I haven’t been to Burger King in years, but I have been feeling the call of the void the past few times I’ve been traveling and needed a place to stop and grab some food.

I stopped eating at “BK” for the better part of a decade after I got terribly sick from eating one of their “Rodeo Burgers”. It was basically the low-end burger option, except they replaced the onion with onion rings and used ketchup-based barbecue for the sauce.

The onion rings must’ve been the previous day’s unsold rejects or something. I remember having the worst heartburn I’ve ever experienced in my life and then feeling so terribly sick for the next 2 days.

I’m 99% sure I have had BK since then, but it was breakfast-only.

Back in the day, it was the only fast food option for onion rings where I was growing up. They sucked compared to the real thing, but despite that they had their appeal. Now my stomach turns just thinking about them.

The sound from my portable bluetooth speaker. But that’s mostly because it’s a shitty speaker and you can barely hear it when it’s sitting 3 feet away let alone when there’s at minimum an ocean between you and it.

In this thread: I’m mostly finding people I feel I need to add to my “no longer like them” list for irreconcilable differences.

I’m having a hard time deciding what qualifies as “HATED” or highly disliked.

A lot of people hated Edge of Tomorrow because Tom Cruise. But I am actually quite fond of the movie.

A lot of people hate Apocolypto, and it’s objectively a terrible movie from a historical as well as moral/ethical perspective, I don’t disagree there. But at the end of the day it is entertaining if you can turn your brain off.

Some people say that real men don’t have feelings

We have feelings (we have feelings)

Some people say that we are not real men

(We’re real men)

That hurts our feelings

(Hurts our feelings when you say we’re not real men)

Some people say that real men are invincible

(We’re vincible) we’re vincible

Build them as connectable hexagons. Learn from the insects, they’ve had a half billion years to figure out what shit works and what shit don’t.

I think it’s possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody’s trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.

I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.

In the morning, it’s “I’m not fully caffeinated, yet”.

In the hour(s) leading up to lunch, it’s “My blood sugar must be getting low.”

In the hour(s) after lunch, it’s “I’ve had lunch and now I feel like I need a nap.”

In the hour(s) before clocking out for the day, it’s “It’s been a long day and my eyes / brain need a rest.”

This is basically science. I just need to apply for some funding.

“We” as in Republicans? Absolutely not true.

In my circle, the outspoken Republicans were absolutely convinced that “Hussein Obama” was a radical, socialist, communist, muslim foreigner who had illegally become president because he was the anti-Christ. He was here to kill the babies and white people and he destroyed the country. Practically everything was Obama’s fault such that it sparked the “Thanks, Obama” sarcastic meme. He couldn’t do anything right. Employment numbers down? Obama did it. Employment numbers up? Obama is lying about it, they’re actually down. Osama Bin Laden killed? That makes everything worse, but also, there’s no proof it was actually him.