boondocking

I will never not read this as some kind of obscure, local nickname for something absurd and sexual/scatalogical. Like “Me and this chick did an Ohio Boondock in an Ace Hardware parking lot once, the manager called the cops so we had to get out of there, but man they must have been glad they rent carpet steamers, ah tell you what.”

I was floored when I saw what even the low-end pre-made travel-vans were going for. They’re really following the whole “Why sell a million cookies for a dollar each when you can sell one cookie for a million dollars” economic model with these things.

To think the trend probably really started because some folks decided to build like, plywood frames around their poop-bucket in back and documented it on social media with various photo filters to look romantic and free-spirited.

Bonfires on the beach at night, shirtless young dude with a guitar, maybe a dog, probably black lab or golden retriever, girls in bikinis and everyone is just perfect and happy… don’t you want to be happy like this too? Get your van with built-in poop bucket for only $90,000 now and start recapturing that escaped youth living off your parent’s dime and a trust fund!

Lucky for you, that’s always a good thing… but that’s also kind of the idea, they don’t build them everywhere, they build a few massives ones to “process” animals on an industrial scale, so it still ends up in your local grocery store, which is why it’s worth taking a minute to check where they get their meat and dairy.

Oh goodie, a dumb post making fun of veganism, I’m sure the comments are going to super mature and nuanced.

does one life form have more value than another?

Like with everything, there is no clear boundary and it’s up to us, the thinking, sapient creature to make these distinctions so that we can exist while minimizing our harm to the world.

We will never eliminate all harm we do to the living world, that’s ridiculous and nobody is expecting it except the most delusional people.

But we do need to draw lines somewhere. And broadly, we can make distinctions that higher animals like cows, pigs and chickens have more of an “experience” of the world than most insects, and thus their lives have more value. It’s a weird thing to say out loud but we can’t shy away from making these moral choices as long as inhabit the earth and want to remain the dominant species.

You haven’t seen how factory farms work then, which is good for your mental health probably, but you should really take time to understand the actual problems and serious it is.

The conditions that most animals live in is horrifying and they suffer a great deal before butchering, and the butchering process is often flawed and has tons of problems, with wide-scale reports of abusive conditions and botched kills, to say nothing of the massive amount of mental and physical harm it does to the people who’s job it is to kill thousands of living beings every day.

You don’t have to give up meat, but at the very least consider buying local from non-industrial farms.

The basic costs of getting a van and converting it can be thousands of dollars at the cheap end, not counting the van itself.

If you want to get a pre-made travel van with amenities like a toilet and lighting already installed it will set you back tens of thousands more than just getting an old beater and modifying it, and that counts on your ability and energy to actually engineer and build the stuff you will need.

So you need either a huge up-front investment, or you need to make monthly payments if you finance it, or you need an already stable lifestyle that lets you slowly collect and build the stuff you need over a long period of time.

I don’t know how you support a mobile lifestyle anyway unless you have a job you can do from the back of a van parked in a walmart parking lot, which is where you will spend most of your time as you will need daily life shit like toilet paper and a few meals a day. (Except you can’t park there overnight, you will need to park either in a campground or an RV park or some place for designated overnight parking, which usually comes with fees if they’re anywhere near a city. Long-term sites with utility hookups or bathrooms will need a monthly rental contract.)

I’m fully convinced, that at least in the US, every last “van life” influencer can only support the lifestyle by promoting it and riding on trust-funds when views run short. Homelessness isn’t that fun actually.

Edit: just to make it clear, my family lived in a van for a few years when I was little, and I respect people who have no choice and live out of their cars or vans, and yah you can do it for next to nothing if you have to, but it’s a hard life and and you still need money, which means some form of stability to interact with the world, a phone, a craft or job or something you can sell, expenses for a vehicle that’s going to run a lot. You’re going to interact with a lot of cops. And other types. Wouldn’t recommend it if you can help it. I am calling out specifically the influencers and the popularized “van lifestyle” that makes it look like a perpetual party on the beach.

Whatever, slippery coward.

As a species we tend to mask irrational feelings with stories our brain make up, connecting abstract social issues and ideas to make us feel like our irrational discomfort is somehow part of a bigger, more “rational” story, but it all leads back to something that makes us uncomfortable. The cure is sanitizing sunlight.

And because Lemmy is packed with incel-adjacent minded young guys and require some pushback on their bad ideas, because people no longer experience social pressure as long as they can retreat to like-minded online spaces, so I rather people are open about what they think so we can challenge it, support it or offer alternatives depending what the actual feeling is.

That’s why I care.

Your turn.

Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.

I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.

I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.

The shot reminded me of Elder Scrolls Online at first, and I had that very real PTSD twinge that made my stomach lurch.

When I was going through the worst part of my life, losing everything, burying my family and pets, closing down my business and having my home foreclosed due to family medical issues, I played Elder Scrolls for a couple years for no other reason than to spend time with other people, including someone I cared about a lot. I hated the game, it was exciting for the first couple hours until I realized how far it deviated from the actual franchise and how limited the gameplay really was, how everything was just a funnel towards premium content and skins.

I drank like a fish and laid in trash watching my life fall apart as I sat in Elder Scrolls listening to people chatter and watching them duel, because I didn’t want to be alone because I didn’t trust myself to be alone.

I did start over and everything is a lot better now, but holy shit, that game ruined Morrowind, Skyrim and the entire game world for me.

Why is everyone vague-posting in here? Just say directly what bothers you about the comic.

They’re fantastic if you keep your blade maintained, it’s honing, not sharpening.

Whetstones by themselves will get your blade sharp real fast, but by themselves all you’re really doing is making a micro-serrated edge every time, and it dulls fast. Smoothing your edge after whetstone with a honing rod smooths the cutting edge and reforms the edge shape after regular use.

If you lose your edge you have to start over from the whetstone, so maintaining the edge with a honing rod will save you time and not take as much material off your blade.

Also, a lot of households have utterly worn-out honing rods in their knife blocks, as the household often will try to use it for actual sharpening and scrape off a lot of the honing texture, and eventually will get so smooth they do nothing.

Nah cynical dipshits on the internet who try to Jordan Peterson every conversation about art theft and AI regulation who are creating division. Have a good one, enjoy your AI titties and shit.

There are a lot of serious laws in the US about owning, transporting and storing explosives (thank you Anarchist bomber movement last century) as well as requirements for permits and the like, so you would have to prove it was a “gift” and not intended to be used for anything, but even then you would not only face negligence charges/manslaughter if someone was killed, but also various kinds of “aggravated” charges related to public safety. I am not a lawyer but I have a feeling the prosecution would make a pretty heavy case to make an example.

No you’re right, and part of the problem in the US is our absolutely batshit, contradictory social conditioning around sex, nudity and the body.

We are utterly archaic in social attitudes here. We had a full-on national crisis when everyone saw a nipple at the super-bowl one time. Yet we sexualize anything remotely female and young to a sickening degree.

This kind of weird paradoxical attitude designed to make you feel shame and desire together has completely ruined any chance of healthy attitudes around sex for millions of young boys who grew up in this media landscape, and had no idea how to deal with it and fell down the incel pipeline, and millions of young girls who only see a world of predation and those angry incels and want nothing to do with dating or boys, driving the wedge further and further, a whole generation of people hating and fearing each other grew up and are now running the entire country.

This utterly baffling societal attitude has empowered people like Epstein and his affiliates since way back, and made it a lot easier for people to commit sex crimes, particularly against children. 🙈 🙉 🙊

Yah except in reality it’s just a drone with a taser and an explosive charge. It doesn’t give you a warning, it already has your face in a database of known “opposition members” and you’ve been targeted as a radical terrorist for laughing at that meme someone posted to your facebook. It doesn’t care about stairs and can wait patiently outside your house for you to open a door or window.

Your violent death will be celebrated on state media along with everyone in your terror cell. (Family.)

I don’t know how satire writers are going to survive this century.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/elon-musk-says-tesla-will-stop-producing-s-x-models-shifts-making-robo-rcna256409

They never have concrete rebuttals to thought-out replies. If it was a matter of thinking, they wouldn’t be going to bat for generative AI. Good work though.

I just think it’s silly

I think you need to ask yourself why this one thing is annoying you enough that you felt the need to push back. I don’t want to know, I won’t even see the reply, I am suggesting you ask yourself why it’s important to you to fight a sentiment that a vast number of people who don’t otherwise share anything, happen to all feel the same about and what good you think you’re doing for anyone, even if it’s just yourself.