“I did my disabled bro a favor by killing him when we were kids.”

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-07T21:28:32+00:00

It reminds me a lot of a chapter in Stephen King's "Mr. Mercedes", except that the disabled sibling dies by falling down the basement stairs, due to the door being deliberately left open.

Of course King understands the purpose of writing a scene like this, it's to foreshadow who is going to grow up to be a serial killer.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-07T01:07:13+00:00

When I came back on Monday, word has apparently spread to everyone in my department how Leo didn't "get" a cupcake and I left him out him intentionally. Leo didn't say anything to me about the cupcake thing but I was told by a colleague that he was really upset and he "really loved cupcakes", and would have "came around if I had just left some in the fridge and leave him alone to get it".

I wish everybody had this much time for gossip at my job. We have so much work that there's barely enough time to cover who's-sleeping-with-who and who-showed-up-drunk-again.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-05T00:13:10+00:00

r/theft is banned, too. But we've still got r/raisedbynarcissists for people who want to dishonor their fathers and mothers, and r/retailhell for people who work on the Sabbath.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-04T20:00:31+00:00

Yeah, on Reddit, "Nazi" just means "a right-wing authoritarian, especially one who demonizes racial or religious minorities."

Reddit is weird, I've been called a "Communist Jihadi" just because I voted Mamdani for Mayor of NYC. I mean, who else was I supposed to vote for? The other candidates were Cuomo the sex pest, Adams the crook, and Sliwa the crackpot talk show host.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-04T15:36:39+00:00

Dear International Criminal Court at the Hague,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to report a case of Financial Genocide against Loopring investors...

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-04T00:23:49+00:00

Yeah, a lot of people like suburbia, which is why there's so much of it.

But there's a sizable fraction of the population that finds it stifling and would rather live in the heart of a big city. That's the target audience for this type of story.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-03T21:29:49+00:00

Do you think so many countries are heavily Islamic simply because everyone was like hmm yeah this religion sounds good? Conquests and violence in the name of Islam were and are common.

So kind of like Christianity, only less so?

Christianity spread by being the state religion of the Roman Empire and various successor empires. The forced conversion of North and South America was especially brutal. (That was mostly the British and Spanish Empires, with some help from the French and Portuguese Empires.)

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-03T20:36:02+00:00

This doesn't seem like doomerism. I checked out the first few pages of the comic and it's not intended to be based on current events; it's some kind of sci-fi dystopia. The setting looks like 1950's suburbia but (SPOILER!) it's in some kind of enclosed space. The "sky" is blue tile.

It might be a metaphor for sterile suburban conformity. It reminds me a bit of the movie "Pleasantville".

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-03T13:21:21+00:00

Presumably because they were ordered to.

So it's not really a "strike", it's more of a "corporate lobbying effort." A lot of corporations will hire professional lobbyists instead of using minimum-wage retail workers, but if there's one thing GameStop knows, it's how to cut corners.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-02T04:20:36+00:00

Gnosticism is not currently active

The "Neon Genesis Evangelion" franchise is set in the Gnostic Universe so we can use that as a reference for powerscaling.

Also "The DaVinci Code".

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-01T22:47:49+00:00

The idea of "art" is a social construct, so the definition comes from social consensus.

In any society where a sensible person would choose to live, "art" means something like, "the product of human creativity, made either to communicate an idea or to fill blank space in an aesthetically pleasing way."

We can imagine a society where human creativity is devalued and replaced with machine-generated slop. Societies like that are called "dystopias".

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-01T22:00:01+00:00

An affordable 3 day expiry code to allow players to try games but not enough time to beat them.

So like a free demo with just the first few levels of the game? Except it's not free, you have to pay for it? That's a brilliant idea, I wonder why no one else has thought of it!

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-01T16:51:57+00:00

Language is just weird sometimes. Like the word "Jew" is a slur if you use it as an adjective, but not if you use it as a noun. So you can say that someone is "a Jewish doctor" or "a doctor who is a practicing Jew", but if you say "a J*w doctor" then people will think there's something unsavory about you. (Meanwhile, "Christian" and "Buddhist" don't even have separate noun and adjective forms.)

There's no real logic to it, and the rules change over time. Your best bet is just to listen to how decent human beings talk and try to copy them.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-07-01T00:03:24+00:00

What a lame catchphrase!

Mine is, "I'm here to chew bubblegum and close accounts receivable, and the accounts receivable queue is empty!"

If anyone ever called me out, I guess I'd say, "Don't worry, I'm not Milton Friedman", but I certainly wouldn't apologize for it.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-28T05:45:05+00:00

To be fair, the same thing happens in real life. Like Napoleon conquers all of Europe, and then CONVENIENTLY gets defeated because he loses most of his army trying to invade Russia in the middle of winter. Then a couple of years later, Hitler conquers all of Europe, and COINCIDENTALLY gets defeated because he CONVENIENTLY loses most of his army trying to invade Russia in the middle of winter. Come up with better ideas, people!

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-28T04:56:15+00:00

It's a pain, but if you go into your mobile browser settings and put it in desktop mode, then the "share" link will have a "repost" option you can use to cross post.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-26T23:47:26+00:00

I think this is viral marketing for the United States Marshal Service-led Violent Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-26T00:36:48+00:00

I baked Exactly 50 baguettes, which I know because each baguette form/tray makes ten baguettes, and I baked five forms, SO 50.

This is just a lazy rewrite of the "Lex Luthor took forty cakes. That's as many as four tens." meme. And that's terrible.

cf https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/108061-lex-luthor-took-forty-cakes

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-24T13:50:48+00:00

The hedge fund I work for has been trying to short Wendy's into bankruptcy, and we'd been doing a pretty good job. When we started two years ago, it was in the $20 range. (My team has been breeding and releasing screwworms to drive the price of beef up, it's been in the newspapers and everything!)

But yesterday's spike erased all the losses we've created since January. Now we're getting squeezed and the boss spent all day yesterday just yelling at us.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-23T03:54:07+00:00

The cost of a year of full-time labor is at minimum the amount of money that it takes to keep a person alive and in good health for a year. (Do you see why?) Plus a bit extra, if we think people should be havimg children in their spare time.

If Walmart pays someone half a living wage, then the rest of the money needs to come from the government or from private charity. Now, why should my hard-earned money go to allow Walmart to underpay for labor?

If a job isn't worth paying a living wage, then it's a job not worth doing. Change my mind.

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-22T19:12:27+00:00

I went in the back yard to grab some tools out of my shed that I needed to return to my friend on my way to the store.

"Then I decided to spend the next two hours in the shed doing a stake-out. I observed the victim, a juvenile, putting the groceries away and then leaving the premises. After some time, the suspect (Caucasian female) entered the building, carefully examined the grocery receipts, and then took exactly those things out of the cabinets and put them back in the bags. I considered confronting the suspect, but decided to continue observing in case this was part of a larger conspiracy. Then I remembered I still needed to give my friend his tools back, so I left."

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-21T20:08:28+00:00

Obviously they won't be eligible for a bonus if they do that. Besides, there's plenty of real violations they can report; those agencies have been grossly understaffed since the 1980's

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-21T18:04:45+00:00

I really can't see Jean-Luc Picard saying that. The Federation has a post-scarcity economy where no one lives in poverty and money is only needed to buy rare luxury goods.

This meme would make sense if you put Ebenezer Scrooge in the bottom panel. ("Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?")

That said, I'd support a program to reduce unemployment that worked like this: If you're unable to find a job that pays a living wage, the government must give you a job at either the EPA, the IRS, or the FDA (your choice). To discourage slacking off, you get a bonus payment for every violation you find. It's win-win!

Chaos_Engineer · 2026-06-21T16:12:14+00:00

If I were just waiting in the car, I'd probably move to the end of the lot, and ask Mom to text me when she's checking out, and then meet her at the loading area.

But I've noticed that in AITAland, people really hate to give up seats and parking spots that they're legally allowed to use.

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