I don’t think it’s the case of OP possibly being trans but I don’t want to dismiss your tale nor discourage the OP from considering this possibility. It’s possible that it could be gender dysphoria.

I’m glad you found peace with your transition.

A lot of this is normal, and yes there are some aspects of your behaviour that I’d find a bit concerning but it’s been mentioned a lot in this thread. And I think that we’ve done so much to vilify men and male sexual desire as a society that it’s giving the manosphere a voice they would otherwise have not existed decades ago.

Society is genuinely at the point where we’ll creep shame any guy who even so much as glances at a well-endowed lady’s boobs or arse in a tank top or yoga pants.

We need to take a long and hard look at our society and ask how we’ve managed to make people like Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder and Charlie Kirk household names.

The amount of people calling similar takes to mine incel ideology is shocking, and I think this immediate attack is why we have a male loneliness epidemic and why I worry for what the future brings.

I’d pay to see an American history pantomime.

I’m debating on whether to go down this career route.

Accountancy is a dud these days and I think I’d get more value from doing CompTIA or Cisco certificates and trying to branch out into IT.

Where I’m skeptical is that it’s being pushed a lot by all these learning providers advertising cybersecurity career paths and boasting potentially misleading statistics. I’ve heard from differing sources that IT is both easy and incredibly hard to get into.

But to answer the OG question, I’ve heard that Cisco CCNA is like the king of IT certifications, but is hard to pass and is expensive to both take and study.

Yeah. Reddit went to hell when the corpos got involved.

Wait, George Takei is on the Fediverse?

It’s a Mastodon instance, isn’t it?

Karaoke enthusiasts are raging alcoholics. Partially true. I also know a lot of borderline or fully teetotal people who take part.

British beer too.

Watney’s and a small number of other breweries had a stranglehold on the UK pub industry because they owned a lot of pubs and could exclusively force their own brands upon their locations. Their Red Barrel bitter pissed people off so much that it led to the creation of CAMRA, an organisation that campaigns for real ale.

CAMRA formed from four ale enthusiasts on holiday in Dublin who were lamenting about the dogshit state of British beer. It was a very successful movement…

I think thorium is the way to go when it comes to nuclear fission. It’s debatably a far safer and more abundant material to work with.

Belgium and Switzerland are the only two countries where the process of medically assisted suicide is alarmingly simple.

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My best friend got cheated on and dumped after he got diagnosed with epilepsy. It took a year of fits (one in which he screwed up his back) to get the diagnosis, and it basically meant he had to abandon his career path of working in the police force as a detective and forensic analyst and switch to something different.

It also doesn’t help that they both got sacked from a call centre whilst this was going on.

The industrial revolution created loads of new jobs in manufacturing, logistics, distribution, procurement and transport.

The digital revolution created loads of IT, cybersecurity and programming jobs.

AI removes most if not all the human labour from the equation if it functions properly. What new jobs has the AI revolution created or will create? Because last I checked, “prompt engineer” is not a job title. I can’t even find any fucking jobs for it anywhere from a LinkedIn search.

(sigh)

I’d prefer tech-bros pushing crypto, Web3 and NFTs to something that can actually cause mass unemployment and societal collapse.

And AI may wipe out a huge number of the rest. I genuinely can’t possibly fathom how it will do anything but exacerbate every single one of society’s problems.

I can see things going one of two ways:

1. Society gets its shit together, uses AI, robotics and sweeping economic reforms to build new infrastructure and create an abundance of resources. Housing shortages, hunger, thirst and famine become a thing of the past, we move towards a post-scarcity utopia.

2. The far more likely scenario. Mass unemployment leads to civil unrest, quelled through violence.

I think it’s only a matter of time.

Waymo already exists in some parts of the US and is being trialled in Atlanta and London. Miso Robotics already can automate manual work in kitchens and have their bots rolled out in fast food chains like White Castle. Claude is miles ahead of competitors in terms of output quality, and there are probably a lot of AI slop content creators making absolute bank from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

Optimus 3 will be released soon and at a predicted price of $30,000 per robot, it could potentially lead to mass layoffs in warehouses. Because remember, robots don’t get tired, don’t need food, don’t need water, don’t need to piss, don’t need to shit, won’t complain about OSHA violations, and don’t need a paycheck. All that matters is work quality and price

According to some accounts, China are apparently even further ahead than the US in terms of AI and robotics, but they’re deliberately holding back their rollout of humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles because they know a wide rollout will lead to mass unemployment and civil unrest.

A big part of the reason AI spend is so expensive is because there’s this huge arms race to throw gargantuan amounts of computing power in the hopes of achieving AGI that way. While I think AGI may be bullshit and unachievable, I think they’ll eventually turn a profit once they stop focusing on throwing trillions at data centres.

At this point I’d prefer the Chinese routers.

Waterstones was on the brink of collapse, until a Russian billionaire bought the chain and put James Daunt in charge.

Daunt reversed years of enshittification. Publishers couldn’t buy shelf space for their books anymore, local managers were given autonomy on what books they wanted to stock and each branch was run like its own individual book shop.

And to the surprise of the business world, his plan worked.

FDR American Badass.

It’s a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.

The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.

You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)

We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.

I dunno, live-action Fullmetal Alchemist was pretty ass.

The only good thing about Dragonball Evolution was that it was so bad that it brought Akira Toriyama out of retirement.

I dunno if I even wanted to go into that subject.

I’m somewhere between women (at least in England) having incredibly stuck-up attitudes and dating apps being enshittified to the point where they’re more like scams.

I legit get no matches apart from Coffee Meets Bagel and OkCupid.

99% of the profiles curated to me for matching on CMB are East or South East Asian women, and this isn’t me not wanting to date Asian women. IDGAF about ethnicity when it comes to partners. I mean I’d rather not be used as the means to a spousal visa by someone who isn’t even in the same continent. I met a previous ex on there, and she just wanted to use me for help learning English.

OkCupid is even worse. I get a lot of matches but it’s all GPS spoofing SE-Asian and African women. Some are legit, many try to lull me into a crypto scam or ask me to Venmo them money for a passport application.

Part of the reason I got into my current hobby (singing, karaoke) was to meet people outside of apps. Apart from someone making out with me once, it’s only otherwise led to gay men hitting on me.