cobysev

I also use Voyager. I browse by “All” and subscribe to communities that look interesting. I figured I’d whittle down my interests over time until I have a nice custom feed to browse, but because Lemmy is so much smaller than Reddit, I still continue to just browse by “All,” even after being here for about 2 years now.

I’ve only blocked a few communities, but they were just some foreign-language communities that were dominating my feed for a while. Whomever owns those instances didn’t mark a language for them, so they’re showing up with everything else uncategorized.

I refuse to use TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. I only have Facebook because 90% of my friends and family are there and it’s the primary way I stay in touch with them, but I’d like to get rid of that too.

Regarding TikTok, I was serving in the US military as an IT sysadmin when it became popular. But we discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China. And you couldn’t fully uninstall it once you’d installed it once. Your phone was completely compromised if you ever installed that app.

It became a huge security risk and we were told to never use it. It was a horrifyingly effective spy tool China could use to easily collect data on us. That’s why President Biden pushed to ban TikTok in the US.

But of course, TikTok became super popular among our civilian population and they refused to give it up, which led to a lot of pushback against the ban. It never held, and now people are still using it and sharing all their private information with China.

Meta does something similar with Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data, since they’re an American company. They mostly use your information to build advertising profiles on you, to better catch your attention with ads. But that information could easily be used against you if federal organizations wanted to. ICE could use it to identify non-white Americans and their daily habits and easily intercept them.

Still, if you don’t want your private information being potentially stolen by these companies, it’s best to dump these programs. I don’t install them on my phone or tablet and I keep Facebook’s website isolated on my computer, since it likes to read other open windows and use those sites to fine-tune advertising data for you.

Google has turned into one of these companies that collects data on everything you do, so I’m in the middle of de-Googling my life right now. But it’s really hard because they’re embedded everywhere.

We’re living in a dark time where the only way to prevent corporations and governments from collecting information on you is to stay offline. Which is nearly impossible nowadays. We don’t get privacy in this modern Information Age. Not while Capitalism is still a thing.

I still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay for access to news articles. There are plenty of free and legitimate articles on the Internet, and public access TV still broadcasts news. You never need to pay anyone.

Honestly, putting a price on access to news just makes me not trust that organization. It feels like a scam, like paying for bottled water when water is one of the most abundant resources in the world.

Paid subscriptions are only a thing because people bought into it and normalized it instead of boycotting it. That’s why everything is a subscription nowadays and no one can just buy and own a product now. We have to spend our lives paying a regular fee for access to something we never own.

I got my glasses in 9th grade (~15 years old). I just went to school one day and realized I couldn’t read the chalkboard at the front of the class anymore. Within a week, I had an eye exam and my first set of glasses.

Personally, it took me a couple years to adjust to them. I had 20/10 vision all throughout my childhood (I can see at 20 ft what most people see at 10 ft). My vision was better than perfect. So it was very distressing to all-of-a-sudden not be able to see clearly and it took me a long time to get used to it.

Also, glasses limited my range of view. Whereas I had a wide view normally, glasses put a smaller focused frame around my field of view, so I could only focus on details mostly straight ahead. Everything that moved in the corners of my vision spooked me because I couldn’t focus on it without turning my head toward it. I was very jumpy for a long time.

My vision isn’t terrible. Even at 41 years old now, my prescription is pretty weak. I’m nearsighted, so I don’t even need my glasses for things up close, just long-distance viewing.

And thankfully, it’s been stable for a long time. It’s hardly changed in the last decade and a half. As of last year, my optometrist has been telling me my eyesight could potentially get much worse, now that I’m over 40. So I’ve been told to report back if I notice another sudden change in my vision. But I’ve been good so far.

I wanted to get PRK surgery for a while and I could’ve opted for a free surgery through the US military while I was serving. But things kept getting in the way of my request, and I finally decided to just leave it be. Especially as I got older; I was afraid I’d only be able to enjoy being glasses-free for a few years before I’d start needing reading glasses or something.

Also, my mother spent over 40 years working for the State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a lot of blind people and always feared losing my vision. So I was a little terrified of getting eye surgery and potentially getting a botched job.

If you want to read the books, it’s 4 novels: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising.

You can skip that fourth book if you want. It’s a prequel story that shows how Hannibal grew up and what turned him to cannibalism. The author (Thomas Harris) wanted to keep him a mysterious character, but Hannibal was so popular, people kept demanding to know his backstory and Harris knew that if he didn’t tell the story, someone else would. So he begrudgingly wrote an origin story.

You can tell he didn’t want to write it. The writing style is completely different than his other books. It’s very direct, like he’s just dictating information instead of weaving a tale.

Red Dragon follows Hannibal in prison and the detective who caught him, using Hannibal’s intellect to help catch a psychotic killer on the loose.

Silence of the Lambs is basically the same story as Red Dragon, except replace the brilliant veteran detective with an amateur FBI trainee, whom Hannibal takes an interest in.

Hannibal is a direct sequel to Silence of the Lambs, showing the FBI trainee’s exceptional career and eventual downfall, thanks to the patriarchy.

The Hannibal quadrilogy is one of my favorite book series. I’m sad that the movie version of Hannibal didn’t understand the point the books were telling. And the Hannibal Rising movie was a terrible B-movie plot about a young psychotic kid getting a taste for murder. Didn’t really feel like a Hannibal movie at all.

I haven’t seen the Hannibal TV series, although I hear it’s pretty good. But it’s an original story, so may not be very loyal to the book series.

Personally, I’m still irritated at the end of Hannibal (the 2001 movie). Spoilers for the end of the film and book ahead:

In the book, Clarice Starling has gone as far as she can in her FBI career. She became famous for solving big cases, moved up the corporate ladder, but that glass ceiling kept her from advancing. Too many misogynistic “good ol’ boys” at the top, who not only prevent her from excelling in her career, but take every tiny mistake and blow it up into a potentially career-ending scenario.

Enter Hannibal Lecter; the suave and highly intelligent cannibal serial killer. He’s outraged that Clarice’s coworkers and bosses are actively objectifying her and ruining her career.

Long story short, at the end of the book, Hannibal rescues Clarice and gives her misogynistic boss an impromptu (and tasty!) lobotomy. Clarice ends up running away with Hannibal, because she realized he’s the only person who respects her as an intelligent human being and not a piece of ass.

The movie chose to keep her loyal to the FBI and combative against Hannibal, even though the FBI actively tried to destroy her life. Hannibal escapes alone and the film just kind of ends. It was a complete non-ending.

The whole point of Silence of the Lambs and its sequel, Hannibal, was that Clarice was a woman trying to survive in a “man’s job,” yet proved she could belong - and excel - through her own skill and intellect. Silence of the Lambs did a pretty good job showing that on the big screen, but Hannibal didn’t get the point of the story and decided the hero shouldn’t end up with a cannibal, period. They treated him as more of an irredeemable monster.

It’s kind of the “man vs. bear” meme, except replace the bear with a cannibal serial killer, and the girl still chose the cannibal as the safer choice to her co-workers.

I find this easier to understand with comic books, since I’m a bit of a collector:

Action Comics #1, the first issue to feature Superman, originally printed 200,000 issues in 1938 and sold for 10¢ each.

But because it’s a highly desirable issue and there are currently less than 100 copies left in existence (that we know of), their value has skyrocketed. One copy sold for $6 million last year! It’s worth a lot because it’s so rare and so many people want a copy for their collection. Scarcity makes the price go up, because it’s valuable and desirable to so many collectors.

Money works the same way, but in reverse. Back in 1938, when that Action Comics #1 released, it was only worth 10¢. Back then, there wasn’t as much money in circulation in the US, so 10¢ could buy you a lot of things. Comics, groceries, gas, etc. all were less than a dollar.

But every single year, the Federal Reserve orders more money to be printed for circulation. More money in circulation means that it’s all worth less.

Remember that Action Comics #1? When there were 200,000 copies available, they were worth only 10¢. But now that there are less than 100 left, they’re worth millions. Money is the same way, but it’s moving in reverse. As more is printed, it’s all worth less.

Back in 1938, a comic cost 10¢. But today, there is so much money printed and in circulation, that a modern comic costs about $5. That’s 50x more expensive! The overall value of comics hasn’t changed; they’re just paper with printings on it. Heck, you could argue that it should be worth less today because they’re so much easier to print with modern technology. But because there’s so much money in circulation, its value has tanked and you need lots more money to buy the same product.

Granted, money doesn’t stay in circulation forever. Bills get old and tattered and eventually become destroyed and unusable. Coins disappear or get melted down. Both types of currency get returned to the Federal Reserve to be removed from circulation and destroyed. But we still print much more money than what falls out of circulation each year. And they estimate how much money is in circulation annually to better approximate inflation each year.

So why do we keep printing money? Because more and more people are born, more products and services are being made and sold, and our economy keeps growing. We can’t just circulate the same amount of currency forever; our economy would stagnate and certain groups of people would just never earn money. And in our capitalist society, if you don’t have money, you can’t survive.

So… We keep printing money to keep up with the demands of capitalism, and the growth in circulating currency means it’s all worth less. Therefore, it costs much more to buy the same item as time goes on. A comic in 1938 costs 10¢. Today, it costs $5. Because there’s so much more money in the world, the value of money is less and you need more money to buy the same things.

I retired young. I had joined the US military at 18 years old and signed up under an IT profession. It started as a jack-of-all-trades IT job (if it touched a computer network, we managed it), but as the years went on, they started specializing us. Because if you’re a jack-of-all-trades, you’re a master of none, and the military wanted subject-matter experts. My final job was basically a server administrator, although they never fully adopted to the specialization change, so I was still doing odd IT work outside of my job requirements until I left the service.

After 20 years of service, I qualified for retirement from the military, which I jumped on. I was grandfathered into the old pension program, which means I get about half my base pay every month for the rest of my life. The military also kind of broke me (physically and mentally), so I’m 100% disabled according to the VA, even though I don’t look like it. That comes with it’s own free lifetime medical and dental plan, along with pay that’s twice as much as my pension every month.

So… I decided to take an early retirement at 38 years old and actually spend some time enjoying my life for once. The military was constant stress and focus on the mission. I didn’t get to spend much time focused on my own life because I was constantly being moved around the world at the whim of the govt. So now I’m settled down and just enjoying not having any responsibilities except what I choose to focus on.

I did try to find other IT work when I left the service. But I couldn’t get a call back from anyone, even through the military’s transitional internship program. Eventually, Google reached out to me, but their “internship” was to give me free access to their online training programs on Coursera for 6 months. They never called me back after that.

Eventually, I realized I didn’t need to work to survive. I wasn’t filthy rich by any stretch of the imagination, but my passive income was enough to live comfortably on without working another day of my life. All my basic needs were being met and I had enough extra each month to squirrel away a little bit for a rainy day. So I chose that path. It’s been just over 3 years since I retired and I’ve never been happier.

OP’s description of bright carpeted floors reminded me of my childhood bedroom. I grew up in the '80s, but my home was built in the mid-'70s and every room was a different color. My bedroom happened to have bright orange-painted walls and thick shag carpet that was orange and yellow. When the sun shone through the window over the carpet, it almost looked like the floor was on fire at first glance.

I loved that carpet, but my parents made me replace it with a thin, ugly, dark brown carpet when I was a teenager. As an adult, I understand why. That old carpet must’ve been impossible to vacuum, as thick as it was.

Regarding the color scheme of the house, my parents’ bedroom was light blue with a patchy blue carpet (varying patches of blue between borderline white and vibrant blue). My sister’s bedroom was pale green with green carpet. The bathroom was half yellow, half light green, with yellow flower wallpaper on one wall and pale green carpet. It had a matching green toilet and green plastic shower/tub insert.

The living room was pale yellow, the dining room was a vibrant red, and the kitchen was just white walls (with some wallpaper designs in places) with dark brown wood cabinetry and white laminate countertops. The hallways and living room/dining room had a reddish-brown carpet that bleached in the sunlight and looked pale and awful by the time I was a teenager.

The kitchen and entryway had tan laminate flooring with designs; the only non-carpeted space in the whole house. Oh! And the entryway had white walls, but the bottom 4 feet of the wall had that brown wood paneling that was everywhere in the '70s and '80s.

The first floor of my house, which was built as a separate apartment, was almost exclusively wood paneling for the walls, except the bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen, which were just white. The carpet was an ugly tan and the kitchen and bathroom had white laminate tile floors.

My sister and her husband, who lived in our childhood home for a while, remodeled and repainted/recarpeted the whole house, but she kept the different color scheme for each room. Now my bedroom walls are tan, master bedroom is light green, her old bedroom is a bright peach color, the bathroom is a light green, the living room is light blue, and the dining room is still red.

She put tiles on the kitchen walls to bring some color to that room, laminate wood paneling on the floor for the entryway, kitchen, and dining room, white laminate tiles on the bathroom floor, and the rest of the house got an off-white/tan carpet with brownish speckles throughout it.

The first-floor apartment had all the wood paneling on the walls removed and the walls were just painted white. One wall of the living room down there was painted a dark bluish-gray by a tenant we had, and I just re-did all the carpets down there with a light blush-gray color. I added a large gray laminate square by their front door so people aren’t stepping immediately onto carpet when they enter into that apartment, and my sister did an awful job with black ceramic tiles in the kitchen. I need to tear those up and replace them sometime; they’re a bit uneven. The bathroom is still white laminate tiles.

My username is most of my real name already. All of my friends and family know this. I even make comments all the time about stuff I found on Reddit/Lemmy/Discord/etc. No one cares. Not a single person has attempted to look me up; at least no one who has admitted it.

I try to be true to myself online. It’s easy to hide behind a username, and eventually you start thinking you’re invincible; that no one will figure out who you are. And you start saying things that might hurt you or ones you love if it ever got out.

I choose to avoid that altogether and just be myself online. Keeping a username that can be tied back to myself keeps me in check and ensures I only say or do things online that people who know me in real life would respect. It helps me to be a better person, even with the anonymity that the Internet may bring.

Wait… Hubert Manne? As in… Human? Are you an alien posing as a human being?

No doubt, it’s a fun game, but not $30 fun.

Then again, my idea of game prices is a bit skewed. I don’t think ANY game is worth $60. I buy all my games on sale, and for most of them, I wait until they’re $20 or less before I buy.

At a full price of $30, I’d expect to eventually find it on sale for $5-10 if I waited long enough. But the developers don’t plan to ever lower the price, which is a big negative for me. If I didn’t get a copy for free, I’d probably still not own it.

As far as gameplay itself, I’m annoyed at the random swarms of bugs attacking my factories. I just want to build and create, but having to also defend from attack and then repair my stuff afterward… that makes Factorio frustrating for me. But that’s my own personal opinion, I know that’s what makes the game fun for so many others.

That’s why I like Satisfactory so much. The wildlife is only aggressive if you bother them, and there aren’t packs of them roaming around. You can relax and enjoy the atmosphere and get lost in your build process without being bothered.

I just bought Factorio after finally learning it never goes on sale, lol.

I always try to buy games on sale, so I’ve been avoiding Factorio on principle. Their developers refuse to lower the price because they feel there no point in setting a price for a game, then discounting it every once in a while to draw in new players. They believe it’s a $30 game, so they want everyone to pay $30 to play it, period.

Fortunately, I won a Steam key for it in a raffle, so I got it for free. And I’m glad, because I don’t feel it’s worth even $30. It’s not a bad game, but I personally would’ve paid $10-15 max for it.

fyi there’s no hyperfocus type of ADHD; that’s just a broad effect of executive dysfunction

True, but explaining the nuances of ADHD in a thread that’s not specifically focused on it is complicated. Especially since we’re still trying to define the vague differences between ADHD, autism, ADD, and a few other cognitive disorders. Some things are merging under umbrella terms (e.g. ADD doesn’t really exist anymore; it’s now a form of ADHD) and other distinctions are getting blurry, with too many cross-over symptoms to clearly define. Much easier to just point out that one of my greater symptoms of ADHD is hyperfocus.

You’re right, the modding community is probably why Minecraft continues to be so popular. Without mods, Minecraft is kind of boring. At least, in my opinion.

I spent over a decade addicted to World of Warcraft. Like, I would come home from work and immediately jump on WoW and do nothing else until bedtime.

Thankfully, Activision buying out Blizzard and then ruining the game made me eventually quit. I’ve tried to go back, but I can’t get into it anymore. It’s just no fun.

The last few expansions, I’ve spent a week burning through the main questline, then I walk away until they announce another expansion. Endgame content is not interesting enough to keep me after the main story is over. I never even finished the last two expansions; I checked out partway into the story. I think I’m officially done buying expansions for WoW and hoping I can get back into it.

Other games that I’ve been addicted to in recent times have been Satisfactory and Enshrouded. Both base building games that have no end, but rely on your creativity to enjoy.

I have ADHD (the hyperfocus type) and Satisfactory really scratches that itch. Focusing on minute details, trying to make a seamless, efficient, organized factory to produce an end product. And the sky’s the limit (literally). You can build hundreds of factories across a massive map and get really creative about style, design, efficiency, etc. it’s a really fun creative game.

Enshrouded is the same, except instead of efficient factories, you’re building homes, villages, castles, etc. in a fantasy medieval setting. With questing and monsters and magic too! It’s been loads of fun and my friends and I have been super addicted to that game for a while now too. I actually just posted a review about it in [email protected] yesterday.

On a side note, I find it interesting to see Minecraft mentioned a lot in this thread. That game first came out when I was in my 20s (I’m in my 40s now) and it was pretty popular when it first dropped. I played it a bit, but besides running around and digging (mining?) a bit, there wasn’t really any direction or goals or anything, so I kind of lost interest. I found out years later there’s a whole endgame to it, but without any in-game directions, there was no way I would’ve ever progressed in that game without online help.

Decades later, Minecraft got a resurgence of popularity with younger generations and now it’s suddenly the game of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of my baby nephews is addicted to that game now and speaks of almost nothing but Minecraft. Crazy how it can continue being so popular across multiple generations like that.

When I was a kid (30+ years ago), I used to lie in the grass in my yard at night and stare at the stars. I grew up in the forested countryside, so there wasn’t much light pollution and I could clearly make out constellations.

I joined the US military and left home for 20 years. When I retired, I moved back into my childhood home to help my aging father.

One of the first things I noticed is that almost all the stars are gone. Light pollution from the nearby cities has gotten so bad, my night sky is just a haze now. I can’t see stars clearly anymore.

I’ve read that light pollution has gotten so bad globally that there isn’t anywhere left on Earth - not even Antarctica - that doesn’t experience light pollution to some degree. I wish I could go up on a shuttle and see the stars from outside our atmosphere. That must be such an amazing view, completely unfiltered. Like living underwater your whole life and then finally seeing clearly when you lift your head out of the water for the first time.

I never saw myself as ugly, but I always just assumed I was pretty average. It’s not like people were tripping over themselves to spend time with me. I didn’t have supermodel attraction powers or anything; the most attractive people in my school never gave me the time of day. Every person I’ve ever dated asked me out, but I just assumed that was normal for anyone who wasn’t absolutely hideous.

(For the record, I tried to ask someone out once and it went so wrong, I never had the courage to ask anyone else out again, so the only time I dated anyone was when they approached me. Which happened quite a bit throughout my younger years.)

I’ve had friends talk about how jealous they are of certain features of mine (strong jaw, ability to grow a thick lumberjack beard, being taller than most of our friend group, etc.) but I was also jealous of certain features my friends shared, so I didn’t ever feel physically superior to anyone. You want what you can’t have, right?

But now I’m in my 40s, my hair is starting to thin, and thanks to a permanently busted leg and two bad knees, I can’t exercise without pain and have gained probably 60+ pounds in recent years. All of a sudden, I’ve realized that people don’t really notice me anymore. I don’t draw much attention when I go out in public and people aren’t as captivated by my conversation like they used to be.

My wife also used to love pointing out when strangers were staring at me in public. She used to brag that she’d snagged an attractive man and that other girls are just jealous. I used to think she was just trying to hype herself up, since she used to talk down about herself a lot, so I’d play along and praise her for being so lucky (and also let her know how lucky I was for getting to spend time with a woman like her). But it’s been years now since she’s pointed out anyone staring at me in public.

It’s kind of dawning on me that I may have been pretty attractive as a young man. But like all things, beauty fades with age and I’m in an awkward phase where people aren’t really paying much attention to me anymore. It’s definitely hitting the ego, not only noticing the lack of attention, but realizing too late that I had that kind of attractive power in my youth. If I hadn’t been crippled with introversion most of my youth, I probably could’ve been extremely popular.

I will point out, I shared a link to a blog of mine on Lemmy sometime earlier this year and I got a single comment, praising my attractive profile pic on my blog. Which is the first positive thing anyone’s said about my appearance in years. That was a wonderful feeling, but also kind of hit hard, realizing that people don’t really comment on my looks anymore.

That profile picture is maybe 5 years old now, and whereas I want to replace it with a more current one, I’ve been struggling to take one that doesn’t make me feel old and ugly. So I’m going to keep using that older one until I feel like it no longer looks like me.

When I was a kid, I always got confused for an adult. Nobody believed I was a minor. I once got confused for a college student when I was just about to graduate from elementary school.

Now I’m 41 and I have the opposite problem. Everyone thinks I’m in my late 20s/early 30s. Even with a white patch on my beard, people still think I’m just a young man who’s going gray young.

It doesn’t help that I retired at 38 years old. No one believes me when I say I’m already retired. I’ve had a few people ask me if I’m just living with my parents and calling it “retired.” Ha!

United States of America: We’re made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we’ve hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn’t call them “states” until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were “colonies” before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.