Sorry to hear that, fam. I hope it got better eventually.

So there must have been one day on which the Tethys Ocean was suddenly no more, right? I looked at the wikipedia page and it wasn’t clear.

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man.

Well let’s see… first we gotta figure out the analogy:

• carriers = posts promoting a product
• carrier escorts = posts commenting on and upvoting the “carrier” post
• torpedos/dive-bombs = bot-delivered replies that disparage “carrier” posts. They “hit” if they get highly upvoted
• fighters = bots that downvote carrier-fleet posts and upvote torpedo/dive-bomb replies
• carrier “screen” fighters = bots that post attacks on enemy fighters and munitions
• carrier AA fire = bots that downvote attacks by enemy fighter bots

The analogy is still a little clumsy… are “carriers” posts, or are they the bots that make the posts? etc. But a Midway-like battle would involve a modest but strategically-positioned product-promoting community that is about to be surprised-attacked by a rival, who will make several posts disparaging the product. But the attack is identified through corporate espionage. The posts are hard to find, so the “fighters” have to search for them but ultimately they do, and after fierce up- and down-voting, the attacking posts are deeply downvoted.

I read somewhere that there are actually two types of fiber, and they have different effects, but most food is only ever labelled “fiber” so idk.

something something bottled water left in the sun something microplastics.

Because migrants are generally peaceful, non-violent people who just want to work hard and improve their lives.

ur gonna give birth to a meme.

Businesses wouldn’t offer free self-defense classes – liability! They’d just put up a ribbon in tribute of all the fallen babies. Maybe they’d sell ribbons too, so you can honor the babies.

Also elderly people. Me or other family buy groceries for an aunt, she has Amazon for emergencies.

Median is the better metric, since we’re talking about outliers.

fleet of accounts

I like the use of the term “fleet” in this context, bc it brings to mind the Battle of Midway but re-done with bots online.

ikr it’s not that bad at all. Reminds me of dazzle camouflage for ships.

Sounds like you were summoned by ouija board.

(edit: I kind of regret posting this image for reasons described below, but I’ll leave it up for context.)

I kinda like this variation on the theme:

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.

Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Last I checked it was still catching up on federation… (checks again) Oooh, looks like it’s caught up!

History is Patrick Stewart playing Lenin sitting in a chair giving orders.

For all we know you could be a victim in an abusive family. I’m sorry to see that people are blaming you without further asking about your circumstances.

FWIW I think it’s a bad older-generation thing, to express your affection by criticizing someone and insulting them. I had one older relative tell me that if you wanted someone to know that you loved them, you had to be a little mean to them. There was even a saying “spare the rod and spoil the child” to justify physical punishment.

To be sure, sometimes you need to be direct and critical and rigid, but it should not develop into abuse. If you feel you are in an abusive relationship, please reach out for help.

Yeah… reminds me of a very valuable lesson I learned during my college years.