cobysev @ cobysev @lemmy.world

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61

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793

Joined

2 yr. ago

Both. I don't like bitter foods, and they're both bitter to me.

Yuck! I hate olives. ;)

I posted this in another thread about a month ago, about why the official Midwest was composed of a bunch of eastern-leaning states:

[...] Our country was originally established on the east coast. Anything off the coastline was considered "west." But knowing just how massive our country is now, we have the true west (left half of the country) and then the mid-west (anything not on the east coast, but not on the left half of the country).

Our basis for cardinal locations is centered around the concept of our nation slowly expanding "out west" from the east coast.

The first two are part of the reason I can't sleep at nighttime. It's finally quiet, no distractions, I can finally sit down and focus on that project, and... why's the sun coming up?!

Fortunately I'm retired so I can sleep whenever I want. I typically sleep through the mornings and am awake all afternoon, evening, and night.

United States of America: We're made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we've hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn't call them "states" until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were "colonies" before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

Google Maps is convenient, yes. But I've been trying to de-Google my life recently, and finding alternative map programs has been difficult.

I was using OsmAnd~ for a while, then switched to Organic Maps. Just recently, I've switched to CoMaps, since Organic Maps started including affiliate links and could potentially be harvesting user data to sell.

It's always a struggle, trying to find free open-source software (FOSS) that provides a reliable service without collecting your information.

EDIT: As part of my de-Googling, I've been trying to find software through F-Droid instead of the Google Play store, since Google can potentially track my apps and their data usage through their store. CoMaps is available on F-Droid.

I don't want to stop mid-season and have to wait for the conclusion a month or more later, so I just avoid the show until the full season is released.

I guarantee this update didn't drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn't turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. "Patching Tuesday" is an unofficial but well recognized "holiday" for IT folks. It's not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don't have to work through the weekend.

Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it'll pop up on Tuesdays.

I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren't good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it's just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can't use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn't know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of "picking yourself up by your bootstraps," so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he'd never heard of this "TSP thing" and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other "more legitimate" options for investing my money.

So I didn't enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad's knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn't have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like "set up a Roth IRA" (whatever that was) and "pay attention to what's happening on Wall Street." I really shouldn't have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I'm 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it's nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could've had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I'm surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I'm not hurting financially, but I'm also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I'm probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don't really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to "class-jump" like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

That's a young James T. Kirk in the opening of Star Trek (2009), the J.J. Abrams reboot film.

For the record, I'm 100% in support of seeking help via mental health professionals. My wife had an extremely traumatizing childhood and she's able to function as a happy, normal adult thanks to years of continued support through professional advice and care.

But for me personally... I've only had negative experiences with my few attempts to seek help, so I'm more interested in dealing with it on my own.

I signed up for the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened and my 20-yr career has been filled with war and conflict.

Early in my career, we were told that seeking help through the Mental Health office at our base's clinic would automatically get us kicked out of the military. The mindset was that mental health issues meant you were unstable and a liability to the effectiveness of the mission, so your commander would recommend you be separated from the service. And commanders were automatically notified when their members sought mental health assistance. So a lot of military members just never sought help, and we had a lot of people who suffered alone, myself included.

Then around 2006 or so, after a military guy on our base had a mental break, shot his wife, and took his child hostage in our base housing, we were told that going to mental health would no longer be a career-ender. They realized that we needed to seek help before it got out of hand, so they told commanders to stop automatically recommending separation every time someone made an appointment with Mental Health.

Of course, the mindset was still deeply embedded in commanders, so despite being told it was safe to make appointments, commanders continued to separate military members for a while afterwards. A ton of people got kicked out suddenly around that time, and people stopped going to Mental Health again.

About a decade later, and after many promises that Mental Health was reforming, my wife decided she needed to see Mental Health. I warned her that it might affect her military career, but she went anyway. To my surprise, it had no effect on her career! She kept her security clearance and she wasn't reassigned or kicked out. Because she sought help for herself and proved she wasn't a danger to herself or others, they let her go back to work with no consequences. Her commander wasn't even notified; they kept no records of the details of her appointments, except that she attended an appointment.

A few years later, I was about to retire, so I figured maybe I should go talk to someone too. At worst, it would be on my record that I sought out Mental Health, which would only help my VA medical claims after I retired.

But it was shortly after the pandemic and they weren't letting just anyone go to Mental Health due to social distancing and manning issues. I had to make an appointment with Behavioral Health first. They assessed my daily habits (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.) and recommended I make healthy changes. They claimed that just fixing my daily habits could resolve most mental health issues and prevent Mental Health from needing to be involved, so they could focus on more urgent cases. They made me log my daily habits for a month, so they could determine trends in my behavior.

The problem was, I was already doing everything right. I ate healthy, I had a normal sleep schedule (minus insomnia brought on by PTSD, which was why I wanted to see Mental Health in the first place), and obviously, my exercise routine was excellent. I couldn't continue to serve if my fitness level dropped.

They didn't believe that I was doing everything right. They accused me of lying on my daily log, and I spent a few more months logging my daily habits to prove there's no suspicious activity in my logs. In the end, I retired before I got them to recommend me to Mental Health.

When I went to the VA after retiring, they collected all the medical records that the military had on me, but insisted on doing their own testing, because they're technically a civilian organization separate from the military. So I had to go through Behavioral Health all over again.

They wouldn't recommend me to Mental Health either, claiming that I'm already doing everything right in my daily schedule. They couldn't understand why I wanted to speak with Mental Health when my daily routine was healthy and normal. After half a year of fighting that, I finally gave up. I cancelled a follow-up appointment and never went back.

Now I just deal with my own issues by myself. I have a good support network and I'm able to function just fine. It's easier now, considering I'm completely retired. I don't have to adhere to a schedule or report to a job every day. I can plan my days as they come and I don't need to commit to anything. If I have a bad day, I can just stay in bed all day and try again the next day.

Honestly, venting on threads like this on Lemmy (and formerly, Reddit) is probably the best "therapy" I've had over the years. Sometimes, just writing down my struggles helps me to deal with them.

Of course, this is my public account that all my friends/family know about, and I don't have a private one. So I can't be too specific on some details of my struggles. But it's still therapeutic being able to share that I'm struggling in an open forum.

Ironically, I don't like mental health professionals because it's so impersonal; they're strangers with no emotional investment in me, so why would I open up with my deepest and most painful secrets to them? But when everyone is anonymous here on Lemmy, I feel comfortable venting about things. I dunno why this feels different, but I prefer it. /Shrugs

In 2018, there was a show called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which was a sort of reboot of the old '80s cartoon of (nearly) the same name. The girl in the comment above my OP is Entraptra, one of the princesses. She's obsessed with miniature versions of food.

OP's post had a miniature-sized combo meal in the last panel.

"...Are you crabs yet?"

I get that reference.

How the hell am I way older than these guys?! When'd that happen? I was a child when I first played these games.

I was born in the early '80s. The 2000s picture was what my McDonald's always looked like throughout my childhood. I've never seen a McDonald's that looked like the '90s pic.

The 2020 pic shows current McDonald's, but they changed to that sometime in the mid-2010s.

Toothpaste isn't a disinfectant. It's just good at breaking up the gunk on your teeth while brushing. If you don't rinse your toothbrush well, or if you don't brush that often, bacteria can grow and thrive on the brush.

Considering its "run time" was from 2009-2016, the actual dates of the webcomic, I'm assuming it's just categorizing it as a show because of all the flash animations included with the comic.

There are other web series that show up as TV shows on IMDb, like The Nostalgia Critic, which has never been an officially licensed show, but have enough serialized video media to constitute a series of sorts.

This is the key to a healthy and long-lasting relationship. I didn't marry my wife just because I found her attractive. She was genuinely my best friend at the time, the person I turned to before anyone else.

During the pandemic, the divorce rate skyrocketed because so many people found themselves stuck at home with their spouses and realized they didn't like spending a lot of time around them. Going to work every day gave them time away, but being with their spouse 24/7 drove them nuts.

Not for my wife and I. We already spent every day hanging out together. Even if we were engaged in our own separate hobbies and interests, we were at least spending time in the same space together. So the pandemic was just more of our normal routine.