This was a thing my parents always threatened my siblings & I with if we slammed our doors when they told us to go to our rooms and they did take my brother & I’s bedroom door away for slamming it one time, but we were not really old enough to value privacy at that point (I was 9 iirc but may have been a year or two younger) and because we shared the room it was collective punishment (to my brother’s detriment because iirc it was me who slammed the door and caused my dad to take it off the hinges) so it was put back on like two days later and it was never done again.

We moved when I was in middle school and I got a bedroom all to myself with a door that actually locked, which I naively thought would keep my parents out until the first time they stuck a toothpick through the pinhole on the other side and pushed the lock out of place. Funnily enough though the way my closet was positioned near the bedroom door, if you opened the closet door all the way it would prevent the bedroom door from opening more than an inch or two - which I discovered after the first time my parents barged in on me sitting naked at my desk at like 3am circa 2008 looking at porn. By the time I was in high school I’d pretty much forgone locking my door or buying myself a minute or two by blocking it with the closet door because I knew my parents would wind up barging in whenever they wanted and instead started making them regret doing so with shit like “hi mom thanks for bursting in without knocking, why do I need to put on underwear and a shirt I’m just sitting here playing the PS3??”

Was actually a big reason why I was so desperate to get out of the house as soon as I turned 18!

US Shoppers Face Fees of $50 or More to Get Packages From China

Wired please hire me

“up to $50 or more” why didn’t the editor take out the words ‘up to’ do they not know what that means

I say ‘struggling’ but it did run it on Low without much issue, yet it looked like absolute dogshit so I was like “nah”

No Mars is under attack by deists what don’t you understand about that

I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET A CHEAP GRAPHICS CARD NOW, MR TRUMP HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO PLAY THE COPY OF OUTER WILDS I PIRATED IF MY 1060 6GB STRUGGLES TO RUN IT ON THE LOWEST SETTINGS.

MR MUSK I NEED YOU TO GIVE EVERY AMERICAN A 5080 SO WE CAN GET TO MARS BEFORE THE RED PLANET IS RUINED BY WOKE DEISM

i would like to be indicted for espionage for the “Communist Chinese” lol

It’s not really a book club or anything but yes

millions-strong flocks of passenger pigeons or the fabled North American parrots or American (western) camels or sabertooth cats or american lions or John Brown

As someone who was recently apartment hunting & was going through the same kind of bullshit my heart goes out to you.

Also why was a 10 month lease like $300 a month cheaper than a longer lease? They’re gonna bump the rent up at least that much after aren’t they?

Hahaha this shit pissed me off during my search. It’s always 10, 12, or 14 month leases too. At least - in my area - I assumed the 10 month leases were geared towards like, students since there is a university nearby but even that doesn’t really make much sense because what college student is like “ah I don’t really wanna sign a year lease, wish I could just do 10 months”??? Anyways one of the places I toured had one of those rent estimate/available units widgets on their site, which I’d spent a good 20 minutes fucking with to see what the cheapest possible rent for their 1br/1ba 500sqft apartments were - the cheapest iirc was like $1300/mo for 14 months.

So when the apartment manager led me back to her front office after giving me a tour and pulled out a printed out table showing the monthly rent for each floorplan based on a 10 month/12 month/14 month lease and the additional trash pickup & other reoccurring fees, I asked “I’m totally willing to sign a 24 month lease, can I get some sort of discount on the monthly rent?” and she literally laughed as if I were joking before going ‘No we don’t do that sort of thing here.’

Anyways I still occasionally get emails from them because she put my info into their system despite me literally getting up and walking out as soon as she said no. Death to all landlords (especially my current ones who are…were? idk i try not to think about it…my fucking friends and yet aren’t exactly giving me a deal. ‘But ABC we’re not charging you market rate - you’re literally just paying the monthly mortgage amount’ they try to tell me, as if that doesn’t mean I’m literally paying for them to own this apartment in perpetuity meanwhile they could theoretically evict me at any time…i will not spare them from the wall despite knowing them for over a decade and that’s why I play the lottery like once a month)

Well yeah, the DoD has an entire 1000 acres of military base that the Air Force uses right across the Potomac from Reagan Airport.

Not exactly where I’d put civilian airport but technically it was there first. Why the DoD/Air Force can’t take a detour that completely avoids coming even close to descending/departing planes for training

thanks babe would you like to play War of the Monsters with me & pretend Preytor and Congar are married and going through a divorce/domestic dispute?? …No? What about if we play Mortal Kombat Armageddon and I’m Bo Rai Cho and you’re Kitana & we do the same thing?? (actual things my siblings and I used to do. dunno why my parents had no problem listening to my older sister be like ‘where’s my money ho!?!’ as she grabbed me with Bo Rai Cho and then subsequently hearing me go ‘I don’t have your money!! I want a divorce, I’m gonna marry Liu Kang!!’ before we started the match for real but then again dad used to love being like ‘choose any character and I’ll beat you with them’ and subsequently doing like the hardest fatalities on us…LOL)

Dr. Muto - 2002 PS2 platformer where you can unlock transformations into 5 different creatures: a hamster, gorilla, piranha, spider, and a flying squirrel. Each mutation has different uses - squirrel can fly so you can reach previously unreachable areas, piranha can swim so you can reach the underwater areas of each level, hamster can travel through small gaps/holes. Pretty standard platformer, nothing really special in terms of level design or mechanics, but damn I loved this game as a kid because HE CAN TRANSFORM!! I first played this in the era of Blockbuster right after its release (so like 2002-2004ish) and remember beating it within a day or two & spending the remaining week just flying around the levels as the squirrel. Goofy ass game but it is burned into my memory (especially that little hip-thrust dance Dr. Muto will do when you get a collectable/unlockable)

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters - 2002-3 Gamecube kaiju fighting game. This shit is what actually put me onto kaiju like Godzilla, Rodan, and Ghidorah. Had a Destruction mode that I really dug where you had to destroy more city buildings/infrastructure than your opponent. You could fucking call in Mothra airstrikes. The NPC Army would attack all monsters randomly with missiles and shit. But above all else, I loved just playing Destruction/Multiplayer mode with my brother and essentially roleplaying our own Godzilla movies.

War of the Monsters - 2003 PS2 kaiju fighting game. I have to pay respects to Destroy All Monsters because without it, I would have never stumbled across this game in Blockbuster as a child and been like “yes!!” but because I had played Destroy All Monsters, I remember being like “yes” immediately. Funnily enough, while Destroy All Monsters used actual kaiju like Godzilla and Rodan, War of the Monsters had ‘original’ kaiju that were very clearly meant to be shit like Godzilla and Rodan but tweaked enough to avoid copyright/licensing issues. There were a bunch that were wholly, at least from what I remember and know now having seen a ton of actual kaiju/Godzilla films, original though. Kineticlops, a giant fucking humanoid eyeball whose limbs are electricity and Preytor, a giant fucking preying mantis stay in the recesses of my mind. Me & my brother actually wound up BEGGING our dad to buy this game for us after we rented it 3 weeks in a row just so we could spend hours roleplaying as our favorite monsters in battles. Most notably, War of the Monsters had actual terrain/movement features that Destroy All Monsters lacked. Preytor could glide and climb up buildings fast as fuck like a bug, Kineticlops’ attacks would bounce and arc between enemies, the larger monsters like the King Kong knockoff (Kongar was its name iirc) could grab things like transmission antennas off of buildings or cars from the road and use them as weapons. You could launch monsters through buildings with combos.

I mean, just look at these two dudes and tell me child you wouldn’t go

Jet Set Radio Future - This one isn’t wholly forgotten compared to like Dr. Muto or Destroy All Monsters; especially not with the reboot they announced a few years ago, but goddamn thank you Microsoft for bundling this and Sega GT together with new Xbox purchases because this game consumed me. The soundtrack still slaps today, thank you Hideki Naganuma. (Understand understand the concept of love - free love is too tame for him! )

The Simpsons: Hit and Run - Another one that isn’t exactly forgotten by most people who were gaming in 2003 but I have to put this one down because more than the other 4 games I’ve mentioned, this is the one my brother and I were OBSESSED with because we both loved the Simpsons. I spent so much time trying to master the Rocket Car’s handling/controls because I was like “holy shit its so fast!!”. The Ghost Ship vehicle…the monorail vehicle…my beloveds…10/10 game, especially the fact that they got the official cast to do the VA for the entire game. Bart’s ‘Eat asphalt, asphalt eaters’ is what I say to this day when I’m winning in like Mario Kart. They dunno how to make games this good anymore that’s why the Simpsons is on Season 35 or whatever and we still haven’t gotten a remaster or even a rerelease of the original on like Steam…

All of the above were basically my childhood with more popular-ish games sprinkled here and there (most people go “what is that??” when I bring up Mortal Kombat Deception and Armageddon, but they recognize Mortal Kombat…can’t say the same for Dr. Muto or even Jet Set Radio…Kingdom Hearts 4 will come out in the next decade…I don’t even try to bring up Viewtiful Joe to most people because I’m not gonna get tricked into explaining what its about…)

Thanks for actually making me think about all these - I haven’t reminisced on them in quite awhile and man, I forgot how much time me & my brother spent sitting in our dining room with the PS2/Gamecube/Dad’s Xbox playing all of the above together and essentially just roleplaying. We, of course, did the same kind of thing with Melee (I used to make him pick Ganondorf so I could re-enact OoT with Young Link on the Hyrule Temple stage…we never managed to get the Peach turnip/Falco reflector/Super Scope black hole glitch to work but I probably spent an entire summer trying to convince my brother and sister daily to play with me on Hyrule Temple as Peach/Falco so we could try to get it to work…good times)

what the fuck is this thread half of y’all apparently do not know how long a decade is…

why are you putting down GPS and epub/eReaders both of these technologies were basically solved by 2015. In fact I’d go so far as to say ereaders have stagnated in the past decade because they keep throwing shit at the wall hoping it’ll stick (what if you could…use your ereader as a digital notebook?? if you use our $800 ereader you can do that!! What, you’re just looking for an e-ink that isn’t going to display ads at you 24/7 like the Kindle? China has been making some great things and it has taken Amazon years to catch up. Oh there’s a new color e-ink kindle out this year? wow the Boox Poke 2 came out in like 2011

Ebikes is like…ok sure I guess, various startups like Lime didn’t really get rolling til 2015 or so…NYC’s Citibike didn’t start until 2013 so this is one of those threshold cases…

Zoom - have you fucks never heard of Pidgin or MSN Messenger?? Both were offering video calls exactly like Skype and subsequently Zoom. Don’t you even think about Discord it has built its empire upon the bones and corpses of the great ones before it like Trilian and Teamspeak & again - it is not a breakthrough to release a ‘easier’ or more user friendly messaging app.

dunno why i got titled reading the comments on this post i think i didn’t get enough sleep last night…

there’s still some terrible posters out there but thankfully i’m still here in the vanguard defending against them

great take grandpa garbage

Parker Solar Probe got up to a speed of 190 km/s during its mission by doing 7 gravity assists using Venus, which is like 10x faster than Voyager 1’s speed - so like cosecantphi said - it is easier to just plan a trajectory that utilizes the gravity of some large object in the path of your destination rather than relying on pure thrust/a large rocket.

my favorite shit is actually Smart TVs/Streaming services doing this.

I love walking into my friends’ house while they’re watching something on like Hulu or Netflix using the built-in app on their Smart TV and as soon as my phone has been connected to their wifi for more than 10 minutes they’ll start getting insulin/diabetes drug ads because my fucking advertising footprint realized I’ve been a diabetic for 15+ years like right around the pandemic. Every time my friends are like “WHY DID THIS OZEMPIC/METFORMIN/ETC AD PLAY NOT FIVE MINUTES AFTER YOU CAME IN?!?!” and each time I’m like “you should install pihole plus I’m not even a type 2 so that shit is useless to me lemme know when you get a insulin pump ad”.