I don’t want to call it a “stupid” question, because most people just don’t know this. But when I was serving in the US Air Force, if my service ever came up around civilians, it was almost guaranteed that the next words out of their mouth were, “What planes do you fly?” It was such a common occurrence, it was a running joke amongst us Air Force members.

Only 5% of the Air Force are pilots. The other 95% work in career fields that either directly or indirectly support those pilots. We have doctors, lawyers, electricians, police, accountants, cooks… You name it, we likely have a similar career for it.

I personally worked in IT. I fixed computers for 20 years, usually in some cold, dark server room deep in the bowels of a facility. (Sometimes underground even!) I was about as far removed from the airplanes as one could get. So despite my 20 years working for the Air Force, I know absolutely nothing about planes.

Also, it kind of bothers me when people thank me for my service because I didn’t do anything. I’m no hero. Anyone could’ve done my job. Heck, I deployed with Marines once and they told me, if shit hits the fan, to just duck under my desk and let them take care of it. Even in the Air Force, we’re told that Security Forces (our version of military police) are the ones trained to handle combat with enemy forces and to get out of their way if anything happens.

When I was deployed with the Marines, my Marine boss told me once that she hopes to god that she never sees an Air Force person with a rifle in their arms. That means the planes are down, the Marines are dead, and the base is overrun. She said we are the absolute last resort to defend against enemy forces. So if we come under fire, she asked that I hand my weapon to the nearest Marine and then go take cover.

“THE VAST ATLANTIC OCEAN.” Nothing to see here…

I often wish I could just sit back and not be so staunch :(

I remember having lengthy debates with myself in elementary school about how strictly I adhered to my personal convictions. It seemed like most people didn’t care, or could easily let go of things. I wanted so badly to stop caring about the specifics of things and just be chill like everyone else, but I just couldn’t let go. Without empirical evidence to prove me wrong, I just wouldn’t budge in my convictions. I was practically in tears about it at times.

Many years later, in my late 30s, I found out that I have a severe case of ADHD. The doctor who diagnosed me had her PhD in ADHD studies and had been working as a researcher and therapist in the field of ADHD for 11 years. She said I was the worst case she’d ever seen.

Most of my childhood was lived through the '80s-'90s, when ADHD was just the “hyperactive kid syndrome.” If you weren’t constantly running around screaming and disrupting everything around you, you were considered normal.

I was always bursting with energy and internally screaming when I had to sit still for more than 5 minutes. But everyone just chalked it up to me being an energy-filled kid with a wild imagination and a love for playing outdoors. The fact that I could sit still meant that I was “normal.”

But as the decades rolled on, our understanding of ADHD has increased and it turns out, it’s a lot more complicated than we originally thought. Obsessing over details, pouring over concepts again and again to form strong opinions, and then refusing to change those convictions unless definitively proven wrong is 100% an effect of ADHD.

Not saying you have ADHD, OP, but your situation is very familiar to me, and ADHD was the answer I lacked for many years.

Haha! Yup, basically.

Fortunately, a lot of Japanese folks were obsessed with Americans and American culture when I was living over there, so if you could convince them you were American, they would bend over backwards to help you with anything.

I flew back into Japan after a vacation and I had a 25-hr layover in Tokyo before flying back to my military base. I slept in a hotel that night, then went to the airport the next morning and asked if they could bump me to an earlier flight so I wouldn’t be stuck in the airport all day.

The lady at the counter said they had a flight leaving in 15 minutes and she would ensure I got on it.

Then she took off her heels, grabbed me by the hand, and literally ran me through the airport! She pushed me to the front of the security line, then we sprinted all the way to the terminal. They even held the plane an extra 10 minutes to ensure I got on it. I felt bad for holding up a plane, but damn! What service!

No, but I have dark hair and have been described as having a Mediterranean look, so a lot of people around the world assumed I was from Europe at first glance. The Yakuza guy didn’t immediately pin me for an American until I spoke English.

This was also way up in northern Japan, where very few foreigners can be found, so their exposure to us is limited. Lots of Japanese people stared at us in public if we went anywhere except the town our base was in.

In the early 2000s, I had just joined the US military right out of high school and found myself stationed in Japan for my first assignment.

I loved Japanese culture and had started a college course on basic Japanese language so I could communicate with the locals and find my way around without getting lost in a foreign country.

One day, one of the civilians in my office was retiring and he chose a fancy hotel in the next city over to host his retirement ceremony. They had a bunch of meeting/party rooms we could host our ceremony in. It was fun, but I’m a bit introverted, so at some point, I stepped out into the grand lobby of the hotel to recover some energy by myself. There was a grand piano in one corner with some petite Japanese lady playing soft music on it. I learned against a large pillar and quietly listened for a bit.

All of a sudden, a meeting room door nearby banged open and some Japanese businessman stormed out on his phone. He was agitated and speaking angrily into his flip phone (smartphones didn’t exist yet). He stopped on the other side of the pillar from me and continued his loud discussion.

I had gotten absorbed into some Japanese drama TV shows and had learned to identify the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) slang. This guy was using the same dialect. I got a chill down my spine; it was my first time running into a Yakuza member in real life.

The guy finished his call and turned to leave… and stopped when he saw me standing practically next to him. His anger flared up and he started speaking aggressively at me in Japanese. Probably pissed that I was listening in on his call.

I caught a few words here and there, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough for full sentences yet, especially spoken rapidly at me in an angry tone.

When he paused, I said in English, “Um… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” I knew how to say it in Japanese, but I didn’t want to give him any inkling that I knew Japanese.

His entire demeanor changed. He grinned from ear to ear and said, “Ah! America-jin, ne? Good! Good guy!” He gave me a rough pat on the shoulder and then turned and went back to his meeting room.

I thought he was gonna drag me into the meeting room with his buddies and I’d never be found again, so I was relieved when he smiled and left me be. I went right back to my party and made sure not to go anywhere by myself for the rest of the evening.

Use CoMaps. It’s a privacy-first app that pulls their map data from OpenStreetMaps. If something is inaccurate on the map, you can edit it on OSM and it’ll populate to most map services. I’ve made changes and seen it pop up on Google Maps too.

I downloaded CoMaps from F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/), just to avoid the Google Play Store. Slowly de-Googling my life…

I don’t know if there is an iOS version. Apple is the OG evil company, long before Google got rid of their “Don’t Be Evil” motto, so I avoid their products. Now I’m trying to get off Android stuff too, but there aren’t many alternatives right now.

EDIT: Someone else linked a website for CoMaps and it does have an iOS app. Also an Apple and Linux desktop program. No Windows though.

I never heard about the Native American bit, but as a kid in the early '90s, we always looked for the star. Rumor around school was that you could win a prize if you found a wrapper with a star, but no one knew how to redeem it.

The Federal Communications Commission. It’s a US government agency that regulates all communications broadcasts (TV, radio, Internet, satellite, etc.).

For a lot of (immature) guys, dating is a game with roles to play, in order to get laid. One thing that some guys do is pretend to want a serious relationship to draw in women willing to commit on the first or second date.

It’s a terrible thing to do, but some guys will go to any lengths to convince a lady to go to bed with them. Finding decent men in the sea of childish boys can be a challenge, but playing it slow and respectful will help to separate the two. A real man will respect your requests and autonomy, not challenge them or give passive-aggressive responses.

The fact that he tuned out as soon as you told him to take it easy speaks volumes about the kind of guy he is. He’s definitely looking for a quick lay and when that was off the table, he lost interest. You should consider it a good thing that he decided to call it off. He’s not wasting any more of your time with incompatible goals in mind.

Minecraft: Story Mode was actually pretty popular. It was basically a story-rich RPG set in a Minecraft world.

Control is one of my favorite games! I’ve really wanted to review it here, but I wanted to review Alan Wake first, since they’re tangentially connected. And you kept playing Alan Wake and posting about it, so I didn’t want to add more Alan Wake content to this community at the same time. It’s my goal to keep adding new content, which is why I generally don’t go back and discuss games I’ve already reviewed once.

I remember the game being short […]

Short?! I’ve played for 36 hours and still haven’t beaten it! Granted, I stopped playing when I got stuck on a boss fight and didn’t want to grind endless mobs to level up for the fight. Then when I did return, I decided to just start the whole game over because it’d been so long since I last played, I forgot what was going on. So I have two half-played game sessions on Steam.

Also, I got absorbed in the details of the game. Something about it scratches a particular itch for me so I love just exploring every nook and cranny and collecting every little bit of lore I can find in game. I love the world of SCP, and this game is based on the overall concept of it. I especially like how this game retcons Alan Wake into an anomaly that The Oldest House is tracking.

[…] if you said introducing them to true local food […]

I did. I took my family to locally-owned restaurants, not food chains or fast food places. Just because I mentioned a couple familiar food types doesn’t mean I bought them from a fast food joint. Still, my family didn’t care for them. They wanted recognizable American fast food instead.

In one case, a Japanese friend of mine invited my family over to her parents’ house to have a home-cooked dinner. My family were weirded out by the food and barely ate. It wasn’t even strange foods; they had grilled marinated meats, rice, some local vegetables, etc. My dad did enjoy the sake though.

Growing up, my family has always accused me of being a picky eater, and it comes up every time we’re eating together. Every family get-together, it’s always a big deal whether I’m going to eat the prepared meal or not. My sister especially likes to offer to make a separate meal just for me because I’m “sooo picky!”

I can’t get it through their skulls that I’m less of a picky eater than they are - I’m just vocal about the very few specific foods I decided I don’t like. Which happens to be in a lot of recipes my extended family makes.

I spent 20 years traveling the world with the US military and I made it a point to try local cuisine everywhere I went. I became a bit of a foodie, and some of my favorite foods are from foreign countries. Every time family members came to visit me in other countries, I’d spend half of their visit just introducing them to amazing cuisine in the local area.

We’d eat out practically every day to give them a taste of the local culture. And surprisingly, most of them didn’t care for it. They wanted their “American food” instead. They weren’t very adventurous when it came to trying new things. There’s nothing worse than going to a ramen shop in Japan or a döner shop in Germany and having your family ask if we can go find a McDonald’s instead.

But sure, I’m a picky eater because I’ve hated squash since I was a child, and that’s apparently a staple of every family banquet.

F.B. Purity is a desktop browser extension, it only works on the website from a PC. It won’t run on Android devices, unfortunately. They’ve been talking about making an app for it for years, but they still haven’t made one.

Has everyone forgotten about F.B. Purity (Fluff Busting Purity)? It’s a browser extension that lets you customize the entire interface of Facebook. It’s been around for 17 years and still works just fine.

I use it to remove not only ads, but FB games, marketplace, reels/videos, suggestions/featured content, FB Messenger, etc. I pretty much locked down my Facebook interface to only show me posts from my friends in the order that they were posted, with the latest at the top of my feed. Just like Facebook used to be before it started shoving useless content in your face.

The only reason I still have a Facebook account is because 90% of my friends, family, and contacts I’ve made over a lifetime of global travels, are all on Facebook. If I need to get in touch with someone, Facebook is where I’ll find them. But I don’t post anything to Facebook anymore; I rarely log on to it.

There isn’t another social media program where I can find everyone I know without subscribing to even more junk. I won’t use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, TikTok, or any of the other corporate social media programs, and most people I know/knew in person don’t use or understand the Fediverse.

Bluesky and Discord are as corporate as I’ll tolerate, and I’m already on the lookout for replacements for both. I used to have a Mastodon account a decade ago, before the Fediverse was a common thing, but I have no idea what site I built an account on. I might have to just suck it up and rebuild my account somewhere else. And there are plenty of Discord clones out there, but none quite as functional as Discord yet…

Ah, maybe I’m getting my pop media confused with actual history. Hitler is obsessed with the occult in many films and video games.

Interesting note: Zombie Army is actually a spinoff series from the Sniper Elite franchise. It was originally called Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, but they dropped the lengthy title when the third Zombie Army game released. There are 4 of them out now.

Sniper Elite focuses on a sniper behind enemy lines during WWII. Despite creating unique stories and events for you to play, its overall setting is somewhat accurate to real life history.

Zombie Army, however, is an alternate history where Hitler revived his fallen Nazis as zombies, as a final solution when he knew he was losing the war. These are supernatural zombies, as real-life this Hitler was obsessed with the occult. No virus plague zombies here.

The two game franchises don’t have much to do with each other, but they started out under the same franchise title.

I served in the US military for 20 years, which has a strict clean-shaven policy. No facial hair allowed unless you’re on a temporary medical exemption. You can’t even have stubble; you have to be clean shaven if you’re wearing the military uniform.

Some branches of our military (Army specifically) require you to be clean-shaven 24/7, regardless of whether you’re in uniform or not. I served in the US Air Force, so that was thankfully not a requirement for me.

However, I have another dilemma. I have soft, sensitive skin, but thick, rough facial hair. So shaving is always tough on my face. I would shave 5 days of the week so I could be presentable in uniform, then let it grow out on the weekends so my face can heal. Otherwise, I’d start damaging my skin from daily shaving.

Even worse, my hair grows exceptionally fast. I had to start shaving twice a day to stay within regs; first thing in the morning before I went to work, then again around lunchtime to keep the stubble at bay. I still had a permanent 5-O’clock shadow and would regularly be accused of not shaving.

In those 2 decades, I tried a variety of razors, from electric, manual, safety, disposable, etc. In the end, the only one that truly worked well for me was the Gillette Mach 3. Not the Mach 3 Turbo, which was more expensive but with no visible improvement.

Below is my current razor. I’ve had the handle for about a decade now, so it’s getting worn down.

I used to swap razors weekly when I shaved daily. Now that I’m retired, I shave once every few weeks and swap razors maybe once a month or two. I save a ton of money on razors now.

My wife once bought me a fancy expensive “electric” razor set from The Art of Shaving in New York. Their “Lexington Collection,” specifically. It’s basically a vibrating razor handle that takes Gillette disposable razor heads. I forget what Gillette calls them, but it’s the one with 5 blades. It came with a metal stand that holds the razor and a shaving brush. 5 blades was too much; it didn’t shave as well as the Mach 3 and its three blades. And I didn’t notice a difference whether it was vibrating or not. So I stopped using it.

I also bought a Van Der Hagen shaving brush and soap cup. I used to use it with a Van Der Hagen safety razor, but despite the name, I kept cutting myself every time I used it. So safety razors are out for me.

I used to get skin irritation all the time, or occasionally break out in face acne when shaving, until I learned that “dry shaving” worked best for me. I was spending a fortune on shaving cream, but that seemed to be the problem. Now I just wet my face with hot water, run my razor under hot water and shave with it, then rinse my face with cold water afterwards. No more skin irritation, no more acne, no more problems. Shaving cream is just a waste of money; it’s not necessary.

Here’s an example of how fast my facial hair grows. This is me right now, after 4 days without shaving:

Flock is a private security company which has been making contracts with city and state governments all over the US to put up their cameras in public spaces. These cameras use AI to monitor the public and report any potential crimes to law enforcement.

Unfortunately, AI is in its infancy and highly fallible. So most of the “crimes” reported are false. Just hallucinations by the AI. However, this doesn’t stop police from responding to every report and treating innocent civilians like criminals before they’ve done a proper human assessment of the situation or any real detective work.

On top of that, police (and government officials) are using these cameras to spy on American citizens and stalk them. Harassment of “suspected criminals” is at an all-time-high thanks to these cameras, and biases (read: racism) are being encouraged. Especially with all the issues with ICE going on right now.

The cameras aren’t even encrypted properly, and some more tech-savvy folks are finding it easy to connect to the Flock camera network and browse cameras themselves without any actual credentials or authorization. You never know who is actually looking at you through these cameras.

The issue with your phone being scanned is a whole different thing unrelated to Flock cameras. Law enforcement can set up fake relay “towers” for cell phones in a mobile van, which your phone will connect to automatically while searching for the nearest strong signal. Then they can track all data that comes and goes from your phone, effectively watching everything you do on your device.

The problem is, they can’t pinpoint specific phones to connect to, so everyone in the area will automatically connect to their relay and they can effectively collect data on dozens of wireless devices all at once. It’s a short-range relay, so it’s not like they’re tracking everyone in the city. But if they’re looking for someone in particular, everyone in the area will have their private data accessed without their knowledge.

Can someone scan your phone and remotely access all of your data? Yes and no. With the right equipment, software, and skill, your phone can be remotely hacked. But no one is just pointing a device at your phone and stealing data that way. Especially not Flock. Their AI is just (falsely) reporting on what their cameras detect. They’re not actively scanning signals in the area and attempting to hack them.

Most hacked devices are either random (hackers scanning networks until they find an unsecure device), targeted attacks by someone with a purpose, or just a regular person accidentally clicking on a bad file or website link that installs a virus on their device that allows hackers to access it.