If somebody pisses me off or upsets me, I need to stop brooding about it like a little bitch and call them out directly.

Over the last few years I’ve learned that I avoid confrontation to a fault.

Bonus: how did this past year’s go?

Shit.

This time last year I was meant to be moving into my own apartment, then I was laid off, my mortgage offer expired and I had to pull out of the purchase. I now work in a shitty purchase ledger job as a temp, where my office is 50 miles away. The pay sucks and I question why I’m torturing myself working in this role just for some recruiter to earn commission from my misery.

Halfway through the year I had a (kinda close) friend disappear for roughly two months after a rough breakup. I met up with her at a karaoke eve when she reached out because I was worried about her wellbeing. She came on to me pretty hard, we kissed at least a dozen times, dirty danced a few times and made out once, but then she apologized and friendzoned me via text after I got home. And to make it clear, she was the one initiating all this.

My love life wasn’t all bad though. I did date someone at the beginning of the year and while that relationship didn’t last, the breakup was amicable and we’re still really close friends.

Still not sure what I’ll do NYE tomorrow…

There’s two edutainment games I remember playing on school PCs back in the early 2000s (either 2000 or 2001) and I’ve found nothing about them since. Asking about them on the TOMT and TOMJ subreddits got me nowhere.

One was set in a castle and had an intro where the main character crosses a moat. I remember it for a particular minigame where you operate a catapult and have to launch cabbages at people hiding in barrels, following instructions like “90 degrees clockwise”, “125 degrees anticlockwise”, etc. If you successfully hit all 8 targets without fail, the victory message was “You cabbage head!”

The other was more like a loose collection of minigames and several different CD collections were released. I used to own one that I found in a supermarket bargain bin. The minigame I remember on this collection involved moving a pin to pop balloons. The background music was some kind of weirdly upbeat jazz song.

Too bad we got dragged kicking and screaming out of the EU five years ago. Securing a job offer and work visa is going to be really difficult, and I don’t speak another language.

At the moment, everything.

This time last year, I was meant to be buying my own apartment and finally moving out from my parents’ home. Then I got laid off, spent seven months struggling to find work and then landed a temporary purchase ledger job which I fucking hate. Partially because the commute takes me about 2 hours each way, partially because I work an 8-5 shift and have to get up at stupid o’clock in the morning on office days, and partially because we use Oracle Fusion which is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever used.

Unfortunately that means I have to live with my parents for even longer. Renting somewhere is out of the question because Bristol is the second-most expensive British city to live in, and I basically can’t get a mortgage without a full time job.

Sometimes I question why I chose to pivot towards accounting. I have a History degree, I’m fully AAT qualified and I’m halfway through my ACCA and I’m earning £13.50 an hour, or just £1.29 above minimum wage on a zero-hours contract. I can genuinely earn nearly as much from stacking shelves, flipping burgers or pouring pints, not that there’s really many hospitality or retail jobs available. Office days genuinely take 13 hours out of my day. 8 of these are working, 4 of these are the commute and 1 is the lunch break I get.

My future is uncertain and I feel like there’s no point in bothering. Best-case scenario, AI is truly a bubble that’s going to burst, crash the stock market and leave us in a recession. At worst, it takes all our jobs and the rich leave us to starve.

Despite a brief relationship with a woman who finally popped my cherry (we’re still really close friends and I’m grateful she took my virginity), my love life is practically nonexistent. Online dating is an absolute void where I only seem to match with GPS-spoofing South-East Asian and African women either pulling love scams or trying to find a Western spouse and the means to a green card. Two ladies messed around with my feelings and led me on big time this year and that’s left me exhausted.

I have a lipoma on my neck which is going to cost me a lot to remove, and good luck actually finding the time to get the consultation and surgery/liposuction booked. The NHS won’t do it because it’s not cancerous, even though this thing has grown to the point where it’s 5.5cm in diameter and sticks out like a sore thumb.

I only knew of him because South Park mocked him and his style of masterdebating by depicting Clyde and Cartman as parodies of him.

Don’t go to university, unless you really want to work in engineering or teaching.

You’ll be saddled with student debt and your job prospects will be worse than if you decided to start flipping burgers or stacking shelves at 18.

Part of the reason Stephen Colbert’s show is getting cancelled is over the Trump Administration approving a merger between Paramount and NBC?

And then they decided to offer South Park Studios a $1.5bn deal…

I’m guessing the Charlie Kirk assassination isn’t the only reason South Park is getting delayed.

As disgusted as I am with the people that have been openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I don’t think death should automatically make somebody immune from criticism. All Kimmel did was point out that the MAGA crowd are desperately trying to characterize Tyler Robinson as a dangerous leftist, despite evidence so far pointing to him being a Gropyer (alt-right white nationalist faction that has openly feuded with Charlie Kirk.)

Kimmel deserves better than to be cancelled because Trump is a twiggered wittle snowflake who can take about as much criticism as a Reddit or Discord moderator.

Thinking of canceling Disney+? You’re not alone

I already cancelled mine over a year ago because Disney tried to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit on the grounds that the family had agreed to a forced arbitration clause, all because their daughter signed up for a Disney+ trial. Do I even need to explain how much of a cunt you need to be in order to wave a forced arbitration agreement at a grieving family whose loved one was killed by the gross negligence of a staff member?

(also, the fact that I can type this comment on Lemmy and not Reddit says it all.)

Counter Strike 2 has a massive problem with cheaters because Valve refuse to make VAC operate at the kernel level.

Firaxis are like the Bethesda of turn based strategy games. They release buggy jank and expect modders to fix it.

Mmmm, Linux

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.

Just a friendly reminder that the OSA was never about safeguarding kids from seeing porn.

Are the government seriously worried about a child being exposed to Break Stuff or So What on Spotify?

(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk’s nazi bar.)

The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he’s on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.

He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:

If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.

This of course generated a lot of fury among the site’s users.

For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed “illegal content” under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)

Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.

This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.

Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)

Zia Yusuf (head of Reform’s DOGE division, yes they’re ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:

Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.

Let that sink in.

Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they’ve handled this legislation, that they’ve straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.

Also, if you’re thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party’s deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.

If Labour don’t get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election…

Under the guidelines imposed by payment processors which were recently clarified by itch.io, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be banned, as it contains moments of non-consensual sex and bestiality.

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

The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”

Did I state that? No?

You can fuck off.

Let’s say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.

She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he’s being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.

Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is “misogyny”, apparently.