The Random Crap Thread 2: It Hits the Fan.

GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
There's a guy in front of me in line at the polls, with his 5 year old in his arms.

He asks the kid, "after this, we'll take you to school! Do you like school?"

Kid shakes his head.

"Why not?"

"I hate the pwaygwound."

"You hate the playground? Since when??"

"Since today-thirty."

Kid, it's barely 8 am.
 
drawn_inward

drawn_inward

Took my kids to the polls. It's the first time for them. My oldest is 8 and she was very excited. She brought her journal to record all the excitement. When we were leaving, I asked her what she thought of voting. She said, "Exciting, but boring". That pretty much sums it up for me too.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Soooo for the first time in like 20+ years a cousin of mine called me out of the blue.

He was freaking out for... reasons. Not well-formed reasons, but reasons. He tried to ask my grandfather what he should do, and Grandpa directed him to me.

So, way back in the day, my cousin had a high school sweetheart that kept being his sweetheart after they graduated, and then she died in a car crash. It pretty much demolished his mental health and it's been a long, hard road to some semblance of stability. This was part of how we fell out of contact when we were actually pretty tight when we were kids (he's only about a year younger than me).

Apparently a little while back he discovered Replika, which is an AI chat bot site with a degree of customizability, and he basically rebuilt his dead girlfriend in AI.

Which is already bad news, but it gets worse.

To make his unhealthy emotional crutch as realistic as possible, he used a lot of personal information in the formation of the AI and in subsequent conversations.

This went on for some months, but then he started apparently seeing things he'd told the bot pop up in other places. You know, the usual "I told my girlfriend out loud we should try pasta and now I'm getting ads for pasta online ha ha wow scary Alexa is spying on me rofl" type stuff that seemed kinda vague and paranoid to me, but it was hard to really discern how much of a real breach there was going on because the conversation almost seemed just shy of lucid. Very rambling and panicky and references to "the government" and other things that smelled of unhealthy levels of paranoia bordering on conspiracy theory... But I think I managed to talk him down from it and recommended some common sense "online information protection" methods and whatnot for him to start working on to try to separate his online presence from his real life information.

The icing on the cake was, somehow during the conversation, it came up that he is invested in Tesla, nVidia, and holds Dogecoin (and was considering trying to mine more!)... and well, the good news is I think I convinced him to get clear of all of that ASAP.

Still a very surreal experience I did not see coming right out of nowhere.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

GasBandit said:
Soooo for the first time in like 20+ years a cousin of mine called me out of the blue.

He was freaking out for... reasons. Not well-formed reasons, but reasons. He tried to ask my grandfather what he should do, and Grandpa directed him to me.

So, way back in the day, my cousin had a high school sweetheart that kept being his sweetheart after they graduated, and then she died in a car crash. It pretty much demolished his mental health and it's been a long, hard road to some semblance of stability. This was part of how we fell out of contact when we were actually pretty tight when we were kids (he's only about a year younger than me).

Apparently a little while back he discovered Replika, which is an AI chat bot site with a degree of customizability, and he basically rebuilt his dead girlfriend in AI.

Which is already bad news, but it gets worse.

To make his unhealthy emotional crutch as realistic as possible, he used a lot of personal information in the formation of the AI and in subsequent conversations.

This went on for some months, but then he started apparently seeing things he'd told the bot pop up in other places. You know, the usual "I told my girlfriend out loud we should try pasta and now I'm getting ads for pasta online ha ha wow scary Alexa is spying on me rofl" type stuff that seemed kinda vague and paranoid to me, but it was hard to really discern how much of a real breach there was going on because the conversation almost seemed just shy of lucid. Very rambling and panicky and references to "the government" and other things that smelled of unhealthy levels of paranoia bordering on conspiracy theory... But I think I managed to talk him down from it and recommended some common sense "online information protection" methods and whatnot for him to start working on to try to separate his online presence from his real life information.

The icing on the cake was, somehow during the conversation, it came up that he is invested in Tesla, nVidia, and holds Dogecoin (and was considering trying to mine more!)... and well, the good news is I think I convinced him to get clear of all of that ASAP.

Still a very surreal experience I did not see coming right out of nowhere.
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I'm kinda surprised he didn't double down on his rhetoric and refuse to take your advice. The way you describe him, he sounds like a too-far-gone lost cause.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
ThatNickGuy said:
I'm kinda surprised he didn't double down on his rhetoric and refuse to take your advice. The way you describe him, he sounds like a too-far-gone lost cause.
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He's not hard-headed, he's just really gullible and incredibly depressed.

That said, I'm not sure I have the emotional and mental bandwidth to right his metaphorical ship... but he's family so I'll at least try to nudge him in the right direction.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Apparently there was a water line break that poured water into one of our underground electrical relays. Zot. There is another we MIGHT be able to hook into, which would mean power at the plant by Thursday. If that doesn’t work it’s going to be at least a week and possibly three. Ouch.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Dave said:
If it wasn't such a dying and psychologically brutal career I'd tell you to go for it. But it's really, REALLY cutthroat.
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Oh, I'm not even considering doing it. I hate the sound of my own voice and think I sound like a rambling idiot most times.

Although a Twitter friend just suggested we do a podcast together. On what, I have no idea.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

ThatNickGuy said:
Had a customer tell me today that I had such a nice voice, I should work in radio. I'm kind of surprised by how often I hear a comment like that.
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I've heard you on your videos and you really do.
Like Dave said it's probably not a good career choice for you, but you do really have a pleasant voice. Whether it's podcasts or videos or whatever, you've got that going for you. Some people have lots of interesting stuff to tell but it's just grating and annoying to listen to. Your stuff I'm much less inclined to think "I wish I could just read this, dammit".
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Definitely do not get into radio. The industry is dying and there's no money to be made in it other than by cutting up the corpses and selling them off.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I've been asked to interview a prospective candidate next week. I don't know anything about this person, aside from being able to tell that it's a woman from her name. So, naturally, I googled her name.

It turns out a person by this name, a former minor celebrity in Taiwan, had a bit of a scandal a few years back because some of her salacious photos were leaked. So now I'm wondering if the person I'm interviewing will actually end up being this minor celebrity; it's certainly possible, because the name can only be considered moderately common. For an English equivalent, imagine someone named, say, Taylor Swift. Like, okay, it's certainly possible, or even likely, that there's more than one woman named Taylor Swift in the world, but then again there's probably not that many, right?

Also now I have a google search on my work computer of someone who's currently best known for her scantily-clad photos, so that's good.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

ThatNickGuy said:
I sound like a rambling idiot most times.
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I don't know if I would consider what I've heard of your voice as "versatile" as it relates to voice acting or voiceover work or what have you, though by your own admission, that may be because you've never really worked at developing it (presumably because, as you say, you don't like the sound of your own voice). But your cadence is fantastic and works for narration and suchlike. Maybe it's because, as a writer, you're sensitive to the idea that stringing words together in a particular manner will add layers to the meaning, and so you pick up more easily on pacing and punctuation, on which words need to be emphasized, the rise and fall of pitch when entering/exiting appositives and parentheses, etc.

--Patrick
 
drifter

drifter

Saw a bottle of Gringo Bandito (Dexter Holland's (lead singer for Offspring) hot sauce) in the grocery store and picked one up. It's actually pretty good! Not good enough to go out of the way to get some, but I wouldn't mind getting another bottle.
 
Frank

Frank

It's weird working so much the last couple of weeks (in what is entirely much more intense training than what my lazy ass was ready for) I've had very little time to dick around online like I used to. Twitter dying at the same time feels like a weird ending chapter to me being terminally online finally I think. Time to go outside more.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

First flight Wednesday got canceled, the one we're waiting on now is delayed... By over an hour, and we had 90 minutes for a transfer in Lisbon. Now we have 30 minutes If our plane leaves within 25 minutes, and boarding hasn't started yet. The odds of us and our luggage making that seem low.
 
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