5434a
8mo ago
Going okay but currently hampered by my lack of adequate tools and workspace. Slow but steady progress.
5434a
8mo ago
I've got a couple of things housemates who worked in similar sectors have left behind but honestly most B2B swag seems kind of shitty, although that might have been due to their entry level positions. Stationery. Toys. T-shirts. Nothing you'd really miss (so you leave it behind), and more like a grown up version of the stuff you would have found included directly inside every box of cereal. I suppose it's a different affair if you manage a multi-million dollar budget.
I refuse any loyalty points scheme more complex than "collect 10 stamps to claim a free coffee".
5434a
8mo ago
That's close, but I mean more along the lines of:
Packet of branded food item (coffee, cereal, yoghurt, soft drink, snack, etc)
"Collect X proofs of purchase and get a free Y!"
And the free Y is something durable and/or worthwhile, and the X proofs is realistic, not triple digits. Or if it's triple digits the Y has real monetary value like a games console. The branded items running the promotion were available in every shop, so it was designed to cultivate brand loyalty rather than loyalty to a chain of shops. Stamps were more agnostic about what you purchased and tend to be limited to one chain or a small consortium.
I suppose most marketing campaigns have transferred to apps, loyalty schemes and other sign up lists, but I get the impression those are focused on discounts and other volume sales promotions rather than straight up material freebies.
5434a
8mo ago
I'm an in-and-out, follow the list, know the layout, largely own-brand supermarket shopper who pays the minimum necessary attention to packaging. Years of internet content have made me selectively blind to anything less attention grabbing than literal naked women (and even then...). But I was lying in bed yesterday reminiscing on being a broke student and getting a "free" Bodum cafetiere by collecting something trivial like two empty coffee packets plus P+P, and some other similar giveaways that I still have in the kitchen cupboard.
Do retail suppliers still do those promotions, or was it a golden age of economic abundance and marketing largesse? What's the best thing you've got from a retail promotion? What do you still regularly use that came as a freebie?
The only one I can think of having seen lately is the tokens on branded yoghurt, which I ignored for years until I one day I caved in to curiosity and looked up the details of the offer. Turns out you basically need to be a commercial kitchen consuming gallons of yoghurt every day to make it remotely worthwhile, and IIRC the offers were split between consumable cross-marketing crap like a sample bottle of artisan moisturiser (which you still needed far too many tokens for) and then jumped up to a weekend in a fully catered holiday cottage, with very little in between.
5434a
8mo ago
Beat them to the punch and send them a brief message on the day-of to cancel.
I'm joking of course but psychology and dating is so counterintuitive it would probably work.
5434a
8mo ago
I think you're being overly cautious and perfect's-the-enemy-of-good but fair play, you've considered that suggestion and it doesn't work for you. All I'd say is that for any bootstraps enterprise to work you're better thinking of it like a penniless illegal immigrant would approach it, ie bending the rules, delay spending until you've got the work assured, bargain hunting for materials, and starting with the small jobs no one else wants.
Magic man repairs, maybe? That looks like a basic/niche kit could fit in a backpack, there's no end of broken shit for free you can take home to practice on and then throw out again, and people pay top dollar to avoid redoing expensive work. Just an idea.
My underlying point was that identifying practical issues and potentially overcoming them to achieve a material result is more productive and stimulating than reading a book, writing a song, lifting some weights or listening to a preacher. It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon. Admittedly that's a lot harder if you need it to be profitable but it's potentially more rewarding too. Chin up.
5434a
8mo ago
name some role models off the top of their head, those people are going to be very famous
Those are figures, not roles. A role per the examples offered would be actor, footballer, and whatever Ted Lasso is. You can't play the role of being Marcus Rashford, but you can play the role of being a footballer and associate other pro-social behaviours like fair play, fitness, practice and respecting the rules with that role.
Influencer is a shitty role because the common behaviours are a blend of populism and commercialism by the nature of the business. Good editing and production skills aren't the basis for a society.
a lot of young men who want to be progressive without a reliable script to follow
The difficulty progressives have with promoting more general role models (train driver, doctor, policeman(!)) is the ""problematic"" nature of lauding people who work hard and take responsibility. It's too close to the small c conservative script of studying hard, working hard, following the rules, saving your money, having kids and raising them right.
The progressive role models are often more akin to radical activists of one stripe or another who rebelled against what society told them they should do... ironically like Andrew Tate.
It's like it's not enough for a plain old teacher to instill good study habits, they have to instill Critical Theories too. Just look at the flack Katharine Burbalsingh catches for being a non-white woman who opens a school in a deprived area and turns it into an academic success story through presenting high expectations for her students, or hardship afflicted single mother and feminist turned squillionaire children's author JK Rowling. In progressive's eyes Marcus Rashford isn't popular for his personal success, he's popular because he scored one for team social justice against the Conservative government. Stormzy raps about spunking on your girlfriend's face after going church but he also dropped that angry outburst for the social justice crew dem about Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. Those are the roles they're promoting.
5434a
8mo ago
I'm content to attribute it to a glitch on my end. Just checked and I do indeed still have an unposted draft reply to another topic in a different tab that was unaffected.
Ah, I was going to suggest something small scale to reduce costs (electronics, crafts, etc) but motor issues rule that out. Gardening might have been a good substitute but if you live in an apartment in Alaska then that's probably not going to work either.
Still if you can think of something that suits your situation I think it can help with the "why get out of bed, what's the point" problem. Seeing something that makes physical progress, that you direct, that presents discrete problems to solve, and that you can point to whether to show other people or just to yourself provides hard evidence that you're making an impact on something. It also gives you a clear objective where upon completion you can make a judgement of whether you've succeeded, failed, or can improve. I think all those aspects are valuable to mental wellbeing and not half as legible in areas like religion/community, exercising, or creative-aesthetic-intellectual activities.
Edit: Reading more of your replies (not much money, government hand outs) maybe consider starting a cash-in-hand pressure washing business? The equipment is cheap enough to make it low risk and small scale, the work isn't fine skilled, you can earn some money, you leave things noticeably better for your efforts within minutes, you can work alone part-time or build it up into a legit business, and having seen a few pictures of Alaska it looks like all the slush makes everything constantly flithy meaning repeat business. Sure it's not a "higher" purpose but keeping things clean and getting paid is a positive sum contribution and should be sufficient for basic self/social esteem. If you're really savvy you don't even have to buy any equipment to start, just make some flyers and see if there's any interest before you lay out any cash.
5434a
8mo ago
IIRC from seeing your previous feedback it seemed to happen to you quite often. This was the first time it's ever happened to me, but on the other hand I don't post much.
On the other other hand I sometimes draft long posts that I never submit and leave them for days and they're still sitting there waiting in their tab.
The screen scrolled without me touching it and then when I got back to where I was the comment was gone. Bizarre.
5434a
8mo ago
Outdoor. Cat shit might be the one thing that smells worse than dog shit and unlike dogs you can't let the cat out for quick shit and then call them back indoors.
5434a
8mo ago
I blinked and my comment got eaten. TLDW find a practical project that puts work in your hands, not your head.
5434a
8mo ago
Other than fees and the technical know-how what's to stop someone swapping from an open blockchain into Monero or another privacy coin and then back again to sever the links? The blockchain might indicate money went into Monero, and came out of Monero, but Monero says "...".
5434a
8mo ago
37 according to the substack post.
It's about as edifying as a man signing up to 37 porn sites in one day. It's an anti-achievement.
5434a
8mo ago
They would be a transitioned-sexual on account of having deliberately chosen to transition from one sex to the other. Changing what you are can't change what you were, and both the change and the decision to change is a separator from those who developed without intervention.
5434a
8mo ago
It's not like being drunk and having patchy memories, or remembering the dumb things you did and wishing you couldn't remember, or needing to be prompted and then remembering. All three times it's happened to me the last thing I remember is taking my nth shot of vodka in x minutes on an empty stomach. Then waking up.
I've drunk the same amount of alcohol on an empty stomach many times, often much more. I think the critical factor is drinking high strength alcohol much too quickly. Much easier to do when it's just a little shot instead of a big glass of cold gassy beer.
I also used to think blue balls and jaw-dropping were merely colourful euphemisms for sexual frustration and surprise.
5434a
9mo ago
Indeed. I've never seen the original TV show but I've read Shogun twice now.
I thought it was time to try out a second Clavell Asian Saga book, and choosing the next one by internal chronology made sense.
5434a
9mo ago
Started in on Jame's Clavell's Tai Pan. Still on the intro but I'm already learning some (pseudo) history about the opium trade that I never knew before, which isn't too hard because all I knew before was that Britain and China had an opium trade and it led to a war.
5434a
9mo ago
It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.
In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.
You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.
With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.
The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.
5434a
9mo ago
I looked through and downloaded IMDB's top rated original (1959-1964) TZ episodes a while ago. I ended up with 9 episodes from S1, 8 from S2, 9 from S3 and 4 from S5. There's lots of other selected Twilight Zone episodes lists out there to browse, they're all roughly in agreement. If you're not bothered about filtering the best of the best you can't go far wrong by starting at the start as that's where the benchmark that justified the additional series and reboots was created.
I don't know about the '80s and '00s reboots but I'd avoid Jordan Peele's 2019 reboot, it's more concerned with moral commentary on $current_year American culture war than it is the human condition.
Like Atelier says TZ is lacking in the sci-fi aspect compared to The Outer Limits. You could try 2017's Phillip K Dick's Electric Dreams but I haven't seen any of those. TZ is a bit dated and unsophisticated compared to modern counterparts like Black Mirror but like OG Star Trek it's classic television that stands the test of time.
5434a
9mo ago
Invested, happy:
I can only think of luck related sayings like hit the jackpot, struck gold, full house, come up trumps, backed a winner etc
5434a
9mo ago
The point is that exploring our cultural frontiers diminishes the amount of territory left unexplored, and a lot of the charted territory has been marked as being of limited interest and value for more than a generation. We know the extremes are out there and most people choose the alternative not out of ignorance but out of preference.
5434a
9mo ago
The [short] Stories Of Ibis is turning out disappointingly girly.
So far I've had a story about a woman who rescues/redeems the morality of a bully victim turned killer using the power of Star Trek fan fic, one about a blind girl who is chatted up in a VR chatroom by a boy who likes her for who she is, and one about a girl's relationship with her best friend character AI who lives inside a vanity mirror toy.
This is tied together with intermissions about a man who has been captured by a caring and enlightened yet powerful robot who knows that she's sexy but is quick to pre-empt the man by letting him know she doesn't have a vagina.
5434a
9mo ago
it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
A slightly less practical one but a good mindset to aspire to nonetheless is the "touch it once" principle.
I generally bundle this and the thirty second rule into just mentally taking the piss out of myself that "I'll do it later, there'll be a better time" is a stupid lazy lie when I'm standing right in front of a task that already has my attention.
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