The chipmunks were cute and didn't hurt nothing (though their pre-dawn chittering was fuckin loud for how little they are, would wake us up even with the windows closed) but the squirrels were true assholes. We invested lord knows how much money into squirrel proof feeders and they would retaliate by eventually getting around the defenses and then knocking the shit down on the ground so they could empty our feeders in an afternoon. They would rip open the suet cages and just drag the whole block up into a tree and gorge themselves on it, and if they couldn't open the cage they'd steal it in the cage lol

Even my wife, who is like a disney princess and wants to go find a clearing and sing and cuddle all the animals, would chuck hickory nut shells at them whenever she was out there so the birds got something.

I got flamed to oblivion when I said that it's stunning how many people will gladly allow any old app onto their phone and have access to their data and scrape their life patterns in order to get like 2 for 1 fucking McDoubles or something.

Used to be when they wanted marketing data they paid professional firms to go out and perform scientific research and compensated people for participating in the study. Now they just throw a 50% off coupon at someone that they may or may not even use and people are like "Here's all my location data for the last month as well as all my contacts and hell why not be able to use my camera and microphone too fuck it, 50% off a Happy Meal is just too much to pass up"

I've literally gotten up and left a restaurant before for not having menus. A QR code on a stand on the table that takes you to a fuckin PDF download...fuck outta here with that bullshit.

I didnt get lactose intolerance until I was in my 30s. So weird that my body just decided "Nah, Im good with dairy products" all on it's own.

Really wish I would have discovered that earlier in life, before I developed my crippling cocoa pebbles addiction.

My last house bordered on a big undeveloped green space; we had , as we called them, 'owl years' and 'bunny years'. You could see the pattern clear as day and predict it to a certain extent. If there were a ton of bunnies out in our yard at dusk in the spring, the following year was going to be an owl year, ostensibly because the eating was real good. If there were hardly any bunnies out there, the following year was almost definitely going to be a bunny year because the owls moved on or starved over the winter.

But there was no balance, that's the weird thing. It was almost binary...but it wasn't directly cyclical. We would know by early spring if this was going to be one of those "we need to put fencing around every single flower and plant in our garden" years, or if there were enough owls around to eat all the bunnies and give our garden a break, but it didn't alternate in any pattern we could tell. We just had to wait and see how many bunnies we had out there at dusk. There were far more bunny years than owl years, but whereas in owl years you would hear them out there hooting all night long, in bunny years...nothing.

Tangentially...it was always a squirrel year. IDK if the owls didn't care for squirrel or what but only the bunnies and the owls were locked into this relationship...the chipmunks and squirrels were unaffected. The owls just really only wanted bunnies I guess lol.

That's what I've been screaming about AI since the beginning.

Take self checkout kiosks for example. Anyone that is old enough to remember what the grocery store was like before the kiosks would know how much faster a human cashier was then the stupid fucking machine. There was no tabbing through 20 screens of fruit to find the plantains, there was no "sorry you have to scan every pencil individually and place them in the bag one by one because we can't do multiples", and there was never, ever, an unexpected item in the bagging area.

The doctor I go to has replaced all their front office staff with self check-in kiosks. You cannot check in with a person anymore. If you are unable to use the machine you have to press a special button and wait for someone to come from the back and press the buttons on the kiosk for you. The time to check in for an appointment with the person used to take under a minute. The kiosk takes 10+ and has a 25% error rate.

But none of that matters, because the machines don't draw a paycheck, and they don't care about anything else.

man im so jelly. anytime i get more adventurous than salt and maybe a teeny tiny bit of pepper my insides turn to lava and I spend at least a couple hours expelling hot fire from my anus afterwards. :(

I am the physical embodiment of vanilla, at least culinarily speaking lmao

Ditto!

Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.

So....fuck em.