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Got_Bent

@Got_Bent@lemmy.world

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Got_Bent ,

When I used to teach European students, they would invariably go out and buy the cheapest crap they could find like cases of pabst genuine draft and then complain how bad the American beer is.

I think the British equivalent would be if I bought a bottle of frosty jack and used it to declare all British cider to be shitty.

You gotta spend some money to get good American beer. Pretty much all the nationally brewed stuff is shit. There's a lot of local stuff that's actually good.

I'm not sure how European beer culture works, but one of the reasons to drink shitty American beer water is that you can drink it all day without dying.

One more useless fact: I long thought that adjuncts in shitty American beer like corn and rice were strictly cost cutting measures. There's definitely some truth to that. But the origins apparently go back to nineteenth century brewers being unable to achieve a clear lager with the barley that was available in America. When they used the barley exclusively, they kept getting a cloudy product.

Got_Bent ,

You've definitely got no shortage of choices out there.

I was up in the other Portland last week (Maine) and they've also got a ton of good options.

That city name must inspire people or something.

Got_Bent ,

Rookies. The real wealth gets to eat sushi off a porn star's front!

Got_Bent ,

As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.

I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.

Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.

Got_Bent ,

Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.

I make roughly one third the money today, and I'm much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don't particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?

No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:

I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.

Got_Bent ,

I found this:

Gay Time was produced by Bally Manufacturing Co. in 1955.

Bally Manufacturing Co. released 867 machines in our database under this trade name, starting in 1930. Bally Manufacturing Co. was based in United States.

And a site with a fuller picture of the graphics

https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/gay-time

Got_Bent ,

Well that led to a fun Google search and surprising results. Today I learned.

Got_Bent ,

You can throw that list I'm now on on top of the pile of other lists I'm on.

Got_Bent ,

In my fifties and still have that dream, but it's worse.

I went to boarding school, so my dreams involve fifty something year old me having to go back to live in the dorm with a bunch of kids.

Got_Bent ,

I love the hit counter. Super nostalgic right there.

Got_Bent ,

This explains her sweet dance moves

Got_Bent ,

The last time I logged on to Facebook was this past fall because there was a death in our fairly tight knit group of high school classmates. It had been three or four years since I'd been in there.

So I went on and said my words.

While I was there, I didn't really notice what was in my feed.

What I noticed was suddenly I was getting notification after notification that my posts from years and years ago were getting deleted because they didn't fit whatever the current terms and conditions of use were.

This amused me.

So I left my words of dead classmate up for a week then sent my account silent again.

I can't see Facebook or any social media being a place I ever hang out again, which is a little bit of a bummer because without any social media, IRL social activities all but come to an immediate and total halt.

Oh well. I'll live.

Got_Bent ,

I, for one, would rather have milk from a bear.

Got_Bent ,

I've had really good luck with archive.md

Got_Bent ,

Does this mean I still can't watch porn in Texas?

Got_Bent ,

At some point, my car is going to be a skateboard. These shitty subscriptions that companies are rolling out can bite me.

Got_Bent ,

Planely obvious

Got_Bent ,

Of all hills to die on that ruin your reputation and legacy, why this one? I just don't get it.

I am a gen x cis heterosexual white male.

Transexuality is strange and foreign to me. I don't understand it. This gives me exactly zero right to take any stand against it. I'd say it gives me less right to express an opinion as how could I be knowledgeable on something I've just admitted I don't understand?

Let people live and go enjoy your billions.

Got_Bent ,

In a different comment, I talked about the difficulty I have with pronouns. It's not because it offends me, it's because the traditional usage is so hard wired in whatever part of my brain oversees language.

Got_Bent ,

I had a student some thirty years ago whose name was Oh Yu Suk.

It was difficult for me to maintain when I first saw it.

Got_Bent ,

This was a real issue back when we had to buy full albums (cassettes) back in the eighties.

Sure, we look back to some epic albums from that time, but a whole lot of them were the one top forty hit and a bunch of crap filler songs. But we had to suffer through it because we'd spent eight dollars of our hard earned money on that crap. (Eight dollars back then would be over twenty dollars in today money)

It was groundbreaking when the CD listening stations came to record stores.

All this said, I love listening to full albums and was one of THOSE guys back in the nineties who would seek out things like Japanese releases that had ever so slightly different versions of songs.

Got_Bent ,

That's a good question. I gotta ponder that for a while.

I can think of albums like Nothing's Shocking that didn't have any top forty hits but was good all the way through, but one hit supported by an entire good album, that's a challenge.

Got_Bent ,

It's the one hit criteria that makes it tough. I didn't much listen to anything top forty after 1985, so I can name a bunch of great indie albums that didn't chart. But if it was a good album that charted, it likely had several hits on it. You've really posed a great challenge. It may take me a week to come up with something.

Got_Bent ,

Zappa has always been tough for me. His stuff is so out there and so complex, you gotta actively listen to it like a hundred times before you can even scratch the surface of understanding it.

The guy was definitely a generational musical genius.

Got_Bent ,

Found one that's close.

Oingo Boingo had Weird Science chart at 45 on Dead Man's Party.

They're admittedly an acquired taste, but if you were in southern California in the eighties, they were... How do I state this? Foundational.

Got_Bent ,

I never could get into Paul Simon, especially after he had the gall to go steal Edie Brickell away from me. That bastard!

Got_Bent ,

Found one - Skylarking by XTC. Dear God peaked at . No other songs charted. It's long been one of my favorite albums.

Got_Bent ,

I lived in Korea for a while where they also do the ten thousand thing. I got used to it for numbers up to about ten million, but then would get quickly lost.

Since everybody was making a couple million won a month, knowing numbers that big was necessary.

Got_Bent ,

I was struck by the address. That's right outside Dallas Love Field in a pretty run down area, which happens to also border one of the wealthiest neighborhoods.

They've since moved quite a bit east to an enormous campus.

Got_Bent ,

Friend of mine had a heart attack in his early thirties working for AT&T in the nineties. I ended up in the ER with acute chest pains working for UBS.

These days, I'm generally able to weather the daily shit storms, but I'm mostly dead inside just waiting for the sweet, sweet relief of the real mortal deal.

I kinda wonder what the machine is going to have at its disposal to extract more out of me after I've left this mortal coil. Reanimated labor I suppose.

I got a pretty decent raise a couple weeks ago. As I usually do, I expressed my appreciation, but added the commentary that when a hundred percent of my time away from work is spent bedridden from exhaustion, what's the difference between an $X thousand dollar raise and an $X million dollar raise.

Got_Bent ,

There's also the little detail that I'm not a dev. But let the guy have his moment I guess.

Got_Bent ,

I am so much NOT a dev, that it took me a minute to even register what you were trying to say. I thought of a college classmate whose name is Dev.

I too have had my time in hard physical labor.

But you do you. Enjoy your Internet sanctimony.

Got_Bent ,

Well that's an unexpected wrinkle!

Got_Bent ,

Well I did just read an article yesterday where some European billionaire was complaining that Europeans don't have the "ambition" that Americans do, so they waste their lives by working fewer hours and spending time in social situations.

Clearly, the Italian builders guild only allows for a two hour work week, so no jobs ever get completed.

Got_Bent ,

My Roku is doing this and has been doing this for quite some time.

Of all the ad delivery schemes cooked up over the past ten years, this one is the least offensive to me.

Like I'll come back from the bathroom or whatever, and all that registers before I hit play is that some random graphic is covering the screen while on pause. I cannot name a single thing that's been in any of those ads.

In general, I do wonder how effective this constant onslaught of marketing is. At some point there have got to be diminishing returns, right?

Got_Bent ,

Yes, yes. I'm sure I've got several things in my home that are terrible. I've cut off streaming and Amazon, have never owned a gaming console or gaming PC, quit reddit, quit Facebook, never had Twitter, Instagram, Tok Tok, used wish, etc. I do not use cash transfer apps. Neither my appliances nor my HVAC connect to the Internet.

But I can't become a complete Luddite overnight. It's a series of steps. So until this Roku that I bought about six or seven years ago craps the bed, I will continue using it, mostly with antenna broadcast local stations, but also with some of the free streaming sites like Tubi.

If you would like to come audit the entirety of my existence and personally fund immediate replacement of everything I have that is evil or offensive, I invite your benevolence.

Otherwise, let a guy use an illustrative example while engaging in casual Internet conversation in peace.

Got_Bent ,

I ice skated when I was a kid and learning to fall was the first thing they taught us.

Funny thing - forty five years later, if you asked me how to do it, I would have no idea. The technique is completely lost to memory. Except when I actually fall. To this day, I have an unconscious instinct to fail so that i suffer scant little damage whenever I take a spill.

Got_Bent ,

War and policing. You're dug into a foxhole/bunker with your bolt action rifle, and a few thousand of these things come marching along. Or you're protesting the party in power, so a few hundred of these automated law enforcement officers get sprung loose to "keep the peace"

Got_Bent ,

Expensive and impractical today, yes. But we would say the same of every man, woman, and child having a supercomputer with the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket fifty years ago.

Got_Bent ,

I had this argument with my boss and lost. They made all of us take photos that they posted on the company website. I said I'm working pretty hard on making myself invisible and don't appreciate being forced to out myself like this. Tough shit. My name picture and contact info are out there for all to see.

Got_Bent ,

I'd never named a boat before. But there was only one I could think of, the most beautiful name in the wide world.

867-5309

Got_Bent ,

Born and raised in California, I was seventeen when I discovered warm clothes existed.

That was when I flew out to see my mother who had somehow ended up in Wisconsin.

I got on the plane, in December, wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

When we landed, it was at a small airport where you have to get off the plane via stairs and walk across the tarmac to the terminal.

It was twenty below zero before taking wind chill into consideration.

I spent that trip wearing her boyfriend's clothes. He was well over three hundred pounds. I was one sixty in a wet towel back then.

Fashion hilarity ensued.

Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads (www.lowpass.cc)

Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing.  ...

Got_Bent , (edited )

How the fuck can an economy that's almost nothing but advertisements sustain itself for any period of time? It feels like forcing more and more ads is the only thing anybody does for money anymore.

Got_Bent ,

I love that there's a reference to the Tom Hanks classic Mazes and Monsters in there.

Funny thing about the eighties. I was absolutely forbidden from playing dungeons and dragons but was totally allowed to play wizardry, Ultima, and bards tale.

Explain that parental logic.

I do feel I missed out. Never did get to play the real deal.

Got_Bent ,

I like that if you squint really hard, you could almost flip that map upside down and get a reasonable cultural map of the United States.

Got_Bent ,

Eventually we're gonna have to have a way to change our social security number like we do with credit cards when they get hacked.

Got_Bent ,

Maybe you could just enjoy a nice game of Scrabble instead.

Got_Bent ,

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!

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