I’ve felt that. In my story, I’m an adult out on a date. I order a molcajete dish from the local Mexican restaurant. I’ve had this dish before at a few places. I know it’s usually spicy. I want this. I have a vague memory of the waitress confirming I was okay with a spicy dish. I enthusiastically confirm.

I had never encountered this level of spicy before. Those other molcajete dishes I’d had were milquetoast. This was flavortown gone nuclear. My entire head turned red apparently. The sweat started on my forehead, then my neck, and eventually my entire head was running like a sock over a faucet. I hadn’t encountered real heat like this before. I was in experienced, so I didn’t know that drinking my beer between bites was only making the heat worse. The waitress kept bringing them though. At one point I could hear people laughing together in the kitchen. It was a quiet restaurant, we may have been the only ones there at this point.

I was not bowed or broken. I ate the whole damn thing. It was otherwise also a delicious dish and now that I had broken through into the fire dimension I was tasting flavors I didn’t even have words for. These flavors were here the whole time but I couldn’t experience them until I had set my mouth on fire. I eventually won the day, or so I thought until the next day when dinner had it’s revenge on the way out.

Jalapenos don’t get the respect they deserve. Sure they don’t have the face melting power of some other peppers. But they taste fucking great in ways the other peppers can’t match. They are also sneaky. I’ve had jalapeno with little to no heat, almost like a better tasting green bell pepper. And I’ve had jalapeno that were face melty sweet awesomeness. The secret I eventually learned was to seek the peppers with those little brown stretch marks. More stretch marks mean more fire.

I see you’ve never played “Dragon’s Lair”, where every scene was cell animated and the player “chose” the path that the animation would take.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

A chain is 66 feet long.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

If I’m going to skin or peel the vegetable, I go with the cheap stuff. If I’m eating the skin then I go organic. I never buy the prewashed lettuce and salads when they are on sale because those have already started to go bad usually. And when it comes to things like berries, strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers I go with whatever looks like it will taste the best. Cheap blueberries for instance, absolutely do not hold up against the good stuff; life is too short for tart blueberries.

Spoken like someone that also didn’t pay attention in class.

If you think that, then you weren’t paying attention.

Come you fools, obviously if you were not there and alive in person, the context of this comment clearly implies that you should have been paying attention in history class.