Yo, is it really so inappropriate?

No, nobody actually cares. Lefties are really, really good at creating things to scold other lefties about.

Also, backing up the request to check sources. Some data just asks if you live in an “owned home” and a vast number of young people are just living with their families and parents now through adulthood. That counts to some surveys as “owning a home.”

I think a lot of the sentiment comes from the absurd difficulty in getting there and maintaining it now. Single-salary home ownership is just dead and buried for the middle-class and even with more than one person working full-time, it’s a grinding slog to make monthly payments and expensive upkeep that never ends.

We should all argue about it.

The process is weeding out everyone who feels awkward about self-promotion or being pushy, which is a shame since that also weeds out a lot of fantastic candidates. I’m sure upper-level management doesn’t care, but in the trenches I much rather have people who are experts at their work or are smart and can get the work done than outgoing business-speakers who like to be seen and heard.

But that can’t be changed. We have to adapt and learn to be at least a little pushy and get out of our comfort zones.

Okay, some things have improved.

Every time I’m at an airport I’m just struck at how much it’s changed since I was young.

In the olden days, it was like a big, clean bus station, people were free and happy and kids were running around, no barriers or guardrails anywhere. Now it feels like a funeral procession getting on a plane with the amount of searching and scanning and poking and prodding and massive walls of rules being posted about what you can’t do or say and one-way labyrinths of security hell.

I lead and manage a financial/tech team in a critical, well-established company.

I haven’t had a pay raise in 2 years and still work hourly.

It wasn’t always like this, the last several years have really, really escalated the global undercurrent of hate towards employees. I feel like every single meeting in not just this company but many others (I have eyes in other places) always report “exceeding financial projections” while at the same time scaling back benefits, hiring and wages. Many other companies I’ve watched get digested by private equity after faking their own value, so it’s basically every business-owner’s goal right now to get bought out for millions and leave the employees stranded.

For that matter, I have years of experience in this industry as well as experience managing, using the tools and software, and doing somewhat specialized analysis work, and it still took almost two years unemployed after my last position got gutted just to land this job and it took twisting the arms of contacts and acquaintances.

During those two years I exhausted every avenue and encountered more scams and ghost-jobs than I can count.

Lemmy, I know you really don’t want to hear this, but if you’re not actively making contacts, playing the game and being social, your chances of getting a job that doesn’t involve a you wearing an apron and name-tag and cutting you off at 39 hours a week is fucking abysmal. You have to exercise muscles you didn’t know you had if you want to land a stable job even adjacent to your actual qualifications.

Degrees, certifications, etc. are still important, but it’s bare-minimum, hiring managers broadly are looking for people with enough experience (or can fake having experience) that they don’t need as much training and people who are social and friendly enough that they feel “at ease” bringing new people in, because so many of them have been directed to keep costs as low as possible. So much of this shit is vibes-based right now.

She was promising my brother that she was “in love” with him and that she wasn’t in fact, dating multiple men from other countries at the same time. (Spoiler: she was seeing multiple men from other countries.) But he didn’t even want to be with her, so I guess he chose to overlook suspicious behavior. She started asking him for large sums of money to help with kids she suddenly revealed she had the moment he got back to the states. It was a weird fucking trainwreck, not helped by the fact that he was deep down the manosphere of insecurity and thought “western women weren’t subservient enough.”

He got eventually went crazy and took a weapon to a school to “secure mates” and went to jail and shit fell apart even worse from there.

The moment your culture makes you feel any kind of superiority or entitlement to make others feel bad it becomes a problem, no matter the source of those feelings or who it’s directed at.

Have a sibling like this. They went to Thailand and shacked up with a scammer for a few months, did the whole thing where he promises to take care of her, fled to the US and ghosted her. Just scum preying on scum and ending as classlessly as you could expect.

That became his whole identity for years. “When I traveled in Asia…”

Bruh, you traveled from your bungalow that our dad paid for to the beach and back every day while contracting god-knows-what from someone you said had a “prostitute’s black book” in her handbag but you explained it as “she’s very social.”

Context mattered in about 1998 but no later than that after the information age started dividing all our perspectives into atomized and subjective views of the world!

FTFY

Cast iron is overrated.

Everything is.

I like cast-iron just because the nature of what you cook in it means you don’t have to scrub it in a sink after. Wipe it out with a cloth or some paper towels and back up in the cupboard. And doing this makes it better not worse. It’s convenience more than anything.

Or stop leaving them out when guests come over. And also, get new friends.

I don’t even know where they spread his ashes so that’s a real accomplishment.

Great then, you are a shining example of what I’m talking about. You can adapt and you can be who you need to be when you need to be it.

If having the label as an identity gives you comfort and you’re happy with it, then there’s no issue. But a lot of people aren’t happy and are actually more scared of change than remaining alone and unhappy. The world demands that we put ourselves into it and gives us what we put into it, and life demands that we have social connections. All muscles that can be developed and stretched no matter what you call yourself.

these games

If you’re talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don’t think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.

Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to “adult zelda” but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it’s expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.

Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.

Butt stuff I assume.

Is it working for you?

I do believe we need gun controls, strict federal systems to track and manage people who shouldn’t have guns, all the authoritarian nightmare stuff to gun nuts. It would sting at first and people would worry, and I wouldn’t want to see it under the current leadership, but that’s what instills some level of societal respect for a thing. A generation later and suddenly everyone treats guns a lot more seriously, because humans are adaptable. That’s just a whole other massive can of worms, but I am glad that at least out of all this recent fascist takeover that it finally spurred a segment of the left to finally start arming up. I don’t want an armed revolution or standoff, but I don’t like the memes of how “easy” it would be for orcs to raid the villages and wipe out the enemy.

I’m not convinced it wasn’t just stupidity on their part.

I think I’ve learned to dance in the space that lay between stupid reactions to feelings and deeply-planned chess games, for the sake of understanding how large groups of people behave and operate.

I don’t think there was or is a single intelligent individual in the Trump administration, but if you get enough people together under a momentum of energy and fear and the power-rush of feeling invulnerable, I think they’re going to instinctively learn they need to whip out their sword and wave it around when they feel backed into a corner. At that time, a lot of fascists suddenly were worried they were going to get thrown in jail the moment Biden took over. (Sidenote: every single one of those fucks should have been thrown in jail.) It was an unplanned, unfocused display of power. Like a group of militants firing all their guns into the air, somewhere between rage and celebration. They had an idea that they were doing something extreme by egging the crowd on, maybe some had this idea forged ahead of time in the back of their mind that they could “use” the crowd to exert pressure but I doubt they really planned it until they got up there and Trump seemed to want to do it. It was a half-assed mess but it proved a point, which side you should be scared of on a basic, physical level. Political capital, original flavor.

I’m done waxing poetic about our political woes. Thank you for listening and understanding.