tiredofsametab

I’m a US citizen and my wife is not. My grandparents are not long for this world. If one of them pass, I will be going to the US alone because I am terrified my wife, who speaks little English, will end up in some ICE camp. It’s horrifying and heartbreaking.

I’m somewhat glad my news diet never told me he went maga as I haven’t heard of him in ages. In other news, given his hometown, upbringing, and -er- success(?) I am not at all surprised

I worked in the MMO industry and played a lot of them, including ones I didn’t want to (and some that never saw the light of day or folded almost immediately). The last one I kept playing was Rift: Planes of Telara and, when they did an overhaul of stuff, I couldn’t be bothered to learn all the new stuff and just quit. That was probably 15ish years ago at this point. It also kinda ruined a lot of gaming for me for years. I do play games again now, and I do sometimes feel the itch for an MMO, but I haven’t played one again.

Mine have generally been mentioned. In my early 20s in the early 2000s. Got into the ancient aliens stuff briefly.

Believed in supernatural and past life stuff for a good bit.

By the mid-2000s, having “pulled myself out of poverty” (I didn’t do it on my own; I had help and support for family after having been homeless at one point) and gotten a salaried job, started listening to rightwing radio hosts. Thought I just needed to work a bit harder and success would come. All the other people were lazy and social programs were bad with the possible exception of something like WIC. Nah, I was just fairly lucky to have survived some stupid situations, had help from family, and was generally just way too entitled and thinking I was special. I was fairly insufferable for a good while.

That could be me. I swapped christianity for the burgeoning new-age and neopagan stuff that was having a moment.

Thanks for the advice; I’ll check into that. It’s probably 6 meters at most if I run the cable behind things. My keyboard and mouse might work but it might be tight depending upon which version of bluetooth their dongles run (I don’t have bluetooth on the motherboard).

I haven’t gotten this yet. Not sure if my TV is too old (2017 IIRC) or because I’m in Japan. I plan to just move my current PC into the living room when I can afford to upgrade but RAM prices just went nuts and video cards are still very expensive here (relative to wages but also because PC gaming is a niche hobby). I hate it.

I have lots of acquaintances and people with whom I’m friendly but few real friends… And I think that’s fine. I’ve never felt the need to spend tons of time around others or have tons of friends.

The getting off the internet thing is good. Usergroups and meetups can be a great place if you need socialization.

I’m old enough to have not had a ton of friends before the internet.

Option 3: we don’t buy any trees.

For the umpteenth time, my name’s not Steve! /s

Throw the book at everyone in the entire chain that planned and executed this.

This was indeed me for the last 20ish years. STAR voting or similar now, plz (and an end to gerrymandering)

I’ve been in Japan a decade and don’t recall ever seeing one of these. It says ネコ飛出し注意 cat jumping out caution.

I had a lot of issues growing up. Neurodivergent kid in rural Ohio in the '80s, lots of conservative people around, abusive people in my family making stuff hard for much of my young childhood, and a number of other things. I wanted the same thing anyone joining a gang wants, really. Acceptance, feeling like I belong, and feeling like I was fighting something or for something better.

I came from a place where I, very much without knowing it, was very entitled and privileged. I was kept away from others a lot as a kid (lived with my grandparents for a bit and wasn’t allowed to play with the other neighbors (who were in my class) because they were not white. Other perspectives were few and far between when and where I grew up. There are some other reasons that there were huge gaps in my critical thinking and bullshit detection (partly due to not questioning people in power and getting heavily punished when I did). I got taken advantage of a lot when I first got out on my own and had to basically do a lot of lessons that most kids/teens learned as an adult with much more dire consequences.

I felt like I was working hard and that others’ failures were because they didn’t work hard enough (and that I didn’t work hard enough when I was failing). In reality, a lot of people attribute way too much of their success to their own skill not luck and circumstance. At the same time I was thinking other people were lazy, I was also helped by some of my family through some financial hard times more than once (though I was briefly homeless another time). I came to realize, as I met more and varied people, that some of the hardest workers I knew were getting fucked over. Two jobs, caring deeply about their families, and barely able to tread water to support themselves and those that relied on them.

Contradictions between people claiming to be christians and anything that christ would have done. People thinking they were holy and great for holding some coat drive and stuff, but any tax dollars for a safety net were just terrible and those people were just going to spend it on drugs. People who kept pulling up every bit of safety because “fuck you, I’ve got mine”, for lack of a better term was just more and more visible when I looked at what was going on. Also being out on my own and working when 9/11 happened and the crazy amounts of hate and racism that followed that. I slowly started actually seeing all of these things, losing that entitlement, not othering people, and realizing things for what they were. I traveled to other places, saw other ways of life. The early internet and chatting people from around the world via IRC and the like also played a role in that.

Living as a minority in another country (I moved to Japan in my early 30s), getting randomly stopped and searched, struggling to find housing, and other things also cemented many of the other things I had already been learning. I am a deeply empathetic person, but I had always assumed that everyone was acting in good faith in a lot of situations and that merit would see me treated “properly”. That’s not the reality. The reality is that people are messy and flawed, that people are mostly good but often wary. This can manifest as racism in the guise of “protecting our culture and way of life” where those others getting stopped and searched (often in front of their communities, peers, clients, etc. who have no idea what is going on and assume the worst) was just a mild inconvenience. That experience in particular showed me exactly what white, male privilege in the US was. I could never see it clearly since I always had it.

This is a very long and rambling response. I guess the TL;DR would be seeing my own entitlement and privilege, realizing that people in power and authority often don’t get there through merit and/or hard work alone (if at all), and generally getting more experience and seeing and experiencing inequity.

The good news, I guess, is that people can get better. I was one of those people who moved further right in young adulthood. I’m glad the social media and such didn’t exist then as I was not equipped to handle that by my upbringing and would have fallen right into that trap. We just had Limbaugh and Beck and the like. At some point, I pulled a 180 and, now in my mid-40s, find myself probably somewhere around center-left to left as most western European countries might define that.

I doubt it purely because the resistance to any form of functional national ID there with the party in power traditionally being the ones that oppose it. Crazier things have happened, though.

US -> Japan. Mostly, I miss family. I have basically no love for the area in which I grew up nor contact with anyone there (half my family never lived there, the other half moved to another state).

I do miss some foods that are hard to find or very expensive here. Things like PC parts are (or at least were) much cheaper in the US since it was generally a niche hobby device outside of business use here until quite recently.

We don’t have that problem and have a water heater (not tankless). I think they just do something different with the plumbing here in Japan most of the time.

The nazis used a variety of orientations of the symbol.