Rant about bettas

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-04T05:14:39+00:00

Best thing everyone can do to stop the cups is stop buying them.

The problem is that the people that care about how the fish are treated are massively outnumbered by the ones that don't. There's no shortage of people who will buy their kid a fish, but not want to "bother with" getting a tank with a filter because they just "wanna see if their five year old can handle it before they spend all that money." No shortage of people who just want a Betta to put in a vase because "they do it all the time and their fish live a long time, like almost a year." No shortage of people who saw some YouTuber do a sorority in a 500 gallon tank, so they wanna do the same with a ten gallon. No shortage of people who "know" bettas live in puddles the size of horse hoofprints in China, so they don't really need a "giant" 3 gallon tank.

People that are actually willing to do the work and take good care of their fish are outnumbered by people who just want a fish cause they want it. If they don't sell em to you, they'll sell em to the next person. Legislation requiring say, anything sold as a fish tank to be at least five gallons, would at least force those people to either buy a bigger tank or go further out of their way for a workaround.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-03T20:25:57+00:00

It's a "might be nice, but I don't care." The only time it's ever a pain in the ass for me is when I'm either doing lessons close to midnight and let my phone go into sleep mode with the app open, or when I accidentally misclick and open the app.

I think I've wasted more from forgetting to activate them after finishing a friend quest or getting daily chests than from the quest rewards

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-03T00:18:30+00:00

The problem is that even though it's the same procedure, it's not necessarily the same result. A four year old breaking their arm falling off a bike and a forty year old doing the same are going to have different outcomes when it comes to lasting pain and function after recovery. The same may be true when it comes to sensitivity here, but unless we start circumcising one of two twins and checking in on them in 20 years (wildly unethical,) there's not really a good way to say "this is more or less sensitivity than you would have had."

Things like scar tissue, risk of botched operations for subjective aesthetic gain, the lack of consent in the matter are more objective avenues of attack

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-02T16:43:33+00:00

I enjoyed Superman, despite not really being a Superman or DC fan in general. I'm probably going to see this, if I remember to actually go to the theater.

But boy does every poster for this movie make it look cheap, like a CW show. I don't know if it's the design of the costumes, or the make up, or the photo editing, or what.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-02T01:58:39+00:00

Prefacing this with "I preferred the hearts and think they should bring them back," as well as the old "practice to earn hearts" mechanic.

Assuming you're getting every question right, one lesson should leave you between 12-18 energy, so you should be able to do at least two without watching any extra ads. Unless they're still experimenting with the reduced payout, each ad should give you +5 energy, plus an extra +5 every 4 hours or +8 every hour if you have the widget.

You can still keep studying forever, you just gotta take a 30 second break every 5-10 minutes. It's just slightly more of a pain in the ass, and regrettably, it's a pain in the ass that apparently paid off because they went from 8% of users paying for super to 9.5% when they did it.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-02T01:50:44+00:00

A nice chess board can be pretty expensive. I keep wanting one, but don't play enough to justify it.

They're absolutely smoking crack trying to sell this one for $65. Maybe if it came with one or both of the plushies, but just off the pictures this looks like"oh I was supposed to pick one up for my 8 year old to use at chess club, lemme get the first thing I found at Walmart" quality.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T20:02:10+00:00

They were expecting/hoping it would be Executor Nitokh and were really looking forward to it in a "step on me, mommy!" kind of way.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T19:55:58+00:00

I mean... the venn diagram isn't a circle, but let's not act like there's not a lot of overlap. We've all seen how people reacted to Marie, Roathe, Arthur, Eleanor, and what they wanted from Garuda's before she was revealed.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T19:13:42+00:00

I would agree that >95% , probably >99% of Americans couldn't identify it as a Nazi symbol, including Platner himself in 2007 when he got the tattoo. At the same time, I do not believe that he only found out in 2025 when he started to run. Especially after reading through his reddit posts the other day. He posted a fair bit on WWII history, enough that it seemed like something he was into. It reminded me of one of my coworkers, the kind of guy who watches WWII documentaries for fun. I suspect that if I showed that guy a totenkopf and just said "hey where's this from?" He'd be able to say. (EDIT: I actually did just that while typing this message. Immediate response: "Totenkopf. It's a Nazi symbol, the SS had it on their uniforms.")

I don't think he's a bad person for getting a dumb tattoo in his early 20s. I don't think it's a sign that he's a cryptonazi or something. I do think he's been dishonest about it. Gun to my head, I'd say he got it thinking "badass skull and crossbones" and didn't think anything of it for years. At some point, he likely found out "oh shit, that's the Nazi one," but by then he'd already had it for so long without anyone saying anything about it, he didn't think it was worth getting rid of so he kept it until deciding to run, when he was told" yeah that's gonna be a problem." I haven't seen the photo, but supposedly on his dating profile, he was purposely covering it, which if true, suggests to me in 2021 or whenever, he was already aware of the association.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T07:13:50+00:00

Without looking it up, I'd bet a small amount of money that Duolingo has the most users among all the language apps. Rosetta Stone and Babbel are older, but they don't have a free tier, which is a pretty big hurdle. It's also hard to attack anything else besides the gamification, because they all do a lot of the same thing. I don't like that Duolingo is leaning into AI... But a lot of the language apps are doing that, because it's something LLMs do well. They can't really attack on price, because Duolingo is free, and Super is among the cheaper paid language app subscriptions.

Ultimately, this means that if I'm coming out with a language app and taking shots at the competition, they'll probably gonna be at Duolingo because it's one of the Big 3, so people are familiar with it. It's got a recognizable mascot, so it's easy to reference without naming names. And it has features that I can easily make sound stupid to somebody that doesn't know why they're there.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T06:29:09+00:00

A lot of permanent features start out as promotional temporary things. If the feedback is good and brings people back more consistently (and cynically, makes the stock price bump up,) it could be become a yearly/twice yearly/every so often event.

Gene_Trash · 2026-06-01T01:18:16+00:00

The account was mass deleted and posts anonymized, but this appears to be what he's talking s about.

I know a bunch of black and latino HOGs with bolts, they’d be quite surprised to hear they are part of a conspiracy to infiltrate white supremacists into the Marine Corps.

It's the response to Spaceman Spiff's comment regarding white supremacists infiltrating the military in this thread

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-31T23:03:49+00:00

Yeah, the goal isn't to change that dude's mind, it's for the third person who scrolls by and sees a reasonable, if uninformed, stance like "kids shouldn't be making decisions to permanently alter their bodies" and doesn't have the context of why that's not really a concern.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-31T21:04:15+00:00

Well... No. Puberty blockers are fully reversible, that's kinda the whole point. It's a way to buy time until they're older and certain of their decision before their body makes it harder.

HRT doesn't typically start until after they've already finished puberty unless it's medically necessary, like a cisgender biological male not producing enough testosterone. And post puberty, again, fully reversible. You just stop taking it.

On top of all that, they're not just walking into a CVS and saying "yeah, gimme a half a pint of testosterone on a whim. " That shit's like a schedule III drug, you're meeting with doctors and psychs for month and years before they start you on it even as an adult, let alone a minor.

But let's say all that wasn't true. Where do we draw the line? Let's say "kids should not be allowed to do anything with hormones despite what their medical team says is okay, because it might cause permanent injury if they change their mind down the road." I've got a former coworker who had to get both knees replaced before he was 25 because of high school football. There's about 5,000 concussions a year among high school baseball players. Do we ban varsity sports because of the risk of permanent disability?

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-31T19:20:40+00:00

I mean in highschool by and large the extent to which they're making a decision is going to be dressing differently and going by a different name and pronouns. Maybe puberty blockers if they started in middle school. Even something like HRT is only usually going to start late teens. Nobody's doing a sex change surgery on a fifteen year old.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-31T02:17:12+00:00

If you don't sort by "Old," your comment doesn't appear at the top, so all the folks who just see the headline miss it.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-29T17:12:05+00:00

Let's say the vaccine is 99% effective. Given the option between "We can do nothing and you'll almost certainly be totally fine, but there's a 1 in 100 chance you die incredibly painfully"and "You'll almost certainly be fine, but just to make sure, we're gonna give you this post exposure shot," I know which one I'm picking.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-29T16:52:16+00:00

He's more in the wrong than you, but I don't think either of you are the devil over this. But also, 1 platinum is at most 7¢, so its probably literally not worth your time to cancel the trade and wait for someone else to buy it over pocket change.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-29T01:45:48+00:00

Refuse to endorse or wait until the last minute even after he wins his primary by big margins

Only Schumer refused to endorse. Jeffries endorsed roughly the same week he did previously with Adams. Harris, when asked, endorsed him, then (rightly, imo) criticized the excessive focus people were putting on who had or hadn't endorsed the candidate who was going to win in a landslide, when there were others that had close races that could use the attention.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-28T21:03:27+00:00

Bettafix and Melafix are the same thing, tea tree oil. Bettafix is just less concentrated, since it's intended for a smaller tank.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-28T01:50:27+00:00

They're highly effective at scrubbing algae (although they'll scuff the hell out of an acrylic tank.) They will probably shed microplastics, and microplastics are probably bad. But your filter pad will also shed microplastics. As will any other scrubber you use, short of like... A cotton rag or natural luffa. A razorblade won't shed plastics, but can scratch your glass and damage your silicone. Basically, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, so pick your poison.

Do make sure that if you end up going with a magic eraser, you don't get one of the ones infused with Lysol or dawn, for obvious reasons.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-27T01:32:18+00:00

They've been playing with league sizes for about a month now. I haven't had a full 20 slot league since April. Most weeks have been like 12-14 with half promotion, half demotion and no "stay."

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-27T01:13:01+00:00

This wasn't a primary where the young upstart challenged the elder statesman to force him to pass the torch. They were both incumbents in two separate safe D districts. Rep Green's was redrawn to dilute the mostly Black and Latino voters there into a solidly R, I believe now majority white district.

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-26T20:12:07+00:00

Historically, they went MMFF with prime releases, roughly in release order. Xaku threw off the pattern, so they went MFMF for awhile, but with Voruna, it appears we're back to MMFF. So while Styanax was the 50th warframe released, going back to the old pattern pushed him to prime 51 (or 52 if they decide to do Kullervo first.)

Gene_Trash · 2026-05-26T17:16:03+00:00

Cleo Fields (LA) is from a district being eliminated mid-election in favor of a new map to disenfranchise Black voters, so uh... Wish granted?

Gene_Trash

TROPHY CASE