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[Xantalos]

you live in America on Black Friday and there wasn't 5 bigillion people flooding the store?
waaaaaaaaat

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Can someone jog my memory on Black Friday? Where did it come from and is its name from some sort of reference to so many bruises after everything's finished?

[pisskop]

I do believe that its an ancient ritual to summon Father Capitalism from his annual slumber, and so call forth the Christmas Season.

[MaximumZero]

Yeh. Charged into the store like "THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAwhereiseveryone?"

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Can someone jog my memory on Black Friday? Where did it come from and is its name from some sort of reference to so many bruises after everything's finished?

Wikipedia.

But actually Black Friday as an annual thing is just the retail industry desperate to foster in adults the same freakish unthinking greed they grew out of as children. Retailers could avoid the whole Black Friday madness if they just let you pay online on Friday and pick up the item in store the following week. But they have an interest in maintaining the atmosphere of scarce opportunity that turns normal people into savages. If a person did all this he'd probably be fined or jailed for inciting civil unrest.

I think we should send retailers a message, by refusing to buy anything except necessities (food, fuel, rent, utilities) between Oct 1 and Jan 1. Visit family during the holidays, but buy any presents in Jan-Feb that you want to give each other. Heck, give up on the idea of a gift-exchanging holiday at all. If you find something great that someone you know would love to have, and it's a good price, pick it up for them. They'll reciprocate eventually. Childrens' gifts can still be done during xmas to feed their emotional health if you think it's worthwhile, but we could easily cut holiday gift spending to 1/10th without affecting children much.

Especially egregious are fucking car commercials. Who buys someone a luxury car for xmas? Ridiculous.

We also need to stop giving each other gift cards. Nothing says "I only know a little about you and am uncomfortable asking mutual friends about you, or else I just don't care that much about you but I don't want to be ostracized by our social group" like handing someone a little bit of cash they can only spend at one store. Just the act of buying a gift card is stupid, exchanging optimally useful money for far less useful money with no other benefit for the buyer. Occasionally you see a store offering a deal, like Half Price Books giving a $5 scrip when you buy a $25 gift card (but the scrip can be used only next January). You sometimes see a +20% deal. I suspect they end up making money off gift cards that get lost or forgotten or expire, offsetting the rebate and attracting more interest than a 1:1 gift card deal. If you buy a $25 HPB gift card, but don't give the person the $5 scrip (or worse, you give them the scrip instead!), they're going to wonder why you didn't give both. In any case, buying the gift card so you can later spend it, gaining money value in exchange for restricting where you can spend it, is acceptable. Giving someone a gift card is still crass and dumber than just giving paper money.

[Neonivek]

Lucky for me we have such low population density that we generally don't get craze.

[Descan]

To be, only times it's acceptable to give a purchased gift is when it's too complicated to make yourself, and the only times it's acceptable to give money is when a) they're literally impossible to buy for (yo) or b) what they want, they're in a better position to get than you are. I.E. they have a credit card and you don't, and it's an online object. Or they don't ship to your area. Or they live in a different country. You would be funding their ability to buy the present, even if you don't physically give it to them.

Unless the person is strapped for cash, in which case: Fuck you, gimme money so's I can not!starve.

[Neonivek]

Ohh damn I forgot... I need to think up presents I want for Christmas for a list...

[MaximumZero]

Update: first customer just came in.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Update: first customer just came in.

In full Camo gear and arms with a machete?

[itisnotlogical]

So vampires are super good at things because they live forever and have an eternity to practice whatever they want, right? But what if somebody who was really lazy got turned into a vampire and just sat around eating cheetos and watching TV all day? There's like, 500 Twilight parodies in that idea alone.

[Sergarr]

I'd imagine being lazy would get tiring somewhere after 50 years of continuous TV watching.

[itisnotlogical]

I'd imagine being lazy would get tiring somewhere after 50 years of continuous TV watching.

Then again, wouldn't being perfectionist about (whatever skill) get pretty boring too? Like, if you spend two millennia becoming the best widget installer that ever was, you'd want to kick back for at least a few eons afterwards.

[Sergarr]

I'm not sure if leisure time can be simply scaled upwards like that.

[Frumple]

Then again, wouldn't being perfectionist about (whatever skill) get pretty boring too? Like, if you spend two millennia becoming the best widget installer that ever was, you'd want to kick back for at least a few eons afterwards.

... it's hard to say. I mean, that doesn't really apply to a lot of retirees, ferex. Shorter time scale, but they'll (or used to, anyway -- corporate exploitation and whatnot has made it considerably less likely these days) often go, y'know, 3-4 decades doing the same thing and afterwards... not really enjoy stopping. Or want to, really.

There's also nothing to say vampire brains work the same way as human brains -- it's entirely possible they're physically incapable of feeling boredom.

Or that, after master skill X, they wouldn't shrug their shoulders and go on to skill Y. Eventually, one says, they run out of skills, but at that point they're probably skilled enough to just straight up make new skills to master.

So the answer is a resounding "maybe", imo.