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.

Stop applying your experience to my life.

You have to understand how this sounds from the outside.

Sees something that doesn’t apply to me

Feels personal space violated.

But hey, whatever you need to tell yourself to avoid hope. Bye.

I am developing an increasing worry that with the way society is atomizing, that our progressive side is going to collapse under the tendency to make “everything I don’t like = conservatism and nazis” and I know that sounds a lot like the conservative complaint that the left calls everything they don’t like “nazis” but there is truth to it and the term “nazi” is just one word in a growing list of ideals and tools of power that are being discarded because “the other side” uses them.

For example: the US flag. It has become a stereotype in the US that if you fly an American flag on your house or car, you are a conservative/right-wing nationalist. “America bad” is a lefty stereotype for good reason.

Meanwhile, until we get to that post-scarcity Star Trek universe, we’re all still just tribes. And groups of nationalists have been the number one strongest force for change and power on our planet since we started drawing borders. It’s pure political capital to have the support of armed groups of “patriots” and this is why everyone in politics is so deferential to our orange clown president, because he commands a political nuclear weapon in the form of history’s oldest power source. January 6th was a weapons demonstration, not a real attempt at coup.

You simply do not get the massive global political machine to move with finger-wagging and lectures. You need force to back up your demands.

I wish I could get the left to reclaim the flag. I know America isn’t a source of pride for the people harmed by America, but if you’re here and you want to make the place better, you should show that you support at least it’s potential and promise.

Don’t get me started on guns.

I despise overly-liberal and even overly progressive-minded young people who are absolutely naive and delusional about society, and can only view the world through their bubble that gets reinforced by their friends and online social groups. And I ain’t even talking just about tankies and people down at the bottom of internet brainrot barrels.

I am a progressive and believe in socialism and a borderless world and would fight to the death against fascism. But I’m seeing way, way too many young people tuning out of reality and supporting absolutely dumb-as-fuck takes and having unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen in our world.

The lack of ability to recognize how and why a side you oppose wins and gains power is a biproduct of living with those blinders. The dismissal of millions of people who don’t think like you is just as bad as the millions of people who hate you for your identity. We have to get a lot smarter and accept a lot more hard truths about how we’re going to keep pushing the needle towards progress. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices like getting out and voting even if you don’t like the candidate. Supporting and physically getting involved with community and groups even if you’re a self-diagnosed introvert with autism.

For some screwball reason, the concept of forcing yourself to do hard things so you get better at them has become very conservative-coded but it’s how we’ve succeeded against evil for generations. We have to start being a lot tougher and stop balking at people who don’t share all your values. We win with community and organized resistance, not constant scolding and trying to be the smartest lefty in line for the camps.

I hear you, I just don’t agree with you.

quit trying to “fix” other people.

I’m offering a rope, many people have taken it and have thanked me. So no, I have no intention of stopping.

You don’t have to touch the rope, you don’t have to even look at it.

But for some reason you are here looking at it scorning it, and you interpret the fact that the rope exists for some people as an implication that anyone who doesn’t reach out for it is “fucked up," which I have never remotely suggested, that came from inside you, my only implication is that you have a greater capacity for change and elasticity in your brain than labels are letting you believe. You do with that what you will.

That’s some fantastic examples of clinging to labels which I am speaking against. As someone who managed to stop feeling the need to be isolated, stopped feeling social anxiety and social exhaustion as rapidly, I know quite a lot about the work it takes to change, and how you look back and realize that it’s not mature or helpful to use these kinds of labels to describe yourself or anyone else.