Middle out!

Nah, I can relate.

Worst experience I had was with a property management firm who made me go through three stages of interviews, kept me waiting for weeks for responses about next steps, sent me a bogus offer acceptance letter, then tried to lowball me by insisting the role I applied for was £5k lower than advertised.

And apparently this is a major property management firm that has BlackRock as one of their big clients.

Job market is shit right now for accountants.

Geoengineering: Whether through launching solar shades into space to block sunlight and cool the planet down, pump aerosols into the atmosphere, cloud seeding, or anything else. I think this is where our research should be going. I think it’s too late to avoid the worst-case-scenarios of climate change from merely cutting emissions, so more drastic measures to alleviate or even reverse the effects may be necessary. Plus it’ll help us with any future colonizing and terraforming of worlds outside of Earth.

Public transport infrastructure to reduce our reliance on cars & planes: While I don’t think hyperloops or a transatlantic tunnel are feasible, building tens of thousands of kilometres worth of overground and underground railway routes to interconnect towns and cities with high speed maglev trains is. China have the right idea.

Right to work from home: Remote working reduces our dependency on cars and frees up real estate to address the various housing crises we have.

Right to repair and outlawing planned obsolescence: Should we have to buy a new smartphone every 3 or so years because Apple or Samsung want to maximize profits? Do we care at all about the amount of electronic waste we’re producing?

Accelerate our efforts to reverse desertification and plant trillions more trees: If we can turn parts of the Sahel, Gobi Desert and the Australian outback green, that could have a very beneficial effect on the environment.

I’ve had loads last night.

Sleep paralysis demon that looked like someone I knew climbing into my bed and choking me.

Playing through a video game where I fall through multiple traps, fall off the stage and then have the devil turn towards me (looking like a more realistic black-haired version of Alastor from Hazbin Hotel and say “You told them, didn’t you?”

One where I was working an evening shift at my local supermarket, had to close up and help clean up the store.

Don’t bother. I’ve tried so many of them and they’re almost all shit.

Wasn’t banned, but I came here because I wanted to seek a genuine alternative. Reddit feels too censored and like you need to walk on eggshells to avoid the wrath of their moderators and admins.

Like… I genuinely can’t use words like “incel”, “cuck”, “snowflake”, “Trump”, “Andrew Tate”, etc without having my comment removed on most subs.

Cats (2019)

• Directed by Tom Hooper, a guy who doesn’t know shit about cinematography but somehow had two previous films gain critical ablation despite this.

• Released years, even decades after the West End and Broadway shows had been discontinued.

• Relied heavily on a star-studded cast featuring Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo and Taylor Swift.

• Horrifically bad CGI which costed an absolute tonne to produce because Hooper was an arrogant arsehole and didn’t listen to the people on his crew who actually handled special effects for a living.

• Most of the songs are significant downgrades compared to the original stage show, i.e. musical vs film version of Magical Mr Mistoffelees.

Yes, everyone will say “civil rights improved”

Gay marriage was only legalized due to a Supreme Court decision that declared same sex marriage bans to be unconstitutional.

Since then, Republicans have appointed replacement justices, and it was they who overturned Roe v Wade and upheld a lot of Trump’s recent antics.

His Andrew Tate one is comedy gold. Perfectly nails a depiction of him that’s both realistic and incredibly unflattering uncanny valley body horror.

I thought the voices for this were AI generated until I heard his quote on Palestine at the end and remembered that very clip which landed him a Twitch suspension. Fucking hell, those are all actual Asmongold quotes?

Ouch, Chávez Jr isn’t having a good week. Imagine losing a boxing match to Jake Paul of all people, then getting deported.

What is Zidane gonna do? Walk up to their president and headbutt him?

United Kingdom (Bristol.)

Used to be pretty decent, but now the NHS is chronically overbooked and underfunded. Ambulances can take hours to come.

Only way to get a GP appointment is to literally call my practice at 8AM on the dot, wait in the queue and hope you’re lucky to have your call answered before all the appointments are gone. There is no online booking system, and if you call at any other time, they won’t be able to book you in advance unless you’re willing to wait months.

My dad (80 years old) has had to go to hospital a few times in the past few years for various reasons, and the longest he’s had to wait to be admitted into a ward was 13 hours. He had a hip replacement operation two years ago where he was on an 18 month waiting list.

If you want a suggestion for a bad movie, try watching FDR: American Badass Only managed to make it about half an hour in before we had to switch it off.

Don’t let the trailer fool you. The actual film is dogshit.

I used to do a monthly one with two close friends of mine. Let’s just call them Poppy and Sam (not their real names.)

Unfortunately, Sam pretty much disavowed our group last year. He had a falling-out with Poppy because she raised concerns about how he was spending his inheritance money. Sam had made some friends at his local pub and was buying them pints all the time. Apparently Poppy telling him that he can’t buy friends struck a nerve with him and he very vocally excommunicated us. My reaction to being cut off was one of frustration and bewilderment.

For some very important context, Sam has physical and mental health struggles, which I won’t go into. He had a particualrly bad month which broke him emotionally and decided there and then that he had no intentions of outliving his cats. That was three years prior to our falling-out.

Poppy did reach out to me two days ago and she wants to do another film night with me and reconnect like old times. We’re gonna meet up on Friday.

I used to participate in r/theredpill. It’s an ideology that got increasingly toxic over the years.

The part that truly made me ditch the manosphere was meeting a lady on a dating app who mentioned to me that RooshV was doing a rally near her town and that it had her fearing for her life. For the record, that was an incel/redpill influencer who was an advocate for legalizing spousal rape.

Depends on what changed. Axis victory would have hinged on three possible outcomes:

• The United States staying out of the conflict (no Pearl Harbour assault, no German u-boat attacks on American vessels, and Hitler & Mussolini not declaring war on the USA in response to the US declaration of war on Japan.)
• Operation Barbarossa not happening.
• British defeat or withdrawal from the war.

In a scenario where the Japanese never attacked Pearl Harbour and never dragged the USA into the conflict, Hitler may have been able to eventually conquer Britain, turn his efforts towards Operation Barbarossa and take control of the entire European continent, along with parts of Asia. The Holocaust would likely have still happened, as the Final Solution was put in place six months prior to the Battle of Stalingrad, which turned the tide of the war in our current timeline.

Lack of US involvement leads to a scenario where nuclear weapons would not have been invented until much later, as Germany had not actually been working on weapons of mass destruction, and the Manhattan Project would never have occurred. World War III would likely have been fought between the Nazis/Japanese and Soviets, while the US would have remained isolationist.

A scenario where Operation Barbarossa never happens (neither Hitler nor Stalin attack each other) may be different. Hitler consolidates his European gains, never attacks the Soviet Union and focuses his efforts purely on the United States and Africa, securing many wins without his armies being stretched so thin. In that scenario, Jews are likely exiled to penal colonies established in Africa or the Middle East, from lands conquered from the British. The Holocaust may happen further down the line, but some historians think it was the unique wartime conditions on the Eastern Front that led to the Final Solution being considered - Nazi Germany actually tried resettling Jews in other lands prior to WW2.

British withdrawal (Hitler negotiating peace with Churchill) or defeat (Nazi Germany winning the Battle for Britain) may have led to Operation Barbarossa happening sooner, and with the Soviet Union not so far along in their industralization efforts, they would have likely lost Stalingrad, Petrograd and possibly Moscow. It either would have been a long and bloody war of attrition or a swift Soviet loss.

I’m not against polyamory, but I find it never works out when somebody decides to open up a previously monogamous relationship.

A (former) close friend of mine got engaged a few years back, and then his fiancé brought a third into the relationship and they became a throuple. That relationship lasted maybe another year or two, until she called off the engagement several days after his mother passed away, and left him for the other guy while he was grieving.

Found out sometime later that the third she brought into their relationship was actually her cousin, so there was definitely some Sweet Home Alabama crap going on.

Another friend of mine tried to commit suicide recently after getting dumped. Her relationship with her boyfriend of ~2 years had been rocky to say the least. They broke up, got back together, etc quite a few times, but the most recent breakup was after he brought a third into the relationship, then allegedly found out she was texting a guy and dumped her on the spot.

On Reddit, yes. To the point where I’ve actually had to self-censor a lot of my comments and tip-toe around certain topics to avoid my comments being nuked from orbit by Automoderator.

Lemmy? Not really.

Lemmy is full of tankies and Linux nerds. It’s a different kind of toxic to what you’d experience over on Reddit.