Those sites will be dead to me :)

QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.

Sounds like something chef would sing.

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Hot take: companies shouldn’t get tax breaks, sweetheart deals, etc. ever, for any reason other than being non-profit public good companies. Succeed or fail on your own merits. Bootstraps and such, just like us poors are supposed to be able to do.

In fact, taxes should scale with a company’s purported value, profits, something along those lines.

The more you make the more you pay, until eventually you hit the ceiling, and everything above that is taxed at 100%. Same with money hoarding individuals.

I’m so tired of these welfare queens living on the public dole. They come into our communities with their hands out, trying to get something for nothing, while giving basically nothing back to society and spawning more of themselves to continue the leeching. And they take so so much more than all the social programs combined would. At what point do we say enough is enough?

I had a site I was gunna buy stuff from ask me for a video selfie to “prove” I was over 21.

First if all, I wasn’t buying anything controlled, so thats ridiculous over-reach, and second of all LOL FUCK NO I’m not giving you, some random-ass e-commerce site, my fucking biometric data. That’s absolutely insane.

Needless to say, I blocked that site on my pihole, so it no longer exists to me as an option. Sent them a message letting them know they lost a rather substantial sale from that shit. I’ll do that for absolutely every one, same with ID or whatever else. I could just use the tricks kids use, but that still rewards them for this bullshit with money.

I’ll just stop using the internet if it becomes a thing everywhere. It’s not really worth being on anymore, for the most part, anyway.

I wouldn’t be able to take a selfie of my back without a mirror or the timer function, either, so thats normal I think. Frontal selfies aren’t too hard though.

You might benefit from a selfie-stick, or learning to use the timer on your camera app, they really help if you aren’t already accustomed to the hand contortions required to selfie with phone alone.

Otherwise it’s a weird and uncomfortable balancing act where you frame the phone with your index finger up the side, pinky supporting the bottom, two middle fingers holding the back, and hitting the photo button with your thumb.

Examples:

These are both landscape, but the idea is the same for portrait mode.

it does seem to be significantly easier for women to take artistic nudes.

I think what a lot of people don’t realize is just how many shots are needed to get that one good one. Especially if doing it yourself.

I sent a really classy-looking black and white (because it evened out my skin and made the lace look extra nice) once, and it took me about 40 tries to get one I liked enough to send it. It took awkward positions, my arm got tired af, and if you’d been there in person it looked dumb as hell. Arms in weird places to hide them, legs bent funny, you get the idea. I had to try numerous poses to see what worked and didn’t, and it took about 45 minutes.

I’m by no means a photographer, I’m by no means a model, I’m not even a sexually-inclined person, but I am stubborn and persistent, and I’m introspective enough to know that if I think it looks nice and classy, most others will too.

I think that’s why women tend to have artistic photos and men tend to look like the swamp thing. Dude nudes tend to be the first pic they take, quality be damned. And often in dirty mirrors (do guys not know how to hold a phone to take a selfie without a mirror?).

Or is it that auditory hallucinations are strongly associated (not clinically, just the way they are always talked about) with bad mental health problems like schizophrenia, which makes them taboo, so people choose not to talk about them, even to doctors?

I get auditory, gustatory, and olfactory hallucinations all the time, due to chronic headache and migraines. Wish I got visual ones too, just for the variety, but alas. I hate peanut butter so so much (my most common hallucination is the smell or taste of peanut butter). My auditory hallucinations aren’t usually voices talking, though, they tend to be cats meowing or chickens yelling, because that’s what I hear most frequently in my daily life, so that’s what I’m trained to listen for.

Probably Hypnogogic hallucination, which is a normal and common transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep characterized by vivid hallucinations incorporating any or all senses.

You can, but I found that roku forced my apps (specifically plex, the only app I really ever used, which should have needed an update exactly never because my server doesn’t get updated either) to break in such a way that I needed to unblock everything and redownload exactly once every 3 months (I assume to collect your stored data), and that wasn’t worth it to me, so I factory reset it and left it that way, because idgaf. I have enough old computers to have one in every room, so roku gets nothing. They are just dumb tvs now.

Maybe that’s changed, but I’m not risking fucking it up to find out.

Mine haven’t been connected to the internet since about a year before they pushed out that update that forced you to agree to their revised surveillance terms or you could never use it again.

My googleOS TCL never got internet access in the first place. Who needs integrated apps when you have tons of mostly old computers kicking around?

Only one of my trips outside the US was “lavish” and it really wasn’t. It was an all-inclusive week trip in Jamaica, in the middle of hurricane season to save money. It was very affordable. Totally great trip, though!

Other than that I walked across the border into Mexico for lunch (this was before a passport was needed), and went on a week-long camping trip, 2 days of which was in Canada.

My passport is lapsed now though because I can’t leave for more than 2 days without arranging to have someone take care of things for me, which I can’t really afford to do, so why bother.

I get mine fitted Monday. I’ve already got the speaker, but my tinnitus is an entire… octave? above the sound from the recording, incredibly high-pitched static. Tho I use a babbling brook because the other ones are just… very annoying. I don’t really find the speaker helpful, but my audiologist said it was unlikely to do much on its own, so.

I’m really hoping the hearing aids work better. But at least I got obnoxiously colored ones!

Mostly because they have nothing better to do than vote, so politicians cater to them pretty heavily.

It depends heavily why i feel they look scary, ime.

Purely aesthetic? Probably chill; i assume you don’t put on an intimidating aesthetic to become an abuser, that’s stupid and counterproductive. Bad vibe? Probably not chill.

Then again people apparently find me, tiny little person I am, intimidating and I’ve never understood why. Guess I need to whip out the chanclas. Live up to it. Not Hispanic in the slightest, but if men are already intimidated…. 🤷🏻‍♀️

But also i mean i was that weird psuedo-goth (never came close to having the money to be goth, its so fucking expensive, so i winged it with thrift store stuff and creativity, i liked the look) so i get that looks are deceptive.

I try to time my bathroom breaks with an empty glass. Then all I have to do is let people around me know that I’m coming back, so they don’t offer my spot to random assholes.

I trust some people sometimes, but depends on the place and who is sitting next to me. Big biker dude who’s wildly intimidating but doesn’t give me any bad vibes? Ill chance it if they are with a group and there aren’t reasonable looking ladies nearby (part of the group and i trust the group a lot more). Intimidating biker dudes genuinely tend to be good people, idk why, but they do. Moreso than your average pickup driver, for sure. Maybe because motorcycles tend to be community-based activities? Idk. Any insight would be helpful.

It’s still wild to me that many parts of the developed world simply don’t use screens on windows.

But from what I can tell its also mostly places where people don’t even have AC because it simply never gets that hot.

Must be nice. (I don’t have AC yet, but I’m an outlier in my area, and I hope to add it this year because a heat pump would be an absolute blessing even if I still need to use my gas furnace as backup)

I have lead pipes feeding my house so I installed an RO unit shortly after moving in, and frankly, treated tap water just tastes bad to me now. I know it’s fine to drink, technically, but ungh. Yuck.

If yours has a tank and you maintain the system yourself, do make sure to clean it out yearly. I was not aware, for many years, that you need to bleach the tank periodically to prevent pathogen growth, but yes you very much do and it is very important, so do make sure you look into how to do that for your specific system. :)

I have chocolate mint and I find its not as hardy as other varieties.

It does really well with fairly wet and shady conditions (I had it under my elevated rain barrels and it did great, but didn’t spread beyond that) and poorly otherwise (since moving the rain barrels and exposing it to constant sun, it doesn’t want to grow much at all, much less spread).

Idk how much that’ll help your quest, but perhaps it will :)

Pipelines also cause a resonance hum that some people CAN hear for miles, and it drives them batshit.