Meet me on the playground after school lil' Stevie. After I pummel your Nosferatu-looking face, I'll rightfully be the proud new owner of all of the possessions that were once yours.
Seriously. The anime and furry communities are nuts. I have blocked so many of them, and the people posting in them but it seems like every day there's a new batch to filter out. Is there really a need for so many communities dedicated to that?
Work is always busy with everyone rushing and demanding things so they can meet some arbitrary deadline for their time off.
Supposedly the season of peace, love, caring but i see far more commercialism and selfish behavior.
Gift giving is awkward. I don't feel worthy of receiving gifts. People spend too much on junk I don't need which oddly makes me feel bad for not being able to match that amount of spending. And it all just usually leaves me with a feeling that the people around me don't really know much about me.
Oh, and we can only be in one place... with family/in-laws in different places we always miss the ones we can't be with.
Since my kids were young, we've made it a tradition to go out to forest service land and cut down a real tree (with a cheap permit), which helps with wildfire mitigation. The trees are usually kind of scrawny and awkward as they're not grown on a tree farm where they're all spaced apart and tended to during their growth, but the experience is fun. We put our cheap, lightweight ornaments on that.
Our main tree is a fake one that we can put up earlier.
In my teens in the mountains of Colorado there were tons of lightning strikes. One summer, a lightning strike in our driveway took out our garage door openers and a TV.
This past summer, I did a 40+ mi bike ride that covered some very open areas of the CO plains. At my turn-around spot I could tell a storm was moving in quick and thought, "ah well, some sprinkles will feel alright." Then I rode for about 9 miles in a downpour with lightning crashing around me while on a dirt road with just about nothing else around me (me swearing aloud the whole time). Finally got to some relative safety of some tight rock outcrops with overhangs. I was still outside and not totally safe, but it felt good to get out of that scary situation as much as I could for a bit while the storm passed.
It was chilly and rainy most of the day. Had written it off as a do-nothing afternoon/evening and then I got word that I didn't get a job I'd applied for. I knew if I just sat around I'd be miserable, so I got on some warm biking clothes and headed out for a ride. Still bummed but glad I tried to do something to better my day rather than just feeling despondent.
Still here some 30+ years later. For a lot of people it was a passing phase and there was a lot of tough-guy bullshit that I think many people who felt marginalized bought into. But not everyone...
I read an interview one time (I think with one of the guys from Snapcase) that SE is just the beginning. If all you did was apply that label to yourself but not use that as a stepping stone for anything else in your life, then what good was it. That resonated with me a lot.
I don't really go around advertising SE because I'm a middle-aged dude at work or at his kid's volleyball game and I don't really define myself by one label or lifestyle choice anymore. Being punk/alt/whatever at almost 50 looks different than it did at ages 16-22.
I'm grateful for the HC/punk family I grew up with and the memories of that scene I have and that I was able to avoid some of the pitfalls around me in my younger days.
Bandcamp is great, but man trying to keep track of what's happening there is a chore. I really wish artist store pages would give an insight as to what's already in my library, already on my wishlist or what might be marked down for a sale or pay what you want.
Thanks for the reminder to go delete my old comments and posts. Reddit is dead to me. I stopped using it two years ago. I'll occasionally go there if there's a legit looking search result for what I'm looking for, but I don't bother logging in or interacting with the platform. Reddit is blocked by my work, which is typically what I'm searching for from there so it's useless anyways.
Disgusting