I got a used car at the end of 2022. I am just now accepting the fact that it was a stupid decision. I'm already upside down on the loan and now the turbo is having issues that may be costly to repair. I'm wanting to move soon to a place where I won't need a car anymore, but now I'm realizing selling it isn't going to be quite as straight forward as I initially thought.
I didn't really find out until I was in my early 20s. I had a close and sometimes intense relationship with my best friend who I met at college. We spent a ton of time alone together, opened up to each other about things we'd never talked about with anyone else in our lives, and had one or two dramatic "friend breakups" before making up again and coming back to our friendship. It took both of us two or three years of this before we realized that this was more than just bros being bros, but that we had real romantic feelings for each other. We confessed our feelings for each other after experimenting with cuddling in a hammock on a hiking trip together and wound up as boyfriends for about a year.
I had a lot of confusion about my identity around that time and didn't really know what to call myself, but I eventually settled on bisexual cis male.
TL;DR You're definitely not the only one. I had to drop out of college because of my toxic family and spend 3 years afterwards wafting around with no purpose and no will to live. But I figured things out and am doing much better now. If my dumb ass can pull it off, you can too.
The year I was in college, and the few years after I dropped out. I went to school as a music education major. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, and with how active I was in my high school's orchestra program most of my family and teachers really pushed me to pursue a career in music. The idea of trying to survive as a gigging musician was honestly a little terrifying, so I decided to major in music education instead of music performance since being a teacher seemed like the more stable route. Turns out I hate kids. Who woulda thunk it?
I went to college in my hometown, so I stayed home instead of living on campus. I lived with my mom and sister who were both alcoholics with bipolar disorder. Plus, music ed is apparently a pretty busy major. So I would have 12 hours worth of classes and assisting student teachers that I wasn't particularly enjoying, just to come home and break up a fist fight and then (try to) go to sleep in a room with a gaping hole in the ceiling that all of the roaches that infested the walls would enter the rest of the house through.
Needless to say, this environment was not conducive to succeeding in school. I lost my academic scholarship. Previously, that was enough to pay for all of my schooling, but without it I'd have to take out loans every semester just to finish a major that I didn't even know if I wanted to do anymore and there was no way in hell I was doing that. So I dropped out and started working while volunteering with the university symphony, until I got a new job with a new schedule that meant I had to stop playing with them. It was an Amazon fulfillment center. Feel free to google that to see why I only lasted a few weeks. I lost touch with the few friends I made in college, I had a falling out with the closest friend I ever had, I now officially had no purpose in life since I wasn't able to do anything with music, and had no plan for getting myself out of my abusive and toxic home life.
That period was rough, but I eventually made it out of there. Long story short, I was able to do warehouse work until I could move out, I did a 3 month program at a community college to get some IT certifications, and now I make $70k/yr to work from home doing tech support for robots with plans to finally move out of my home town later this year.
Pretty great actually! I just signed the offer letter for a new job and will turn in my notice at my current job later today. I've also been reconnecting with some old friends and was able connect some of them back with each other too. I stayed up a little late playing some games with them last night. It was great hearing everyone goofing around together again, it almost felt llike no time had passed at all
I hope everything goes well during the visit! If she's supportive, that's already a great sign. Constantly explaining things can get exhausting after a while, but it's definitely easier to handle when those questions are asked in good faith.
I hope you don't mind me asking, but as someone who is really considering moving to Portland from the deep south, how is it? It seems like a really fun city, but it's hard to sift through the propaganda with it being such a target for conservative media.
It's gotten a lot better. I've been getting back in to the game with some friends of mine lately. We do encounter bots every now and then, but one of two things happen. Either it's a single bot that's kicked pretty quickly, or a few bots join at once and we just queue up for another server. Either way, it doesn't happen that often and we can still have a good time playing in pubs. If you play community servers, bots are basically non-existent. Definitely worth giving it another shot if you're at all interested in playing again, the new summer update just dropped a few days ago!
Tacos for sure. Throw your choice of meat (I prefer chicken), chopped cilantro, and some diced onion in a corn tortilla, then squeeze a slice of lime on top. It's very possible you'll need two tortillas per taco for some extra structural integrity depending on how much meat you put in there, but either way you'd definitely want to lightly toast those tortillas on a pan for a minute or so on each side before assembling the tacos to kick it up a notch.
As a bonus, chips with guacamole is a great side for this that's similarly easy to throw together. An avocado or two, lime juice, and some salt and pepper is all you need, plus your tortilla chips of choice.
It depends. During the work week, I'm awake before I've developed an appetite and settle for a banana and a coffee. Specifically cold brew espresso with a splash of whole milk and a scoop of chocolate flavored whey protein powder.
On the weekends though, I wait until 10 or 11 before I eat so I can savor a bigger meal. Typically bacon, eggs, and some diced red potatoes all cooked in the same cast iron pan. If I'm feeling frisky, I might whip up some French toast or pancakes as a side.
Congrats! That's a huge step.
Alcoholism kind of runs in my family. Frankly, alcohol caused enough problems in my life long before I ever had a single sip of it myself which turned me off from drinking for a very long time. I've occasionally drank as an adult, but recently a close family member went through some serious health problems because of alcohol and it was just the final straw for me. I don't know exactly how long it's been since I've had a drink, but it's been a few months and I just don't have any desire to change that right now.
I never had problems controlling my own drinking, but I don't want to risk going down a bad path by turning it into a habit. Seeing the people I love get affected by this poison just makes me question why it's such an acceptable substance to abuse in our society.
Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I've sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I'm not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn't engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.
My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps
I think it's a great idea. Using melodies from other songwriters/composers has been a part of the western music tradition for centuries: Brahms writing his Academic Festival Overture with melodies from a bunch of drinking songs, Tchaikovsky using both the Russian and French national anthems in the 1812 Overture, both Brahms and Rachmaninoff having pieces titled Variations on a Theme by Paganini, basically the entire history of Jazz music, half of the discography of Led Zeppelin, etc. It seems the logical continuation of this tradition in the digital age would be make samples or sound libraries available for other artists to use. Music is the most collaborative form of art after all, and copyright laws only serve to hinder that while enriching a select few -- with those few very infrequently being the actual artists.
Quick plug for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who released their album Polygondwanaland for free, including the vinyl masters. So anyone who wanted to could press their own vinyl of the album with their own album art and even create their own music videos. There were a ton of small record labels who made their own prints with super cool designs.
I have a few from playing with friends a few years back. But my favorite is when I accidentally made a dick castle.
Generally my method of building castles is finding a nice big hill or cliff, plopping a few towers along the top, and then connecting them up with a big wall. If it was big enough, it'd be an open court yard in the middle. But in this case, it was just a long hallway connecting 3 towers, with the main tower overlooking a sheer cliff face into the plains below. Majestic, glorious, the perfect spot.
My friend had been heckling me about how the shape was a little phallic, but I scoffed at his observations. After a week of building this thing, and finally getting the roof done over the hallway connecting the towers, my friend made a map. And I could deny it no longer. I spent a week constructing a giant cock n balls, with the head threateningly pointed at the village to the east. The map remained proudly displayed in the entryway to our shared base just south of my castle. To a 15 year old, this was peak comedy.
Later my friend burned it down. I still bring up this betrayal to him sometimes.
Much better. I've seen maybe 2 bots in the past month or so and they were kicked pretty quickly
In the meat industry, animal suffering is not the goal. The goal is to deliver as much product (food in this case) to the consumer as cheaply as possible. Animal suffering is a byproduct of this because on a large enough scale, both the consumer and the capitalists running the slaughterhouses are far enough removed from the animals that they don't have to confront the moral questions of what they're putting these animals through.
I agree that it's still a disgusting practice, but it's not the same thing as deliberately harming animals for your own amusement. In the meat industry, some people can hand-wave those moral concerns away by saying to themselves "at least the animals died for something good: to feed countless families". Whether you agree with that reasoning or not (which, for the record, I do not), that same person can't use that excuse in the case of these monkeys. It's just pointless suffering for the amusement of a handful of psychopaths.
Definitely glasses. I tried contacts when I was younger. It took the eye doctor about 15 minutes to put on my trial set of contacts for me and I was very concerned about how the hell we were going to get them back out. I tried to put them in by myself in the mornings before school for about a week and couldn't get them in once. So I gave up.
Shame, because I feel like I look better without my glasses. But oh well
These sorts of proposals always seem biased toward white collar work. If you can accomplish all of your work for the day in 4 hours and spend the rest of the day "sitting in cafes arguing about politics" then that's great for you, but wouldn't someone need to work in that cafe to bring you the coffee? And if more people are going to be going to cafes, wouldn't those workers need to work even harder? And wouldn't the people who harvest the coffee beans and the people who ship those beans halfway across the world and the people who inventory these shipments and divide them up across multiple retail spaces based on demand all still need to work the exact same amount, if not more? To me, it seems like blue collar or retail workers will get the short end of the stick while the people with bullshit jobs that contribute nothing to society get rewarded with even more free time. But of course that's nothing new. People with essential jobs have always been the first ones to get shafted.
This guy: "Oh gee golly, all of this pretending to work all day sure is hard. I wish I had more free time :( " The girl bringing him coffee who makes minimum wage and just learned she'll need to work a double shift today and will now need to make arrangements to have her kid picked up from day care: "Wow that must be super hard, I literally cannot imagine having to deal with that"
I don't know man, I'm not going to pretend I have any better ideas but we need to start framing these things better. Obviously I would love for all workers to have as much free time as possible, but when people keep talking about work in terms of "going to pointless meetings all day" or "typing stuff into spreadsheets" then it's hard to take their ideas seriously.