The US Military sector will be fine.

As a retired veteran, I’d like to point out that this topic is a bit too complicated to summarize as “fine.”

The military industry itself with be fine. Heck, it may thrive! But the individuals who make up that military will definitely experience hardship along the way.

During Trump’s first term as president, he tried to ban trans people from serving with an executive order. Which he can do as Commander in Chief over the military. That order was very quickly shut down though, because we had a mostly Democrat government that pushed back against anything extreme he attempted that didn’t benefit both parties’ goals. He had his hands tied more than once, which is why his first term was relatively quiet. Back then, I was still serving and I remember our military leaders standing up to Trump on that order and making him back down.

During this second term though, Republicans have a majority in the federal government and have basically given Trump a blank check to do whatever he wants with little pushback. So trans people ARE banned now, and he’s replaced a bunch of high ranking generals with his own civilian yes men, giving them rank and authority without a career of military service or going through proper legal approval processes. The military leaders told him no once, so he’s replaced them with his own loyalists who won’t challenge his executive orders now.

Not to mention, with the push for ICE to round up anyone who’s (essentially) not white, we’re seeing military members and their families affected by that as well. There was a time when serving in our military was a sort of fast-track to citizenship. I worked with a guy once who was Brazilian, but by serving a term in the US military, he would earn his citizenship and get to stay in America. That’s going away under Trump’s new regime.

And Trump is talking about gaining access to voting records, which would just give him more incentive to target anyone who doesn’t vote Republican. Everyone, military or not, will be affected if it comes to that. Being an active service member as our country falls to fascism isn’t a free pass; if you don’t believe in the new order, you’re going to be targeted and, at best, kicked out. At worst, you could be labeled a terrorist threat to our nation and “disappeared” to Guantanamo Bay.

Also, as a 100% disabled veteran, I’m only retired now because my VA pay and benefits can cover my meager and quiet lifestyle without taking on another job. But if Trump has his way, my benefits will be a fraction of what they are (if not removed completely), and I’d be forced to find work to survive.

Military members (and especially veterans) will suffer. But the military industrial complex will be fine.

I never saw myself as ugly, but I always just assumed I was pretty average. It’s not like people were tripping over themselves to spend time with me. I didn’t have supermodel attraction powers or anything; the most attractive people in my school never gave me the time of day. Every person I’ve ever dated asked me out, but I just assumed that was normal for anyone who wasn’t absolutely hideous.

(For the record, I tried to ask someone out once and it went so wrong, I never had the courage to ask anyone else out again, so the only time I dated anyone was when they approached me. Which happened quite a bit throughout my younger years.)

I’ve had friends talk about how jealous they are of certain features of mine (strong jaw, ability to grow a thick lumberjack beard, being taller than most of our friend group, etc.) but I was also jealous of certain features my friends shared, so I didn’t ever feel physically superior to anyone. You want what you can’t have, right?

But now I’m in my 40s, my hair is starting to thin, and thanks to a permanently busted leg and two bad knees, I can’t exercise without pain and have gained probably 60+ pounds in recent years. All of a sudden, I’ve realized that people don’t really notice me anymore. I don’t draw much attention when I go out in public and people aren’t as captivated by my conversation like they used to be.

My wife also used to love pointing out when strangers were staring at me in public. She used to brag that she’d snagged an attractive man and that other girls are just jealous. I used to think she was just trying to hype herself up, since she used to talk down about herself a lot, so I’d play along and praise her for being so lucky (and also let her know how lucky I was for getting to spend time with a woman like her). But it’s been years now since she’s pointed out anyone staring at me in public.

It’s kind of dawning on me that I may have been pretty attractive as a young man. But like all things, beauty fades with age and I’m in an awkward phase where people aren’t really paying much attention to me anymore. It’s definitely hitting the ego, not only noticing the lack of attention, but realizing too late that I had that kind of attractive power in my youth. If I hadn’t been crippled with introversion most of my youth, I probably could’ve been extremely popular.

I will point out, I shared a link to a blog of mine on Lemmy sometime earlier this year and I got a single comment, praising my attractive profile pic on my blog. Which is the first positive thing anyone’s said about my appearance in years. That was a wonderful feeling, but also kind of hit hard, realizing that people don’t really comment on my looks anymore.

That profile picture is maybe 5 years old now, and whereas I want to replace it with a more current one, I’ve been struggling to take one that doesn’t make me feel old and ugly. So I’m going to keep using that older one until I feel like it no longer looks like me.

The casing on the outside of my air fryer is plastic, but the inside, where my food cooks, is all metal. 🤘

Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m leaving the originals alone, I’ll just make a new post for those games.

It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.

I think 02 must be the sheep.

Ah! That makes sense! I wondered if there was going to be some twist in the plot where the original Jan was an alter himself (the actual #2) and the real original died with the rest of the crew. But I didn’t want to speculate and inadvertently spoil a good twist.

I’ve watched thousands of movies and TV shows and played a lot of games, and my wife gets mad at me because I’m pretty good at spotting a twist coming a mile away now. So I do my best not to speculate where the plot is going in these posts. But you’re right, it might just be as simple as counting how many clones have been made.

Yeah, there definitely seems to be a story the game wants to tell, and you’re punished for veering too far from the plot. I’ve definitely restarted a save or two to undo a bad choice.

I do like that it highlights your previous conversation choices, so you know which route you picked and could try another option in your next run. That definitely makes it a bit easier.

I’m excited to see what new alters you create and what their personalities will be like, but I’m also kind of dreading the personnel management system getting too complex.

Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.

But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I’ve made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It’d be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.

Thank you! I enjoy discussing video games (and movies, but my movie review blog has been abandoned for the past couple years), and I’ve always wanted to find someone who goes into a little depth on games; someone who introduces people to the premise of a game and gets them interested. The little summary on Steam isn’t always enough to let me know if it’s going to be fun or not.

Since I couldn’t find any content like that, I decided to just create it myself. I’m retired young and I got nothing else going on, so why not?

It’s published by the same studio (11 bit studios), but they each have different developers. 11 bit studios also created The Alters, but Starward Industries created The Invincible.

When I was a kid, I always got confused for an adult. Nobody believed I was a minor. I once got confused for a college student when I was just about to graduate from elementary school.

Now I’m 41 and I have the opposite problem. Everyone thinks I’m in my late 20s/early 30s. Even with a white patch on my beard, people still think I’m just a young man who’s going gray young.

It doesn’t help that I retired at 38 years old. No one believes me when I say I’m already retired. I’ve had a few people ask me if I’m just living with my parents and calling it “retired.” Ha!

When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.

However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.

Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.

When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.

Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.

Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems

He turned a 1993 Fiat Panda into a 1993 Flat Panda.

United States of America: We’re made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we’ve hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn’t call them “states” until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were “colonies” before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

I only use Lemmy. Fuck Reddit. And this is from someone who spent over a decade using Reddit religiously. I dropped them during the whole API scandal. I had been growing more and now dissatisfied with Reddit and that was the last straw.

The only mainstream social media program I use is Facebook, and I don’t really use it anymore. I only keep my profile because I’ve met people from all over the world who I stay in touch with through Facebook. Plus all my childhood friends and family members are there. But Facebook (and Meta as a whole) is garbage and I have a bunch of tools to prevent them from feeding me garbage content and recording my data while I’m trying to keep up with my friends and family there.

I have a Bluesky account, which I don’t know what to do with. Twitter always felt like social media for celebrities; there wasn’t much going on there for us normal people. I created a Bluesky account just to get away from Twitter, but I don’t have much to post and none of it gets attention from anyone, so I just feel like I’m talking to myself. I don’t have anyone really interesting to follow there either.

I also use Discord to stay in touch with my closest friends, on a personal server I built. That’s pretty much it. I don’t trust any other social media programs. So Lemmy is my main source of news and content.

Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”

Reddit wasn’t immediately known as the “front page of the Internet.” It took time to build up a reputation and tons of content before it started to get noticed and promoted by search engines.

Lemmy is the same. It’s small now, but with enough content, it will eventually become a reference point like Reddit. Every little bit counts.

Thank you. As a former IT guy, I’ve been trying to keep my family away from Apple products. They’re way overpriced for their limited and locked down functionality compared to everything else out there.

My dad had Parkinson’s late in his life and my sister replaced his Android with an iPhone, specifically so she could give him this fitness tracker. He spent the last few years of his life struggling to figure out a new phone, and we could never get the damn app to work anyway. He fell all the time and it never once reported it.

I spent 20 years in the IT field and getting my computer-illiterate family to consult me before buying computer tech is like pulling teeth. I offer them free consultation and support all the time and they just go out and buy spyware-riddled junk on their own. They only come to me when their stuff is no longer useable.

My sister finally stopped buying iPads… only for her to go and buy Amazon Fire tablets for her kids. I had to go in and lock them down because they were constantly shoving ads into every function of the tablet. Her kids kept trying to buy games because they were constantly being advertised to them. And guess who left their credit card credentials on the tablet?

My apologies, /rant.