Hi folks, I stopped posting (not here, I never posted here) back in 2014 or so when my local DOT stopped being responsive to my incessant requests for better bike lanes and kept not posting as I slowly became overwhelmed with the constant stream of opinions from other white dudes clogging up all the tubes, but the fediverse is starting to coax me out of my shell. One of these days I might even manage one of these 'shit-posts' the youths are doing.
I'm an engineer (structural and software), and I live in a city in the US, and I ride bikes, work on my bikes, camp with my bike, and look at my bikes a lot. I'm into urbanism and transportation and other things that go hand in hand with riding a bike in a US city. I also make clothes and do some hand-tool woodworking, am weirdly into swords (it's not a good time to be a leftist sword guy on youtube, I tell you what). I belong to an industrial arts group, so if you're looking for space to make shit and you also happen to live in a city in the US then let me know, we like new people.
Politically, I read the Manifesto in high-school and considered myself a leftist but generally went along with liberal ideology for a long time, thinking markets are cool we just need better regulation, I'm sure we can vote our way out of this, if we all just had (business) unions everything would be fine, etc. Finally climate change, Black liberation movements, and yeah, Ol' Bernard started motivating me to peel back some of the cracking layers of contradiction in my ideology and read (or OK, listen to podcasters read) some theory. I feel better now.
Genderically, I chose comrade/them pronouns as I've long been pretty lukewarm about being a cis man. I felt some dysphoria around high-school and college but then I grew a big ass beard and just decided that my personal definition of masculinity was pattern baldness and a face rug, and I could perform whatever way I wanted and feel secure in myself. I've been shopping around he/they or various forms for a minute and figured the internet, and especially Hexbear, would be a fine place to pin one on for a while.
Sincerely, LuddyBuddy
I'm in my mid 40s and didn't discover how left I was until I was in my late 30s. There's a reason why we're fed propaganda from an early age: it works.
Welcome!! I have a bike. Biking is cool. I love camping too. You'll do fine here.
Yay bikes! I even had good teachers, ie when I read all the “lies your teacher told you” I was like cool, my teachers didn’t tell me that! But there was still a lot left out.
Wait... Are you me?
Do you (or should I ask, do I) listen to a lot of reggae, BBQ on the weekends, and actively try to smash nazi faces at concerts? If the answer is yes, I applaud myself for creating an alt, probably while I was drunk, while having no recollection of it all.
It's really just the reggae part that doesn't fit. Is it possible that when you're (or I as it were) drunk you switch to 90s UK jungle and/or Japanese noise?