chat

tl;dr extremely small portion, like the size of a microwave meal and it was overcooked and to add insult to the injury, bland as hell.

I've been cooking my own meals for the past couple of months and I decided to treat myself today and not have to cook and clean up. Fast "food" has taken a nosedive. I'm out $30 from a comrade that could have went towards groceries and I feel stupid and ripped off.

FUCK FUCK

Each month I ask for Sainsburys supermarket vouchers on mutual aid, because I'm going through a benefit appeal and have no money for food, and worry that taking actual money could get me into trouble with the UK's benefit system. My last mutual aid post was answered and someone sent me a sainsburys voucher (thank you!)

I have to order for delivery at the moment due to my foot surgery and busted achilles tendon. I can't drive there as I'm partially sighted. How it works is that I fill the online shopping trolley with items and then at checkout I enter the gift card number. it converts that into an online coupon which then pays for the food.

I had a bit left in an online coupon, and then someone here sent me a gift card last week. Every day for about a week I have been trying to do my usual online shop, filling the trolley with food and then when I get to checkout and try to pay with the coupon or gift card it says "For technical reasons, we have not been able to connect you to the page you requested and we hope to be able to do so soon. Please try again."

This means I can't spend the coupon or gift card right now. I have emailed sainsburys customer services, two of their CEOs (Simon Roberts and Mike Coupe) as well as a customer service email address for someone called Sarah Tipper. The Mike Coupe email was returned as undeliverable and the others have not responded.

I'm stressing out about it a lot. I don't know what else to do and unless someone responds to my new mutual aid post for a different food voucher very soon I will be in trouble. I have already run out of food. I thought surely this technical problem would be sorted by now. And I can't find anything online about sainsburys website having technical issues, what is happening?

[Click play] Hiii, this is <first_name> calling from <Organization_I've_been_waiting_for_a_call_from> if you could call me back that would be great my number is <phone_number>. Thanks!!

Oh good I've been waiting a month for this call...

Huh, why didn't I hear this ring [checks call log] oh it was marked as spam... Great. [Unmark as spam]. Well I better call her back.

[Calls number, robot answers, its a corporate call center] OK so its not YOUR number... Got it. [Your call is important... Your position in queue is 9]

[30 minutes on hold]

Hi this is <not_who_I'm_looking_for>

Hi I'm looking for <first_name>

Oh OK did she say... Why?

No... She said just call her back

OK what is your information

[Gives information]

OK let me see of she is available

[Waits 10 minutes on hold]

Hi, sorry <first_name> is on lunch she'll call you back after lunch OK?

Uh, OK, yeah that's fine.

[Click]

I guess I can wait another... Hour? Who knows...

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.

Slop is for gossip, the only rule for fake news is that it's OC only. I didn't think "Mark Wahlberg Claims Elon Musk’s Botched Penis Implant Wouldn’t Have Gone Down Like That If He Was Attending Surgeon" was going to set off the "I can't actually tell if this is real and that makes me upset" brigade.

So I've started to see what is seemingly Gen AI slop being labeled with an artist's name as some sort of slight of hand or less likely the name of the artist that generated it. I came across one name in particular a few times now, but I'm not sure the 'human artist' even exists.

Anyone else noticed this kind of thing? When I did a bit of searching around, all the references were other people sharing the 'art' of this 'digital painter' or 'digital artist'. There's even a short bio that has been reused across many sites like pinterest, facebook, instagram, etc.

But if you search before 2020, there's much less results. The most legit looking page indicated the 'autodidactic' artist first started putting out works in ~2017, which just happens to correspond to when the first art gen AI was made publicly available.

I'm guessing this is happening at significant scale across different creative domains. I've come across albums on youtube that are also gen AI, but do a pretty good job obfuscating it. At least in that case it did eventually lead to an admission if you dug a bit into the label/artist. This one I'm thinking of also was posing as a 'band' from like 50 years ago, like this was some cool music that had been found and republished.

It's just gonna keep getting worse I guess, that seems to be the trajectory here. Is there a crypto verification scheme proposed already as the solution to this?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23932288/leica-m11p-camera-rangefinder-adobe-content-authenticity-cai-ai-verification-price-specs

This is from 2 years ago, but I haven't heard much about any other stuff like this yet.

i was checking out and the worker asked if I had my military ID, I figured she was joking so I said no just the hat and she inputted the 10% military discount lmao

ive been saluted by an old man and got the discount, now I just need to be thanked for my service to hit the trifecta

pic of the hat

But like, what's use if grammar if you don't also know spelling and vocabulary? Are there British kids who just go around saying "period, exclamation point, ellipses!"

It seems that as life becomes more expensive, the amount of financial aid available gets drastically reduced. The latest thing to go is Macmillan cancer charity. They used to give struggling cancer patients a grant every 2 years. It had lately gone up to £300 a year. I myself received one of these grants in November 2023, I was due to become eligible for another this November coming and was relying on it. Now I won't get it because Macmillan have decided to save money by no longer giving grants and no longer giving benefit advice to cancer patients (so they can cut staff numbers). Meanwhile there are news reports that they are hiring more managers on inflated salaries.

My local council used to give a £150 cost of living grant to low-income people twice a year. It was a lifeline. Then they cut it down to £100. Now they've scrapped it altogether. Why? Because:

The government decided to cut winter fuel allowance. They used to give all Old Age Pensioners the winter fuel allowance - a few hundred pounds to see them through the winter so they could afford to keep the heating on a bit longer and not freeze to death. Well, the government decided to make the winter fuel allowance available to far fewer pensioners, to save money.

So my local council has decided, instead of giving the Cost of Living Allowance to all low-income people in the area, they are going to give it all to pensioners to replace the winter fuel allowance. So younger poor people get nothing.

Meanwhile MPs, many of whom are millionaires, have given themselves a pay rise worth millions. Just when they're making disability benefits harder to claim too. Money is always being taken away from the poorest and extra given to those who don't need it.

fall in

fall in love

fall in love again

fall in love again and again

fall in love again and again

fall in love again and again

See the previous post for more info.

Things I'll be sending up:

printed small FALGSC flag

hexbear logo, possibly physical

mack the knife poem by Bertolt Brecht

images: Belly_Beanis's spacebeanis, AstroStelar's "Someday I'll Go To Space", and Deinonychus's curry-space emoji, incremental_anarchist's photo of Gerard way and an image of David Bowie/Wheatley

usernames: oscardejarjayes, cosecantphi, isame, Coolkidbozzy, MikeyChaz, WellTheresYourCobbler

Link to Pitbull - Give Me Everything ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer

If anyone else has something they want me to send up, reply with it.

The launch got pushed back a little, so I've got a fair amount of time to add what you want (the "real" payloads basically done already). Launches are basically never on time, lol.

If anyone wants proof, I'm perfectly willing to DM some Blue Origin stuff that shouldn't be public (it probably shouldn't dox me). I'll be responsive for the next day or two, then probably again in a few weeks.

It’s an arraignment for a 4 year old misdemeanor warrant out of a neighboring county (criminal trespassing). It’s a good sign that they let me out and gave me a court date, when they could have just held onto me, but idk. I’m scared.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7780189

I will try not to reveal much personal information in order to maintain privacy.

Anyway, I've known Alex for most of my life, they were pretty good for most of it.

In recent years, they've gone down the MAGA pipeline, and it's gotten worse and worse over the years.

At this point: about every day they talk about illegal immigrants and Trump, often even making jokes about it.

They talked about it so much, and I tried to tell them the truth (such as that most undocumented aren't criminals, they can't migrate legally, etc.) and even encouraged them to do research about it, but they refused.

Here's where things start to get crazy:

In recent times, anything they see that goes against their worldview is called "fake news" while they literally unironically called Fox News a reliable source. (Another family member made fun of them for "only looking at Fox News," not knowing how right they were.)

They started to say how scared they are about "Venezuelan gangs" and even said that they check their windows and get scared at every sound because they are literally worried that it's one of the "gang members."

Then it happened:

We discussed the Garcia situation, where a legal immigrant was sent to CECOT without trial. We argued about it.

I asked stuff like, "Where's the fair trial? Where's the due process? Should you be punished for a crime you weren't even tried for and convicted of?"

They kept saying lies like, "They DID get a trial! They're an abuser! They're a gang member! Only the worst criminals go there! You just support mean people and gang members!"

This continued back and forth, until it happened.

They cried about how scared they were of the "illegal immigrant gangs" and being attacked by them. That's right, cried, with tears.

I was disgusted. I felt sad because they bought into this propaganda so much. And I felt amused to the point of laughing, which they didn't like.

That person had various problems in their life. And they decided to cry about "the evil brown people coming after me!!!"

I didn't feel sorry for them at all. That's disgusting.

And that was just the first instance.

Recently:

We were having just a mundane conversation in the car, and they made a joke about CECOT and El Salvador. I said that I didn't want to talk about that. They got angry and talked seriously about El Salvador. I told them again multiple times that I didn't want to talk about it, and they kept continuing. They said stuff back at me like "You know who goes to CECOT? The worst of the worst!" so I was forced to confront them like "They send innocent people there without trial, I don't want to talk about it." I keep saying no, they say "I have a right to say what I believe." I say, "I have boundaries, I want you to respect them. Can you please be respectful?" They say, "I cAn'T bElIeVe YoU sUpPoRt GaNgS!1!1!1!"

I tell them that I never said that and I want due process and don't want to talk about this, they sounded like they were going to cry about "the brown people coming to get me again!!!" and I wasn't in the mood to deal with that. Thankfully, I got to my destination soon after.

It is incredibly sad to see somebody I've known throughout my life turn into...this. Of course, there's much worse that could've happened, but this is unbelievable.

They do see a therapist, and I think I should encourage them to talk to them about it.

Do you guys have any thoughts or stories to share?

And I will refuse to learn to code

I hate that some racist Karen is going to become a millionaire for being racist on camera. And this has happened many times before. Meanwhile I am sitting in a fast food place after spending $13 for some deep-fried slop served to me by people who are probably making $12/hr.

I've been unemployed for a while, using Wall Street to keep bills paid, but honestly I have no interest in working for anyone else at this point. This whole life is a huge scam! How is any of this fair?!? The evil people are celebrated, the worst companies get the highest valuations, the bad guys not only win, but they get ahead of us honest folks. I feel like I woke up in opposite land.

I do a lot of housework, work on my own projects, and am constantly working on self improvement. But those don't have a paycheck attached so I guess I'm a useless, lazy bum according to society.

I'm tired of all this.

My sister recently married into a Central American family and my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of tamales, but I accidentally left them at my Dad's place. I got them today and he admitted he ate one but said the "outer layer was really stringy and tough".

Thing is I'm 90% sure I've had tamales with this man before.

It was an art forum but super edgy and toxic. They would be horrible to any new artist and if they didn't improve quickly, they would continue to bully. They would even do the lolcow thing with some people. They hated deviantart because they felt it was too soft.

It was also populated with professional artists from the games/movies industry. So you would have these industry leads shitting on literal children for drawing poorly.

I know a few of them splintered and started conceptart.org, which tried to be more professional about it. But the owner and his friends used it to grift. Eventually the owner (who started a production art company an used the site for recruiting) got accused of being a creep. I just remember their attitudes and the way they would present themselves like rockstars.

Anyways, I saw someone mention SomethingAwful and it got me thinking about all the old forums from the 00s that, in retrospect, were fucking horrible.

Also LUElinks. That was more like right on the edge and was close to when 4chan started.

Washington State, Amerikkka

We moved into a unit that was unfinished with only being told that it wasn't renovated. When we moved in, we didn't have function light bulbs in many places, pantry was broken, not cleaned, and had a huge gaping hole at the base of the roof. Also, the carpet had been peed all over by the previous tenant's cat and it smelled awful. I even offered to lay down hard flooring for free if they removed the carpet because I didn't want my baby crawling around on cat pee. Instead they just cleaned it and I'm sure you cat lovers here know, you can't get that out.

Now, we just thought we could push through it bc my wife didn't want to move again after just giving birth a few weeks after we moved. It's been 8 months and if the fixes took longer than 5 minutes they never did them. Our electrical was so poor we kept tripping breakers running more than one small AC because our entire upstairs was tied to a single 20 amp for EVERYTHING (yikes)! Thats 3 rooms and a bathroom. Started talking to the rest of the other units on how they were running all their ACs in every room. They are RUNNING EXTENSION CORDS UP THE STAIRS!!!

So I go to her to break the lease because they broke it first for not fixing anything, which she promptly does without a fight. But I bring up how her units are about to be set a blaze due to the building get the Slumlord special from everyone who touched this building the last 50 years, but because its so old it technically doesn't have to be up to electrical code. Which I told her, but also that it gets super hot upstairs with no insulation in the ceiling. Neighbor had grounding issues and flickering lights and about 3 extension cords running up their stairs as a permanent fixture. After uniting the building, everyone sent request for electrical inspections. You know? So they wont die in a fire. Also that extension cord setup is hugging the wall on my stairwell so we are fucked if it went up in flames.

They instead get NOT an electrician to parade around as one with the Slumlord Couple in tow, telling everyone, "It's your responsibility if the place burns down and you (tenant) have to pay to run another wire. Which requires a permit" I found out the next day dude hasn't been licensed in anything but a Electrical Trainee that expired 15 years ago. So instead of fixing anything, they just

Need to get back to work, will update part 2 tomorrow.

I'm kinda looking forward to liberals busting out the "Miss me yet?" bumper stickers but with Biden

If a creepy British lady forced me to remember my ex from when I lived in an artist loft, that would be the darkest shit ever.

Seriously it's often the tiniest little thing, like the margins are 2mm too small or a spreadsheet was filled in a certain method. I've had convos with teachers where I ask them "hey do you mind if I do it slightly differently", they go "OK", and then 10 minutes later a manager comes and asks me to do it the original way. Like fine, but why the fuck didn't the original teacher just ask me. I'm the most gentle and flexible person I know, I literally haven't had an loud argument at work since I before 2000. I'm not gonna have it out over this issue with you.

How the fuck is telling the manager not considered snitching with some people?