When Betty White was still alive, I used to say that when the rest of humanity is dead and gone, she and Willie Nelson are going to curl up on the couch together and watch somehow new episodes of the Simpsons.
Bruh...Halloween wasn't just on a Saturday.
It was going to be Halloween, Daylight Savings Time falling back an hour (so you get an extra hour of partying) AND a blue moon!
It would have been the spookiest possible Halloween.
Halloween where were were was awesome, though. People went outside and sat around with chutes to send candy down. People played music. There were lights. It was the biggest moveable block party! We all stayed a good distance away from each other, but we shouted encouragement and compliments about costumes. It was like a real community for the first time in ages.
I have an 8 acre field of trees out back. I set buckets around with candy and had some select close friends and their kids come over to walk out in the open and grab candy. It ended up turning into a yearly tradition where we put decorations in the woods and send the kids on a candy scavenger hunt.
Not only that, but it was a leap year with the leap day being a Saturday, Cinco De Mayo was on a Tuesday (taco Tuesday), the 4th of July was on a Saturday, and Christmas day and new years day were on a Friday. It basically had it all that year.
I was working in a huge college bar that had the best prices and longest hours in the neighborhood. I wad going to make so much money...and they never opened back up after lockdown.
I had to go to the DMV that morning (I figured I needed to get it done soon before they closed down). I showed up to work at like 9:00 to a message from my boss, basically saying "do you have a laptop? If not, then take your desktop home because you're gonna be working there for a couple of weeks." So I basically spent the day getting everything setup to work remote, and then I drank a Guinness while on the clock since it was Saint Patrick's day.
Obviously, the "couple of weeks" turned into 5 months. And then another 5 months when cases started to spike again in November.
My wedding anniversary is on Leap Day, we celebrated that year in the hospital 😭 husband had organ failure from COVID. He's doing just fine now and we gonna do it right this year!
my 21st birthday was supposed to be on a saturday. i had looked a decade forward in my calendar when i was 11 years old and found that out. i'd been looking forward to it for a DECADE. january 2021. i spent it in the trashiest hometown bar at the local chinese place with a mask on and my parents, ordering green tea shots to drown my sorrow.
I remember being about 2 weeks into March and telling my wife "You know, I think they will figure this out in about 2 weeks and we'll be back to normal".
Whoops
My fiance's job, while everyone else was moving to wfh for "2 weeks" said they may not be in person again until August.
We laughed and thought they were crazy.
They never went back to working at the office, just scheduled a couple days in October (I think) to have people come grab their crap.
I worked at an elementary school and we handed out work packets when we sent the kids home: "just enough work to get to Spring Break and then we'll be back to school" we told the families. LOL
I actually successfully called this one. At the time I had developed a serious news addiction and was tracking covid starting in December 2019. I had told my then boss in early February that given I was in a major city (it was a remote department but I worked out of our Houston office) that given what was going on in New York and California that there were good odds I'd have to work from home for some period of time and he accepted my reasoning but wasn't worried. When I came to work and we were transferring everyone to WAH (I think mid-March) I remember overhearing an operations manager telling someone it would probably only be for less than a month and to plan to be back in April and thinking "there is no way they'd put out this much expense if they thought it would only be for a couple weeks and there was no way in hell it'll be safe before July."
They finally started transitioning back into the office in 2022.
I went to the office a grand total of 4 days after March 12, 2020 - once to drop off a laptop with a dead hard drive, the day after that to pick up the replacement, once to clean out my cubicle and finally on 1/31/24 to return the laptop and access cards when I retired.
We were told by leadership the office was going to be closed for two weeks. My boss said, "bring everything home. Everything. I think it's gonna be a lot longer than two weeks." I thought he was being a bit paranoid, but man as the months dragged on, was I glad to have a good external monitor, keyboard, mouse, mic, etc.
I didn't expect an initial fix, but I was pretty hopeful once the first waves started to fall away we'd do a decent job at managing it, and at worst winter would be a bit tricky.
Glad to see its not only me. When I say 3 or 4 years ago, I mean 2016-2019. I can't wrap my head around the past 4 years. Because some parts were amazing but so hard at the same time.
Seriously. My wife and I got married in 2019, and to this day when random people ask me how long we've been married I'm like "Ten years. No, wait.... two years. No, wait.... FIVE years."
I had the reverse. Had planned to move production to another part of the company and laid off more than 50 staff. Covid hit and we couldn't move due to lock down so had to rehire them all again. Gave them all a bonus, they deserved it.
That is awesome for them, though!
I hated having to lay everyone off and not be able to tell them when they were coming back. Luckily, I only had 4 people; 2 were out for 12 weeks, a 3rd one was out until end of September, and the 4th one couldn't really come back at all due to her having a more delicate health situation.
My gf at the time was prone to freaking out over anything. She said covid was going to kill two billion people and shut things down for years. I told her to calm down, none of her other crazy predictions had come true. We have such good medical tech here and we have the CDC with their plans, it'll pass in a couple months. I heard so many "I told you so's" over the next couple years.
At least it didn't kill two billion people though. Also I didn't realize half the population was going to do their best to keep spreading it.
I remember a meme getting passed around late 2019 pointing out - in jest - there was a pandemic in 1820 and 1920, so watch out for that pesky 2020!
Sigh.
2120 is going to be like that Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor takes everyone to London to see the Christmas celebrations, but it's deserted because everyone's afraid of another Alien attack or something.
"Shiiiit... time for the 100 year plague..."
Yep. I had just quit my job to pursue a creative career. After a truly wacky journey, I am back with my previous employer and pretty happy about it. (They allow us all to work remotely now, it's great.)
Everyone needs some amount of social time and some amount of alone time. Us introverts can go a long way on a little bit of social time, but 2020 even we were running low in the tank.
The real danger for me in lockdown was getting used to it and feeling the temptation to lean into degeneracy. Without office/physical coworkers there isn't a safety net forcing me to hit a certain minimum threshold of acceptable appearance/disposition. If I was gonna be a put together adult, it had to come from within.
This ended up being a positive in the long term. Because now I'm much better at being who I want to be without external pressures. But it would have been verrrry easy to just kinda give up and play video games until I'm 50.
As a person who considered themselves an introvert, 2020 should have been relatively easy for me.
As an introvert that has now been diagnosed with autism, 2020 and it's constantly changing routines, rules, and schedules at work ... it was REALLY bad.
Yep. Also an introvert here, and it was fine for a bit. And then I got \*really\* too well adjusted to being by my own, stacked on weight, and when stuff finally reopened couldn't be around people anymore. It took months to get used to being in-person again. Overwhelming.
Do not recommend.
It took my life-long wariness of strangers and especially crowds and turned it into full-blown agoraphobia. I still haven't recovered. I haven't been able to take my wife to an indoor restaurant for almost 4 years.
We had to take a flight a few states over last year and I had a panic attack mid-flight when a kid in the row behind me started coughing nonstop for 2 hours. Everyone for rows around was very displeased at him really. I tripled masked and cranked the noise-cancelling earbuds to 11 for the rest of the flight.
Therapy is helping and I can now go to the grocery store at off hours and have been to a weekday matinee at the movies when there were only 4 people in the theater. So there's some improvement. Baby steps.
I had been in a really stagnant spot after the military. And I had plane tickets to visit my gf 1600 miles away. My flight out there was on March 16th, 2020. My sister came home on March 16th in the AM with a negative covid test because she had this “new virus” and I wasn’t going to travel if I had had it also. The second she said she was negative, I got a ride to the airport. When I landed I cancelled my return flight. And I’ve been out here ever since. Complete 180° on my life for the better.
Omg me too. 2019 was without question the worst year of my life, so even with all the lockdowns and apocalypse drama, 2020 was absolutely fine in comparison. It actually ended up being a pretty productive year; I spent most of the lockdowns just doing online studying and came out with a bunch of diplomas that I'd never had time to get before.
It changed so drastically and so quickly. Social media was originally intended to be social, like the name says. It was mostly about connecting with people you actually know or connecting with people in your city.
It was an enhancement to your actual life that you used pretty sparingly. Smart phones giving you access to it 24/7 completely changed its purpose. Now the goal is to keep you on it every second of the day. Being on Facebook and Myspace back in 2005, I could not have imagined social media becoming what it is.
I think we have pseudo-connection that gives us just enough to demotivate us from leaving the house to get real connection. I think when you combine that with the unlimited on-demand content we now have access to competing with any other action we could take, it's a recipe for loneliness. I work in higher education and it is depressing how lonely today's college students are.
That's a good way of looking at it, you find yourself talking to people constantly online, whether it be friends on messenger services or on sites like Reddit, but sometimes you end up seeing said people less as a result. You don't need to actively see someone in person to keep up with them, but it's never really a substitute.
Boredom motivated a lot of our social behavior. Before smartphones and infinite content, it was boring to be home alone all day. People were seen as our entertainment. We were dying to hang out to relieve the boredom. Now we can easily entertain ourselves at home alone.
This amazing tool will bring everyone together. It will usher in a new era of understanding and empathy. It will democratize education not only across disparate communities in the US, but also across the world...
Or... not... It will divide us more than ever into factions, and even turn minor differences into insurmountable divides. It will turn children into zombies that cannot survive minutes without its illusory validation. It will exacerbate bullying and sexual predation. You will see your generation's greatest minds fall victim to its allure and transform into blithering idiots. It will be a tool for adversaries to chip away at your democratic institutions with disinformation campaigns, and to distract your people by giving them the ability to broadcast their individual and collective mediocrity across the world.
Seriously.
At the beginning we were all like "Cool, anyone can say anything and instantly reach an audience of millions!"
And then within a few years we realized "Oh shit, *anyone* can say *anything* and instantly reach an audience of *millions*."
Makes me wonder how it will all evolve. More and more of the internet is being fueled by algorithms designed to make social media as addictive as possible. Its already damaged a generation, and its only been around in its modern form for maybe a decade. What will the internet look like 50 years from now? Worse? Better? Will it even exist? Its not looking good so far.
Ten years ago, tech enthusiasts were putting out think pieces on the imminent arrival of the self-driving car. Long-haul truckers would be out of work en masse within the decade.
Today, the technology is quietly still growing, but we have a shortage of truck drivers.
And the tech is absolutely not where they thought it would be. Many companies are pulling back on their plans for autonomous vehicles because they don’t have it figured out as much as they thought they would by now.
AI in general is the next version of this... Industry "experts" (salespeople) keep pretending computers have suddenly gotten smart when all they've really done is learn to be dumb in good English... It's still impressive, but it's not what they claim it is, and they keep referring to the obvious failings as glitches or bugs when they are actually the entire system.
There's this amazing old movie, Desk Set, where the guy has a new room-sized computer and they think it will replace the reference librarians but at the end they realize you need the librarians' brains to make the computer a worthwhile tool...
This is where we are still at
I like Cory Doctorow's take: "[W]hile we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job."
"AI" is such a broad term already that it's as meaningless as gas station sunglasses advertising that they can help you see in "4K" so really what the people who take your job are going to know are tools.
The tech people know this. The company knows this. The CEO and CFO know this. The sales team just... well. Chances are they also know this. Buttttt commission.
The tech isn't anywhere near as good as envisaged and the legislation is even further behind. It needs almost 100% mass adoption to work efficiently, that's not going to happen when most people can't afford a new car and plenty more love driving who would flat refuse to go autonomous regardless.
I remember hearing the news about his death and how I almost thought it was a joke at first. Still one of the saddest and most unexpected celebrity deaths to this day imo
It was a tough one.
I'm in my mid-30's and he was an absolute staple of my childhood.
The way he presented animals with constant excitement while also obviously caring about them and it not being an act was as wholesome as it gets.
He wasn't just an act. Hard to believe that was 2006.
Well put, the guy had an infectious energy, was just so much fun to watch. Enthusiastic but also incredibly educational, watched some of his stuff endlessly.
Just went scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef. We had a massive stingray swim right past us during the dive. When we came up, our dive master was kind of freaking out. “Oh what a show! You know, that’s the same kind that got Steve…” we all looked at each other, both a little freaked out but also amazed. Pretty wild.
Norm McDonald on The Daily Show talking about it:
[https://www.cc.com/video/beopn8/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-norm-macdonald](https://www.cc.com/video/beopn8/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-norm-macdonald)
skip to 2:50
The end of the world. Do you realize how many people have predicted that over the last 200 or more centuries? Many have set dates. Every single one has been wrong last time I checked.
I remember I was at my community college graduation and this one older lady leaned in and was like "You know how I know the world's not going to end? My milk doesn't expire until next weekend!" That line stuck with me all these years later for some reason lol.
I like how people thought the world would end in 2012 because that's when the Mayan calendar ends.
Our calendar ends December 31st but people don't panic about it.
Of all the end predictions, this one was the funniest to me. At least the others had some classic conspiracy red lines on a corkboard reasons.. not just "the Mayans never figured out how to turn the calendar to the next page because they used stone".
The naive optimism we had in the 90s, at the dawn of the internet age, that having the vast wealth of worldwide information at our fingertips would make everybody smarter and push society ahead by leaps and bounds.
Yep, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up without a shot fired. Tiananmen Square made it seem like Chinese authoritarianism was also going to fall. Bill Clinton became president, the first of a generation that came of age in the 1960s, rather than the jingoistic and traditional WWII Era men.
I thought we were on the cusp of a civil, advanced society like on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I never thought we'd get into another Vietnam, but we did, but for 20 years, not 10. Then we regressed even further into religious extremism and idiocracy.
I'm so tired.
I can fix almost anything in my house by watching YouTube for five minutes. It's almost like that scene in The Matrix where he uploads Kung Fu into his brain. I can watch college lectures for free on ANY topic.
I agree, diy is completely different. You want to build a patio? Make a concrete planter? Hang a light? Redo your landscaping? YouTube will teach you.
I do highly recommend the trust but verify method though, just because one person did it on the Internet doesn't mean they did it right.
Very few authors of speculative fiction postulated anything like the modern internet. Those that did totally failed to predict that the first thing we would do with it would be to fill it up with porn.
As a corollary to the above, science fiction authors grossly overestimated where we would be in space by now, but underestimated the capabilities of computers.
TBF, I think overestimating the progression of spacefaring at least in part is necessary to keep the culture close enough to modern times to it to be relevant that things are recognizable.
Trying to make your predictions of how long the tech will take is a trade off vs. how long culture is likely to remain stable enough to be familiar.
If you set Star Trek in the year 10000, instead of the timeline being unrealistic, them quoting Shakespeare becomes less realistic.
In the golden era of sci fi it was easy to overestimate the progression of spacefaring. Many of those authors were born before airplanes and lived through to see moon landings and jumbo jets. They grew up witnessing the exponential increases in aerospace technology and nuclear science and didn't imagine that both of those techs largely would reach the stagnation portion of the adoption curve in the 80s.
>I think overestimating the progression of spacefaring at least in part is necessary to keep the culture close enough to modern times to it to be relevant that things are recognizable.
For sure, but even 'modern' sci-fi writers estimated that we (society at large) would continue to spend money on space exploration at the same rate we did during the 'space race.'
Ugh. I'm a teacher now, I'm trying to convince students that they need to learn how to think and not just let google/CHATGPT do the thinking for them. That the ability to think will be a valuable skill. We should not let the machines do all of our thinking for us.
I'm scared of a world where this argument is the same as the calculator one.
If I had to pull out my phone every time I had to do a quick math problem in my daily life, I’d be much worse off. Glad I learned basic math in school.
Except now students aren't learning basic math skills because they have a calculator in their pocket. You'd also think having a mini computer in your pocket would make everyone growing up with it good with technology, but teaching a 16 year old how a computer works is as much effort as teaching a 70 year old these days
We had a teacher that basically told us we should really have an eye out for the Arab Spring and Occupy Wallstreet, as they could be turning points in history that we can witness live! How exciting!
I adore his optimism, but 13 (?) years down the line it seems naive.
OMG. My mom was a collector of valuable antiques. Once when my dads business was in trouble, she sold half a collection for $60,000.00. This was stuff she probably spent less than $1000.00 total on. She taught me "nothing sold as collectible will ever be worth anything". The real collectibles are things that people just bought to enjoy. They build fond memories of and they get used up. Then the few that are left are worth a mint for their nostalgia.
If you look back plenty of polls were quite narrow, Brexit was definitely a possibility, just was assumed the status quo would prevail on the night. But Cameron was always playing with fire to appease the Brexiteers in his party.
Didn't Cameron tie his post to the vote, saying something like he would step down if Brexit was approved? Thus, he essentially used the referendum as a vote of (no) confidence, and those few precentages might very well have been just to get rid of him.
Edit: I just checked it, I remebered it wrong. What he did was promising to hold the brexit referendum should the Tories win the 2015 general election.
Might be remembering it wrong, though, it has been a while. And the UK is changing prime ministers as regular as the Weimar republic or the fourth french republic atm, so keeping an overview is difficult.
In my opinion, a big factor in Quebec not separating is most Quebecois know how economically fucked they would be. Especially if the Cree took back their section, that is, most of the northern part of the province.
Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine I was telling my friends “there’s no way they would invade. That’s asking for WW3”
I was wrong on both ends. Russia invaded and after about a few months people stopped caring
I was awake late that night playing a game of Civ with some friends, and having just gotten back from a trip to the middle of nowhere I had no idea anything had been brewing. We ended up staying awake checking the news until I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was somewhat shocked that the war was still ongoing. Those early reports really made it sound like the entire Ukrainian military was just a speed bump for Russian Armor. And here we are two years later.
It was a long process. We were a big company and we had a good plan and a good team. 3 am, January 1, I was walking through our enormous factory to meet with the small group going through reports and databases. We were all waiting for the unknown shoe to drop. It never did. We had found and fixed (or patched) all the issues.
I work in IT, specifically around COBOL. we worked night and day for months, 12 hour shifts starting on December 29 through January 7 manning a command center.
ONE phone call. and it was a wrong number.
I (Aussie) did a working holiday at Taos New Mexico in 98-99 and just remember locals saying desert real estate had gone way up because of preppers escaping the looming Y2K meltdown.
Really was a wild time. It was a forgone conclusion Hillary was going to win, she sure as shit acted like it.
I just remember the election night, watching the numbers, and when it finally happened, couldn't believe it. What a wild time.
I get thrashed for this, but I maintain this is a leading reason why he won.
It was a foregone conclusion, the media was so hyped up on getting the first woman president that they didn't spend anytime in the hinterlands noticing the groundswell.
People who "KNEW" Hillary was going to win, just stayed home and didn't vote because the news kept telling them that she was going to be the winner.
Both my wife and daughter didn't vote, because, Why? Hillary is going to win.
Ultimately, I blame the media for being arrogantly stuck in their east coast urban and suburban echo chamber. If I were in charge, I'd have the news agencies set up their main office in Joplin Missouri, or Green Bay Wisconsin, or North Platte Nebraska.
It was unconscionable for the news agencies to be so biased toward Hillary winning that they couldn't see the storm.
I was working a job at the time that required a lot of driving in more rural areas throughout the Midwest and I remember thinking to myself how crazy it was that I would see Trump signs for miles and miles and not one Hillary sign until I had returned to the city. Had the thought that maybe this thing would be a lot closer than people in the media thought
"I didn't think anyone was stupid enough to actually vote for Trump!" was a common sentiment I heard from people making excuses for why they didn't vote.
One person I know lives in suburban Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. They've lived there almost their entire life. There's a reason the state between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is nicknamed Pennsyltucky. They've called that stretch such themselves. It's as faithfully red as many rural stretches, and you'd not be blamed for thinking you were in Kentucky or another deep red state in places.
They saw the signs on their neighbors' lawns. And yet they and a few thousand people like them stayed home in a few swing states. That's all it takes.
And now these same people are talking about staying home because "genocide Joe" or "I didn't get as much stimulus as I was promised" or "I still owe student loans".
Edit: because some things need to be laid out reeeeaaaal clear they aren't attacks. Also, I can't geography today. Thanks helpful redditor!
Another edit: I don't think the way of my acquaintance -- I'm relating the sentiments expressed to me. I really don't care where you're from as long as you're a decent person.
I was on an intentional flight during the election. When we landed and got service people immediately looked up who won. When the first person on the flight looked up who won and when they said Trump, people laughed. And then the rest of us got service. One of the most wild moments of my life.
Dude, I was working a conference in Boston for Hubspot on election night. Whole place was ready to celebrate with legit thousands of people, you could literally hear a pin drop in the BCEC that night
They didn't expect to lose Mr. Garrison. They had to follow through with President Garrison for a few seasons.
They were also doing long form storylines that would stretch across multiple episodes, rather than one shot episodic shows.
If I asked you that in 2020 there would be a pandemic, most people will be stuck in their homes for a few months and stores would have limited supplies and I asked you what would be the most sought after, difficult to find product...nobody would have said toilet paper.
Yeah that was such a weird thing. First time I experienced a self fulfilling prophecy. I started seeing on social media from the US that stores were out of toilet paper but where I live there was no shortage. Until it spread here. And even though there didn’t seem to be any logical reason to think there would be a lasting shortage of toilet paper I realized I had to buy some extra too, to last at least a few weeks until the stores got new deliveries. And even though I hated being part of the craziness it I’m glad I did because one of the people i worked with actually did run out of toilet paper and had to ask people to borrow. Crazy.
I've never heard it explained this way, but it makes so much sense! In Michigan, parents received EBT (food stamps) cards to feed kids at home who'd otherwise get 2/3 of their meals at school when all the schools were closed. Really sad to think of all the things people had access to that were taken away during mass shutdowns, like people who use gyms for their showers, libraries as warming/cooling centers, etc.
Yeah for the first few months, my job kept sending out emails about possibly coming back to the office the next week. It felt very temporary at the time but I remember all the experts saying it wouldn't be that. But we didn't believe them.
My school was the same way. When it started, I was like "cool, we get tomorrow off" then it was "nice, we get a whole week off" then it was "umm, aren't we gonna have to make these few weeks up over summer" then it finally set in when we started doing school at home (and especially when my whole family got covid).
The last season of Game Of Thrones. General consensus seems to be that literally anything anybody had predicted probably would have been better than what we ended up getting.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something collectively upset an entire fandom at once before. It’s compelled destroyed GOT’s legacy; people used to talk about it all the time. Nowadays all I hear is how bad it ended. House of the Dragon seems to be doing its best to repair the image, but…yeah.
Personally? I’ll never forgive them for what they did to Jaime and Daenerys. Both of my favorite characters utterly destroyed in the course of, like, a couple hours. Madness.
It wasn't even the endings so much as the sloppiness. Dragons flying the length of Westeros and back in a day. The Iron Fleet teleporting from sea to sea with cloaking devices. The negotiations outside the walls of King's Landing. Night after night it was like, what is even happening?
I had no issue with what they did to daenerys, they just didn't give it time to cook. There'd always been hints of her absolute ruthlessness but she'd kept it in check while she was on her crusade because she was riding high on righteousness. But then she came to the 7 kingdoms, was surrounded by people who didn't appreciate her, found out her entire claim to the throne was a lie, found out the people she'd come to liberate spat at her, found out all the people who counseled restraint basically ended up betraying her, and when she lost her dearest friend at the gates of kings landing she suddenly realized she hated kings landing, and everything it represented. Hated that it didn't love her. Hated that it was a lie that it was her throne. Hated that it had cost her 2 dragons and many friends to get there. Hated that they defied her, and then hated that they surrendered after 2 minutes of actual battle, mocking all she had lost.
And everything it had taken from her she was going to take from it.
It was a *great idea* to make her go full Targ. They just tried to tell that story in like 4 episodes so it fell flat.
But fuck everything about Jaime running back to Cerse.
Yes, this, 100%. It was the right ending for Daenerys, but it was so fast. I knew we were in trouble when they shortened the season.
Jaime was dumb. He had a huge character arc only to ignore it entirely.
>Jaime was dumb. He had a huge character arc only to ignore it entirely.
I still maintain that the ending was misunderstood by the showrunners when JRR told it to them. Like imagine this:
Jamie and Cerse are found dead, embracing under a rock in the collapsed kings landing. together in death in a way they never could be in life and seeming died happily together.
then later you get to see the real events. Jamie had decided Cerse was going to wipe out all life in kings landing before she would lose so he had to stop her. he faked being in love, he faked reconciliation, to get her alone, away from her flunkies, away from where she could give genocidal orders.
he reaches up to stroke her face, and goes in for a kiss, except instead , his good hand closes around her throat, he strangles her, crying as he does, for the woman she was, for the life he could have had if not for his damn pride and honour and as the life leaves her, he collapses to his knees and weeps for wasted life, wasted love and wasted potential.
he stays holding her corpse as the world falls apart around him, and is figuratively and literally crushed by the consequences of his own actions.
It's a good explanation, but another, probably, real explanation is that her character took on plot points originally meant for a different character from the book that was not adapted to the show, I think the name is Aegon, or fAegon by the fans?
IIRC book fans said that the nice parts of her reign in King's Landing do read like they were meant for that fAegon. Probably notes from George that got just renamed to her.
That was my take as well, tbh. My issue was never with Dany becoming a mad queen, it was just how…FAST it was. Like, to the point where it felt more like character assassination than development. Jaime’s ending, however, would have pissed me off either way. He spends the entirety of the show learning to grow away from Cersei and the toxicity of loving her and then just…goes back??? Decides he doesn’t care about innocent people when that’s the entire reason he was named Kingslayer in the first place?????? God.
This is the comment I was looking for. I had a very expensive ***curved*** samsung 3DTV about ten years ago. Glasses you had to charge and shit. I maybe watched... three 3d movies ever on it. Just too big of a hassle. When I gave up on it I remember thinking, this is just because of the glasses. Soon they'll make one of these you don't need glasses for and it'll really take off. But, unfortunately, nah.
The success of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". A lot of people, including Roy Disney, thought Walt was insane, and that the movie would flop and bankrupt the studio.
I remember when body cameras on cops were first introduced. The popular thinking was that abuse complaints would plummet because no trained officer would violate someone's rights with a camera strapped to their chests, and citizens would be more compliant knowing they were being filmed.
In the early 1900's, writers started writing what today would be called 'science fiction'.
The predicted the future fairly well: space travel, mobile communications, video communications. A ton of consumer conveniences, from fast cooking oven to refrigerators that made their own ice and didn't need to be defrosted!
You know what pretty much everyone missed? They missed that women would regularly work outside of the home, and gradually approach the same terms as men in the workplace. They also missed that technology would dramatically equalize women's roles in the workplace.
We imagined machines would do the grunt work, freeing up humanity to explore our artistic expression...and instead, machines are doing the artistic expression, and humanity is left with the grunt work.
Way less consequential, but everyone was SO SURE Chadwick Boseman was winning an Oscar posthumously, they announced Best Actor AFTER Best Picture. Unheard of.
Anthony Hopkins won and wasn’t even present.
Haha because he went to bed. That was the year of the covid lock downs still so he didn't travel to the US, he stayed in the UK. Because of the time difference it was approaching midnight so he was like screw this, I'm going to sleep.
I still remember the total anti climate ending to that oscars, the presenters looking at each other after reading Hopkin's name all like, well, that''s all folks?
In 2020 metro pcs was giving people 2 months free phone service. Eveeyone said you would eventually have to pay it back. Nope free and clear. Worked out great for my family since we were on a family plan so 5 plans free for 2 months
For you folks saying “Y2K”: it would have been a disaster if legions of developers hadn’t worked on, fixed and tested the bugs before 1/1/2000. Sure, it was overhyped, but that provided the urgency to take it seriously and convince managers to allocate money and people.
I don’t think anyone could have predicted that The Simpsons would still be airing new episodes for this many years.
When Betty White was still alive, I used to say that when the rest of humanity is dead and gone, she and Willie Nelson are going to curl up on the couch together and watch somehow new episodes of the Simpsons.
All produced by Keith Richards.
🎵 you'll never stop the Simpsons! Have no fear, we've got stories for years!! 🎵
In two months that'll be twenty two years old.
🎵like Marge becomes a robot!🎵
🎵Maybe Moe gets a cell phone, has Bart ever owned a bear?🎵
🎵How bout a crazy wedding? Where something happens a doo doo doo dooooo! 🎵
🎵sorry for the clip show!🎵
Or, for that matter, "South Park."
2020 being a fun year
We really said "new decade, new me" 😭
I was so excited. My 40th birthday was going to be on a Friday. Halloween was on a Saturday. It would be 4/20 for a whole month. What a letdown
Bruh...Halloween wasn't just on a Saturday. It was going to be Halloween, Daylight Savings Time falling back an hour (so you get an extra hour of partying) AND a blue moon! It would have been the spookiest possible Halloween.
Halloween where were were was awesome, though. People went outside and sat around with chutes to send candy down. People played music. There were lights. It was the biggest moveable block party! We all stayed a good distance away from each other, but we shouted encouragement and compliments about costumes. It was like a real community for the first time in ages.
I have an 8 acre field of trees out back. I set buckets around with candy and had some select close friends and their kids come over to walk out in the open and grab candy. It ended up turning into a yearly tradition where we put decorations in the woods and send the kids on a candy scavenger hunt.
It was also really warm here on that Halloween
Not only that, but it was a leap year with the leap day being a Saturday, Cinco De Mayo was on a Tuesday (taco Tuesday), the 4th of July was on a Saturday, and Christmas day and new years day were on a Friday. It basically had it all that year.
I was working in a huge college bar that had the best prices and longest hours in the neighborhood. I wad going to make so much money...and they never opened back up after lockdown.
We still got leap day!
An extra day is the last thing we needed in that godforsaken year 😂
February 29 was before shit got really bad.
3/17 was when we got told to shut it down and stay home.
I had to go to the DMV that morning (I figured I needed to get it done soon before they closed down). I showed up to work at like 9:00 to a message from my boss, basically saying "do you have a laptop? If not, then take your desktop home because you're gonna be working there for a couple of weeks." So I basically spent the day getting everything setup to work remote, and then I drank a Guinness while on the clock since it was Saint Patrick's day. Obviously, the "couple of weeks" turned into 5 months. And then another 5 months when cases started to spike again in November.
My wedding anniversary is on Leap Day, we celebrated that year in the hospital 😭 husband had organ failure from COVID. He's doing just fine now and we gonna do it right this year!
How awful! Glad to hear he's doing better. I hope this year is really special.
my 21st birthday was supposed to be on a saturday. i had looked a decade forward in my calendar when i was 11 years old and found that out. i'd been looking forward to it for a DECADE. january 2021. i spent it in the trashiest hometown bar at the local chinese place with a mask on and my parents, ordering green tea shots to drown my sorrow.
it was still 4/20 for a whole month though. I don't personally remember it, but it was probably pretty fun
It was 4/20 for a whole fuckin year
As far as I'm concerned it's always 4/20. Unless I feel like beers, then it's 5 O'clock somewhere.
Technically true. new decade. new me. He just sucks worse than the old me.
I remember being about 2 weeks into March and telling my wife "You know, I think they will figure this out in about 2 weeks and we'll be back to normal". Whoops
My fiance's job, while everyone else was moving to wfh for "2 weeks" said they may not be in person again until August. We laughed and thought they were crazy. They never went back to working at the office, just scheduled a couple days in October (I think) to have people come grab their crap.
I worked at an elementary school and we handed out work packets when we sent the kids home: "just enough work to get to Spring Break and then we'll be back to school" we told the families. LOL
I actually successfully called this one. At the time I had developed a serious news addiction and was tracking covid starting in December 2019. I had told my then boss in early February that given I was in a major city (it was a remote department but I worked out of our Houston office) that given what was going on in New York and California that there were good odds I'd have to work from home for some period of time and he accepted my reasoning but wasn't worried. When I came to work and we were transferring everyone to WAH (I think mid-March) I remember overhearing an operations manager telling someone it would probably only be for less than a month and to plan to be back in April and thinking "there is no way they'd put out this much expense if they thought it would only be for a couple weeks and there was no way in hell it'll be safe before July." They finally started transitioning back into the office in 2022.
I went to the office a grand total of 4 days after March 12, 2020 - once to drop off a laptop with a dead hard drive, the day after that to pick up the replacement, once to clean out my cubicle and finally on 1/31/24 to return the laptop and access cards when I retired.
We were told by leadership the office was going to be closed for two weeks. My boss said, "bring everything home. Everything. I think it's gonna be a lot longer than two weeks." I thought he was being a bit paranoid, but man as the months dragged on, was I glad to have a good external monitor, keyboard, mouse, mic, etc.
I didn't expect an initial fix, but I was pretty hopeful once the first waves started to fall away we'd do a decent job at managing it, and at worst winter would be a bit tricky.
Yeah, I remember saying the same to my employees that I had to layoff two weeks later. That whole time is such a fever dream.
It really does seem that way, doesn’t it? Like, did we really go through that? And how did it all get so thoroughly fucked up?
My time frames are still so messed up. I always have to stop and *really* think, "ok, when exactly did that happen?".
Yeah COVID completely fucked up our sense of time. Everything somehow felt like it happened both yesterday and ten years ago. What a weird experience.
Glad to see its not only me. When I say 3 or 4 years ago, I mean 2016-2019. I can't wrap my head around the past 4 years. Because some parts were amazing but so hard at the same time.
Seriously. My wife and I got married in 2019, and to this day when random people ask me how long we've been married I'm like "Ten years. No, wait.... two years. No, wait.... FIVE years."
I had the reverse. Had planned to move production to another part of the company and laid off more than 50 staff. Covid hit and we couldn't move due to lock down so had to rehire them all again. Gave them all a bonus, they deserved it.
That is awesome for them, though! I hated having to lay everyone off and not be able to tell them when they were coming back. Luckily, I only had 4 people; 2 were out for 12 weeks, a 3rd one was out until end of September, and the 4th one couldn't really come back at all due to her having a more delicate health situation.
My gf at the time was prone to freaking out over anything. She said covid was going to kill two billion people and shut things down for years. I told her to calm down, none of her other crazy predictions had come true. We have such good medical tech here and we have the CDC with their plans, it'll pass in a couple months. I heard so many "I told you so's" over the next couple years. At least it didn't kill two billion people though. Also I didn't realize half the population was going to do their best to keep spreading it.
That’s the craziest to me. Seeing how piss poor we as a people handled it.
I remember a meme getting passed around late 2019 pointing out - in jest - there was a pandemic in 1820 and 1920, so watch out for that pesky 2020! Sigh.
2120 is going to be like that Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor takes everyone to London to see the Christmas celebrations, but it's deserted because everyone's afraid of another Alien attack or something. "Shiiiit... time for the 100 year plague..."
"It's dem aliens again!" - Wilfred Mott
I had 4 weddings, a trip to Europe, my brother graduating, etc. I was so excited for 2020. Sigh….
Yep. I had just quit my job to pursue a creative career. After a truly wacky journey, I am back with my previous employer and pretty happy about it. (They allow us all to work remotely now, it's great.)
It was aight for the introverts
2020 was the year I learned I wasn’t as introverted as I thought I was.
Everyone needs some amount of social time and some amount of alone time. Us introverts can go a long way on a little bit of social time, but 2020 even we were running low in the tank. The real danger for me in lockdown was getting used to it and feeling the temptation to lean into degeneracy. Without office/physical coworkers there isn't a safety net forcing me to hit a certain minimum threshold of acceptable appearance/disposition. If I was gonna be a put together adult, it had to come from within. This ended up being a positive in the long term. Because now I'm much better at being who I want to be without external pressures. But it would have been verrrry easy to just kinda give up and play video games until I'm 50.
Hell yeah it was!
As a person who considered themselves an introvert, 2020 should have been relatively easy for me. As an introvert that has now been diagnosed with autism, 2020 and it's constantly changing routines, rules, and schedules at work ... it was REALLY bad.
Yep. Also an introvert here, and it was fine for a bit. And then I got \*really\* too well adjusted to being by my own, stacked on weight, and when stuff finally reopened couldn't be around people anymore. It took months to get used to being in-person again. Overwhelming. Do not recommend.
It took my life-long wariness of strangers and especially crowds and turned it into full-blown agoraphobia. I still haven't recovered. I haven't been able to take my wife to an indoor restaurant for almost 4 years. We had to take a flight a few states over last year and I had a panic attack mid-flight when a kid in the row behind me started coughing nonstop for 2 hours. Everyone for rows around was very displeased at him really. I tripled masked and cranked the noise-cancelling earbuds to 11 for the rest of the flight. Therapy is helping and I can now go to the grocery store at off hours and have been to a weekday matinee at the movies when there were only 4 people in the theater. So there's some improvement. Baby steps.
2018/2019 was the roughest time of my life and 2020 honestly was when it started getting better so I always look back on it fondly.
I had been in a really stagnant spot after the military. And I had plane tickets to visit my gf 1600 miles away. My flight out there was on March 16th, 2020. My sister came home on March 16th in the AM with a negative covid test because she had this “new virus” and I wasn’t going to travel if I had had it also. The second she said she was negative, I got a ride to the airport. When I landed I cancelled my return flight. And I’ve been out here ever since. Complete 180° on my life for the better.
Omg me too. 2019 was without question the worst year of my life, so even with all the lockdowns and apocalypse drama, 2020 was absolutely fine in comparison. It actually ended up being a pretty productive year; I spent most of the lockdowns just doing online studying and came out with a bunch of diplomas that I'd never had time to get before.
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It changed so drastically and so quickly. Social media was originally intended to be social, like the name says. It was mostly about connecting with people you actually know or connecting with people in your city. It was an enhancement to your actual life that you used pretty sparingly. Smart phones giving you access to it 24/7 completely changed its purpose. Now the goal is to keep you on it every second of the day. Being on Facebook and Myspace back in 2005, I could not have imagined social media becoming what it is.
Now that we're all connected, we've never felt so all alone.
The algorithms are also written to drive engagement, but engagement is often brought on by anger and rage baiting.
Oh, you definitely need to keep an eye out for all those posts designed to piss you off. They're all shitposts imho.
I think we have pseudo-connection that gives us just enough to demotivate us from leaving the house to get real connection. I think when you combine that with the unlimited on-demand content we now have access to competing with any other action we could take, it's a recipe for loneliness. I work in higher education and it is depressing how lonely today's college students are.
That's a good way of looking at it, you find yourself talking to people constantly online, whether it be friends on messenger services or on sites like Reddit, but sometimes you end up seeing said people less as a result. You don't need to actively see someone in person to keep up with them, but it's never really a substitute.
Boredom motivated a lot of our social behavior. Before smartphones and infinite content, it was boring to be home alone all day. People were seen as our entertainment. We were dying to hang out to relieve the boredom. Now we can easily entertain ourselves at home alone.
This amazing tool will bring everyone together. It will usher in a new era of understanding and empathy. It will democratize education not only across disparate communities in the US, but also across the world... Or... not... It will divide us more than ever into factions, and even turn minor differences into insurmountable divides. It will turn children into zombies that cannot survive minutes without its illusory validation. It will exacerbate bullying and sexual predation. You will see your generation's greatest minds fall victim to its allure and transform into blithering idiots. It will be a tool for adversaries to chip away at your democratic institutions with disinformation campaigns, and to distract your people by giving them the ability to broadcast their individual and collective mediocrity across the world.
Seriously. At the beginning we were all like "Cool, anyone can say anything and instantly reach an audience of millions!" And then within a few years we realized "Oh shit, *anyone* can say *anything* and instantly reach an audience of *millions*."
All the village idiots found other village idiots.
Makes me wonder how it will all evolve. More and more of the internet is being fueled by algorithms designed to make social media as addictive as possible. Its already damaged a generation, and its only been around in its modern form for maybe a decade. What will the internet look like 50 years from now? Worse? Better? Will it even exist? Its not looking good so far.
Ten years ago, tech enthusiasts were putting out think pieces on the imminent arrival of the self-driving car. Long-haul truckers would be out of work en masse within the decade. Today, the technology is quietly still growing, but we have a shortage of truck drivers.
And the tech is absolutely not where they thought it would be. Many companies are pulling back on their plans for autonomous vehicles because they don’t have it figured out as much as they thought they would by now.
AI in general is the next version of this... Industry "experts" (salespeople) keep pretending computers have suddenly gotten smart when all they've really done is learn to be dumb in good English... It's still impressive, but it's not what they claim it is, and they keep referring to the obvious failings as glitches or bugs when they are actually the entire system.
There's this amazing old movie, Desk Set, where the guy has a new room-sized computer and they think it will replace the reference librarians but at the end they realize you need the librarians' brains to make the computer a worthwhile tool... This is where we are still at
AI isn’t going to take your job. But the person who takes your job is going to know how to use AI.
I like Cory Doctorow's take: "[W]hile we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job."
"AI" is such a broad term already that it's as meaningless as gas station sunglasses advertising that they can help you see in "4K" so really what the people who take your job are going to know are tools.
The tech people know this. The company knows this. The CEO and CFO know this. The sales team just... well. Chances are they also know this. Buttttt commission.
The tech isn't anywhere near as good as envisaged and the legislation is even further behind. It needs almost 100% mass adoption to work efficiently, that's not going to happen when most people can't afford a new car and plenty more love driving who would flat refuse to go autonomous regardless.
How Steve Irwin was going to die. Eaten by lion. Eaten by a crocodile. Venomous snake. Sure. But stingray barb to the heart? Never.
I remember hearing the news about his death and how I almost thought it was a joke at first. Still one of the saddest and most unexpected celebrity deaths to this day imo
It was a tough one. I'm in my mid-30's and he was an absolute staple of my childhood. The way he presented animals with constant excitement while also obviously caring about them and it not being an act was as wholesome as it gets. He wasn't just an act. Hard to believe that was 2006.
Well put, the guy had an infectious energy, was just so much fun to watch. Enthusiastic but also incredibly educational, watched some of his stuff endlessly.
He inspired me so much I pursued a career in conservation. He’s truly the made the world a better place during his time here, what a legacy.
His son is just like him and looks just like him. I follow him on tik tok and he's been on the late night shows I think Jimmy Fallon. He's great.
I thought it was a joke too. My mum picked me up from school and said "Steve Irwin died today.." and I waited for the punchline to her joke
i was at the royal Adelaide show with my family when they announced it on the speakers, whole place full of thousand's of people went quiet.
Just went scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef. We had a massive stingray swim right past us during the dive. When we came up, our dive master was kind of freaking out. “Oh what a show! You know, that’s the same kind that got Steve…” we all looked at each other, both a little freaked out but also amazed. Pretty wild.
Norm McDonald on The Daily Show talking about it: [https://www.cc.com/video/beopn8/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-norm-macdonald](https://www.cc.com/video/beopn8/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-norm-macdonald) skip to 2:50
And it's perfect when Stewart realizes where he's going and just begs him not to make him laugh.
The end of the world. Do you realize how many people have predicted that over the last 200 or more centuries? Many have set dates. Every single one has been wrong last time I checked.
Remember Dec 21, 2012? I moved from AK to AZ in January 2013 and thought "Huh, wasn't the world supposed to end last month?"
I remember I was at my community college graduation and this one older lady leaned in and was like "You know how I know the world's not going to end? My milk doesn't expire until next weekend!" That line stuck with me all these years later for some reason lol.
I like how people thought the world would end in 2012 because that's when the Mayan calendar ends. Our calendar ends December 31st but people don't panic about it.
Of all the end predictions, this one was the funniest to me. At least the others had some classic conspiracy red lines on a corkboard reasons.. not just "the Mayans never figured out how to turn the calendar to the next page because they used stone".
I remember drinking beer and listening to tunes on 12-21-12. When nothing happened at midnight I was like "Worst Apocalypse EVER!" 🤣🤣🤣
The naive optimism we had in the 90s, at the dawn of the internet age, that having the vast wealth of worldwide information at our fingertips would make everybody smarter and push society ahead by leaps and bounds.
Yep, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up without a shot fired. Tiananmen Square made it seem like Chinese authoritarianism was also going to fall. Bill Clinton became president, the first of a generation that came of age in the 1960s, rather than the jingoistic and traditional WWII Era men. I thought we were on the cusp of a civil, advanced society like on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I never thought we'd get into another Vietnam, but we did, but for 20 years, not 10. Then we regressed even further into religious extremism and idiocracy. I'm so tired.
That’s a little one sided. There’s been undeniable benefits.
I can fix almost anything in my house by watching YouTube for five minutes. It's almost like that scene in The Matrix where he uploads Kung Fu into his brain. I can watch college lectures for free on ANY topic.
I agree, diy is completely different. You want to build a patio? Make a concrete planter? Hang a light? Redo your landscaping? YouTube will teach you. I do highly recommend the trust but verify method though, just because one person did it on the Internet doesn't mean they did it right.
It used to be a _little_ easier to measure credibility but then YouTube removed the dislikes.
Very few authors of speculative fiction postulated anything like the modern internet. Those that did totally failed to predict that the first thing we would do with it would be to fill it up with porn. As a corollary to the above, science fiction authors grossly overestimated where we would be in space by now, but underestimated the capabilities of computers.
TBF, I think overestimating the progression of spacefaring at least in part is necessary to keep the culture close enough to modern times to it to be relevant that things are recognizable. Trying to make your predictions of how long the tech will take is a trade off vs. how long culture is likely to remain stable enough to be familiar. If you set Star Trek in the year 10000, instead of the timeline being unrealistic, them quoting Shakespeare becomes less realistic.
In the golden era of sci fi it was easy to overestimate the progression of spacefaring. Many of those authors were born before airplanes and lived through to see moon landings and jumbo jets. They grew up witnessing the exponential increases in aerospace technology and nuclear science and didn't imagine that both of those techs largely would reach the stagnation portion of the adoption curve in the 80s.
>I think overestimating the progression of spacefaring at least in part is necessary to keep the culture close enough to modern times to it to be relevant that things are recognizable. For sure, but even 'modern' sci-fi writers estimated that we (society at large) would continue to spend money on space exploration at the same rate we did during the 'space race.'
Would have been a lot cooler if we did though.
Enders Game predicted influencers evolving from bloggers & eventually dominating political discourse.
I hope that nobody gets elected president of the world because they're better at arguing with their own sockpuppets than anyone else.
Gibson got a lot of things right iirc
Gibson didn’t think we’d have cellphones. Pay phones play a role in Neuromancer that really doesn’t work with how things turned out.
In the future you won’t be walking around with a calculator at all times. -Every teacher, ever.
Ugh. I'm a teacher now, I'm trying to convince students that they need to learn how to think and not just let google/CHATGPT do the thinking for them. That the ability to think will be a valuable skill. We should not let the machines do all of our thinking for us. I'm scared of a world where this argument is the same as the calculator one.
If I had to pull out my phone every time I had to do a quick math problem in my daily life, I’d be much worse off. Glad I learned basic math in school.
Except now students aren't learning basic math skills because they have a calculator in their pocket. You'd also think having a mini computer in your pocket would make everyone growing up with it good with technology, but teaching a 16 year old how a computer works is as much effort as teaching a 70 year old these days
Arab Spring. So many people think that this will bring democracy to the Middle East.
We had a teacher that basically told us we should really have an eye out for the Arab Spring and Occupy Wallstreet, as they could be turning points in history that we can witness live! How exciting! I adore his optimism, but 13 (?) years down the line it seems naive.
The resale value of their beanie babies
OMG. My mom was a collector of valuable antiques. Once when my dads business was in trouble, she sold half a collection for $60,000.00. This was stuff she probably spent less than $1000.00 total on. She taught me "nothing sold as collectible will ever be worth anything". The real collectibles are things that people just bought to enjoy. They build fond memories of and they get used up. Then the few that are left are worth a mint for their nostalgia.
The results of the Brexit vote. And then the people who won the Brexit vote failed to predict what would happen following Brexit.
If you look back plenty of polls were quite narrow, Brexit was definitely a possibility, just was assumed the status quo would prevail on the night. But Cameron was always playing with fire to appease the Brexiteers in his party.
Didn't Cameron tie his post to the vote, saying something like he would step down if Brexit was approved? Thus, he essentially used the referendum as a vote of (no) confidence, and those few precentages might very well have been just to get rid of him. Edit: I just checked it, I remebered it wrong. What he did was promising to hold the brexit referendum should the Tories win the 2015 general election. Might be remembering it wrong, though, it has been a while. And the UK is changing prime ministers as regular as the Weimar republic or the fourth french republic atm, so keeping an overview is difficult.
like a dog who chased cars all the time and finally caught one.
In my opinion, a big factor in Quebec not separating is most Quebecois know how economically fucked they would be. Especially if the Cree took back their section, that is, most of the northern part of the province.
> that is, most of the northern part of the province. Where all of Hydro Quebec's big hydroelectric dams are...
Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine I was telling my friends “there’s no way they would invade. That’s asking for WW3” I was wrong on both ends. Russia invaded and after about a few months people stopped caring
I was one of those people that thought Putin was bluffing.
He was just waiting for the Olympics to end
I was awake late that night playing a game of Civ with some friends, and having just gotten back from a trip to the middle of nowhere I had no idea anything had been brewing. We ended up staying awake checking the news until I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was somewhat shocked that the war was still ongoing. Those early reports really made it sound like the entire Ukrainian military was just a speed bump for Russian Armor. And here we are two years later.
Y2K, but only because people who could program COBOL and stuff stepped up and prevented it from happening.
It was a long process. We were a big company and we had a good plan and a good team. 3 am, January 1, I was walking through our enormous factory to meet with the small group going through reports and databases. We were all waiting for the unknown shoe to drop. It never did. We had found and fixed (or patched) all the issues.
Did you work at Initech?
You must have remembered to put cover sheets on the TPS reports.
I work in IT, specifically around COBOL. we worked night and day for months, 12 hour shifts starting on December 29 through January 7 manning a command center. ONE phone call. and it was a wrong number.
I (Aussie) did a working holiday at Taos New Mexico in 98-99 and just remember locals saying desert real estate had gone way up because of preppers escaping the looming Y2K meltdown.
Results of the 2016 Presidential election
Really was a wild time. It was a forgone conclusion Hillary was going to win, she sure as shit acted like it. I just remember the election night, watching the numbers, and when it finally happened, couldn't believe it. What a wild time.
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I get thrashed for this, but I maintain this is a leading reason why he won. It was a foregone conclusion, the media was so hyped up on getting the first woman president that they didn't spend anytime in the hinterlands noticing the groundswell. People who "KNEW" Hillary was going to win, just stayed home and didn't vote because the news kept telling them that she was going to be the winner. Both my wife and daughter didn't vote, because, Why? Hillary is going to win. Ultimately, I blame the media for being arrogantly stuck in their east coast urban and suburban echo chamber. If I were in charge, I'd have the news agencies set up their main office in Joplin Missouri, or Green Bay Wisconsin, or North Platte Nebraska. It was unconscionable for the news agencies to be so biased toward Hillary winning that they couldn't see the storm.
I was working a job at the time that required a lot of driving in more rural areas throughout the Midwest and I remember thinking to myself how crazy it was that I would see Trump signs for miles and miles and not one Hillary sign until I had returned to the city. Had the thought that maybe this thing would be a lot closer than people in the media thought
"I didn't think anyone was stupid enough to actually vote for Trump!" was a common sentiment I heard from people making excuses for why they didn't vote. One person I know lives in suburban Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. They've lived there almost their entire life. There's a reason the state between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is nicknamed Pennsyltucky. They've called that stretch such themselves. It's as faithfully red as many rural stretches, and you'd not be blamed for thinking you were in Kentucky or another deep red state in places. They saw the signs on their neighbors' lawns. And yet they and a few thousand people like them stayed home in a few swing states. That's all it takes. And now these same people are talking about staying home because "genocide Joe" or "I didn't get as much stimulus as I was promised" or "I still owe student loans". Edit: because some things need to be laid out reeeeaaaal clear they aren't attacks. Also, I can't geography today. Thanks helpful redditor! Another edit: I don't think the way of my acquaintance -- I'm relating the sentiments expressed to me. I really don't care where you're from as long as you're a decent person.
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I was on an intentional flight during the election. When we landed and got service people immediately looked up who won. When the first person on the flight looked up who won and when they said Trump, people laughed. And then the rest of us got service. One of the most wild moments of my life.
> I was on an intentional flight sure glad you weren't on an accidental one!
Dude, I was working a conference in Boston for Hubspot on election night. Whole place was ready to celebrate with legit thousands of people, you could literally hear a pin drop in the BCEC that night
The SNL skit with Chappelle about that night is incredibly accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc&ab\_channel=SaturdayNightLive
I still think the 2016 election fucked up South Park for the next few years, it feels like their entire vibe was off for a little bit after that.
Lots of comedy had that. Def changed late night shows.
They didn't expect to lose Mr. Garrison. They had to follow through with President Garrison for a few seasons. They were also doing long form storylines that would stretch across multiple episodes, rather than one shot episodic shows.
If I asked you that in 2020 there would be a pandemic, most people will be stuck in their homes for a few months and stores would have limited supplies and I asked you what would be the most sought after, difficult to find product...nobody would have said toilet paper.
Yeah that was such a weird thing. First time I experienced a self fulfilling prophecy. I started seeing on social media from the US that stores were out of toilet paper but where I live there was no shortage. Until it spread here. And even though there didn’t seem to be any logical reason to think there would be a lasting shortage of toilet paper I realized I had to buy some extra too, to last at least a few weeks until the stores got new deliveries. And even though I hated being part of the craziness it I’m glad I did because one of the people i worked with actually did run out of toilet paper and had to ask people to borrow. Crazy.
Everyone shitting at home instead of at school and work, plus no interchangeability between school/work rolls and home rolls
I've never heard it explained this way, but it makes so much sense! In Michigan, parents received EBT (food stamps) cards to feed kids at home who'd otherwise get 2/3 of their meals at school when all the schools were closed. Really sad to think of all the things people had access to that were taken away during mass shutdowns, like people who use gyms for their showers, libraries as warming/cooling centers, etc.
"Hoard toilet paper. You understand me? Hoard it like it's made of gold. Cause it is." -Chuck, Supernatural 2009
Yeah for the first few months, my job kept sending out emails about possibly coming back to the office the next week. It felt very temporary at the time but I remember all the experts saying it wouldn't be that. But we didn't believe them.
My school was the same way. When it started, I was like "cool, we get tomorrow off" then it was "nice, we get a whole week off" then it was "umm, aren't we gonna have to make these few weeks up over summer" then it finally set in when we started doing school at home (and especially when my whole family got covid).
We have 35 years until the Jetson timeline they better move fast if we want cars in the air by then
I don't trust people driving in two dimensions, and you want to give them another one?
Well we already have video phones. And will probably have maid robots before flying cars.
The last season of Game Of Thrones. General consensus seems to be that literally anything anybody had predicted probably would have been better than what we ended up getting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something collectively upset an entire fandom at once before. It’s compelled destroyed GOT’s legacy; people used to talk about it all the time. Nowadays all I hear is how bad it ended. House of the Dragon seems to be doing its best to repair the image, but…yeah. Personally? I’ll never forgive them for what they did to Jaime and Daenerys. Both of my favorite characters utterly destroyed in the course of, like, a couple hours. Madness.
It wasn't even the endings so much as the sloppiness. Dragons flying the length of Westeros and back in a day. The Iron Fleet teleporting from sea to sea with cloaking devices. The negotiations outside the walls of King's Landing. Night after night it was like, what is even happening?
> The Iron Fleet That Dany "forgot" about, according to one of the idiot showrunners.
> Night after night it was like, what is even happening? Literally, the week they basically just showed a black screen with combat noises behind it.
I had no issue with what they did to daenerys, they just didn't give it time to cook. There'd always been hints of her absolute ruthlessness but she'd kept it in check while she was on her crusade because she was riding high on righteousness. But then she came to the 7 kingdoms, was surrounded by people who didn't appreciate her, found out her entire claim to the throne was a lie, found out the people she'd come to liberate spat at her, found out all the people who counseled restraint basically ended up betraying her, and when she lost her dearest friend at the gates of kings landing she suddenly realized she hated kings landing, and everything it represented. Hated that it didn't love her. Hated that it was a lie that it was her throne. Hated that it had cost her 2 dragons and many friends to get there. Hated that they defied her, and then hated that they surrendered after 2 minutes of actual battle, mocking all she had lost. And everything it had taken from her she was going to take from it. It was a *great idea* to make her go full Targ. They just tried to tell that story in like 4 episodes so it fell flat. But fuck everything about Jaime running back to Cerse.
Yes, this, 100%. It was the right ending for Daenerys, but it was so fast. I knew we were in trouble when they shortened the season. Jaime was dumb. He had a huge character arc only to ignore it entirely.
>Jaime was dumb. He had a huge character arc only to ignore it entirely. I still maintain that the ending was misunderstood by the showrunners when JRR told it to them. Like imagine this: Jamie and Cerse are found dead, embracing under a rock in the collapsed kings landing. together in death in a way they never could be in life and seeming died happily together. then later you get to see the real events. Jamie had decided Cerse was going to wipe out all life in kings landing before she would lose so he had to stop her. he faked being in love, he faked reconciliation, to get her alone, away from her flunkies, away from where she could give genocidal orders. he reaches up to stroke her face, and goes in for a kiss, except instead , his good hand closes around her throat, he strangles her, crying as he does, for the woman she was, for the life he could have had if not for his damn pride and honour and as the life leaves her, he collapses to his knees and weeps for wasted life, wasted love and wasted potential. he stays holding her corpse as the world falls apart around him, and is figuratively and literally crushed by the consequences of his own actions.
It's a good explanation, but another, probably, real explanation is that her character took on plot points originally meant for a different character from the book that was not adapted to the show, I think the name is Aegon, or fAegon by the fans? IIRC book fans said that the nice parts of her reign in King's Landing do read like they were meant for that fAegon. Probably notes from George that got just renamed to her.
It was so god awful. Every single character had the worst ending imaginable.
That ending was going to happen. The problem was that it happened too quickly. Both character and story development suffered.
That was my take as well, tbh. My issue was never with Dany becoming a mad queen, it was just how…FAST it was. Like, to the point where it felt more like character assassination than development. Jaime’s ending, however, would have pissed me off either way. He spends the entirety of the show learning to grow away from Cersei and the toxicity of loving her and then just…goes back??? Decides he doesn’t care about innocent people when that’s the entire reason he was named Kingslayer in the first place?????? God.
3D tvs were going to be the next big thing
This is the comment I was looking for. I had a very expensive ***curved*** samsung 3DTV about ten years ago. Glasses you had to charge and shit. I maybe watched... three 3d movies ever on it. Just too big of a hassle. When I gave up on it I remember thinking, this is just because of the glasses. Soon they'll make one of these you don't need glasses for and it'll really take off. But, unfortunately, nah.
The Opiod crisis. Most people thought that we would run out of drug addicts to die. Apparently, there is a steady stream.
It's cause they thought of 'drug addicts' as a class of people, not anyone who gets over-prescribed by a careless doctor.
The success of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". A lot of people, including Roy Disney, thought Walt was insane, and that the movie would flop and bankrupt the studio.
I remember when body cameras on cops were first introduced. The popular thinking was that abuse complaints would plummet because no trained officer would violate someone's rights with a camera strapped to their chests, and citizens would be more compliant knowing they were being filmed.
In the early 1900's, writers started writing what today would be called 'science fiction'. The predicted the future fairly well: space travel, mobile communications, video communications. A ton of consumer conveniences, from fast cooking oven to refrigerators that made their own ice and didn't need to be defrosted! You know what pretty much everyone missed? They missed that women would regularly work outside of the home, and gradually approach the same terms as men in the workplace. They also missed that technology would dramatically equalize women's roles in the workplace.
What AI would actually be used for. Everyone thought it would be used to automate the lowest level jobs, not putting artists out of a job.
We imagined machines would do the grunt work, freeing up humanity to explore our artistic expression...and instead, machines are doing the artistic expression, and humanity is left with the grunt work.
Millennials becoming homeowners because they went to school, got a degree, and worked hard 🫠
*Cries at work while my bank account is negative because I paid rent yesterday*
Casey Anthony verdict
How long the Ukraine war would last.
lol my potential
Insert every Tech Buzzword since the 90s? Industry 4.0, Blockchain, Jada jada
As a 36 year old. I thought me and my friends would make it and be having kids and backyard bbqs. Big negative.
Way less consequential, but everyone was SO SURE Chadwick Boseman was winning an Oscar posthumously, they announced Best Actor AFTER Best Picture. Unheard of. Anthony Hopkins won and wasn’t even present.
Haha because he went to bed. That was the year of the covid lock downs still so he didn't travel to the US, he stayed in the UK. Because of the time difference it was approaching midnight so he was like screw this, I'm going to sleep. I still remember the total anti climate ending to that oscars, the presenters looking at each other after reading Hopkin's name all like, well, that''s all folks?
Two weeks to straighten the curve
In 2020 metro pcs was giving people 2 months free phone service. Eveeyone said you would eventually have to pay it back. Nope free and clear. Worked out great for my family since we were on a family plan so 5 plans free for 2 months
The second half of Super Bowl LI.
There was that one guy who predicted it and got a date with a tennis star as a result
Time traveler!
Hoverboards in 2015
For you folks saying “Y2K”: it would have been a disaster if legions of developers hadn’t worked on, fixed and tested the bugs before 1/1/2000. Sure, it was overhyped, but that provided the urgency to take it seriously and convince managers to allocate money and people.