Was Meta stock dipping and needed a boost? Fraud is legal now, so I guess that’s fine.

It took ages of the subject sitting still to get a picture back then. The photographer had plenty of time to grind one out about it.

Zebra Sarasa. Bought one on a whim at a 711 in Tokyo a long time ago, kept coming back.

2008 Dodge Avenger. Believe it or not, it was that 2008 Dodge Avenger.

I hated every inch of that car. It was big without any of the benefits a car might have from being big. No power at all, pretty bad on gas. Didn’t have a very comfortable road feel or suspension. Every inch of the car was cheap. I drove it for a long time and towards the end, around 100,000 miles, everything in the car felt like it was malfunctioning.

I’m out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.

Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.

I’m not an adventurous person. I haven’t been to a sex shop at home in decades so I don’t keep up with what’s available out there. But on vacation in Tokyo in 2023, I was at a four story sex shop in Akihabara. The top floor is exclusive to men, no women allowed up there. There are all sorts of fuck dolls and the more intense, expensive dude stuff up there.

Now, what I was not mentally prepared for was the glass display case. I don’t remember much about what else was in the case but the thing that caught my eye was what I can only call “The Device.”

The Device was a very inelegant metal machine that in any other context I would have assumed was some kind of kitchenware. But it had a nozzle on the end and it was incredibly obvious what The Device was there to do. This was not a nice machine, it was a tool with one purpose. I imagine it was incredibly good at that, too.

I was tight on cash for that trip and this thing was listed at 45,000 yen, which was about $375 at the time. I joked with my friends that it would be well worth it. It would have been difficult to get home due to size and I imagine heft. I would have taken The Device back to our rental house and let it suck the soul out of my body. I would have died on that trip and would have had no regrets.

I went back to the same store earlier this year and the glass case had other things in it, The Device nowhere to be found. Someone bought it, took it home, and was claimed by its power. The shelves of the top floors of that shop are now sleek looking plastic and silicon jerk machines that look very user friendly; exactly what you’d expect from a sex toy. But they are probably nothing compared to The Device.

I locked into something, but I have no idea what it is. Cool.

Gotta go with Bad Religion on this one.

Been happening a lot longer than you imagine. I stopped using Reddit when the third party apps got shut down. At least the last year of my time there was calling out repost bot accounts. Threads like that on smaller subs with week moderation were really common.

Even on some better moderated subs, they got through.

Reddit died for me a long time ago.

Did the trailer include the part where he was hammered to death during a play? Linking how it happened below. Pretty graphic stuff.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dRw62qVLs

I got a 2008 Dodge Avenger when it was new and immediately hated it. Everything felt cheap, it had absolutely no ability to get up to speed, and felt all around sluggish.

Everything I hated about that Avenger for the 8 years I drove it were nothing compared to the two Dodge Calibers I got to drive in that time. Every bad feature for a car dialed up to 11. Felt like it was built so cheap it could fall apart on the road. My parents and my partner both got one. They were both so, so very bad. It’s unreal that car ever got sold.

Tasty nitrogen.

I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.

Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren’t just people coming in and posting things we’ve seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post’s comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.

The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn’t know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it’s February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture’s aesthetic.

I’m not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.

https://www.tiktok.com/@kirstypaterson3/video/7340997397910211873

She put out a video explaining that she sees the humor in all this but realizes that this picture is now a part of that, which is a bummer. I think it could go down as the least flattering picture of a person of all time. In said video, she looks lovely and clearly takes great care of herself.

Otakon registration line, probably about 2014. The line wrapped the Baltimore convention center two times.

Unrelated but you just said “but fuck”.

I stopped posting but keep the account active because a lot of the Japanese artists I follow have stopped using other sites that were once pretty standard and never moved away from Twitter. There are also some people I don’t want to lose touch with that never moved away.

I was once listening to The Pillows’ “I Think I Can” around a friend. Japanese band, lots of their songs are in English but you’d never know through the singer’s heavy Japanese accent. He repeats the titular line a lot in the song and my friend thought he was singing “I lick my cunt.”

That was 15 years ago and it’s still all I hear when I listen to the song.

White vinegar, run them again. All good.