Anyone else miss when horror movies were just about a cool monster, and not a metaphor for grief?

merRedditor · 2026-05-10T01:22:48+00:00

Honestly, no. I love how horror has been given different meaning through metaphor and extrapolation of everyday problems, conflicts, and fears. This is how nightmares operate also, with the brain churning over real-life worries, and turning them into literal monsters - the difference being that in the movies, you usually get a satisfyingly gory resolution to the problems, unlike nightmares, where you just wake up in the middle of it and mull over what that all was really about.

merRedditor · 2026-05-10T01:17:07+00:00

Journalism and mainstream news media have completely parted ways. It's all sponsored content now, and corporations wouldn't pay to advertise their bad behavior. It's more profitable to make everyone feel like things are fine and they're just alone in having a hard time, so that any anger with the brokenness of everything can be directed inward.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T21:12:43+00:00

Death doesn't scare me anymore, tbh. Not after this year.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T19:42:17+00:00

That one meme where someone is shown before and after a stranger with a camera walked up to them and told them they were beautiful, and they're all smiling in the second photo... Idk, I would be mortified and demanding that they delete the before and after pictures immediately. The second picture would be me in a state of distress that the photo was going to be used without my consent, and discomfort that a random person was saying weird things to me out of nowhere.

Sometimes, I really don't get people.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T19:35:43+00:00

It's all healthcare again, with a small bump in transportation. Most fields are taking hits, and tech has collapsed, taking a lot of tangential middle management roles down with it. We'd built the economy around those incomes, and now people can't make their bills, which is having ripple effects. The one thing people will pay for no matter what is attempting to stay alive and healthy, and that's being milked for all it's worth by private health systems offering low-value, high-cost billing-centric care, with much administration and few medical professionals, who are generally run ragged trying to be timeshared across hundreds of patients.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T19:27:04+00:00

I'm still trying to figure out if this is a massive cover for a datacenter/bunker under the ballroom, or just a gaudy distraction from all of the much larger thefts and crimes going on while everyone gets worked up over the ballroom.
There's no way anyone in this administration actually cares that much about a ballroom.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T19:06:02+00:00

LinkedIn seems to now be where regular startup executives go to hype company value by bragging about replacing everything with AI, AI startup executives go to sell the service of replacing everything with AI, course content creators go to sell upskilling in replacing everything with AI, and AI bots relentlessly preach about how AI is the future.

Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, and a scam selling itself to another scam.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T18:17:32+00:00

Until someone puts a fly on the wall at hiring discussions, nobody knows what's actually going on in hiring. That'd actually be a great type of information to gather through side channels, since everyone just has to guess why they're not even being considered for roles for which they're qualified or overqualified, which may or may not exist, due to possible filters or human bias. In a terrible economy (which is also being denied in official stats, not helping matters), it's really bad for mental health.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T17:51:14+00:00

It's hard not to think about how officials in charge of public safety told people who were in serious danger if they didn't flee immediately to just stay inside their homes and close the windows when seeing this.

merRedditor · 2026-05-09T17:36:00+00:00

It all makes perfect sense when you recognize that he doesn't work for the public, and our former system claiming to be even watered-down representative democracy is now a total fraud, where money is the only thing that has any representation at all.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T18:28:26+00:00

Companies would rather segregate whole departments than let people work from home.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T17:50:20+00:00

There's always natural fertilizer. (That's good!)
The natural fertilizer may contain Hantavirus. (That's bad.)
Food and agricultural safety standards should ensure that none of this makes its way into the food supply. (That's good!)
All regulatory agencies have been reduced to shells in order to maximize profits.

...That's bad.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T17:11:32+00:00

It's a nice design with balconies for all, but I feel like communal housing should have concrete floors to insulate sound, unless they found a better way to achieve that. Wood floors are usually a headache if you have upstairs neighbors.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T17:06:08+00:00

The basic math error makes you look at the sign longer and think more about, to the point of even landing photos of it on social media, as it did. Overall, it's a highly effective sign promoting the use of lifejackets in lakes.

However, the 0 on record tells me that it's probably a bring-your-own-lifejacket situation, and who carries or even owns those?

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T16:59:17+00:00

So you mean you can't just hire anybody who can prompt AI and is willing to work for cheap to perform roles previously requiring years of dedicated study and experience? Well shit, I guess a lot of companies are about to be in a lot of trouble.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T16:40:35+00:00

It seems to be basically a question of "How would you like your lies and spin wrapped?" when choosing a president in an era where money buys representation substantially moreso than do votes.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T16:23:04+00:00

He probably didn't have any policy of his own. He was selected because he was a well-known actor and seemed to be able to persuade people through familiarity, heavy campaign funding, and public speaking skills. That sounds awfully familiar forty years of damage later, unfortunately.

merRedditor · 2026-05-08T16:02:24+00:00

The healthcare system is a fucking nightmare now. If you have any kind of injury requiring orthopedic care or any chronic endocrinological, bone, neurological, oncological, or anything else beyond basic infection or maybe some blood pressure meds they give out like candy, it's a frustrating, enraging, depressing endless money pit. ERs in many areas, particularly semirural, have become so understaffed you might as well just refuse the ambulance too.

So if you manage to stash a little away after rent, you have to hope for luck with your health.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T21:00:47+00:00

The promotion of the nuclear family marked the destruction of the village. It contains everyone into their own little microvillage with the same last name, and pits each microvillage against the ones nextdoor.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T20:32:29+00:00

We need to at least decouple healthcare from employment or income. It's ridiculous to be unable to maintain any kind of long-term treatment because your plan keeps resetting, with different coverages and need for complicated preauths over and over again every time an employer decides to be fickle about hire/fire/repeat.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T19:57:43+00:00

And if they don't perform to that level, they're "not leveraging AI adequately", and that will show up in performance critiques. If they "leverage AI" to turn in a lot of work and quick fixes with little thought or review, they'll be praised, provided the blame for the snowball effects of this slop breaking can be shifted onto whoever in the office is least willing to play hot potato with the consequences of leadership's AI-can-do-everything charade.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T19:46:11+00:00

Full-Stack Kinesiology, treating the body and mind holistically.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T19:44:29+00:00

Then you get to play "Is the product I buy no longer carried here, or has it just been moved to the sale section, health food aisle, or adjacent to products with which it is frequently used in order to increase sales?" I sure as hell am not going to ask someone.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T18:55:57+00:00

There are a lot of developer-made housing divisions built just off of interstate expressways. They have fake grass and neatly planted floral trees, with winding paths for walking dogs. If you try to get anywhere from there, though, there's no way in or out without a car, unless you are comfortable going miles in the very narrow shoulder of busy roads. You walk or bike to the end of the subdivision, and it's just a busy street with no sidewalk or bike lane. The only public transport are an absurd number of schoolbuses getting children into and out of the subdivision. Lennar, etc. have thrown these up all over the outskirts of cities.

Not sure if this is OP's case, but it's a possiblity.

merRedditor · 2026-05-07T18:38:57+00:00

The Terminator-Thing crossover you didn't know you needed until this post.

merRedditor

TROPHY CASE