FraidyBear

As someone that grew up in the 90s watching NASCAR Dale was also hella legit. He hated the Confederate flag and was quoted as saying, “racism is a moral commitment to ignorance.” I miss when rednecks understood the fight and also hated cops. Now they suck and give the rest of us a bad name.

If anyone in your family starting at like your second cousin and closer have already done DNA testing then the cats outta the bag on worrying about your privacy.

So so incredibly true. I provide Admin support for folks that want to publish apps with Apple and let me tell you, it’s the wild fuckin west out there and I’m not even talking about the coding part which I’m sure is a hellscape if my side of things is anything to go by.

Mom and pop got an app idea for passive income so they just hire a company to publish it for then, usually from India, with devs who can’t put two and two together because they work for assholes that want apps pumped out asap. They don’t want critical thinkers, they don’t want knowledgeable employees, what they want are tons of employees they can take advantage of as cheaply as possible that can do a good enough job to stay afloat and make them money. These guys know basic code and nothing else nor do they seem to want to know how to actually manage a development team, they seem like they are under a lot of pressure. I personally don’t actually code or know how to code outside of basic HTML Myspace bullshit but I do know how to get shit published and I know how to get the apps ready for publishing. I know these things because our guides are massive and massively detailed with screenshots to help you out and yet I’m busier than ever. 90% of my job outside of the admin and fraud prevention work I have to do is sitting on the phone reading instructions word for word or copying and pasting it from the guides for people who should be able to understand the content, but they don’t.

Imo as someone that’s been doing this for 5 years now, it’s a bubble and she’s ready to burst. It’ll be another .com crash that we’ll all pretend we didn’t see coming.

Imo blurring genderlines and rendering them useless as a meaningful measure of power is precisely why so many in power now don’t want the gender/trans movement to gain any traction. If people were to realize that gender truly was nothing more than your outward appearance and did not in any way impact someone’s ability to gain power, knowledge, or success then we could end up with a WOMAN in powerful positions or even worse the women could actually start to gain allies with the power to change things when former white cishet male presenting people who still speak with their white cishet friends about all the I justices women face start to get outraged on their friends behalf.

I’m neridivergent and have issues with misophonia. Your description of listening to people eat was spot on. Hearing people chew food or smack gum makes me want to smack the gum the fuck up out of their mouth. I like these people but the reaction that misophonia causes in me feels barely containable. I’ve had to walk away from people to collect myself or have someone else help customers because of the physical and psychological reaction it causes. It feels violent and torturous. I also have this same reaction to kids and babies being loud or crying. Yes, your crotch goblin is cute. Yes, I recognize that they are kids and these things aren’t controllable. But that doesn’t stop me from having serious sound stimulation overloads that bring me to the brink of sanity, that’s not controllable either no matter how much I wish it was. .

OP, best way to deal with it if it is a misophonia issue is to carry around ear plugs or do what I do and get some nice noise cancelling earbuds. If you’re in a situation that you cant use these things, like a family gathering of people who won’t understand what you’re going through, take frequent breaks. Go outside, go take a breather on the bathroom, talk with someone you trust and see if they will step aside with you for a bit because I’m 100% sure there are others there that don’t want to hear the kids being loud.

The folks around me just used the factory settings on most of theirs. Mines SlytherLAN and GryffWANdor with the guest network set as Hufflepuff-puff-pass.

The American Genocide

FFXIV

I don’t PVP so I can’t speak to that but the lore and PVE is solid. Gameplay is very classic MMO. The releases continue to be ranked and reviewed higher with each one that comes out. Players are strongly encouraged to help new players (sprouts) via the mentoring program. Community has been so good, very helpful, never seen anyone rage or get angry at a new person, or anyone for that matter. Very LGBTQ+ friendly. TONS of fun stuff to do on the side between chapters like glamour or housing for folks that want a chill experience or you can do savage raids or hunts for the more hardcore game play focused players. Me and a friend love to just run around to all the apartments and houses to check out everyone’s place from time to time. Some are really amazing. I’ll throw mine and my buddy’s apartment in that ring we put a lot of work in and did some really cool tricks to make the space feel bigger and more unique. Some people turn their houses into cafes or dance clubs, some require RPing when you visit some don’t. They are pretty fun to go to. From time to time they’ll have giveaways for gill or items at the parties.

BONUS: It’s totally free up to level 70 so you have plenty of time to figure out if the game is for you.

I’m not playing right now, taking a quick break but I’m in the NA server Sargatanas. The name is Obi-Bun Kenobi, I think I have the address to my place in my Adventurer Plate. I leave the apartment unlocked so people can use it for g-posing or just to have a nice place to hang. Come check it out sometime!

Fuckin preach. I’m 33 and have spent the last 8 years in near total isolation because I simply do not have time for anything other than work, chores, feed and bathe myself (if I have time), sleep. That’s it. It’s deepening my depression and sense of total desperation in ways that I’d never imagined. But hey, at least my company is making billions because that’s the truly important part. I’m ready to just say fuck it and go the way of Gen Z. I’ve saved and saved and worked my ass off, played by the rules, got my degree and it’s all been for nothing. I still have nothing. In fact I literally have less than when I was in my 20s. There’s nothing I can do to stop another economic crisis and I’m no where near having enough to survive one so fuck it. I’m ready to just do what I want and if that gets me fired or Im in debt because I finally decided to just take the hit and travel wherever I want then so be it. There’s nothing we can do, we’re on the ride, the clicking of the chains has already started and we are buckled in. Time to just enjoy what we can I guess, even if it sucks the entire time.

That’s so interesting! I didn’t know that Brazil was also a “United States.”

I wish that there was a name for US Citizens in the same way but with English being such a shit show combination of too many different languages, I don’t know if that’ll be possible. The only way I see it happening is if the US just “adopts” a word from someone else’s culture, that’s usually how English gets a new word or term.

There’s not a clear and conscience alternative to “American.” If you’re trying to differentiate us from other people from the Americas you’d just say US Citizen. And while yes the entirety of this hemisphere is some variation of America be it North, Central, or South the other countries here have distinct names and we really don’t.

At the risk of sounding like a typical US asshole, here goes nothing. This is how I’ve explained it to friends from Europe and it seemed to help.

If Brazil had decided to go by the name “United States of Brazil” we would still call them Brazilians because there is another country with the title “United States” that also exists. Similar to how we call people from the Peoples Republic of China, Chinese. We don’t call them “People’s Republicans” because that’s a title not a unique identifier or name. What if that same country decided to go by the name the Peoples Republic of Asia instead, would we call them Peoples Republicans or would we call them Asians?

The title “United States” is telling you that this area is united together and the borders represent states, not country’s. “America” tells you where those united states are, the continent of America. The term “American” is generalized and honestly doesn’t accurately represent the vast cultural differences within the United States. The states often have their own rights and laws separate from the US government and also unique cultures. Ideally we would be called by our states name for its citizens like Californian or New Yorker, for example. Similar to how you would refer to people from Europe as European unless you wanted to be specific to Italy, then you’d say Italian. But sometimes you need a general term, hence “American.”

All that being said, it is problematic and a massive reminder of this country’s bloodthirsty and genocidal colonization of a large part of North America. Looking at the country’s past shows that they were very much trying to also get central and south America as part of the United States. What better way to propagandize and make it look like they had every right to the rest of the Americas than to make it appear as though this country or that country already was America and therefore should be part of these United States? But however problematic it is this is the name we have now, for better or worse.

As an addendum of sorts. We Indigenous Americans would often much rather be called by the names of our sovereign Nations yet everyone calls us Native American. Why is that? Food for thought that might help with understanding the problematic struggle we have here. It’s not simply us as citizens that perpetuate the issue, it’s a global colonization effort whether the others realize they are participating or not. (Spoiler: they realize)

tldr: because colonization + United States is a title not a name