Yeah, was mostly trying to do a funny.

That's fair

Yeah that's probably the move

Yeah that's probably good advice. Just don't know of any in my area.

I guess it would just be a hangout? I hadn't really thought of that.

Mama mia spicy meatball (idk I never watched it)

Sure am. I had more women among my friends when I was in school. Mostly in that "friends but not close friends" layer that gets completely obliterated when you leave school.

I've got plenty of friends. Roughly ~12 people I'd consider "close" friends and none of them really know anybody to introduce me to. All of the guys know almost only guys, because they don't have girlfriends, because their friends almost only know guys, etc.

Yeah, I know about that. I max out on volume, but I don't think my "rate" is really all that bad. It's not like I'm swiping right on everybody I see. It depends on the day, but I'd say I'm swiping right somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8 times.

I appreciate the advice, but this is all stuff that I feel like I'm pretty good at. I put active work into my style and grooming and can talk to people just fine (My job is half receptionist.) I've got some "attractive" hobbies like woodworking and art on top of my more generic video games and anime. I make that long trip over to the city to go to concerts every other week or so. I'd even say I'm a pretty funny guy. I have some issues "turning it on" when it comes to flirting, but once I'm in the zone I'm just fine. Really, I feel like my issues mostly boil down to getting my foot in the door. That's what I'm trying to whine about. I have no issues with rejection, that's just part of the whole process and I don't take it personally. It just feels like there's a thousand times more men in the world than women, so I don't even get a fair shot.

Damn, can't believe it's illegal to have some fun and do a little mischief

That sounds super chill. We get plenty of thunder around here, too. There's really nothing better to take a nap to.

I don't normally dream much about other people anymore. Maybe it's because I've gotten more isolated over the years, but the rare occasions I dream about people, it's usually an immediate family member. A while ago (maybe two or so months ago?) I had a dream that was out of left field.

When I was a kid, I was frequently a loner. Not by choice, but because I just lacked any social skills, confidence, or extracurriculars that gave me a connection to kids my age. This persisted from when I was pretty young up through high school. I never really stopped being weird and most people still thought of me as a net-negative to any social situation, but not all of them. I ended up with a group of friends. Not just people who were my kind of weird (which I was very self-conscious about and essentially avoided like the plague) but more varied. Some theater kids, some athletes, some boys, some girls. In the mornings before the bell rang, as well as during lunch, we'd sit out in this side area between the auditorium and the cafeteria. It was all concrete-floored, partially covered by the sides of the auditorium roof and partially under a covered walkway. There was a picnic bench and two small concrete cubes adjacent to the wall of the auditorium to sit on. That place ended up meaning a lot to me, I think, because it was the first place I ever really felt like I had friends.

In my dream, I was sitting at the bench alone, eating lunch. A friend who I had a crush on for a long time, I mean for years, sat down across from me and started eating with me like it was the most natural thing in the world. I haven't talked to this girl in close to a decade now, hadn't thought about her at all in a long time. I tell her "I'm sorry I acted sort of weird for a while before we ended up losing touch, and I'm sorry I never just let us be normal friends." She tells me it's okay, and that she forgives me. We keep eating. A moment later come two friends of mine who I had been close with a while back. Lost contact with them as well, and was pretty unfairly disappointed in them when I last knew them. They got married the other year, not that I had ever heard anything about it from them. I apologized to them for expecting more than was fair out of them. They accepted, told me it was water under the bridge, and started eating. The four of us were talking amongst ourselves about I don't know what, along comes another friend. I had, at times, been unfair to them, too. Nothing dramatic or out of the ordinary, but I had definite hangups born from insecurity around him. Another apology, another acceptance. This kept going for a while. People I knew would keep joining the group. I would apologize for however I wronged them. They would forgive me, grab a seat somewhere, and talk amongst us. People ended up having smaller side conversations as more people showed up and it felt almost like a big picnic. I knew as I was apologizing that none of this would bring these people back into my life. This quiet lunch on a beautiful afternoon would end, we would go our separate ways. I think somewhere in there, I recognized that it was all a dream. The mass of people became more than just the friends I had lost across the years. It was everybody I had ever wronged in my life. Even strangers I had met only for a minute when I accidentally cut them off or inconvenienced them. Every last mistake was accounted for. The scores had been settled and every debt was freely forgiven. I felt an overwhelming feeling of love. It was the warmest, softest, and kindest sensation I had ever felt, and maybe the first time in my life feeling fully and totally at peace. Like I was enough, and the world was enough.

Soon enough, I woke up. I've never experienced a dream like that in my life. Nothing so vivid or so coherent, or that I felt so deeply. I just had a peace that washed over me. It reminded me of something I heard once from somebody whose thoughts have deeply impacted my own: that all cruelty in the world, even sadism, comes from fear. Fear that we will not be forgiven for the things we have done or the things we might do. It is a belief that there is no escaping judgement and punishment for the things we have done and the things we might do, and that on our deathbeds we will be in agony because of it. That when we die, we will have to pass into the terrifying unknown alone, in pain and fear. And lastly, that in becoming that punishing agony for somebody else, we escape the punishment looming over our own heads, or at the very least that we will not be the only ones punished. This fear of judgement is in everybody, to some extent, and can make all of us cruel, even in small ways. Living with this gnawing fear is what it means to be in Hell. Heaven is something we must build. It is not a place that can be entered by an individual, it must be built by many hands. It is the understanding among people that everybody is human and shares the fundamental human experience: we are small beings, cast into a world that cruelly gifts us with a body that feels pain and wants and needs that can never be done away with, and it will never be our fault. We do not choose our faculties or our environments. None of us do. If you believe that of everybody, and you believe that they think the same of you, it all falls into place. We come to understand that, having felt those pains and injustices, nobody would ever choose to punish each other. It would be like choosing to hurt themselves. The fear melts away, and we feel forgiven. When we feel forgiven like that, we conquer our manic fear of death. When I heard all this, it sounded like absolute woo-woo bullshit to me from a guy I normally thought of as one of the most clear-minded and well-meaning people I had ever seen. I had given it thought, rolled it over in my mind, and decided it made some sense, but was far too sappy and optimistic to be anything real. But it all felt true after that dream. I understood what I think it feels like when you have been forgiven for everything, and it's something I wish for everybody.

I teared up a little bit after the dream. I certainly cried a bit writing all of this out. I hope I didn't sour it with something incoherent at the end, but that's it. That's what it meant to me.

There's not even a full podcast of us.

I left it off until I got desperate enough to start lying about it.

Mostly because the capitalist system needs new markets. It's a requirement of the system. Most of the real new avenues for capital have already been exploited, so we've seen most of them in the past few decades be invented in tech. Presumably, this will continue to be true in the future. If interest rates go back down, then it's likely there'll be another boom. So long as capital thinks it has a new market, real or fabricated, that it can get bigger returns from, it'll bite. That'll involve creating new products from scratch much of the time. Due in part due to racism and in part due to the very real advantages of a shared native language and timezone, I think investors will find an American most desirable if all else is equal. You're right that outsourcing can cut costs, but US programmer salaries also have a lot of space to fall.

Sure, it's entirely possible that things don't improve and that's I'm super fucked, but I have no real way to pick apart the odds of that and even if I knew for sure, I don't have much I could do to act on the information in a favorable way that I can't do later down the line.

This thread has mostly convinced me to lean more towards open source contributions than a masters, yeah. I don't know what you did on citra, I've used it to emulate a few gens of Pokemon, so thanks for your work!

I don't miss the promises things will surely get better for me, I've known those are mostly empty for a long time now. If anything, it's encouraging to hear people drop them without going full doomer like so many people do. The undeniably spiritual component of even the most orthodox Marxism very often gets overlooked. I found a lot of solace in Matt Christman's cushvlogs for that reason.

I hear that from time to time but I'm never really sure what to do with that. I never see job postings that list a certification in the requirements or preferred qualifications outside of maybe some IT jobs, and they're usually pretty hyper-specific. Have any suggestions on certs and where to take them?