I personally used the same washing machine from the time I was 13 until I was 36.

Been through some dryers though, and the old washer gave out a few years ago. I probably could have repaired it but I couldn’t find the time.

I should have figured the Rick and Morty episode was a reference to something.

Makes me think about South Park and watching it as it aired when I was a kid. There were so many things I missed because I hadn’t seen any of the source material for a lot of the jokes.

Watching it all again 25 years later and damn, even better the second time around when you’ve seen all the shit they’re parodying.

That just screams that folks don’t actually read the Bible.

Well, that, or 7 year olds just took context and ran with it.

There was a lady who came in my store regularly. You could tell she put a lot of work into herself. I mean, it had to take her hours to get ready every morning.

She always seemed so sad. Not rude or anything, just depressed or something.

It took me more than a month to work up the courage to say it, but one day I got the guts and I said, “Hey, I’ve been wanting to say this to you but I know how men can be and I’ve stopped myself a hundred times. I’m not hitting on you, I’m married. I just have to tell you that you are one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen in my life and I just love the way you dress and do your makeup. You’re always a pleasant sight.”

I never seen that woman with a sad look on her face again.

Had another customer, very old lady. Very hateful. Always in a rush but doing everything so slow. One of the meanest looking people I’ve ever known. I didn’t see her smile for years. She was probably about 85 years old.

One day I said to her, “You know, you’re one of my absolute favorite customers. I’m always happy to see you coming.”

She looked up at me with that mean face and flashed a short smile. I had never seen her smile before that. She didn’t say anything, just smiled.

Every time she came in after that she’d be her usual mean looking self, but she’d always smile at me and then go right back to grumbling.

You know what really sucks? This hasn’t always been the way we experienced the world. Unlike the next generation, we had a small window where things were normal, where you could leave your house and bad news could wait. You could be free to be alone and as far away from everyone as you wanted.

Maybe the average person likes being connected all the time, but it has destroyed my brain, my creativity, just everything.

I held out on getting a cell phone with constant connectivity until 2019 when my wife made me get service because we were having a baby. My magic jack (and the app that came later) were enough for me. I could leave my home and experience true freedom from the world. Everyone knew I didn’t have service so no one was upset when they couldn’t reach me. It was, “hey, call me when you get home. You really need a real phone man.”

I feel like I experience no freedom whatsoever.

The best time of my life, the most creative time of my life, the most I ever read, the most I ever accomplished, I did by refusing to have cable, internet, or a phone back when I first moved out on my own. I wrote songs, short stories, tried painting, etc.

I require hours and hours of being completely uninterrupted to do anything and that just isn’t the world I live in anymore.

My wife’s grandmother has a ton of dogs that roam her house.

When I first went there she was cooking for me, and oh boy that scared me. Turns out that she’s damn good at cleaning.

I didn’t even get fur on my clothes like I usually would when a person only has one dog. Place is somehow immaculate with like 12 dogs running around.

I just took a trip down south in the US and obsessively monitored the weather back home and pined for it haha.

92F (33C) where I was at, 68F (20C) at home.

I’ve been dealing with this forever.

Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:

If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.

In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.

Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.

The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.

Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.

I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.

Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.

BPD and NPD (narcissism) are related.

I was sure my ex was a narcissist and I wasn’t surprised at all by her diagnosis, except I expected NPD.

Funny thing, my ex never drank, but after I caught her cheating I also had to drag her out of dangerous places so intoxicated she couldn’t stand and was vomiting on herself regularly.

It’s like once that door opened, the floodgates opened with it.

I’ve always been a drinker, but I have two beers a night (10% alcohol, so almost 4 typical beers). In all the years we were together she drank only one time until those floodgates opened.

I am going to a Modest Mouse concert with my wife tomorrow, just kissed her good night and went outside the hotel for a smoke. I can’t believe I have her at all.

I hope you have amazing luck for the rest of your life. I really do.

You’re absolutely right. That bit about projection is so true. My ex was always convinced I was cheating with someone, but it never even crossed my mind. She only ever outright accused me once, but my sister said that she was always paranoid about it.

Life is crazy, isn’t it?

I don’t want to spend my life paranoid and looking for crap to explode all the time. I just want a peaceful life.

I have refused to build up walls because of my ex.

I’m glad you’re doing well too. I hope it keeps going that way for you.

I’d be willing to bet that if we talked for a few hours we’d find many parallels. My ex was diagnosed with BPD right at the end of our relationship. Of course, I “made that up” once she did some reading and realized it was the answer for everything.

Man, it got so crazy at the end it was unfuckingbelievable.

She went around telling people I beat and raped her, all kinds of things.

If there wasn’t something wrong with my brain I’d be terrified to ever do it again.

It caused me to seriously believe that any long lasting relationship only lasts because one of the two always has their head in the sand.

Even after all of that, I’m still who I always was. I do not spy on my wife, I respect her privacy. I never even have the desire to go digging.

I can’t help but wonder though, if I did would everything come crashing down.

As long as she’s smart enough to keep it from being blatant, I’ll never know. That’s how my ex got away with so much chaos over the years. I never once looked. She got too confident with one though, either confident or impatient. She slipped up and told easily verifiable lies. “I’m house sitting for my sister.” The only time she was ever asked to do that. Didn’t make sense. “I’m not ignoring you, I’m just watching Shameless on Netflix and I keep falling asleep.” Nothing had been played for days on Netflix.

When I caught her red handed with a guy, she told me to my face that he was a gay friend of her sister. He couldn’t even look at me. She said the car he was driving was her sister’s car. Same color, different make and model, tags from another state.

And my god, the people all around me who knew, smiled and waved, and never said a word.

It just blows my mind. It really does.

I have no idea how I managed to trust anyone enough to ever do this again.

Man, I had the complete opposite experience. I had a nervous breakdown, fought like hell to make it work, caught her cheating over and over again, lost my mind completely.

Then, when I couldn’t take anymore and had spent a night out looking for her when she failed to get back home after a concert, only for her to show up the next afternoon with a hickey on her neck, I decided enough was enough.

I went out with a girl who had been asking me out for a while, fell in love, and moved on.

She lost her damn mind and tried to get me to come back, but it was too late. She ended up committed to a hospital, then after a fight on her end to fix things she ended up with the last guy she cheated with and then died from cancer a few years later.

Fortunately he turned out to be a great guy and took care of her through it all.

It’s crazy how fast everything has gone since then. I’ve been with the girl I mentioned above for nearly a decade, we have children, and still have passion.

I felt like I had spent a thousand years with my ex. If started when I was around 18 and ended when I was around 32. We lived together for 10 years.

This last decade has gone by in a minute, and I can’t believe I will have lived with my wife for longer than I ever lived with anyone just around the corner.

I believe that I am better prepared to deal with such chaos now, but I hope I never have to again.

Man, I could write a book on the chaos that was my ex.

The first chapter would open up with the story about us just being very close friends, and her telling me that when she turned 18 she’d move in with me. Well, the day came and she did just that, packed her bags and showed up to my place in the middle of the night.

About 4 days later I got a call at work, “If you don’t bring my daughter home tonight, you will have hell to pay.”

“Oh yeah!?” I replied. “Well, she’s 18 now and she doesn’t have to be your fucking prisoner anymore, bitch! Have a good life!” click

Phone rings again, “Listen! I don’t know what my goddamn headache of a daughter has told you, but she just turned 17. My advice to you would be to call someone to come take your shift and get in your ugly little car, and bring my daughter home now or rot in jail!”

Uh oh. I did just that. She cried all the way home. Her mom told me if she ever seen my car in her driveway again, I’d go to jail. I had the apology letter my ex wrote me for years, but she burned the box of letters when we split. It went something like, “I’m really sorry I lied to you. I thought you were awesome when we met and I thought you wouldn’t talk to me if you had known my actual age. Time went by and it became more embarrassing and harder to deal with. I didn’t think my mom cared if I left. I didn’t think she’d even try to get me to come back home. I’m never there, and she never cares.”

That should have been it, but one year later she showed up with her bags again. We lived together as friends for months, slept in the same queen size bed under our own blankets. One night we moved on each other and that was all she wrote.

Man, that isn’t even the craziest story with her haha. But it was always something like that. She lied about EVERYTHING. I believed her father was a lawyer for the first 5 years of our relationship. Turns out he was a mechanic. He’s actually been a meme for the last few years, but I don’t want to dox myself. You have definitely seen the meme, I can say that much. He became a meme for something really, really dumb too.

All the years I was with her, I didn’t meet him until her funeral. I feel guilty, but I said that out loud when I shook is hand. “It’s crazy that your granddaughter is 13 and we’re meeting you for the first time at her mom’s funeral.” You could tell it hurt him, and I still lose sleep over that because I wouldn’t want someone to say something like that to my father and I doubt he’d even be at my funeral.

Sorry for the book. I’ll stop now.

How would a civil war even play out nowadays?

I imagine the United States fracturing into multiple independent states that form alliances with each other in some way. Will there be independent cities, landlocked, surrounded by enemies? Will forces move in to occupy and conquer lands up to and around cities? How many states will survive to have actual statehood?

“We traveled into the Carolina empire into an area once known as Southwest Virginia. Fighting continued for months, but we couldn’t make progress. The locals know these mountains better than we ever could, even with our tech, they were killing us with pellet guns and improvised explosives called, “yee haws”. So we made our way into Georgabamasippi to hide among the Cousins and regroup. I’m keeping hope alive that the United States of California will make its way east, but even the word California can get you killed in these parts. I know you’ll probably never get this message, but it’s set to send as soon as I get signal, if I ever get signal. I love you, my darling. -1337NUTZ69420”

I hope I never have to live through anything like that, but I’d love to play the video game or watch the series of movies. :p

Isn’t protest coooooo you guys?

This is United States Social Media Compliance and Monitoring. Remain at your current location. Do not attempt to flee. You will be captured and molested. No one has ever escaped. Remain calm. Hail Barron. Long live the king.

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First of all, I have not seen it, and second off, I don’t want to see it. Lets focus on the Reddit lawsuit.

Yeah, and there are decent ways to do that, which many successful companies and individuals manage to pull off every day.

I have no horse in this race because I don’t use any of this stuff, but I despise the direction everything is going.

Human parasites are never happy with being well fed it seems. They aren’t happy unless they gorge until they get fat and explode, or they’re so greedy they end up killing their host.

:p Some folks want that dick anyway haha, so don’t worry about it.

Damn, man. That really sucks.

That’s really depressing.

I always figured we’d go down this road, and in a bout of psychosis when I was younger I even lost my head over it and we really are there now.