So, here you are. Aren’t ya. AREN’T YA? Ya, ya are.
The transit information around here is all running some janky ass kernel from 20 years ago, and sure, it works, until it don't. I appreciate the effort and all, but damn I wish they'd take shit more seriously.
Write it all down. Just for yourself. Dumb takes and all. Write it all out so you have your own opinions clear before you on paper, black and white. Then when you've edited it all and have said everything you want to say in a way that you are satisfied with, print those pages and put them up in your bathroom right opposite where you shit. Every time you shit, you read it, close your eyes, and try to recite it without looking. In a couple of weeks you can perfectly tell anyone exactly what you feel and think about it without missing a beat.
If you can't perform on the spot it's because you're still not comfortable with what you really feel and think. This is the cure.
The second time was possibly even more heart-breaking, but at least nobody lost any money. My parents, my father specifically, I mean both of them but this concerns my father- they grew up in a war torn country. My father had three brothers. He was youngest. When he was three years old, war broke out. The big one, number two, and in the worst possible place. He loved his brothers, and the eldest one got drafted, the story is unclear and lost to time, but joined the airforce somewhere abroad. The second one, I can't even recall, but he disappeared somewhere, sometime, somehow, and none of dad's family ever heard anything from him again- MIA, basically.
It was a big thing for my father, my grandmother too, she lived with us for years in the new country after the war, and just like in the story above, it's first after I got up in years and some that I realized what that haunted look was on her face as she zoned out and pulled her fingernails along the armseat of the leather chair that was hers, as the family watched TV together. Dad used to say, "Grama! Stop scritching!", it was a thing and we all laughed at it because grama scritched. She was thinking of her two lost sons- one of them went into the airforce but was also never heard from again, the other, who knows. Nothing good, probably. But they never knew.
Dad was like her, he just never got over it. He had kind of reconciled the fact that his eldest brother either died fighting, or after the war just relocated somewhere in another country and couldn't find his family back home again. But the other brother, it just itched him until the day he died, he used to light a candle every Christmas and make the table for one person extra, just so that in case he happened to come knocking, the table would be set for him to sit down and have Christmas dinner with us. We didn't think much of it, only, again, in my older years did I understand what emotional luggage was being brought out and put on display on that one night every year.
Sorry for being long-winded, but it kind of matters- decades go by, no more grama, parents getting old, and one day there is a letter. Dear so-and-so, it has come to our attention that a lost relative of yours, by the name so-and-so, has been trying to get in touch with you. Disclosed are his personal information, we are reaching out to you to make sure that you are actually related to this person, and would you want to accept his communication? If so, please get back to us by sending $100 to the following address for verification purposes, and he will be passed along your contact information.
My dad called me at work, "Something amazing has happened, get over here straight away after work". So, of course, I did. By then I was coming up on 40 working IT, I'd been around. I took one look at that letter and just laughed at it, "dad, this is a classic scam. Like, do you mind if I keep this? I have never seen an actual printed Nigerian Prince letter with stamps and all, like, they really went the extra mile with this one!", and he looked at me with despair, and I will never forgive myself for not being quicker on my feet and realizing the trauma I was casually laughing off, and said, "are you sure? His name is in there, and all, and our name is too, this is clearly real!".
He wanted so badly for it to be real, my mom sat by him, they both started arguing with me, like, clearly it was real, and that is when I knew for sure that it wasn't, because they weren't arguing with me, they were arguing with reality, or god himself, pleading for it to be real. I just shook my head, ever the bitter cold rationalist, "no, this is a very classic trick, and your long lost brother is not trying to contact you".
I don't know how I should have handled it, to me it was just another Nigerian scam letter, I was just overcome with the novelty of having a physical copy in my hand, but to my father, and to my mother, it was the one tiny spark of hope they had been waiting for, for decades.
That is the type of sorrow and grief that scammers prey on, and cause. Fuck them all to pieces.
Twice we got scammed. Well once for real, I caught the second one. I only realized the first one after my parents were already gone. My brother went on a solo psycho-journey when I was like 14, trans-Siberian railway through Russia and Mongolia, ended up in China. He was perhaps 19 at the time. A couple months in we got a call from China. Chinese embassy say my brother is in trouble. They read back his information, everything on the passport, is this him? Yes, it is. Keep in mind this was in the 90's when international calls to the other side of the planet cost actual money by the minute.
My parents spoke very broken English, and I was too young to speak properly to handle something like this, so there was a bunch of back and forth over several days, but it was clear to all of us that he was in trouble, and needed us to send money to get him out of whatever it was. China, ffs. I don't remember, shit I don't know even how much they ultimately sent, but it was likely by my estimates around $1500- a very solid chunk of change for our not necessarily struggling but not exactly thriving family either.
He came back a year later or so, and I don't know why but the whole debacle kind of never came up at the dinner table, until just like a year or so before my mom and dad both passed. We were all sitting after dinner, drinking and telling the usual family stories, and it came up, and we all laughed about how crazy that shit was to deal with back home when he was on his crazy first trip of his life and had to send money to China. He didn't laugh. He hadn't any clue what the fuck we were talking about, and nervously laughed it off.
At the time I just shook my head, of course he wouldn't remember when someone else bailed him out and saved his ass, narcissistic piece of shit as he is. Only after they passed did I realize, oh shit. There was no embassy, there was no emergency. Some entrepreneurial Chinese hostel manager just took down his info, somehow tracked down our parents (likely he had just straight up given them their contact information, just in case), and scammed us out of a decent amount of money.
My parents were hard working, we never wanted for anything, and they never let on we were actually not particularly well off and struggled at times. If they were alive, I still don't know if I would tell them. What was, was. What good is that heartbreak gonna do anybody thirty years after the fact? Anyway, that moment has passed either way, and well, we survived anyway, but damn it stings being the only one knowing this such a long time afterwards. My brother stayed a piece of shit and our remaining family have all gone no-contact with him, so even he doesn't know, it's just me.
First meme on here I've legitimately laughed at. :)
And every country has this tiny minority screaming "NO! WE NEED TO SUCK HIS COCK! GARRBBBLLRLWAAARGBLLLGBBLLLRBBRBRBRB" and for some reason more and more people are like, hey, check out these dudes gobbling geriatric oligarch cock, let's all get in on that!
They're the rich lonely fat kid in elementary that would always invite you over to play with their fancy toys and latest model game system and give you the broken controller just so that they would always win to compensate for the fact that their parents were in the middle of divorce proceedings over who would end up stuck with the kid.
I fucking love this template, I am going to run it into the ground
It’s such a fringe theory that not even Luigi subscribe to it.
He has pleaded not guilty, brother.
Yeah I think next time we see him is in his NY June 8th trial.
He was never out. None of us were.
I read a good fan conspiracy theory, that it was a two man job they planned together, and they kind of looked alike- one dude did the deed, the other sloppily went on the run while the first one escaped. Luigi was the fall guy, but is actually innocent, and he can prove it in court, while the actual killer is chilling on a beach somewhere. And that would, allegedly, be why Luigi seems so relaxed about the whole thing. Because he knows he's gonna walk. Kind of like an inverse "The Life of David Gale" maneuver.
I don't know if I believe it, but it's surely a possibility, and it's an interesting take. :)
People who feel the need to feed drama in their life feel like they don't matter. They create problems to feel like something actually matters in their life, that they matter, that their problems matter, and they create these problems themselves to involve others to get that social validation of themselves as being people who matter. It's basically narcissism. They feel like they don't get as much attention as they think they deserve, so they create problems for everyone so that they have to pay attention.
MOTHER fuckers. Tectonic activity now, all of a sudden? In OUR orbit? Has someone forgotten to take the moon out for a walk again? This shit just pisses me off I don't know what to tell you. We had JUST gotten it just so. The fuck are we gonna do now, buy a new moon?!