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.

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

Much better. I’ve seen maybe 2 bots in the past month or so and they were kicked pretty quickly

My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps

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.

Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.

For me it’s Skyrim. Streets of Whiterun, Masser, Jerral Mountains, Under an Ancient Sun, so many tracks that just instantly transport me back to the world I was immersed in throughout most of high school. They bring a sense of peace that comes from exploring in a simpler time.

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.

Koopa, either the normal or the skeleton version. Isn’t his name dry bones or something like that? Anyway, those are the only two I’ll ever play