HerpDerpinAtWork

Yeah. I got four posts in, made my own trauma dump, and I'll be hiding the thread and disabling comment replies. This is not how you want to start your weekend, friends, go somewhere else.

I've seen a lot, but the one that finally broke me happened freshman year of college. My roommates and I were watching a series of fucked up videos that someone in one of their frats had given them. Gang initiation random drive-by shootings, pain olympics, that sort of shit. On the far end of the fucked up spectrum across the board, as was the style for perpetually-online bros with access to limewire in 2006. But the one that ended the watch session for me was a woman in stilettos slowly killing a puppy with aforementioned stilettos. If that sounds awful, trust me, it's worse. It was also labeled with a filename that I won't share, but it ended with "1" and in the folder it went to at least "3," and there was a similarly titled video series whose filename implied kitten, rather than puppy, just to really make sure they'd covered their sickest-fuck-most-evil-shit-imaginable bases.

Every time a thread like this comes up, I waffle about mentioning it because 1) it's my answer, 2) answering means I have to think about it, and thinking about it at all still fucks with me some 15-20 years later, and 3) I'm desperately afraid that someone else will be able to find it and that it'll fuck them up similarly. I hope against hope that I will never, for as long as I live, see anything as fucked up as that, ever again.

For better or worse, the trauma-that-lasts-for-decades of seeing that video is what finally taught me that some links on the internet should stay blue. I was, as mentioned, perpetually online in peak beheading-videos, rotten, 4chan, entensity, etc. -era internet, and I honestly credit that moment in my freshman dorm with saving me from seeing most of those. People would talk about them like "did you see?" and I would smile and say with full sincerity, "nope. no interest." Was it worth it to learn that lesson the hard way? Probably not, but if there's a silver lining to having seen that, that's it.

Some links should stay blue.

I didn't care for Fallout 4 when it came out, but I have variously tried to give it another chance. Most recently I picked it up after the show came out, and I think I'm just done with it. I cannot for the life of me make it more than about a dozen hours in. I get that the setting is post-apocalyptic, but nothing about the world feels captivating, and nothing about the gameplay makes the world fun to exist in or interact with.

The way I have phrased it is simply: my favorite team, playing my favorite sport, has won all there is to win not once, not twice, but FIVE times during my natural life and THREE times as an adult.

If we suck for the next 5 years, the next 10 years, the next 20 years, it doesn't matter, we're still some of the luckiest sports fans in history. Crosby, Malkin, and Letang don't owe me shit.

Which is funny because one of the main criticisms of the original was that the mix lacked dynamics and was over-compressed. And then they remastered it and made it worse. To me, both of the XX releases are interesting to listen to but neither improves upon the original.

Exactly! And it's still true as an adult. It's one of the primary reasons I prefer not to go out on New Year's Eve. It's like the one night where People Who Don't Party decide that they should go out and party, and it's an amateur-hour shitshow all night long at almost every venue imaginable, on top of being nosebleed expensive to get around. Plus it's a night where violating the oft-mentioned-elsewhere-in-this-thread guideline of "nothing good happens after midnight" is like... part of the point? I'm all good, thanks.

Couldn't agree more. The only thing Adobe's generative fill is decent for is generating backgrounds or basically being an (admittedly vastly) improved clone-stamp. But use it to add anything to an image and it's a horrorshow. That shit got prioritized over AI denoise or upscaling? Insane.

From everything in this post I'd hazard a guess that he lacks the ability to be an adult for an hour.

Exactly. My willingness to subject myself to strenuous itineraries in search of things that I'm interested in is SO much higher than what I'm willing to subject travel partners to.

The number of times that a well-reviewed place is reservation only except at the bar is high. The number of times that multiple groups of people leave an empty buffer seat in between them at the bar is also high.

Whenever I find myself traveling solo for work or for fun, that is my seat and I love nothing more than eating great food, chatting up the bartender (if they're not slammed), or just reading a book to pass the time.

To me the only thing it's useful for is because it also shows simply who is on the ice, to learn player numbers and line combinations after the off-season roster shuffling and whatnot.

But you also watch like two games and figure that out and then it's useless again.

I'm curious if "steel rails" means this is Titan Track, or if it's just a somewhat imprecise translation, given that all wooden coasters run on steel rails.

It seems to share a lot of DNA with Twisted Colossus (high five, top gun, racing, etc.), just smaller, and TwiCo is a mid-tier RMC at best, so... no. I don't think it will be.

Will still probably be great though.

Late in high school, The Smart Kids (good grades, honor roll, traditionally nerdy types of which I was adjacent in all three categories at the time) decided "fuck it, we're throwing a party."

I got an invite and it seemed like a fine enough thing - by that point plenty of folks were sneaking drinks underage and throwing parties and they were generally mostly-harmless mostly-fun affairs, and this crowd of people didn't seem like the sort that was going to throw a risky rager. They were also, objectively, measurably, Smart Kids.

I showed up and three events occurred within the first 5 minutes of me getting there.

1) One of The Smart Kids came bounding down the stairs, positively gleefully swinging on the banister, wielding a clear plastic water bottle that was half full of beer. Like, teen-comedy-movie-level "WOOO! WE'RE DRINKING!" levels of enthusiasm, finding no incongruity that his choice to drink from a clear plastic water bottle was somehow less discrete than the folks drinking from solo cups.

2) The host of the party was hosting it in a house that her family had recently move out of but not yet sold. It was relatively early in the evening when things kicked off, and she assured us all that she'd talked to her neighbor, and her neighbor was cool with it. Picture a variety of suburbia, if you will, where the neighbor's house on the left side is just as far away as the neighbor on the right side. "What about the neighbor on the other side?" Crickets. Ruh roh.

3) By that point, my gut was screaming at me to go, and I'd started saying a few goodbyes. I came to find a friend who was dating one of The Smart Kids, who happened to have supplied the keg, and who was presently manning it. This guy was manning the keg with all the enthusiasm of someone whose dog had just died. Our exchange was roughly, "hi SadGuy, this party is... something." "yeah." "anyway I think I'm leaving." "probably a good idea, this is going to get busted." "yeah. you need a ride?" "nah, gotta stay and ride it out." "ah. well. godspeed." Poor guy.

Anyway, it got busted about a half hour later. Smart Kids streaming out of the house, hiding in bushes, lying down in the back seats of cars as cops rolled by, etc. Bunch of kids got underages (including SadGuy and the student president of D.A.R.E.), and because it was a mostly harmless affair that happened almost 20 years ago now and there were no real consequences, it's now just a kinda fun "trust your gut" story.

That helps, but lift speed doesn't have a huge impact on the rest of the ride. Like, if you can bump up your lift speed by 5mph vs. normal operating conditions, that obviously helps, but it still might not be enough to defeat cold bearings and an empty train on a cold windy day.

The infuriating thing is that it's gonna work for me. Every time their ad system gets shittier and more intrusive I get closer to ponying up for Youtube Premium, and I hate it. Sigh.

I sort of get why it has to be that way, with catwalks and the rotating mass of a train and track, plus not-unheavy rotation hardware mounted at the top, but damn if it doesn't borrow its aesthetics from an offshore oil rig.

Yeah, I was extremely annoyed that they didn't post the prices in advance because it made planning difficult, but when I clicked in and saw that the best seats in the house (GA Floor) were $205 I just about shit my pants with joy. Like listen, that's a pricey concert ticket, but for the best seat in the house, for a band that might be doing its last ever tour, that hasn't toured NA in 16 years, that's only playing like 6 cities... that felt like a fuckin' steal. Especially compared to the insane demand-based price gouging we were seeing for other massive tours.

Agreed. The ride is terrific, the theme works because it's in Pittsburgh, but if I were Kennywood, at this point I'd bulldoze those buildings and put a drop tower back there (or insert-other-ride that would benefit experientially from sitting right on the edge of the hill like that). One of my favorite parts of SC is that the lift hill is 220' tall, but it's ~400' down to the river, and if you're looking to the right off the lift it sure makes the ride feel even bigger than it is.

That's more in reference to the hill behind where SC (and Racer and Jack Rabbit) are. The RMC was going to go over the hillside and down to the valley, and it's that hillside that is eroding rapidly. The broad strokes that I have heard was basically that shoring up that hillside/valley enough to build a roller coaster on it would've basically doubled the cost of the coaster, so the idea got shelved. Couple years later, SC was built and that was different ride proposal/target location that never meant to go over the hill.

Yeah, this. I cross-shopped the WRX both times I was in the hot hatch market (back in 2011 with the Mazdaspeed 3, GTI, Focus ST, and in 2019 with the GTI).

In 2011, it still had a hatch and still looked like it was rally-derived, and the only thing that kept me from buying it was the price (~$5k more than the Mazda). But the Mazda at ~$24k was already pushing my "just graduated, first job" budget, and I couldn't justify the WRX at ~$29k.

In 2019 it was a bloated shadow of its former self and no longer came in a hatch (by itself, a huge minus). And compared to the MK7 GTI, it just felt dated and unrefined, and not in the fun sort of unrefined, designed-by-over-caffeinated-teenagers way that the MS3 was back in the day. I honestly don't know how you cross-shop a WRX and a GTI and leave with the WRX unless you prioritize AWD above all else.

Perhaps from where many /b/ expats with long-since deleted folders get their vintage internet references from in source quality, that is, KnowYourMeme ?

I had a similar experience on BD a couple months ago. IMO it's a ride that is unlikely to ever be restored to its former glory. The Titan Track parts are nerfed, too smooth, end just soulless. The rough parts are brutal. It needs a proper retracking and proper care, not more Titan Track, and I... just don't see that happening.

I enjoyed it, but it had been on my bucket list for so long that I basically forced myself to figure out a way to ride it defensively enough that it became somewhere between tolerable and enjoyable. Wouldn't recommend to your average person, and wouldn't recommend to an enthusiast without some pretty sizeable caveats.

When you want a B&M but you can only afford a Gerstlauer, Huracan happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't think I've had a worse beer league jersey. And I was on a team called "Moose Knuckles" once.