I’d also never noticed either of the 2 nymph stages before. Heck, I hadn’t seen too many of the adults.

A big nest must have popped because the little black nymphs were EVERYWHERE a little while ago, crawling all over the outside of my apartment building and the tree next to it, I even found a few INSIDE my apartment. Smash smash smash.

The second nymph phase is nice and easy to see with its bright red. Also smash.

It makes me sad how many I am seeing.

Thanks for reminding me Batmetal is 11 years old lol

I’m a particular fan of the 2nd one (9 years old)

Here’s the whole trilogy. Insanely better than the original Metalocalypse music videos, but those themselves are ~18 years old… Insanity, now I feel super old.

https://youtu.be/_r7mWacAlvs

My recent ex girlfriend would take certain things we were about to do together (traveling, going to the spa, going to a particular restaurant close to my house, spending the day at a museum, etc.) and would just automatically assume that I had already done that same thing with some unspoken past ex of mine, and get preemptively sad, upset, and self-conscious that she wasn’t “the first”… What? Life isn’t all about firsts, why even get upset about that? So what if I’ve already done something before with someone else, I am still going to enjoy it with YOU right NOW. Maybe a lot of people do compare past experiences to current ones, but I don’t find that very fulfilling, so I just don’t. It’s a lot easier to just live day to day.

I’m in a similar boat. I love my car, I like driving my car, I like working on my car (Subaru BRZ), but if I had the opportunity to take the bus or the train to work, you bet I would. (I COULD, but because the routes are so ass-backwards, it would take me over an hour and a half to ride the bus 12 miles with 2 transfers)

In the spirit of “Cars that SHOULD exist”, I’d love me an Autozam AZ1. I grew up playing Sega GT on the Dreamcast, and I LOVED racing that little thing… Or, for a slightly more practical but still tiny and awesome, a Nissan Be-1. I’ve actually been close to importing a Be-1 a couple times, but the ass-backwards laws that make it difficult to register and drive kei vehicles in the USA are stupid.

Tiny cars are awesome. Big-ass trucks and SUV’s in the USA are getting out of hand (I’m sure we can all agree). Just this weekend, I literally exclaimed “What the fuck” out loud when a truck pulled up next to me and the tops of its wheel wells were right at the top of my driver’s side window. It was a relatively stock looking new Toyota of some kind and it truly dwarfed my car. I’m used to feeling small, and It might have been because they were passing me on a very narrow bridge, but it was the biggest truck (that wasn’t obviously made bigger) I have seen in a long time.

One showed up in the glass case of my local Savers somehow last year for ~$800. I was VERY VERY tempted. It was a Type II, with the case, and the finger-loop was intact.

All in all, that’s actually a screamin’ bargain, but I definitely wasn’t in a place to drop $800 +tax on the spot. I thought about it ALL day and the whole next day after, went back after work to buy it, and it was gone. Wasn’t meant to be.

It’s been a few years now, and it’s not quite as scary anymore, more of a fact of life, my new normal. I’ve gotten some good mental tricks down for remembering people’s names, and I’ve had a lot of good practice lately with all the new people I’ve been meeting. The first time I meet people, I basically just tell them straight up that I WILL forget their name, and I’m sorry, and the next time we meet I’ll re-introduce myself, and it will take 3 or 4 tries to get it… And the re-introduction part of it really seems to help. I’ve been meeting a lot of people from Discord lately, and adding a username on top gives some other “hook” to catch, especially if it’s a particularly funny username, which seems to help to add something more memorable to recall.

The places and things part has been relatively solved by me just keeping daily itineraries and lists when I have stuff to do, and long-term lists of things to remember. I’d never had to do that, so once I got over the initial “Well I Shouldn’t HAVE to!”, it just became part of the routine and works fine.

Nothing seems to be getting significantly worse, so I’m not spiraling down into some hellhole of non-recollection… I kind of see it as similar to losing a finger or something. Relatively minor, changes how you interact with the world slightly, but nothing earth-shattering.

I used to have a spectacular memory. The very first time I got Covid, though, it all went to shit. Maybe it’s also just because I’m getting older, but I definitely feel like that original brain fog never went away.

Weirdly, it’s not ALL of my memory that’s shot, it’s only proper nouns. Names of people, places, or things. I will forget the names of people who I’ve been working with for 3 years, the new brand of coffee I really liked when I’m at the store trying to buy more, or the name of the store I need to go to after work even if it’s something obvious like Harbor Freight (Like I know I need to go buy a torque wrench, but where had I researched and decided was the right place to buy one?).

Numbers, facts, figures, physical properties… those all stick like glue. I can look at a machine at work, take it apart, then come back the next day and put it back together right without taking any pictures or notes.

I’ve started using a notes app on my phone and that’s improved things a bit, but it’s really irritating when I am sitting trying to remember something and it just will not come to me. I’d never experienced that in my life before, it’s a little scary.

I’ve talked to a few other people before who all have similar selective amnesia like this after Covid, but with various different things that are easily forgotten. I find that really interesting and feel like it could hint at how different brains store information in different ways/places. People’s names were always what I’d call the “most difficult” for me to remember, but I never had THIS much trouble with it, and the places and things were never a problem before.

Way back in the before times of ~2012 or so, I had 2-door 2001 Chevy Tracker, the fun one with the soft-top. I loved that thing, the ability to drive top-down without having a big-ass jeep was exactly what I wanted.

I had bought it from some lady who had owned it since new, and had just moved from the desert out West in the USA to the Northeast USA. The paint was absolutely nuked from ~10 years in the desert sun, there was barely any clear-coat left on it. The underside was spotless, though, no rust at all, which was unheard of for a car in the Northeast. It had some of those very 90’s “swoosh” decals on the side.

I was navigating through a parking lot, and some guy apparently decided it would be a good idea to zip right through between 2 parked cars to cut from one aisle to another, and bonked right into my passenger side door. It was a low-speed impact, no airbags, just a decent-sized, but aesthetic dent on the door. This was my first ever traffic incident, even though I’d been driving for a decade already, I had no idea what to do besides swap insurance info.

A couple days later, I get a call from a body shop saying that I need to bring the car in to have it fixed. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, nobody else had reached out to me, I didn’t have any contact from the other guy’s insurance, and I hadn’t filed a claim, because I didn’t care about the dent (there were already other dents on it from many years of regular use). Well, I was somewhat more young, and definitely naive, so I dropped it off where instructed, and didn’t really get a lot of good information from the front desk guy at the shop. A week later, I get a call “We’re having some trouble finding the decal on the side of the car, would it be ok if we just didn’t replace it?”

So it turns out that they had taken this beat up old thing with nuked paint, replaced the door with a door off a donor vehicle, re-painted the donor door perfect shiny brand new black, and then BLENDED this perfect shiny black into the fading scuffed original paint all around the door.

I have no idea how much this cost, I never saw any paperwork, they just handed me the keys and I was off… I should have requested a pay-out lol. It honestly looked worse with the obviously mismatched door and the blended paint.

Here’s a before pic, I can’t find any good ones that show the aftermath or even the original dent.

I ended up accidentally running it out of oil summer of 2017 after some catastrophic computer thing cleared all the mileage data somehow and I forgot when the last oil change I did was… It lived for another 2 years with a little tick in the top end until one day it spun a bearing and was toast. If I wasn’t a renter and had a garage and extra space I would have kept it and tried to fix it as a project car, it was just so much fun, but there were enough other things wrong with it that it just wasn’t worth it with my limited resources. I ended up selling it with a spun bearing in 2019 for almost double what I originally bought it for in excellent condition in 2011 lol.

I bought a brand new Subaru BRZ to replace it, and that’s what I’m still driving now. Very different vibe. I miss the Tracker sometimes. I went from Forza Horizon 5 to a real-life version

Aw man, you could have waited until July 19th and made a sick callback .

Never forget.

I proposed 2172C as the Pantone color of the year for 2024 lol

If you use Android, check out “Distraction-free Instagram”. It’s an app that lets you disable various parts of the app like your home feed, stories, etc.

I really wanted to stop scrolling on Instagram, but I also really wanted to keep posting my photography, as the interactions I sometimes get on my posts are fun and I enjoy sharing my craft. I also have some friends who ONLY interact via instagram messaging.

I downloaded the app, and disabled everything except messaging, and it’s been great. It’s definitely made me happier overall.

“Trust but verify” are some excellent words to live by. Some boss I had years ago bestowed that wisdom upon me when I was still a wee spritely junior engineer.

It’s hard to implement in practice, though, and I still fall victim to the “Damn, I should have just checked” pretty often.

But that’s none of those genres…

I would like their stuff so much more if the nu-metal parts went away.

I am unsure what makes something “Swing”, but I absolutely adore The Roar of '74 by Buddy Rich. I discovered it via my dumb rule of “See vinyl record with car on it, buy vinyl record with car on it”

I wouldn’t say it’s less well-known overall, but for others of my generation, I feel like it is…

I was born in '92. My dad apparently liked Thunderbirds (1965-66), so we had the full VHS set. We didn’t have cable for a LONG time, so my brother and I watched a lot of VHS tapes. We grew to absolutely adore Thunderbirds. Sadly, the VHS set is long gone, but there’s a full rip on the internet archive, so I’ve got it all anyway.

I used to work at a company that had a side-hustle and received large shipments of boxes from China containing the front half and the back half of electronic multimeters. One employee would sit there all day, put the 2 halves together, put 2 screws into it, then toss it in a clamshell pack proudly labeled with “ASSEMBLED IN THE USA” with a big-ass american flag.

This is a hilarious example of “Read headline, formed opinion, investigated no further”

You could probably run a study on this. Call it “Regarding the Leap Year of '45”

Also, I swear I reached this page from the top of a community page, how have I traveled 7 months into the future… Uh oh. (It was probably a cross-post)

I didn’t have depression, but I wanted to try the experience after hearing how much someone I knew enjoyed it. I had a terrible trip (in a safe space, with good intentions, an experienced user I trusted very deeply, etc. etc. etc.) and suddenly developed pretty gnarly depression and felt like an unnamed part of my brain was missing/out of reach for over 2 years… I’m only one data point and my experience seems uncommon, but I definitely won’t be touching shrooms ever again. It’s only in the last 6 or so months that I’ve felt more “myself” and have been making progress out of the hole I was dropped into.

I desperately wanted to be on Figure It Out (With your host, Summer Sanders)

I reference the secret slime action fairly frequently, and it seems that maybe I’m the only person in my area who watched/enjoyed the show, because most people have no idea what I am talking about.

Don’t even get me started on Figure It Out Wild Style.

I signed up for the physical print edition at the tail end of last year. They are excellent reading and I have 0 regrets. Well I do have one regret… Not signing up sooner. I missed the November 2024 publication to tie the whole shit-sandwich together.

Their marketing/member emails are also amazing.

All the browser settings are also stored there, too. I turned all the AI stuff off, then the next time I booted up my PC the AI was back. Turned it off again. Same thing the next time I logged back on…

I finally looked into it and it was because I had firefox set to clear the cache on shutdown.

It can fall under the same umbrella. Unrealistic beauty standards being set by the “rich”, who some people look up to as role models. If there were something that you could do that you might be able to afford, like botox or lip fillers, that you believe would make you more beautiful, closer to your role model… If that sort of thing matters to you, then yeah, you might go for it. I can even take the same analogy of watches above, because there are definitely cheap imitation versions of the gaudy diamond-encrusted ones.

I was sort of thinking more like this though with respect to extreme alterations…