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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Yeah, in meetings with outside teams I can usually understand it and it’s tolerable. But honestly I prefer if the person running the meeting prepares enough to make formal introductions for everyone. The worst is being in a meeting with someone nobody knows, and was never introduced nor given the opportunity to introduce themselves.

    My manager does it perfectly, she quickly goes around and says “for the new folks on the call, that’s Bertram, he does x, y, and z. That’s pishadoot, they’ve been here for years and do a, b, and c. It reminds her team that she values them and shows the outside folks that’s she’s a competent manager.



  • I’ve worked with people who will sometimes interrupt the natural pre-meeting banter to force an icebreaker. Like, what the hell do you think we were just doing you corporate ass-hat?

    Frankly, I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who forces a “round robin” of any kind during any meeting. It very rarely has any value and tells me that that person shouldn’t be running the meeting, or that that particular meeting didn’t need to happen.




  • I posted this response a while back about a different “AI” comic in the same style, which might have also been yours, but the thread was deleted after lots of people replied so I don’t know for sure. Regardless, it still applies:

    I don’t want to pile on too hard, because hopefully you’ve internalized some of the other criticisms in the comments, but this is actually a great example of why “AI” art makes so many people so angry.

    On its face, this is a nice-ish comic strip with a joke that might get a smirk or chuckle in response. The moment you look at the image critically, that all falls apart. And don’t you want people to look at your art critically? Don’t you want people to zoom in and enjoy every part of what you created? Thing is, this isn’t your art. You didn’t create it. You wrote some sentences, and then an algorithm (without permission) used the real, painstakingly created artwork of artists from all over the world and throughout history, to spit out some pixels that look like this. You didn’t pick up a pencil or stylus, you didn’t ink the lines and labor over the facial expression or color pallets. You didn’t build on a lifetime of artistic experience to create something new in a style that you’ve been developing for yourself. And then you called it OC to make it seem like you had actually done all that. That may seem okay to you, but it’s deeply insulting to lots of people.

    I’m a shitty visual artist. I couldn’t draw to save my life. And that’s totally okay, not everyone is Van Gogh. I find other outlets for my artistic impulses.







  • That does help explain the strangeness of the whole thing, thanks for sharing. Sounds like things were pretty tough for you, so I’m sorry for that.

    It sounds like he is a bit oversexualized (not sure if that’s the right term), but it doesn’t seem like it’s anything too out of the ordinary for someone figuring themselves out. Many of us probably pushed things a bit too far when we were little, I certainly didn’t understand how uncomfortable it made people for me to run around the house naked when I was young. But we all test boundaries like that when we’re growing up, and usually the adults around us help us find the right boundaries, not stretch them.

    So yeah, with that new context, giving a fleshlight to her 18 year old son is very odd, and does raise some red flags. Sounds like you made the right call cutting things off.







  • Synthetic textiles are a major contributor to funky smells in my experience, and I wasn’t aware of it until a few years ago. Sheets especially (microfiber sheets are disgusting, I regret ever using them), but also window shades, couch pillows etc. They can smell nasty, and it’s a kind of lowkey rotting plastic smell. Gross. I’ve switched to as many natural textiles as possible (been on a huge linen kick lately) and my place seems much fresher.


  • Despite how unlikely it is for this to actually happen, it’s at least good to get people used to hearing it out loud. I don’t have any faith that they’ll follow through, but it does strike me as odd that this is being used as a threat against Israel. Like, “Israel, if you don’t stop indiscriminately massacring children then we’ll be forced to symbolically recognize the independence of the people you’re ethnically cleansing.”

    The fact that Israel has no desire to see an independent Palestinian state doesn’t mean a toothless and symbolic threat like this will stop their monstrous actions…