edgesmash

Agent K said it best: "A person is smart. People are dumb panicky dangerous animals, and you know it."

My folks got me to eat broccoli by telling me there were little trees. I still love broccoli 40 years later.

About 15-20 years ago, we moved into a four-story apartment building with Italian restaurant and smoke shop (cigars) on the fist floor. Landlord didn't want us to sign a lease, but it was too good a deal to pass up otherwise. When we moved in, we had my inlaws and their friend help us, then we treated them to a nice lunch at the restaurant. At one large table gathered a group of men that looked like they'd fit right in on The Sopranos, which made us chuckle. A few minutes later, my inlaws' friend, a handyman and construction worker, went pale and quiet. My father-in-law asked him what was wrong. In a quiet voice, he explained that the plate glass windows at the front of the store were bulletproof windows. (In retrospect, I doubt windows that large could be bullet "proof", but they were indeed very thick and had a very slight green tint to them.) The meal went fine, and we went on with our lives.

There wad no entryway for packages to be delivered, so they'd be dropped at the cigar shop. Someone there would text us for us to get the package. Everytime I went there, it looked like another scene out of The Sopranos: a couple older guys lounging in leather armchairs, cigars in hands or mouths, wide smiles and chuckles, as if by living there we were part of the family. And really, that was what it all felt like, that we were part of the family.

All of that was circumstantial, and we assumed they all just liked the aesthetic. That was, until years after we left, we saw a news article about how the FBI had raided the restaurant and cigar shop and arrested a mob boss.

Toys and games, mostly. We'll get food from grocery stores and farmers markets, tools from the Ace Hardware, clothes from a variety of retailers. But there's no place around with a better selection of toys and games. (We used to live near a great independent toy store, but nothing like that around here).

Target usually has better prices on cleaning products than our other options, as well.

Probably because the nearest similar store is far enough away to make it unreasonable to go anywhere else.

I don't particularly like shopping at Target, but it's sometimes the best option for me. Except my local Target's management refuses to hire enough employees to properly staff the store. Unpacked boxes of products crowd the unorganized and uncleaned aisles. Employees look stressed and generally unhappy. Half the time there's a single cashier or no cashiers, and the self checkout is limited to 10 items (and is often closed, presumably because no loss prevention staff is on duty to monitor it). One time I had ~20 items and there was no cashier. I was about to rage quit (seriously considered just rolling my cart out the doors) when an employee saw me and opened a register just for me. (She clearly was stressed and overworked but took pity on me. I made sure to rate her highly on the survey thing printed on the receipt.)

The Target two towns over is the opposite: well staffed, clean, plenty of cashiers on duty. Staff there seem happier too, presumably because they aren't overworked and/or are paid better. But the local one is 5 minutes away and the farther one is 30 minutes on the highway. I'll still go to the farther one if it makes sense and fits in my schedule, but it rarely does.

Wow, that's remarkable, because the GOP health care plan should also be here in two weeks! What are the odds!

I think we need to run a controlled experiment to determine the ratio of boys brought to one's yard.

Consider the consequences of your actions, please!

That's what happens when the engineers are forced out and the marketers are given control.

Magic.

Wait wait wait one goddammed second. Is that a thing: hearing someone speak, saying "what was that?", then a moment after they start speaking, you suddenly know what they said the first time?

I discovered I had ADHD in my 30s and it was life changing. If this is another thing, then I'm in for another life changing discovery in my 40s.

I can 100% related to having AI generate this meme. If I had the idea to make this and didn't want to use AI, I would spend far too long by making an excel sheet, building a table, messing around with the values to make the pie wedges reasonably believable sizes, second-guessing what items to put in the table, tweaking the hex codes for the colors... and then never finishing. (Hell, I spent a good 20 minutes writing and rewriting this comment.)

Not saying using AI is justifiable here or anything, but I figure this community would get why.