China will be the dominant world superpower for a while and their standard of living will drastically increase. Middle East will be unlikely to stabilize any time soon. Africa might be put into play as serious economic competitors to fill the gap in skilled labor and services that the United States will leave behind in its wake. South America might finally have a chance to heal from the destructive regime meddling of the USA.

Cut out social media from your life completely. No, I swear to god, this is life changing advice not some boomer platitudes about how kids these days are always in their phones.

You don’t realize how much life you are missing by being completely stuck to your phone. I promise the world will continue to turn if you ignore your phone for a few hours at a time.

Quit Facebook, quit Instagram, quit X, quit TikTok. If you feel like you are bored and want to open the apps, try something else. Read a book, start a creative writing project, listen to music while meditating, play video games, do some woodworking, go for a walk or a hike with your dog, learn a new language, go out to the bar or club and socialize, go to the gym and work out, draw stuff from your imagination.

I promise promise promise you will feel better. Not right away, but very soon after you start doing these things instead of the vapid doomscrolling, shitposting, clout-chasing, self-aggrandizing social media spiral you will realize that you don’t need your phone. You are able to live your best life when you aren’t thinking about what’s being posted online or taking constant selfies or photographing every meal you eat.

Your future self will thank me.

Not only is this a ripoff, but traveling to the United States right now from literally any foreign country is a terrible idea.

If you get picked up off the street by the secret police, there’s nobody who can come to your aid at that point.

I believe the Ayatollah already has one on him.

Also also pictured: a framed photo of him doing the fist pump after his failed assassination. Also one of those hats says Trump 2028.

I fucking hate this man with all of my body and soul. Fuck every last person who voted for this cunt.

The story changed since the first it was reported. The news said it was a group of 10 teenagers who were trying to carjack him. Then as soon as someone with more than two functioning brain cells thought to ask the logical question about how 10 teens were going to clown car their way into a vehicle to go joyriding, the story changed to a group of teens who wanted to rape his girlfriend and he pushed her into the car to protect her.

I don’t believe any of this horseshit. The dude calls himself Big Balls, so you know he’s a caustic little shit who probably talks a big game but can’t back it up when people get physical with him IRL. Wouldn’t be surprised if he picked the fight and the photo of him with a nosebleed was used as a propaganda photo op, complete with a fabricated story about a “group” of criminal teenagers who assaulted him.

Another 1 million Russian soldiers into the meat grinder it is, then.

He could be the Cincinnatus of our time. Trump proved you don’t need qualifications to do the job, so why not pick someone who has demonstrated that they are willing to fight for the average American without an expectation of a reward? Rather than some business tycoon sociopath who wants to run the country like a business and promptly bankrupt it.

Shh, just play dumb. Let them think they are so smart for figuring it out. Feed them climate change data and tell them there’s something suspicious about it all. I don’t care if they take credit for fixing it, just as long as it gets done.

If you’re rebadging your Tesla because you feel some second hand shame for owning one now that it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Elon Musk is a literal Nazi, just sell it and buy a different EV.

…he was, though? We funded the Mujahideen to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then when the USSR collapsed we cut him loose to get all chummy with the Saudi government so we could get that cheap oil.

Ravioli ravioli, give me the formuoli.

I was just talking about this with a friend the other day, but it’s really not worth it to go to these fast food places anymore even if you do like the food. I remember when, speaking to my friend, we would go to BK in high school and get a couple of “buck doubles”, because Burger King used to run a promotion where you could get two double cheeseburgers for two dollars. It was honestly a great deal. Then the shrinkflation kicked in and over time the size of the food became smaller and smaller. Then, the actual currency inflation hit, and fast food companies used the increased price of beef, chicken and other such ingredients as an excuse to gouge the hell out of their prices. Now, if I were to go to BK and get my usual fare, I would be lucky to leave paying less than $16. For like, $4 extra (not including tip) I could go to the Chili’s across the street and get an actual restaurant quality burger, and a side, and a beverage and be more than satisfied.

These fast food places are completely off their rocker if they think these prices are reasonable. Inflation is going down, so we as consumers need to stop buying their shit so they can’t justify keeping prices so insanely high. McDonalds and other fast food places are the biggest bulk purchaser of raw ingredients, so you bet that they have an insane amount of negotiating power to convince farmers and ranchers to supply the stuff they need for below market rate in bulk quantities.

If you are really craving that unique fast food flavor that you can only get at your favorite chain, let me tell you, there are YouTube channels with copycat recipes that can be made quicker and cheaper than the time it takes to drive to the nearest chain location, order, pay, get your food, leave, and come back to your house to eat it. And they taste almost the same or better in most cases because you make it yourself so you can add as much of the flavorful stuff as you want.

This is a Safeway, and those signs are at the ends of the aisle, so no, he didn’t just conveniently crop out more aisle that says dairy. The dairy section is usually open air chillers, not closed refrigeration units like this.

Some Safeway stores are ancient and too small to carry all the product people expect to be able to find these days, so they put stuff in nutty locations like this from time to time.

In the entire time I used Honey, I never once got a valid coupon code for literally anything. Pretty sure they scraped a ton of my browsing data though.

Congrats bro! I’m happy for you and also a bit jealous 😁

Good point on the ethics issue. Youngsters these days don’t know what hard games really are. Games used to be diabolically hard, design holdovers from when quarter-munching games moved to home consoles and every game you paid full price for was essentially a gamble on whether or not it was going to be good or even playable, but finishable was almost not a consideration back then because it was pretty rare to actually ckear a game from start to end.

These days to think it’s important and walk a line between challenging and entertaining not just for the sake of capturing a larger market share of players, but also to avoid bad publicity from having a game be too difficult to o complete.

Aw, but all my other bones are so low maintenance.

Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

I got accused of this the other day. Some random on Steam added me because he liked my profile pic. I was bored and decided to humor him. Two sentences in and he’s like “What’s with the ChatGPT sounding responses?”.

I honestly didn’t know how to react to that.