cobysev

I chose not to participate.

I joined the military as soon as I graduated high school, got a solid 20 years of free food, free shelter, free college education, free travel, and plenty of life skills/experiences, all while collecting a solid income. Then I retired at 38 years old, collected a pension and a 100% VA disability check for the rest of my life (which includes free medical/dental for life), and inherited my childhood home in the countryside when my father passed away this year.

I do what I can to help out my local community, but I’m not working and have no need to contribute to capitalism. I make my own schedule each day, do whatever hobbies/goals I have the energy for, then call it a day whenever and start again the next morning.

My wife gets the same VA benefits, although she didn’t serve long enough to collect a pension; she was medically discharged. So we’re both just enjoying a quiet life in the countryside, no jobs, just focused on whatever makes us happy each day.

This is the life everyone deserves to have, and I’m upset that capitalism is basically the opposite of this lifestyle. They preach that if you’re not working, you’re a drain on society. Because the fewer workers they have, the less money that’s generated for the rich elites running the capitalist regime. That’s why our retirement age keeps going up. The longer people live, the more time they have to be productive members of “society” (read: capitalism). No thanks; I retired at 38 and I’m happy enjoying my youth while I still have some semblance of it.

EDIT: I just want to point out that military life was basically democratic socialism, with all our needs met, the govt ensuring we had food and a home, education was free, most all work-related expenses paid for. (uniforms, travel, etc.) Our paycheck was basically just spending money for us. We didn’t have to worry about covering bills because we received a separate “allowance” to cover rent/mortgage and utilities. Food was another allowance on top of our paycheck. If we were reassigned to another base somewhere in the world, the govt would foot the bill for movers and they packed your house for you. And you basically had to break the law to be kicked out of the military, so job security was excellent. We all got paid based on our rank and time in service, so it didn’t matter if you were a geothermal physicist or just handing out towels at the gym; everyone got the same wage across the board. It was an ideal situation. You’ll be hard pressed to find something similar in the rest of America.

I love that the photo is grainy, as if there’s so much radiation in the air that he can’t get a clear picture of it.

Is this commentary on the game’s anti-corporation story, or about Microsoft shutting down this game’s studio after this highly successful release? Or both?

Steven Universe is one of my favorites.

Also, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes is excellent, and created by Ian Jones-Quartey, the spouse of Steven Universe’s creator, Rebecca Sugar.

He used to write a webcomic that I followed a couple decades ago, which he officially ended in an episode of OK K.O. His webcomic was called RPG World.

An anonymous third person is interviewing Red and the wolf separately. We’re bouncing between their two interviews, seeing both of their reactions to the same situation.

The interview is a way for the comic artist to tell this awkward version of the Red Riding Hood story without actually showing it.

The situation is about the wolf “eating grandma” (a euphemism for a sex act). Which is why Red is traumatized by walking in on them.

The wolf is probably being defensive, hence why he keeps asking the interviewer to “listen.” He’s trying to make his case as plainly and directly as he can and he wants the interviewer to pay attention.

When I was living in Japan (about 20 years ago now), I was dating a Filipino woman who spoke very good English. But I quickly learned that she didn’t understand colloquialisms.

There was one day when she kept calling me multiple times throughout the day. After the 5th or 6th call, I picked up the phone and said, “Jeez, you’re killing me!”

She immediately started crying and asked, “Why would you ever say that?! I would never kill you!” Which got a laugh out of me and just made her cry even harder.

I quickly realized she didn’t understand English expressions. I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t want me to ever say it again, because just hearing the accusation hurt her, even if I didn’t literally mean it.

While dating her, I became hyper vigilant to the amount of expressions we use in English. I had to continually rephrase everything I said because I caught myself using so many colloquialisms that she just didn’t understand. She took everything so literally!

Here in America? It’s super early. Americans don’t like to talk about sex with children, so they wait until we’re already experiencing puberty to finally tell us what’s going on. Hence why my Sex Ed class was in 8th grade (around 13-14 years old).

It doesn’t, but then again, no one else seemed to be talking about them either, so I decided to contribute to the main discussion in the comments.

My dad never gave me “the talk.” It was my mother. According to her, when I was around 7-8 years old, she overheard one of my friends making crude remarks about having sex with women. And he didn’t understand how a woman’s biology worked, so he was extremely inaccurate in his description of the act.

My mother decided at that moment that I needed a lesson in how sex actually works, so she went out and bought an educational children’s book about where babies come from. Then she sat me down and read through it with me.

Honestly, I kind of like the fact that I was taught so young. I was already mature for my age, and being taught before I was a ball of raging hormones meant that I could comprehend it from an educational standpoint and not a “what’s wrong with my body/I need to get laid” mindset.

My school didn’t teach sex education until 8th grade. By then, everyone was horny as hell and making poor decisions. Because I already understood how it all works (and no one wanted to ask our teacher all the embarrassing questions), I ended up being a bit of a relationship counselor for my friends.

I was raised on skim milk, thanks to my mother who was constantly dieting throughout my childhood. 2% milk tastes like liquid ice cream to me. Skim is much more refreshing.

Also, it was fun to freak out my friends by hydrating with milk after exercising. Skim milk is mostly water anyway.

There (is/was) some incentive there to cover surgeries, i think?

Yeah, while serving in the US military, you are allowed one free “cosmetic” surgery. They define cosmetic as any unnecessary surgery you elect to have. Most people used to use it to get laser eye surgery to fix their vision, before they successfully argued that fixing your vision improved your ability to do your job, so it’s not “cosmetic.” I knew a few women who used it for breast reduction surgery. (Large breasts are not comfortable/functional in heavily armored gear.)

At some point in the last decade, they started allowing people to use your cosmetic surgery for trans operations. So a lot of people outed themselves, filling out the paperwork to have the operation on the govt’s dime.

A couple years after the process started, Trump just sent out a DoD-wide notice that trans people were being banned. So many people had publicly outed themselves by this point; there was no way to reneg on all that official paperwork and go back in hiding.

Thankfully, the DoD stood up for us then and got Trump to back down. But he’s determined to not let anyone stop him this time as president.

I was serving in the US military the first time Trump was president and he tried to ban trans people then. The Department of Defense told all of us to not take action yet, and they managed to talk Trump out of the decision.

But that was when we had a Democrat majority in the other government branches. This time, it’s all Republican, and they love cutting our military pay and benefits. Don’t let them fool you; they act like they care about the military but they just use us for the good press. If it weren’t for Democrats, we wouldn’t have any benefits left. I’m retired now, but I expect my pension and VA medical benefits to be gutted under Trump. I might actually have to end my retirement and go back to work.

I expect trans people will actually be banned this time. Plus gay people; Republicans were pissed we let gay folks openly serve a decade ago. And women’s roles in the military will probably be restricted too, if not outright banned. My wife served in the military too and she’s had her own challenges with people not respecting her authority because she was a woman. I imagine it’ll get far worse soon, with Trump’s presidency inviting misogynists out into the open.

Here’s a Wikipedia article that explains what a “Tankie” is.

TL;DR - It’s a slur to refer to authoritarian communists, originally used to speak out against people who supported using tanks to suppress dissidents.

Generally, anyone who supports aggression or violence to silence or oppress people are referred to as Tankies.

I can’t tell if this is a shitpost or if this is an actual Ctrl Alt Del comic. It sometimes got weird like this.

I served in the US Air Force for 20 years. Ever since I was 18, AF was always the abbreviation for Air Force.

So when “AF” suddenly entered the common lingo as “as fuck,” it really threw me and my coworkers for a loop. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be talking about the Air Force, but the context didn’t make any sense at all! It took a while before we learned that it meant something totally different.

… And then we felt old and out of touch.

I LOVED books as a kid. I was reading at a high school level by the time I started kindergarten, and I just absorbed every book I could get my hands on. I would bring a 100-200 page book to school every day and would finish it before I got home in the afternoon.

I also enjoyed writing and would write my own stories. I was part of an organization in elementary school called Young Authors that encouraged kids to write, and I wrote 3 books through that group. It was my dream to be an author one day.

Then the Internet became a thing.

Suddenly, I didn’t need to spend hours in a library reading through dozens of books to find information I needed. I could just do a quick search on Infoseek, or Excite, or AskJeeves, and have a repository of knowledge at my fingertips. It was life-changing!

As the Internet evolved and more data got dumped on it, I started spending more time perusing its depths and less time reading physical books. I ended up getting a job in IT because computers fascinated me so much. Eventually, I realized I hadn’t picked up a book in years. Everything I wanted to read, I could find online.

Now here I am at 40 years old and my dream of being an author is gone. In our modern age, most people don’t read physical books anymore and authors don’t make enough to survive, unless they make it on a best-seller list or something. Even Stephen King is more well known today for his political commentary on Twitter/X. I haven’t heard much about any books he’s been writing in a long time.

I once wanted a library room in my dream home. I still kind of do, for the aesthetic. But I don’t really read physical books anymore, and I could only fill maybe a single wall with the books I currently own; mostly treasured classics from my childhood that have been stored away in boxes for years. I’d be better off having a PC gaming/theater room in my dream home, as that’s more where my modern interests lie.

I love the Internet age. It revolutionized my childhood and brought us into a wonderful age of information. But I can’t help but think about how completely different my life would’ve been if it hadn’t been invented. I sometimes wonder if I would’ve been more happy and/or successful in a world without the Internet.

If you have a government job, pensions are still very much a thing.

I just retired from a government job 2 years ago (US military). I received a pension, but only because I was grandfathered into the old pension plan. The military stopped giving out pensions in 2017. They switched to the BRS (Basic Retirement System), which is basically their version of a 401K.

When they switched, they gave all service members with less than 12 years of service the option to switch to the BRS or stick with the old pension program. Anyone who joined after the switch doesn’t get a choice. They’re automatically enrolled in the BRS.

I had 15 years of service at the time, so I didn’t qualify for BRS. It wouldn’t have benefited me anyway; there’s no way I could’ve saved up enough money to retire on in my 5 remaining years. I much prefer my monthly direct deposit for the rest of my life.

Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.

To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.

We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.

But the girls’ presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada’s legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.

They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they’re just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman’s autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.

In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I’ve never looked at it the same way since.