There's a big cake mix manufacturing plant near where I grew up, and I knew a lot of people who worked there. They all confirmed that the only difference between the name brand cake mix and the store brand they made was the box they put it into at the end of the process.

Teacher here. I consider all of the teachers I've worked with, and I consider how few of them I would trust with a loaded firearm under the best possible circumstances (maybe 10 percent).

Then I consider the number of those who would actually consider using a firearm (down to about 3 percent).

And then I consider how many of those I would trust with a firearm in a room full of students... and it's zero.

I finally just avoided the problem by moving to a country where civilians are not generally allowed to own guns and school shootings are not a problem.

The way that someone responds to you is a reflection of them, not of you. If someone in your life is wildly inconsistent, all you can do is make sure that you are maintaining consistency yourself.

I've worked with a number of people who acted like we were besties one day and then gave me the cold shoulder for weeks. I spent too many years wondering what was wrong with me before I finally figured out that their mood swings had nothing to do with me.

I don't understand how it's legal for a court to order religion-based therapy that costs $1500 per month. That's absolutely insane from every possible angle.

US politics have moved so far to the right that I'm pretty sure contemporary moderate Democrats are nearly interchangeable with Reagan-era Republicans.

I wonder what would happen if the world found out that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (or any other celebrity/athlete/role model) was using Chat GPT to respond to fan mail. My gut feeling is that people would find it disingenuous at best -- and there would probably be significant outrage.

Where's the AI that does my dishes and cleans my house so I have more time to write, create, and connect with others? That's the technology I want -- not one that does the meaningful part and leaves the menial stuff up to me.

The convicted felon?

Taxi accessibility varies wildly depending on where you are.

I lived in a small city (700k-ish people) for a decade and almost never saw a taxi on the streets. One morning, I locked my keys in the house and had to call a cab to take me to work. It took 30 minutes for a taxi to arrive. I lived literally one block away from the city's taxi depot.

A couple of years later, Uber hit the scene. With their service, I never waited more than 8 minutes for a ride anywhere in the city.

I am old enough to remember that. My, how times have changed.

Also, remember the time that Howard Dean tried to stir up some excitement among his campaign supporters and was knocked as "not being presidential"?

This is truly the Darkest Timeline™.

An older lady and a kid were at South Park in the row in front of me. They didn't make it 10 minutes.

I think that a lot of people in the Boomer and older age ranges never really understood the idea of adult animation, so they just assume that animated shows and films are made for kids.

(But my favorite Parker/Stone walk-out was the obviously Mormon couple who sat in front of us for the first 30 minutes of The Book of Mormon. The guy had the word "Mormon" embossed on his belt. They didn't do their homework before they bought those tickets.)

Opening weekend, my then-fiancé (now husband) and I went to see this movie. I had gone way down the viral marketing rabbit hole before the film came out. I had read all of the websites and watched all of the "supporting evidence" videos. I knew it was a work of fiction, but I was super invested.

The movie ends, the final credits roll, and the woman in front of me looks at her date and says, "That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. It wasn't scary at all." Then she turns around to get her sweater off the back of her seat and we make eye contact.

I'm sitting absolutely still, staring straight ahead, tears dripping off my chin.

She didn't say anything else, took her things, and left.

I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical church, and I had a lot of religious trauma around witches as a kid. Like, my mom made me listen to Mike Wernke and wouldn't let me go trick-or-treating because she believed that witches were sacrificing children to Satan. I had recurring nightmares -- well into my 20s -- about a witch who lived in the woods behind my house who tried to kill me in horrible ways.

So, while I absolutely understand that The Blair Witch Project is not for everyone, it remains the single most terrifying film I've ever seen.

That's most of the programs car dealers buy.. lowest bidder marketing company with no context and little practical experience gets told "we need X" and voila, here's X.

I worked in marketing for a decade, and when my company started trying to court car dealerships, the quality expectation for that segment of our work was basically non-existent. We went from a high-end boutique experience with 99% accuracy and on-time delivery to mass-produced garbage marketing with literally bare-minimum quality control. 1/10, would not recommend.