Starbucks is among the worst. I tried grounds from a good variety of brands, all prepared with a normal coffee maker which another poster suggested is not actually a good way to brew coffee. They all fell somewhere on a spectrum between bad and REALLY bad. Didn’t go for the crazy fancy stuff - my favorite ended up being a hazelnut flavored whole bean from the bulk section of WinCo. Which is still my favorite, I just milkshake-ify now.

Coffee. I really wanted to be able to enjoy black coffee, cuz it smells so deceptively good, is cheap as fuck, and basically zero calorie. Except it tastes like concentrated dirt. Bitter. Acrid. None of the appeal promised by the smell makes its way to the taste.

Unless I acquire the taste!

Typically my coffee has a similar cream and sugar content to a milkshake, so I actually measured it out to get a baseline, then over the course of about two months phased down to just black coffee. …and over the course of two months, my coffee phased more and more into tasting like shit. But I tolerated it - eyes on the prize. After that, I spent another month drinking it black. At the end of that month, I finally accepted that black coffee tasted just as much like shit as it did on day one.

My coffee is back to resembling a milkshake… fuck.

I tried.

New hypothesis: there’s some kind of generic factor at play like there is with cilantro. That shit is delicious to some and absolutely vile to others, and no amount of trying to acquire it will flip that switch. I drew the short straw on that horrid plant, too.

The VA canceled my surgery

Report to the ER and complain of 10/10 pain coming from your uterus the next time you menstruate. Then next month do it again. After about 6 months, talk to your OB and explain how it’s getting worse, completely stops you from normal daily activities at its peak, and is causing you to become depressed and anxious.

Also bitch about it in other unrelated appointments. Seeing ortho about your back? “My pain today is 10/10, but only in my uterus. My back is the usual 4.”

Throughout, there will be assessments where they’ll inevitably find nothing - keep complaining. Pain can be paradoxical - eventually they’ll decide it needs to come out.

It’s stupid and tedious, but if you need to lie to get health care, then lie.

Years. Starting with his first term, he fucked the troops over every chance he got. That they support him so zealously is some absolute peak face-eating-leopard shit.

What’s the error code for ‘help not found’?

Hope this chud finally realizes he isn’t a boxer now that he took his first real punch and fucks off.

Don’t be hasty now - he’s still got some unfractured bones.

I was a medic in the USAF about a decade ago - training is a joint program of USAF, Army, and Navy, so we all saw the same stuff.

None of our training used animals, dead or alive. We did hear about it though: I got the impression it was something they did for the special-ops folks, which do have medical positions.

For non-special-ops medics like me, we just used mannequins. …and even back then, the mannequins for combat training were fancy enough to squirm, scream, and pump out buckets of fake blood while you’re trying to put on a tourniquet.

I don’t think live animals would have contributed anything. Like on one hand I guess there’s value in knowing that if you fuck up the simulation, something will die, so it might make trainees take it more seriously… but on the other hand, it would also detract from the training by introducing an unethical practice, and one thing we don’t want to train our medics to do is second-guess whether or not they should be patching someone up in the middle of doing just that.

Freeman’s Mind

Caffeine.

This looks promising! Looks like I can save individual vcf files using Outlook, but I can’t figure out how to export an entire contact list in one file. In the contact group in Outlook, there’s a ‘forward group’ button that has an export as vfc or outlook file, but the vcf just exports it as a .txt and the the outlook export is… idk what it is… there’s no file extension…?

Neither the .txt or extensionless file seem to be recognized by my phone - it opens the .txt to plain text, and doesn’t recognize the other.

headscratch

Did I do something stupid?

If I sell you a 2025 Ferrari then give you a 2011 Honda Civic, I broke the law and you got scammed.

Even if I take the unexpected step of sending you a civic-to-Ferrari conversion kit after the fact that makes the car I delivered somewhat comparable to the one I advertised, that doesn’t excuse the initial deception.

What they did was deliberate and dishonest - it’s awesome that they’ve taken (a shit ton of) steps since to make it right, but it’ll never be right.

Holding them accountable is not psychotic.

I was one of the fucking idiots that preordered No Man’s Sky. The devs have done a lot to make up for it, so I don’t really regret it anymore as it’s a decent game now, but at release it was so drastically bare-bones compared to what they advertised that if the legal system actually gave a shit about consumer protection, the staff of Hello Games would have served jail time.

But Sean was a charismatic little con artist, and he cut right past my defense. bUt ThiS gUy’S diFfeReNt!! Bruh I fuckin knew better than that!

Sup, ICE. You’ve done such a good job emulating your rolemodel from the 1930s/40s with the mustache, I think you’ve all earned a fast-track in that career!! Just skip right to the end and go ahead and feed yourself that bullet! Remember not to aim perpendicular to your throat - that’ll just punch a potentially nonfatal hole: instead aim it up toward your brain!

You are a traitor not just to your country, but to all of humanity: your legacy will only ever be that of a villainous cautionary tale.

Best of luck with the go kill yourself! 💖

Never bothered with putting a tree up, but I’ve always kinda wanted to steal this idea:

Another stocking.

Ad hominem

Flagrantly false. Gaza has been leveled since Biden left. Not leveled vs leveled =/= just as bad.

pre-loaded accusations

They’re called logical fallacies. The one you just used is called a false dilemma. If you don’t like me drawing attention to them, I’d recommend refraining from using them.

Whether it would have been a “lesser” genocide is unfalsifiable. We’ll never really know. But I don’t have the faith in it that you have. I’m not sure what a more competent genocidal administration would have done.

Correct. But I’m confident the Harris administration wouldn’t have taking the swan-dive that Trump’s did. Same with all the other evils he’s committed outside the scope of genocide: bad under Harris, worse under Trump. Given what we know about the two, that assumption seems pretty reasonable. If you disagree, well like you said, that comes to which candidate we have less faith in. For me, Trump is the obvious rock-bottom worst outcome, but I can’t compare to an administration that never happened, so speculate as you will.

Consider what many US Palestinians did: threaten to withhold their votes if Harris didn’t say there was at least some daylight between herself and Biden regarding Gazans. And she wouldn’t even do that much.

But that’s how you use the vote, if you use it at all. You use it as leverage. If the Democrats know you’ll “vote Blue no matter who” or “vote Blue no matter what,” then they’ll ignore you altogether, because you’re already in their pocket. You’ve made yourself irrelevant.

Half correct. Withholding votes won’t get their attention - we’ve seen that play out again and again. Democrats would rather lose than change. If you want their attention and real change, you’ll need to do things other than vote.

It’s extremely telling that even you “lesser evil” BlueMAGA types can’t being yourselves to actually be honest about what you supported

You’re projecting. Y’all need to get that under control.

bullshit white washed version of the Democrats that wasn’t entirely all in on genocide.

Where did I say that? They just don’t have the same affinity for it as Republicans, so between the two, blue team is the wildly obvious choice if you want to minimize the suffering.

Clearly even you know the lesser evil position as it actually exists is indefensible.

Correct. The lesser evil is still evil. But contrasted against a greater evil and locked into a dichotomy, the lesser gets my vote despite being indefensible.

If you had me tied up and held a loaded gun to my head and offered the choice of either pulling the trigger or using it to pistol-whip me, your actions would be indefensible either way, but one stands out as significantly worse than the other, so I’ll choose the pistol-whip. I’ll also be doing other things like trying to fidget my way out of the ties, but I can do that in addition to choosing the lesser evil of a shitty dichotomy.