Growing up, I lived a lower middle class life. Now, I can only eat once or twice a day and still pay my bills. My parents are in the process of a divorce and selling the house and when that’s done I’ll be homeless.

My life has never been like the image of poverty, but money has been very tight my whole life. We live in a rundown and neglected suburb, but it’s certainly not a ghetto or slum. I did get some toys growing up and played in sport leagues and very rarely went on trips to places. After I turned 10, money got way tighter for my family and most of my comfort and luxury has come from working and buying my own stuff. Luckily my parents are too prideful to shake me down for money which is normal for other poor parents to do to their kids around here.

I don’t think there’s too much a middle class person has experienced that I haven’t, but I’ve spent my adult life so far by spending as little on my day to day as possible so I can afford to go out and enjoy life. Last week, I went to a fancy indoor gokart place and ate at a restaurant after with some friends and another day I went to street festival. This week, I’ve eaten 7 times total and haven’t gone anywhere. Eventually I’ll leave this overpriced shit hole, but I’m trying to hunker down and not shake anything up while The Orange Emperor reigns.

Kingdom Hearts 2. I think my parents randomly got it with the ps2 slim they got me for christmas or a birthday when I was a kid. I knew nothing about final fantasy or anime, but I absolutely loved disney movies. I don’t really know too well why it got me hooked so much. I had a head injury when I was 15, and have heavy amnesia of my life before it. The fact I remember so much about that time is really a testament to the impact it had on me.

I remember the aesthetic was completely new to me and I thought it was really cool. In hindsight final fantasy characters hanging out in disney movies is pretty weird, but they just looked like really cool guys fighting evil in the background of the movies.

Roxas’ story was also super compelling for kid me, the entire prologue felt dreamlike, emotional, and thought provoking. It was like I was playing a novel. For context, the games I had played up until that point were essentially just pokémon, spyro, smash bros, and mario kart. So the idea that a game could be emotional and have an interesting story was completely new to me.

Now I can see the flaws and oddities in the series, but I still love it and it’s had a ridiculous impact on my life. I sometimes worry a little that if the people in my life played the series they might see the inspiration for so many habits I have now and pretty much my entire sense of style is heavily influenced by the idea of Tetsuya Nomura design blended with disney vibes.

I pretty much always win with votes. If I get upvotes, I think someone appreciated it. If someone downvotes, I think they’re a hater.

I won’t lie though; my adhd ass checks way too often in a desperate search for dopamine.

What’s wild is that my dad is a democrat, “union man”, who is himself otherwise liberal. He agrees that there’s a class war, but that the rich are organized specifically by a few secret unimaginably rich jewish families for unclear purposes.

I was eating dinner with my dad a year ago when he told me about how he believes jews secretly run the world and that there’s something fishy about the Rothschilds. I burst out laughing thinking my dad had suddenly developed a very modern online sense of humor, but unfortunately no.

I’ve never known my dad to be antisemitic, and he even explained that regular jews are a different group from the ones in control.

I straight up told him it’s ridiculous and that he needs to get off the internet, but he never agreed with me. I still don’t know how to handle the situation really.

Oh and my mom went borderline sovereign citizen a few years ago, but I don’t remember what insane thing she said first.

I was reading about these a while ago. I saw pictures someone had made by taking shots through filters for red, green, and blue and then editing them together for a color image. It looked neat, but I had thought about taking that same idea, but just doing duotone photos with different filters and palettes.

You’d have to figure out a tripod for the gameboy to get consistent shots and get the filters, but it seems pretty doable.

I’ve taught a few of my friends photography and if I were to teach a 12 y/o I think I’d do the same albeit slower, softer and simpler. I have an old Nikon D3400 I lend out with all the setting set to the optimal P-mode point and shoot settings and a basic 80mm wide lens and a 70-300mm zoom.

I start by explaining the buttons and dials and encouraging experimentation and asking questions. They won’t remember what they all do, but I think explaining it makes it clear that I enjoy it and makes them more comfortable to ask.

When we go on a walk, I make sure to frequently ask about their photos and if they like how they came out on the screen. If so, that’s cool and I ask them why did they do what they did. If not, I ask them what they don’t like about it and if something unexpected happened. After they tell me what they wanted/expected I explain the settings, lighting, composition etc necessary to get it and tell them to try again with these tips.

I also try to shoot the same thing they are in my style with my camera and show it to them and ask for their opinion. Sometimes I get something right that they wanted and they’ll ask about it.

My friends practically all have ADHD or difficulty learning and in my experience they all respond best to solving the problem on their own. I’ve never taught it to a child, but I think my method would work well with some added patience.

Where I’m from, the tourists are usually nicer and more respectful than the locals.

Something I rarely see brought up is specifically the edgelord to right wing pipeline. When I was a kid, it was essentially standard for any boy online to try to be super edgy. Adolescents and teens just have a natural urge for rebellion.

The problem comes when kids think edgy and shock value humor is their favorite thing, but more mature online users reject that behavior and exclude these kids. These kids feel misunderstood and are drawn to figures and role models that accept what they like.

I’ve met a bunch of younger, “conservative”, incel types recently and they’ve all been edgelords who found their own little community instead of growing up. They largely have no ideology in the beginning but slowly absorb manosphere bullshit and over time they become less “ironic”.

The thing that got me to stop being edgy was joining the swim team and having my friend group go from edgelords to gay swimmers. I developed a ton of respect for them and they were my teammates; it completely changed my mind without me having to “conform” to the things I wanted to rebel against. I don’t really know how to get that across to some many kids that get sucked up into this madness though.

I felt that way for a while, then I found out those people didn’t care about me as much as I thought. I’ve been holding on to my anger at that to keep me going for a year now. I dunno what’ll happen once that burns out.

Ah, yeah I got my sense of smell knocked outta me when I was a kid. I’ve read about some kind of treatment to help people train their sense of smell. It came up a lot in some anosmic groups I was during the pandemic. I never looked too much into it because there’s no point, but it might be worth a trip to an ENT in your case.

I’m anosmic too and I had the same experience in college. I never had to deal with “fresh” milk ever being not so fresh though. Although after reading your post, I think I’ll get a pitcher for milk so i can pour out the bottle when I get it to double check for chunks. You could try that too, but I can’t say how well it works.

I don’t think I can taste if milk is sour, but I’ve developed a tolerance to food that’s gone a bit bad anyway.

The tag I played melee under was “frenchfrymaster” which was stupid. So I changed over to my in-game nickname “FRYD” which was supposed to be “fried”, but a few years later I found out it’s the norwegian and danish word for joy and I started using a bastardization of their pronunciation.

Good luck!

I probably shouldn’t tell you what your goals should be, that’s my bad. That said, you’ll eventually become less fearful on your path to fearlessness and it’ll be up to you to decide when it’s good enough.

If you’re afraid of therapy, I understand that. I don’t know you, but I was personally afraid of my inner thoughts causing people to reject me and I was also afraid that I may come to discover I’m worse than I thought. I’ll tell you how I came to see those things over time and maybe you feel something similar even if you can’t describe it and it may help. I unfortunately can’t do much more.

For the first fear (rejection) there’s two main things I clung on to: 1) There’s always someone worse than you out there and likely any therapist has already dealt with someone much worse than you or I. 2) Therapists are trained to deal with all kinds of people and manage whatever stress that may cause them. It’s why they cost so much money and that training is the difference between a therapist and a good listener. It’s also worth mentioning that they’re legally required to maintain confidentiality and unless you’re a danger to others, they’ll never spread anything you say.

For the second fear of realizing I was worse than I thought, that wasn’t really assuaged until I started. One thing most people come to realize as they become better at self reflection and self evaluation is that your imagination is almost always worse than the reality.

Whatever your particular fears are, it’ll take a measure of will power to overcome them no matter what. You should be proud then when you do go since you overcame your fear for your own betterment.

Generally when you start out, they have to get a feel for how you think and it’s mostly just you complaining about what stresses you out. After a few sessions, a decent therapist will have figured out some patterns in how you think and will be better able to direct the conversation so you end up talking about more of the situation than you typically think of on your own. From this it’s up to you to figure out how you want to solve the problem and/or what you want your goals to be.

I get the never ending struggle for more money. That’s a tough one let me know if you figure it out lol.

Fearlessness is probably a pretty unhealthy goal imo. Fear is a normal, healthy response that keeps you from making bad decisions. I think what you would really benefit from is: increased self-confidence, stress management skills, and good planning. You could definitely tell a therapist that you’re looking to become fearless or at least less fearful and they would be able to better look for what you might be hung up on.

I personally suffer from pretty bad anxiety and I know it holds me back, but I’ve become more confident in my own judgement and I’ve become better able to seek support from the people in my life thanks to therapy. Things haven’t turned around for me yet, but I feel better about the future and that’s a massive improvement on its own.

Therapy isn’t brain medicine. It’s different for lots of people, however to me it was an opportunity to practice skills I otherwise wouldn’t in a safe environment. The main skills I was able to practice were self reflection and emotional expression.

If I hadn’t gone to therapy, I would still be practically unable to open up to the people closest to me and I would still have my self image corrupted by delusions of self hatred from depression.

It’s sounds like fru-fru bullshit, but it does slowly make a difference. Eventually I realized that all my relationships became more healthy and my self confidence was significantly improved.

Lots of people -especially men in my experience- have no experience opening up and have a lot of deep fears about it and they end up self-isolating way more than is healthy. Therapy is the only real way where you can express yourself and get a sanity check without any kind of blowback.

I’ve actually never tried brave search. Which is kinda funny because I started using DDG when brave came out and it was the default search engine.

What do you mean by slow though? Like just the webpage loading or the time it takes you to get good results? I’ve never noticed any load time, but I’ve always had a few tweaked content blockers running and that may affect my perspective.

I’ve been using DDG exclusively for something like 8 years. It works great for regular text search and I use bing for image searches. I really don’t understand the reluctance of people to switch to it. To me, Google has been borderline unusable garbage for a long time.