The first thing I thought of reading this was how you could write the exact same about the rural midwest US. I was the only kid in my class who had ever seen a black person face to face, and that was because I lived in Florida first. My grandma still calls to warn us to stay inside if a non-white person is spotted near town (usually a utilities guy fixing power lines). They just have no experience with the wider world and know only the stereotypes they echo back and forth to each other.

The peace corp warning does a good job framing it as it is, but it’s important to remember that “innocent” ignorance can still carry real violence and hatred.

This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.

The Blood Machines OST is my favorite album of any genre, and I’ve never even seen the movie.

It was fun to see Michael Emerson in Fallout with a dog that looks just like Bear. He’ll always be some variation of Finch to me.

I agree on board games.

See if there are Board Game shops in your city. If they have tables for Magic the Gathering you can check their calendar and usually find open board gaming nights. In my experience people usually bring a bunch of their own games and are open to new players. Some of the people in our group don’t own any games; the rest of us are always bringing more than we can possibly play anyway.

Goatse. It took me like 20 tries to finally see it, but now it’s unmistakable.

In college I lost one of my jobs and knew I needed another one fast or I wouldn’t be able to make rent. I spammed my resume on Indeed and Monster.

I got an email offering an IT-adjacent job in town. It was Saturday and they said I could stop by in a few weeks to fill out the paperwork or we could do it over the phone and start Monday. I called so I could get my first paycheck before the end of the month. We eventually got to her asking for my Social Security number and I froze.

I realized this could be a scam, but I was really desperate. I tried to think of a way to test them, so I said that I just realized I would be unavailable during certain hours, would that still be okay? She said she had to put me on hold to talk to the manager. After a while she came back and said it should work, but I would have to discuss the specifics with my supervisor once I started.

That sounded real to me. If it was a scam surely she would have just immediately said my schedule was fine, right? I gave her my SSN. She said I was ready to go and to have fun on Monday. I got there and it was just a parking lot. Couldn’t get a response via phone or email.

A couple months later I found out someone across the country had used my SSN and I had to freeze my credit.

To work and create ‘for nothing’, to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

All the people trying to sleep in those houses:

A lot of people don’t understand how much time long hair actually adds. When mine was reaching my hips it would add 10 minutes to my shower. I wasn’t even doing conditioner or anything; it just takes forever to get all of your hair lathered up and then rinsed out. Now that my hair is short again I’m in and out in less than five minutes, but I wouldn’t have minded music back then.

A Teams meeting!? I wish I was as brave as you. I’m not even brave enough to poop while listening to a Teams call, much less showering. I’m terrified they’ll call me out and I’ll either have to unmute at the worst possible moment or stay muted and have my boss assume I’m not paying attention.

If I showered during a meeting I would be paranoid about somehow magically turning on my camera.

It’s usually not scary, it just jolts me up and out of bed, which interrupts my already limited sleep. It’s definitely not great. I’m hoping it’ll calm down as my son gets older, but I won’t hold my breath.

This happens to me almost every night. Usually while coming out of sleep, but sometimes while I’m still trying to fall asleep. It used to only happen when I was stressed about work, but once I had a kid it became very frequent.

I hear/see the door open, hear my son’s door open, see giant spiders on the wall, hear someone rummaging through the fridge, hear my son screaming, etc. If I get up to check it’s always nothing.

The first couple seasons of Sliders are really comfy. It starts fast, episodes are self contained, and the world is usually in a slightly better state at the end of each episode. Often it's thought provoking too, but not in a Black Mirror doom and gloom way.

SG1 is great and can have the same feeling, but it takes a couple seasons to get there. Definitely worth watching in my opinion, but if you want an immediate hit of comfort it may not work unless it's a rewatch.