About 5 years ago I decided to abandon all major social media. This includes but was not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which I never really dived into anyway), as well as other things that I only dabbled in like TikTok. I found that my life got better and more productive once I left these time-wasting things in my rear-view mirror for good. These days, when there is a lull in my activities, I try to fill it wit something productive or if I have no other choice and need to look at my phone to pass the time, I look at 9gag. Now 9gag is not perfect because the usual political bullshit still sneaks its way in there but tags are pretty vigorously enforced by the community via downvotes if a post is mislabeled. So for example if you were tired of hearing about the Russia/Ukraine conflict or don't care how slow Joe Biden is, you can block the tags for that particular thing. If some blowhard tries to sneak said content through the system by intentionally mislabeling their post, it get ratioed into non-existence.
But when I do have free time I will mostly just look at memes, because memes are fun
Here are the ones in the past however-long-it-has been that caught my eye and made me laugh or think.
While I would imagine the above is true for a lot of people, where I live in the extremely humid part of SE Asia, the hot months are unbearably hot. Just walking from my air conditioned condo to the mini-mart that is less than a block away results in me sweating to much that I need a shower by the time I get back. This all changes in November where we get 4 months of wonderful weather. I look forward to that every year but yeah, drink a lot of water ok?
I was a huge fan of hardcore metal when I was a teenager. I still am now but I have a difficult time keeping up with the latest and greatest music. When I was a teenager I would travel vast distances to go and see my favorite metal bands, many of whom were traveling from overseas to play in front of just a couple hundred people. I got involved in stage-diving as well as mosh pits and it was at a show featuring Obituary that I got blind-sided in the mosh pit and knocked the the ground. I was 16. A group of dangerous looking, but ultimately extremely friendly beefcakes with all black on surrounded me, preventing me from getting stepped on, while one the adult giant-sized people, helped me to my feet. Those pits look dangerous, but for the most part the people in them are very good people and this is the case with most metal fans.
This was very funny to me because like a lot of people that went to a state university, I was much more interested in partying than I was for anything educationally-oriented. There were several times that my parents found my drugs but thankfully, didn't know what they were. I once did laundry and had a little bit of cocaine left over in the bag and when my mom went to add clothes to the load that was already there and there was a little baggie floating in the wash and she was quite curious and very naïve about what it was and innocently gave it back to me when she found it and said that she "found some medicine" floating in my laundry. I am a bit ashamed to say that I put that in the sun for about a week and then used it again and it was still rocket fuel. I am not a drug addict but I am kind of happy that I have done basically all of them that didn't involve needles and emerged on the other side still functional and relatively successful.
Staying on that theme, I am kind of happy that I went to college in the years where mobile / cell phones were still in their infancy. Film cameras were still the norm and I was actually in a bar one day when a promotional group came through with the very first digital camera I had ever seen: I'm kind of dating myself here but that was the case. The digital display on the back of the thing was only about an inch square but all of us were just blown away that we could see the image RIGHT AWAY! That just seems so normal now but believe it or not there was a time when people were impressed by something like that and it would take many years / decades for me to appreciate the fact that this technology didn't exist during my more embarrassing years.
I am sure I am not alone in this. Unless you are my Mom and even if you are, outside of special circumstances, unless you are at the front door with a pizza delivery, NEVER call me.
No offense intended to anyone of course but I have a really good friend who is a Mac-bro and just buys anything that they make. I have always been of the opinion that Macs are not necessarily expensive, but they are just overpriced. If you do a breakdown on the hardware that is in the latest Mac and made a PC equivalent you will get a computer for half the price. I have to admire Apple's marketing because they have done a fantastic job of customer retention. I know that when I buy a new computer I pay almost zero attention to who manufactures it. Apple fans always buy Apple.
When I was in my 20's I was a bit of a playboy. I'm not trying to brag here but for me at that time I had the correct mix of confidence and humor combined with being young and reasonably good-looking and fit. These days I am in my late 40's and when I talk to girls I feel like the above is more likely than the alternative.
Lastly, I want to include this. 9Gag doesn't talk very much about Covid anymore but every now and then someone reminds us of the absolutely nutso situation that existed during that 18 months. I still stand in awe at the fact that this happened on a near global scale. It is nice to see that even during those horrible times there were still people out there that were prepared to do some high-level, real-life trolling of the police.
We will bid you adieu with that last pic of Nadi, about 4 minutes after arriving in a relatively busy pub. SPLOOT!
Wow dear me too, I ditched most of the platforms about 2 years ago, Hive is actually my most used platform on the phone. Although to be honest I still keep TikTok but I see the waste of time and less productivity whenever I'm using these platforms. It's a real problem for today's generation of young folks
I think it is largest contributor to sadness and depression, especially among young people.
Yes no doubt dearest I agree 💯 with you. That's exactly why they're so depressed and I would add that theft crimes have increased because young kids don't want to go through the process to get the things they see on social media
I can relate to a lot of those. We actually got pretty lucky here that we were still able to go out and do things during the lockdowns. Businesses were shut down, but we still went camping and did a lot of the stuff we usually do in the summer. Which is funny because everyone talks about how horrible our governor was about locking things down. I was at a NIN concert and we got stuck in the mosh pit. It was the scariest thing ever. There was absolutely zero control or organization and we had to fight out way out. No big beefy guys to rescue us. I also agree, don't call me if you can text me. The one exception is, most of my friends are driving a lot and therefore they can't text, so I get that.
I guess some of these things are just universal, especially among men. Now I am going to say something that might sound a bit snotty.. NIN isn't really metal, especially when they went mainstream so their mosh pits are going to be filled with people the likes of which go to Woodstock headlined by Limp Bizkit, haha. At these smaller shows I think the pits are filled with veterans who know the unofficial rules of the pit. I was at another show with a similar lineup, this time with an English band called Carcass and some skinhead got up on stage and got a hold of a mic and shouted out "white power" and gave the Hitler salute. He was treated very roughly in the pit when he got back down and when he started to harass the younger people in the audience, the pit bosses, so to speak, showed him the door. Security didn't even have to get involved.
Wow, that is pretty cool that they self policed like that. Queens of the Stone Age was the opening act, so it was a little metal before the electronic stuff started. We saw NIN again later at a venue where we got actual seats and it was much better.
The lockdown onw was actually pretty good, but I hardly even look at these things because I think most you either get or you don't. The ones you get you can relate to I suppose and I prefer the cleverly thought out ones than just the obvious.
!LOL