I relate to a lot of what you're saying. I've failed shitloads of classes because I fell behind and I was afraid of asking the professor if I could hand stuff in late, and once I got behind I felt ashamed of myself and I started to assume the professor didn't like me and thought I was lazy, which made it harder for me to motivate myself to go to class, leading to a vicious cycle. I've finally started to get over this, for me it was a combination of having cool professors that approached me and encouraged me to hand in my late work, and also my financial aid eligibility is on a knife's edge from all my past screwups and I've come too far to fail now so that desperation has helped me become a little more shameless.

I'm also terrified of being accidentally rude or offending people in some way, which gives me social anxiety and makes it hard for me to by myself around others. I've been diagnosed with ADHD in the past but for some reason the doctor was hesitant to prescribe me any stimulants like adderal, she wanted to fuck around with anti-depressants instead which didn't really work so I just gave up on having my ADHD treated.

It's so frustrating how some people can just sort of suspect they might have ADHD, walk into a doctor's office and then come home with an adderal prescription, while others like yourself and I who have struggled for years can't even get anyone to give us a proper diagnosis or the medication we need.

Salt Lake City is like an oasis of semi-normality surrounded by a sea of white mormon suburban hell. If you live in Salt Lake city proper and not the surrounding suburbs it's actually not so bad, there are a lot of bars and restaurants and a few music venues in the city, and the west side has a fair amount of ethnic diversity. Contrary to popular perception it's not all just white mormons, the mormons are actually most concentrated in Utah county to the south. There's not a lot of crime and it's somewhat safe to walk around at night even in the poor parts of town. Salt Lake is also great for hiking and camping because it's right next to the mountains and southern Utah which is just a few hours away has a lot of national parks and beautiful red rock desert.

The downsides of Salt Lake besides the mormons are the inversion, Salt Lake is in a bowl surrounded by mountains so the air pollution gets trapped in the winter and it gets really bad, and as I hinted at before the city is racially and economically segregated, the west side is poor and more non-white while the east side is rich and predominately white. Also like every other city in the US Salt Lake is gentrifying and rent is getting really expensive here.

Yea I've played EU3 and 4 and I really wanted to like the series, but I stopped playing both after just a few hours. Honestly at the end of the day EU is just boring dogshit that's designed to let European nations steamroll everything and win the game no matter what. At first glance it looks like a complex game where you can do all sorts of strategizing but really it's just a shallow genocide and map painting simulator.

So, this is some pedantic archery nerd shit, but I fucking hate compound bow archery, and modern archery in general. Not only are compound bows ugly as shit, but the whole sport seems to be built on late capitalist excessive consumption. There are so many expensive gadgets and doodads to buy for a compound bow that help make you make you more accurate it's almost as if the sport is more about buying stuff than it is about practice and skill training.

I know that from a technical standpoint compound bows are vastly superior to traditional bows, but nobody besides remote hunter-gathers need bows for hunting and warfare anymore, we have guns for that. The only reason to practice archery is for sport, and I think training your skills with a traditional bow is a lot more fun and exciting than driving to Cabela's to get your bow tuned and spending $50 on a peep sight or whatever the fuck.

Yea spending tons of money on fancy tools in general is pretty dumb, because if you actually use them for anything they're bound to either break or get really worn and look like shit after a while. When I was younger I thought it would be a good idea to drop $120 on a nice Buck pocket knife, and then when I started working in construction I ended up using a cheap pocket knife for work and leaving the Buck at home cause I didn't want it to get ruined after I spent so much money on it.

I never watched the anime but I've read the manga (up to volume 8) and I agree it's pretty good and I need to get back into it. The art is beautiful and it has an interesting story and premise.

I also agree that it's an underrated series that hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves. I've looked at anime review sites like myanimelist for it and some people were pretty critical of it and say the author didn't handle the story very well so I guess that's why it never took off. I'm not very good at media critique so I don't really understand what they thought was wrong with it, I like it a lot and I think it's worth reading.

Maybe Children of the Whales was just a little too unique/niche to gain mass popularity.

Punk is dead, like, for real this time

Looks like they also have a single out, what the fuck is this shit it's the most low-energy punk vocals I've ever heard

I worked at a JC Penney for 7 years and looking back I really regret staying there as long as I did. At the time my thought process was similar to yours, I thought that even though it was a shit job I was relatively comfortable and I wouldn't be able to find anything better until I got a degree. But then once I left I realized that job was actually hell on earth and there are much better jobs out there.

The reality is that working in a department store is probably one of the worst jobs you can possibly have for your life long term. So long as you're working there you'll never, ever get a decent raise, you won't get a promotion and you're not really learning any skills that look good on a resume and could help you get a better job somewhere else (I know dealing with customers and shit takes skill but managers/capitalists don't see it that way).

There were a few older people who had worked at JC Penney for much longer than I had and they were still making basically the same rate as me, and they were some of the most miserable depressed people I've ever met.

When I started at JC Penney I was making $7.25 and hour, and when I left 7 years later I was still only making $8.35 an hour. The job I had after that was a construction/manufacturing job that started at $9 an hour, and when I left that job 6 years later I was making $18.

Retail is a trap and I would recommend getting out while you still can.

Same deal here in Utah, Californians are seen as snobby uptight gentrifiers.

As far as podcasts with black hosts go, I like to listen to The Discourse. I don't think they release their episodes for free anymore though, you have to subscribe to their patreon .

That poster was also being a huge asshole in a thread yesterday :thinkin-lenin:

Yea they should be but apparently the school district where this happened is extremely racist so they won't.

Who are these people and why do I need to care about any of this shit

Yea, I mean there's nothing wrong with talking about it and it's pretty deep compared to a lot of other shows, it's just that sometimes it seems like Evangelion posting is the only thing that gains any traction on this site.

I liked Evangelion when I watched it but yea I think it's overrated and this comm talks about it a little bit too much.

I'm getting big nazi vibes from this "Evropean Spectre" person

So, I'm not a biologist, but isn't it kind of a fallacy to assume that just because a trait exists it must have been necessary/useful in the evolutionary past? From what I understand, genetic mutations are random, and bad ones get weeded out while good ones get propagated and spread around until they became dominant. To me what this implies is that mutations that are neutral and don't contribute to or impede survival could stick around and become common traits even though they aren't really good for anything. Someone who knows more about biology, tell me if I'm wrong or not.

The main critique was accepting the poisoned chalice of US help, rather than cutting a deal with Assad. I can’t blame them too much, they had a hard, hard choice and a deal with the devil in exchange for true independence might have seemed very attractive.

Occasionally I read news sites based in Rojava and I feel like one thing that some leftists don't understand is that a lot of the people in that region legitimately hate Assad and the Syrian Government, so accepting the return of the Syrian government would have been a very bitter pill for people to swallow. Not only was the Syrian government discriminatory towards Kurds and treated Northeast Syria as an internal colony, but apparently it was also just incompetent, corrupt, and centralized to such an insane degree that municipalities were incapable of maintaining themselves properly.

It wasn't me doing the telling off, but I once had a manager who was a massive dick. Supposedly he was a former CEO and millionaire and he looked down on all of us for being manual laborers. Every week he would call a shop-wide meeting where he would yell at us, call us fuckers, and brag about how he didn't have to work as hard as us because of his education and work experience. He also liked to make us work mandatory weekends, and one Saturday after the shift ended his laptop went missing. Apparently it had a lot of important data on it, and for weeks he was begging for it back, he even offered a cash reward if it was brought back to him. Eventually someone found it stashed in a cooler with the screen ripped off. I think he got the message because after his laptop was found like that he started being a lot nicer to us.

Basically, there is a tradition of conceited liberal academics who try to use anthropological research to construct social theories that justify colonialism, imperialism, and the capitalist world order, despite not being anthropologists themselves. Because they're not anthropologists and because they're too arrogant and politically motivated to properly engage with anthropology, their theories are dogshit, but because they're cheerleaders for capitalism they're taken seriously by the media and their "research" ends up overshadowing actual anthropology in the popular discourse.

Steven Pinker is one of these academics, he's a famous professor who wrote books such as " The Better Angels of our Nature " and " Enlightenment Now " that try to argue that human society has steadily improved and become less violent over time because of the development of the state, capitalism, etc.