Home Depot is a home improvement warehouse. “Hardware store” is underselling it a bit as they sell lumber, building supplies, appliances, flooring, roofing, lawn and garden supplies, etc. You’d be better off buying from a wholesale lumber yard or building supply, but Home Depot has a contractor supply program. You can buy everything you need to build a house out of a Home Depot. It’s a direct competitor to Lowe’s; if you watch videos about American woodworking you may hear them obliquely refer to “orange and blue big box stores.” Home Depot’s logo color is orange, Lowe’s is dark blue. Home Depot also has a theme song that slaps harder than it has any right to. And “big box” is apt; you can measure the average floor space in a Home Depot or Lowe’s in acres. Home Depots tend to stand alone with their own parking lots.

It’s something of a stereotype for day laborers especially Mexican immigrants to hang out in the parking lot of a Home Depot waiting to be hired for work. Need a building roofed? Go to the Home Depot parking lot and hire a half dozen Mexicans to get it done cheap, fast, and probably well, so goes the stereotype. I associate this image with the Southwest, I’ve never personally seen this here on the Eastern Seaboard.

Best Buy is a big box electronics retailer, they sell televisions, computers, cell phones, game consoles and video games, etc. They have a reputation for not having many customers because most people shop online now; in fact there was a joke going around that Best Buy was Amazon’s showroom. People would go into Best Buy to see the product in person, leave the store and order it from Amazon cheaper. Best Buy is also known for their in-house tech support staff called the Geek Squad. Best Buy sort of sells PC parts, compared to something like MicroCenter they have a pathetic inventory of ATX stuff but I have bought the occasional SSD from there, they also sell garbage tier laptops and tablets. Best Buys often anchor strip malls and will have other stores attached to them, sharing one long parking lot.

OP is trying to conjure an image of a bunch of IT guys and developers milling around in a strip mall parking lot waiting around for someone to hire them to configure a server or something as if they’re undocumented immigrants looking for work paid under the table.

A warm cat is a happy cat.

I’ll be around the Fediverse.

PC gaming is kind of a continuum to me. I can draw hard lines at DOS > Windows and Win9x > NT-based Windows a la XP where compatibility mostly or partially breaks but you can play a lot of games made since the Steam era on modern hardware without much fuss.

Consoles really define the “generations,” and the only console generation I’m really nostalgic for is the SNES era. Mine was always a Nintendo household, and the SNES was my childhood. I had an N64, I’ve gone back to play it, I’m not sure even Ocarina of Time holds up anymore. The thing I still clutch to from the N64 era is the music. The SNES though, sometimes I want to go back and play those old games.

Here’s another version of this joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09W8bAUJD2Y

If you search for a recipe using a general purpose internet search engine, you’ll invariably find a website that has a multi-paragraph story which falls into two general formats:

If the recipe would be considered normal and domestic by 30 year old American white women, it’ll be a story about coming home from a wholesome day’s activity or visiting grandma or something like that and baking this good old fashioned cake.

If the recipe would be considered foreign and exotic by 30 year old American white women, it’ll be a story about traveling through exotic yet safe foreign nation and being served this dish at an authentic restaurant, occasionally lapsing into wikipedia-like fact dumping.

Either way it seems to be cynically designed to appeal strongly to middle class white chicks with wholesome, cozy stories, mentions of vacation, travel, family, colors and smells, etc. but in reality it’s even more cynically designed to appeal to search engines which want to see keyword laden yet naturalistic paragraphs rather than abbreviated lists of words like everyone wants in a fucking recipe.

The specific joke in this post is replacing the wholesome cozy Hallmark story that precedes a recipe with one of grief and tragedy, still a family-oriented story meant to tug at your heart strings, admittedly in a different direction. You almost think whatever idea cancer system is in place that makes up this stuff might actually do this.

The title text refers to the growing trend of dreading Thanksgiving meals with family, which…

That’s been a thing in American culture since I was a kid, but it seems to have changed a bit. When I was a kid, you’d often dread Thanksgiving or Christmas meals because Aunt Gerty is going to be passive aggressive about how the potatoes are cooked, and Grampa Joe is going to get into a whole goddamn thing about Josh’s pony tail, and Dad and uncle Charlie are going to argue about sports the whole time, the kids really don’t like boiled brussel sprouts but nothing about Grandma Jean’s personality has survived except a need for the kids to eat the goddamned brussel sprouts, but at least everyone will shut up during the store bought pumpkin pie. This is done because we “have” to.

Nowadays you’d dread family gathering meals because some of your relatives are Democrats, some of your relatives are Republicans, and they vividly hate each other and at least some of them own guns. “I’m not going to your father’s house, he said out loud he wants to kill our daughter.”

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Also, I’ve noticed people on Lemmy are more willing to just come out and say “I don’t get it” than other platforms; I saw one person just say “help” which is…interesting.

America doesn’t have laws and isn’t a functioning society.

Oh really? Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we?

In Universe A, let’s round up everyone with at least a master’s degree in math and shoot them.

In Universe B, let’s round up all the mechanics and shoot them.

Which one goes to shit faster?

“Our society has enabled people to go to college for too long without actually contributing anything.”

“Such a thing is possible” It kind of isn’t though? It’s a sphere that can pass through itself but not be sharply creased…how are these rules not just made up?

“How come my typing fingers hurt?”

“you’ve never used them before.”

That’s from that video about flipping a sphere inside out that I’m sure someone thinks is an important and useful concept.

Have I got this straight in my head:

Illusion of Gaia was the second in a trilogy: Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and a third one that wasn’t released in North America. And was that third one Terranigma or a different game?

Not all popcorn buttons are alike. Per Alec at Technology Connections, some microwaves merely engage a timer and in those microwaves following the instructions on the bag are probably better,. Others have a sensor that looks for the poof of steam that comes from the bag opening its vent. Based on how long it takes for that poof of steam to occur it can deduce the size of the bag and thus how much longer to cook for. On these microwaves I use the popcorn button.

Has SecureBoot ever accomplished anything vaguely resembling security?