TL;DR You’re definitely not the only one. I had to drop out of college because of my toxic family and spend 3 years afterwards wafting around with no purpose and no will to live. But I figured things out and am doing much better now. If my dumb ass can pull it off, you can too.

The year I was in college, and the few years after I dropped out. I went to school as a music education major. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, and with how active I was in my high school’s orchestra program most of my family and teachers really pushed me to pursue a career in music. The idea of trying to survive as a gigging musician was honestly a little terrifying, so I decided to major in music education instead of music performance since being a teacher seemed like the more stable route. Turns out I hate kids. Who woulda thunk it?

I went to college in my hometown, so I stayed home instead of living on campus. I lived with my mom and sister who were both alcoholics with bipolar disorder. Plus, music ed is apparently a pretty busy major. So I would have 12 hours worth of classes and assisting student teachers that I wasn’t particularly enjoying, just to come home and break up a fist fight and then (try to) go to sleep in a room with a gaping hole in the ceiling that all of the roaches that infested the walls would enter the rest of the house through.

Needless to say, this environment was not conducive to succeeding in school. I lost my academic scholarship. Previously, that was enough to pay for all of my schooling, but without it I’d have to take out loans every semester just to finish a major that I didn’t even know if I wanted to do anymore and there was no way in hell I was doing that. So I dropped out and started working while volunteering with the university symphony, until I got a new job with a new schedule that meant I had to stop playing with them. It was an Amazon fulfillment center. Feel free to google that to see why I only lasted a few weeks. I lost touch with the few friends I made in college, I had a falling out with the closest friend I ever had, I now officially had no purpose in life since I wasn’t able to do anything with music, and had no plan for getting myself out of my abusive and toxic home life.

That period was rough, but I eventually made it out of there. Long story short, I was able to do warehouse work until I could move out, I did a 3 month program at a community college to get some IT certifications, and now I make $70k/yr to work from home doing tech support for robots with plans to finally move out of my home town later this year.

I got a used car at the end of 2022. I am just now accepting the fact that it was a stupid decision. I’m already upside down on the loan and now the turbo is having issues that may be costly to repair. I’m wanting to move soon to a place where I won’t need a car anymore, but now I’m realizing selling it isn’t going to be quite as straight forward as I initially thought.

I have a few from playing with friends a few years back. But my favorite is when I accidentally made a dick castle.

Generally my method of building castles is finding a nice big hill or cliff, plopping a few towers along the top, and then connecting them up with a big wall. If it was big enough, it’d be an open court yard in the middle. But in this case, it was just a long hallway connecting 3 towers, with the main tower overlooking a sheer cliff face into the plains below. Majestic, glorious, the perfect spot.

My friend had been heckling me about how the shape was a little phallic, but I scoffed at his observations. After a week of building this thing, and finally getting the roof done over the hallway connecting the towers, my friend made a map. And I could deny it no longer. I spent a week constructing a giant cock n balls, with the head threateningly pointed at the village to the east. The map remained proudly displayed in the entryway to our shared base just south of my castle. To a 15 year old, this was peak comedy.

Later my friend burned it down. I still bring up this betrayal to him sometimes.

I hope everything goes well during the visit! If she’s supportive, that’s already a great sign. Constantly explaining things can get exhausting after a while, but it’s definitely easier to handle when those questions are asked in good faith.

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but as someone who is really considering moving to Portland from the deep south, how is it? It seems like a really fun city, but it’s hard to sift through the propaganda with it being such a target for conservative media.

Definitely glasses. I tried contacts when I was younger. It took the eye doctor about 15 minutes to put on my trial set of contacts for me and I was very concerned about how the hell we were going to get them back out. I tried to put them in by myself in the mornings before school for about a week and couldn’t get them in once. So I gave up.

Shame, because I feel like I look better without my glasses. But oh well

Pretty great actually! I just signed the offer letter for a new job and will turn in my notice at my current job later today. I’ve also been reconnecting with some old friends and was able connect some of them back with each other too. I stayed up a little late playing some games with them last night. It was great hearing everyone goofing around together again, it almost felt llike no time had passed at all

It depends. During the work week, I’m awake before I’ve developed an appetite and settle for a banana and a coffee. Specifically cold brew espresso with a splash of whole milk and a scoop of chocolate flavored whey protein powder.

On the weekends though, I wait until 10 or 11 before I eat so I can savor a bigger meal. Typically bacon, eggs, and some diced red potatoes all cooked in the same cast iron pan. If I’m feeling frisky, I might whip up some French toast or pancakes as a side.

Congrats! That’s a huge step.

Alcoholism kind of runs in my family. Frankly, alcohol caused enough problems in my life long before I ever had a single sip of it myself which turned me off from drinking for a very long time. I’ve occasionally drank as an adult, but recently a close family member went through some serious health problems because of alcohol and it was just the final straw for me. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink, but it’s been a few months and I just don’t have any desire to change that right now.

I never had problems controlling my own drinking, but I don’t want to risk going down a bad path by turning it into a habit. Seeing the people I love get affected by this poison just makes me question why it’s such an acceptable substance to abuse in our society.

You’re conflating the “amusement” of eating food with the amusement of killing the animals to obtain that food. They are not the same. As stated in my previous post, there is a big disconnect in most people’s minds between the food they eat and the animals they come from.

But more to the point I’m trying to make, animals dying in order to feed people is different from animals being recorded while they are slowly and deliberately tortured to death as a form of entertainment. I don’t know how to explain that one is worse than the other. I’m not disagreeing with you that plant based alternatives are preferable to meat in order to avoid the suffering of animals, but I’m also not understanding why you feel the need to bring that up in the comments of this article. The issue described in the article is fundamentally different from that of the meat industry.

In the meat industry, animal suffering is not the goal. The goal is to deliver as much product (food in this case) to the consumer as cheaply as possible. Animal suffering is a byproduct of this because on a large enough scale, both the consumer and the capitalists running the slaughterhouses are far enough removed from the animals that they don’t have to confront the moral questions of what they’re putting these animals through.

I agree that it’s still a disgusting practice, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately harming animals for your own amusement. In the meat industry, some people can hand-wave those moral concerns away by saying to themselves “at least the animals died for something good: to feed countless families”. Whether you agree with that reasoning or not (which, for the record, I do not), that same person can’t use that excuse in the case of these monkeys. It’s just pointless suffering for the amusement of a handful of psychopaths.

Fedora with KDE. I ditched Windows about 4 years ago and never looked back. I bounced between a few different distros, but I’ve been using Fedora in recent months (switched once version 36 was released) and I think I’ll stick with it for a while. It’s been a great experience and gaming has been pretty painless so far, the only exceptions being games with easy anti-cheat as it doesn’t always play nice with Linux users.