Big real estate killed malls. They aren’t as efficient at generating rent due to their maintenance and upkeep costs, so real estate holdings firms are hell bent on liquidating them, subdividing them, and redeveloping the land piecemeal in ways that better optimize for fine access control and not having to take care of any “dead” non-money-making spaces such as the concourses between the stores. Instead: just parking lots between store fronts.

Now there’s a Walmart, a Home Depot, an Applebee’s, a mattress store, a liquor store, and maybe a transient party supply store that will occasionally occupy a space on a seasonal basis. When a slot isn’t occupied by a tenant, they get to shut off the power, water, and climate control completely, and not have to end up wasting electricity or fuel conditioning the air of a space no one goes to right then.

If you WANTED to make a mall work, you could, especially if you added faux “residential” space (actually retail space where the product being sold is storage and privacy, with “sleep” being “against the rules” but they built it to intentionally not know that that’s what the “customers” are doing there). Residential malls would guarantee a constant customer and worker base as people come and go to visit family and friends and end up shopping along the way.

But they don’t want that.

They want to sell a MINIMUM viable product, and charge maximally for it.

Humans are literally a categorical subset within the taxonomical kingdom of “animals”.

“People” who argue that humans aren’t animals are clearly vegetables :p /s

It merely serves to illustrate that traditionalist conservative chudscum will say anything to excuse their disgusting barbaric inhumanity without actually believing it. They will make both of these arguments in the same breath. Then they’ll say their “god” works in “mysterious ways”. Arguing with them is a waste of time except in so far as being able to publicly embarrass them and get them so angry that they discredit themselves in their own irrationally because at least THEN you can convince some bystanders to not be like the waste of skin you just dunked on.

oH YeAh WeLL yOu kNoW wHaT eLsE iS NaTuRaL, RaPe aNd cAnNiBaLiSm!!!11!!!1!1one!11!1!!1eleven!!!1

idea: opt-in mutual aid union of online content creators collectively bargains to form an arrangement with this board who will represent them in fair use disputes. might be the source of professional and academic clout needed to protect creators from abuse and give them some kind of leg to stand on. maybe use the EFF as a middleman to serve lawsuits built on evidence assembled, organized, and cross-referenced by this content advisory board.

Wife Material is apparently Minky :3

it’s actually astonishing that it took THIS long for his career to implode

Staying hydrated is known to increase performance.

Beards are based, mullets are cringe.

Ace people: Guess you’ll die then…

deleted by creator

Hnng yeah thats right womansplain to me, whip out those big beautiful FACTS and correct me till I BLEED

Beef tea was when people would boil jerky to rehydrate it. I actually do that at work sometimes! Most nights I enjoy bouillon broth on its own, but occasionally I’ll spruce it up with a little jerky, and it actually thicken up and get more tender! It also GREATLY enhances the flavor of the broth. When the dry night air of the office is bothering my throat, nothing satisfies quite like warm broth.

(I get hot water by not putting any coffee grounds in the coffee machine. I also use this to prepare tea on occasion, and also ramen cups every once in a blue moon)

Ha good fucking luck charging an early cancellation fee to the VIRTUAL CARD I GENERATED AND DESTROYED THE MOMENT I DECIDED TO STOP PUTTING UP WITH YOUR SHITTY “SERVICE”! FUCK you, Adobe. You get NOTHING from me.

They’re sure giving EA a run for their money universally despised revulsion…

MapMen. I still rewatch some of their ad skits just because they were catchy and fun.

it has in fact been a delightful creative aid for brainstorming fiction, actually!

The things are fantastic at “yes-and” improvisation and extrapolating from a premise.

If I want to build a world and populate it with loosely defined ‘impressionistic’ background info that doesn’t necessarily require fully fledged lore that interconnects, it can do a great job at showing where the lore could go if i decided to explore there. It’s great at suggesting character names, place names, and ways to fill in blanks that make it easier for me to pick or reject individual elements.

In a story idea I’ve been marinating for a while, one character possesses advanced medical knowledge in a world where germ theory, medicine, and surgery never developed because people had access to ‘healing magic’. The problem is, healing magic works on all organisms - including parasites, bacteria, and cancer, which means trying to ‘heal’ someone with an infection makes the infection worse because the pathogens benefited from the healing magic.

I asked AI to extrapolate more detail about this character’s background and it suggested that his father was the village healer and simply didn’t mention his mother at all.

Those two little details exploded in my imagination as an entire history of emotional conflict:
His mother fell ill with a bacterial infection that magic couldn’t fix when he was too little to do anything about it even though he knew what was wrong and how to help her, and so he blamed himself.
His ‘strange ideas’ about physiology, epidemiology, and concepts like hygiene and medicine put him at odds with the traditional teachings his father, and made the other people in his village view him as a ‘problem child’.
This led him to be quiet and withdrawn until he befriends the protagonist, and it is her falling ill when the same disease that killed his mother that motivates him to try again with the rudimentary resources he was able to secretly scrape together since.

(this is an ‘isekai inversion’ where all the reincarnators are disillusioned and discouraged, and the protagonist is a native of that world who travels around finding them, putting them in touch with one another, and motivating them to pursue their specializations again. A nuclear engineer, for instance, won’t be able to get much done in a world where the scientific method hasn’t been codified, manufacturing doesn’t exist let alone precision machining, and chemistry has not clawed its way to distinction out of the vague, secretive, formless depths of alchemy)

" - what lurks beneath all this water"

moar water

…complex almost entirely wholly-hallucinated answers that only have as much bearing on reality as ‘some dude who is very talkative and heard about a bunch of stuff second-hand, and who is also high as balls and experiencing a manic episode where they think they know everything’

Oh no, now he’s going to smell almost like there’s an orange in the next room!