I got a 2008 Dodge Avenger when it was new and immediately hated it. Everything felt cheap, it had absolutely no ability to get up to speed, and felt all around sluggish.
Everything I hated about that Avenger for the 8 years I drove it were nothing compared to the two Dodge Calibers I got to drive in that time. Every bad feature for a car dialed up to 11. Felt like it was built so cheap it could fall apart on the road.
My parents and my partner both got one. They were both so, so very bad. It's unreal that car ever got sold.
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.
I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
She put out a video explaining that she sees the humor in all this but realizes that this picture is now a part of that, which is a bummer. I think it could go down as the least flattering picture of a person of all time. In said video, she looks lovely and clearly takes great care of herself.
Reading so many stories like this through my life, and now all this on top of that, is relying on the lived experience of transfems to make absolutely sure I never bother with it. I would love nothing more but I've already got too much to worry about. I don't need all this, too. I wouldn't survive it.
I stopped posting but keep the account active because a lot of the Japanese artists I follow have stopped using other sites that were once pretty standard and never moved away from Twitter. There are also some people I don't want to lose touch with that never moved away.
I was once listening to The Pillows' "I Think I Can" around a friend. Japanese band, lots of their songs are in English but you'd never know through the singer's heavy Japanese accent. He repeats the titular line a lot in the song and my friend thought he was singing "I lick my cunt."
That was 15 years ago and it's still all I hear when I listen to the song.
When I was a kid, I never worried about owning a home. My parents couldn't afford it, I assumed I wouldn't either. Back then it was because I never thought I'd be successful. Now, it's because it's unattainable, even at the mild level of success I've achieved. What I have now would have been more than enough in my rural area 20 years ago.
I got a 2008 Dodge Avenger when it was new and immediately hated it. Everything felt cheap, it had absolutely no ability to get up to speed, and felt all around sluggish.
Everything I hated about that Avenger for the 8 years I drove it were nothing compared to the two Dodge Calibers I got to drive in that time. Every bad feature for a car dialed up to 11. Felt like it was built so cheap it could fall apart on the road. My parents and my partner both got one. They were both so, so very bad. It's unreal that car ever got sold.