yeah, honestly. plague of frogs, plague of locusts. sounds like they just had a particularly wet year that spring.

there’s nothing about negatively affecting others lives?

so successful sociopaths and narcissists don’t have a disorder?

i don’t think that’s quite right.

ok, did you read the body of the post?

did you try clicking the link? titles aren’t meant to convey all relevant info.

doesn’t sound ridiculous at all to me. you just don’t get it.

in Wisconsin there used to be a popular morning radio segment called “who’s more sheboygan” making fun of how backwards and redneck the area was. sheboygan has always had a reputation as the Florida of Wisconsin.

so yes, fair. America bad. but also here’s a little nugget of context to go with that.

idk, that had already changed the basic nature of how gods work from the book.

they also tended to go for cheap shots where the author really thought a lot about how to use certain gods.

for example:

in the epilogue of the anniversary edition of the book gaimam talks about wanting to incorporate Jesus, but deciding that the scene he wrote for him wasn’t good enough to capture what Jesus was to Americans. but he includes the scene in the post script anyway. it’s a quiet scene where Jesus comes and offers guidance in one of shadows most desperate hours.

in the show Jesus gets shot trying to cross the Mexican border. which is the absolute lowest hanging fruit when it comes to Jesus. i have made that joke before. I’ve heard others make that joke before. “if Jesus actually was alive right now he’d get shot at the border for being brown and communist”. they clearly just wanted shock value at the lowest intellectual price.

i don’t hate shows or movies just for adapting a story to a new medium. for example, the new dune movies really aren’t actually capturing the point of the books very well so far. that’s because the dune books are mostly people thinking about what people think it doesn’t adapt into visual mediums well. what villenuve has made is a great movie series regardless. the shining is another great example of that. i had a Stephen King fan try to tell me that Stanley kubrik was a hack for not following the book better. I’d argue that Stanley Kubrik is a better filmmaker that king is an author. the shining is an all time great movie regardless of what it was based on or how much it changed that material. that said, i do hate adaptation that add story elements and change basic rules of reality without putting thought or effort in to making it worthwhile. these two examples are great because kubrik and villenuve are masters of their craft that made these movies with immense amounts of care and effort.

deviating from the source material isn’t inherently a sin, but making a much worse story when you started with a good one that was already written and loved and using its name to draw people in is worse than just making a bad show. a bad show is easily ignored, but a bad adaptation will put people off of the source material you love. or worse, will supplant the source material in the cultural zeitgeist and you’ll forever have to specify “i mean the book, not that terrible movie they did”. i think tv American gods was… just ok. it completely failed to capture what i liked about the book, but others seem to like it well enough. it has gotten multiple people i know into the book, so i can’t hate it entirely.

similar to the Witcher show. i hated it. it had nothing of the books in it. it was schlocky and the plot BARELY made sense. they just went off and did entirely their own thing after season 1 and it was shit. but everyone who hasn’t read the books seems to still like it so maybe I’m just a hater.

thematically it holds up fine. productuon wise it’s about what you’d expect from 90s scifi. it even has early cg aliens, with a tv budget. lots of big rubber suits or people with skin paint and wigs.

surprisingly dark too, especially in the latter seasons. they just keep making the main characters fail and suffer and betray each other and get tortured and have their friends and family die in front of them after failing to escape the body horror mad scientist that wants to steal your organs and trap you in the matrix…

i actually had to stop watching it towards the end over the continuous concentrated negativity. it’s not a very happy show very often. still good, i just can’t deal with shows that never turn on the lights. like bojack horseman and mr. robot. two other shows that are just too depressing for me to watch. i resonate too hard the consistent downward spiral with no positive moments, then the feeling sticks with me. all three are really good shows that i had to turn off for my own wellbeing.

ah yes, psychohistory. math predicting the future is the initial idea that gets asimov’s “foundation” rolling.

nah, that all lives in short form video these days.

it’s the perfect format for it. just long enough to say something crazy, not long enough for you to ask questions about it.

that and social media. take this website for example. lemmy.ml and lemmygrad both have some veeeeery interesting ideas about the history of certain authoritarian governments.

show a map of the land area it takes up and you might actuality convince some people it’s not lol.

it could be like milk lovers trying to call almond milk bad for the environment due to water usage. despite cow milk being infinitely worse. the propaganda machine did its job well. if you bring up non dairy milks to an American conservative in 2025, nine times out of ten they’ll feel the need to smugly tell you how terrible almond milk is and how we shouldn’t be allowed to waste all that water on it. if you try to tell them that cow milk is worse they’ll just tell you you’re wrong and that the data is lying.

i straight to showed one of them the hard numbers on how much cows are putting out greenhouse gasses and she just said “that can’t be right”. it didn’t FEEL right to her so she just didn’t believe it…

if you wrap a burger in foil it’ll keep in the fridge as long as there’s no veggies.

put that whole thing in the oven for like 15 minutes on like 300 and it’ll come out nice with a bun that has a pleseant, light crunch on on the outside.

thicker burgers might be harder, i usually do this with smash burgers. just, for the love of God, add the veggies after reheating. please.

no no, it just needs your location data every second to make sure it’s set to the correct time zone. Microsoft and their 1.8 million partners decided that the clock can’t work without your location data.

(I’m joking, for the inevitable person that’s going to try to disagree)

i think a lot of that comes from the staff and administration as well. if the adults in the room get annoyed or exhausted by someone with special needs it basically gives the kids permission to be mean. and the staff tends to stick around.

i work with high school sports teams a lot. this DEFINITELY holds true for team culture. the number of high school sports teams that just act like teenage versions of their coaches can be unbelievable.

I always know I’m in for a bad day when the coach is a dick.

this whole exercise is really meant to exist in schools. like, schools for young kids.

we’re adults arguing about which nursery rhyme is cooler while forgetting that this isn’t for us. it needs to be easily understood by children. that’s why we use one with only short easy words.

even the sentence structure of the second one is complicated and hard for a child to remember.

i think it’s more about being words that kids will know.

i guess lol. america is the great innovator. it’s just the the only innovations that are being invested in are “how do we squeeze people more while spending less” America is cutting edge on that front.

that probably went i, a not morning person, have anyways felt like hotels want to push me out of bed.

as a lifelong second-third shifter i would pay 3 times as much for ANY HOTEL that can accommodate me wanting to sleep during the day. moving across the country and not wrecking my work sleep schedule is impossible exclusively because all hotels want me to check in 4 hours past my bedtime. so either I’m buying an extra day off noisy bad sleep, or I’m just not sleeping for a day.

as much as they suck for other reasons and have enshittified beyond usability; this was what air b&b was great for. hotels were and now are again an industry that’s very stuck in its ways and NEEDS disrupting. they need to to live “normally” for them to work.