tiredofsametab

I have lots of acquaintances and people with whom I’m friendly but few real friends… And I think that’s fine. I’ve never felt the need to spend tons of time around others or have tons of friends.

The getting off the internet thing is good. Usergroups and meetups can be a great place if you need socialization.

I’m old enough to have not had a ton of friends before the internet.

Option 3: we don’t buy any trees.

I saw this and I don’t know if I could do 10 hours in that thing. All for it existing for the people who can! (I’ll be on the train instead)

No one needs it and it’s inconvenient. Some people with money import foreign cars (particularly around Roppongi/Akasaka/Meguro in Tokyo)

As a farmer in Japan, not all tractors are even road legal here. It would also take me hours on a tractor to go get anything of size. That said, I also don’t need or want american-sized trucks for that. We have kei trucks.

Also out of Japan as well, please. We definitely don’t need these, especially in pedestrian- and cyclist-heavy areas. (I have seen hummers trying to drive some streets in Tokyo and it’s insane).

Not buying the game until all the people whose works we’re used are compensated and all training data using illegally-used material is destroyed. Once that is done, anyone who wants to can opt-in and license their works with consent to be used for training.

/ Or the whole world goes to properly sharing the fruits of our collective labors, but that seems even more fantastical

I had a lot of issues growing up. Neurodivergent kid in rural Ohio in the '80s, lots of conservative people around, abusive people in my family making stuff hard for much of my young childhood, and a number of other things. I wanted the same thing anyone joining a gang wants, really. Acceptance, feeling like I belong, and feeling like I was fighting something or for something better.

I came from a place where I, very much without knowing it, was very entitled and privileged. I was kept away from others a lot as a kid (lived with my grandparents for a bit and wasn’t allowed to play with the other neighbors (who were in my class) because they were not white. Other perspectives were few and far between when and where I grew up. There are some other reasons that there were huge gaps in my critical thinking and bullshit detection (partly due to not questioning people in power and getting heavily punished when I did). I got taken advantage of a lot when I first got out on my own and had to basically do a lot of lessons that most kids/teens learned as an adult with much more dire consequences.

I felt like I was working hard and that others’ failures were because they didn’t work hard enough (and that I didn’t work hard enough when I was failing). In reality, a lot of people attribute way too much of their success to their own skill not luck and circumstance. At the same time I was thinking other people were lazy, I was also helped by some of my family through some financial hard times more than once (though I was briefly homeless another time). I came to realize, as I met more and varied people, that some of the hardest workers I knew were getting fucked over. Two jobs, caring deeply about their families, and barely able to tread water to support themselves and those that relied on them.

Contradictions between people claiming to be christians and anything that christ would have done. People thinking they were holy and great for holding some coat drive and stuff, but any tax dollars for a safety net were just terrible and those people were just going to spend it on drugs. People who kept pulling up every bit of safety because “fuck you, I’ve got mine”, for lack of a better term was just more and more visible when I looked at what was going on. Also being out on my own and working when 9/11 happened and the crazy amounts of hate and racism that followed that. I slowly started actually seeing all of these things, losing that entitlement, not othering people, and realizing things for what they were. I traveled to other places, saw other ways of life. The early internet and chatting people from around the world via IRC and the like also played a role in that.

Living as a minority in another country (I moved to Japan in my early 30s), getting randomly stopped and searched, struggling to find housing, and other things also cemented many of the other things I had already been learning. I am a deeply empathetic person, but I had always assumed that everyone was acting in good faith in a lot of situations and that merit would see me treated “properly”. That’s not the reality. The reality is that people are messy and flawed, that people are mostly good but often wary. This can manifest as racism in the guise of “protecting our culture and way of life” where those others getting stopped and searched (often in front of their communities, peers, clients, etc. who have no idea what is going on and assume the worst) was just a mild inconvenience. That experience in particular showed me exactly what white, male privilege in the US was. I could never see it clearly since I always had it.

This is a very long and rambling response. I guess the TL;DR would be seeing my own entitlement and privilege, realizing that people in power and authority often don’t get there through merit and/or hard work alone (if at all), and generally getting more experience and seeing and experiencing inequity.

The good news, I guess, is that people can get better. I was one of those people who moved further right in young adulthood. I’m glad the social media and such didn’t exist then as I was not equipped to handle that by my upbringing and would have fallen right into that trap. We just had Limbaugh and Beck and the like. At some point, I pulled a 180 and, now in my mid-40s, find myself probably somewhere around center-left to left as most western European countries might define that.

I doubt it purely because the resistance to any form of functional national ID there with the party in power traditionally being the ones that oppose it. Crazier things have happened, though.

US -> Japan. Mostly, I miss family. I have basically no love for the area in which I grew up nor contact with anyone there (half my family never lived there, the other half moved to another state).

I do miss some foods that are hard to find or very expensive here. Things like PC parts are (or at least were) much cheaper in the US since it was generally a niche hobby device outside of business use here until quite recently.

That song is EVERYWHERE here in Japan each Christmas and it drives me nuts.

From the US but in Japan. Christmas is a normal working day. Couples often go out for a date night. KFC’s chicken (or another fried or roasted one) is a common staple for dinner.

Family will get each other presents. I’ve heard it’s more like one present, but I don’t really know. I should ask the in-laws this winter when we go for New Years (the big family gathering time in Japan and NOT so much a big party time with lots of businesses closed).

Started on beehaw but hated Lemmy of the time. Went with a kbin instance. First one died. Second died. I liked mbin so I picked one more and so far it is yet to burn down, fall over, and then sink into a swamp.

If this one ever goes away, I might try pixelfed or whatever it’s called

Table tennis

Works well here in Japan (though the police could enforce it better. Got passed by some jackass in a 30 no passing zone the other day in an area with poor visibility)

Such hits as ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘x’, and ‘y’. I know the version of the language we were using didn’t have native utf-8 support, so I don’t think kanji varnames were possible. It even made comments in kana and kanji really wonky (I think the comments were shiftjis)

Pay down the house or. If that doesn’t count. Buy an EV (or maybe the electrical work at my house to support one)

You got 3 letters?! Luck!

I worked at a japanese company whose engineers we’re former NTT developers. Copypasta (i.e. not using functions), inefficient algos, single-letter var names, remote code execution from code as root, etc. good times!