I hope they don’t drag out the “will-they, won’t-they” romance suspense for the entire series again. Rumiko Takahashi is infamous for refusing to resolve love plots in her manga series, claiming that the tension keeps people coming back for more. My wife won’t watch any anime series created by her, just because she knows the romance drama will never be resolved by the end.
My name’s Coby. Close enough. People call me Colby all the time.
Meh, don’t feel confined to the sidewalk. Be adventurous. There’s a path to the left there, where others have continued their walk.
My pet peeve is when a show or movie ends and they immediately try to play a trailer for another show. I actually enjoy reading the credits! Or maybe I’m looking for the mid- or post-credits scenes. Either way, they give me like 10 seconds or less to cancel the next preview.
Oh man, since setting up my Plex server, I almost never use streaming services anymore. I mostly just keep them because my wife is obsessed with true crime shows and I don’t have any of those on my Plex server.
Yeah, I was pretty jaded by the end of my career. Couldn’t wait to retire, which is why I left as soon as I qualified for retirement. I served exactly 20 years and 6 days.
I only made it to Technical Sergeant (E-6), but it was my ideal rank. I had enough rank and authority to manage personnel and resources, but I was also the technical expert and could get down on the ground level and do the work alongside my Airmen and NCOs. All career fields operate differently, but my IT field specifically didn’t allow Senior NCOs to do the job. They were upper-management; they always got put behind a desk and made to do paperwork, pass down orders, and oversee projects.
I didn’t want that for myself, so I stopped trying to promote once I made TSgt. I expected I’d have to keep working once I retired, so I wanted to stay technical and keep my IT certifications and experience strong, so I could transition into a high-paying gig on the outside.
Little did I know that I’d earn that coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating. Now my medical and dental costs are covered for life and my monthly VA check is bigger than my pension, so I’m essentially making a little bit more money than when I was serving, just to sit on my ass all day. So… yeah, I’m enjoying that hard-earned freedom right now.
I served in the US military. I was in the Air Force, but my profession was IT, so I spent my whole service working as a sysadmin.
You can officially retire and collect a pension after only 20 years served. I joined at 18, so I retired at 38 years old. Normally, a 20-yr pension isn’t enough to fully retire on, but I got a bit messed up during my service. The VA gave me a 100% disability rating, which includes a monthly pay bigger than my pension! Plus. My wife also served and was medically discharged with a 100% disability rating as well. So she gets the same medical benefits and pay as I do (minus a pension).
With all three sources of passive income, we can live without working. We’re not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but we pull in enough to live comfortably and have all our basic needs met.
Like I said, I could go back into the IT field and double my current income (or more), but then I’d be stuck working all the time again, and I don’t want to do that. The military was a 24/7 gig for 20 years. “Service Before Self” was one of our core values; we always had to prioritize the mission over our personal lives, and we could be recalled to work any time, day or night. So it’s nice to actually have some “me time” now, where no one can make me go anywhere or do anything. Not looking to go back to work and give that up so soon.
I did work in IT, but now I’m retired young. I could go back to work and make double my income, but I just don’t wanna. I’d rather have less income with a stable, comfortable life and the freedom to do whatever I want every day, than spend all day stuck in a job just to have no free time to enjoy the extra money I’d be bringing home.
Retired at 38 and living childless with his wife in the countryside… What will he do with the rest of his life? #7 may surprise you.
When I was a child, my mother had to travel to Kentucky for work and I told everyone who asked that she was at “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
My dad pointed out where Kentucky was on the map, and I almost immediately saw the chef and pan in the state shapes. I’ve never forgotten where Kentucky was since then.
I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.
Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.
He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.
The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.
Electricity still needs a specifically built medium to pass through before it can form a consciousness, though. You can’t just send electricity through a tree and expect the tree to suddenly become conscious. Electricity is just a key ingredient of consciousness, not the full picture.
Bodies have neutral pathways that allow electricity to simulate consciousness if regulated properly. Same with computers and circuitry.
Yeah, that’s the one. Since I didn’t qualify for it, I didn’t pay much attention to it. They always just told us it’s kind of like a 401K, where you contribute up to a certain amount and the govt matches your contribution.
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.
I remember when this meme was about the early '90s. I just turned 40 like a month ago. Now I just feel super old.
My wife has access to my password database. If I go before her, she’s in charge of going through all my accounts and shutting stuff down.
My father actually just passed away a few months ago. I had convinced him to use unique passwords for everything, but he couldn’t keep track of them all, so he just wrote them all down on a piece of paper that he kept on his computer desk. When he passed, my sister took a photo of his password sheet and we both have been going through his stuff, closing accounts, transferring money, notifying his social media accounts of his passing, etc.
For the record, my dad had a Trust set up, with my sister as the executor of the Trust, so we’ve already talked about money stuff (even with my dad while he was still alive) and we’re both in agreement. And we’re both decent people, so there’s no complications with dividing his estate or anything. My sister is in charge of all his finances, and she’s been very straightforward with me about what he had and how it’s being divided up.
EDIT: If my wife goes before me, I would probably give my sister access to my password database. She and I are pretty close, and I’d trust her with that access.
See, my middle name ends with an S and my last name begins with an S… and my middle name is a pluralized name, so nobody hears the S when I say it in conjunction with my last name. So I’ve gotten really good at pronouncing the S, stopping for a beat, then saying my last name, without it sounding super weird or robotic.
So properly pronouncing “hot potato” while enunciating the first T doesn’t seem too challenging to me.
I came here to reference this book as well. It was required reading back in my elementary school (in the early '90s) and, as a white American male, opened my eyes to racism for the first time. I still have my original copy of the book; my school made us purchase a copy so we could highlight passages, take notes in the margins, then have our own personal copy to keep forever so we had a quick reference to grab. This was, of course, before the days of the Internet, so if you needed a reference, you had to go to the library and search for a book.
Ahh, just in time for the election season.
Spoilers for the series ahead:
I remember binging the whole series when I was a teenager, and the second movie (Nihao My Concubine) was the first and only time where Akane actually told Ranma she loved him. But only because they were in a nasty predicament and expected to die moments later. She reneged on that confession as soon as they were safe.
I remember being so mad that I had watched the entire series and that retracted confession was the closest they ever got to actually being honest about their feelings toward each other. They didn’t actually get married, or even go on dates together. They obviously cared for each other, but they could never openly say it, choosing to fight with each other instead. It was a very toxic relationship, and it’s hard for me to re-watch the series now, even though I absolutely loved it in my youth.
EDIT: Re-watch, not re-read watch. Stupid autocorrect.