I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.

Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.

Met a woman on OKCupid back in like 2014. We seemed to hit it off, so we agreed to a mall date since we were both broke (she was a college student, I was a youngster in the military). We were gonna get food and just kinda walk around and window shop and talk. Gonna try to keep this short, but a lot happened:

1. Had me pick her up from her dorm, went up to the dorm, her roommates were drinking even though everyone was underage, and they’re thanking her for having mom get it for her. She’s super nice about it, but proceeds to complain the entire drive and start getting emotional because she hates that they drink when they’re underage, etc. Yet… She provides it…

2. She doesn’t eat when we get to the mall, and instead spends the whole time I’m eating, talking. No breaks for me to respond, just keeps going.

3. We start walking around the mall, and she starts randomly pinching me. Like, painfully, randomly pinching me in my arms and torso. I’m finally like wtf is with the pinching, and she says that she was doing it because I wasn’t holding her hand while we walked around… We just met, and the vibe is already pretty crap, and how in any way is that a way to communicate…

4. We finally leave and get back to her dorm, I walk her to her door, and I’m invited in by her/the roommates. Fine, I decline drinking because I’m a good sailor, but my date and I exchange some pleasantries with the roommates and then head to her room. It’s basically just a bed, I think maybe she was just super nervous at the mall and being in her own environment she’ll relax.

5. We’re just chatting, and the pinching starts again, and she’s kinda just going for it with no breaks. I’m getting pissed and finally grab her wrists and tell her to stop, and she bit me. On the chest, like, hard, not a romantic playful lil love bite. I’m, again, taken aback and am like, wtf?!?

6. She starts giggling and tells me that that’s how women tell guys that want to make out/get intimate. What?! No, not how that works, at all… Especially not on a first date. But, fine, I tell her she can just ask, figuring she just wants to make out.

7. After a little while making out, the pinching starts again, and apparently this time it’s how women say they want to have sex. I wasn’t so turned off, it just didn’t happen, like, at all.

8. She walked me back to my car, and I drove her back to her buildings door, and she bursts into tears about her roommates and the drinking again, I console her enough for her to feel better and go back to her room. Say goodnight, and she just sits there staring at me. I’m kinda done at this point and just ask what, and I get, “No kiss?” Fine…

9. Get a text while I’m driving home telling me it was one of the best dates of her life, she really hopes we can see each other again soon, she really liked me and was attracted to me, etc. I respectfully declined, and when she wouldn’t just take that as an answer, I sent her a text essay outlining basically all of the above, and I honestly can’t remember if she responded.

Honestly, she wasn’t a bad person, and maybe at different stages in our lives things could’ve gone better… But she had a lot going on and a lot of life to live and learn from, and I wasn’t up for the ride. Hope she’s doing well, if she sees this and recognizes it, and that she stopped using pinching as a means of communication.

Oh, and to illustrate how hard the pinching/bite were, I had dime sized bruises all over my arms and torso the next day, and a bite mark bruise on my chest.

Purchased a soft drink from a fast food restaurant. I have a few friends that, in their minds, it is never justified to buy a drink from a fast food place if you’re doing takeout because “you have drinks at home, they charge $3 for something that costs them $0.11 to make, etc.”

It’s become somewhat of a debate amongst our group of friends: I argue they have flavors I may not have at home, it can be a treat, and it helps keep restaurants in business since drinks are where they make their money. I’m told it doesn’t matter, the upcharge is too much to justify.

I’ve boiled my view on it to “There is a fine line between frugal and cheap.” But never thought the purchase of a soft drink would be so polarizing amongst people in my life, hahaha.

There’s also an ongoing moratorium on the board game Life simply because we cannot agree if it’s legal for one player to take out all of the bank’s loans on their first turn. It’s not explicitly stated in the rules you can’t, but many of us feel it defeats the spirit of the game.

I’m gonna throw “forecastle” out there. It’s referring to a specific part/area of a ship, but it’s pronounced similar to “folks-sole.”

Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.

Let’s say you’re in school, and you’re assigned a lab partner and told the requirements of your project and that you need to compromise both individual’s ideas to make it happen.

Every time you try to make a suggestion, they immediately say no and suggest something that isn’t even graded for the project, and refuses to budge until you compromise. When you don’t compromise, they threaten to tell the teacher that you’re not compromising. As you try to hold your ground trying to get a good grade for both of you, they just keep doing whatever they want and making more threats to you: they’ll take your lunch money, they’ll beat you up after school, they’ll pop your bike tires, etc.

When you tell the teacher, they tell you to stop overreacting and you need to learn to work with others. After school, your science partner punches you and says you better agree to XYZ tomorrow. You tell the teacher they hit you, and you’re told you need to stop exaggerating and learn to compromise and work together. Every day that week, your science partner makes good on each threat after school, and every day you tell your teacher, they tell you to stop exaggerating and learn to play nice.

On the last day, you punch the kid back, really hit him, break his nose kind of punch. And you’re punished: the teacher says you shouldn’t have resorted to violence, your partner says they were the true victim in the project arrangement, you get a failing grade because everything you compromised on didn’t meet the requirements, but your science partner still got an A and wasn’t punished for anything he did all week because “the rules don’t apply to them the same way, they’re troubled/have a lot going on at home/whatever excuse.”

That’s the current state of US politics: Republicans are justified in any and everything they do because they’re “special,” but Democrats have to follow all of the rules, all of the time, even when the other side of the aisle refuses to even listen to them or the centuries/decades of legal precedent. And they, the Republicans, still win because that’s just how the fucking system works.

I’m with you 100%. No one consents to being born, and it should be every human’s right to decide when they’ve had enough and consent to checking out of life.

We put down animals because they’re suffering, it’s seen as a mercy, yet when it comes to humans? Oh no, go through your fifth round of chemo, take two shots of morphine every day, exist in nothing but physical pain because wanting to die is somehow… Wrong?

I’ve suffered from depression the majority of my life, and I’ve even asked my therapist: what is so wrong, so bad, about wanting to die? We live in a society where the majority of wealth is held by very few, we’re watching governments across the world fall to fascism, people’s rights are being stripped away left and right, and yet the majority of the population believes “Well, you have XYZ, so you should be grateful! You have so much to live for!”

This is not a pro-suicide comment, either, to be clear. If you are suffering, please reach out to friends/family, or even better, a mental health professional if that is an option for you. Death is a permanent solution to what can be a temporary problem. But if an individual of sound mind and body wants to consent, for whatever reason, to no longer wanting to play this torture we call life, I believe they should 100% have the right to do so, and we should be glad we as a society have come so far as to extend the same mercy to human beings that we provide to pets.

When I worked for USPS as a carrier, my LLV (the mail truck) was older than I was by a year. I could also put the key in the ignition, start it, and then completely remove the key and the truck would keep running.

That kinda shit cracks me up, hahaha

It was my grandmother’s, and I was the 5th owner after she passed away. Manual windows, manual locks, and a fully-metal body. By the time I got it, it was so quirky, I loved everything about it.

• The horn was dying, so if you held it for longer than 2-3 seconds, it sounded like the doppler effect,
• Since the hood was metal, the horn would make it vibrate a little and the car sounded like it was begging to be put out of its misery,
• The brakes screamed when you came to a stop, but only at speeds under 10 mph, so I basically scared the shit out of every drive-thru worker I encountered,
• Our family dog knocked the rear view mirror off with her head, and after 5 months, we finally glued it back on, only for her to do it again a week later, so I learned to drive with only my sideview mirrors,
• The parking brake basically couldn’t be relied on because the previous owner, my sister, drove it for about 6 months with the parking brake fully engaged, complaining to my dad constantly that it had no acceleration.

Was a beautiful, green, Kia Sephia, and I miss that car more than some family members. My second car had another favorite quirk: the driver’s window motor died, so the window wouldn’t roll up or down. So, being the high school chucklefuck that I was, I’d go through drive-thrus in reverse if I had a friend in the passenger seat (also without a rearview mirror, thanks to the aforementioned dog).

All the staff used to come to the window laughing, and one manager gave us real shit for it despite their being no signs or anything indicating we couldn’t.

Sigh my younger days, cars today are just too boring 😂

Yeah, I remember one of my teachers (I think my high school biology teacher) chastising us a bit one day because most of the class would come from PE before hers. She was complaining that we smelled like sweat and working out and all that.

But we weren’t allowed (or given even close to enough time at the end of the PE class) to use the showers. You basically showed up, had until the second bell (about 5 minutes after the first) to be in the gym ready to go, you’d run/play/workout/whatever for almost an hour straight, and then be given at most 5 minutes to change and go to your next class.

No shit we stank, and when we asked why we couldn’t use the showers, we were told there was no way for us to be monitored in there, so it left too many opportunities for misdeeds and shit.

My dad’s trade school had this rule back in the 70s/80s. If you showed up and weren’t clean shaven, you had to pay $0.25 for a disposable razor and small little pouch of shaving cream. If you refused, you were sent home for the day.

He had a teacher that he said was really well liked among the students, former Marine who I think served in Vietnam. The guy had a coconut carved into a monkey’s head on his desk, and he’d tape a cigarette in its mouth. But he had some odd rules and, according to my dad, could be a scary dude at times.

Like, if he caught you yawning, he sent you out of the class because “You aren’t full awake, and therefore didn’t prepare for class properly with a proper night’s sleep.”

If the class got off track, or really pissed him off, he’d either: A. Lift one of those old-school metal drafting tables off all four of its feet and slam it back down, causing a HUGE boom sound that got everybody’s attention, or, B. He’d drop-kick the coconut monkey head down the hallway before returning to the class.

Reminds me of a teacher my dad told me about when he was in trade school (he went to a trade school for high school back in the 70s/80s). He said all the students called the guy Mr. Hitler behind his back.

He would regularly make fun of students, call them stupid for not understanding things, send kids to the principal for the slightest infractions, etc. My dad didn’t grow up with money but started working at like 14, and he said it always bothered him the most that Mr. Hitler would especially pick on poor kids.

“Oh, is that all your family could afford for you, rags and old shoes?” “Really, the same pants two days in a row, what, your family can’t afford to wash them?” Just shit like that, in front of the whole class, absolutely demeaning and stuff that wouldn’t be tolerated today.

Well, apparently Mr. Hitler suffered a stroke at some point during my dad’s high school days, and according to him, not a single student gave a damn to do anything to help him. He had trouble walking/was in a wheelchair, kids would let the door slam behind them despite him trying to get through. If he had several things to carry, students would ignore him requesting help to carry them, pretending like they couldn’t hear him.

I wrote my first AP English thesis in high school on this exact issue: students being assigned too much homework and the detriment it caused them. I don’t remember the source, but an academic paper from around 2010 (I wrote the paper in like 2012) talked about how assigning more than 5-10 math problems per night could cause way more harm than good.

Not only was it incredibly time consuming for people who likely had sports/music/jobs/family obligations/etc, but it reinforced incorrect learning habits. Basically, if you were given 100 math problems, but didn’t understand how to solve them correctly, you’d just be reinforcing your mistake 100 times. Add in the fact I never had a teacher who would spend an entire class going over all 100 of them, and kids were basically learning the wrong way every night. Plus, at least in my experience, the assignments were turned in and then the class moved on to the next lesson, and by the time you were given the graded assignment back, you were already 3+ lessons ahead, still learning everything wrong because the foundation was built on sand, not stone.

Was in an AP English class, and we were given a book on AP format for writing essays and such (think proper way to cite sources, alphabetize authors, other grammatical and formatting rules, etc). The class was given an example handout and told to group up into fours and go over the handout, finding mistakes and such based on the book previously mentioned.

When we went over it as a class, every group found basically every mistake except one. Every group missed this one mistake, and none of us flagged it because the book we were supposed to base all of this off of stated that it, in fact, was not a mistake. Since it was a graded assignment, we started debating with the teacher that since everyone didn’t flag it, and the book we were given said it was actually correct, we shouldn’t be penalized for it.

The teacher, however, refused, stating that it was incorrect based on AP formatting standards. Students even showed her, in the book we were given, where it said that the “mistake” was in fact correct. She refused to budge, and arguing continued.

The discussion ended when she (the teacher) finally said, “I’m the only one in this room with a Master’s degree in English, you got it wrong, I’m not hearing further debate on this,” and took the points off from all of us.

Same thing happened with a math teacher (who was an absolute piece of shit, literally everyone including the staff hated him, but that’s for another time). Everyone got a problem wrong, and when he went over it, several students pointed out the answer we all got was correct based on how we were initially shown how to solve the problem. He pulled the same “I’m the only one here with a degree in mathematics, so none of you are getting the points for it because you’re just wrong.”

Several students went to other math teachers and showed it to them, who in turn went to the piece of shit and not only pointed out that he was wrong, but the head of the math department was basically demanding either the points be restored or the question thrown out. The next class he went on a long spiel about how “after conversing with several of my other academic colleagues, it was brought to my attention it was a poorly designed question, and thus I will be removing it from all of the tests.”

Just fucking admit when you’re wrong, all you’re teaching us with your fancy degrees is that you’re a prick and to resent authority figures.