Pray with me.

Smile for the hidden camera, you have been pranked! You thought it was indica, but in fact it was the mythical, elusive cannabis rutica!

You know, cannabis rutica, the one which Harrison Ford allegedly brought to the production of Star Wars in 1976, and which Carrie Fisher later blamed for being unable to recall most of her time on set during that period, under the spell and fog of that ol’ rutica magic.

Gotta hand it to Harrison Ford and his California carpentry buddies, with all their logging and crazy strong weed contacts up north in Humboldt County!

In so much of this cookie-cutter “hip” newer housing, it’s either this or a dangerously steep angle, sometimes even both at the same time.

Enshittified architects building enshittified spaces thinking only of how it looks, not how it’s supposed to be lived in with safety and comfort from Day Two onward, the novelty wears off very quickly and you’re stuck with an unnecessarily, potentially deadly space.

The difference between a shithead like this, and any and all sane people, is that sane people could see this unnecessary shitstorm approaching from afar, while these stunted minds only seem to be able to see things only after things smack then in the face.
Fuck him, all his ilk and the greedy, myopic, ignorant goddamned boat they rode one.

Yep, this is the one I was scrolling down to find.

Godfather.
Godfather 2.
The Conversation.
Dog Day Afternoon.
The Deer Hunter.

All five Best Picture Oscar nominees, three winners.

“I am at the center of god’s universe!”
From your narcissistic, myopic perspective with no depth, sure, that’s what you see. But from where we’re standing, you’re just another idiot, and you’re dead.

the vast majority of US citizens are abjectly fucking stupid who have no clear understanding how absolutely anything works or any understanding of how consequences follow actions

This happens both equally with the maga batshit crazy voters, and the narcissistic “my vote is a pure and delicate flower”/“bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL” non-voters.

Which is of course exploited by bad-faith actors pushing these lazy idiots back down on the couch and stroking their hollow vanity, to not do what they already didn’t want to do - doing the homework instead of just getting their “facts” from twitter or tiktok or whatever, taking the time and effort to register and vote, if just once a year, or at the very least once every two years for the midterms.

These idiots want instant results, have not a shred of a clue as to what political inertia is; just as medieval as maga, they want a political messiah with a magic political wand.

The 2010 midterms proved that these fickle mediocre idiots did NOT have Obama’s back, and lazily initiated a cascade that drowned their own future, rewarded the fascists for their virulent hysterical opposition, and to this day remain mindlessly, narcissistically oblivious to the fact.
Their mediocre motto as a mediocre electoral block is “If at first you don’t succeed, give up.”

So much of the world has rightly lost all faith in the intelligence and decency of the average american. As in - they have none, distractedly and lovingly fondling their purity, then sniffing their fingers and picking their teeth with those nails.

SEA and Astrum

Can confirm. The one thing that bugs me about Astrum is the clickbaity titles (along the lines of “The Image That Shocked NASA Scientists!”, that sort of thing), but don’t let that turn you off and away, the content is solid and the tone is much more grounded than those stupid faux-populist titles, which I’m sure the author chooses to gain traction with YouTube’s skewed algorithmic tyranny.

Another channel I’d love to add here is ParallaxNick, who does astronomy and science history videos, this man is a poet and a scholar, deserves a million subscribers and more.

No wonder Saruman started getting weird.

Kessel Run. In less than 12 parsecs.

That’s actually quite an interestingly accurate one, considering that something like 95% of Egyptians live near the Nile River, and anywhere that is NOT near the Nile is desert wasteland.

Other accurate analogies would be anywhere in Canada that is NOT near its’ southern border, or nearly anywhere/everywhere in inland Australia, they call it the Outback for a reason.

In the past week on YouTube, on channels about math and physics, I started getting a constant bombardment of online casino ads. The predatory enshittification is intense anywhere you look.

Wolf say we all

Probably the hope, not completely unfounded, that the migration from one “legacy” (from the 00s) platform to a more recent alternative service - twitter to Bluesky - will help inspire people in other legacy platforms to also realize that alternatives do exist now, they are part of a broader conversation that they weren’t a part of even two years ago.

Even a year and a half ago, this place felt like it hadn’t yet installed the drywall, the wiring and tubing was incomplete. Now it feels more seamless, ready for a spurt of growth.

“Hey… Bluesky isn’t all that bad, I’m glad to be out of the clutches of a billionaire asshole, and not feel utterly lost here”, now cue what OP believes a number of people will also think: “Hmm… maybe I’ll check out Lemmy, too. See what the alternative to reddit is like.”

Some of them could have tried it, didn’t like it, might come back and be like: “Hey, Lemmy’s not too bad since last I last looked a year ago”, and here’s a clincher that definitely wasn’t here a year and a half ago: “The app works pretty good”, and there are a lot of new apps, having a choice gives a sense and weight of legitimacy.

Great, now I’m seeing “teim” and not “team”.

Which reminds me of Mexican 7-Up knockoff Teem, which used to be in all the taco stands decades ago. Whatever happened to Teem? One day it was gone and no one seemed to notice it. It disappeared and life carried right on.
Did it disappear right around the time Sprite started showing up everywhere? I can’t remember.

Anyway, there’s no “i” in Teem. Carry on!

The “Stressed” one should actually be something along the lines of “Cold-blooded cruel”, I remember that scene from Vampire’s Kiss.

Smile bro, I’m posting this on Tiktok!

that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup

Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn’t even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.

Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - “Hmm… Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I’ll go to 7-11”, and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus… like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.

Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie “Please Let Me Die” Pie, even less often than you do!

Imagine if McDonald’s had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn’t happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?

Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level…

When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave’s Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.

Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in… Monterrey I think it was… they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.

So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave’s Kitchen. Poof… gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine… instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.

Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see… why the other ones had gone, I guess?

Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn’t leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.