I think if you watch Severance, he does a really good job of changing your perspective, because I had the same feeling going into Severance, and now I feel different.

Same for Brent Spiner as Data.

I have incredibly wild and vivid dreams, a handful of times a year.

My most recent one is one that has repeated a handful of times. I am in Portland for some reason and there is a restaurant with a large gravel lot.

I park and I walk up to the restaurant to order a hot dog and Colin Melloy from the Decemberists shows up. His hair is about shoulder length, he’s wearing cut off blue jean shorts and a plaid shirt. And he puts on an open air concert out in the gravel lot for free for everyone who just happens to be stopping by this particular hot dog stand.

He played songs from the Crane Wife album, which was pretty cool.

I’ve had other dreams where I’ve led choirs of priests and nuns on a musical rampage throughout New York City, singing a song I’ve never heard before and have not heard since as like this massive musical number.

I’ve had dreams where I Fight evil villains on spaceships with laser swords only to find out that the villain was my cousin.

I’ve had dreams where it’s the 80s and I am a white guy that wears white suits and sunglasses and I’m rich and I drive a red sports car that’s a convertible and I have a lot of money and that dream. I told myself, oh yeah, I’ve got to make that big purchase in the morning. I better put $50,000 under my bed so it’ll be there when I wake up. And then I woke up in the real world and immediately looked under my bed to realize that it was a dream and I’ve never been more upset to wake up in my life.

I’ve had dreams where I’m in a dark room being assaulted by demons, being told all the horrible things that there are about me, and I’m trapped to a chair, and like I’m praying to get out of this situation, and the demon laughs at me, and he flicks his finger, and while I’m stuck to the chair, it lifts up onto one leg and starts spinning around and around faster and faster and faster, trying to get my hands to unclass from prayer as the demon laughs in the darkness.

And I’ve had a recurring dream throughout most of my life, well two recurring dreams throughout most of my life, one of which is where I’m standing in an infinitely large black room on a small little pedestal, and there is a glowing, blue, thin strand of string that serves as a tightrope between here and the end of infinity, and i become aware that I am supposed to walk this tightrope.

Somewhere out beyond the darkness are a tribunal of judges who are watching me and watching my performance, as I take one step onto the string, and then I take the second step, and I realize I have to balance, and I immediately fall, and as I’m falling and I’m plummeting through infinite darkness, I hit the ground, and in real life I wake up, and my entire body convulses and bounces on the bed.

The other one that I have is there is a town, and the town has rolling green fields and sunflowers and wooden fences and white houses and paved roads intersecting through it that wind back and forth and I am driving in an old beat up blue Ford truck with the wooden slats on the truck bed. And, as I drive through the town people stop and wave at me and I wave at them because I am making a delivery and they know me and I know them and I get to drive back and forth in this beautiful, serene, peaceful, perfect town full of happiness.

Amazon

I’ve never gone to a website and searched for socks and been shown bicycles before.

In the original script, they would continue to meet up, fall in love, spend time together and then one or the other of them would erase the other person after which the other person would follow and then they would meet and fall in love again and this repeated until they were old and gray

If your car ever gets spray painted, WD-40 is also very good at removing that. Just spray it on a lint-free rag and gently wipe the spray paint and the WD-40 will dissolve the spray paint and whisk it away with a minimum amount of effort.

I have a friend who went through something pretty similar, ended up spending ten years alone except for when people would come over to see him.

Eventually he pulled out of it and is married now, And if everything can work out for him, then it can work out for you too.

And also, like, don’t worry about your opinion of yourself and thinking that you’re gross, because it really doesn’t matter. Like, the things that you’re concerned about are never the things that other people are concerned about.

If you are clean and somewhat presentable, everything else can take care of itself. No matter what you look like or what you think you look like, there is going to be somebody out there who sees you as the most attractive, beautiful, desirable being on the planet if you give them the opportunity.

I’ll step up. I was raised in the south by… well, okay by the kind of racist white people that say they are not racist even though they don’t like people of other colors inside of their field of vision.

I am not white myself, and so I got preferential treatment. I was “one of the good ones”.

Plus, as a Native American, I kind of had like this weird, beneficent racism thing where they were like, oh, he can talk to horses, and he can hear it in the trees, and see it in the wind, all of that stupid shit.

Anyway, I didn’t really mind people of color, black people, I would talk to them and be friendly with them because I didn’t have any reason not to be, right?

But sometime around when I was 18 years old, I suddenly realized that I would change my way of speaking when I was around black people. I would say things like, “yo, dog, what’s up?” Instead of, “hey man, how’s it going?”

And I realized now that that is ingratiating behavior. I wanted the other people I was around to feel more comfortable with me, and so I was imitating what I assumed was their speech pattern.

But I also realized that I was pigeonholing them into acting a particular way. I was maintaining the concept that “Black people talk like black people” instead of “people just talk”.

Once I realized I was doing that, I dropped the act and started continuing to be myself when I was around people of different races.

And you know, I made better friends that way. People liked me more and they responded more favorably to me, which to me feels like justification that I made the right decision.

My ex often got frustrated with me because I spend so much time in the planning phase, like learning about things, researching the various options, and making sure that everything is fully prepped and laid out before I start on a project.

Despite all of that, I have yet to have a project go to plan, Except for the one that I came up with off the top of my head.

I was redoing my flooring, and I have like a half third story that’s open, and there’s a lot of exposed transition space between the straight drop-off and the end of the flooring.

It was gonna look really bad to just put L-shaped brackets down to cover over the transition, So, spur of the moment, I realized that I could put a longer flat piece that had a beveled edge on it, and then the L bracket on top of that, and it is probably one of the nicest features in my house.

It is rather banal to be anal about pronunciation like that.

There’s even a saying about it. “I would rather a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man be murdered”.

Kinda sounds like me when seatbelt laws came out.

At first, I was against them, not because I myself didn’t wear a seatbelt because I did, but because I thought it was absurd that we would waste time and money trying to make stupidity illegal.

Like if you make stupidity illegal, then the people making stupidity illegal would be illegal because it’s stupid to try to make stupidity illegal.

My opinion was that if you are stupid enough to drive a two ton death machine without basic protection and it kills you, then that’s your own stupid fault, right?

But my mind got changed about it when somebody mentioned to me that seatbelts don’t just save lives, they also reduce injuries.

And, given that the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without a seatbelt is also the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without insurance, the real reason for pushing for seatbelts was to reduce the taxpayer burden of covering the health care financial deficit caused by these stupid idiots.

It was not a life-saving measure, although it does save lives, but rather, it is a money-saving measure.

Protecting taxpayer money from stupid people is a smart move.

Now I am fully behind seatbelt laws.

I was wrong thinking that having access to information would change the world for the better.

My childish self honestly had no idea that so many people would rebel against their fellow man and common sense rather than learn and accept that they had some wrong information about something.

My hopeful naivety kept me blind to the idea that people are fundamentally stupid, and will fight to the bitter end to die like the dogs they are rather than take one step as a human being that has the tiniest little flaw.

And that includes myself.

There’s this concept called circle of influence, which is basically what things can you actually do about the things that you know.

99.9% of politics are outside of any of our individual circles of influence, And news profits immensely off of sharing every single bit of misery inducing sad and dreadful knowledge they can peddle.

So if it’s outside of your circle of influence, then feel free to completely fucking ignore it, because you can’t do a goddamn thing about it, and knowing about it only makes you sad.

Like the saying goes, where it is folly to be wise, ignorance is bliss.

That being said, if there are things that are local to you, or things that you or your friends are passionate about, that are inside of your circle of influence, take the energy you would have spent being sad about the stuff you can’t do anything about, and direct it to the things that you can do anything about.

There is a chance, albeit somewhat small, that I will finally be able to pay off my student loans in the next six months.

Started at $60,000 and now they’re down to like 14. But I’m expecting a pretty large bonus coming up in the next few months, And if it does come through and no unexpected expenses pop up to take it away, then there’s a chance.

Hey, there’s nothing weird about my collections of vinyl records and German beer steins and uranium glass and sterling silver and quack medical devices and watches and books and pewter and brass and guitars and cameras.

I honestly started off with the intent of being funny, and then I realized how many fucking collections I have, and now I don’t really know what to do with myself.

This sounds like a dick move, but if somebody tells you to your face that if you do not do a thing, they will murder themselves and it will be your fault, the only correct response is to tell them to go ahead and murder themselves.

Actually, suicidal people typically don’t broadcast their suicidal ideations. When people do broadcast them, it’s either a cry for help or it is a manipulation tactic.

The cry for help people can be differentiated from the manipulation tactic people by frequency.

People will cry for help a couple of times in their lives. Manipulators will manipulate at every opportunity.

Using a sibling as an additional point of manipulation is another tactic of manipulators.

Cursing the holy spirit is not blaspheming the holy spirit.

The only way to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to have the Holy Spirit move through you, where you know beyond any shadow of any doubt that the essence of God itself is working in your actions, to be purified and elevated above mankind, and then to claim that this purification, elevation, and miracle comes from the devil and not from God.

It is very difficult to do this, and even then, Jesus himself said you would be in danger of Hellfire, not guaranteed to go to Hell forever.

The day my niece was born, my mom had asked me to wake her up so that she could be there after the birth.

Apparently, me actually doing what she asked me to do turned out to be a grave insult.

She ended up yelling and screaming at me, which triggered me, so I started yelling and screaming at her, and then she hit me with the only thing she could think of to actually hurt me.

See, from before I get into that, I’ve got to explain that from the time I was 15 until I graduated high school at 17, my mom and my stepdad essentially locked me in my room and only let me out for punishment, which was digging up stumps in the backyard or picking up a rock from one pile and hauling it to another pile, picking up a different rock from that pile, hauling that one to the third pile, back and forth. for eight to ten hours a day, And for going to school, just enough to prevent CPS from being called on them.

There was also a healthy dose of corporal punishment on top of that, being beaten for half an hour or longer for the smallest infraction.

It really messed with my head because I honestly thought like at some point they would come to their senses and realize how absurd the entire thing was and apologize and they never fucking did.

Anyway, now that we’ve got the groundwork in place, my mom decided she would say the thing that she could think of to hurt me, which was to tell me that her mother, my evil grandmother, had convinced her to do all of those things because otherwise no one would ever love me.

And why is it that otherwise no one would ever love me?

because I’m not white

My mom had shamed the entire family by marrying a Native American and giving birth to his child, And my grandmother, who is evil for multiple reasons, and I’ll be glad to go into those, cause may she rot in piss, was a terrible person, had decided that the only way to cleanse the family of the stain of my existence was to psychologically induce my own mother into tormenting me in every single possible way she could.

And so every single time I think about all the opportunities I missed out on and all the times my mom wasn’t there for me and all of the times that I was neglected and abused throughout my entire childhood, it all rolls back to my grandmother being a racist cunt, and my mother somehow not realizing that for what it was, and just being a good little flying monkey and doing whatever her mother told her to do with her own fucking child.

So yeah, I was abused because my grandmother is racist, and I didn’t find out about that until I was 23 years old.

Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to do something along the lines of stating upfront that “if anyone in the company does anything to offend you, please report it to the appropriate channels. You’ll have our full support. We’re here to get work done, not to make people feel bad”

You’re not likely going to say by accident something they haven’t heard before, or to offend them in a new and novel way, But establishing and occasionally reinforcing the fact that they don’t have to tolerate it, that putting up with abuse is not part of their job, and that they have the boss’s backing at the same level of the non-LGBTQ employees should they find themselves being abused or offended, would probably go a decent way in minimizing the risk of something actually bad happening.