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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • Back in February, I took a Waymo for the first time and was at first amazed. But then in the middle of an empty four lane road, it abruptly slammed the brakes, twice. There was literally nothing in the road, no cars and because it was raining, no pedestrians within sight.

    If I had been holding a drink, it would have spelled disaster.

    After the second abrupt stop I was bracing for more for the remainder of the ride, even though the car generally goes quite slow most of the time. It also made a strange habit of drifting lanes through intersections while the turning indicators went from left to right alternatively like it had no idea what it was doing.

    Honestly it felt like being in the car with a first time driver.





  • Perhaps you’ve not visited this place, so for an impression: the area itself is very large and open and the site has restricted access with a fairly pricey admission fee.

    Voices don’t carry very far in this environment, however the issue is that there are literally hundreds if not close to a thousand vendors literally screaming for attention. My objection is to the authorities who have permitted this kind of presence at a heritage site. Of course locals have taken advantage of the situation, that much is very clear.


  • It’s great that we’re enforcing laws that are there to protect our anthropological heritage. It’s not so great that it means this violator is attacked by the locals.

    As an aide, I feel like Mexico themselves have quite a ways to go to protect the heritage site. The grounds of Chichen Itzá are absolutely overrun with “tour guides” telling dumbed down or outright fabricated stories and literally hundreds of souvenir stands with obnoxious sellers that don’t shy from any tactic to try to get your attention.

    Walking around in that area should be serene, educational and immersive. Instead, it’s like being in a kindergarten, where hordes of salespeople are incessantly calling out to you (“where are you from, sir, where are you from?”), literally throwing cheap Chinese junk in your direction, playing drums and pan flutes or squeezing squeaky toys and gimmicks that are meant to sound like monkeys. It’s a cacophony of cheap garbage and harassment from locals (and nonstop clapping to hear the temple’s acoustic effect) that takes you out of experiencing your surroundings in an inkling of tranquility. In fact, only from specific angles is it even possible to capture a photo of the Temple of Kukulcán without the brightly colored eye sores of a hundred nearly identical souvenir stands visible directly adjacent to it.

    Mexico should also take more pride in this site and treat Chichen Itzá with more respect.




  • I had the strangest experience on Reddit that was the final drop for me to leave. In a thread of lousy jokes, I commented something along the lines of “This is all the fault of Leon Trotsky of Mexico City! Let’s find him and get him, boys!”

    It was flagged as doxxing and I was permabanned from the subreddit. I replied to the modmail ever so gently, saying, “Whoops, it looks like my poor sense of humor may have been misinterpreted, because Trotsky was famously assassinated in 1940.”

    The mod came back absolutely lamenting me, riddled with explitives, further calling my username a “racist dog whistle” (my username there is the same as here but suffixed with a number). They then proceeded to attempt to have me banned sitewide for “abusing modmail,” although I was ultimately only suspended for 7 days.

    The whole thing just left me so confused. But boy was that mod upset, holy moly.