This is the natural progression in my decade-long quest to just get one fucking friend to play and of the original STALKER games. Sometimes I feel like I chose to incarnate into this particular simulation where life gets really good in my late-thirties, but I spend a lifetime failing to get friends into STALKER.

Sheyyga Dreamcayyshhht…

Years back when I worked for Kmart, there was some sort of large Samsung Galaxy tablet advertised as a Black Friday front-page exclusive for only $40. As you can imagine, people were ready to kick the fucking doors down to get their hands on those, because anyone dumb enough to participate in the Black Friday madness is definitely too dumb to know why 1gb non-expandable storage is next to fucking worthless. Not to mention they had the weakest hardware imaginable, with a whopping 1.5 MP camera.

Black Friday is such a cheap illusion.

Humans steeply on the rise, animals sharply on the decline. We’re all reincarnating up.

The number gets higher and higher every time a console dweeb makes the argument that they’re not constantly fucking themselves.

It’s a nice one, too. It makes the room feel like it’s full of music. Presidents only get the best braiders.

I don’t know if this will age like my previous belief that PS1 had photo-realistic graphics, but I feel like 4k is the peak for TVs. I recently bought a 65" 4k TV and not only is it the clearest image I’ve ever seen, but it takes up a good chunk of my livingroom. Any larger would just look ridiculous.

Unless the average person starts using abandoned cathedrals as their livingrooms, I don’t see how larger TVs with even higher definition would even be practical. Especially if you consider we already have 8k for those who do use cathedral entertainment systems.

Holy fuck, I just looked up the record. Not what I was expecting at all. It looks like one of those 700 lb. people who can’t roll off of their futon. Even the underside is shockingly similar.

Everything in this comic is a cake pop to my brain.

Reminds me of StumbleUpon. I miss it dearly, but it had this major flaw. You’d hit stumble and it would dump you to some random part or the internet based on your interests (assuming you selected any). Sometimes an article, sometimes a pic, video, joke, you name it. Based on what you like or dislike, it was supposed to yield better stumbles over time. Except it didn’t.

What would happen is that you would eventually make the fatal mistake of liking a single image of a horse or something, and every other goddamn result from that point forward was tailored to horse culture. The only solution was to go back in your count and remove everything you ever liked, then never, ever, ever like another goddamn horse again.

But using StumbleUpon with interests selected and absolutely no feedback was a truly wonderful thing. During my younger days abusing Adderall, I used to go so fucking deep down the archeology and Celtic mythology rabbit hole, to the point where I felt like I was the intrepid explorer who was unearthing these ancient secrets.

It is kind of wild. Some dudes have small dicks, big dicks, egg-shaped dicks… Stinky dicks with moles on them… Fat dicks with freckles… Dicks that look like sad elephants… Dicks that look like Shar Peis…

Then you have big vaginas, small vaginas, long vaginas, sleeve of wizard vaginas, jutting serrated-looking labia vaginas, wise old horse-like vaginas, cauliflower vaginas, meat pile vaginas, vaginas that look like Shar Peis…

And any of these… And I mean any of them… can be on the hottest person you’ve seen in your life. It’s like opening a Kinder Egg. Drop in a coin, pull the lever, and see what surprises await you in the dankest, steamiest, most razor-burnt region inside of your new partner’s pants.

It’s like one of those comments you type out half-asleep on the toilet some mornings before stopping yourself and asking, “Why the fuck am I even saying this?”, before deleting it and going back to lurking. Except he didn’t delete.

Don’t mind if I do!

Same. 7-3:30 most days. Some an hour or two earlier. I always crash out after lunch, or guaranteed by 1:30. At that point I’m just walking around trying to find shit to do.

I don’t know that this even counts, but one of the most strange but wildly interesting things I used to do years back was randomly exploring defunct teleporters in Habbo Hotel.

For those who don’t know about teleporters/teles in Habbo Hotel, there are probably tens of thousands of pairs of teleports that exist in the game, each of them connecting only to its pair. Since trading furniture is pretty much a currency in Habbo, a lot of individual teleporters get traded off or lost throughout the years, and often end up being parked in random rooms and vast furniture junkyards.

So I would often lay down several random teles from my inventory, or enter my own furniture junkyard, and try every tele in there until I got a live one. This would Bill & Ted me to fuck knows where. If I’m unlucky, it’s just a dead end room. If I’m lucky, it’s a room with even more teles. That’s where the rabbit hole begins. Pretty soon you’re ten teles deep into the weirdest, most liminal Back Rooms spaces you can imagine. Sometimes you even find a back door into other players’ private rooms and get to explore like a cat burglar. The sky was the limit.

I haven’t logged in for a decade or more, but I still miss doing that sometimes.

I included the best pic I could find online of what a tele goldmine looked like, except there would typically be a wide variety of styles and not all portapotties like these.

Are you talking Australian Kmart or North American? In North America it was minimum wage for the vast majority of workers and zero benefits. I only made $11 USD (my store went under in 2016) as a supervisor with keys to the store and the safe, so it was a pretty shit arrangement. But it was a good stepping stone that got me into managing within the grocery industry, where I’m making significantly more for much more palatable work.

As a former PM Supervisor at Kmart, I think I just got mildly triggered by the K-Mart’s store closing part. That liquidation process was hands down the most monumentally stressful and hellish period of my life. Fuck that company and everyone who turned up to plunder it.

It wasn’t terrible for what it was. I just remember being let down after years of listening to my best friend’s other friend telling me all of these promises he had fully subscribed to. It all sounded too good to be true, but both us and the industry itself were too young to have experienced overpromises like that. I thought maybe I just didn’t know how far technology had come, and we were about to see it fully manifest in all its glory…

But what we got was a fuck load of bloom and a few branching choices. And a marriage system that let you be gay. I definitely made my guy gay. Well, not at first. At first I married the barber because I thought I’d get free haircuts. That didn’t work. So I made my guy gay.

Those are valid observations. My bet is on a juvenile Great Blue Heron.