boxes they need to, and move on.

    But yeah, I very much have had the same experience for the past 10 years or so with my same doctor, it just feels absolutely useless going to them for anything. It takes alot for me to go to the doctor for anything or to bring anything up even with the doctor if it’s not life-threatening. I’m not a hypochondriac by any stretch, I just try to keep an eye out on my health and if I notice my body doing something out of the ordinary, I just ask about it to see if it means anything.

    Before my regular check-up though I’ll kind of bank up whatever questions or oddities that I’ve noticed, things that I figure I can bring up and see if maybe it’s a sign of one thing or another. Most of the time when I mention anything though, it just feels like the doctor is blowing me off, or he’ll just give a guess, maybe google it and show some pictures. At best he might tell me something like, “Hmmm, well it’s probably not cancer.” and then just sort of shrug and move on. I’m a guy, so I’m used to no one caring about my health or well-being at all, but I think I had a different image in my head when I was a kid about what it was doctors actually did.

    The one regular benefit I see from going to the doctor is getting my blood drawn and being able to track health numbers from that, my job does the same thing too, so I get two sets of numbers from my blood work every year and I track it to see overall condition of my health, which I kind of wish was something my doctor did. He’ll mostly just comment the most obvious thing possible when the test results come in, but there’s never a look at health numbers over time, which is why I started just tracking it on my own.







  • I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.



  • I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.

    Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).






  • I work in a company that seems to have mostly women in management roles and the area I work in has mostly women in our area as well. The things I’ve heard women say about men though would get any guy shit-canned within a day if he were to say anything like that about women. Women can straight-up say things like, “I hate men” or “Men are such assholes” or “What is wrong with men?” or “Guys are so stupid!” or “My husband is such a fucking idiot” or saying blatantly sexual shit about men that they have crushes on or find attractive. It’s just a joke to them, like whatever. Meanwhile, if a guy were to say anything even remotely approaching to what I’ve heard in our office, they would be gone like nothing, there’s just no tolerance for that.

    And don’t get me wrong, I’m not offended by women saying sexist things like that or talking sexually about guys, I don’t give a shit, I’ve heard worse from other guys. That doesn’t bother me and I’m not looking to get anybody in trouble over it, I just want tolerance from both sides. What bothers me is that men aren’t afforded that same courtesy and aren’t allowed to talk the same way. Women can talk shit at work all they want about men because “Fuck the patriarchy, old white men are ruining everything, etc”, but whooo, if a guy says anything remotely out of line about women, they will be reported like that 🫰.