First partner is fine.

If you’re really concerned about security, you should know people can often crack this one pretty easily if you have public social media accounts. It depends on how much you have at stake. I don’t think it would matter for your Netflix password, but if it’s an investment account with tens of thousands of dollars or more, you should be aware that “hacking” is really just a very organized process of digging into data leaks and social media accounts to scrub as much information about a target as possible.

To this end, your childhood friend should be (237#0Je<-)Banana39999_willywarmer, and the street you grew up on is Jupiter’s radiation belt.

The best example of how the world has changed and changed us is by rewatching The West Wing. A show that if aired today, would probably end up with the production studio burned down.

Hyper-individualism is a much more modern idea that may have its roots in our founding but it was exploited by capitalism during the post-war financial boom last century.

Before we had media showing us “how it should be” families lived together throughout their lives, communities helped each other and American towns pulled together and helped each other in a variety of ways. The whole idea of single-family homes was invented by the housing industry to get people to buy three to four times as many homes. To sell this they started leaning harder into the idea that you’re the protagonist, you specifically, you are special just for being American, you are special for wanting your own things (that are advertised to you) and so on.

And before industrialized America and throughout the last several hundred MILLENNIA we were a communal species, it’s why we have so much contradictory hard-wiring that influences how we feel about our social standing, about other people’s feelings towards us, why there are so many people who latch onto authoritarians and fear strangers. These are ideas that run in direct opposition to “rugged individualism” and they are clear signs we’re not living the way we’ve been designed by literally millions of years of evolution.

Capitalism has pried apart the very fabric of our species and weaponized it.

If you’re going to use a movie to deliver populism and morality, it better be a good movie or you’re just handing ammunition to the world’s worst piles of shit.

We need to all collectively admit to ourselves that Superman is tired and over and from a different world. We can write new stories that will connect with and give hope to a far more apathetic and cynical population.

It’s entirely demographical.

I was unemployed for a while when private equity butchered the company I was manager at, at some point I spent about a week playing as dedicatedly as some of the younglings and I got really good, really fast, but the moment I had to get back to the grind I fell off again.

You simply cannot compete with kids who’s primary concern in life is if their mom will keep paying for their ChatGTP subscription to do their homework for them when you have bills and family and medical procedures and loans and thousands of ropes of responsibility pulling you in different directions. You simply will not compete with people who can play several hours a day when you only get weekend nights, when you’re already exhausted and just want to sleep anyway.

Yah, we shouldn’t hold our breath since every media organization are commercial entities and owned by people with agendas towards profit and holding particular narratives. Media is not only complicit in our current state of American decline, they’re largely the instigators.

Network news. Social media. Youtube pundits and streamers. Movies and television. Magazines and print media. Radio and podcasts.

These are all tools to deliver propaganda and the ones with the most money have the most stake in maintaining their profit margins and relationships with other corporations.

Also, we do not have an “opposition party” anymore, if we ever did at all. It’s all WWE spectacle to hook viewers on drama and narratives.

Reading is the metric, but the implications are so much worse.

This isn’t about if someone can read articles and get facts, even literate people don’t do that.

The problem is that reading comprehension is directly tied to one’s ability to comprehend, manage and categorize information in one’s brain. When you learn to read, you teach your brain to take complex ideas information and organize them into manageable sets and abstractions using language.

When you don’t have this “enhancement” to your internal dialogue and cognition, you don’t have a rich inner-voice if any at all, and you just go along with whatever you feel and whatever story is provided to you.

Make no mistake, the destruction of our education was deliberate and planned and it’s working exactly as intended. If we try to organize and even get budgets passed to increase our education capacity, our teacher’s pay, our textbooks and schools and so on, we will still be fighting far more wealthy organizations and corporations who want a population that stares transfixed at shows about people buying things.

One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for… well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.

I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.

The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.

Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.

You likely hold many such superficial judgements, we all do about something or other. I don’t think I would frame it as “mental illness” without expecting a lot of pushback from such an inflammatory statement. Normal, healthy people make judgements all day long based on the most superficial of ideas and perceptions, the question is how much you personally care.

If it’s strangers on the internet you’re just bullshitting with, I can’t imagine caring about how some stranger perceives you. But these things can become self-harmful if you’re genuinely trying to be heard and understood about something that’s important to you. If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media (including forums like this) I’m sure you’ve seen this play out over and over, where people end up deeply stressed because they’re talking past each other and dismissing each other’s actual feelings about things that are important to each other.

This is what I decry, the lack of effort to be heard about important ideas, even if subjectively important, we’re all collectively really neglecting effort and embracing anti-intellectual catchphrases (just put the X in the bag, the curtains were just blue, I ain’t readin all that, etc.) and making our lack of effort to communicate other people’s problem when it goes wrong.

If you think none of this matters, end up in a role of responsibility and have to spend a month interviewing people for a role of great responsibility and sifting through the masses of young people who make zero effort and feel entitled to rewards for it.

It absolutely makes my day that you think this is a fight. Have fun out there.

You don’t have to agree with me, the topic is about people generally and their perceptions, if this wasn’t something shared by a number of people this wouldn’t be a post. You can disagree with me all you want, you will still encounter people who will judge in different ways depending on how you present yourself online. If you don’t like it, go change the world.

Sure, and I do, but anime profile pics come with extra baggage and we all know it.

Do you think this is a shouting match?

Then congratulations, now instead of engaging and interacting it’s just an immature schoolyard shouting match which could have been avoided by taking more care in how you present yourself.

But I am gathering that there are a lot of people who really enjoy schoolyard shouting matches and invite them because it makes them feel superior to fight others over trivial nonsense.

The topic is about the perceptions of others, it’s not deep to you but someone else might read into, particularly if you find yourself having a serious (deep) conversation and don’t want to be judged unfairly. If you don’t care about your self-presentation or how to manage the impressions others have of you, then great, no need to even comment here.

If you do care, and yes you do, then think about it from someone else’s perspective.

This “the curtains were just blue” or the “just put the X in the bag” anti-thinking mentality is eroding our whole world. Try to avoid doing that.

Yah but we quickly all learn to just avoid tankie communities.

I used to shake my fist at how many people had really shitty hand-drawn furry profile pics and often made the judgement that they drew furry shit just because it’s harder to draw people’s faces.

Now I instantly praise anyone who has any kind of low-quality but obviously non-AI made imagery on display to the world. I don’t care if it’s ball-point pen on lined notebook paper. You rock on with that artistic bravery king or queen.

If you witness that kind of exchange taking place, you can probably toss the entire convo out.

Although, I would lean more towards the furry pic than the anime pic, at least furries are largely autistic adults who consume a ton of information and may have more educated opinions on some topics. At least from my experience working adjacent to the tech sector.

Whereas a suspiciously large percentage of people who choose anime profile pics are just saying “this is a cartoon girl I want to bang” while also being a raging nazi online.

Counterpoint: sometimes it’s just a funny picture I like,

Fully fair, likewise it’s also fully fair for someone to make judgements on you based on that funny picture if you choose to engage in different kinds of conversations outside of the space where people joke about funny pictures.

Fully agree, you choose profile pictures based on how you want to present yourself to the world. It does communicate a message. A message that if not chosen with some level of care will signal different things to different people.

If you come to a party wearing a stained shirt and haven’t showered I will assume you don’t actually care. Likewise, if you are arguing politics or mature topics and your profile pic is some obscure, underage anime girl, I will also make assumptions about how much actual media exposure you have that you choose to present yourself to the world with that image.

This isn’t persecution or discrimination, this is just how people relate to each other, particularly in an information world where we can’t judge the rest of you.

edit: based on the replies and threads in this post, it’s wild how many people do not give a shit how they are perceived by others in any regard and are angry at the idea that someone might judge them for how they present themselves. And then we wonder why everyone is so lonely and angry and cynical. These are related concepts guys, you HAVE to learn to socialize better. Seriously, this avoidance of accountability is eroding the whole fucking world.