Jackie's Fridge

The Birthday Massacre are so gooood

I am with you on every one of these points. The image selection process is terrible now, where before it was quick & simple. And in the past couple of updates, sending larger images and gifs was sporadic until now I always get an error. I was happy when they added message reactions, then puzzled when they just stopped at six, half of which are rarely useful.

I’ve been a paid user for years, but now I’m causally shopping for something else. If they’re giving up on their app, so am I.

Apologies. “Straw bugaboos.”

Kind of a fire hazard to have that many straw men in one place.

Seriously. USA is like the generic video game starter character before anyone’s had a chance to customise it and level up. At all. And I say that as someone who lives here.

As someone else who lives in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I use Amazon for stuff I can’t find locally. Our local (and family owned) grocery & hardware stores are not much more expensive, so I tend to buy essentials there and save Amazon as a last resort. Amazon’s pricing isn’t anything special, and being able to talk to a knowledgeable shop owner is more than worth the extra few cents in price.

She vaguely thinks there may be something out there but it has zero bearing on her life. I think that makes her functionally an agnostic atheist.

It has been surprisingly un-stressful so far, probably due to the ridiculously supportive community there. The best part is that everyone’s submissions go live at the same time every week, so there’s a whole new playlist of brand new music to enjoy!

Yes, yes, yes, of course he will, and I think the new outrage is that he is literally only disclosing the stuff he gets caught on, which begs the question, exactly how deep does his corruption run - not to mention the other “justices” (ahemcoughALITOcough)

Ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today!

It wasn’t my idea and it’s an inherited friend group (they are my partner’s friends) but you are more than welcome to grab this idea and run with it!

It’s a great way to turn work into a fun social activity.

Started a “community support” projects group with friends. We schedule a day to descend upon one of our houses and take care of whatever tasks need to be done - painting, yard work, home repairs, etc. It takes very little time with three or more people dividing the work, and we can chat and joke the whole time. We got a lot done, had fun together, and we’re done by early afternoon.

Next weekend everyone is coming here to help cut up a fallen tree, and the weekend after we are renovating another friend’s small dayroom.

Women raising their voices makes Pence wet himself in fear (or possibly joy) so that’s probably not a good metric.

First of all, excellent username. Second, I would love a chance to win the Tomb Raider I - III remaster just for the nostalgia. Third, the cool new thing I’ve done this year is take part in WeeklyBeats, a year-long challenge to create and post a new music track every week of 2024. So far so good! Fourth, I don’t have a decent meme to share but here (if I can get photos to work) is a photo of my void.

Another vote for the T480. I have a T480s running Mint and it’s been lovely. No driver issues and for office/light media creation/consumption it seems to work without a hitch.

A Mary Sue can fail, but those failures don’t usually have a massive impact and are easily reversed without the feeling that the MS had to struggle to earn the reversal.

The more flaws a character has, the more they have to work to balance them out. Readers are more likely on the side of a character that has to work and make sacrifices to make it through the difficulties the plot throws at them.

Random Example: Diana Rowland’s “My Life as a White Trash Zombie”. Protagonist Angel has a criminal record, drug addiction, abusive home life, and generally makes very bad decisions. Because of her life course, she has very few resources (she can’t go to the cops, nobody she knows has money or connections, etc) but she can think quickly and has a sort of desperate resourcefulness. Because everything is working against her, she has to fight for any positive forward movement, and one misstep can be a serious threat - and those happen frequently, undoing any success and forcing her to burn her resources to try a new path. IIRC in one of the books the B-story is her trying just to earn her GED as the main plot around her is utter pandemonium. Just that struggle to graduate high school is a herculean task given the deck stacked against her. Readers aren’t thinking “how will she win”, they’re thinking “well what’s going to go wrong this time?”

TL;DR: If every time your protagonist has a setback the readers shout “can’t she ever catch a break?” instead of “ah she’ll just breeze through this” you should be doing okay.

YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A MOUSE

I have random stupid hangups and for who knows why profanity is one of them. I’m fine with it. I barely notice when others use it. But I just can’t. It doesn’t sound right in my context or in my voice.

Of course I hate my own voice with a fiery passion, but that’s another hangup.

It’s been around for a while. Over a decade ago Target ran a cheeky back to school advert featuring a slow pan across school cubbies with lunch pails all labelled with variant spellings of “Braiden”. I thought it was hilarious.