HD SimAnt? sick.

Well, my life would have been measurably better had I never opened that link.

I was in 3 car accidents over the course of three years, all of which the car I was in was totaled.

The worst of the three was one of those secondary, peak rush-hour accidents. I was on a two lane freeway (two lanes one direction, two lanes the other with a cement divider in the middle) around rush-hour with a pretty heavy amount of traffic but moving fast. I was going between 60 and 70 and in a really good mood. I’d just spent the whole day making music with one of my best friends with crazy vintage equipment and I was on my way to play a show that night. I was daydreaming and looked away from the road for a second, looked back and saw break lights. So I tapped my breaks, but then in a split second I realized those break lights were coming super fast. I did the exact wrong thing and slammed on my breaks. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was hit from both the front and the back. I was driving a tiny two seater from the early 90s, not exactly the safest car. I felt around myself and I seems to be all in one piece. No pain anywhere. Iwas able to squeeze my way up out of the car, bewildered. I didn’t seem to have any injuries at all. The car looked like a crushed tin can. I went to the hospital just in case and it’s a good thing I did because as the shock wore off I discovered I had a bruised rib that was making it very hard to breathe. But that was my only injury. They gave me painkillers and sent me on my way.

I spent the next year in a fog of painkillers and existential despair and confusion. To this day I have trouble driving and I frequently question whether I’m actually alive or living out a dream in the dying seconds of my mind.

I started writing a response, then I looked at some of your other comments.

Even if this was as big an issue as you’re making it seem like it is, the answer is never “crawl back to suckle at the capitalist teat.”

Use your damn imagination. We have a much more direct ability to organize ourselves here. Shit, we don’t even need to be restricted by the code of Lemmy. If a large enough group agrees on a specific way to be organized and self-polices, what’s the difference? Rules only exist if people choose to follow them.

You don’t like how it’s working? Do it differently. Talk to people. Convince them your way makes more sense. But it sounds to me more like you just miss that sweet condensed spez milk.

Impressed cat video. Didn’t used to be in english!

I second the folks I see talking up Nebula. Great shit on there.

The ones I spend the most time with are probably Fact Fiend, Animalogic, vlogbrothers, Seth Skorkowsky, XP to Level 3, Hello Future Me, Gus Johnson, Reuben Solo, Andrew Rousso, EVNautilus, David Firth, Adam Millard…

Then there’s a bunch that I only watch on Nebula now: Extra Credits/History, Legal Eagle, Nerdwriter, Adam Neely, Philosophy Tube, Innuendo Studios, Tale Foundry, Just Write, Like Stories of Old, Lindsay Ellis, RealLifeLore, TierZoo.

Then there’s this guy who just makes long, quiet videos of him interacting with stray cats. Good, good, gooooooood shit. Changed his name recently.

Me? Me is that you?

I can’t tell you how much I love that Denmark has hillbillys who drive hatchbacks and are called fuckin’ Brian as a slur.

Ahh, yes, of course. Forgot about that. I graduated 2010 so that wasn’t really on my radar at the time.

Another favorite was “no flat billed hats”. I’m realizing now a lot of it had a very “we don’t want gangs. Well, all rappers are gangsters, let’s watch some hip hop music videos and just rule out everything they wear” vibe.

I wish I could remember the specifics but my high school had an extremely ridiculous dress code policy at one point. Mostly targeting girls, of course, but also had weird shit like “no large/long coats.”

What I do remember perfectly though, is that a friend of mine and I, angrily pouring over the details of the stupid dress code, realized that capes were perfectly fine according to the code as written. So we both got huge capes and that was like a whole year of high school.

I used to do this to everyone, all the goddamned time. Then I got diagnosed with ADHD and I become a lot more self-aware of my behaviors.

I worked so fucking hard to learn ways to get ahead of or sidestep my urges. Now when other people do it around me it irritates me way, way more than it ever did before.

I’ve never really enjoyed playing online games. (I don’t like being harassed by strangers. I have enough problems with my self-esteem, thank you.) But now I’ve gotten into several niche games I’d prefer to play with people and I have no skills or energy to make that happen. The most niche one is the Armada 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire. I love that game and I’d love to play with my friends, but my friends have very little trek fandom/rts enthusiast crossover.

There’s this series of compilation albums called Dark Country, most notable for having a lot of the music from the Rebel Galaxy games. I would not call these good, exactly. But they have a very specific vibe and they all do that vibe extremely well. It’s not what I normally listen to by a long shot, but I keep coming back to them. They’re gritty, dark, cheesy, catchy, and fun.