pokari

61

Natural consequence of unplanned cities in an automobile-driven society. A lot of the roads was big enough when they built them. They were big enough when people bought the land adjacent to them. They are not big enough now.

And the problem of all the traffic that needs to go through not-enough streets would be even worse if we didn't have Apple and Google's spyware doing load-balancing now!

Fact (possibly outdated by like a decade): The fun, sporty cars with the happiest customers are not the six-figure supercars but rather some budget stuff from Mazda (like the Miyata).

Expensive cars are pretty much unilaterally a waste of money.

31

That doesn't mean I don't think a certain era of, say, garish Lamborghinis, don't look really cool.

Personally I'm hoping that, if the next vehicle I get is four-wheeled, it'll finally make sense to get all-electric. But I suppose that almost by definition, by the time I'll get them, they won't be "fancy".

>w< Penrose...! *flying tackle hug*

Of course you got a return offer, you smart puppy you. <3

(Though more soberly I do hope it's actually somewhere worth returning. Not, say, some place that chews people out and spits them back out. That would be bad.)

18

*Extra huggles* :>

Just hi~

Personally, I'm glad that the media cycle seems to be slowing down a bit. I hope this trend continues and we can start talking about boring stuff again by, say, autumn. Maybe even late spring if we're terrifically lucky.

Also trying to fix my sleep schedule, which basically means inverting it now because I'd slid so far forward as to reach the grim point where basically all my sleeping was during daylight hours. Great mood for playing Cyberpunk, to be sure, but...

On that note, actually, good night XD

][>,/

My brain is trying desperately to string together a face from this and coming up with nothing.

Well, nothing reasonable anyway. If I interpret the square brackets as a headband or beard and the angle-brackets as a scrunched forhead or a pouty face respectively, I do get interesting results.

7

Hey guys. I read some manga again after a long time:

https://mangadex.org/title/46011/boku-no-tsuma-wa-kanjou-ga-nai
https://mangadex.org/title/25229/hokuou-kizoku-to-moukinzuma-no-yukiguni-karigurashi

good to see everyone is still active, I have online class 6 days a week nowadays and lots of other things happened

That second one has been on my to-read list for a while >w<

I am sorry you have online classes from hell, although that does seem to be the going thing :/

Anyway hi, hi, hi~! *tackle-hugs* >w<

8 omg pens alive! he's alive!
ahem.
 
We the guardians of the vatoto forum certify that you have completed the quest of dragon slaying and has returned with the dragon crystal. You may now enter the sacred chamber to proceed with your ascension to kingship in accordance with the ancient rites.

I second the above-signed. But add that one should be careful because no one's sure what it's kingship of. We hope it's something fluffy and heartwarming.

Bumblebee

<3

I am doing relatively okay. This year has been an oddly okay time to be unemployed while trying to sort out sleep problems groggily at home. Which is going half-okay, though the whole CPAP machine thing remains a mixed bag even after I've been trying to make it work for half a year.

But I still live with my family (actually my eldest sister even came home during the pandemic so it's the entire family of five now), and we've all been locked up snugly in the pandemic like only a family of snuggly introverts can. Which isn't to say we haven't been going a little stir-crazy from time to time.

And I've been reading lots of manga and playing lots of games. As one does with lots of free time indoors.

Penrose has been seen around periodically, though current rate is like once every few months so crossing paths might be difficult. ~.~ But I'm still expecting to see him again, broadly speaking.

Are you doing okay? I fervently hope you are doing well. >~< It has been such a long year for just about everyone, of course, but all the more reason one hopes one's friends are doing well.

And it is quite nice to have you visit.

<3

Much love, and if you're not sticking around, take care of yourself, okay? (Actually please take care of yourself regardless. o.o)

Me, a pedant:
I mean, I see no theoretical reason that some day something even greater might emerge, optimistically—indeed that would be wonderful—though I agree that there's nothing like that in the foreseeable future.

But yeah, I miss it. :/

Also "Greatest Of All Time" is a totally unfamiliar acronym to me for some reason and all I could think was "Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test" (à la Fallout 3).

Start again, guys. Sorry-not-sorry~

^^ Nice of you to drop by~ :'D

-1

Whereas I've been going to sleep super late just on account of pandemic-induced cabin fever and existential angst. oxo; (I saw dawn the other day from the wrong side which is very rare for me).

A lot of my time lately has been spent in Fallout 4 making settlements to my architectural and artistic tastes. A good amount of the time is spent fighting the build system to get it to let me do what I want or trying to find pieces to make things fit together without looking terrible which in its own weird way is actually rather zen. An open-ended puzzle of sorts.

It's never snowy here so complain all you want. u.u

I'm sorry about the course, though.

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about the batteries. Lithium ion batteries last pretty long now if they're not garbage. Conversely, the one time I tried to store an extra battery at exactly 40% long term (after looking it up) it was dead a couple years later when I next tried it (and the battery I'd been using all in the meantime was still okay). It's almost definitely not worth the effort of keeping it "optimal", especially since a lot of the electronic manufacturers are usually already doing some of that for you (e.g. 100% on a phone is usually not actually 100% of what it could charge to, for exactly this reason).

Prime rib

...go big and with bone?

D: D:

Hang in there, Penrowo!

*super hugs* >~<

Xylitol

so anyway, here the situation is like a kid wouldn't dare even utter the d-word, and pretty much anything like marijuana or anything is 'druggy' and not good (or rather, shame to your family, a bit cliche, but very true still),

[...]

the fact that you explain the drug statistic without any sense of 'wrongdoing' attached to 'drugs' is also not a common stance you would find here.

[...]

in rural areas here its 'poverty out of their fucking minds' so the moment you get addicted to something, there goes your entire existence and your bloodline ends. bad end.

To be clear, as a kid it was made clear to me that if I did drugs my entire life would end in ruins.

We don't have the "dishonour on your family" thing here as strongly, of course; our (over-)emphasis on individualism has that societal benefit, at least. Because society at large believes you're supposed to be independent from your family once you become an adult, anything you do as an adult isn't assumed to reflect on your parents as much; if your kid does drugs as a kid, it's more complicated and my impression is you'll get an overwhelming mix of conflicting sympathy and scorn from others.

As for our overall differences in attitude—a lot of that's due to stuff that happened back in the 60's and 70's in particular (and then our reaction to that a decade or so later, and then our reactions to our reaction in another decade or so, etc. e.g. presently culminating in stuff now about how we've put waaaay too many people in prison for drugs to the point where it's stressing our prison infrastructure, at which point you start asking things like, "okay, but did we really need to stick them in there for multiple decades just for being a dumb kid, if they never really hurt anyone but themselves?")

But I digress—Pertinently to myself, one of the things that happened in the 60's and 70's was the hippie movement; a generally anti-establishement movement formed of an amalgamation of both wise and foolish, smart and stupid people, deciding for a mix of both selfish and selfless reasons, that we should all love each other, free ourselves from various arbitrary-seeming restrictions of our culture (on love, sex, drugs, clothing), seek peace and the end of conflict, take care of the planet, enjoy simple pleasures, seek truth and deeper meaning, and persue both individual and communal spiritualism. A complicated mix of enlightened altruism and thinly-veiled hedonism, which apparently can get along amicably enough.

And the university I went to never has quite left that movement behind. Effectively, it was established in 1965 by a bunch of folks who were more on the "enlightened altruism" side of things, and while U.C. Santa Cruz has become much more of a traditional university since then—it's no longer clothing-optional, teachers now give letter-grades for classes instead of just giving you a note telling you how they thought you did in class, etc—and while the engineering divisions I was in were less-effected—the culture still lingers tangibly (my eccentric psychology prof, an old hold-on, would tell us at the end of each lesson, at least half-seriously, that we should remember to go run naked in the woods). That too is true with the students—and alas, as part of that, a visible cloud of marijuana smoke can be seen drifting off the campus every 20th of April.

While I won't even touch alcohol myself, one of the things that happens when you're in university with so many "druggies" in a relatively drug-casual environment is you get introduced to a bunch of them without knowing who is who, and only after you've learned that they're competent engineers who you can trust your back to on an assignment, do you learn dropped in casual conversation that they smoke pot and do magic mushrooms. It sort of deflates the narrative that these substances are all mythical evils that will consume you alive.

Though the flip-side is that some of them actually will. So in the end, the "softcore/hardcore" drug people are on to something to some extent, it seems, but...

like the terminology 'softer' drugs, mostly people here (and to a large extent me) have no distinction between soft and hardcore drugs, drugs are bad, stay away, thats it.

smoking/alcohol is popular enough, but not really in school, rather in college seniors. seeing senpai smoking/getting drunk is a pretty common sight, though it is banned, and they try to keep it under the radar. and still most of the kids have it drilled in their heads that its bad, and avoid it.

No, that's pretty much the same as it was for me growing up, except for different details; I mean I vaguely knew in theory we had the "softcore" and "hardcore" drugs but they were all forbidden things that bad, sad people take.

By softer vs harder here I actually just meant alcohol and tobacco and coffee vs. everything else; except marijuana has sort of become half like that in popular consciousness around here over the past ten years (which makes some sense; it's hard to argue that it's much worse than heavy smoking or boozing based on studies of it's effects, though, god, it smells terrible, which is unfortunate because it's basically as common as cigarette smoke here now).

I'm not done responding to everything in prior posts but I'm posting it now because this is on my phone and there are various ways I could lose what I've already typed at any point in time
The rest is as follows:

also what is creepy is how quickly people in america get 'diagnosed' with add and adhd and some other 'notasgoodasotherpeoplesbrains' diseases, and have no problem getting started on what people here would call 'brain-addling' 'medication', whereas here were just told to put in more work without complaining too much. i know that has its own set of disadvantages and leads to unimaginative people, but its weird how america is just going the opposite way, so liberal that everyone becomes edgy (or at least seems to me). no parent here would ever get their kid 'tested' (because psychologists help = you are retarded, again shame from what others think, in fact, counselling help in general is seen the same way) unless of course its an obviously visible issue

Keep in mind that there is such a thing as school psychologists here (though they're mostly invisible to most of the students most of the time), so "problem" kids may be diagnosed as ADD or ADHD even without their parents taking them anywhere.

I don't remember how I got diagnosed as such, personally; I was genuinely a weird, hyperactive, stubborn kid, so I think I'm more glad I was here—where I had to take medicine I didn't want and which made me slightly depressed—rather than being, say, the nail-to-be-hammered-flat in a society that still beats children who constantly stray out off line—but it's hard to say ~w~;

My gut feeling is that we now do over-diagnose people as being "ADD" where in olden days we'd just call them "distractible" or "absent-minded" and accept that as a personality trait that, while perhaps not desirable, is what it is—instead of trying to "fix" it which seems, I agree, a bit creepy. Especially so when we're possibly so focused on these disorders that hurt "productivity", moreso than others... But I digress.

There is a very interesting million-dollar question as to whether ADD and ADHD levels have actually been rising, or whether just diagnoses of them have. It is possible, given our changes in habits, diet, etc, etc, that we really do have a rising number of distractible kids; it's also possible we're just going manic about diagnosing them as such, and no one has a way of measuring one way or another. And so people just arbitrarily decide for themselves which of the two is the problem and act accordingly.

As for whether, in general, my generation in this area have become weird people, because of our not-well-tested, progressive upbringings—nobody knows yet, really, I think (that is, the casual relationship is difficult to establish. From the point of view of previous generations, we are definitely weird, I think, though perhaps that's normal). But, if you're getting your impressions from the media and from talking to people on the internet, you will get a bad/overemphasized example of how strange people are (as always :'p).

How that relates to edginess in particular, I couldn't say. ~w~; I'm almost tempted to blame prevalent internet access at younger and younger ages for that, moreso, honestly, but that's just a gut feeling with zero real basis.

only s tier jobs are possible from my college (and major), so dont worry.

To the extent that that's not sarcasm, I'm glad :'3

like your senpai sjoe?

>w< sjoe where

Indeed, I wanna see sjoe-senpai again uwu

If I'm allowed to be irresponsibly selfish here: I want someone kind, cuddly, cute (be it in personality or appearance), who loves me unconditionally.

...

It appears I've just described a dog, not a person. Oh dear. I may need to think this through a little more...

In actuality, based on people I've had crushes on instead of pure idle dreaming, my de-facto requirements are something more like: Someone I enjoy talking to, who is compassionate, and who I feel like I can trust. But saying "someone I can talk to" would ruin the joke.

...Or would it? Based on the behaviour dog owners I've known, maybe not. Is my dream boy(/girl) really a good boi?! D':

*cries*

I typed out a really long and reply with some heartfelt bits and then the computer ate it TT_TT