Miss Mary Mack.

I hear she dressed in black with silver buttons down her back.

The girl arts. Double dutch, the hand games like Miss Mary Mack and Bisquick, stuff girls seemed to spontaneously do that boys had nothing to do with. It feels like, when I was 6, the girls around me were always teaching each other stuff like that, and then by the time I was 16 it had transformed into teaching each other the cha cha slide. Done well those hand clap games and such could be impressive to watch.

Okay, so back in the 1990s Charter Medical Corporation ran a suicide prevention hotline with the number 1-800-CHARTER. They ran a massive TV ad campaign with the tagline “If you don’t get help at Charter, please, get help somewhere.” These commercials ran on daytime TV so they were a little…oblique. Euphemistic. So that children wouldn’t understand them. So we didn’t.

Around that time, it was popular slang among teh youthz to say “you need help” as a way of calling someone stupid. You can hear one of Roger’s daughters say it in the first Lethal Weapon movie in response to his attempt at rapping.

And of course, people who “need help” should call Charter. So in the 1990’s there was a fad of us school kids calling each other stupid by saying “You need to call Charter.” And I wonder how local that was, I know at least two elementary schools in my county did that. American Millennials, do you remember this?

“oil”

I’m sick of this lie that the internet isn’t real.

Have you ever heard it said that character is who you are in the dark? Kind of a Jungian take, the whole “you change your persona depending on environment and company, you’re only ever your true self when you think nobody’s watching.”

Well, I think the internet is “in the dark.” It brings out the actual in people.

Confirmed.

IIRC some restaurants were flavoring their oil with horse tallow.

pneumatic staple gun.

“communism” devolves faster, is basically my thesis statement. I say, as an owner of a lot of power tools.

Boys will be boys.

To port over a semantic argument from elsewhere on Lemmy:

You know the phrase “own the means of production?” A phrase I’ve been taught to associate with communism is “the workers shall own the means of production.”

Well, ‘the workers’ means ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ means ‘the public’, and anything owned by ‘the public’ is actually owned by ‘the government’ and ‘the government’ is controlled by ‘the elites.’ Which is why any communist nation falls immediately to despotism, the instant you actually form your communist government the elites are in 100% control.

I’ve argued with someone on here before on the difference between a free market economy and capitalism. I was taught in a free market economy, private individuals own the means of production. An individual has his tools, he works, and trades goods or services to others at prices set by the laws of supply and demand. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production, a capitalist is a wealthy individual who invests that wealth - or capital - in ventures with an aim to make a profit. The boss owns the tools and pays workers a wage. The American system has sloshed around between those two extremes since the industrial revolution, periods like the early 20th century trusts and robber barons and…now, where large corporations headed by a very few very wealthy individuals own basically everything, and periods like the 50’s and 90’s when smaller startups in exciting new fields were springing up. The former are the closest we come to the elites owning the means of production, and it tends to be a terrible time to be alive for the average citizen, the latter are the closest I think humanity has come to “the people” meaning individuals at large actually owning the means of production.

Neither system “lifted millions out of poverty.” Neither capitalism or communism has the means or motive to do that. Industrialization did that. Turns out, improving the reliability and quality of food, water, tools and medicine increases the population’s standard of living.

Go to Wendy’s and get a 4 for $4 add bacon. bacon cheeseburger, nuggets and fries. That counds as three.

It has gotten almost impossible to find a practical pickup truck. they’re all giant penis enhancent vehicles.

Some aspects of streamer culture I get, I do not understand vtuber culture. Youtube started recommending one to me because apparently played a video game I like and watch videos about, and…as far as I can tell her job is to be professionally sexually harassed. Like, men used to whistle at showgirls in saloons, now they throw virtual acorns at anime girls to “nut on” them.

Fun part is her mom apparently found out, and participates.

There are a few reasons why I’ll watch a stream or let’s play of a video game:

1. the sports angle. If you like to play a game, be it basketball or A Link to the Past, watching someone else play it extremely well can be gratifying.

2. Additional performance. Streamers themselves are characters, watching someone react to the game can be compelling in a way that’s difficult to describe.

3. Rediscovery. Watching someone play a video game I know well can help me see it through fresh eyes. I can never play A Link to the Past for the first time again, but watching someone play it for the first time can help revisit that experience.

Go get The Good Place on DVD.

low rise pants or see through electronics?

Caffeine. It’s perhaps a boring answer but I have a physical dependence on caffeine.

That’s something I’ve noticed in the US as well; gas stations are all over creation, easily visible, they have giant signs along interstates. I’m familiar with several long stretches of major highways and interstates, I could not take you to a charging station off the top of my head, nor do I think I could find one by highway signage like I can a gas station. I’m sure they exist but they haven’t called my attention to themselves.

Or because he’s a cat that is near lemons. Citrus is very bad for cats and they HATE the smell.

Oh man, reminds me of kissthisguy.com. Back when the internet was still run by humans.

Tell you one I recently realized: Chattanooga Choo Choo. I don’t know who the “original” artist of that one was, it’s been a country-western staple for awhile. Came back into my attention recently because I was rewatching Hyce & KaN’s Let’s Podcast of Railroads Online, and one of several backing tracks is an instrumental version, so the song got stuck in my head. Singing it while doing dishes, I got to a lyric I never understood, and looked it up.

The lyric I heard:

There’s gonna be a certain party at the station

Satin and lace, a hustacauphanie face

I…didn’t know what “hustacauphanie” meant. My brain did that thing where I assume a word exists I’m not familiar with. Like, you know how sometimes women’s skin is compared to alabaster? Hustacauphanie might have been dead people talk for some luxurious or exotic material or…something. So I looked it up. The actual lyric is:

There’s gonna be a certain party at the station,

Satin and lace, I used to call ‘funny face’

The songwriter managed to pack the entire second act of It’s A Wonderful Life into half a lyric. We don’t have compression algorithms that good anymore.