TheTechnician27

Near 18th and Holmes; been there since March.

“Wolf Cola has become the official drink of Atlanta.”

“Atlanta, Frank? Or the official drink of Antifa?”

Sponges are animals. Phylum Porifera, m8.

Sometimes asking something is just hard, man. Nobody’s saying it’s your responsibility to ask or that they can’t ask on their own, but that it might comfort the person struggling to get something off their chest if you express that you’re open to it. It’s not coddling in some zero-sum game; it’s just trying to be in-tune with how your partner’s feeling.

Do you mean that sales were poor? If not, and you mean that literally, then they did – about 25,000 units, making it a commercial failure, but nevertheless “brought”.

It seems pretty clearly like a “what not to do at a stoplight”-style joke about unhealthy interpersonal behavior. Like it’s calling out a real pattern you may not have noticed and then, as a subversion, providing the most insecure, manchildish response to it.

Edit: To be more concrete, my interpretation of the takeaway is that if your partner is doing this shapes thing, they might have something on their mind, and maybe you should ask them if they do. (And the joke to make you realize that is to juxtapose you getting up and leaving like Patrick Bateman.)

Cohen added that eBay’s earnings power could increase materially under tighter cost controls, arguing earnings could potentially double over a relatively short period.

Okay, yeah, he’s fucking delusional.

(Also, ‘GameStop stock sinks’ feels like a mild tongue twister.)

11.7 was the “undecided” portion of Democratic primary votes in this county.

Oh, okay, so you just decided:

• Not to say what the 11.7% was – baselessly assuming that everyone would mutually understand.
• To completely switch topics – whereas I said “Muslim vote in the 35th Senate district”, you decided to go with “undecided in the 2024 presidential primaries in this county” (the 35th is made of multiple counties, and you fail to even specify what “this county” is).
• Not to provide a source.
• That the alleged 11.7% undecided were ride-or-die on Israel–Palestine based on absolutely nothing.
• That any of this at all pertains to the district’s status in 2026.

This is pigeon chess. You’re trying lazy numerical sleight-of-hand assuming people won’t actually question what you’re saying if you say it authoritatively enough. Steve Bannon would be proud of your ability to flood the zone by throwing mountains of bullshit out and hoping people get disoriented enough that they stop bothering to check.

You are calling 11.7% of voters in this county/ district “fuck all”

Where the fuck on Earth are you pulling this from? You just dropped a bunch of random-ass numbers in your above edit, and now you’re just like “11.7% of voters”. There is not an 11.7% Muslim vote in the 35th; are you on fucking meth?

Edit: “why are [sic] numbers might disagree. We don’t actually get district level results for national offices,”

Buddy, it’s in the article I linked when saying that. It literally says Harris “narrowly won” within the 35th overall in 2024. That’s not double-digit percentage points; that’s a percentage point or two between her and Trump at most. “Are” numbers differ because you appear to be pulling them out of fucking thin air.

So you’re using figures from a 2026 Michigan Senate election to extrapolate about how Michigan was so winnable in 2024 thanks to Israel–Palestine instead of the obvious “Trump fucking sucks and people are angry”. This district swung about 5 points just from the 2022 race when Israeli apartheid was well in effect but before most Americans were concerned about it as a primary issue.

You can make the argument that Israel–Palestine mattered at the margins in Michigan in 2024 (which wouldn’t even have decided the election); trying to argue it was “one of the most winnable elections of all time” (even if hyperbolically) at all let alone based on those 35th District figures is so obviously asinine that I don’t even feel I need to explain it. I will offer that the 35th Senate District has effectively fuck-all in the way of a Muslim vote and that you don’t magically get an approximately 9-point swing when you take Israel–Palestine out.

Edit: So you edited your comment to:

And like, lets just work with what you’ve given.

And then… What fucking numbers that I gave are you talking about? Seriously, where did you pull these numbers from? I didn’t even have let alone offer exact figures for 2024 for the 35th Senate District; it just said “narrowly”, so I assumed a sub-1% margin.

• 2022: 53.4 Kristen McDonald Rivet (D) to 46.6 Annette Glenn ®
• 2024: No state senate election in this district. We’ll assume based on “narrowly” that Harris was c. 50.01–49.99 (whereas I would consider up to e.g. 50.5–49.5 “narrowly”; I’m trying to be as generous as possible to your argument).
• 2026: 58.9 Chedrick Greene (D); 39.4 Jason Tunney ®; 1.7 Ali Sledz (L)

Where on Earth does “net negative of 27 points” come into this? Net negative what points? +13 what in 2022? I feel like I just dropped midazolam while I’m reading this. Nothing you’ve said is substantiated or makes any sense.

Just more evidence that '24 was one of the most winnable elections of all time

Or, or or, and hear me out: Trump being in office for another year and a half has served as a stark reminder of how shitty Republicans actually are, and even Republicans are angry about it. American voters as a collective are fickle, stupid, incurious, and confoundingly forgetful. The district is considered a swing seat roughly mirroring Michigan statewide, and we’ve seen a consistent trend across the country of Democrats overperforming after Trump took office and somehow displayed even worse leadership than in his first term. Democrats did considerably better in 2026 than they did in 2022 despite having the same district map, and Harris narrowly won the 35th in 2024. The much larger margin clearly reflects anti-Trump sentiment caused by his time in office.

Oh dear god. I’ve never bothered to read much into the anatomy of horseshoe crabs until today, and I had no idea they have an array of photoreceptors along their telson (the long, tail-like segment). That’s so creepy.

And you can’t dismiss the accumulated experimental data

I don’t. I actually read psychology meta-analyses about accumulated experimental data, and relatively few individual papers are using terms like “superego” (and I can find two meta-analyses, one of which is just describing psychoanalysis). Even then, it’s within a modern framework of psychoanalysis which has evolved over 100 years, not regurgitating what they think “Freud would say”. You’re citing Freud specifically by literally saying “here’s what Freud would say”, so don’t strawman me by pretending I’m anti-experimental data or whatever the fuck.

Psychology isn’t a question of physics.

I’m not saying it is; it’s an emergent phenomenon in a chain thereof. I’m saying it is a science that deserves to actually be taken seriously, not mired in “here’s what someone who barely understood the field as we understand it today would’ve said” like that holds literally any weight about why people behave the way they do.

Freud would

Can we please not. I don’t bring up hylomorphism when I talk about physics, so can you please give psychology a similar dignity by treating it like an actual science?

Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.

What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.

I don’t think the vinyl analogy holds up here, because even though I don’t use vinyl, I recognize it’s a very different way to experience music. Vinyls you have to physically go out and buy, physically retrieve, physically place into your player, and then listen to in one static location. The iPod, meanwhile, is damn-near the same thing: you have 1) a portable electronic device 2) of a similar size and form factor 3) holding the mathematically exact same digital recordings of songs 4) which you listen back to through nearly the same medium (same speakers; different DAC) and 5) can see displayed on a screen. Navigating through the music is very slightly, near-meaninglessly different. As noted: the ClickWheel™.

Nevertheless, even under the premise that it’s highly analogous to vinyl, this would be like if you had a comparison of vinyl versus digital audio and spent half of it ranting about streaming services while basically ignoring local digital playback. That’d be fine if you set out with “vinyl versus streaming”, but you started on the premise “vinyl versus digital”. “Here’s my comparison of CRTs and OLEDs. But first, a rant about Netflix.”

Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid.

Sorry, you’re right; it’s more like around 20 of mine.

I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice.

I’m not complaining about their media player of choice; I’m remarking that the way they chose to discuss it in this article – especially being so focused on streaming – is stupid as fuck. Like 50% of this article is spent bitching about non-issues with phones. I don’t even mean “non-issues” in the sense that they don’t annoy me personally; I mean “non-issues” in the sense that this devolves into a comparison not of iPod versus smartphone but of iPod versus streaming, or that they’re talking about it being so convenient not to have to worry about charging a second device. They can enjoy what they want to; the reasons they describe are, for the most part, asinine.

You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs.

The author of this article certainly did consider DACs: [Modern smartphones have] got […] a DAC chip that is by all measures transparent, near-lossless wireless streaming […]" and that’s the last they mention of the DAC, so they clearly don’t give a shit about the Wolfson.

The fact they chose to wait until the middle of the article to say “yeah btw this thing is hardmodded for the battery and the storage” is so telling. That’d be the first thing I’d mention about a technological comparison.

Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat

Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.

I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.

??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.

This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.

They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like ten twenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”

So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.

Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.

This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.

who still wants a television in this century?

This is so out-of-touch it’s unreal.

—Someone who doesn’t still want a television in this century