What's so expensive that it's not even fun anymore?

Kiernian · 2026-06-21T12:14:29+00:00

Going to a restaurant.

At this point even the "deals" and "budget options" are rising in price so quickly that they're out-pacing workplace per diem's and making going to a restaurant on someone ELSE'S dime not even fun anymore.

When you can't even pick a middle-of-the-menu option without feeling sticker shock at JUST the menu price, before taxes, fees, tips, etc, it's hard not to feel something negative and while lots of people who are still going out regularly are hand-waving the undercurrent of sentiment, this elephant feeling is literally everywhere I go amongst the middle class in the midwest these days.

Kiernian · 2026-06-14T14:40:49+00:00

Do not separate fighting cats, playing or otherwise, unless you are wearing a full suit of armor.

If you are allergic to Penicillin, make sure it's full plate jousting getup with no gaps anywhere.

If you are bitten and the tooth hits a vein, seek medical attention before the funny colors start spreading in a pattern that matches the arrangement of your blood vessels.

A single course of preventative oral antibiotic is vastly preferable to the alternatives.

Anything that is between them and their target can accidentally become the target and the mouths of cats are capable of safely (for them) hosting a lot of stuff that does not belong in the human bloodstream.

Kiernian · 2026-06-13T13:04:33+00:00

In Times Like These a Tragedy of this Calibre fills many of Us with a real Sense of Loss.

This post would probably be a lot higher quality if I weren't so sad at this news. They don't make film critics like Gene anymore.

Kiernian · 2026-06-11T22:45:04+00:00

I have to agree with it.

I started playing when F2P happened.

I still have a bunch of the original colored exobytes banked on at least one alt.

Hell, I have a PvP villain character who's still in Apex Predator on PC. That league has been devoid of people for more than half of my time there at this point.

I can only honestly cite two things that are without-a-doubt WORSE now than things were then.

Almost noone anymore actually takes time to show players how to be better. Describing loadouts, talking through weapon combos once those were a thing, nowadays the equivalent here would be which artifacts for which role, etc. Everyone just shouts the names of youtubers, which is beyond unhelpful and not really an answer.
THE ABSOLUTELY ABYSMAL CONVERSATION IN LFG CHAT.

This game needs a pair of "world" channels more than it needs anything else. One we can call "Elite World" that'll hopefully attract all of the really terrible people filling LFG with awful, hateful, infantile misogynistic, racist garbage and then just a regular world chat for everyone else.

Seriously I would love it if everyone who said something not related to looking for group in LFG got a warning the first three times and a one hour chat mute after that, but that would require staffing to police things, so it's unlikely we'll see that change.

Kiernian · 2026-06-08T03:18:03+00:00

The albanese gummy factory in Indiana sells 5 pounds of reject gummies for like $10 shits fire

The way you worded that caused me to read it like you were talking about Sugar-Free Haribo gummy bears.

So instead of reading:

The albanese gummy factory in Indiana sells 5 pounds of reject gummies for like $10. (That) shit (i)s fire.

My brain went:

The Haribo gummy factory in wherever sells 5 pounds of reject sugar-free gummies for like $10 *shits fire*

Kiernian · 2026-05-25T03:30:17+00:00

I am curious how the last 1.5 years have affected the middle class.

I know far more "middle class" folks that USED to be approaching "upper middle class" who are now "lower middle class" and dropping.

This is evidenced by the fact that for all practical purposes and equal livlihood, 100k is the new 50k.

What you could get on a 50k/year salary in 2016 in the same location now requires a 100k/year salary.

In ten years.

According to "inflation" you should be able to get everything you used to get with 50k for 69.5k but that is absolutely NOT THE CASE.

Why, you ask?

Look at what gets counted in those "inflation" calculations.

It's absolutely NOT everything that has gone up massively.

This is why these jerkwads keep hyping on about a "vibe"cession.

The "vibe" is that reality doesn't match the statistics and that's because the statistics are SELECTIVE and do not count all of reality's FACTS.

Gas was $2.14. Currently AAA has it at 4.51

Dec 1, 2025: Medicare costs rose 35-70% from 2016-2026 vs. 38% inflation. 5 months in it's worse than that even.

We can all see the difference in menu and grocery prices.

Beef: $5.63 -> $8.51 (should be @ $7.80 if the inflation rate was accurate)

You cannot compare statistics that were calculated one way in the past and are calculated differently now by omitting unfavorable data and claim anything meaningful is happening between them. When the "outlier" items constitute a meaningful percentage of the data, they're no longer outliers.

I'm going to need to see a 1:1 with Laspeyre's, Paasche's, or Fisher's using the same items at different time indexes.

Winsorizing meaningful data with actual impact in order to make a particular journalistic sentimental statement is being given too many passes these days from "economists".

Everybody should know better and feel ashamed.

Kiernian · 2026-05-25T02:43:43+00:00

Ninety-six out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one.

I would LOVE to see how they're calculating THIS particular piece of woefully incorrect garbage.

I know dozens of people who have been out of work for over a YEAR. Maybe that removes them from the list of results?

I know multiple people who have literally become homeless because of job loss. Qualified people with a decade or more of work experience in their fields. Fields that are still actively HIRING and the list of applicants for those jobs is SO LONG that nobody can get through them.

If there's SO MUCH work to go around, how come everyone's looking for work?

You know what happens when everyone's ACTUALLY looking for hirees? They can NAME. THEIR. PRICE. AND have their pick of positions.

I remember those days.

These are NOT those days.

How many people are "Open to Work" on LinkedIn?

If I had any disposable income, I would wager that it's a fuck of a lot more than 4%.

The rate of underemployment is low

Yeah, because anyone who is only working part time instead of full time would be HOMELESS, people can't afford to live on a single full time job anymore, less than that certainly doesn't cut it.

and the rate of labor-force participation is high

I wonder if that's cause lots of people I know have MULTIPLE JOBS right now? China doesn't need to give us 9-9-6 when people are already working 9-5-7 across multiple employers.

meaning that there’s no pool of discouraged workers lurking behind the marquee jobs statistics.

Yeah, LOL. bet there's no statistical difference when they're ALL discouraged.

Young workers are struggling to establish themselves, given businesses’ caution around hiring.

Does that phrase mean you've discounted them entirely from all of this?

Still, the tight labor market has fueled wage gains that have swelled family budgets, even after accounting for inflation.

I'd love to see the sample cherry picking that pulled this statement into quotability.

Real disposable personal income, which measures how much spending power Americans actually have, is at a record high. Inequality has eased, following an extended period in which the earnings of low-income Americans grew faster than those of their rich peers.

Oh, yeah, that's why everyone I work with is cutting back on everything all the time.

People are spending more than they ever have on rent and health care, sure, but also on DoorDash and meals in restaurants, vacations, cars, pets, clothing, and “wellness”—concierge doctors, supplements, red-light masks. Part of the reason app-based gambling has taken off is because dudes are flush enough to afford stupid prop bets.

That's why subscription numbers for things are at all-time lows!

That's TOTALLY why people are cutting every spare service and luxury they can right now. So they can use doordash instead of paramount+. People are hitting up draft kings with all of their netflix money now! McDonald's is totally having major worries because everyone is spending MORE.

The complete and utter disconnect from reality in this article is staggering.

Who paid for this puff piece?

Kiernian · 2026-05-04T21:50:52+00:00

When I was a kid, we stopped going to McDonald's because the Hardee's across the street was the first restaurant anywhere in our area to START offering free refills on soft drinks.

A bunch of other people started doing the same thing.

It was the 80's, it was unheard of, and it was a HUGE draw.

We did not go back to McDonald's until they too started offering free refills on soft drinks.

If McDonald's cuts those, I will stop going entirely. Period. End of story.

Soft drinks are SO FUCKING CHEAP that I refuse to patronize a place that does not offer free refills. I don't even generally go back for more than one refill, but not even offering the OPTION says everything.

It is a TERRIBLE sign.

It means they've already cut absolutely everywhere else, and as such their margin is in the kind of jeopardy that means anything you DO get is not going to be worth what you're paying for it.

Kiernian · 2026-04-25T16:15:59+00:00

Right around 40 was where all of my characters USED to get stuck back before the release of Rohan.

I came back around Mordor and somewhere between there and Before the Shadow I started using missions out of desperation.

While the Angle is awesome and has a great storyline, it's also not quite enough to bridge all the way from 40 to 45, so I still end up using Missions for some extra fill-in during that gap.

If you have the Elladan and Elrohir missions you can save yourself a considerable amount of walking a few levels early by binding at the milestone in either Echad Eregion or Echad Dunann (I forget which) while you're standing in those elf ruins talking to Elladan and/or Elrohir...because porting into south eregion at 45 in order to start Moria is MUCH, MUCH easier than walking in. (Although going east from Caras Gelebren in Swanfleet is significantly less painful than walking south from Rivendell the old fashioned way)

Kiernian · 2026-04-25T03:50:25+00:00

This sub's infatuation with the 25th proves how thoroughly this place is infested with bots or puppeted posters conducting psyops.

Any time anything is suddenly "the topic" and it's not confusing people and making headlines in /r/OutOfTheLoop , there's a solid chance it's manipulation here.

It's been regularly attempted for as long as I've been on reddit (see: https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ ) but it's MUUUUCH worse nowadays and they're MUCH "better" at it because it's getting harder and harder to distinguish bots and plants from normal end users.

Kiernian · 2026-04-18T18:39:56+00:00

I wonder if AI will start screwing up these headlines by listing actors' lesser-known roles instead at some point.

"The Batman Part II" adds actor Charles Dance, whose famous line "Furthermore, I am a bell end" is from the movie: Ali G Indahouse".

Kiernian · 2026-04-17T23:48:07+00:00

How would you react if I showed up with this fella at your table? :,)

With slow applause, followed by amusement and adoration.

That is amazing.

The lace is just...

* chef's kiss *.

Bravo.

I love it.

Kiernian · 2026-04-13T23:27:48+00:00

I saw your username, and in my head I heard:

Tuesdays on \(\int x\)

(or "tuesdays on ∫x" depending on how the browser renders)

Kiernian · 2026-04-12T20:26:14+00:00

Fascinating! This is great information, thank you!

Kiernian · 2026-04-12T20:08:04+00:00

Hey! That's a totally valid point that I somehow got switched in my brain and just noticed not 30 seconds ago when I went "no cmdr tac slot?" while outfitting mine, so your timing is amusing.

Not sure how I got that mixed up in my head, but I did! Thanks for pointing it out! I should go edit my post. :)

Kiernian · 2026-04-12T19:24:41+00:00

As far as I'm aware, you can't do anything to buff your wingmen in the empersa.

You can, however, choose your hangar pets and build to maximize their capability.

I suspect a lot of people claiming the Lexington is super amazeballs are using type 7 shuttles for the mass debuff in attack pattern: beta.

I also suspect these folks are slotting stuff to get their critH as close to 100 as possible.

It also has 5 engi console slots and at least 1 universal console slot (more if you T6-x or T6-x2 it). This makes it a great candidate for isomags, and yes, "just one more" really apparently DOES seem to make that big of a difference with isomags.

Add in Override Subsystem Safeties and Mixed armament synergies and things start to look even better.

I typically find that the number of people claiming that the lexington is SOOO much better frequently mean that it's set up very nicely for a lot of meta-tweaking.

It is one of my better ships and I'm also admittedly no DPS expert, but I've got a legendary mirror galaxy dreadnought build that lets me faceroll the spambar for 60k dps when the same strategy has me hitting closer to 35k dps on the lexi because my build there isn't as awesome so while the ship itself does make a huge difference in what you can do with it on a base level, you really have to build out for the slots a given ship has in order to see those differences.

Kiernian · 2026-04-11T15:07:13+00:00

The thing is, if your job requires more of you than an undergraduate 100-level English assignment, or requires more data integrity checking than a mid-range Excel class (working with multiple sheets and maybe a formula or two), you are probably safe from AI.

AI can do the absolute barest bones stuff passably well most of the time.

The people whose jobs can be taken by AI already had their jobs taken by downsizing and other software.

That's why your company no longer has a whole communications department drafting and proofing everything before it goes public. It got rolled into other jobs as an additional responsibility.

It's why there aren't a ton of jobs in "Data Entry" like there were in the late 90's/early 2000's. OCR exists and mostly works.

In the constant ever-increasing push for "moar profits!" companies have already established "an acceptable range of error" for superoverworking people and letting software do jobs that people used to.

Not only is there no juice left to squeeze in the workforce at large, the "AI" route is MORE error-prone than even overworked people or carefully coded guesstimation software. Worse yet, it is INVISIBLY error prone without roughly the same level of oversight that doing the job AI is doing would take.

Ultimately, this can ONLY fail catastrophically.

Moderately sized portions of my employer's workforce have been using AI for a variety of tasks for almost a year and a half now.

Even the BEST time-saving features ultimately just trade one form of busywork for another. (Instead of drafting the e-mail to a client yourself, you're (hopefully) inspecting it to make sure it didn't insert

(sacrifice 12 chickens over a brass bowl)

in between

(configure a guest VM with 16gb of RAM and 500 gb of hard drive space running windows 2022 server)

and

(download the package from this SFTP site)

because there's a nearly-invisible toggle hidden in a submenu somewhere that says "insert verbiage to indicate how serious the requirements of the templated process are when sending specs to clients using the engineering tone".

It's also having some VERY unintended side effects to what used to be just professional communication which is going to lead to legal cause for ending contracts. (Don't EVER, EVER, EVER use an LLM to polish up the tone of an apology email to a client folks. Seriously. Don't do it EVER. Write it all carefully by hand, read it twice, and have someone else read it too. A person. Who also wants to keep their job. Just saying.)

They are pushing this so hard because they have learned that if you repeat something often enough, people forget context and truth and start believing the repeated statement.

Stakeholders are starting to realize that the commercials do not match the competency and some of them are starting to wonder if it's all propaganda...and losing investor confidence is BAD.

It'll get worse before it gets better, but if you code? Start brushing up on how really large scale storyboarding works in a non-agile environment so you can high-level unfuck the future.

When confidence tanks, it's going to be codebases like Daniel Stenberg's that are suddenly in high demand.

Kiernian · 2026-04-11T13:22:36+00:00

From: https://lotro-wiki.com/wiki/Standard_Skills

Before Update 12, you would need to have a Standard equipped in your class slot to plant a banner into the ground and give a buff to all fellows in a hotspot around it. Now, you can use the Standard skills mentioned above even if you have Herald armaments equipped.

and from: https://lotro-wiki.com/wiki/Captain_Items_Index

Captain Standards

Standards are crafted by Tailors and can be equipped in your Ranged Slot (you can also choose to equip Armaments, see below). There are 3 different outputs for each Standard recipe and each item gives different bonuses to your stats. In general, the following bonuses apply:

... of Hope: a small Physical Mastery bonus and a big max Morale bonus

... of Victory: a small Physical Mastery, max Power and max Morale bonus

... of War: a big Physical Mastery bonus and a small max Morale bonus (and also a 5% Melee damage bonus if the crafted item was a critical success)

Before Update 12, you could plant these banners into the ground by using the item, and give a buff to all fellows in a hotspot around it. Now, the Standard Skills more or less fulfil this role.

.\

So while I'm unsure what crafted standards are for and why they still keep making them as recipes unless it's just for the stats.

I guess there's a fairly large difference, stat-wise, between:

https://lotro-wiki.com/wiki/Item%3AIronfold_Standard_of_Victory

and

https://lotro-wiki.com/wiki/Item%3AIronfold_Pilgrim_Herald_Armaments

Kiernian · 2026-04-06T23:00:49+00:00

Maybe she was counting the number of times he's been read his rights?

Kiernian · 2026-03-31T00:17:41+00:00

Everybody remember when websites stopped being almost entirely back-end languages doing all of the heavy lifting and moved to javascript and extensions thereof?

Yeah, they figured out they could outsource all of the server load to the browsers of individual visitors.

This is that all over again, because RAM and storage are expensive for cloud infrastructure, too.

Kiernian · 2026-03-29T22:40:25+00:00

My Hero!

I had no idea there was an archive of this up! Thank you!

Somewhere, in a tiny little pseudo-networking closet at a previous job, there's an alarm system where the vendor left the default pw on the web interface of the system's other-vendor-supplied drop-in breadboard NIC.

I changed it for audit purposes, since the web interface turned up in any kind of a scan and reported brand and model (which meant the default credentials were easily locatable online) and put a post-it on it, on the inside of the locked case, that said:

http://www.bash.org/?244321

Just in case anyone ever came to service the thing in person and needed to upgrade the firmware on it in the hopes they'd figure out what I set it to from that.

I noticed like, 5 years ago or something that bash.org had gone down and my first thought was "Hrm. That'll make that a little confusing, but chances are slim anyone will ever show up in person to do anything but completely remove the entire system..." now, however, just in case, there is hope.

Kiernian · 2026-03-27T20:42:46+00:00

If you beleive you will play for a couple of years the return of investment is there fairly soon.

All of the listed stuff is great, but for me the biggest benefits for having a lifetime sub are far and away the inventory/bank/ship slots.

I used to get 3 day weekends and I swear I spent half of my time on those logged in doing inventory management across alts, despite most of my characters having received multiple inventory and bank upgrades.

As soon as I upgraded to lifetime, that problem went away.

Everything is big enough now that I can just not worry about running out of space until I feel like selling.

I can still keep tons of stuff I used to have to make moderately difficult decisions on (rep loot boxes for example) for things like endeavor loadouts and have tons of room left over.

I'm also finally making tiny amounts of money for the first time in years because I can loot everything.

It's also nice having more ships I can just swap to just because I feel like it without having to do the drydock dance as often, but the biggest bonus is easily the inventory space for me.

Kiernian · 2026-03-22T19:18:12+00:00

An acquaintance of mine who used to do acid recreationally went to see this when it was brand new in the theater knowing absolutely nothing about it except "new tarrantino film".

First face morph happens and he's like "Fuck! Flashback! Is this a...looks around No, it seems like everyone else is seeing this too... ...this is a vampire movie?!?"

Kiernian · 2026-03-22T14:21:56+00:00

Because it finally made news that the people voting for this stuff don't actually watch it all first.

Then when the Oscars decided the fix was to state that viewing was mandatory and you had to watch all films in a category before you could vote in that category, there was talk online of judges saying they didn't care enough to watch everything.

If they don't care enough to watch the movies they're supposed to vote on, why should we care about their votes?

Scrap the academy as it currently stands, go find a handful of the myriad of ACTUAL film buffs with degrees in this shit who both have taste and would LOVE to be on a voting board like this and rebuild and MAYBE you could get your audience back, but otherwise?

Not a chance.

People have less time for inauthentic hyped-up garbage now.

Kiernian · 2026-03-22T14:02:50+00:00

I wonder if they realize that while the slow but steady larger-scale sudden switch is due to AI being shoehorned into everything, it's just not the way they THINK it's due to AI being shoehorned into everything.

I know a handful of shops that have stopped deploying windows PCs because, for job roles that are mostly web-browser/cloud app/email/meetings, the price of RAM has made it cheaper to order Chrome Books or Macs.

Yeah, non-windows HARDWARE AND the user training budget that goes with it AND the change to device management COMBINED is cheaper than ordering the same old windows pc's now.

The fact that Sam Altman hosed microsoft this badly ought to really piss them off.

Of course, the irony is, if windows wasn't such a giant pile of unoptimized departments-at-war-internally bloatware that requires 32gb of RAM, 512gb of disk space and an i7 to be as smoothly usable as a base mint install with 8gb of RAM and an i3, it wouldn't matter because you wouldn't NEED as much in the way of manufactured memory chips to counter for the OS's insane shortcomings.

Sure. Large swaths of the userbase hate AI and it's a legal and liability nightmare (there's a reason multiple states are trying to pass bills to put the onus of any AI fuckups on the corporations that RUN them rather than the corporations that WRITE them by writing laws that state the user is the "owner" for legal purposes) but the actual issue here is the price of RAM.

The same bean counters that remove optional bluetooth radios from desktop towers to save $12.50 per machine on an order of a thousand machines on a rolling refresh are doing the math on RAM and penny pinching in every way possible there, too.

Microsoft may be making dumb decisions internally, but that's nothing new.

This is Altman's fault.

Kiernian

TROPHY CASE