I’m just here for the free vacation.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 10th, 2023

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  • Aww thanks for checking in! We ended up cancelling last minute and booking a random flight in the opposite direction, to Omaha NE. We’d never been and it seemed like a good time. I ended up getting a duck butt tattoo, and we rescheduled his. His appt just happened and he was good all 5 hours of it!

    We also explored the coast a little and got to see the devastation first hand, houses completely wrecked, timber everywhere, whole neighborhoods ruined. Got some cool shark teeth tho!




  • I have a successful store through Amazon Merch program (the one all these shirts are sold through) and there is some serious shit about what is and is not allowed to be sold. Each shirt is sent through an approval process that is first automated, and then any that fail will go to manual review. They base the automatic review process off the text (anything from the description or title of the shirt to the additional bullet points that help the shirt sell). The filters are based on their own list of banned phrases, a database of trademarked stuff, and some arbitrary rules. A classic one was when someone trademarked the words “hot sauce” and Amazon took down anything that used those two words in sequence. If you have a flagged word or phrase, manual review happens, and this typically means a human will look through your whole catalog of products as part of the review. And usually, you get a max of like two warnings before they remove your store. And the appeals process is non existent - all the email responses are automated. Then there’s this fun part - the terms of selling on the Merch program say that profits are only realized 60 days after the shirt sells, and that termination is immediate. Basically, they keep the last 60 days of profits from your account. So, they have this really volatile review process with no clear guidelines, no way to appeal, and a flaky TOS that allows them to skim 60 days of profits from each account they terminate. Type in “orca” with your Amazon search to see all shirts in the program (I guess it’s some kind of dev passcode?).

    I had a friend lose $20k of profit from this nice little loophole. Amazon really have a nice racket going on.

    So I guess all this to say I’m not surprised they’re doing it.





  • Very accurate. We have the Quest 1 and 2, both just collecting dust now, I’m not even sure if they would work anymore. We set up a VR gaming night with a few friends who also had headsets, played Beat Saber and Synth Riders a bunch, then got bored and decided to explore a new game where you walk about and chop wood and whatnot. Five minutes of that and I was so dizzy I almost threw up. It made me realize that the type of game you can play on these is very very limited. I did get a lot of mileage from Synth Riders, so I’m not saying it’s all worthless tech, but we probably could have got a better ROI just buying a regular console with the money.