My wife probably wouldn’t come with me, my cat wouldn’t make it, I think I would struggle with finding suitable water sources that don’t count as part of the civilized world.

I go solo camping about once a year to remind myself I’d probably die out there but get it out of my system.

I’ve never seen a more accurate depiction of my typical experience in a professional environment. “Nobody wants to speak up or handle things correctly because someone senior with direct responsibility for your employment shouted down any dissent because they want to meet a metric” is apparently a timeless experience.

At least where I am in the southern US self-checkout ends up being slower.

Ten years ago my experience was likely similar to yours, pretty quick to just scan your own groceries, not much of a line to speak of as some people are opting for a cashier. Go for the self checkout every time.

The trouble now is that there aren’t enough cashiers so almost everyone has to go through self checkout. Longer line but you would think it wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

But they only have one attendant watching all the self checkouts. So if three people are buying beer at once you have only one to go around checking their IDs. If an item (usually a fruit or vegetable) doesn’t have a proper entry in the kiosk’s database and no barcode to scan then the attendant has to go by and manually enter a code scan the item to unlock the machine. For example when buying habaneros my grocery store only had an entry for “green habaneros”, if you selected them the machine would call a cashier over because you picked an item they don’t actually have. Don’t even get me started on their touchy anti theft measures erroneously triggering because you moved your hand weird when setting down a bag.

Again, none of this was really a problem back then, but now at my grocery store it’s one attendant handling 8 self checkouts at once where any number could have these problems to resolve.

This part may be more in my head, but I also frequently feel like I’m stuck behind people who have never used a touchscreen before, or been in a grocery store, or exchanged currency for goods. Someone always needs help with some part of the process and if you add that to the problems I listed above, it can really slow things down.

It’s really disheartening. I originally pursued tech for the money but I fell in love with it as a sort of creative outlet a few years into my career. I actually WANT to make new tools but my coworkers immediately outsourced their brains and come asking me for help because the code they got from copilot (and didn’t test) is breaking something in production.

In 2016 I used self checkout if I wanted to get through quickly.

In 2026 I look for a cashier.

Cult of the Absolute seems to mostly be filled with weirdos.

Very little. I was always content to wait for the actually funny greentexts to break containment and land somewhere else. I went to /b/ in like 2010 after hearing it was funny but it was pretty much just racist. Other boards seemed fine just sort of boring.

Similar experience with Tumblr, I like the funny stuff other people find for me and bring to reddit (and now Lemmy) but the site itself tended to be a little dull day to day.

They’re a rape apologist and trolling to try to prove a point about Cornell. Look at the comment history.

I just hit them with the “Oh wow that’s crazy yeah I don’t really know much about all of that tbh”.

Yeah feel like maybe 60-70% of my therapy sessions involve talking about socioeconomic factors behind my problems and I’ve never felt like my therapist downplayed that

That tracks with my experience. I visited Japan but knew minimal Japanese (pretty much just 有り難う御座います) and everyone was very friendly and helpful, and seemed pleased the limit of my Japanese was at least something polite.

I feel like one difference is a friendly Mandarin speaker would be less likely to try to correct me if I made a mistake and more likely to try to just interpret what I’m trying to say. I wonder if some of that comes from the possibility of misunderstandings from a tonal language.

I’m a Mandarin learner and there are some things in Mandarin that feel really intuitive for me, and other things that I really struggle to wrap my head around.

Tones are tricky but when speaking I’ve found I can really rely heavily on context to get me through a lot of it. Culturally Mandarin speakers are pretty forgiving, most of them just seem excited I’m giving it my best shot. Not sure if it’s the same for Japanese speakers.

The traditional toxic redditor stereotype never struck me as particularly overweight.

The less pleasant portions of the community have a pretty long history of hating fat people, and the last few years I was there I noticed a bit of a trend toward somewhat puritanical outlooks on indulgent food or general alcohol use. Still anecdotal, but this corroborated with my (ill-advised) decision to attend a reddit meet up. Not a lot of fat people there.

My guess is that though many were not overweight, they didn’t have much else going for them. It was easier to insult someone being overweight than being broke or single or too online because it was the one that didn’t apply to them.

If the answer is anything other than Long John Silvers then you don’t have enough game to get beyond the first date.

Most religions tend to involve a deity that is either alive, resurrected, or concepts like death don’t really apply to them.

Tiamat in ancient Mesopotamian faith is sort of a creator deity, though her death is responsible for creation. The storm god Marduk kills her, splits her corpse in two with one half being the sky, the other the Earth and her tears the source of the Tigris and Euphrates. Tiamat’s spouse and general Qingu is also killed by Marduk and his blood is used in the creation of mankind. So in a sense Marduk is more of the creation deity here who is very much alive.

But you can’t really get anything from a dead god so there isn’t much record of people worshipping Tiamat, at least not quite like they did Marduk.

It makes sense really, why would I pray or present offerings to something that can’t listen when there’s plenty of living deities whose favor I could try to earn to bring rain to my crops or give me healthy sons?

I’ve been eyeing a Cordoba C9 or Yamaha GC12C for awhile. Kind of figure I’d save it to treat myself, celebrate a promotion or something.

I thought about getting something more affordable like you’ve described just to scratch the itch, and maybe that’d be better than depriving myself this long. But I guess having a luxury to look forward to has a positive psychological effect on me.

Depending on the model you probably got a great deal on that Takamine too

I’ve worked with people who read Capital annually and I can’t get them to show up to an action on time or to get through it without calling a mentally ill unhoused person a reactionary.

I’ve worked with people who haven’t skimmed the manifesto but work every week getting food for their communities.

The latter are much better to work with.

Ideal conditions would mean organizers are all super politically literate and active, but I agree with you that you can’t expect every member of a movement to read stuff like this as a prerequisite to organizing. Cadre members? Of course they should read. But the fascists aren’t making general members read hefty political tomes.

Buy a classical guitar.

I’ve been eyeing them for about ten years now but I don’t play enough guitar to justify the cost just yet. At some point I’ll probably just wake up one morning and buy one and play it plenty and wonder why I waited so long.

I can’t believe they just put the source code out there like this

There’s people who won’t like me saying this, but I put a pin in the revolution talk to work on what’s immediate.

Like you, I’ve tried local groups and found they tend to have small, disconnected local chapters and actions sometimes have questionable efficacy.

I think some of this comes from being so focused on “the revolution”. I get it, groups like PSL don’t want to get bogged down becoming a band-aid organization. They want to get rid of the broken system, not be a food bank in a system designed to make people hungry. I’ve done the reading so I understand where they’re coming from here.

But then I attend meetings with groups that have about 10 regular attendees who mostly seem to tell each other to read more theory and paint a lot of banners. They get frustrated that the revolution didn’t come after the latest sit-in, call each other every political science term in the book, and break off to form an even smaller, less effective group.

What I’m trying now are advocacy groups for specific causes I care about. They more often seem to include members of impacted communities and have a better idea of their needs.