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#2416
I have the sneaking suspicion the worst of the badness is over, so I summarized it all now.

Idea was basically that there's no point giving blow by blow updates and depressing everyone, better to be like "look at this bullshit I survived" after the fact. And that's how it feels right now, I have been through the wringer but goddamn it I won!
#2417
Oh yeah, so: this time I'm going back to Utah and taking the goddamn train to Chicago, dropping a piece of luggage to be shipped there, then taking a bus which only lets you check two bags (hence the dropping off luggage) to Lansing.

I will never board a Greyhound again, this is the second time doing so nearly killed me.
#2418
Allow me to explain my past few days.

1: wake up to non emergency police gathering my stuff and me in a friend of an acquaintance's house in Fresno. This would be the first of February.
2: spend 4 nights in unpowered, unheated sheds in a homeless shelter. Acquire bedbugs.
3: get simultaneous offers to bankroll my escape and give me a place to go from friends.
4: bedbugs defeated by, apparently, black magic. We have no idea.
5: board a greyhound to Michigan.
6: Las Vegas sucks. It looks like a migraine and everyone acts like they aren't happy unless you have a migraine too.
7: let me just say Utah is annoying to look at in the winter snow. Fortunately I didn't have five minutes in the Salt Lake City bus station before we were crammed into a van toting a trailer. This is what passes for transit in Utah.
8: we get to Butte MT and are told all further busses east are cancelled, do not go to Billings you will die in the cold, find a hotel here
9: panic
10:friend buys a hotel room, other friend reaches out to his huge network, I am temporarily rich (I had 900 dollars before I booked all the stuff for leaving shithole USA, I still have around 250)
11: now waiting for taxi to take me to the bus station which is only open from, I kid ye not, midnight to 6pm. It's unconscionable and fucking weird too

And let me just say. There are no Ubers or Lyfts here. No DoorDash or Grubhub here. Your smartphone is a phone and nothing else as long as you are in Montana. If you can't drive, you had better be okay with taking a taxi or simply walking.

Extra fun: all this happened about one month after I nearly got human trafficked in San Bernardino. My life is a fucking mess. Hopefully this cleans it up a bit.
#2419
I tried to write a response but I can't manage it without talking about my own life choices in these areas (be good even if you don't believe you need to) vs the apparent truth in these cases (they might believe their own shit but they don't act upon it). Which just makes me sound holier than thou when I'm a foul little gremlin like everyone else.

So I'll leave it at the above for now, and mention that I wish there were an easy and snappy way to say "I'm doing better things than these people seem to have done but that doesn't mean I'm inherently any better than them."
#2420
See, the key there is that statement, "nobody can". For you that means "torch it," for me I wonder how close we can get.
#2421
Quote from: Doktor Howl on February 06, 2019, 09:35:59 PM
Quote from: nullified on February 06, 2019, 09:33:07 PM
For me, Dok, I see all of that and I'm motivated to be better than that. No one will remember my name when I die, but on the off chance someone recovers old internet records. I want my epitaph, set in digital format: "She tried at least."

Because you're absolutely right. And I think you're going to be right forever. But as long as I see a way to be a better person, I'll be damned if I'm gonna stop trying my hardest to do so. It's tilting at windmills, but so is everything in this life. So, I might as well be happy with /myself/, even if everyone else knows as well as I do that it's pointless wank.

The good news is that "forever" means "somewhere between 20-100 years", because not only are humans essentially evil, they're also dumb as fuck and shit in their own nest.

The only justification for human survival is to go out to the stars and make sure everything else in the galaxy is dead before we go extinct, because it would be nice for the place to be tidy.

There's always baseless, pointless hope for collective self improvement.

What?

I never said I was doing this for realistic reasons.
#2422
For me, Dok, I see all of that and I'm motivated to be better than that. No one will remember my name when I die, but on the off chance someone recovers old internet records. I want my epitaph, set in digital format: "She tried at least."

Because you're absolutely right. And I think you're going to be right forever. But as long as I see a way to be a better person, I'll be damned if I'm gonna stop trying my hardest to do so. It's tilting at windmills, but so is everything in this life. So, I might as well be happy with /myself/, even if everyone else knows as well as I do that it's pointless wank.
#2423
That's one way to look at it, Roger. I have always approached it as: this media has problems and it's my duty to know them if I want to enjoy the media.

Lovecraft was racist and I think he was a shitty author. But Hodgson was just as racist and an excellent author. I can be aware of the racism rather than passively accepting it, and still consume it "as what it is". I think most relatively progressive people who read famous authors of the last century do that same sorta thing, not like they have a choice.

Because it's as you say. There is no wholly non problematic media. Everything is fucked, all the way back. The only way to move forward without burning the whole of human culture is to be aware of the problems and try not to repeat them. And well make new and different mistakes in the process, and our descendants will keep that steady trudge forward.

And I don't feel like this endless cycle is hopeless. No end goal doesn't mean it isn't worth improving our cultural output at all.

All of this, though? Just my opinion. YMMV.
#2424
Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / Re: Noise
February 04, 2019, 09:37:45 PM
Quote from: Con-troll on February 04, 2019, 09:21:29 PM

So speak. With a silent, slow, low, calming voice.

That kills the noise.

I like to follow that up with yelling really loud.
#2425
Also, if you have any smokers, keep the ashes. They can be used to scrub down surfaces so the soap can be saved for hands.

Seriously consider a few spools of steel wire and an acetylene torch as well. Steel wire and sufficient heat makes a wide variety of good little tools and minor "bandaid" repairs on the fly, and if it gets bad enough you need any of this stuff, I promise hardware stores will be desolate places, ransacked to the bare bones.
#2426
Quote from: Doktor Howl on January 31, 2019, 03:52:18 AM
Me:  "They called me MAD."

Billy:  "..."

Can we have context, or would it spoil the party?
#2427
To be fair there, I'm still in mild disbelief that Pelosi had one solid vertebra, let alone the relatively complete spine put on display. If I could deny my eyes, I'd say it was nothing to do with her or Chuck "I will roll over if you make the little finger motion and won't even ask for a treat" Schumer.

Unfortunately, I'm cursed to believe that events I watch happen are actually happening.
#2428
Quote from: Doktor Howl on January 30, 2019, 01:01:11 AM
Unrelated:  tmw you see someone you respected sail away on a wave of blatantly false populism.

"TEH WORKURZ ENDED TEH SHUTDOWN SUCCEZZFULLY"

This sucks, every goddamn time. I've lost more people than I have appendages that way. (Not necessarily populism alone, but the whole general deal of people buying into bullshit with their entire life savings.)
#2429
Quote from: Trivial on January 27, 2019, 02:37:37 AM
Friend of mine was asking for money for a mission trip to evangelize to the heathen country of Finland...

Issues::

1) They're already mostly some flavor of Christian.
2) This time of the year it's dark and they're drunk.

At least this is what my Finnish co-worker told me.

I can confirm both of these thanks to my friend who lives there. She doesn't drink but the booze scent is enough that she is drunk anyway.
#2430
Quote from: Cain on January 26, 2019, 05:30:08 PM
I think you mean "fiddling while Rome burns"?

Rome is built on 7 hills, but that aside...

That's the one, yeah. Sorry about that.