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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: November 21st, 2025

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  • Whats really sad is… genuinely every town I’ve -ever been to- had a train station. Most of them have been converted into other things, the rest torn down. But they were there.

    We had the whole system of rail already spanning most of the country. And stopped maintaining it. 😭😭

    I rode a train for the first time last year because it cut the worst part of the drive into/out of a big city off, and wasn’t -too- expensive. So instead of dealing with a car in a place I’m not comfortable driving, we parked where I was comfortable and took the train the rest of the way (appx 2 hrs, if there had been a closer station to board we’d have used it, but had to drive 1.5 hrs just to get to the train), then walked. Could have also used the local light rail once we got there but didn’t need to. I fucking loved everything about riding a train! From not driving, to not driving, to holy shit it’s a train, and even not driving! Best trip, and I wish it were practical to make all of them that way. I hate driving.


  • Gross enough, but I usually just use my pinky finger to dislodge it and then blow it out in a tissue. I’ve tried using things like cotton swabs, but they just cause bleeding, and neti pots just rehydrate it and make me congested. But because they moved my septum over, my pinky goes all the way up until it hits a bone ridge, roughly the entire length of said pinky in there, which is where the stuff forms up, lots of wrinkles and stuff up there to catch on.




  • I think you might have missed my last line there. :)

    I’m not terribly familiar with those specific works, but there certainly are some that are actually worth the time investment. I just personally find most of it that I’ve tried not to be, for me and maybe OP up there, because they lack depth (being intended for younger audiences). I read through young adult stuff in elementary school and moved on to whopper 1,000+ page books around 5th grade (read sphere and the third pandemic that year), so admittedly I don’t have a lot of experience with more modern YA stuff, tho what I have explored has sometimes been far superior to what was available when I was young. And the shows made for younger people are also sometimes real gems, like adventure time.



  • Most of the fiction I’ve been exposed to (which is a lot, I enjoy it very much and always have) isn’t like that. They don’t just describe someone as strong or evil, they describe actions and events and emotions from a specific perspective and let you come to your own conclusions.

    I guess if you like stuff made for kids, teens, and young adults, you’ll run into that problem a lot more, but it’s not actually an overall problem with fiction as far as I’ve noticed. I’ve never really liked young adult fiction though, because it’s lacking in depth, much like you describe (some exceptions do apply of course).



  • Stupid questions don’t bother me as much when I can be assured they who are asking them at least made an attempt to figure it out on their own first.

    You know, I kinda low-key hate this. I get why it’s your thing because I’ve also worked various retail and service/hospitality jobs, but still. I usually go out of my way to avoid having to talk to employees, but sometimes I don’t have the time, or my pain flares up and I lack mental energy to do that. In especially the latter case, which is getting more frequent, I just ask someone rather than spending 45 minutes looking with pain-glazed eyes that pass right over what I’m looking for. Same thing if I go to huge places I don’t normally go to. It’s absolutely, no question, a gigantic waste of my time to even try to figure it out rather than just ask someone who works there to look up where it is and point for me, 3 minutes tops. They don’t know where it is either, what hope do I have to guess right?

    This is one of those “you don’t really know what someone is dealing with/has experience with” things. And it sucks on both ends, but at least from my experience in those roles, it helps to remember that retailers of all types have a nasty habit of changing store layouts periodically with the specific goal of making regular/frequent customers wander around looking for things they used to be able to find, just so they can briefly make more money on impulse purchases. They’ve even done studies to see how often people are willing to tolerate these layout changes so they can maximize it further. Maybe retailers shouldn’t keep forcing customers to use their whole brain (remapping, which will take multiple trips at full brain power. The effort also fatigues a person, which reduces willpower to resist impulse buys) for what should be a minimal-brain activity (routine habits exist to decrease mental load), and you wouldn’t have people who don’t want to further engage their brain just to find the pie crusts that used to be right here, damnit. The frequency with which they do this encourages people to just ask rather than look because it happens so much they’ve learned it’s probably not worth the effort. A form of learned-helplessness.

    I can feel the overwhelm set in whenever I walk into a store to discover a changed layout, sometimes months after it happened. Half the time I just leave because I’m not prepared for that much effort, and I have the luxury to do so because I’m the only one impacted. If I had kids to feed or something the entire equation shifts dramatically, and I’d be in there, zombied, asking annoying questions.