Clowns

Gothica

Chill Amusing, Clowns, Political Economy

This is funny, and true, but when malls decided they were for Directly Observable CapitalismTM only and not for any hanging around, being social and having some sort of community function they became much more boring. And, funnily enough, much less profitable. This shows that social control trumps profit, as I’ve long posited. It was more important to restrict social spaces than it was to make money. The tale everyone spins is that the internet killed malls. But that’s not really true. It was the ownership class deciding that the interests of fuddy-duddies who didn’t actually spend that much money were more important than those who purchased the most but were younger and less socially powerful.

I could not find it again, but think it was on Reddit — anyway, there was a story someone told about they and their 18-22ish-year-old friends hanging around at a Starbucks nearly every day, not being disruptive, just chilling. Then out of nowhere, the owner asked them to leave and not come back. So they did. Turned out this group and their friends who would drop by also sometimes were responsible for something like 30% of the store’s sales alone. The drop in orders was so severe that when the owner saw one of them again, he apologized profusely, gave them all a free couple of days of drinks and asked them to please, please come back.

Malls never did the “begging to come back” part. The fact is, most people are dumbasses most of the time. Mall owners are no exception.

The Other DMV

Chill Amusing, Clowns

It’s been fascinating to watch women incel themselves with tattoos. To put it in bluntest terms, tattoos decrease a woman’s dating market value greatly and mean that for women with more than one or two small ones, it reduces their chances to be with the top 1% men they want by 90 percent or more.

Then they carp about men’s “war on tattoos” and that sort of thing. They sound just like incels, often even using the same language. Strange exercise in self-harm and then complaining that you’ve made a choice and that the choice had consequences. Again, just like incels.

Chaser

Chill Clowns, Evil

I’m with Natalia. If someone grabbed my kid in public, I’d stab them in the throat and twist. And then stab them a few more times to make sure they couldn’t get up to chase me. I don’t care about their mental problems or why they’re doing it. I’m gonna live and they’re not. Simple equation.

The lefties and libs really do believe that everyone should just let the delirious vagrants and “unhoused” have some free assault, as a treat. It’s not exaggeration; it’s completely real and absolutely batshit crazy. And people wonder why mass transit ridership is falling. It’s no mystery at all, though.

Slim Slow

Chill Clowns, Lying Liars

“Slim doesn’t always mean healthy” and such claptrap is functionally equivalent to a lie, though it’s semi-true just often enough that it’s not quite a complete fabrication.

The truth of course is that being slim means someone is far more likely to be healthy and stay that way. Where the Fat Acceptance and related self-harm movements allow their nonsense to slide in is that some (a few) slim people are in fact unhealthy. Those such as anorexics, cancer patients and people with genetic defects can be svelte but on the edge of death.

This allows in the faulty logic that slim == bad. Which of course is heavily promoted by the obesity-benefting food industry in the US.

Fat Acceptance really did a number on us (with food industry financial and propaganda assistance).

Linguini

Chill Clowns, Tech

RIPE says we’re in Germany – so FireFox and Chrome says Guten Tag.

Sites and browsers seem to have no idea to get this right. Even though I am using English as my OS language and browser language, I guess because I’ve searched for enough junk in Spanish and French that Google shows me results in those languages even though I’d prefer English unless I specify otherwise.

And that’s despite not being logged into Google and blocking most things. So it means Google is using my IP to track me enough to toss French and Spanish results my way semi-randomly (I’m not usually behind VPN as it’s too slow for me).

Just give me results in English, please, unless I request something different.

Styled

Chill Clowns

I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. That said, it is amusing how he acts like a complete clown half the time and still frequently outplays his soi-disant “smarter” foes handily.

Perhaps they are not quite as bright as they think they are. Their moms were all wrong; turns out they weren’t actually the smartest boy/girl in the world.

Former

Chill Clowns, Evil

Reddit is removing links to Luigi Mangione’s manifesto.

I mean, yeah? Reddit has been censoring anything even mildly critical of the health care industry, much less actual links to a manifesto. And no, I don’t mean them tossing anything celebrating Brian Thompson’s death. Even just, “Maybe we should reform this mess” often gets deleted and the user banned.

Reddit has gone full corpo (not surprisingly now that it is a publicly-traded company).

Boot Re

Chill Clowns, Tech

Why do users seem to be mad that simple advice fixes their problems?

I’ve seen this many times over the years. I think there are a few things going on here. Most users are very insecure about their computer abilities, so when you tell them to do something simple and it works they take that as somehow calling them stupid. (Which is insane, but well, you know…users.)

And related to the above, they want some fix to be final and the problem to be fully resolved forever. They want to witness you engaging in an epic bout of troubleshooting where you call Satya Nadella himself and rewrite and recompile the Windows source code just for this one aggrieved user 1.

Of course, because they do not understand computers and how fantastically, insanely complex they are, explaining to the person experiencing a problem that a reboot or logging out and back in again is the best (and often, only) way to fix a problem they see as you not wanting to do your job 2.

So to wrap this up, when you combine insecurity, entitlement and lack of knowledge you end up with anger. Which is one of the many reasons working helpdesk is terrible.

  1. Don’t laugh. Or do. But whatever you do, I’ve gotten this exact demand when I was doing support.
  2. Another thing more than one lovely user has told me over the years.

House

Chill Clowns, Culture

Didn’t really understand how fat our country is until frequenting tinder (U.S.).

I’ve never used Tinder and never will, but this is true. We need to be just putting Ozempic in the water and in soft drinks1.

Everyone becoming house-sized was not a positive change. Combine that with horrendous tattoos and people walk around looking like fucking dumpsters for no goddamn reason at all.

  1. Yes, I know it doesn’t really work taken orally.