It’s not nice to kink shame.

Meth lab oompa loompa is the best new meme I’ve seen in a long, long while.

We prefer you call him The Great Pumpkin, thank you.

Thank you!

I’m a pretty pragmatic at heart, so I feel silly sometimes when realizing that I used fictional characters for inspiration to build myself up. I don’t aspire to be the hero of anything, but do want to be someone that is worthy of respect.

It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but TNG was a factor for me in finding emotional maturity.

I was a happy, naive child that was lucky to get to 8 before everything sorta fell apart. Parents divorced, sexual abuse from within the extended family by different people, having to toughen up at school due to the emotional issues starting to crop up, abandoned by a parent because of their addiction, and even the social pressure during the satanic panic (this was obviously the 80’s).

Somehow, I did manage to keep some of the happy-go-lucky and naivete, but otherwise I had a rough time reigning in my temper and sometimes would break into tears from being overwhelmed (alone, obviously, because I had to be manly).

When I got into watching TNG, I really admired Picard as a character template, and worked on some of my own self perceived character flaws, and why I acted the way I did. Essentially, looking for the causes and not the symptoms. It was the start of a growth that continues still. His morality and introspection as an archetype gave me hope.

A therapist surely would’ve been a better way to go about it, but those weren’t really much of an option for us back then.

I would take those and the adhesive rubber feet that you would get with switches and make coasters out of them to give away.

Blew it.

Scott Bakula is what I was thinking.

I concur with all of your statements, to include the one concerning the realization of being a cog in the machine.

I have several errands to run, and would love to continue the discussion when I return, if you’re amenable, of course.

You have a great points, though your scenario is a bit too simple.

It’s not that we’re so fat and lethargic that we can’t be bothered to get off the sofa long enough to effect meaningful change. It’s that “the media” is gargantuan and goes far beyond the synthesized news cycles and reports. The OG social media outlets like churches, work culture, family structure, regional Identities, and every other socialized structure you can think of manifests itself into these ideals that have been pummeled into our head since the first time we stood up in preschool and recited the pledge of allegiance.

Making it more complicated is that our real concerns like, paying our bills, feeding our families, getting Timmy to soccer practice, protecting our kids, being a good employee so we don’t lose our job, being a good dad, being a good son, keeping our relationships healthy, etc., etc. is condensed into an infantesimally small amount of time. When you finally get to stop you’ve only got the bandwidth for bullet points. It’s not laziness, it’s exhaustion. It’s not lack of self-reflection, it’s overclocking. We have an entire backbone population that’s absolutely exhausted and still feeling like failures because somehow the American dream is feeling like a greasy, over-hustled nightmare that we’re constantly struggling to live up to.

This cycle does lend itself to your headlines of gun violence, gladiator arena us v. them politics, and on, and on. The system with which we now live is a constant grinder that no longer leaves time for, nor praises individualism and ideas. It’s a finely tuned revenue machine built on an overhauled slavery model that instead praises corporatism, classism, ruling parties, and residual monthly income… with a smiley face of nationalistic exceptionalism posted on the packaging.

Apologies for being so long winded, but some sympathy for the devil might be in order. We’re largely not a bad people. Most of us are kind, optimistic, and try very hard to change the things we see out of place. The problem is we’re becoming more and more just white noise in the background. A sort of spectre of idealisms past.

The avocado toast is fan-fuckin-tastic here.

Oh no. No, no, no, no, put it back!

I bought bidets for the house during the COVID toilet paper lunacy and it’s likely the best personal hygiene investment I’ve ever made. I still get upset when I have to poop somewhere that doesn’t have a bidet.

Grifter gonna grift.

It would appear that based blanket statements aren’t the sole domain of MAGA shitbags.

Hear, hear!

Wow! 10 years is a long time for an SD!

Backups are so easy on Raspbian that every couple of years I swap out the SD cards from the old set to a new one, and just keep the old ones around in case one of the new ones decide to croak out.

“You can always tell a Milford man.”

I must confess to missing the vastness of Reddit, but I’ll never go back. The company I keep here is better, by far.