Try to be better.
I carried a CCW for years and finally gave it up because it’s a huge hassle to always have to be aware of. It’s a presence that doesn’t give me comfort, it made me always aware of its presence and that’s not how I want to experience the world. I would go back to carrying if I move to a more rural area again with less chance of immediate response of emergency services or other people.
I thought you were being hyperbolic and then scrolled down.
Holy shit, it’s no wonder sex and relationships are crashing through the floor right now. Ya’ll don’t know how to have human interactions anymore.
Nobody bats an eye when it’s worded like “My bud told me I couldn’t do this in 8 hours, said I should call a pro, I said I could do it.” You people out there have no idea what the tone is like here.
If your partner isn’t a friend who can challenge you and be your “bud” you’re not with a good partner. Is this what you guys think relationships are really like? Dancing on fucking eggshells and being given ultimatums? It’s a goddamn self report.
Ya’ll gonna blow your minds on this one:
People make shit up on the internet.
Also, even if not made up, people have this bantering shit all the time. Nobody bats an eye if it’s worded like “My friend bet me I couldn’t do this myself in 8 hours and said just call a professional, I said I could do it.”
A happy relationship is a friendship where you can challenge each other. You have no idea what the tone is.
Sounds about enough for a decent down payment on reliable vehicle. Then I would still have to pay off whatever is left and make insurance payments and licencing tax, so ironically if I magically made 20k, I would end up spending more than solving anything.
Meanwhile in my country 20k USD is like, your mortgage payments and property taxes and insurance for almost half a year if you have a decent home in or near a city.
Sounds like some cheap ass motorcycles tbh
While we still can, sure.
In about another year or two, even the most detailed inspection is going to be almost impossible to differentiate so we might as well get some enjoyment now in kicking them out.
I’m pretty sure out of the 340,000,000+ Americans, there are probably SOME who aren’t ICE agents.
Yeah so you do have a point though that it seems more challenging to make friends, as a strange new form of mass-hysteria has enveloped the younger population in particular that makes everyone not want to hang out with everyone else and withdraw into their own heads, overthinking everything.
But it’s not the entirety of the nation. Not yet anyway. It just seems that way from what we see and read, but the people who do want friends and connection are still out there doing things. So our challenge if we want to nurture our social lives is be out doing things. Have interests, passions, have energy. If you’re tired and groggy and achy from staying inside, then that’s your cue to stop staying inside.
Do things until you find something that ignites a spark of some kind of feeling or emotion.
Pursue that thing until that spark turns into a passion. Or even a healthy interest that holds your attention. You might need to force it a little to break your habits.
The passion is shared. There are enough people to guarantee this. It will happen naturally if you’re not deliberately trying to avoid people. The internet and discord-type groups should be your “staging area” not your substitute. It doesn’t matter if it’s Warhammer miniature gaming or rock climbing or reading books, there is someone out there somewhere who wants to share the enjoyment with someone else.
If this is your only option for socialization… then something is wrong with your life, please do something before settling on this den of shut-ins and literal children.
I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.
I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.
This, even without the technological forces of capital swooping in to take advantage of every leveraged opportunity, even if people did rally together it would just turn into a political/performative circus and the entire thing will get lost and buried under some streamer drama that erupts from it.
A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games’ so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.
Then after you’re comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven’t seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.
THE HORROR AND HUMANITY SOMEONE SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM THIS BURNING WASTELAND HELLHOLE
If it’s a new thing in life, it’s alexithymia, emotional dysregulation, and likely a consequence of mental health problems, from trauma to other, deeper underlying conditions. The good news is this can be treated, it’s just a survival mechanism gone haywire, you can get better and have love and happiness and friends and family again and enjoy the full range of human experience. It may take time and effort to find a good therapist and stick to the plan, but trust me, it’s worth it.
If you’ve always felt this way, it still may be a chemical imbalance but also may be a personality disorder.
Personality disorders are incredibly hard to treat. But this is often because people with personality disorders don’t think anything is wrong with them, they think the people around them are the ones with problems. But the good news in this case is if this is your issue, you are already suspecting something is wrong and that’s already the hard part crossed. The rest is just structure and planning. The human brain is incredibly flexible and you can actually rewire yourself to be the person you want to be for your loved ones, for yourself, to experience more and feel more. But again, it takes time.
Be good to yourself. Take stock of your life and situation, make a few calls to some all-inclusive mental health clinics, there are a lot of places that will both set you up for insurance/financing, and they will do the preliminary health tests, medication recommendations and therapy sessions. You have options, don’t go into it alone.
Not very. The list of real-world obstacles is long, but there are a few top ones that leave super-heroes firmly in the world of fantasy. (Outside of a few edge-cases that others have listed here, people who really seem to have done small-time stunts for attention rather than a real effort to “fight crime.”)
Guns. The biggest obstacle in the US at least would be the high likelihood that the criminals you try to beat up, people already willing to break the law and victimize others, will just pull out a gun and shoot you in the face because you seem insane and threatening. Body armor may help with some shots from some angles and some calibers, but most likely you will go down even if it stops the bullet.
Getting your ass beat. I studied and taught self-defense and martial arts for well over a decade. The biggest lesson I learned from it is to NEVER get into a fight if you can at all help it. It doesn’t matter how big and tough you are, if you’re looking for a fight on the streets, you WILL get hurt. You will lose teeth, you will get maimed, you will get cut and stabbed, you will face off two people and one will trip you and you will end up with every rib in your body shattered. Every street fight ends up rolling around on the ground, do YOU want to end up on the ground with multiple people trying to kick your teeth in?
Finding a crime. If you’re really lucky you might see a hollywood-style crime in progress once in your life. The “group of robbers hijacking an armored car” type crimes are vastly outweighed by the “ex boyfriend uses his key and slips in while everyone is gone and takes the playstation and perfumes” type crimes. The vast majority of ALL crimes are between people who know each other or family members, how tf you gonna find that shit going down?
Cops. Their success rate at catching perpetrators and suspects is much lower than media would like you to believe, but they’re generally going to be better armed, more organized and more capable of finding and arresting your ass. They don’t take kindly to nutcases on the street upstaging them or causing public disturbances.
Let’s say you prepare. Let’s say you train and be the best fighter in the world. Let’s say you get money or investors who help you develop the highest-level meta-material alloy armors and weapons and electronics. A million dollars in advanced optics, ballistic armor that lets you move freely, drones that fly around and scout for you, machine-gun tasers or knockout-gas bombs and rope-bola launchers that let you trip up bad guys before they even get close… you still trip on a curb and get your ass beat and your gear stolen, because running around the streets in the dark is fucking hard and you are still always just going to be a lone human made of squishy meat and with limited capabilities.
I wonder if they will ever catch the person who did that.
Plastic is an organic molecule. Think of it like a complex set of legos, and the individual lego bricks have a tendency to want to stick to other things if they get shaken. At an atomic level, everything is always shaking, all the time. So this shaking energy, over time, will increase the probability that some of those lego bricks are going to fall off and stick to other things or just fly free. There are simply more ways these lego bricks can be arranged in ways that are not plastic than ways they can.
Or another way of looking at it, there are nearly infinite ways you can break or damage a porcelain teacup, but only one configuration where it works as a cup that people can drink out of. IE: The chances of it not being a teacup anymore are greater than the chances of it remaining a teacup over long stretches of time.
What does all this mean? Your tapes are literally falling apart. Even if they’re kept in boxes or on shelves away from other energy sources like light or heat, they are still vibrating, they are still shaking. A few molecules here and there, pop off every few minutes or more, never to return. While it might be centuries before they turn to dust, these changes over time will in fact start to smear or degrade the subtle magnetic alignment in that plastic tape which is what the actual audio and video is encoded as. This may take only a few more years to be unreadable depending on the age and quality of the tape.
If you want to save your collection, invest in something to record them onto a digital medium, and even then the best you can hope for is a few more decades. Currently we don’t have many commercially available methods for long-term data storage.
Is the AI in the room with you right now?
The only thing as bad as AI zealots are anti-AI zealots.
so far has been detrimental to human societies in every measurable way
I’d like to see a source on that, and even if you have sources, I’d like to see if this fact holds true as this brand-new technology that is inarguably being exploited and misused continues to mature over the next decade. It’s possible to have nuanced opinions on technology, it won’t make you a better or worse person, just better informed.
We have to stop being dogmatic. All of us.
I don’t know what the word “adult” means. It’s just a made up term we tell kids so we can guide them more effectively towards not falling off a cliff and dying.