Don’t feed the Yao Guai!

https://youtu.be/3sry34AOwlU

All I can say is that my wife could live in squalor for weeks without batting an eye, but simultaneously believes I’m high strung for not being able to chill if my space is dirty. Tells me to leave it. But we both know how bad it gets if/when I leave it, and it ends up being me who cleans it one way or another.

“This!”

“Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!”

Why do they have to say the things? People don’t say the things here.

I was a loser who didn’t seek a real job until I was 25, and didn’t get my shit together and move out until I was 30, but despite all that my dad always loved me and never so much as pushed me. Gentle encouragement from time to time, but always just glad to have his boy around. I live in a different country with my wife now. I have a beautiful daughter and a decent, stable job. We flew my dad out a few years ago and I’ve never seen him so proud of what I’ve become. He loved my daughter so much. We took him out to the Canadian Rockies. That trip meant the world to him.

He had a heart attack and died two years ago.

As tragic as it all is, I watched the emotional shit he went through over the way his father raised him, and his father’s suicide when I was too young to remember, and he made it a point to make sure I never had to wonder if he loved me or was proud of me. He was.

I hope his soul is flying through the universe somewhere and has seen how much my daughter has grown, and has seen my awesome new house. I sprinkle his ashes around my flower gardens every spring just to keep him around. I hope he’s around.

Love you, dad.

https://youtu.be/H6wl-EyhXl0

Like many others have said, the old, lost internet was really something special. Every website was crude and janky, poorly formatted for some specific resolution that you weren’t using, and both animated clipart and midis were exciting to collect. There were websites dedicated to them. My brother and I used to fill folders on our desktop with sparkling or flaming banners, signs that read “Under Construction” and more. Same with midis. I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Sublime’s Santaria in midi form. It may have been my first favorite song.

I wish I could properly articulate what that all felt like. It was a similar feeling to collecting Pokémon cards as a kid. Everything was just a neat spectacle on the mid-90s internet. Then over time, as everything modernized and monetized, it lost that weird magic and became what it is today. I can’t remember the last time I gave a shit about exploring a website. I no longer come across spooky animated images of a skeleton peering out of murky water and excitedly tuck it away for future viewing pleasure. The entire thing just sucks now, but it probably sucked then, too.

My sister-in-law has them all throughout her house and I’m just like, “You know you have a teenage boy, right? You ready for that?”

Nah. My brother, wife, my two best friends and one co-worker are the only ones who even know it exists, and that’s because they know I use it as an alternative to reddit since the API fiasco. It’s honestly pretty obscure, but I like it that way. I’d love to see larger niche communities, especially since r/stalker was one of the only places I could actively talk about my favorite game series, but Lemmy has been a far better experience overall.

Sync (Pro) has been my go-to since my brother referred me to it 10 years ago for Reddit. As soon as it was available for Lemmy I grabbed it. There is a stigma surrounding it, of course, as ad-free is a premium/subscription feature. I truly don’t give a shit. I spend my money on far worse things.

STALKER. I’d be miserable, but I spend so much time in the Zone already.

Or maybe Stardew Valley if I want to be happy.

I have no idea, honestly. I don’t pay attention or mingle between them.

I was playing some crappy F2P MMO (Perfect World, maybe?) and I made a warrior of some werewolf race. Just played with random wolf-related combinations and settled on this. Quit after two days and the username carried on for probably 15 years now.

I don’t even really know all that much about Stalin. I just pulled it out of my ass.

Does the server matter at all? Wasn’t able to find a straight pixelfed.ca like I did with Lemmy, but it seems like people always end up dunking on the larger servers or defederating them because of Nazis.

I’m in a similar boat. I immigrated to Canada back in 2017, and I have a daughter now who is turning five. As of right now Facebook is the single most effortless way for me to stay in contact with my friends and family back home, and allows them to feel familiar with and/or connected to me and my daughter.

You spin a wheel and they ship you free meat. I couldn’t disagree with you more. I recommend anyone try it out. I don’t know why it exists, but my freezer is stocked.

Used to love losing power during ice storms as a kid. Sure, I couldn’t play Bassin’s Black Bass on SNES, but my dad would stoke the fireplace and light up the extremely dangerous kerosine heater that smelled fucking awesome. Then we would chill with my mom on the couch and read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

That kerosine heater never did blow the family up…

I’m not Christian/religious at all, but I still have a very deep nostalgia for classic Christmas hymns like Silent Night, O Holy Night, etc. I remember sitting beside my tree as a child listening to our music lights playing midis of all of them. The lyrics can be discarded entirely.

Always Sunny, “The Gang Hits the Road”.

The entire episode is just them driving around Philly with the intention of going elsewhere, but the plan gets derailed in typical gang fashion when they wind up just switching seats over and over (both in and out of the U-Haul) until they end up back where they started, and with zero interest in continuing the original plan.

It’s an absolute travesty that they threw away nearly every character’s arc in the final season and robbed them of their big moments, purely to subvert expectations. These arcs were predictable because that’s where their stories were fucking heading. But noOoOoo…

Jaime is probably the show’s finest example of an eight-season arc thrown directly into the trash at the last moment. What was even the point?