Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Tyranexx congrats on the offer!

@HobbitGamer If only I were near one of those 10 locations....or mumbai!

@HobbitGamer, @NintendoByNature Thanks! I've been reading through some of the material this evening. Pretty sure I'll take it. I've been hoping for an offer for some time. ^_^

I've never been to a Bennigan's, but I've heard they're pretty decent.

@Tyranexx hopefully it's close to home. Sometimes that's make or break for me. But who am i kidding , I do outside sales and cover 70% of the state of Illinois. So im always driving around 😑

@NintendoByNature It's roughly a twenty minute round trip from my house depending on traffic, so the distance isn't bad at all. My current place of work is closer, but I've been bringing my lunch most of the time anyway. Plus they're only a small jaunt from a really good local restaurant and some fast food joints.

...I'm sure you've been near my whereabouts if the 70% claim is true. XD

@HobbitGamer The weather has been pretty mild today - upper 60s as a high, lower 70s tomorrow - but that'll spike into the upper 80s in a few days. That's hot enough for me, you can keep your 96°F. XD

@Tyranexx yeah, Georgia summer is here now. Gonna be up to 101 Friday. It’s not so bad by itself, but it’s always accompanied by 90-100% humidity and nary a breeze. It’s 11pm and still 78 now.

@Tyranexx think you said you were in southern Illinois. Furthest South ive been for work, is herrin,IL. That's on rare occasions though. Only if i have appointments and never for cold calling.

@HobbitGamer That's what I dislike here, too: the humidity. The heat itself isn't normally bad, but the humidity gets pretty high sometimes. By far the most humid place I've ever been to is New Orleans in July.

@NintendoByNature I'm somewhat familiar with that general area - I considered going to college near there even. But believe it or not, that's actually farther south than here. XD

Does anyone think there will ever be a dual screen system again? With the failure of the Wii U, and Nintendo basically merging their console and handheld business, the only real future for it is phone and console integration.

I just can't imagine playing a game like SMT Strange Journey on a single screen.

@Trajan
I'm thinking about Nintendo HDS with replaceable Top screen.

Gonna start surgery on the truck. I’ll put pics on Twitter for anyone interested, but you’d have to ask @Morpheel How to find them. I barely could figure out the posting part.

If you put the url to your tweet in a post, it auto embeds itself. It’s quite useful.

This right here. This is my people!!

Well, quieter neighbors usually.....apartment noise and bustle would be the sucky part. That and getting Amazon deliveries. No way I'm actually going out shopping in that zoo of a shopping lot, that used to be 20 minutes away and how is an hour away because every road from here to there is more of a parking lot than a road, and then you get there only for them to be out of what you wanted and they cheerily tell you you could order online and have it delivered right to your door like it's a special service only their amazing brand can provide.

But yeah, the costs, the taxes, the maintenance......it often seems not worth it. They say ownership is cheaper than renting. They forget to include the maintenance costs. The cheap wood-and-plastic houses they build are only good for 30 years until you basically have to tear it down and build a new one....conveniently the length of a mortgage!. The new fad around here is luxury "townhomes/ carriage homes/ insert some Orwellian word here homes" which roughly translates to "it's just like an apartment but you have to get a high interest mortgage, pay retail for it, and pay taxes for life, pay maintenance for life (when THEY tell you to do so, with whatever they tell you to buy)....but otherwise you're just living in an apartment for double the money plus a stipend to the national chain building company that actually owns the lot."

Somehow none of the finance industry ideas never make sense to me. Loans equity, interest, blah blah. I don't know, I still live in a world of "if I have cash in my hand I can buy it, if I don't I can't"....none of that odd credit nonsense will ever make sense to me at all beyond mortgages themselves...which still don't make sense.

@ThanosReXXX It's probably hard to compare European life to American in terms of cost. On the surface, your cost of living sounds extraordinarily high by standards here....and it likely is. And when I think Europe, and I think Amsterdam my mind automatically thinks "really expensive to live in." So your cost expectations are going to be on the high side to average here, I think. You're "the rich people" me and rjejr complain about But not in the context of where you live. And being from CA it must seem like a bargain since CA is the far, far, far extreme of costs of living in the US as it is to the point that it's really a different country there anyway. Yet, on the other hand, your other costs are different. When you talk about food prices, are you including VAT which there is baked in? Recall here you have to add sales tax to those prices. 5-12% depending on locality. Plus like rjejr and I have been talking. The taxes. Real estate tax (township AND county!), school tax, trash fees, sewer fees, obviously water/phone/internet/electric/(gas if you have it), Then there's the township income tax, state, federal, then the surcharges, social security, medicare, various random other taxes. Then there's the insurances. Then health insurance (which your company may pay some of, all of, but that only works as long as you never actually use it...then you're on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars that it doesn't cover but you never really understood that, at which point you're best bet is bathing in the ocean in a thunderstorm during a sharknado.) etc. etc. You guys still do pensions. We get "social security" (or rather probably won't, we just had our money confiscated for decades to pay for it for other people and by our time we'll be sleeping on a park bench waiting for the crows to pick us apart. At least Switch is portable!)

By the time you're done. You get your choice. Chopped chicken or Nintendo games. The chopped chicken entertains you for half an hour. The Nintendo game entertains you for 40+ hours. I pick the Nintendo game. If taco tuesday kills me at least I went happy trying to get that last red coin with a Yoshi egg.

I don't want boneless bananas because banana is not Exo / Endo skeleton plants.
Plants doesn't even have bones.
Except Dry Piranha Plants.

@Tyranexx I've been to an Aldi once. It was tiny and only had a limited selection. It's not local either so there's that, but I don't know, I didn't find much to like about it. Then again I have no less than THREE Whole Foods around me. The parking lot looks like a Prius dealership. And no car has less than 5 bumper stickers. Weird store. Pretty. They don't carry a single product you've ever heard of, and everything is 175% more expensive than other stores for the same product category. Some of the stuff looks interesting. But it's very much a place for those with cash to separate their lives from the peasantry. I've bought like 10 things there ever, all hardlines, not food, mostly because they were the only store with it and were cheaper than Amazon proper for some reason. I felt like a pariah. It's like showing up to a wine tasting in a straw hat and overalls. you know you don't belong there. you know everyone can tell you don't belong there. But you just pretend it's a normal day regardless.

Yeah, you missed the good Pizza Hut era. And an....interesting...Nintendo era Actually you missed the last good era in general. I can't imagine the perspective of you or even worse anyone younger than you that was born into the current imaginary world where nothing is based on reality and it's all a woven fiction without the memory to realize what was broken. That's what they count on of course, it's by design. All you need to do is change the world until the last person old enough to remember the old world dies off, then the new reality is the only reality. Nobody even knows how much worse it is because to them it's all that ever existed.

For Pizza Hut, the big thing is it's just not actually even the same food. Or anything close. Back then it was true actual restaurant-made Chicago deep dish pizza. Served at the table smoldering hot in a thick black aluminum pan. What they call "pan pizza" now isn't anything close to deep dish. It's a "self rising crust" type frozen pizza crust.

I actually got to make a pizza in their kitchen once with a field trip as a kid. Back then the idea of letting 20 kids into a commercial foodservice kitchen didn't raise any red flags. Today the lawyers would be out for millions and the store would be shut down by the board of health. THAT is how different a world today and yesterday is. They made the dough fresh. The toppings were chopped. The sauce was in big bins, they'd simmer it a bit in the pots like a real pizza store. It was lined into the pan manually. It was real restaurant food.

Today, it's literally a par-baked frozen shell from a bag, a can of sauce, and bagged frozen toppings. It's literally a frozen pizza reheating facility and nothing more.

@HobbitGamer
Green monster?
Is that called "Envy" ?

@ThanosReXXX Are you taking about "gravity chairs"?

My mother gave me 2 of those, they were too big for their deck that my dad built, but I left them out in the rain and they rusted to pieces after a winter. 1 fell apart while I was trying to recline it. So now I only buy plastic. Which probably after the summer will brittle and break, but at least it was cheap. And light.

I'm actually throwing out 6 old sling aluminum chairs that are in good condition frame wise but the material all tore up. Anybody want to repair them they'll be in front of my house on Friday.

@NEStalgia Was I supposed to be cc'd on that last reply, b/c I never got an email from your quotes? Anyway, I read it and I'm here now so...

"....none of that odd credit nonsense will ever make sense to me at all beyond mortgages themselves...which still don't make sense."

You'll never be President w/o a deeper appreciation of going into debt $1B times over. It's all about the leveraged credit. Buy a home, owe the bank $300k. Then borrow on that from another bank another $30k to improve the home, then borrow $10k from your credit cards to pay the taxes. And whoever dies w/ the most debt to the bank wins. Bank ownership > home ownership.

@rjejr Got to love powder coated Chinese steel. I have patio chairs from the 80's that are just now starting to fail. I've since then bought several China-tastic sets that lasted about 8 months. "Recycle!" Bite me. Make stuff that doesn't break and you won't need to worry about it going in a landfill.

Yeah I wasn't sure if the quotes tag or not. For other people I seem to get emails when I'm in the quote they're hitting, but when I do it no one seems to get it.

LOL, yeah, sounds like the American way. I'll never get it. The whole debt thing. If I have $10 I can spend $10. That's it. Simple. How it was meant to be. How it used to be. This bizzare system where people with all this debt that live more luxuriously than I, with way more purchasing power etc than I, yet, when you run the actual numbers they technically have less actual money than a high school kid....they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and I don't owe anyone a dollar.........I don't understand the world around me at all.