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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Good luck man!

    As someone that left the US a decade and a half ago, here’s some things to go ahead and start getting answers to so you don’t have to figure it out when the time comes:

    • Figure out how to get a bank account (hopefully you’ve already worked this one out before arriving)
    • Where to buy toiletries and medicine. Specifically deodorant. The UK is mostly spray deodorant where as I’m a stick deodorant person. At one point I was just bringing 4 sticks of deodorant back with me after every trip home. I’m not sure which way NZ leans but it was definitely something I hadn’t considered before
    • Where to buy socks and underwear you’re comfortable with
    • Figure out how the health service/insurance works. Go ahead and book dentist and doctors appointments 6 months in advance if possible so you get in the habit.
    • Figure out how paying taxes works
    • If you’re a US citizen, remember you’re still required to file taxes with the IRS every year.
    • Learn how to make friends. I still haven’t figured this one out. Let me know if you do.



  • I actually stopped using mine a long time ago, and every time I get a new laptop, I remove it. Not because I hate it, but because I like it. Even after modifying the acceleration settings to where I like them though, the repeated stress of pushing on the nub eventually start to develop dendonitis in my finger.

    After I’ve trained myself to only use the trackpad I put the nub back on. Partly because it’s so iconic it just looks wrong without it, and partly because I want to avoid conversations with guest about my growing clit graveyard (although I guess I could just not leave them in a cup on the coffee table where everyone can see)






  • I hate Lord of the Rings. Well, I don’t hate it. I just don’t understand why people love it so much (not “why everyone loves it”, but “when one person loves it they love it more than anything else”). I don’t consider the story all that enjoyable, especially for the movies. I definitely don’t consider it rewatchable.

    Like, I’m the target demographic. I was 16 when the first one came out. I played DnD and Magic the Gathering. Warcraft 2 was one of my favorite games. Mages and Orcs are something I’ve always had in my life since as long as I can remember. My parents read the Hobbit to me and I had read fellowship and two towers at some point around 11 or 12. But the movies? They just don’t connect with me. And I’ve never had anyone be able to put into words what it is that makes it click for them.





  • I’ll be honest man: it sucked.

    Imagine a time where you had a question, and you just… didn’t get to know the answer. Like, literally every time you just had to hope someone in your general area had some level of confidence in their answer to satisfy your curiosity until you could confirm it later. Or you’d just go around repeating it to people with out confirming. Whatever.

    If something was important enough, you’d go track down an answer. Remember to look it up when you got home using your parent’s encyclopedias. Or make a trip to the library.

    In a way, we kind of lost something: conversation and discussion. Before I feel like people really picked apart an issue where you’d all come up with a consensus over a few hours of discussion about a topic at a party or something. Then someone would come back with the answer another day, and bring in some more stuff they learned while looking it up, and it would start a whole new conversation.