More than the doctors? No, absolutely not.

More than the bean counters who want to replace these doctors with unsupervised robots? I’m a lot more confident on that one.

I think LAN is still dead but offline single player works fine.

Kids do.

Their problems are smaller than us adults’, but they feel those problems with the same intensity we do. Being ostracized from your social group is a big problem even for adults. It’s worse for kids.

And kids, being kids, will bandwagon the hell out of anything. If somebody clowns on your shoes every day, give it a week and half the school will be doing it. Give it a year and you’re “that guy with the shoes”.

Is your brand of shoes important in the long term? No, not at all. Your social status in high school also, largely, doesn’t matter in the long term. But “the long term” is difficult to keep your eye on when you’re looking at 4-8 years of pointless bullying in your future.

All this to say - yeah I think this is pretty dumb, but it’s important to the people who are living it. And something that’s important to a child should also be important to their parents, in my opinion. I was the kid with the ratty shoes and the hand-me-downs. That stuff can really do some permanent damage to a kid’s psyche.

Does this mean that every middle schooler needs to have a fresh set of Jordan’s and a fitted suit every year? No, of course not. But if I can spend an extra $50 once every two years to make my son happy then why wouldn’t I?

Same, and I know this is true and not just me being crazy because I’ve heard it rather than felt it when my phone is sitting on my desk.

I’ve never met this man in my life and I am 100% confident it was the latter.

You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?

Look man, we work with what we’ve got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.

There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we’ll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don’t need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn’t even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.

This was in 1999. I haven’t lived there in a while but I’d bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.

We still like the grocery store because you can’t go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can’t pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that’s a promise.

You’d think so, right?

Receipts you say?

We’re at 56 pages of this now for a nice round count of 1400 charges

So far as I am aware all of these are publicly searchable court cases

When I was a kid we had a dog named Monkey

In the South? Yes, definitely.

1. The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn’t expect them to leave the southern border undefended.

2. It’s extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I’m ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that’s about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you’ll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You’ll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.

3. Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it’s confusing) are not all racist, but uh… you’ll see more who are, than aren’t. If you’re any shade of brown you’re going to have a rough time. If you speak with a “funny” accent you’re going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn’t want to roll those dice, it’s still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don’t like.

Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don’t take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn’t have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I’m not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it’s already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn’t stop them.

Like 10+ years ago I had a “private photos” app that would open up two completely different photo vaults based on what pin you entered. I didn’t even think it was a big deal at the time because it makes perfect sense to do. I’m amazed that hasn’t become standard practice in the meantime.

Flying in from outside the US during this time to then attempt to drive all the way across the South

Both. It’s both. I hope they stay safe. There are like 4 different major threats to a foreigner on that route.

Sure, maybe. But my yard has frogs and fireflies in it and my neighbors’ don’t. That seems pretty empirical to me.

Man I’m the complete opposite. I grew up in the hood, if you had nice things, you wouldn’t have them for long.

Driving nice cars and wearing name brand clothes just states “I have more money than you and I’m proud of it” which is a) universally a dick move, especially when you drive that fancy car past a dozen homeless every day, and b) makes you a mark. Oh you’re driving a Benz? You’ve probably got valuables in it, let’s take a look.

Nowadays I still drive a beat up old car and wear off brand clothes, both because I can’t afford better but I also don’t want to even look like I can afford better for the above reasons. It’s just being an ass and also putting a target on yourself.

I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to ‘God’ are all answered at about the same 50% rate.

-George Carlin

Love my guy George. Listening to Cardboard Castles got me through a really rough time in my life and I don’t expect to ever be able to repay it. Least I can do is to spread the word.

Braindead former humans wander the land aimlessly and cause huge problems for everyone else.

They’re the same picture

That’s essentially how they wrote the song, so yeah! I can see it. I’d watch this.