Okay, goddamn, I’ll tear these old motors apart and get them to the scrapper

The thing about that era that nobody seems to remember for some reason is that 4Loko made everyone crazy because there was pseudoephedrine in it. It’s an upper that’s used as a decongestant, but it also makes people feel like they can do 100 pushups easy when they can barely do 5.

The stuff was in everything. It’s WHY “Red Bull gives you wings” and Red Bull has never been the same since it killed some kid who wouldn’t stop chugging Red Bulls at a rave, and they had to take it out. The stuff was legal enough to serve in cans at the gas station, you could buy the hell out of pseudoephedrine products of every kind, even if you weren’t old enough to drink alcohol in the US, it wasn’t really controlled at all, so it was the secret engine behind the Scene Kids, as well.

It was in EVERYTHING. I have a story about being at work with a miserable flu, dragging complete ass and wishing for death, but then lunch came, and I took some TheraFlu that I had, only to spend the rest of the day gacked out of my mind like “let’s get these fuckin NUMBERS bro!” Ridiculous.

Dumb old caffeine doesn’t hold a candle to it. The real reason pseudo was taken away was because all the tweakers were doing kitchen sink bullshit with stolen cough medicine to make crank and then selling that shit to Indiana truckers, it was crack for people who couldn’t get crack. You could already fly off a can of Red Bull, but they had to have more. It was bigger than 4Loko, it was a hell of an era. Motherfuckers were crawling on the roof. Everyone’s mom was flipping off of stuff at the drug store that she innocently enough bought for a cold. It explains a lot about the 1995-2005ish era.

There were a lot of different options on the booze racks next to 4Loko, I’m not sure why people latched onto that one brand so hard, probably because it was cheap, or maybe it was the first of its kind. Red Bull doesn’t have booze in it. But that’s why Red Bull and vodka became a thing, as well, but that drink was a bit too classy to earn the ghetto legend status. For me and my crew, it was Dragon Jooz, which my roommate had to ban from the house. Same shit, though, it was a 4Loko copycat, there were a bunch of them. House parties were nutty for a little while. It was a real obnoxious era for the party people who only smoked weed and had to put up with it.

But the era came to an end. They took the pseudo away from the public. 4Loko and Red Bull both got severe downgrades to “just a bunch of caffeine and maybe booze.” A lot of the 4loko copycats vanished forever without their real star ingredient. TheraFlu is probably just aspirin and dust now, or discontinued. Party’s over. Thank fuck.

The strange part is how the pseudo wiped everyone’s memory somehow. To this day, I still hear people talk about this era like the energy drinks just had a lot of caffeine in them and that’s why things were all crazy. No, bro. No. You are missing the most important Horseman in this apocalypse, come on. I think a lot of people weren’t all that aware of the ingredients in the can of cheap swill they were pounding, so that’s probably why.

Resident Evil 5 x The Internet

Generally the true problem with trailer parks, and the reason they’re so associated with rural white poors (and Hispanics but they never get in the photos) is because these areas just do not have proper rental housing of any sort.

The towns have single family homes, maybe one or two small apartment buildings, if any, and that’s it. So if you’re too broke to chase a house, but need to hold down a job, there’s no place to live. So they build trailer parks, which are dirt cheap from the landowner’s perspective, you can get away with a dirt road or two and some concrete pads, the plumbing is probably the most expensive part, but it’s going to be greenfield work. The land is going for a song. Everything else is the trailer owner’s problem. No building, no building permits, no proper construction, and you can make them mow the damn lawn for you, too. They don’t know any better. People with apartment experience know that you’re supposed to be maintaining your own fucking property, landlord, but they don’t live out here.

A piece of land this size in a proper city is too valuable for this use, though there are still a lot of them in proper cities, it’s just that out in Bumfuck Indiana they have no intention of building proper rental housing, and the trailer is a bad investment that poor people don’t understand, or worse, they do, actually, but it’s this or nothing.

I’m sure this book says much the same. I’m a trailer park kid so I can anticipate what’s in it. Hopefully it acts as a useful historical record but that’s all it’s good for.

Yeah, and I’ve heard plenty of “Biden sucks but I’m voting for him I guess I suppose since everyone’s twisting my arm FREE PALESTINE” type shit so what?

It’s that type of election.

Damn I just eat these whole now. I guess it’s all about the presentation.

I wonder if there’s a “This Side Toward Enemy” onesie you can buy.

Suddenly legalizing psilocybin, and NOTHING else, all of a sudden would be the most Indiana-ass shit.

How do we make it stop? I am quite reasonably not caring about T. Swift, international billionaire. Where is the big red switch that goes CLANK and the lights all shut off so I can just not worry about this woman’s life for a couple months?

This sublemmy has been a fascinating experiment into how your relatives “eat the onion”.

Yes, the tired joke is that reality is getting too ridiculous, but if you’ve been paying any attention to the AI music situation you have come to the glum realization that they can make Johnny Cash sing whatever the fuck they want him to, now. It’s very convincing. The “weird fingers” era of AI music was years ago, but people kinda missed it. Also, it sounded like Wagon Christ, so it didn’t matter. In hindsight, I hope that Bjork got a hook out of it.

Now we’re here, where they can make Johnny Cash sing a jingle for an insurance company if they can, and it just sounds like an outtake of his, maybe. For that matter, they can make your Mom talk, given a decent sample of her voice, and the sample is smaller than you might think. I would venture that a few minutes of her voice would do it. Black Mirror shit. It’s getting kinda hard to write scifi, lately, you have to pitch 1000 years from now and insist on FTL just to buy yourself some time.

This was your official warning, years late, everyone is paying attention to the visual results of AI, but the audio results got better, much sooner, and nobody really got hung up on it because we are visual monkeys, and it just did not strike us as headline news.

I feel like the automagic beat matching and tricks of something like Virtual DJ were part of the cutting edge of this “AI” thing that’s honestly harder to describe the better I understand the son of a bitch. The ability to speed up a recording without changing the pitch, ignoring the limits of vinyl, pretty much demanded making new material where the original artist just performed the song at a new tempo, in real time, on demand, but I was messing around with it as a hobbyist in like, 2015. I did not understand what I was fucking with, at all. I understood BTC well enough in 2012, but my time with Virtual DJ? I did not grasp it. If I had understood it, I would be much wealthier, only now do I understand Nvidia fanboys.

So now when they make Johnny sing, it sounds like Johnny. The only real tell is that it sounds like some old classic record of his, and not like whatever crisp thing it would be with his voice like old trees, if he was simply alive now and singing in 2024. But he always sounded like old trees. It just means they can make him sing Yellow Submarine, and you’ll be like shit, did I miss that episode of Sesame Street or something? This is great!

Nossir, I don’t like it.

It’s a graphic design thing? Tumblr and Reddit are kinda infamous for the thing where nobody reads screen names, so you end up reading a post from u/everythingipostisaboutpeopleatingshit so you get got every time you get most of the way through the post, and it’s about somebody eating shit.

Somehow my interaction with The Onion content had managed to slip through that perception filter. I tended to read The Onion articles by going to the website and reading the Sensible Chuckles. So they never really fooled me.

But aha. Reposition the presentation, and give us all a dose of Reality is Stranger Than Fiction, and suddenly here I am, going, yeah, that makes sense. I bet all the fucking phone calls came from call centers in India, kinda thing. Nah, bit right through the skin, like a sheep.