NetHandle

There are always things people have in common. More-so today with the accessibility to media provided by the internet. That said being a friend to someone isn’t about checking a bingo card of similar interests. It’s about listening to their experiences and being interested.

What do people watch on tv, what are they listening to, where have they vacationed recently, did you hear about xyz happening in the news.
Kids. People with kids talk about their kids.

Some of that might overlap with your experiences, some of it won’t, it doesn’t need to. You just need to shoot the shit, hear what they’ve been up to, say what you’ve been up to, and enjoy doing it. Maybe do an activity of somekind while your at it, maybe just eat dinner.

The age range is just when people get busy with life and have less free time to actually do things. So they have less to talk about. Work becomes their lives. That changes eventually, wait another five year period. You get settled in your career and your focus shifts more towards what’s going on in your actual life.

You should look up ‘speech communities’. It’s a linguistic anthropology thing. Essentially boils down to ‘people talk differently and about different things depending who they’re talking to and where’. In your case you want a group of work friends to talk about work topics with, separate from your group of childhood friends, who you can talk about non-work topics with.

Cest une pomme!

Reading through these comments is depressing and my only hope is that I will be dead before the droughts lead to food shortages that effect me. I like eating, I like eating good food, I like having good food available when I want it. I don’t like being hungry. I hope I’m dead before I have to deal with starvation. At least nuclear war would be quick.

Megaprojects are a pipe dream. We can’t even deal with a lowball pandemic together as a nation. What hope do we have of coming together as a world? Let alone for something that isn’t going to have immediate consequences slapping us in the face. We’re a pathetic society that can’t do anything good. All we do is consume. Mr. Smith was right, we’re a virus.

We’re heading for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi future, and all the horrible shit that goes along with it.

In a fucked up way, our only hope is if a mega power somehow dominates the world through some horrific war and consolidates power, while somehow avoiding nuclear war and then does a quick 180° straight into eco-fascism. That’s the glorious future we have to look forward to. Life under a global authoritarian regime with severe austerity measures to deal with global warming. People will starve, people will be executed. The horrors of Stalinism will be our reality, and it is the only thing that can save us from ourselves.

I fucking hope I die, because I wasn’t built for suffering.

I’m going to offer an alternative.

Steam lets you streamplay games from your computer to another computer.
Your phone is a computer.

You don’t like the built in controls for a phone.
You can pair xbox and ps5 controllers to androids phones with little to no effort. Not sure about other phone OS’s, and quite frankly, not my bag baby.

So now you have a controller hooked up to your phone, and it’s channeling games from your computer over wifi.

Never had a cause to try it personally, but I might just do that and come back to confirm it works.

Might save you a couple bucks for your kids college fund.

Firby I’m sad, play despacito

Ibuprofen + acetaminophen at the same time.

Alternate ice and heat in 15 min intervals. You can get an electric heating pad they work well. Lay on the floor to do it.

Get a firm mattress. If that’s out of your immediate price range, sleep on a folded blanket or a mat on the floor. Your shoulders might get cranky, but it will be relief on your back.

Walk.

Bend at the knees for everything.

Light stretching, nothing that puts an unsupported load on your lower back.

Ab exercises. Planking is your friend.

Oatmeal. Not exactly date night, but it’s hot and healthy.
Get large flake oats, not the instant stuff.
Boil 1 cup of water in a small pot.
Decrease heat to mid-low.
Add 1/2 cup oats. Stir only once.
Cook for 10 minutes,
let cool for 10 minutes,
eat for 10 minutes.

You’ll want to watch it closely for a minute or two after you add the oats to make sure it doesn’t boil over. If it looks like its going to boil over just remove the pot from the heat till it calms down, and decrease the heat a little maybe, every oven is diff. It still needs to simmer though.

You can season it with whatever you want after cooking it: maple syrup, milk, oat milk, brown sugar, chocolate chips, raisins or other dried fruits (if you do raisins add them to the water before the oatmeal), cinammon, apples… etc.
Maybe a small pinch of salt.

It’s the new form of marketing really. Ads aren’t super effective anymore as they’ve reached saturation and are showing severely diminished returns, so the next thing you can do is to create bot posts in the form of ‘product testimonials’ similar to what a person would see on amazon reviews, but from a source they’re more likely to trust such as a subreddit comment chain.
Ie. Initial: I use [product], going on 15 years etc.
Reponse: I use it too works great.
Alt response: I use [diff. product], its cheaper but works the same.

The “buy it for life” subreddit was full of them.

Of course it gets a little more inisidious when it’s not just used for pushing products, but instead pushing ideas or propaganda. It’s commonly referred to as psyops, and they try to maintain a steady presence on any popular online forum. It was a big problem on Tumblr for a long time before Reddit.

Also news post bots are super common, they want to generate traffic to their news sites, as that is their source of ad revenue. Lots of ad revenue related bots making posts to generate site traffic. Some of it’s not the worst thing to have, creates something of a newsfeed and a lot of it is already present here or on Mastodon.

It becomes problematic when you have very biased news organizations and they’re allowed to use bots to upvote their news articles with impunity so all you see is biased news, it circles right back around to psyops.

Also ad revenue fraud is something that happens a lot. Ad engagement with a bot that is meant to simulate a user browsing the site and clicking on an ad so that the person hosting the ads gets paid by the person who put the ad up. Sometimes it happens on entirely fake websites with entirely fake traffic, its much easier when you dont have to fake all the traffic and just the ad engaging traffic, as it adds legitimacy to the website. I wouldnt be surprised if a good portion of Reddits revenue is from ad fraud. It would go a long way to explaining why traffic was down only 6% during blackouts, if a large portion of the 94% remaining traffic was ad engagement bots.