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While I totally agree with you, this meme isn’t referring to college text books. It’s referring to school supplies and clothes for elementary school children.

The vast majority of public schools in the US are severely underfunded and don’t have enough supplies like markers, disinfectant, crayons, pencils, etc to provide kids and teachers don’t make very much money, yet they often come out of pocket to buy supplies. What has happened as a result, is parents have to purchase many of these supplies to send to school with their kids for the whole classroom to have the items they need. I have three kids in kindergarten and second grade. Their school supply lists were about $150 each. With creative shopping for sales, we managed to get everything about $150 cheaper than listed. We are waiting for the tax-free weekend to buy clothes for all of them.

Gotta love the good ol’ US of A and it’s hatred of the poors.

Yup. Ours had some really expensive hobby items in addition to the books and book accessories. They had a rock tumbler kit one year I remember wanting really bad. My grandparents ended up getting me one for Christmas. I recall a telescope one year as well.

One of the more mischievous kids in my third grade class was the son of the high school chem teacher. He purchased a chemistry set at the book fair that year. He and another kid took it into the bathroom by the cafeteria and drank a few “experiments” from the kit in the box. They both got violently sick and an ambulance came. I’m really glad I stuck with my Box Car Children collection and Calvin and Hobbes book mark that year.

Indeed. It has a lot to do with that and about a dozen other things. Degree. Job field. Connections. Experience. Personality.

I have a general comms degree and an MA in digital media. These degrees and my job field are extremely broad, so I have experience in loads of different things. As such, I can apply for any job from digital marketing to public relations to a press officer and have a shot of at least getting an interview. I’ve never had a shortage of knowing people in my industry who would be willing to write me a letter of recommendation or give me a referral where they work. I’ve gotten one of my colleagues hired at two separate places that I have been a manager.

But to add on to that, I interview well and have a very relaxed and jovial personality. I work well with others and make friends easily. I can’t count how many times there have been interoffice issues where an independent consultant had to come in and mediate or get to the bottom of an HR problem and it would turn out that I’m one of the only people in a division that not a single person had a conflict with.

Not to derail your point, but I am 100% positive that the meme isn’t saying Barbie is a bad movie at all. This meme isn’t near as deep as you’re giving it credit for.

It’s making the observation that Hollywood has eroded its creative foundation to the point that there have only been two movies that anyone is talking about this year. Whereas in years past there would be dozens.

I have certainly noticed that over the last few years I care less and less about yet another Marvel movie or remake of an awesome 80s or 90s movie. It’s extremely obvious why masterful productions like Barbie and Oppenheimer stand out above everything else this year. These would have been great movies in the 90s too, but they would have actually been competing against substantially more films that are worth talking about.

Honestly, you should check out Nelly’s Nest. Some of the simultaneously most disturbing and inspiring comics on the internet.

Still kicking but…somehow not the same. It’s something I can’t quite explain. There’s just something different about it now. I had to look something up on Reddit a couple of days ago. It was the first time I’d been back since they killed all the third party apps. It reminded me of going back to a city I used to live but my friends were all gone and my favorite places to go had changed. So, while it was the same place, and there were plenty of people around, it seemed exhausted and forced.

The guy that is one of the main creators of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, made Bluesky. It’s a Twitter alternative that I believe is still invite only. It’s funny, when Bluesky officially started allowing people to use it, Twitter was abuzz with excitement and people posting memes about begging for access. Those select few that did get in early were going on and on about how awesome it is and how it was like old Twitter.

Then Threads drops without the invite barrier automatically adding everyone with an Instagram account and I haven’t heard a fuckin peep about Bluesky in weeks.

This is extremely interesting. So many products that I’ve never heard of and many of them were actually around for 6-12 years before being axed or coming up on death soon. A lot of these I had heard of and even used occasionally over the years and I didn’t realize were gone now.

Agreed. Sorting by top 6 1/2 hours works very well for me.

Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people’s lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it’s extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.

The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who’s still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they’re continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there’s only six still there that were there when I left last September.