Got_Bent
@Got_Bent@lemmy.world
- Comment on Smoking PSA 2 months ago:
And the synthesizers in the eighties were nothing like moogs
- Comment on Smoking PSA 2 months ago:
They existed and were more of a new wave instrument at the time, but not heavily used in rock like that.
I was unaware of Brownsville Station when I was eleven.
Sorry to have failed your class professor.
We couldn’t all be Jack Black in high fidelity at that age.
- Comment on Smoking PSA 2 months ago:
I believe I was in sixth grade when that album came out.
First of all, it used a whole lot of synthesizers, which were pretty new technology at the time, and I felt like I was living in the future when I heard it.
As to the album cover, it somehow didn’t register with my that it was a baby smoking.
Rather, it made me think of teenagers smoking in the high school bathroom.
Motley Crue’s Smokin in the Boys Room came out a year later, so I don’t think that influenced my mental image.
- Comment on Could an American please prove me wrong? 2 months ago:
I believe that’s the European Union free trade zone for bidets and electric kettles. Metric cash only, please.
- Comment on Andrew Greenberg, co-creator of the classic RPG Wizardry, has passed away 2 months ago:
Wizardry was great. I’ll never understand how I lived in one of those ultra religious eighties homes that wouldn’t let me play D&D but wizardry, Ultima, and bards tale were just fine.
- Comment on Why does the USA have so few legal protections for ordinary people, and how can we change that? 2 months ago:
I’d wager that his lease has a mandatory arbitration clause that requires him to pay to front then try to get it back via arbitors chosen by the landlord.
- Comment on Chatbots offer cops the “ultimate out” to spin police reports, expert says 2 months ago:
Hell they already submit plenty of pseudoscience as evidence that juries lap up like a pack of dehydrated wolves in the desert. Why not add some worthless text that shows the officer in a sublime light as well?
- Comment on DuckDuckGoose 2 months ago:
Not in computers. I’m an accountant. I don’t have enough money to throw the double middle fingers. Can somebody please, for the love of all that’s holy, show me the way out or, you know, come sneak onto my property when I’m not looking and delete me?
- Comment on DuckDuckGoose 2 months ago:
There were a bunch of geese around my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. God those things would torment me. They had free range of the property and I turned to completely avoid the area they hung out because they were hyper aggressive and would chase after me every time I got anywhere near them. I was six years old, so it felt like they were as tall as me and they were definitely faster.
It wasn’t so bad once I got a little older, a little taller, and relied more on my bicycle than my feet for movement.
Nonetheless, those things gave me childhood trauma to the extent that I still can’t stand geese some forty five years later.
- Comment on Facebook 2 months ago:
I remember when Facebook was solely for college students. Now it seems to have a three denture minimum.
- Comment on Use Zotero 2 months ago:
I’m so old that the last time I wrote a research paper, it was on a word processor with no Internet connection or spell check.
Given such constraints, I can’t fathom the concept of waiting until the end to add all the references. If I didn’t do it as I went, I’d have surely died.
- Comment on Malk? 2 months ago:
No good story ever began with a glass of milk.
Anthony Burgess: Hold my milk plus.
- Comment on Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports 2 months ago:
I misread tone on the upset part then. All due apologies for that one.
- Comment on Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports 2 months ago:
Just like paid streaming services, Reddit, Twitter, etc., they’re free to charge as much as they want, bilk mountains of money out of people while simultaneously selling out their personal data and content.
But they won’t take my money or my data.
That’s the only thing I can control, so I do.
You seem upset that I pointed any of this out. Not sure why. I was a rabid baseball fan growing up and was fortunate enough to have both American and National League teams to go watch. I could afford to attend several games each year by mowing lawns as a teenager.
Today, with considerably more income, it’s more financially difficult to attend a game than it was when I was a ragtag odd job teenager.
Since spectator sports are not a necessity, and I personally think they cost too much, I chose to cease my attendance.
You do you. Won’t bother me.
- Comment on Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports 2 months ago:
Everything is on TV
Ticket prices are on par with a mortgage payment
Parking prices are on par with a day’s pay
Concessions damn near require financing
And let’s treat every person who comes through the gates like a terrorist
WHY IS ATTENDANCE DOWN?
(Not that they care since the sweet sweet luxury boxes bring in a ton of revenue)
Last professional sporting event I attended was in 2013.
Last time I paid to attend a professional sporting event was in 2005.
I just see no reason to bother with it.
- Comment on X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders 2 months ago:
PayPal was so far ahead of the curve. I’ve actively avoided using them for a long because of something that happened many years ago. I sense that young people see it as a boomer app.
PayPal could’ve been the big bank of the Internet and they fucked it up.
- Comment on Shart, not fart 3 months ago:
She died first
- Comment on NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation 3 months ago:
Shitty Boeing aside, how are they eating up there? I don’t know anything about space station food logistics, but if a planned week has turned into ten weeks, surely there must be a resource strain.
- Comment on Have you ever realized just how broken you are? 3 months ago:
I spent several months last year actively looking for a therapist. I’m not talking a single casual Google search and done. I’m talking months of calling, emailing, physically driving to. The only therapists I could find who were taking on new patients and would accept my insurance were magic Jesus Crystal types whose “therapy” was little more than thinly veiled proselytizing.
Given how it seems people need to go through several therapists to find the right one, I gave up after failing to secure the first.
I almost fell for that whole better help scam but fortunately it was exposed for the personal data mining nonsense that it is before I signed up.
- Comment on Have you ever realized just how broken you are? 3 months ago:
I learned of my father’s death weeks after the fact. My involuntary reaction was an emotionless, “huh.” I think I was forty eight years old at the time.
I hadn’t spoken to him for over thirty years, and had suffered decades of nightmares that he’d found me.
After learning he had passed, the nightmares finally ended, but the lifelong fight or flight tendency to keep to myself and never rock any boat remains.
My sister has said that she’s jealous of my daughter because we have a pretty close father/daughter bond - something my sister never knew and never will.
In my fifties now, I generally avoid human interaction as much as is physically possible. While I could cite other reasons as to why I’m this way, I can confidently point a rigididly extended index finger at dear old dad as the foundation of it all.
My parenting duties complete, I mostly just exist waiting for the sweet sweet embrace of death when I’ll no longer have to go make money for the man or pretend that I enjoy the saccharin sweet small talk of co-workers who don’t give two shits about me or anybody else, but professional decorum for the win, right?
I don’t even look forward to weekends because those are just two day stints of solitude doing chores so I’m ready to go make more money for the man on Monday.
- Comment on Someone has been pedaling Viagra at the bingo hall 3 months ago:
Can’t really get a solid grasp of the place via search. Can you explain?
- Comment on Someone has been pedaling Viagra at the bingo hall 3 months ago:
There was a gay bar not to far from me that used to do drag queen bingo brunch, so this doesn’t seem too far off a stretch, though I’d suspect our delightful Texas State government would find reason to criminalize it were somebody to try doing it here.
I never got around to going to the drag queen bingo brunch, so I don’t know if it was for cash. Knowing how Texas works, it was probably for low value prizes.
- Comment on I've heard it clears up again after the first wave of divorces 3 months ago:
No. No it does not.
- Comment on Kids 3 months ago:
We don’t do that.
My kid is twenty three years old. I raised her alone. Crazy, I know, but she and I are pretty close.
To this day, I get dozens of adulating text messages on mother’s Day for “playing both roles.”
On Father’s Day, total utter crickets except from my daughter herself.
Fathers are here to donate sperm and fund other lives. That’s it.
- Comment on Kids 3 months ago:
I was both of those dads.
“Go get me a beer and let’s figure out the answer to your question!”
- Comment on Sign of the times? 3 months ago:
Yeah mine was 1980. Didn’t know they kept it in that long!
- Comment on Sign of the times? 3 months ago:
I remember when I was a kid, the Guinness book of world records had an entry for most cigarettes smoked at once. There was a picture of a guy with a whole bunch of cigarettes stuffed in his mouth smoking them. Great reading material for kids back then.
- Comment on Defense 3 months ago:
Hoofta.
Not that I need to tell anybody here, but if there’s an arena with bigger egos than politics, it’s academia. I’d pay money just to watch the carnage.
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 3 months ago:
I know it’s hard to imagine since you’ve pretty much got to pay to exist anywhere today, but malls were a place to just exist. I spent hours and hours wandering around the mall in the eighties without any money.
Expanding on the thought, it was perfectly ok to be, get this, a TEENAGER existing without any money in a mall!
- Comment on How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet 3 months ago:
That’s how I try to describe growing up with it when people ask why I don’t to to church or subscribe to any religion.
Aside from the many other aspects of it, even as a child, I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be so enthusiastically smug that I belonged to this thing that seemed to exist only to impose rules on everything imaginable and that those rules would invariably be against anything even remotely fun or pleasurable. Hell we couldn’t even use most spices; thanks Dr Kellogg.
At age six or so I legitimately perceived it to be sinful to smile or laugh for fear I’d be punished because there would be some arbitrary rule that whatever caused me to smile or laugh was too worldly.
Fuck that. I’ll be miserable and curmudgeonly on my own terms!