What hyped thing did you fall for that you now regret and have to live with?

I have a Tesla that, for financial reasons, I can't get out of for another couple few months and while it is one of my favorite cars I've ever driven (and I've driven many), I can no longer enjoy driving it because Musk is a piece of shit that deserves cancer. Looking at Lucid and Rivian now.

I also used to believe America was a great country, but in my late 20s started to realize it's bullshit (I'm in my 40s now). It was kind of a sad realization and it has only gotten worse since then.

I also used to believe more in people and their ability for empathy and, if presented the facts, they'd ultimately make good decisions. I now believe people are generally selfish and narcissistic, and that most don't give a shit about facts and live entirely on off-the-cuff emotion. It doesn't stop me from caring and trying to help (some) of them, but it's definitely made me more wary and paranoid.

I also used to believe America was a great country, but in my late 20s started to realize it's bullshit

Honestly I was 100% bought in when I was like 19. I'm still a big believer in what the Constitution stands for (at least as it means to me), but I fully understand that I got duped by the branding with that one. It has been exceptionally radicalizing and upsetting to see how few of my countrymen believe in the dream of America as I do. May we one day live up to our lofty ideals.
Felt this. I haven't really ever felt proud of America. It was weird growing up with immigrant parents, proud of their new homeland, just for me to learn of all its atrocities across the world and be like: "y'all moved here for this? They murdered and raped your birth country!" I really want to be more optimistic and hopeful, it's just so hard with everything going on and how overt the racists are these days.
I went here as well, but managed to turn it around. I now have more belief in America being a great country, but as an ideal, as something we need to work hard toward. I’ve become a lot more progressive as I see what it would take to live up to this myth about ourselves. Let’s do it. Let’s do it for our children, for the next generation, for a better world tomorrow! Lets start small and local, be the neighbor you thought you had, show the empathy we all deserve, make America a Community again
Are you me? I was about to post the exact same thing, almost verbatim.
Surely there can be some symbol or obvious modification to let people know when you own a Tesla but disown the talking head at the top.
- I mean, I guess I could put stickers on it and stuff, but I live near Portland and the Tesla vanadalizing is pretty wild here. Not sure it'd do much.
  
  I've actually been taking an old gas truck around lately just so I don't have to be seen in it. But it sucks because the Tesla costs me like $20/month to drive and the truck costs like $30/week.
So you'll buy another car, while you mention financial problems, just because the (ex-) CEO of the manufacturer is a piece of shit?
- Yes. Because in my area Tesla's are being spray painted and kicked. Which also has financial implications.

"Get a college degree and the world will be your oyster"

"Put in those extra hours/days/years, do more than the people around you, and it will payoff"

Twitter/Reddit.

I was all in. Quit Twitter around 2015 when it started getting ultra toxic. Quit Reddit when 3rd party apps were killed.

I don't regret my time on Reddit. I enjoyed it a lot, though it did kind of feel like I was in a bit of a backwater after development switched to the new interface and updates for the UI stopped coming in.

I also expected Reddit to shift to their monetization phase at some point. I just hoped that whatever they did wasn't going to be something that I didn't like. As it happened, they killed the third-party apps, which is something that I wasn't going to put up with if there was any reasonable alternative. I have never used the official app, and don't intend to do so. But I don't think that I "fell" for anything -- I got use of a service that made me happy for a long time.
- I used to preach Reddit. Like the gospel. If you called me on the phone about an arbitrary subject, at some point I would have said, 'Well, on Reddit...'
  
  I was so in, there was a sub of one of my favourite tv shows I was hot on and I ended up being mentioned in a newspaper in the UK.
Doesn’t seem like you have to live with it…
- Oh I do. Friends remind me all the time how all in I was.

I’m really glad I couldn’t afford a Tesla back when the Model 3 came out because I probably would’ve bought one.

Things I actually fell for… mostly video games, but it’s not the end of the world. Mostly it made me much more discerning with new purchases.

I have this weird habit of buying the less popular but arguably better thing. I went with windows phone, a nook instead of a kindle, an zune mp3 player, and a Mustang MachE instead of a Model Y. That last choice might have been the only one that ultimately paid off.
- I miss my Zune. It had a great trackpad for scrolling. I had the 8gb model that was about the size of a granola bar. It felt like amazing, futuristic tech!

Spore :(

Everytime I see it in my library, i feel a little sad.

What's funny is I just made another comment about it in this thread and I'm starting to feel nostalgic, but I know if I go back and play it I'll just be disappointed again!
- My feed:
  
  .......
The Spore hype was genuinely the reason that killed my thrill of anticipation in video games and movies altogether.
I got into it with no hype, as an Internet-less European who never saw a videogame trailer before (aside from Pokémon ones on TV), and loved it as no other game before it.

I’m flopping what someone else said and goin with: buying a home in 2008. “Build equity! Stop renting”

Then the economy collapsed, I lost my job, moved to California for work after listing my house, could not afford Bay Area rent AND my mortgage, and the house got foreclosed on.

Fuck Chase fuck banks fuck the economy.

We lost our house. Bank bailouts vs. consumer bailouts even though the financial institutes acted in criminal levels of BS was a big wake up.

It's very, very clear that the 99% are nothing but dog shit on the bottom of the 1% shoes.
- It gets even worse for me.
  
  Since I knew I couldn’t afford it, I tried to setup a short sale when I found someone who was interested. that’d mean chase would lose about 10k on the 120k mortgage.
  
  So I went through the tedious process which took about a month, and just as we were ready to go chase changed my case handler. So I had to start over with the new person, for reasons that were not provided. So fine, I did.
  
  Month later, THAT person switched off and I got a new case processor to take over, and when they told me I had to start over I literally said “you can fuck yourselves, in walking” and I never spoke to chase about the house again. Couple years later the foreclosure finally went through, and instead of 110k they got… 22k from the sheriffs sale.
  
  My step mom worked at chase in the mortgage dept at the time, and later told me this was SOP for short sales at the time. They were uninterested in actually doing it, just jerking me around until I quit trying.
  
  Motherfuckers.

Pretty much anything Elon Musk. I used to be an Elon Musk fangirl up until 2018, then each successive year was like the cutscene of Crash Bandicoot having all the boxes he's missed falling on his head.

With 2018 you are waaaaaaay ahead of the most other people.
- 2018 was when he called the diver a pedo? That was the moment for me. I thought he was an awkward nerd trying to make electric cars a thing against all odds, an underdog. That was the moment I looked more into him and saw how wrong I was.
I enrolled in Aerospace Engineering in 2018 because of Musk.

Part of why I never graduated was the gradual loss of faith in the person who had inspired me. Although he has actually never changed.
I remember on Reddit one awful "This is Musk. He didn't like ___, so he invented ___" picture with like 4 examples of things he stole and a stick figure with his head. "Be like Musk" was the bottom text. I agreed with it at first, then I saw it like 6 more times.

Being annoyed at those constant repost made me leave his fan club pretty quick. Oh how naive I was, thinking the worst thing he could be was annoying.

Ctr +f "cybertruck": 0 results

Good job everybody!

Pfff as if i could afford to make that mistake
Ctr +f "cybertruck": 1 result

Lol you moro...oh, okay

I pre-ordered No Man's Sky -_-

Now, they've done WAY more than any of us thought to make things right; but at the time of release, NMS was probably the single most egregious example of false advertising to hit the gaming industry, ever. Or at least within a comparable scope of visibility to the gaming community.

It wasn't just not living up to the hype; it was purchasing a brand new Lamborghini, and receiving 2003 Honda Civic.

And no they didn't just bite off more than they could chew - they knew what they had created; and proceeded to show demos and make promises that amounted to a completely different product. We were scammed.

...and then I guess their conscious got the better of them, cuz rather than disbanding their studio and laughing all the way to the bank like we all expected them to, they spent years at least trying to make look like the product they promised. So, credit where it's due. But still lesson learned: never preorder a game, no matter how good the demos looks, no matter how charming their spokespeople are, no matter how closely the product they're pitching aligns with your specific niche interests: assume it's all complete bullshit until you've seen some gameplay posted by real people.

I didn't fall for the no man's sky hype. The game didn't appeal to me.

But cyberpunk 2077. That one hit hard. After ages of hype, and amazing trailers, I was so for it! I don't get very excited for to many games these days as I'm getting older, but this one ticked all the boxes for me. My disappointment when I realized how buggy and unfinished the game was, alongside everyone who was playing it at launch, exasperated my feelings of being let down and I felt like a sucker. They never really delivered what they originally promised either.
- Yeah, after years of updates Cyberpunk is now an amazing game. But it's not at all the game that was hyped up and promised. People don't get it, everyone says it's good now, yeah it's great, that's not the problem. The problem is that it's not what it was supposed to be.
- I bought Cyberpunk 2077 for the metro system showed in all the teaser trailers.
  
  There were no remains of it in the playable game.
  
  It got added back in one of the latest updates in late 2024, if I'm not mistaken.
I preordered Spore back in the day. The galactic edition. As a teenager I kept it visible on my dresser as a reminder to never preorder games.
I remember when John Bain was trying to explain this to people constantly, and then he died and all the motherfuckers kept being NPCs and gobbling up the bullshit
- Rip totalbisquit
After the turn around they made with NMS, I’m actually looking forward to their fantasy game. I was already on the “don’t preorder stuff” squad when NMS came out but I still shared the disappointment that everyone who bought it felt.
- Yea at this point, they've owned it and put in the effort to correct it that I wouldn't be opposed to buying another one of their games.... just... after it's been released for a month or two :P
Yea, Hello Games, and No Man's Sky burned me so bad. I essentially had dreams about being Han solo, smuggling cargo from system to system, for months.

Then I got the game after pre-ordering and was dumbstruck at how..... Not anything they promised it was. I mean, the game was HUGE, but aside from that?

Ive heard they fixed it, but I never checked back in after playing for a few weeks. My 9 year old likes to play it though. It came out not long after he had as born hahaha.

"Spore." That video with Wil Weight showing it off was incredible. Ordered it from Amazon. CD key was no good. EA didn't give two shits. After over a week of dealing with them via support tickets and called, I gave up and just returned it.

Meanwhile, my friend pirated it, played through the whole thing, and said it was just ok.

How did spore make it into this list twice?
- It was kinda like the launch of No Man’s Sky. Tons of hype, failure to deliver.
- Thrice now, at my time of reading, rofl.

Doing a PhD. One more year and then I’m free again…

You'll make it. I, too, fell for it.
At least you learned how to make a killer Latte.

KSP2

Can't get it refunded now

That's definitely a lesson

I don't know, the ksp redux project that a lot of the ksp2 modders are working on sounds pretty promising.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/226985-ksp2-redux/
After a couple thousand hours in KSP1, I still managed to dodge that bullet. The only new feature I really cared about was multiplayer, and I knew it wasn't going to happen when they they started early access without it.

Many people commuting in the Bay Area… “My Telsa.”

Music. Way too many albums are that one decent song you hear on the radio and 38 minutes of filler shite, and you could never take it back to the shop to get a refund for being full of shite. So all my music is pirated first, purchased second, and anyone that objects to this is basically admitting that their industry is based on selling shite that can't be refunded.

I bought the finger eleven CD. So, can confirm. I also bought Cult Ceremony, thinking it would be anything like Sonic Temple. This just means I don't learn.
album sales can't be refunded? I bought one physical CD, and one full album for download. Never wanted to refund either purchase, never found out that it's not possible. But really? It's not possible to get a refund from buying a physical album?
- It's to prevent people from buying the CD, ripping it (or taping it back in the day), and returning the CD with a free copy of the music.
Have you thought about having better taste and listen to bands other than one-hit wonders ?
- Hey! I thought we lost you! We need you back at Unhelpful Back Handed Comments.

Tasmanian devil ankle tattoo.

Fuck, I know alright? It was 93 and I was barely 16

That's one tattoo I can respect.
I'm pretty now that ankle socks are back in style, ankle tattoos of oldie cartoons are 100% allowed and cool again.

Nevermind: I got confused, ankle socks are out of style now.

america

I once got a ouya.

Ouya really got burned on that one.
Always think of this when I see someone mention the Ouya: https://youtu.be/QY5yG2KyQfM
- When I got it, I remember the lag the most.
  
  You would do a button press and then about a half second later it would register. It was VERY bad and laggy.
  
  The controller buttons would stick as well. So playing an actual game sucked.
  
  And it had to be online on order to play any games. Which sucked at the time when att would be flaky.
  
  It was actually a cheap lesson in not pre-ordering anything ever again. It's inadvertently saved me thousands over the years.
I got the remake that Razer made after they bought Ouya. I still use the controller it came with..
Same.

I still use the controllers to this day though. Those are actually pretty good. The console itself though.... Garbage. So much regret. First, last and only kickstarter project for me.

3D printer (FFF).

Didn't start out too bad. I knew I was having issues but tried an upgrade I shouldn't have done (because complexity). Upgrade was mostly done too, issue was fan wiring/firmware. I stopped with it there many years ago, so now it's all dusty.

On top of all the variables/tuning/test prints, equipment/material cost etc. I also just don't want to sell anything like I once thought I might.

It's gotten a lot better in the last year or so. There's a whole new class of machines that solved those issues and aren't nearly as difficult to operate.

Prior to a year ago, I'd say 3D printing was a hobby meant for someone who was into robotics, and programming, etc.

I run a repair shop, and now I see all sorts of children printing stuff, and it's easier than it ever was.
- Sure, but that doesn't help me now.
  
  It doesn't install a better auto-level sensor or tool-changing on my printer. It doesn't give me a good print bed (one I bought was damaged by prints) or even just a newer control board. I'm not even going to buy a slicer key, I don't want to spend more money on this nor do I want to think about it.
  
  I've already acknowledged that some of this was my hubris and I would likely still be printing had I just stuck with what I had. Maybe someone could even help me get back there in exchange for/using my spare parts, but I live in nowheresville w/no car and don't know anybody so that is not happening.
Yeah I’m glad I waited as long as I did and purchased the best I could out of the box.

The amount of tinkering the old Creality at work has needed over the years…
I wouldn’t have lasted long with that at home.

Super happy with our Bambu. It just prints nicely and just works every time.
Before people get mad at me for having a Bambu: I bought it before the UA changed and it’s in LAN mode with no internet. Hardware is great even though the company is a little shady these days.
I’ve had a 3D printer about a year now. I’d say I’ve gotten my money’s worth: I’ve printed generally useful things that aren’t just gimmicks.

But I also think I’ve been pretty lucky - there are some problems that I just don’t have the patience to deal with right now, for example some materials just don’t adhere to the bed. But I haven’t had anything fundamental that would make me really pissed off.

I could have totally seen myself in the same position as you if I ended up with a dud printer or something. It’s getting a lot better but it’s certainly not an instant plug-and-play device for most people.

I never fall for hype, never pre-order. life is good

Oh, no! They've fallen for the "don't pre-order" hype!
I stopped watching movie trailers years ago. Now, my friends just tell me, "Go watch this movie," and it’s made for an amazing movie-watching experience.

For example, I walked into the theater to watch The Lighthouse without knowing anything about it.

Movies are so much better when you have no idea what to expect.
- Also great when reviews don't predetermine your expectations
I've only bought a couple early access games, but in both cases I played the demo long enough to justify the purchase price.

Foam mattress promising to be extra firm. It arrived in a convenient little roll, but 6 months later, it is absolute shit. Fell for the marketing and now my back is paying for it.

With foam mattresses, you need to look at the density of the high-resilience foam (HR foam) that they use. Generally the higher it is, the firmer the mattress will be and less prone to sagging.

It also means it will be a lot heavier and difficult to move around. If the density info is not provided, you can just look for ones they claim are for people who are heavier than your own weight.
I bought a Douglas one and I've been incredibly happy with it. My sleep quality improved quite a bit, and almost 2 years later is still going well
Go hybrid
Oh I still love mine after 5 years. It's medium firm, so maybe an extra firm one wouldn't have held up as well.
Try flipping it.
Which brand? My IKEA Morgedal (now superseded by some other name) has been incredible.

Renting. An inescapable financial burden.

Did you fall for it because it was hyped or because you couldn’t afford to buy?
- Sometimes it is hyped because of the "freedom" aspect.
  
  In some countries, it's not even a bad idea because there are a lot more renter protections.
Not necessarily. All else being equal, mortgage + property charges + maintenance + tax is usually quite a bit more than rent. The issue is that renters almost never save or invest that delta, they spend it.
- You're missing the value of property going up over time
- "Wait? The world isn't the US?!"
- Depends on where your at.
  
  My mortgage doesn't go up every year, but rent always does! I now pay significantly less than the average rent in my area. Fun times.

GTAV, sure the online portion was fun for a while, but it quickly devolved into a money sink.

At my lowest I bought shark cards for thousands of SEK every month, and it got clear that the devs had built the game to require an insane ammount of effort to gather enough money to enjoy it properly.

I quit cold turkey and am still ashamed that it is my most played game in steam

Apple Vision Pro. It’s an amazing technical achievement. But they should be pushing out tons of immersive content to keep it interesting. It’s otherwise a great tech demo that isn’t ready for prime time. This might be different if I traveled a lot, but I stay home mostly and just use my Mac.

VR in general, there is no killer app, no thing that makes VR worth the cost. The peak of VR is probably Beat Saber. I have a quest 3 and I just use it to watch TV in bed without disturbing my wife. It’s nice having a giant video display but not useful for most people.
- The killer VR app for me is golf games. GOLF+ and Walkabout Minigolf. It's a great way for me to keep in touch with my parents who live in a different city. It's like a better version of a phone/video call every once in a while (and at $350 with the better headstrap, it's not too expensive for a present)
  
  Ironically this is where the Quest absolutely destroys the Vision Pro, which doesn't have any VR golf (or even minigolf) games as far as I can tell.
  
  VR headsets are basically multiplayer golf simulators to me. Which makes the Vision Pro a golf simulator that doesn't have golf.
- Simracing with VR is quite nice, tho. You'll never get that level of immersion with screens
- There are great VR games on PC. Problem is Meta flooded the market with their standalone headsets that can only play very simple small games, and shifted the perception that that's what VR is.
- VR had such a bright future around 2014; between VRChat, tech demos of VR browsers, big players like MS and Sony getting into VR, and generic hacks to port old games to VR, it seemed obvious that companies were going to start re-releasing old games in VR (since you couldn't run modern AAA games) and most every app would support VR and multiple users to make better use of the network effect.
  
  Except instead 99% of games released for VR were just underwhelming tech demos and the only people who pursued creating a metaverse were short-sighted, rent-seeking, cryptobro parasites.

I pre-ordered Brink.

I'm gonna be wild here and say Brink actually was fun as hell to play, but what killed it was it being so jank and being lacking in content. The parkour and gunplay was a ton of fun
- I agree; my regret comes from the fact they just killed the game instead of fixing the problems that would have made it even more fun.
Omg I remember watching those youtube trailers on repeat as a kid. It looked so cool and made so much sense to combine parkour and fps. Never got to play it though :/ I don't think I have ever been as hyped for anything after Brink.

Stalker 2.

I didnt just buy the game once, I paid for a "collectors edition" with a bunch of physical merch that I wont see until may or june. and even briefly volunteered to be a community mod. sifting through waves of hateful filth from hostile actors within the "community". there is a LOT of Russian incited hatred against the game because of the fact the game was Ukrainian

I got incredibly hyped for the game because I had been waiting for it since the late 2000s. watched it die and come back from the dead, and it looked awesome.

the sad reality was that it needed more time in the oven, and I dont think they had a choice. I think they were forced to release it in the state that it was because they couldnt afford another year of no sales and surviving off investors and pre-orders. so what we got was like a 7/10 and it needs a lot more work.

and the political situation in their country where as many as 1/3 of the staff still live and work, is tenious by the day, they are absolutely fighting World War III over there. and some countries are trying to stab them in the back, telling them to just go surrender and get murdered..

My only real gripe with it so far (only 6 hours logged because I've been waiting for improvements) is the performance. Like when I installed kcd 2 now I expected to have to go in and turn down some settings because the first one was quite heavy to run. But no, right out the box it runs amazingly on all ultra (with dlss enabled as a caveat). I'm just waiting for some random youtuber to say "oh the deva forgot to set this one flag in the level editor and now it runs three times better".

Not stuck anymore but I was for like a month. I bought Pretty Litter cause multiple drag queens I liked told me to do so. That is the worst goddamn litter I have EVER used in my life. The smell was horrendous, the dust was so so bad I actually couldn't even be in the next room when my partner did the litter because of my allergies, and our house looked like a fucking beach. Fuck those people. (And shame on me for falling for goddamn ads)

Is it for cats?
- Yeah it's marketed as being able to detect urine irregularities in cats so it changes colour with their pee. It also supposedly "locks" in the smell which, to their credit, I couldn't smell the cat shit, all I could smell was dust.
  
  It's also made of silicone which, you know, not meant to be eaten so I'm sure that's great for cats to have in the fur they clean with their mouths.
  
  I really didn't do my research on this one.

Maybe Linux, too lazy to swap back to windows, a lot of random stuff doesnt work or is super annoying to get working, like a material library addon I use for Blender doesn't work for linux apparently (sanctus) and makes it so I cant render with any light in the scene so its not just the menu but the materials themselves. I was hoping at least blender would work, already had to stop pirating houdini and I couldnt get the free version to work either.

All games have been fine, but I dont just game anymore, I like making stuff and playing with 3d tools.

At least embergen seems to work, so I might transition to jangafx over houdini, can buy it monthly and I spend way too much time learning houdini (its fun af) when im likely never making money off this hobby. (cant justify 300$ a year or 2500 perpetual rnow, its an insanely fun simulation toy so it honestly might be worth that, even not making money off it) Its just annoying, I've spent too much time learning it, my brains crammed with Houdini specific information.

like a material library addon I use for Blender doesn't work for linux apparently (sanctus) and makes it so I cant render with any light in the scene so its not just the menu but the materials themselves.

I don't even know why that wouldn't work. All my blender addons work just fine on Linux
- I had a few not install, some say that linux isnt supported in reviews and dont work like alt tab easy fog 2, and sanctus are the ones I remember off the top of my head (sanctus menu didn't work and caused blender to freeze, took me forever to realize it was soemthing I was appending that had a sanctus material causing my crash, didn't realize til I installed the addon on a fresh install and tried applying it to something getting the same issue)
- Wonder if I'm missing a dependency, no idea how to check, seems odd that the material itself wouldn't work on linux

Marriage.

Not that it was particularly hyped but I bought PS4 back in the day and just never really used it. My SO has uses it to watch netflix occasionally but that's pretty much it. The most useless purchase I've ever made.

It had some great exclusives when they were still exclusive. God of War, Spider-Man, Persona 5, Horizon, etc… Nowadays all of those are on other systems. But originally, you had to play them on PS4. The console had a wonderful library at the time, even if that has been eroded over time by the former exclusives landing on other platforms.

Crypto. I didn’t spent a ton, but I didn’t make a ton either. I’m net up now but it’s so stupid.

I made 2K on Doge a few years ago, but ever since I’m just sitting on it. It’s not a loss unless you sell.

I've been shuffling a few thousand Doge on the peaks and valleys ever since the SNL Spike. Sell a thousand at .20, buy it back at .15.

It's softened the blow, and I think overall, I am slightly ahead. (As long as it doesn't crash to 0) I've given up on the moons, but I'll keep holding and hoping it gradually climbs before it dies.

An Indigogo electric bike campaign... 10 years ago. It was a scam and I lost a lot of money. Subsequently I have built 5 e-bikes on my own and do not regret it, they are wonderful. But, no crowd-funding for me, ever again. Also, I am anti pre-ordering anything in general.

Do you have any resources on how you built said five bikes? I would love to work on something like that this spring
- Sure! It has been a couple years since my last build, but I found a lot of great information on a website called endless-sphere. I also only use a battery supplier called EM3EV - they fuse each cell and generally have great quality packs. Bikes-direct also has quality bike platforms for builds, including fat tire bikes.

I haven't been hyped for anything since Godzilla Minus One came out (which more than lived up to my expectations). I do have to live with my parents buying into the hype of owning a new home. So I'll be stuck inheriting a pile of shit that's going to be falling apart by then instead of their old house that was rock solid.

Before you end up selling the house and moving to the pile of shit, let me tell you that there's nothing wrong in living with your parents. Everyone I know at age 25 still has legal residency at their parents' house.
- What I'm saying is they sold their good old house and had a new house built that is incredibly shitty for what they paid. It's just a straight downgrade in almost every way in workmanship, materials, layout, and neighborhood. Inheriting from them is also probably the only way I'm ever going to own a home so it really frustrates me that they did that. Living with them or not won't make a difference.

Diablo 3

At launch yeah, Reaper of Souls changed it into a really good game. I spent $100 on Diablo 4 and definitely regret that.
- Path of Exile 2 blows the pants off Diablo 4
- How did Reaper of Souls fundamentally make the game better? I never played it other than the open beta back in the day. I see this all the time though.

I thought touch screens would be a fad. I dont fall for hype but thats because Im an idiot, not because Im smart.

Soon as the Gorilla Arms problems start popping up we'll see the leopards.

CGPgrey's AI and his self driving cars videos.

Definitely made some poor choices in life due to these that I could scream into a pillow. The future is always unpredictable, but while behind the scenes I'm sure a lot happened, more than a decade later the use cases are still the same - grifting.

Gold coins. I bought at the all-time high.

Life.

Got married. 0/10 would not recommend.

Tell us the tale?
- I'll spare the details and just give you the highlights:
  
  She put me through years of domestic abuse, gaslighting and manipulation
  
  She had zero regard for our family's financial future and nearly pushed us to the brink of bankruptcy
  
  She walked out on me and our son to become a literal crack removed
  
  Heed my words, dudes: if you must have a joint checking account, have your direct deposit go to an account only in your name. I didn't and she cleaned me out to buy crack.
Agreed. Last boss just kept droning on and on for a decade

Jesus, I got suckered hard by the 'elio' bullshit. When I was looking around for vehicles, the promise of a really affordable (lol, that should have been a clue) and gas efficient car was amazing. Plus, they already had a working car (lol, should've looked a little closer at those videos to see the duck tape) and were setting up their factory!

Before I gave reddit the finger, I would check in on the sub that was posting the obviously bullshit updates when they came out. There were at least a few of us who wanted to keep joking about that fucking joke.

Humble Bundle. Twice now, I've subscribed for a month and forgot to unsubscribe until after I got billed for the next month.

Done it successfully for a single month many times, so overall I'd still say I'm ahead, lol

I always immediately unsubscribe. Can always resubscribe. (I never did.)
- Yeah, I should subscribe, redeem, and unsubscribe in one session...ah well.

Anthem

I fell for New World myself.

Even played the beta and saw how empty it was, but nope I continued on.
It still hurts
- I know brother. My Barney themed tank was left to forever remain in stasis out there in the bits and bytes.

The Fediverse (turns and exposes bare back)

the thin plucked eyebrows (2000s).. I'm now trans masc and wish i had them back lol

Chia cryptocurrency. My dad got into it, and the price was mooning. Gave me an excuse to build a new PC and learn linux, so I thought it was a worthwhile investment. Sunk a decent chunk of change into hard drives that I still have laying around, but I'm using several of them and have a sweet gaming rig that I would've built eventually anyway and had something to talk to my dad about. So basically, just out the cost of some drives. All in all, it was a calculated risk that didn't pay off but was still fun.

Retro handhelds.

Clearly Canadian. It came back from the dead and pre-ordered ordered 2 cases while they were getting set up. Never showed up and their support staff kept putting me off.

I would absolutely buy orbitz if they remade them even though they were mostly garbo.

Tarkov.

When I was a young idiot, I really thought Clonaid was gonna be a thing. I guess I thought it was plausible because I grew up reading a fuckton of scifi and Dolly the Sheep had been born a couple years prior. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ceramic pans. Thankfully I only bought one.

Chain link (LINK) crypto.

Should have stuck with Dogecoin.

Your mom

Our mom. Why deny our Alabama living?
- In this economy it's nice to share innit

Two factor authentication.

Multi-factor authentication is a good thing. Trust me, you will regret not using it way more.
- Unless you're only using SMS MFA and get SIM swapped...or whatever it's called.