Eh, the age of majority has been a sham for a long time.
You can get drafted to die for your country in some god-forsaken land, but if you survive to go home you can't grab a beer.
I'm not saying the drinking age should be lowered, but be consistent.
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American, in the early 00s is when I got my license.
We never had that shit.
What we had was a school promoted driver's ed course. I think there was a video in the first week about drunk driving, but it was never this dramatic.
Then, we had road time. Lessons on the actual rules/laws of the road? Nah. Chuck a 15 year old into a car with a few other students, give the instructor a chicken brake, and figure it out. If you passed the school program, you didn't have to take a written or road test, you just got your license. Unless you had an accident, you passed.
I'll just say, that seems to explain a lot of the shitty drivers in my home town. Hell, my first time getting on the highway was coached by a friend of the same age as I did it for the first time. Didn't learn that in the drivers ed program, we just took side/back roads.
Also round-a-bouts didn't exist back then, in our area. They got real popular in the last couple years. No one seems to know how to use them. Yield? What the fuck does that mean?
My wife and I moved to another state a few months ago. I just gotta say driving was something I fucking loathed. In this new state? Well, I still don't like it, but honestly, its fine. So much better. People observe traffic signs/laws. It makes a big difference.
Hah, one of my favorite aspects of early Christianity was the concept of "Sanctuary."
Glad to see fascism has firmly stamped that out, though it hasn't been a thing in a long while.
Fuck, I've heard this shit before. The entire point of online play, for competitive games; in my mind, is seeing who YOU as a player, are better than. Cheating ruins any of the fun. You don't grow as a player, you don't do better at your class/weapon/whatever. If you can overpower everyone through illegitimate means, you're missing the point entirely; plus you ruin the fun of everyone else. In short, fuck those people. That being said, I like single player RPGs. If I've played through legitimately 10 times, I don't see a problem with some sort of QOL type cheats. I've done it before, I've spent the time farming currency; ultimately, it detracts from my experience - Key word: MY experience. Its single player. I'm not fucking over another human being.
I was alive in the glorious era of LAN parties.
My friends and I had spent approximately 36 hours (straight) mainlining caffeine and running a variety of games. Quake 3 RA, AOE2, a little CS, etc. Towards the end, we all played.... fuck, I can't remember the name. It was an over the top FPS that took Duke Nukem to unheard levels of cheesiness. Anyways, after a certain level of exhaustion after the caffeine was gone, someone suggested we all LAN CS with a caveat, we all had 30 minutes to find and install the best hacks we could find and see what happened. It was mostly auto-pilot at that point, both gaming wise as well as things like breathing.
It was a fun experiment, and to allay any worries about online play, all of us were the nerdiest of nerds. We formatted our drives frequently. Hell, a friend of ours was running WindowsME at a LAN party and we formatted his drive and installed a cracked version of XP before he even got a game up, lol.
End results of the hackfest rounds? It was determined that the scout rifle was superior to the AWP, with perfect headshots. Mobility won out when guaranteed headshots were a thing. It did take a few people a surprisingly long amount of time to figure that out.
If a four person table has three Nazis sitting at it, and a fourth person sits down with them, there are four Nazis at the table.
Accordingly, if a public figure makes a Nazi salute (several times) in a public live recording, they are a Nazi.
If it walks like a duck, etc.
They may not claim Nazism, but fascism is fascism whatever flag you wave. The individual motivators behind it are not relevant.
Both my grandfathers are rolling over in their graves as I watch fascism goose step into America.
That reminds me of a trip to Vegas with some friends.
Outside our hotel was the PBR bar.
So we thought, hell yeah, drink some shitty cheap beer in the sun before we walk down the strip to.... whatever.
Nope, Professional Bull Riding bar.
I don't recall what I ate (that would a trend for the trip, I was hung over for a week after I got home) but I remember it was pretty tasty.
I'm worse about eating and drinking water at home, by far, than at work.
At work I have a schedule. About halfway through my shift, give or take. I work alone, over night, and don't have any scheduled or required breaks; however, the wireless headset reaches almost everything so I just get up and nuke whatever I brought in.
As for water? I'll slug some water down and go refill my vessel just to get up and stretch my legs.
At home... Well, have you ever started playing a game at night and 5 minutes later the sun was up? Yeah, I'm always like that at home lol.
Why is the sky blue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering
Just being pedantic, rapists, especially child rapists need the book thrown at them.
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I don't go back to straight Debian, but generally something Debian-based.
By that, of course, I mean Kali to continue my on-again-off-again pentesting studies... I know there are other platforms, but that is where I'm comfortable.
Sadly, my daily driver is fucking Win11 (gaming rig). Why? I work in IT, and MS is killing Win10 so I'll have to support shitty Win11 soon enough, need to know its quirks to support it. I do miss my Linux build for gaming though.
You're bipolar, you just hide it well.
Get your meds sorted before college or you're gonna wind up dropping out.
Also, its a seizure disorder, it just doesn't present typically; and its medication resistant. Keep trying. That alone is gonna set you back about 10 years.
Don't forget, those of us who "produce" aren't even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We're already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
I won't quote it, but yes. First thought.
Man, I know English. I know some Spanish, high school drop out level, and I have some "real world" experience from working in a hotel... but man, I don't think I can change languages on the fly.
Mi Espanol es muy mal. Muy, muy, mal.
From past experience, and I mean, before proton...
You need to know that learning is part of the fun. Playing the games themselves isn't the fun part. Getting them running is.
As a Texan, this makes me happy.
I don't believe in book bans. If a kid can read it, they should. Will they agree with the message? Maybe, maybe not. However, they were exposed to different thoughts. This isn't a bad thing. It is up to the reader to determine how valid that line of thinking is in their life.
The bible.... whew, the bible.... Violence, sexuality, fucking incest, rape, etc. It isn't a "clean" book.
However, if they're gonna ban books for questionable material, the fucking bible is chock full of it.
I say this as someone who had southern baptist grandparents I spent the summer with, and have read the bible cover to cover more times than I ever cared to, but it was the only reading material available.
My first IT job was at a school district. Elementary school.
I wasn't in charge of kids, per se, but sometimes I was surrounded by kids and no other staff.
We had a power outage, it was between periods, kids everywhere. I was making my way to the network closet to do my fucking job.
Suddenly, I had like a hundred kids looking to me for guidance. Some questions I could answer. What happened? We lost power. What should we do? Well fuck man, I dunno. So I stood in the hall to monitor as best I could (you know, make sure they didn't kill each other) and announced that they needed to go to their next location.
Kids started filing around each other and me, heading where they knew they needed to (late in the school year) except one kid.
I knew this kid. He was special needs. He didn't know where he needed to go. Ok, cool. Well, when he was a classroom disturbance, because I couldn't set boundaries, I let him "help" me.
Honestly, this kid was probably just autistic though I never saw paperwork. He was decent with computers. I put him in my lab and had him imaging machines for me. He loved it, and I'd like to think he may wind up with a career because of it. I had him "help" me a lot more throughout the year. He replaced some hardware even!
Anyways, while he was imaging, I called his collective of teachers and figured out where he needed to go. He wanted to watch a machine finish imaging (PXE boot, it was a time bar) and then got him to his next class.
As I relate this, I really miss working in an elementary school. The kids are so curious about everything. I only worked there a year, I received an offer that literally doubled my take home pay. Now I've been corporate and medical IT and I hate it. Ah well, capitalism is a bitch.
When I acted up, threw a tantrum, basically disturbed the peace, my mother would get up, take me outside away from others until I settled down. Did trips to the grocery store take some additional time some days? Yeah. But I learned pretty quick.
This wasn't some stay at home mom who had tons of free time. My mom worked 40+ hours a week, was the primary bread winner, and still did a decent job of raising me.
Some office environments too.
Last place I was at, I worked nights pretty much solo. If my wireless earbuds died, sure, I'd play it out loud. I was the only one in the building. About an hour before anyone else started getting in, if my ear buds still hadn't charged enough I turned it off.
Partially to be respectful, and partially because some people get offended by metal even if they can't understand the lyrics. And I mean, yeah, some bands can have unprofessional lyrics. I get it having been in the working world so long.
A bit between friends is different.
Fuck, I was a skater in school. I threw myself down a two story half pipe in a warehouse every weekend. I had bruises on top of bruises.
Pain wasn't new to me, cause man, I fucking sucked on a skateboard.
Let me put it this way, the kid I gave a broken nose to was a wanna-be MS13 member at the time. Ran into him after high school - guess who was a member? I'm glad I had friends with me, and we outnumbered his crew. They backed down. I don't know what they had, but we all carried knives - and at the time - were ready to use them. My late teen years were a little wild. He recognized me, and called them to back off.
I guess getting the cops involved over a pool table in a bowling alley would have fucked up their bigger plans.
During driving lessons.
Sure.
In the state I learned to drive in, they didn't exist. They weren't in the driver's manual. Nothing.
So there are generations of people who can't, or won't, figure out how they work, its a fucking nightmare.
Moved to another state recently. No problems here. In fact, driving here is a much less harrowing experience.