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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • They marketed the headset as being able to replace the functions of basically everything an average person uses a laptop/pc, cellphone, and tv for.

    People routinely use computers and tvs for many hours at a time.

    People routinely spend hours on their phone and basically always have them in their pocket or nearby.

    They showed people wearing the things in planes, to watch 2-3 hour movies.

    Sitting down in their (strangely TV-less) living rooms to watch 2-3 hour movies.

    Doing … some kind of work you’d do on a laptop, but easily being able to keep the things on, kick a ball around with your kid, and then seamlessly go back to working.

    Wearing the headset as you are unpacking at a hotel, and then taking a video phone call with them.

    Not the thing ringing, you putting the headset on, and then taking a call.

    No, you’re just already wearing the headset, having just arrived in a hotel, implying you just had them on as you took your luggage up to your motel, like a hat.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=IY4x85zqoJM

    Taken as a montage, you certainly get the impression that you’re encouraged to just wear the thing all the time, anywhere, that its an ‘all-device’ that replaces a whole bunch of other devices, and is easily used/worn in many settings for long periods of time.


  • Ogrish.

    Doesn’t exist any more, but definitely traumatized me as a child.

    If you haven’t heard of it, it was basically a video hosting site focusing on extreme violence and gore.

    Tons of clips of people being killed or horrifically maimed in war, car accidents, industrial accidents, ‘extreme’ magic shows gone wrong, brutal gang attacks, straight up snuff videos…

    Some videos off the top of my head I won’t ever be able to erase from my memory:

    The beheading of Daniel Pearl.

    Low resolution video of 9/11, but you could make out people jumping from the towers… and splattering all over the ground. The camera man tracked people the entire distance they fell.

    Some insane magic show gone wrong where a man chain sawed his wife in half … she hadn’t managed to fold herself into the right position inside the magic box… her screams and twitching legs were not an act.

    A video taken in Fallujah (I think?) of an Iraqi hopped up on an absurd amount of drugs, taken from a US soldier who had just dismounted with most of his squad from a humvee.

    Him and others advance down the middle of a street towards the soldiers, all holding AKs. A volley of fire from the dismounted soildiers either took out all the group, leaving them with chunks blown off, writhing in agony, or scattering…

    Except this one guy. He’s clearly seriously wounded, but is still advancing basically blind firing his AK.

    The US soldiers are in shock that he’s still walking.

    Now for a burst from a 50 cal.

    Huge parts of this guy’s body are visibly blown off of him, but he still advances.

    A second, more sustained 50 cal burst basically liquifies him where he stood.





  • Currently taking a sabbatical from giving a shit about anything.

    Got assaulted, seriously injured, car got stolen, lost my job working at a non profit helping the homeless, became homeless, spent a year that way, racked up a whole bunch more injuries.

    Managed to qualify for SSDI, got on a bus, rode halfway across the country in horrible agony to find a shithole I can afford to rent, with just the clothes I had on me.

    Its been about a year now, doing my own physical therapy, slowly recovering.

    Can’t afford actual physical therapy, couldn’t get to it anyway.

    Maybe sometime next year I’ll be able to get my glasses replaced.

    Maybe if I get to the point I can walk or use my wrist for more than 10 minutes at a time I’ll look into some kind of remote work… or just make a video game or something.

    How do I deal with it?

    Just keep living, one day at a time.


  • Does this mean toilet paper is banned?

    Paper towels are banned?

    Food wrappers made wholly or partially of paper are banned?

    Is cardboard packaging banned? Does cardboard count as paper?

    Are paper sticker labels for shipping banned?

    Are paper/sticker labels on all kinds of products not packaged in cardboard banned?

    … I am curious as to your answer, but I struggle to concieve of a society where everything is done on electronic devices, but somehow also all kinds of paper and paper based products common to many households and vital to the supply chain and logistics that produces and distirbutes the electronic products are also banned, entirely.

    Even if the answer is somehow yes, all kinds of paper based products are banned and replaced with metal or plastic or glass or something…

    Clay tablets. Whittle a stick into something that can make impressions on it, bake the tablet, or really any kind of pottery.

    Use a knife to etch writing into pieces of thin plastic, or wood.

    Use a laser engraver to engrave glass or metal.

    Make crude ink or liquids capable of staining on your own from raw ingredients, write on thin fabrics, white fabrics like cheap t shirts or certain kinds of gauze or bandaging, again with a whittled stick, a chopstick, a feather, etc.

    You didn’t say paint is banned. Spray paint stuff. Make stencils out of thin plastic or metal.

    Glue toothpicks to thin plastic.

    For any of these methods, you can make up your own language or pictogram / hobo sign style system of symbols to convey whole concepts.

    And for most of these methods, the object with the writing or the writing itself on it can be destoryed by fire, immersion in water or pulverization, for more resilient material use a dremel or radial sander/grinder to obliterate the message.

    And this is all just homebrew ways to do writing.

    Tons of other ways of communicating.



  • Short version:

    Basically, the roof of your mouth presents skull bones which are much thinner than many other parts of your skull.

    Longer Version:

    If you hold the gun with the grip facing downward, as others have said, I guess the hope is you get a shot straight through your medulla oblingata.

    If you obliterate that, bam, instant brain death basically.

    But if your angle is off, you may only sever your spinal cord, now you get to be mostly conscious, in extreme pain, as you collapse and asphyxiate.

    Or you may just blow part of your jaw off. That might not even kill you.

    If, on the other hand, you go grip facing up/out, the ole’ Bud Dwyer…

    You have a much greater liklihood of obliterating a whole lot of your brain’s frontal lobe, the executive decision part.

    probably? You’d lose consciousness completely within seconds, 10(s?) of seconds at most, your brain activity would grind to a complete halt as the massive bleeding would just stop the remainder of your brain from working.

    But also: Phinneas Gage.

    Sometimes people can survive insane bullshit like this.

    Personally, I once met a guy that claimed he’d been shot with a .22 in the forehead, that that was the source of his scar there, and that his forehead skull was actually just thick enough that it stopped the .22 without the fracture creating any spall of loose bone fragments into his brain.





  • No.

    This isn’t OCD at all.

    They’re not describing a need to perform specific tasks in a specific way or number of times which they feel anxiety if they do not do.

    They do not describe any rituals that they feel they need to do to alleviate anxiety.

    They don’t describe anything like needing to check if a door is locked 10 times or checking if an oven is off 10 times, you’re just making that up from nowhere.

    They’re describing a generalized, heightened sense of anxiety about the security of their digital devices from people they are in close proximity to, as well as just a general fear of being spies on by cameras.

    As well as germophobia and mysophobia.

    None of these fears are entirely factually unfounded or without merit, germs can harm you, digital devices can be covertly spied on.

    They then go on to detail how their family is emotionally manipulative and abusive.

    … IM(unprofessional)O, this is CPTSD.

    That will manifest as heightened general paranoia as well as any number of specific paranoias… because it makes sense to be extra worried about trusting things when you are constantly surrounded by duplicitous assholes who lie about things constantly, and cause you to fear things like footsteps and knocks on doors.

    If your baseline is: I am normally lied to, spied on, have my words twisted against me by people I am forced to be around constantly, you’d likely become generally untrusting and paranoid too.

    Germo/Mysophobia could come from being stuck in an unclean environment where people rarely or never excersize sufficient hygeine and cleaning, don’t throw out moldy food, etc, which has gotten this person sick multiple times, so the compensation is to have a heightened awareness and aversion to potential sources of sickness.


  • It already happened to me.

    My old phone was on a Verizon family plan, with my family.

    Problem: My dad is a QAnon nut who builds ghost guns in his garage.

    Mom is a pushover, brain broken from a childhood of drug abuse.

    Brother dropped out of high school to do drugs at raves, very emotionally unstable, 3 different times in my life I’ve had to drop everything to save him from becoming homeless and/or dying of an overdose, all occuring either when i was getting two bachelors degress simultaneously at the best uni in the state, or right after I graduated.

    I up and left one day after getting sick of their bullshit. Just completely ghosted them after I couldn’t stand their bullshit anymore.

    For the next two weeks, my brother keeps somehow showing up every 2 days, despite me being in locations I’ve never, ever been to before.

    He is always in his car, slow crawling, looking at his phone, looking around, then panicking when he realizes I am staring at him, driving off.

    Hrm. Turn off GPS? Nope, brother keeps showing up.

    Call up Verizon explain what is going on, they say oh you’re not an authorized plan admin.

    Huh. I was 2 weeks ago.

    Root the phone, properly de google it.

    My phone plan is then immediately cancelled, within a minute of booting up the phone again.

    Call up Verizon (on a shitty grocery store sim card). Oh yeah your phone number was disabled by the admin, you have to contact them to enable it, no you cannot transfer the number to your own new plan, that’s all we can tell you.

    … My family de listed me as an admin from the phone plan, enabled parental controls to literally stalk me, then disabled and froze my number/line after i uninstalled their ability to do that.

    … This also had the fun side effect of locking me out of every single account that that I was using that number for with 2FA, so, no more banking for me!

    If you think I’m nuts: This is just an optional feature in a Verizon family plan.

    Works to approximate location even if the target phone doesn’t have the app installed on it.

    https://www.verizon.com/support/verizon-family-faqs/

    What Verizon Family features are available without downloading the Verizon Family Companion app on my dependent’s device?

    Certain features are only available if the Companion app is installed on your dependent’s smartphone and paired with the Verizon Family app on your device.*

    Without pairing, you can:
        View Verizon cellular call and text activity†
        Set time restrictions on texts, calls and data usage**
        Set data limits**
        Set text and call limits†
        Get access to the device's network location
    
        Note: Network location accuracy may vary up to a few miles.
    

    Obviously if you are stationary, and connected to a WiFi network with a known location, like a motel, or a library, or a coffee shop, you can narrow the pure cell tower triangulation error range, by a lot.

    So uh yeah, if you have a Verizon family plan, you can easily be under realtime surveillance by whoever is the actual plan master.


  • Nope.

    If Trump can get alway with almost all of his bullshit, if the Supreme Court can just hurr durr away a hundred + years of legal precedent, then this whole system is bullshit.

    Anybody that is charge of or oversees the systemic application of violence toward great numbers of people, who is legally allowed to do so, in a system where the common person has 0 chance of ever altering this system to police itself and actually enact justice by preventing said person from doing that and prosecuting them for their crimes against the people…

    Anyone in such a position should be afraid, should keep suffering consequences until theyfinally figure out that they need to acquiesce to a reformation of the system, need to stop fucking over millions for the grotesque enrichment of thousands.

    When the game is rigged against you, play by your own rules, otherwise you guarantee your own defeat.


  • Yep, same here.

    If there were any subscription I would get, it would be a VPN, to allow me access to basically all content for about the same monthly cost as any single subscription service.

    Sure, it might take some more effort in terms of tinkering to get exactly the same functionality and ease of use, but uh I’m disabled and on a fixed income, I literally cannot afford to be spending something like half my monthly food budget on a medley of subscription services… and I have a lot of free time.