I’ve gone through very similar experiences, I actually never pulled out and ended up basically losing everything. Started over a few years back.

I mean, it all fucking sucks but I think after actually facing the worst-cases and living through it, you feel far less anxious about a lot of the smaller stuff.

But if I could recommend one thing, it would be consider looking into therapy ahead of time and making time for it. Being a caregiver and having the full responsibility on your shoulders to make things work is more than traumatic, it can destroy you. PTSD is a constant presence in my life and it doesn’t work like media portrays it, it’s just a constant, gnawing anxiety and despair that doesn’t go away even when things are fine. Your brain keeps looking for reasons for the feelings and throws you all kinds of narratives that you have to manually address and squash down every day or it will spiral in your mind and get worse and worse. Not fun. Would not recommend.

It’s not quite volunteer work, but still donate to food banks seasonally, or monthly when I’m able to. I don’t make a lot of money but I still donate what I can.

I had some crashes in life, I had to rely on food banks. I now give back. It feels amazing. I think a lot of people are afraid of the feelings involved honestly, it’s a strong emotional ride when you donate stuff and see the faces of the people waiting in line for food, toiletries and things like socks and underwear.

Hey look at it this way, we may finally get our mechs out of this.

I mean, they may be the last thing you see, but at least we may see them.

If Kazakhstan did have it, they would have already used it in some capacity.

I expect maybe putin to keep it in his back pocket because he’s capable of using it tactically to leverage massive geopolitical moves like averting/sparking WW3.

Work From Home is great, just don’t do WFH as extra work, if you work from home it is work and you count your hours.

If your company is making you work overtime, unpaid, you can file a complaint and leave, let’s not everyone be so desperate to work that we give employers leverage to rape us even harder than they already are.

Developed nations with social safety nets don’t have to outsource keeping their fucking citizens alive to religious institutions that build giant megachurches and try to take over politics and try to decide when people should have fucking empathy.

I don’t care if they saved a trillion puppies, we should not be praising religion for doing the bare-fucking minimum I expect. I’m not mad at the churches who literally keep communities together and raise money for the poor, I’m mad at the churches who build media empires and try to oppress anyone who isn’t a white, male christian. You know, the actual vast majority of Christianity. The church has way, way too much blood on its hands for me to give them a pat on the back.

I don’t have the energy to fact-check the 50-billion, which I am sure has about 5 asterix next to it, but that’s not as much as it sounds when we’re talking nations with hundreds of millions of people. (A fast check of US statistics shows US churches MADE 150 billion in 2025, but I guess that extra is just to afford Jesus’s jet fleet.)

The most important revelation I ever had about existing and being human was the understanding that our brains are not machines of logic and reason, despite being capable of performing logical reasoning.

The brain is, by default, a story telling machine. It just takes your memories and experiences and uses those things to explain whatever you’re feeling at the moment. Those explanations don’t necessarily have to make sense or be connected to reality, it just has this massive priority to weave a coherent story to explain how you got here, feeling this thing, doing whatever it is you’re doing.

In the early world of survival, this helped us. Seeing paw prints by your watering hole made you feel uneasy, your brain tied that to the time a saber-tooth cat killed your uncle. Emotional connection to a sense, an association, a story for why you should feel afraid.

In the modern world, the brain tries to do the same goddamn thing when someone you like ignores you or when you feel embarrassed in a social setting. Small things that spark the same survival response to weave a story together around it. Or you feel a sad spell from a chemical imbalance and instead of waiting for it to pass, your brain decides it’s because of your entire life, the people around you, and your lack of success.

From that understanding, you can beat rumination, you can challenge yourself, you can overcome addiction and do a lot of amazing things with your life, but it all comes back to understanding that your brain doesn’t work “out of the box” and if you want to make better decisions and feel better, you have to manually TRAIN IT to make you feel better and make better choices. You have to learn to control not your emotions, but your reactions to those emotions, to think through your thinking, to follow your chains of thought to a source. This is what a good therapist will do for you, set you on a course to retrain your brain.

A lot of people resist this because it feels “fake” and that you’re “fooling yourself,” so they resist change and training their own brains.

You are not your brain. Your brain however is very, very complex, with a multitude of voices inside of it each trying to get attention, you’re only aware of the top-most surface level that uses language to think, but the very best thing you can do for yourself is get in the habit of thinking about how you think.

We will organize the factions and all the underground clans and unite to free our leader!

You may see this as a defeat, but this may be the driving force that finally brings together the Seven Barista Legions in the West and the Mighty Purple Hairs of the South, along with the scattered troupes of Transamurai that are now walking the wastes without a master.

I appreciate that, you guys are gonna also have a hard time with this spreading virus, I mean more than you already have. But I really think the citizens need to keep the alliance alive and we need to all work together to fight this growing tide of oligarchy-fueled fascism that knows no borders or humanity.

I’ve seen a LOT of hate directed at American people, even right here in Lemmy, supposedly from Europe and Canada, and I can only assume it’s more bots and paid shills trying to drive wedges between us. We need to be really vicious in calling it out and shaming these donuts as hard as possible.

Fun fact, in the Epstein files it shows Moot, founder of 4-Chan met with Epstein and made /pol the very next day, the politics forum that saw the revival of centralized neo-nazism and racism on the internet.

There is a lot of evidence pointing to the idea that Epstein and a multitude of other right-wing figures, along with various international groups, have deliberately been working to sabotage democracy since the 2000’s and this entire societal decay in the US was planned. Even the seeding of Q-anon as misdirection.

deleted by creator

I think for a good game, by a good company worth supporting, $30 is very fair and reasonable, especially if you get more than a few hours of play out of it.

We seem to spend $60 on movie tickets and snacks for two and leave the theaters after 90 minutes disappointed and never complain as a society beyond saying the movie sucked, but then going to watch the sequel because everyone else is watching it.

The only reason I wouldn’t personally spend more than $30 or so on a game is because generally everything more expensive is published by a major studio, and thus sucks ASS.

I have not spent more than $30 for a video game in over a decade and a half. I have no idea who’s affording all these “AAA” titles that go for $50+, or who’s keeping that market alive.

There are some miserable, well-off parents out there in liberal America who just throw money at their kids and ignore what they do with it I guess.

Were… were you under the impression that companies who sell products of any kind have some kind of deep formula for making sure their pricing is only the razor-edge of what they need to price it at to keep a business running?

Are you insane? Have you ever sold anything? Have you ever run a business?

Also $8 is “greedy assholes” to you? Are you a bot or a tankie or something?

Removed by mod

Unfortunately we broadly allowed the bulk of our population to check out and the 2024 exit polling confirms it, they voted for all this because they had no idea what they were doing, and now this group of jackasses controls the military and we can’t really directly assault them unless we can radicalize a LOT more comfortable liberal middle-class people.

Besides, we can still turn this around. Mussolini (and a number of other dictators) were not defeated by a plucky band of armed rebels who stormed the capital, he was arrested by his own government and handed over to the opposition who executed him. Even the most corrupt systems can break if we apply enough pressure.

They are absolutely going to pull ahead on the world stage, whatever that really means.

But if you have lived in America all your life and been told how we’re the gleaming city on the mountain, the land of milk-and-honey and all that pabulum we’ve been fed for decades and decades, and then walk around in one of China’s newer cities you will have a radical culture shock. Then have a medical problem and walk into one of their hospitals.

Fuck, just walk into a public restroom or use their mass transit and you will wonder where the fuck your tax money is going.

Their space program alone gets zero coverage in the US and has done amazing things that will guarantee them the solar system in just a few decades.

Not saying they’re some kind of perfect nation, their human rights issues, their abuse of their workers, their racism and xenophobia are still huge and glaring, but it’s going to be a lot worse in the US before long.

Cutting them to look like Mario Bros mushrooms.

https://ironchefshellie.com/2013/04/12/tutorial-radish-super-mario-mushroom/

the butter is undoing the idea of them being low-calorie, but you can use greek yoghurt with garlic and lime and seasoning as a dipping sauce you will have a far, far healthier snack.

It’s not going to happen and we all know it, it’s funny as fuck to imagine and on some deeply repressed level they know it, that’s why they knew it would get publicity.