cobysev

When I was 13, I decided I wanted to learn piano because I heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and became obsessed with it. I already knew how to read sheet music from performing in choirs since the 3rd grade, so I just had to figure out where middle-C was on the piano and pluck out the rest of the keys from there. It only took me 2 weeks to completely decipher and memorize the Moonlight Sonata, without any instruction or lessons.

I was a natural at the piano, and I taught myself more complicated pieces over the next handful of years. My wife is super jealous of my skill because she had to take 4 years of piano lessons for her music college degree, and I, without any formal lessons, can play better than her.

Fast-forward a few decades. I haven’t been around pianos for so long, I’ve forgotten most everything I learned. I just bought a fancy electric piano at an estate sale (normally costs $5,000; family was willing to sell it for $240!) and I’m excited to play again, but I’ve been afraid to just sit down and figure out where my skill level is at now. Gonna be a lot of hard work just to get back into it. And I’m old now, so I’m hardly the impressive “teen piano genius” I used to be. Now I’m just an old guy who might remember how to pick at a few simple songs on the piano.

Getting old sucks. Especially if you don’t keep up your skills. You’re special if you have great skills as a kid. But if you’re old, people just assume you’ve had a lifetime of practice. And that’s if you kept up with it over the years.

Dude! I had this exact alarm clock when I was a kid!

I’m 40 now and use my phone as an alarm clock. I haven’t had a dedicated alarm clock in like 15 years now.

Spoilers for the series ahead:

I remember binging the whole series when I was a teenager, and the second movie (Nihao My Concubine) was the first and only time where Akane actually told Ranma she loved him. But only because they were in a nasty predicament and expected to die moments later. She reneged on that confession as soon as they were safe.

I remember being so mad that I had watched the entire series and that retracted confession was the closest they ever got to actually being honest about their feelings toward each other. They didn’t actually get married, or even go on dates together. They obviously cared for each other, but they could never openly say it, choosing to fight with each other instead. It was a very toxic relationship, and it’s hard for me to re-watch the series now, even though I absolutely loved it in my youth.

EDIT: Re-watch, not re-read watch. Stupid autocorrect.

American here, who has spent about a decade living in various countries around the world.

The biggest problem with my fellow Americans is that we’re raised in an isolated country, which only borders two other countries (Canada and Mexico). And our country is so massive, probably 90% of Americans don’t live anywhere near either country border.

Crossing borders is a big deal too; it’s not like Europe where you can be driving and suddenly see a sign welcoming you to a new country. There are checkpoints, blockades, passports, regular inspections, etc. Especially since 9/11 happened, our borders have become even more locked down. Plus, going anywhere else requires expensive plane tickets to fly over the oceans.

This leads to most Americans having no social interactions with foreigners most of the time. We’re fully ingrained in our own culture bubble and we don’t get a lot of interaction with other cultures, outside of stereotypes through pop culture.

Combine this with the fact that we’re taught from childhood that we’re the “greatest nation on Earth,” and you get an entire culture of entitled, narcissistic jerks who think the American way is the best way.

Our education has been failing for decades now, thanks to politicians on both sides of the aisle realizing that we’re more easily manipulated if we’re less educated. So there’s this race to the bottom, where we’re being fed lies and embellishments about how great America is and how we’re this amazing country that the rest of the world looks up to and admires.

With this entitled world view, it makes Americans scared when foreigners come to our country because we only know of their culture through stereotypes and we fear their culture taking over our “amazing and most perfect country.” Just as we’ve stepped into other countries and spread our own democracy, we’re afraid other nations will attempt to do the same to us.

It doesn’t help that we have an entire political party who maintains their voter base through fear mongering about foreigners taking our jobs, stealing our women, and destroying our “great culture” for their “backwards and corrupt” values. It’s complete lunacy, but to the average American who has no regular contact with the outside world, it seems plausible.

So yeah, a lot of Americans get uncomfortable when foreigners speak their native language around us instead of English. They tend to find it rude at best, and offensive/dangerous at worst. And some of the worst Americans travel abroad and expect everyone to essentially worship the ground they walk on, so they get offended when other people don’t know or speak English. It’s a really messed up world view, but it’s hard to change when we live such isolated lives.

I hope they don’t drag out the “will-they, won’t-they” romance suspense for the entire series again. Rumiko Takahashi is infamous for refusing to resolve love plots in her manga series, claiming that the tension keeps people coming back for more. My wife won’t watch any anime series created by her, just because she knows the romance drama will never be resolved by the end.

My name’s Coby. Close enough. People call me Colby all the time.

I used to use Gboard. I still do, but I used to as well.

It used to be my default. Every time I got a new android device, I would immediately install Gboard before doing anything else.

But lately, it’s been garbage. It’s been getting words wrong that I never had problems with previously. It randomly capitalizes normal words in the middle of sentences and I can’t seem to train it not to do that. Like “Ever” is the standard capitalization now. I need to manually fix it every time I use that word.

It’s been forgetting my name, which is annoying because I have a very unique first and last name and I had previously trained it to swipe my name.

It’s also just sticking with variations of a suggested word instead of giving me words in the same swipe area to select. Like if I swipe “food” and it autocorrects with “good,” my options to correct the autocorrect are things like “goodness,” “goody,” “God,” etc.

I’m trying to de-Google my life right now, so finding a new digital keyboard seems like a good idea. I’m gonna try some of the suggestions in this thread. I am definitely NOT recommending Gboard.

Thinking in terms of words and sentences always felt really slow and tiring, so I took the “picture is worth 1,000 words” metaphor literally and just visualize thoughts instead of using words. I could spend a few seconds/minutes piecing together a scene or conversation with words, or I could just instantly see it in my mind and have an innate understanding of the concept or situation, almost immediately.

Of course, this makes it harder for me to communicate verbally (especially since I’m an introvert), so I’ve had to spend years practicing conversations out loud. And since I think in terms of images, I’m basically translating visuals to words every time I open my mouth. So I can be a bit awkward and fumble over words sometimes. I spent a lot of my youth just lost in my own head, because dealing with the real world was like trying to translate a foreign language in real time. It was exhausting, so I was just the quiet kid growing up. Kept to myself, for the most part, and just absorbed information about my surroundings.

In the novel Hannibal Rising, they explain Lector Hannibal’s brilliant mind as a sort of visual hallway, with many rooms branching off of it. Any time he needs information, he takes a mental stroll down the hall and into the various rooms, where he’s filed away all sorts of knowledge. It’s how he can recollect fine details about almost everything he’s exposed to; he visualizes filing it away in a particular room in his mind, so he can go back to retrieve it anytime he wants.

I always loved that concept of a visual recollection, but I feel it’s too complicated a visual for myself in particular. It takes time to take that mental stroll down a hallway and go through files in my mind, so I keep it simpler and try to just jump right to the visual I need. If I can’t find it, then I can’t find it. Trying to keep mental files of everything just seems like way too much work for me, even if it would work as a shortcut to memory recollection.

When puberty first struck me (about 25 years ago now), I found myself in a strange battle for control over my mind. I felt split in two directions: my intellectual side, which I felt was my true self. And my instinctual self; the impulses that tried to betray the strict moral compass I had in place. Almost a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing, now that I think about it.

I actually had a mini-struggle with this concept of a mental “self” when I was in elementary school. I was obsessive about details and had to do things in a particularly structured way. But I noticed that my peers were very lax about details and just did the bare minimum to accomplish tasks, sometimes very messily. It bothered me, and I spent several weeks agonizing over whether I should relinquish control and just be a messy, disorganized person like my peers, or if I should keep suffering under my mental structure and discipline. I didn’t want to stop hyperfixating on minor details, but I felt like life would be less stressful if I could just give up trying and go with the flow. Little did I know I was already suffering from ADHD, even way back then. I wasn’t even diagnosed until I was 37 years old.

But as I started to mature both physically and mentally, that split between being “normal” and being “organized” became my instinctual and intellectual sides, and I spent many years fighting to hold true to my morals and personal beliefs. ADHD won in the end, and I refused to give in to my instinctual impulses all my life. And the older I get, the easier it is. As my hormones and testosterone cool off with age, I get less impulsive drives. I’m more careful and more patient, with less effort.

In regards to OP’s mental “depths”… I don’t like to avoid topics just because they give me a negative vibe or emotion. I’m a realist, and I’ve always wanted to understand the world I live in, including the good and bad. I don’t want to trick myself into a false understanding of the world; I want to see it as it truly is, so there’s no misunderstanding a situation I find myself in.

So unlike OP, who has layers of their mind where they tuck away negative thoughts, I prefer to process and deal with them up front, come to some level of understanding, and then file them away. Once I’ve processed it, then it doesn’t hurt me as much in the future and I’m able to deal with it in the moment without freezing up or suffering from emotional reactions when I least expect it.

It makes me more adept at handling real-world situations as they come at me. Which was really handy when I served in the US military. When you’re being attacked by an enemy force, you don’t have time to be horrified at the carnage around you; you need to be present in the moment and focused on the next step to survival. If something truly shocking happens, I can set that thought aside while I focus on what needs to be accomplished first. Once everything’s said and done, then I can sit down and process that shocking situation I dealt with.

TL;DR - I visualize thoughts instead of speaking or forming words in my head, because it’s much faster. Also, my ADHD mind is a battlefield, wrestling for organization over impulses. ALSO also, I’m a realist who prefers to process everything up front, good and bad, instead of just tucking away negative thoughts and emotions and not dealing with them.

Meh, don’t feel confined to the sidewalk. Be adventurous. There’s a path to the left there, where others have continued their walk.

My pet peeve is when a show or movie ends and they immediately try to play a trailer for another show. I actually enjoy reading the credits! Or maybe I’m looking for the mid- or post-credits scenes. Either way, they give me like 10 seconds or less to cancel the next preview.

Oh man, since setting up my Plex server, I almost never use streaming services anymore. I mostly just keep them because my wife is obsessed with true crime shows and I don’t have any of those on my Plex server.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

My wife has access to my password database. If I go before her, she’s in charge of going through all my accounts and shutting stuff down.

My father actually just passed away a few months ago. I had convinced him to use unique passwords for everything, but he couldn’t keep track of them all, so he just wrote them all down on a piece of paper that he kept on his computer desk. When he passed, my sister took a photo of his password sheet and we both have been going through his stuff, closing accounts, transferring money, notifying his social media accounts of his passing, etc.

For the record, my dad had a Trust set up, with my sister as the executor of the Trust, so we’ve already talked about money stuff (even with my dad while he was still alive) and we’re both in agreement. And we’re both decent people, so there’s no complications with dividing his estate or anything. My sister is in charge of all his finances, and she’s been very straightforward with me about what he had and how it’s being divided up.

EDIT: If my wife goes before me, I would probably give my sister access to my password database. She and I are pretty close, and I’d trust her with that access.

Skibidi toilet? As a 39-yr old millennial, I’m aware that was a thing like a year ago, but I assumed it was a Zoomer meme or something. I can’t get past that captcha.

EDIT: Upon looking at it again, I see it just wants me to type in “what is skibidi toilet” into Google, not answer what it is. Ugh, I’m turning into my Silent Generation/Boomer parents.

I don’t usually participate in these kind of events. Those closest to me know my service experiences and that’s usually good enough for me. I don’t feel right being publicly acknowledged and/or thanked by strangers. There are far more deserving people.

But my prior service does occasionally come up in social circles. I actually had a doctor ask me this morning what kind of work I did, and he was somewhat familiar with it, as his son in-law served in the Navy in a technical field like mine.

Most of the time, when I tell people I was in the Air Force, the first question people ask is, “What planes did you fly?” It blows their minds when I tell them I don’t know anything about planes; that my job was to fix computers. Not even computers on airplanes, just regular ol’ desktop computers, servers, laptops, etc. Anything that touches a computer network.

Only 5% of the Air Force are pilots. The other 95% of Airmen work in jobs either directly or indirectly supporting those pilots. We have a lot of generic job fields you might find in the civilian sector: mechanics, police, doctors, lawyers, cooks, firemen, chaplains, etc. All have a critical role to fill that ensure our ultimate flying missions are accomplished.

So yeah, there are a lot of people in the military who work a job that doesn’t put them anywhere near the front lines of war. In some careers, your job is the exact same as the civilian sector, except that you have to wear a military uniform while doing it.

As a veteran of the US Air Force, I can say that veteran is not exclusively a military term. You can be a veteran of any field, hobby, or activity if you’ve been there a while and are experienced.

We always get these people who might have served for a single enlistment (4-6 years), then make the rest of their life about their military service. It’s really cringey and they don’t deserve half the respect they think they’re entitled to. Your life shouldn’t be defined by a few years in a particular role.

(Hint: no one is entitled to respect. Respect is earned.)

For the record, I spent 20 years working an IT job in the military, mostly out of harm’s way. I feel weird when people try to thank me for my service. I didn’t really do anything worth thanking. Save it for people who laid down their lives in your defense. Most of us don’t actually experience that level of responsibility and hardship in our service; a lot of service members tend to have a pretty quiet career.