Lurker > _Rinku_

I've never had a pleasant experience at Checkers. The employees are always pissed off. It takes like twenty minutes to get any food. It's always greasy as hell. Not worth it.

comicfire posted...

Megadeth songs for Rock Band iirc

It was probably also Rock Band DLC for me. I was really into Rock Band 2 for a while. Played it online a lot.

Nope. I have just enough in my bank account to pay rent a second time. I don't really consider it savings because I technically owe about that much on my credit cards (all on zero APR promo periods, so I'm not running up interest) but I hold onto it in case I lose my job. My credit score is decent, but I don't make enough to qualify for any houses in the area.

Depends on what type of "day off" it is.

The weekend: relax. Play video games. Draw. Write. Chat with friends.
Paid holidays: lowkey stress
PTO day: high levels of stress to the point that I am not relaxing at all

Cheap shampoos and conditioners are pretty hit or miss, but they're rarely great.

Cheap body wash though? Love that stuff. I bought some fancy frou frou crap not long ago. Barely works. I don't feel clean. It doesn't even smell that good. I switched back to the "emergency" 3-in-1 I bought from Dollar General and it's fantastic. I wouldn't put it in my hair, but everywhere else is fine.

Mormaurd posted...

Thats how it starts. You do it ironically, then you like it, then its unironic.

And every time I hear someone mentioning Brotha it always defaults in my brain to Liquid screaming BROTHA!

It's a positive feedback loop that I fall victim to every time.

I started ironically saying "brother" and "my brother in christ."

I can't stop myself now.

You could have just watched this instead:

https://youtu.be/7_ktnQAC3TQ

DirkDiggles posted...

Put them in the freezer first. You will thank me later.

This seems genius, but I also feel like the wafers would get weird ice crystals in them.

Glob posted...

A cheap one bedroom here is like $300.

My super crappy one bedroom apartment in college was about $300. Constant roach infestations, the AC didn't work properly, and there was frequent crime in the parking lot/in other apartments.

I kinda miss it sometimes. Mostly miss the price. The absolute cheapest you can find in my city is about $700 but that will have you in the actual ghetto where people get shot and the police don't show up.

Glob posted...

When I graduated most people did one of two things:

1. Got a job and their own place (or with partner).
2. Moved back home with their parents while they looked for work.

I was living with my at-the-time-fiancee. We moved here after I graduated. Moving "back home" wasn't an option as I didn't really have one to move back to (moved out of my childhood home, which was my grandmother's, pretty much as soon as I legally could and I was very much not welcome back).

Before I moved into my current apartment, I tried talking a buddy of mine into splitting a two or three bedroom. He's paying a comparable price to what I am for a studio apartment and he complains a lot about financial difficulties, but he didn't want to do it. Which is just as well. I'm struggling, but I do tremendously value my privacy.

Spiderman23J posted...

thats crazy and I bet you live in like a 1 bedroom apartment or something

Yup. It's relatively spacious (~850 sqft) but it's not a luxury unit or anything. Rent prices have absolutely skyrocketed in my area in the last few years. I moved to this city about eight years ago and a two-bedroom apartment was around $900 then.

Oh, definitely. At work, I'm [Legal First Name], extraordinarily sweet insurance auditor. I will laugh at the stupid jokes that clients make. I'm extremely accommodating. "Thank you, sir/ma'am." People flirt with me (or attempt to) and I play the naive ingenue and bat my eyelashes like I'm not aware of what they're doing. I routinely get people complimenting on how wonderful I am, what a delight I am to work with, and how grateful they are for my patience.

Outside work, I'm [Middle Name]. I'm an asshole. I'm cranky. I am utterly repulsed (and reactive) to anyone even looking at me with any hint of devious intent. I intentionally shove people away so they won't get close to me if I suspect they're even starting to be interested in me. I dress like a mentally arrested seventeen years old loser.

Work me is like a character I play so I can afford rent, coffee, and vinyl figures.

Fudge Rounds or Nutty Bars

Fun story: when I moved into my first apartment, the only food I had was sliced turkey, bread, and fudge rounds. I lived like a sad bachelor (which I was). The girl I ended up dating for a while told me, much later, that she was absolutely appalled that I had no other food the first time she came over to hang out. She brought her crockpot and made queso and chips for me not long after that. I think she thought I didn't know how to cook...

They don't, for the most part.

I currently live alone. I make roughly $16/hr. My rent (which includes water and internet) is approximately $1300/month and is, by far, my biggest expense. I don't own a car. I've absolutely slashed my grocery budget to under $50/week but I can get it lower if I push it. I've stopped eating breakfast and lunch for the most part, substituting coffee (and not like fancy lattes but drip coffee with a splash of cream). I have visible tremors and I can hear my blood pumping in my ears as a result. I had a mental breakdown on Monday, took basically the rest of the week off (burning through all of my PTO in the process), and may not have a job come tomorrow.

It's fucking miserable. I feel like I'm burning myself at both ends just to stay afloat. The only real positive is that I've lost a big chunk of weight and look fantastic. People really love to gush about that, without pausing to wonder why I've had this drastic change in appearance or why I seem utterly miserable.

Capitalism isn't designed for one person to survive on their own.

I remember watching this at a friend's house as a little kid. Even at the tender age of like... seven or eight, I could tell it looked lame as shit. I remember trying to convince her that I had already seen it and she asked me what the plot was.

Ladies and gentleman, I'm actually quite a talented actor, storyteller, showman (read: compulsive liar) but at that moment, I could only lamely sputter out, "Uh... they... churn butter?"

She made me watch it. I wanted to watch Antz or the Sailor Moon movie. I was so mad lmao

No. I spend way too much time thinking about how often my Final Fantasy XIV probably accidentally sits on his tail to actually have to deal with one IRL.

I don't think I'm attractive; I know I am. I'm not drop-dead model gorgeous by any means, but I know I'm not bad to look at. I've had enough people try to get into my pants to be confident in that.

LeoRavus posted...

The guy was a total loser anyway. He offered to get me drunk when I was working at a gas station in town when I was 16-17. He'd hang out there before closing and eat free ice cream and shit. I hear the girl's father punched him in the face when he found out she was pregnant. Wish I saw it.

Jesus Christ. It blows my mind to think about that. I bet the age limit at my prom was so that you couldn't bring a date who could legally buy booze.

LeoRavus posted...

A girl in my class went with a 27 year old town cop so I guess there was no age limit. He ended up getting her pregnant and lost his job. I later worked with him in a department store where he was one of those undercover shoppers who looked for shoplifters. Sad turn of events.
.

Oh wow, that's... super creepy, tbh. I don't personally feel too different from my teenage self, but I would never even look at someone that age with any sort of romantic/sexual intent now. It's just weird to me. Like... that's a child. I felt like an adult at the time, but I was a child.

My school held prom for juniors and seniors. You paid $150 (or it might have been $250) your junior year and you got to go both years. You were allowed to bring a date who was (I think) up to two grades below a junior or two years older than a senior. So, you could have people as young as fourteen and as old as twenty at prom. Kinda weird in retrospect.

I paid the money junior year. I had fun, but I really didn't want to go (was essentially forced to by my mother). I didn't go to any after-parties. I vividly remember wishing that I had just stayed home and played video games on Xbox Live instead.

I didn't go my senior year. I was extremely depressed (in general, not just about prom). I thought about tagging along with my best friend (I think his girlfriend had already graduated and didn't exactly want to come back for a third prom), but ended up just staying home and crying in my room the whole night. Still a better use of my time than getting dressed up, dancing in a room full of people I felt completely isolated from, and dealing with the issues I was having with my sexuality at the time lol.

I also would have greatly preferred to spend that money on new games, books, or college application fees. I think my mom probably paid the bulk of it (I fundraised some of it, as most kids did), admittedly. She paid for a lot of shit that I thought was a waste, like my class ring ($300 for a ring that felt uncool to wear basically immediately after graduation and that I have lost more than once) and senior photos (where I had a horrible haircut that I was forced to get the day before).

Sometimes I wish I could go back to when I was maybe twelve or thirteen and try to do things differently, but I doubt I'd have the power to change my situation. I would have liked to have a more typical high school experience. I never even had a girlfriend (I did have a secret Internet boyfriend my senior year, but that was a whole thing that I immensely regretted).

I was around ten the last time I remember even being in the same bed as my mother. She worked late nights, so she would often be gone when I got up for school in the morning, asleep by the time I got home, and only up for about an hour before she had to leave for work (most of which she spent showering/getting ready). A lot of my memories of talking to her are with me standing in the doorway to my bedroom across the hall from the bathroom where she'd be putting on her makeup. It was basically the only time I got to talk to her. I stopped sharing a bed with her through the night when I was four or five. My memory stretches back far enough that I can very hazily remember standing in my crib around the time I was too old to sleep in it, so I suspect this arrangement didn't last very long.

On the rare weekend mornings that she would be home, I would sometimes climb into bed and watch cartoons with her before she went to sleep. I stopped around ten because it didn't feel worth it to try to be close to my mom at that point.

I honestly don't ever remember sleeping in the same bed as my father. When I would stay the night at his place, he would usually let me have his bed and he'd sleep on the couch. I have a particularly vivid memory of being around four years old and throwing up in bed, alone.

Of course, I didn't get a lot of the parental affection I needed from my parents. I'm not sure when you're "supposed" to stop sleeping in bed with your folks. It might be why I can't stand to share a bed now.

02fran posted...

itt people who scoff that people pay for porn complain there is no porn of the type they want.

Everybody wants shit for free.

This is giving me the motivation to look for an artist to commission though. Money is a bit tight at the moment, but by god my need for lewd fanart of two fifty years old men outweighs my need to eat. I could also just draw it myself, now that I think about it...

Yes. I used to get them constantly as a kid. There's a paste you can put on them that will make them pucker and heal up but it hurts like a bitch. Gargling with warm, lightly salted water also seems to help a bit.

I still get them occasionally. I find that eating excessively acidic food, intense stress, and physical damage (i.e., biting the inside of my cheeks or lips) tends to cause them.

WizardofHoth posted...

where the heck have the videogame youtubers gone these days anyway??

Most of them switched to just streaming on Twitch. You do still see some dedicated edited content creators on YouTube, but it's nothing like it was five or ten years ago.

KlownArt posted...

I didn't watch them every day, but there Shitstorm videos in October were incredible. Loved there Silent Hill playthroughs too.

I still go back and rewatch their videos from time-to-time. Enough time has passed that I can enjoy them again.

sonichu posted...

Dawn of YouTube and he was doing reviews and videos with higher quality due to his film school history. But now everything has been covered and James clearly thought the AVGN movie would be his step into bigger things.

Like I said, I think his new stuff is just okay but I used to eagerly await each new episode. Like, me and my friends would gather round to watch new AVGN videos (and NC too) when we'd hang out. I find myself thinking, a lot, that I don't really feel super different from my teenage self, but I don't share his enthusiasm for YouTube skits.

sonichu posted...

AVGN. He is still around but holy hell his content has been shit for like a decade at this point

I think his newer stuff is still okay. I find it much more palatable than, say, the Nostalgia Critic. I don't know how I ever enjoyed him aside from the excuse that I was a teenager with garbage taste in media.

I've found this to be an issue with all artists, not just the explicit ones.

There's a specific artist in one of my fandoms whose style I love. It's very stylized/anime-inspired, but I think it's beautiful. A lot of their work is completely normal too. You could hang prints of it on your walls and no one would bat an eye.

They also draw a LOT of amputation/gore/vore fetish art. Like, a lot a lot.

No idea. I've preemptively made as many cuts to my budget as I possibly can. I drastically cut the amount I spent on groceries. Before, I was making well-balanced, diverse meals with breakfast, lunch, and dinner planned for every day. It was tight, but it was running me about $75/week. Now, breakfast is a pot of coffee with a little bit of creamer. Lunch usually doesn't happen, but if it does, it's a scoop of peanut butter. Dinner is whatever the absolute cheapest thing I can slap together is (current reigning champ is spaghetti because a $1.50 box of noodles, $3 jar of sauce, and a $3 box of garlic bread can easily last a week). I can stretch $50 across two weeks without much issue.

I think my job is fairly secure, economy-wise, but I actually had to take an unplanned break this week due to a health emergency. Genuinely kinda worried that I'm gonna be fired come Monday.

I used to watch JordanUnderneath. Loved his old style. Didn't care for the change in direction, but I'm happy that he's happier with that work. A person's mental health is more important than my entertainment.

PMarth2002 posted...

Other

Hotel room.

Also, to clarify: I'm not saying this in a "I waited until marriage" way. I was eighteen, it was a cheap shitty motel, and I was desperate to get laid.

While I don't wish I had waited until marriage, I do kinda wish I hadn't slept with that specific person. If I had a nickel for every time a FWB begged me to be in a relationship with them, I gave in, and they proceeded to abuse/traumatize me, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's kinda weird that it happened twice.

Vokrent posted...

What is ao3

Archive of Our Own. It's a fanfiction website that has a really robust tagging system, so it's easy to find specific things. I can't make myself go back to FFN at this point because AO3 has so many features.

Other

Hotel room. I did later take someone's virginity in their bed.

Vokrent posted...

my core problem was trying to figure out how the world-looping of higurashi would fit with the angels.

really if i were to write something again it would be a mass effect fanfic about that one turian guard and the refugee girl who's waiting for her parents

I'm sure you could figure it out! I've run into a bit of a roadblock in my story in that I have character A pulling a gun on character B. It's not getting in the way of them getting together by the end of the story (it's like 1/3 romance, 1/3 character study on character A, and 1/3 character study on character B), but I am a bit fuzzy on how exactly they get to that confrontation. That's the fun part though! Admittedly, the climax largely hinges on that and, if I can't figure it out, the story is dead, which is... stressful,lol

You should write that too! Post it on AO3.

Vokrent posted...

i keep thinking about going back to it, but at this point, i'd probably scrap it all and start over.

would still have no idea what i'm doing

I'm sure people would be thrilled if you restarted it! You could always update the original with a note. I bet you'd get some new readers too.

No one really has any idea what they're doing; that's what makes it fun.

Mild. I can tolerate Hot, but it's not my preference.

Vokrent posted...

Yeah I was writing an Evangelion/Higurashi crossover, then dropped it once I realized I had no clue what I was doing.

Still get emails from fanfiction.net about people following the story, even though I haven't updated it since 2013.

People really hold out hope that authors will come back to their old stories. That's part of why I mostly read stuff that's complete; I don't have the heart to be left with a cliffhanger. That's also a major factor in why I don't post anything online: I get burnt out super easily and I'd hate to disappoint my readers.

Drunk_Cobra posted...

https://youtu.be/3cqU1pFRqYE

I think a lot about the fact that this was one of my ex(who cheated on me)'s favorite songs.

Anyway, my contribution to the topic:

https://youtu.be/JOLApg2tvPk

It's a song about family annihilation/murder-suicide.

As a grown ass man who grew up deathly afraid of being murdered by his unstable father I related so hard that I had a full-blown panic attack listening to it. Still slaps though. Listening to it kinda helps me cope with the trauma, if that makes sense.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I always miss the "E" rating on ao3 and get surprised when stories suddenly get very... descriptive. I was reading a wonderful fic about a life-changing roadtrip that had only had very mild sexual elements and then, BOOM, penultimate chapter is just an extremely vivid description of two of the characters having a week-long romp. Like, it made sense for the narrative and I don't know how the author would have shown the change in their relationship otherwise, but it immediately changed it from a story I could recommend with some caveats to something that I would have to keep as a personal shame.

YourBestFrenemy posted...

If by people, you mean everyone other than me, then yes. Yes they do.

I really should remember. Might explain the weird looks I get sometimes, because of the assumption lol

A few food trucks have come by my apartment complex and, without fail, two things happen:

1) I pay $15 minimum for a thoroughly mediocre plate of food
2) I get horribly sick (at least two of them resulted in me puking immediately after eating it)

Yet I keep going back.

YourBestFrenemy posted...

Does masturbating to it count? Not saying I've done that, just asking for a friend.

I, somehow, always forget that people do this.

Yes, but I haven't actually posted anything online in a long time. I have a cripplingly low opinion of the stuff I create, so I've always convinced myself that anything I made was terrible. I actually wrote a fairly long story years ago (that I was quite proud of) and ended up completely deleting it off my laptop. Most stories I will be content to just let rot there, but I was so unhappy with this one that I completely obliterated it.

I'm actually re-writing it now. I don't know why I ever hated it so much. I still remember most of it, but I'm putting a lot of new elements in. I'm also writing a new piece, but it's going to be much shorter (a oneshot versus a multi-chapter affair). I'm telling myself that I'll actually post both when they're finished.

Also, I write under pseudonyms that are completely divorced from my usual online handles, so no one can ever find my works.

Infinitely more embarrassing is the amount of fan fiction that I read. I used to be quite ashamed of it, hiding it. I think I only ever revealed it to one friend, in middle school, as we had shared interests. In the years since, I would admit that I read fan fiction but not delve into specific fandoms or ships. Even my ex-wife didn't know what I specifically read or wrote (and a few cruel jokes from her indicated that she had no real clue other than some massively broad guesses).

Lately though, I've had some kind of mental breakthrough/down and will kinda freely recommend stories that I've greatly enjoyed. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a very casual acquaintance and just kinda off-handedly recommended a super dark fic I had read because it had left me feeling queasy and unhappy. I was stunned when he binged it in one night and had positive things to say about it. That led me to recommend another to him (much happier, by the way) because it had deeply moved me. Like, legit left me crying and nauseated (but in a good way). He read through the whole thing and we gushed about it a bit.

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by gremlinteeth is the latter fic, if you're interested. You'll scoff at the fandom, but believe me, it's an emotional rollercoaster that will change you as a person.

Bass posted...

We're all old here.

Pretty much. You'll see talks about high school stuff on other social media. I follow a lot of artists on tiktok and you wouldn't believe how often you'll see something like, "I promise to get the next part out this weekend; I've just got AP exams to worry about!" and then you click through to see that they're like sixteen.

When a man refuses to take his wife's last name and keep his current one, is he aware that his name was his father's? So that's still kinda being owned by a man, right?

Respect men of course.

That's what you sound like.

Also, I'm a man. I was married to a woman. I never wanted her to take my name. She threw a fit because I didn't take hers. I think a lot about that and how, roughly three months after we got married, she demanded a divorce. If I had changed my name, that's about the time that everything would have been finalized and then I would have had to just go and change everything back.

Having to change your name is such a dumb concept. I've long hated my last name because it was my father's (who was an utter bastard). I've been alive long enough that I no longer think of it as being his name; it's mine. It took a lot of mental work to be okay with that. I'm not giving that up for anyone.

Depends on how you define "own."

If you mean "cars that were meant to be mine and mine alone" the answer is two... but I only ever got to drive one of them. My mother gave me her 2002 Honda Civic as a graduation present and it served me well through part of high school, all of college, and a few years post-grad. My father had a 2000 Camaro that he wrecked and promised to fix then give to me. He talked that shit up for years. Never fixed it. Never got to drive it. Eventually sold the scraps.

If you want to include the cars I shared with my ex-wife, I suppose the number is four. I'm not including the car she had when we started dating, but I am counting the two cars she bought after we had moved in together/were engaged. One was a 2012 Subaru Legacy (roughly three years old when she bought it and that she destroyed by not changing the oil) and the other a brand new Impreza (I don't remember the exact year).

It's a lot of fun being in a relationship with someone where there's a tremendous imbalance in your financial situation. I've never, and likely will never, own anything that's as relatively new as my first car (which was about eight years old at the time) and I sure as hell will never own a brand new car. Honestly, at this point, the only way I'm likely to get another car is if someone dies.