cobysev

[…] we have so many things wrong PlanetSide that it makes the stars almost irrelevant.

Yeah, this has been my fear lately. As a kid in the '80s/'90s, I had high hopes for humanity. I loved space travel stories; read so many science fiction books, watched Star Trek/Star Wars, loved space films of all genres…

But lately, I’ll be happy if we ever make it to Mars. The one person who had a dedicated mission to get a man on Mars turned out to be a self-destructing billionaire sociopath who seems to have abandoned that dream for political meddling aspirations instead.

If we can get capitalism out of the way, humanity might have a chance at bouncing back. But as long as a few powerful elites maintain control over society, our hopes and dreams will forever be redirected toward financial gains until the collapse of society.

On the plus side, even Rome, the most stable and advanced civilization outside of our own, eventually collapsed. Humanity survived and eventually went on to thrive once again, doing even better this time. By the historical timeline of the birth and death of civilizations, America is long overdue for a collapse. Maybe we’re about to see a global change that will reset our predicament and give us another chance to succeed. If we can learn from our past.

I just wish I could see how life goes on without me. How our world changes in the future beyond my limited time on this planet.

I think about people who lived hundreds of years ago. How they couldn’t even imagine the scientific and technological advancements that we have. And then I think about hundreds of years into the future. What changes will be so extreme and advanced that I can’t even imagine it today?

I wish there was some way for me to glimpse into that future and see where society is heading. Will we expand out to the stars? Will we be extinct long before we leave this planet? What’s the ultimate future for humanity? These are questions I want to know, but will never get a chance to find out, unless everyone but me dies out in the next 30-40 years. And I highly doubt that’s gonna happen.

As a pansexual, intellect is the #1 most attractive trait I find in a significant other. I need someone whom I can have a solid productive discussion with. Intimacy only takes you so far; if you can’t bond on a mental or emotional level, then I can’t stay engaged in a relationship with you.

Empathy is a close second; without empathy, I can’t necessarily trust that your conversation or personal morals/goals are coming from a good place. And I will quickly start to doubt every choice you make in the relationship.

Physical attractiveness is always a bonus, but not required. I am happy with any gender, any body type. I have preferences, but they won’t make or break a relationship. My wife used to worry because she has the opposite body type to some of my preferences. But I informed her that her differences gave me a new experience and helped me to better appreciate her body type. There’s no such thing as a bad body type in my opinion.

I married my wife, not because of her looks or gender, but because she’s my best friend in the whole world. The one person I can talk to about anything and not hold secrets from. We understand each other, wholly support each other, and can agree on most things. And the few things we disagree on doesn’t hurt our relationship. You shouldn’t blindly agree with everything anyway. It’s good to have some conflicting opinions in your life so you don’t get sucked into confirmation biases.

Again, discussion is key. If someone just accepts what you say without any personal thoughts or opinions, then I don’t feel like they’re able to make informed decisions or use critical thinking skills. And that’s not attractive at all to me.

If you were a member of ISIS, you would be considered a member of ISIS regardless of whether you were a janitor or secretary or worked in the cafeteria or you were a combatant.

By this logic, all Americans are terrorists, since they exist under the rule of the US government and haven’t risen up to overthrow it. Therefore, complicit in its actions.

Which, by the way, is the mentality I was regularly exposed to while living abroad. There are some countries that judge our entire nation based on the actions of our government and persecute any citizens of that country because of it.

The world isn’t black and white. Real life is complicated. You can’t make blanket statements against an entire group of people based on the actions of an organization. That’s just encouraging hateful and biased rhetoric toward people you don’t know anything about.

That’s a life lesson I learned while traveling the globe. Some people treated me like a hero when I arrived; some treated me like a terrorist. None of them actually took the time to know me. I was judged based on the actions of the organization I associated with instead of taking the time to witness how I was trying to influence that organization.

And the same could be said of other countries. We’d receive reports of terrorist cells embedded in the populations of third-world nations and be told not to trust the citizens. Yet most people I encountered in that nation were grateful for our presence and glad that we kept the local crime and violence at all-time lows, simply by being there.

I worked with Iraqi citizens who begged us not to leave their country because they hadn’t known peace until we arrived; there was so much violent and murderous infighting between the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. And having a foreign military power in the area, especially one with our reputation, prevented a lot of deaths and gave local citizens a chance to rebuild and get back on their feet.

I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in supporting rich powerful elites. I joined the military to help empower the working class; to give them the tools and resources to rise up against dictators and take back their rights as human beings.

And during my 20 years of service, I had a net positive result in that regard. I never had to raise a weapon against anyone. Never had to violate anyone’s rights while supporting their oppressive government. Never had to compromise my own morals for my job. I accomplished my personal goal of being a positive influence on this world.

You talk about Iraq as if it was a one-off, an outlier.

This was the largest conflict during my time in the military, so it was the first example I defaulted to. Yes, I’m aware that the US has involved themselves in foreign conflicts that it doesn’t have any right to be associated with. Heck, I’ve been protesting our direct involvement in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the poor way we’ve handled the Russo-Ukraine War so far.

I am but one man. I can’t stop the US government from making bad decisions. But sitting on the sidelines and protesting something I don’t have any experience with hardly made a difference. I chose to be directly involved so that I can influence positive change from the inside.

While serving, I made sure my subordinates were educated on our military’s current actions. I made sure they made informed decisions when ordered to do something, so they would use critical thinking skills when given orders and not just be “yes men.” This was not only to protect them, but to ensure they made choices that helped people instead of pushing ruling party objectives.

The military is a propaganda machine, I won’t deny that. But by being directly involved, I could use that propaganda to push its members toward wholesome choices. The military claims they’re a humanitarian service? Fine, let’s do some solid humanitarian work! Let’s get outside and actually help struggling citizens.

Community volunteer service was a requirement in military life, and I made sure myself and my subordinates were actually affecting positive changes in communities instead of just going through the motions for the publicity. We rebuilt low income neighborhoods, set up organizations to house and feed homeless and/or abused people, created safe spaces for people to receive free mental health services, etc. I did my best to ensure we weren’t just showing up to a single public event to “help out” and then abandoning it the next day.

Change comes from within. You can shout and protest the government’s actions from the sidelines all day, but what are you doing to actually change them? Until you’re directly involved and have hands-on experience with that organization, you can’t really claim to be doing something positive. This is why I joined the military, despite my friends and family thinking I wasn’t the kind of person to do well there. I didn’t join to shoot people or spread hate and fear. I joined to use their power and influence to help out citizens. And I’d like to think I succeeded in that regard, while also positively influencing other military members to do the right thing.

My hope is that the “butterfly effect” of my actions permeates through the organization and continues to positively influence members. Heck, I’m still mentoring some of my old subordinates, several years after my retirement.

One of my friends is currently working for a unit stationed in Germany that is filled with pro-Trump members, and he claims it’s getting hard to see any opinions besides their view. We’ve had lengthy discussions on the destruction and harm Trump has been up to here in America. I’m hoping he can turn around and be a voice of logic and reason in his unit and spread some reality instead of the fascist propaganda that’s already settling in. If I hadn’t served, there would be at least one unit in Germany who is falling for that fascist propaganda. Every little bit helps.

If you’re a US citizen, I’d recommend getting involved yourself. You don’t need to join the military, but we need positive voices in local and federal government positions to fight against tyranny and oppression in our own nation. Our human rights are already on the chopping block and we need everyone we can to speak up against it from positions of authority. Even being on the board of your local town hall is better than nothing.

Yes, this was one of the common stereotypes I heard a lot, mostly from anti-war people who only view the military as a war vehicle. Fortunately, I had no direct involvement in terrorism during my service. We mostly engaged in humanitarian aid. Publicly, we promote ourselves as a humanitarian service, and in my experience, that was the majority of what we focused on. But some people (like myself, initially) only know the military through war films and assume we’re just there to kill people.

That’s not to say the US is completely exempt from bad deeds. For instance, the Iraq War should never have happened and there was literally no reason for us to be there. That was a very bad call by Bush Jr., who expected we’d find something to justify our campaign into the country. (Note: we did not.)

We have regulations about what type of orders we have to obey and what orders we’re required to disobey. Thanks to the Nuremburg Trials, we know that “just following orders” is not an excuse to carry out horrific actions. So if we’re given an order that violates the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), we’re expected to ignore those orders, and depending on the situation, we may even remove the person who gave those orders from command.

Honestly, I’m glad I retired when I did. I served during Trump’s first term in office and it was a dark time for us. But he was mostly restrained by a majority Democrat government that time, so most of the fascist ideals he demanded got shut down.

This time around though, he’s running with a majority Republican government and they’ve given him a green light to do as he pleases. He even replaced the Secretary of Defense with an unqualified alcoholic National Guard captain. Completely circumventing the promotion programs we have in place to ensure only the best and brightest are allowed to hold those positions. You’d better believe I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation to disobey unlawful orders if I was still serving.

what OS do they use in the military?

It depended on the function, but most computers were Windows. Historically, Windows has had the most versatility with other common file systems that we and our allies/enemies used, plus it was easy enough for any service member to pick up and use with minimal training.

However, we always had custom-configured Windows images; we didn’t just install a blank copy. Like I mentioned, our systems were severely locked down, so there were plenty of registry configurations and custom software suites that would take us a few days per computer to install manually. So we would build one that met our requirements, then create an image of it and copy that to every other computer in our unit.

Depending on the unit, there might be custom software builds to meet a particular mission requirement, so there were always several images ready to be pushed to specific computers.

they believed that the best security was older systems that had been thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities

Oh no 😅 I am not a cyber security expert but that seems to me like a recipe for a disaster

It worked well enough for a while, but computer technology kept evolving, so we were constantly playing catch-up.

For the first half of my career, we were always at least one OS behind the civilian sector. When I joined in 2002, we were just phasing out Windows 95/98 and replacing it with Windows 2000.

Then in 2008, we were on Windows XP and Microsoft was trying to get us to upgrade to Windows Vista. Vista was a terrible OS, so we decided to just skip it and go for the new Windows 7 that was supposed to be coming out a year later.

Then Microsoft announced an end to support for Windows XP in a few months. We can’t have an OS without any support, so we quickly signed a contract to upgrade to Windows Vista. Before the ink dried on the new contract, Microsoft announced that they would be extending support on XP for 4 more years.

So we got suckered into a Vista contract, and as soon as Windows 7 dropped, we switched to that. We stayed mostly caught up ever since, although it could take up to a year before we switched to the latest OS. Our own cyber security teams did their own vulnerability assessments before pushing out a new OS across the Air Force, and that could easily take them months of testing and research.

In the last few years before I retired, the Air Force started testing the concept of handing computer support functions over to civilian companies. This was something they had been talking about long before I joined the military, but they were finally pushing forward with it. My last base was one of the test beds in the US, and AT&T took on the contract at that particular site.

Our base-wide IT unit had to hand over administrative access to our unclassified network to them, and as the civilian company took charge of more functions (and had security clearance investigations completed), we started handing over classified networks too. Which seemed wrong to me; we had always kept our classified networks secure by managing them ourselves, so handing it over to a civilian company felt like trouble.

It was even worse when Trump became president the first time and started discussing classified operations on Twitter. Dude had no concept of security protocols and messed up a lot of missions we had overseas, putting our members’ lives at risk so he could brag about secrets he knew.

He ordered us to give security clearances to a bunch of civilians whom we had already refused in the past for being a threat to national security. But you don’t say no to the president, so we started handing over classified access and before long, a bunch of our foreign operations started getting compromised. It was an absolute clusterfuck.

Things mostly went back to normal under Biden and I soon retired. I can’t imagine how messed up my old career field must be now, since Trump got back in office. All I can say is I’m glad it’s not my problem anymore.

They later said the only finished animations were the ones in the trailer. Live action filming was done, but they had barely gotten started on the CG animation when the awful trailer dropped, so it was easy to change course and redesign Sonic for the rest of the film. Also, the film was delayed while they made changes, so it did cause a setback.

Although I would believe that somebody dropped that trailer to prove a point that no one would watch a Sonic movie with that abomination. After the outrage and public backlash, the point was proven and whomever greenlighted the original design backtracked and let the animators fix it.

Being in the Air Force, the job was mostly like any civilian IT job. We worked off a ticket system to resolve computer issues, dealt with “customers” (other military members), managed servers, satellites, networks, etc. The specifics depended on the exact job; it seemed like every base I was assigned to had different equipment or mission requirements, so I was always learning some new system to manage.

Probably the biggest difference from the civilian sector was that military networks were severely locked down. There were approved software lists that were managed from much higher levels in the Air Force and only that software was allowed to be installed on computers. Half the time, even us administrators at the base level couldn’t mess with installed software.

There were software scans that would detect unauthorized software and boot computers off the network until it was resolved. Most places I worked, you couldn’t bring CDs or flash drives with your own programs on them. USB devices would be flagged instantly and get your account kicked off the network until you completed remedial training through your local IT office.

Our web browsing was severely limited too. Some bases only allowed official military website access; others would allow access to the web but only from an approved white list of sites. It depended on the job and the classification of the network.

Also, they believed that the best security was older systems that had been thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities, so we were usually a step or two behind the civilian sector in terms of operating systems and software/hardware. They preferred that new systems were thoroughly tested in the civilian sector first, most vulnerabilities identified and remedied, and then we would trust it. So I rarely got to learn about modern IT technologies unless I researched it myself in my own free time.

EDIT: In terms of harassment, there was sometimes a lack of respect for the IT guys. Lots of higher-ranking officers made unreasonable demands, expecting us to make some impossible network requirement magically work because “that’s your job.” Or just getting mad when things were broken, because “Why do we have IT guys if things are always broken?” Or the same if things work: “Why do we have so many IT guys when nothing ever breaks?” We had our own leadership in the IT field whose job was to explain to other leaders exactly what we did and how it benefits them, so the rest of us could focus on the job.

The branch you join does make a difference in experience. I was in the Air Force, which is one of the most chill branches to serve in.

Despite the name, most Air Force members are not pilots. In fact, only about 5% are pilots, while the rest work in careers that either directly or indirectly support those pilots. We have doctors, lawyers, accountants, police, cooks, engineers, teachers, etc. I was an IT professional in my service, so my job was basically to sit at a desk and fix computers.

The Army and Marines tend to abuse their members, both mentally and physically, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those guys don’t recommend military service to others. I’ve heard horror stories from my Marine buddies, and I’ve personally witnessed some of the harassment/hazing rituals Army members go through.

They have a lot of toxic behaviors that keep getting passed down to the next generation. Surviving it and promoting above it is more a badge of honor than anything, so they subject the new guys to the same abuses to “toughen them up” or something.

The Department of Defense also uses it as an excuse to give them the worst equipment and hand-me-downs in the military, so they tend to operate with old and barely serviceable gear, while the Navy and Air Force tend to get the newest equipment.

But the Air Force was pretty fun. The Navy is pretty good too. They have some of the best technical schools in the armed forces, so they set you up with plenty of opportunities when you leave the service.

The Space Force is basically Air Force 2.0. All our space programs were under the Air Force until the Space Force was officially created, so they just transitioned those members into the new branch and copied Air Force regulations over until they could define their own unique requirements.

That is very true. Leaning more toward the terrible side, in my experience. However, the terrible people usually get out pretty early in their career, while the good people tend to stick around longer and make a full career out of it.

Not always the case; I’ve definitely met some terrible high ranking leaders in the military. But generally speaking, You need some solid core values in order to go far in your military career.

As a teenager, my friends and family always told me I was the nicest guy they knew… and they were genuinely shocked when I joined the US military.

I came home after Basic Training for a couple weeks before moving to my first assignment and everyone was surprised I came back successful. They expected I would’ve been kicked out for being too nice. In fact, I earned Honor Graduate.

I didn’t know much about the military when I joined, except for what I’d seen in old war movies. But they had some amazing benefits that I couldn’t pass up, and my uncle, a retired service member himself, highly encouraged it. I got free medical and dental, free college education, my initial career field training qualified me for most of an associate’s degree in my field, free travel around the globe, free food/housing… and they paid me to do it all. It was the best deal I could get right out of high school.

My whole military experience was a lot different than I expected; I spent a lot of time correcting stereotypes about military service with my friends and family. I actually had a pretty good career and retired after 20 years of service.

That’s definitely a dragon in disguise. Looks like a cat to mortal eyes, but weights a helluva lot more.

I also enjoyed Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.

The whole Hannibal trilogy is one of my favorite series of books. (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal; respectively.)

There’s a fourth book, Hannibal Rising, that serves as a prequel/origin story for Hannibal Lecter. But it was written under duress by the author.

Thomas Harris didn’t want to explain Hannibal’s origin, as it removed the mystery surrounding his character. But Hannibal had become globally famous through the films, and Harris was basically told by the film producer, Dino De Laurentiis, that if he didn’t write an origin story, someone else would. So in order to maintain some control over his own character, he begrudgingly wrote Hannibal Rising.

And it shows. The writing style of that book is very different from the other three. Unlike the trilogy, which has a way of weaving an intricate and mesmerizing story, Hannibal Rising just feels mechanical and methodical, like it’s just checking boxes and getting to the point as quickly and efficiently as it can. It told a basic story, which was immediately pumped out as a low-budget B movie 2 months later.

If you get into the Hannibal books, I highly recommend skipping Hannibal Rising. It’s poorly written and removes the mystique behind Hannibal Lecter.

Yup, because of his comic about it, paleontologists have officially named it the Thagomizer.

I used to hate touchscreen keyboards, but then I learned about swipe-to-text. Now I can swipe words on a digital keyboard faster than I can type them on a physical keyboard. I can’t go back to pressing individual keys now unless it’s on a desktop computer keyboard.

I’m just about to turn 41 and I had several experiences with long-distance relationships before I got married. Heck, I got hitched before online dating became a common thing; I totally missed the boat on that. I feel like online dating would’ve made my life much easier because I’m an introvert who sucked at talking face-to-face with anyone I had a crush on. But I could chat online all night and seduce practically anyone with my charm and wits. I had serious game as long as I was behind a computer screen, haha! And I was pretty handsome in my youth, so I never disappointed when people met me in person.

In 2001, I was 17 and long-distance dating my best friend’s 3rd-cousin. She lived about 3 states away. We got to know each other through AOL Instant Messenger after my friend asked me to chat with her one night. We’d be chatting all night, keeping each other company with only typed words. I only met her twice in person. The second time, she decided that the long distance relationship was too hard to maintain. She was about to graduate and go off to college anyway. I still had another year of high school before I was free.

A few years later, when I was 20, I had joined the US Air Force and was stationed in Japan for my first assignment. I found myself dating a local Filipino girl. She was 27, and the most advanced tech she owned was a flip phone. Planning dates was awful because I didn’t even own a mobile phone, so I had to hang out near my landline phone at home and wait for her to call when she was ready for me to pick her up. She would soak in the tub for 3+ hours each night before our dates, so I spent most of my evenings just sitting at home, waiting for her call. She didn’t own a car, so I had to go pick her up.

In 2005, I got deployed to Africa for 4 months. I basically told my girlfriend that I would be unreachable while I was there, but if the opportunity arose, I’d try to contact her. I wrote her a few letters while I was gone, and even sent a few brief emails to her phone. She had some email service that would forward messages to her flip phone, but only if it was less than 20 characters. She didn’t own a computer. I got to call her only once, but we were limited to a 5-minute call, and someone was always listening to the conversation, to make sure I didn’t discuss classified information.

I came home from Africa and my girlfriend was so excited to see me again, she planned to spend the night at my place. But after a very passionate “reunion” that night, she suddenly got very quiet. She wouldn’t look at me and refused to talk. After coaxing her for a bit, she finally opened up and accused me of cheating on her while I was gone! When I asked where she got that idea, she said the sex was so good, I must have been practicing with other girls! I tried to explain that it was just the pent up emotions from being abstinent for so long, but she wouldn’t hear it. She had thoroughly convinced herself and she dumped me that night.

I went home on vacation to visit family shortly after that and wound up meeting the girl who would eventually become my wife. She was the college roommate of an ex-girlfriend of mine whom I was still close friends with. My soon-to-be wife and I spent a few days of my vacation hanging out, then I went back to Japan and we stayed in touch over AOL Instant Messenger. We chatted almost every day and got to know each other really well.

When I got sent to Oklahoma for my next assignment, less than a year later, I was only a few states away from my eventual wife, and she asked if I would be willing to try a long-distance relationship with her. I had finally received my first-ever mobile phone (a flip-phone) and I made an effort to call her at least once a week. Outside of that, we stayed in touch via email or through AOL Instant Messenger. About once a year, when I had saved up some vacation days, I would drive the 7+ hours out to her home and I would spend a week or two staying with her before returning to my military base.

A year later, she graduated college and wanted to move in with me, but I got deployed to Iraq a week before she was supposed to move in. So I mailed her a house key and told her to make herself comfortable and I would be back in 4 months. While I was deployed, we chatted almost daily through Gchat, Google’s attempt at an instant messenger program embedded in Gmail.

I eventually came home and we lived together for about 9 months before I got a new assignment to South Korea. I was going to be stationed there for 1 year before being reassigned to Germany. I couldn’t bring my girlfriend along, so she went back to her home state for the year. I promised we’d meet up in Germany a year later.

A half year later, I went home on vacation and proposed to my then-girlfriend. She said yes, but also dropped a bombshell: she didn’t know how to keep a steady job if she was just going to be following me around the world, moving every few years at the whim of the military. So she asked if I was okay with her joining the military as well. She had learned a lot about military life and how excellent the benefits and pay were, and she wanted to try it for herself.

So I took her to a military recruiter, got her signed up, then I went back to South Korea for the second half of my year-long assignment.

But I told her, if she joined as a single woman, she would get a random assignment somewhere in the world and I might never see her again. So I suggested that we just get the legal paperwork for marriage out of the way so she’s legally tied to me, then we can plan a big wedding some other time when we’re living closer to home. If we’re legally married, then the military would keep us assigned together.

So we looked into the legal process for her home state and found out I didn’t have to be physically present to get married, and we were allowed to sign the marriage license in advance of the ceremony. So she mailed a marriage license to me, I signed it with a legal notary as witness, then I mailed it back to her and she signed it as well.

Then she asked a friend of hers who was an ordained minister to perform a brief ceremony to legally wed us. My wife invited her military recruiter as a witness and they performed the wedding ceremony from her bedroom. I joined the ceremony over Skype, from my dormitory room in South Korea.

During that time, I only lost connection once. Webcams were not very reliable in those days (around 2009), so it was a miracle I only dropped the call once during the ceremony.

After the ceremony, her recruiter borrowed the wedding license to update her status as married before she officially joined the US military. 5 days later, my wife left for military basic training and it was almost a half a year later that I got to see her again. I couldn’t reach her while she was in training. I got assigned to Germany and my wife followed me there about 3 months later.

And that was pretty much the end of my struggles with old-fashioned long-distance dating. In 2009, I got my first-ever smartphone while in Germany (an iPhone 3S) and staying in touch with people became a lot easier from that point on.

Oh yeah, and I had the worst time staying in touch with my family while I was in the military. My mother would always mail me calling cards (back when long-distance phone calls were expensive as hell). She expected ME to reach out to HER, though. I gave her my email address, but she almost never emailed me. She thought it was MY responsibility as her son to call her.

Suffice to say, I didn’t have much contact with my family in the 20 years I spent in the military. Long-distance phone calls were expensive and difficult to figure out when I was stationed outside the US, and I was always a bad conversationalist on the phone. If I couldn’t see who I was talking to, my brain would wander and I’d lose track of the conversation. I learned at 37 years old that I have a bad case of ADHD, which explained my struggles with staying in touch with people who weren’t physically nearby.

My wife and I moved in with my dad when I retired from the military a few years ago, but my mother had divorced him and moved across the country by then, so I still struggle to stay in touch with her. I’m trying to text her more often, but she’s extremely old-fashioned and expects me to call her instead of messaging. She’s 100% a boomer (born in the '40s) and is completely tech-illiterate. It’s very frustrating. She doesn’t really believe in ADHD and thinks it’s just an excuse to be lazy, so she regularly plays the victim when I don’t contact her enough. Which just makes me dread calling her.

So I guess I’m still struggling to communicate in an old-fashioned way with my mother, even to this day. But I’m pretty good at staying in touch with other friends and family via more modern communications.

I’m atheist (and used to be extremely Christian once upon a time) and I’ve always celebrated Christmas. I’ve never seen it as a religious holiday, even though Christians try to claim it as their own. It was originally Saturnalia, and has more lore behind it that doesn’t line up with Christian beliefs. Like, who is Santa Claus in Christianity? They literally just took an already established holiday and claimed it for their religion to pull in more followers to their faith. Nah, I’m gonna keep celebrating Christmas without the Christ part. It’s a fun holiday that doesn’t need religion poisoning it.

Is anybody else just Not planning on gift-giving this year?

I’ve always been awkward about mandatory gift-giving situations, like birthdays and Christmas. I prefer to give gifts in the moment, from the heart, that people really need. Not gifts because the situation demands it from me.

As such, I tend to avoid gift-giving for specific holidays and events and tell everyone to avoid giving me gifts in return. I usually buy everything I want for myself anyway, and I hate receiving gifts I never asked for. What am I going to do with a trinket, or daily calendar, or a light-up desk toy? Maybe it’s the ADHD in me, but I like to plan and organize my home and other spaces, and receiving gifts I didn’t ask for messes up my structure. I don’t want to be a jerk, but if you give me a non-functional gift, it’s likely going in the trash the first opportunity I get.

My wife and I are already talking about getting a divorce (due to other long-standing issues) and things have been tense in the household for some time now.

Sounds like you have more on your plate than worrying about gift-giving this year. My recommendation is to give your kids and niblings (nieces and nephews) some simple gifts at a minimum. Don’t ruin their Christmas because the rest of your family are treating you like crap. They aren’t to blame, and they shouldn’t be roped into the drama. If anything, avoiding giving them gifts is just more ammo your family can use to turn them against you.

Keep the peace with the innocent bystanders, but I would totally forego gifts for the rest of your family. Save that money and buy yourself something nice instead. (Or save for a divorce lawyer if you need one)

• Epic wants to be Steam’s direct rival, so their storefront has many of the same features, but it’s not as popular within the community. I honestly have no opinion about them.

I have an opinion on them. They’re a terrible company with anti-gamer friendly policies.

I have no problem with competition. It keeps businesses legit and cheap/reasonable for consumers. Heck, GOG does a great job as a companion storefront with Steam.

Epic Games could have tried to be competitive too and provide a similar or better platform for games. But instead, they wanted to corner the market and steal gamers from Steam, so they started pushing exclusivity contracts with publishers. New games would come to only their storefront for the first year, then release to other PC storefronts after that.

Then they started publishing games themselves, which kept them isolated to their storefront indefinitely. Even game series that were released to other consoles and PC platforms suddenly had a sequel that was stuck on Epic Games. I’m looking at you, Alan Wake II.

Or worse, buying up IPs and removing them from other storefronts, like Fall Guys and Rocket League.

They also tried to pull people in by releasing a new game for free every week (even AAA titles!), which was actually the coolest thing they ever did. But it doesn’t excuse all their other anti-gaming practices. If anything, it made me feel dirty using their platform.

I have never given Epic Games a penny of my money and until they decide to be competitive with Steam instead of just stealing the market from them, I will continue to boycott them.

I’m not alone in this mindset. Ubisoft was releasing games exclusively on Epic Games for a while and they’ve just decided that their newest Assassin’s Creed game will release on Steam, due to poor sales on Epic. Also, Alan Wake II had dismal sales because it’s locked behind Epic’s storefront. So a lot of other gamers aren’t willing to put up with Epic Games’ BS and their model is crumbling.

Epic is what happens when a corporation pops up expecting to make money off gamers. Steam is what happens when someone who is a gamer themselves and appreciates the gaming experience creates a store for gamers. I have given thousands of dollars to Steam over the years and have a massive library of their games. I only have a few free games on Epic and I won’t even install their launcher anymore. As a consumer, I vote with my wallet, and Epic needs to get with the program or go away.

I would highly recommend not starting with phone games. 90% of them are designed to be addicting, borderline gambling games, which you can collect or accomplish more things if you just pay them an easy $2 or more… which quickly turns into $20, which then becomes $50+. Before you know it, you’re throwing hundreds of dollars at what is essentially a repetitive unending game, just for the dopamine hit.

I know; my wife is addicted to these games and I see $20 charges to our bank account every few days. Nothing ever changes in her games. She never progresses anywhere and there’s no end to the game, but it gives her a boost on scores or collectibles or rare limited items, so she drops the money. It’s been especially hard to break her of the habit.

I got her to sign up for Steam on her desktop PC and I gifted her a few co-op games, and so we play games online together to give her something fun to do that doesn’t require spending money to progress. She used to be awful at FPS games, but playing with me gave her more confidence and practice, and now she’s pretty decent.

She really loves Deep Rock Galactic, because a lot of the game is just mining and resource-collecting, with only a little alien bug shooting. She plays as the engineer, so she can set up a turret and not have to worry too much about aiming herself. Plus, playing solo means she gets Bosco, the flying droid, to help her with combat and resource-collecting too. If I’m not around to play with her, she has all the assistance she needs to relax and enjoy the game. It was a very good intro to video games for her.

If I had to ask my boss for permission to use the restroom all the time, I’d probably respond the same way.