cobysev

I was 10 when the Internet because publicly accessible, and 13 when I made my first ever email address. I used my current username as my email handle, which was an abbreviated version of my name.

It took me like 10 seconds to come up with it. I had a cute girlfriend who was insisting I make a private email because I was sharing my mother’s email account and my girlfriend didn’t like my mother having access to our private conversations.

It’s been 29 years now and I’m still using this username. My original email is long gone, but the username lives on.

It was actually a pretty common stereotype in my childhood. The mother was the “housewife,” while the father was the “bread-winner.” Anything different was poked fun of in pop culture.

Then sometime in my teen years, people started talking more seriously about different family types, and pop culture slowly shifted toward being more accepting of “unique” family situations. It took a long time for it to be commonly accepted, at least here in the US.

Of course, there were always outliers to pop culture. It’s not like other family types didn’t exist. It’s just that media always pushed their straight Christian family roles on us through movies, music, news, etc.

My mother’s family has always had strong women, which is why I hold women in such high respect in my life. My mother only begrudgingly took on housewife roles because my dad didn’t step up, but she was also the bread-winner in my family.

And her mother (my grandmother) was also a tough-as-nails woman who built her own business from the ground up and was the matriarch of her whole large family.

On my dad’s side, his mother lost two husbands in their 50s and decided that was enough of that, so she raised a half dozen kids herself as a single mother.

It’s just my parents that slipped into the stereotype during my childhood. But that was all I knew growing up, thanks to pop culture and my home life, so I had a lot to learn about the world when I turned 18 and left home.

Elder millennial here, in my early 40s now. My parents were like this. Dad was antisocial and didn’t know how to be a dad (his own dad died when he was 2 years old), so he was there, but hardly interacted with us kids unless we approached him.

Mom was the bread-winner, but also did most of the parenting/cooking/cleaning. Probably a big part of why their marriage didn’t last.

Granted, my parents also waited really late in life to get married and have kids, so my mother was an early boomer and my dad was actually from the Silent Generation.

I prefer to watch movies and TV shows in their original language. I feel it loses some of its cultural identity when it’s dubbed in another language. I especially hate when companies change the context of the show to make it relevant to the foreign audience. (e.g. changing rice balls to “jelly donuts” in the English dubbed Pokémon series.)

So when it comes to anime, I’m a huge advocate for watching subbed. I lived in Japan for 3 years and anime just sounds weird to me in English. It’s unnatural. And there are so many interesting cultural quirks with their language that get lost when it’s translated into English. It’s boring when the show is really identifiable as my own culture. I wanna enjoy a different culture’s perspective!

Broaden your horizons and learn more about foreign cultures. Watch your anime subbed! It’ll also improve your reading speed and comprehension skills. I don’t even notice that I’m reading subtitles anymore.

Plus, you’ll be able to easily identify Japanese in the wild after a while. I also lived in South Korea for a couple years and I’m very good at picking out Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, and Tagalog (Philippines) languages, just by sound. Not to mention a handful of European and Scandinavian languages from a few years living in the EU.

I never realized how ignorant and closed-minded I was, living in the US. Traveling abroad made me realize there’s a whole world out there that is extremely different from what I’m used to back home, and it’s given me a new perspective of the world.

I didn’t realize how much of an echo chamber America is. We’re isolated on the other side of the planet from most everyone else and are exposed solely to our own media propaganda, which promotes the idea that we’re the best country in the world and looked up to by everyone else. (We barely make the top 20 lists when compared to other nations, and are generally seen like a cringey edgelord by other countries).

Plus, we only have 2 foreign neighbors, but America is so huge, a majority of Americans don’t live anywhere near the borders and will never bump into Canadians or Mexicans. So most of us live our whole lives without foreign cultural experience, and it’s easy to fear-monger about “invading foreigners.” Watching subbed movies and shows, of any language, is the easiest first step toward stepping outside your comfort zone and exploring other cultures.

I measured like this when my first girlfriend asked what my size was. I told her it was 10". Suffice to say, she was definitely not impressed when the pants came off for the first time. 😅

They cropped off the fourth kid on the bottom, who is afraid of Conor.

It’s not Pixar, it’s Disney.

Pixar got its animation start when John Lasseter got fired from Disney for promoting CG animation over the traditional hand-drawn animation. He moved over to the Lucasfilm CG studio, which was later renamed “Pixar.”

Through Pixar (after Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas), Lasseter and his team proceeded to not only revolutionize CG animation, but to create incredible unique stories with it. They were seen as a real competitor to Disney for a while. They only started making sequels when they started collaborating with Disney.

Eventually, Disney realized the money to be made from CG animation, so they bought out Pixar. Now it’s a Disney product and their ideas are bankrupt once again. We don’t get original stories anymore, just a bunch of unnecessary sequels and garbage films that were probably written by AI.

Same here. I had been playing World of Warcraft for over a year and still hadn’t reached max level with my main character, so I spent a whole day grinding to finish off the last few levels. Then I walked down the street to my local Walmart and went to hang out in the electronics section until midnight.

This was back when Walmart was open 24/7. I asked an employee where they would be releasing the Burning Crusade Collectors Edition and they said they’d bring them to the electronics register exactly at midnight. So I started a queue next to their sole register. By the time midnight struck, there were about a dozen people behind me in the line.

It was the first and last time I showed up for a midnight release of anything. I personally thought it was worth it, but I never did it again. The next WoW expansion released while I was stationed overseas with the US military, so I had to order it online.

Maybe that’s it. I only watched it on DVD back in the day. It was grainy and everyone’s faces looked plastic and uncanny. You couldn’t see facial textures or wrinkles.

EDIT: Nah, the hair in the meme is feathered. Everyone’s hair in the film was solid and plastic-looking. You can see in your example images that Skull’s hair is one solid piece. I still think someone at least touched up the meme a bit.

Where did this HD version of this meme come from? I’ve seen Monster House, and CG wasn’t that good in 2006. I’m pretty sure someone’s enhanced this image with AI.

Under a fascist regime, yes.

If/when I shower at night, I just need to soak my hair in the shower, scruff it a bit, then towel dry. Then I can comb it out and style it as if I just took a fresh shower.

I’m a guy though, with relatively short hair. If I had long hair like this photo, it’d probably be a rat’s nest in the morning and need a full shower to fix.

The military is definitely all about following regulations and protocol, even if they don’t make sense.

[…] the military often does stuff in a dumbass way

I was in the Air Force when I served, but I deployed with some Marines once. Their motto, which they repeated all the time, was, “If it’s stupid, but works… it wasn’t stupid.”

They used this as an excuse to try very dumb ways to problem solve everything. And it led to very creative ways to do things; some of which actually worked.

But myself and a couple other Air Force folks got a kick out of watching the Marines figuratively smash rocks together, hoping to ignite a fire.

My favorite quote from that deployment came from one of the young Corporals in my office. He had just returned from a week-long forward mission and got stuck in an airport for 24 hours before his connecting flight.

He said, “I was so bored, I actually read a book from cover to cover! I don’t think I’ve ever read an entire book in my life!”

I expected that to be a joke, but instead of laughing, the rest of the Marines just solemnly nodded along. Wow.

Yup.

EDIT: I see someone else commented that they’re not the same. The truth is… it depends.

When I was serving in the military, we used the two terms interchangeably. They were basically the same thing to us. Although “military grade” is a more common term in the civilian sector, we would still use it when working with contractors on custom military equipment.

So if you want to be pendantic, mil-spec may be the more official term in the military. But in practice, we don’t really differentiate between the two terms.

Former military member here. There are a couple things at play here.

1.) The military will outline a specific requirement for specific equipment that contractors need to meet. Requirements depend on the mission, usage, tools required, etc. so “military grade” just means “we needed a specific product to perform a specific way.” This does not mean it’s good for any use. Just that it’s what we needed in the moment for a specific job.

2.) We are required to buy from the lowest bidder. We ask contractors to build products for us that meet the specific requirements we outlined, then compare/contrast prices. Every contractor that built our product are in the running to become our supplier for that product… if they can beat every other contractor in price.

So how does a contractor win a government contract while still making money on the product they’re selling? By cutting corners, using cheaper materials, and ensuring the product will last just long enough to meet our requirements before breaking. The cheaper they can build it, the more money they make while also selling cheaper than all their competitors.

So “military grade” just means it’s a cheap piece of crap that met some arbitrary request the military made for a specific tool at one time. If you want quality products, avoid military grade.

This reminds me of an old Bill Nye clip I saw once, where he explains that, biologically, there is no such thing as race. We’re all one race, the human race.

From there, we tend to sub-divide ourselves by cultures and geopolitical origins, but we’re still all the same regardless of what we look like or where we come from.

For the few who don’t get the joke, “pain” is French for “bread.”

Old (early 40s) guy here. I exclusively discovered new music through the radio. I had several favorite radio stations that would introduce me to new music, then I’d use Shazam to find out what the song and artist is, then look up their albums.

But I’m extremely anti-advertisement nowadays, so I don’t listen to the radio any more. And I hate online music sources because they’re all algorithm-based and suggest similar stuff instead of new music I’ve never experienced before. It’s easy to get stuck in your own bubble with algorithms. Plus, they’re littered with ads, even if you pay for a subscription service. Which I’m also very much against doing.

So… I mostly discover new music through my wife, who is still using the radio and online music streaming sites. All the music I own, I rip to my PC in the highest quality I can, then stream it to myself through Plex, so I have my own ad-free radio station anywhere I go.

Found the boss.

When I was 9 years old, my golden lab got hit and killed by a car.

He was always an outdoors dog. He just showed up on our country property when I was about 3-4 years old and decided to stay there, so we vaccinated him and gave him a collar. I named him Rusty because of his coloring.

He was an old dog at the end. Blind in one eye, hearing was going, and he had bad arthritis. He liked to just lounge around and fawn over me. Sweetest dog ever. There’s a lake across the road from my house, through a thin forested property, and he would trot down there for a swim every now and then to soothe his aching bones. One day, he popped out of the woods on his way home and got hit by a car on the road.

My mother didn’t plan to tell me about it. She didn’t want to risk traumatizing me with my first death, so she was just going to ignore it for as long as possible. Rusty would disappear for days on end, so it wouldn’t be unusual for him to be gone for a while. Then when I’d start asking questions, she’d suggest that he probably migrated somewhere new.

I was playing in my front yard one day when a minivan came up my driveway. A lady hopped out and handed me a small plastic bag. She said, “Here’s your dog’s collar. I figured you’d probably want it. I’m sorry for what happened to him.” Then she just hopped back in her car and drove off, leaving me staring blankly after her. ‘What was that all about?!’

I went inside and showed my mom the bag, told her some lady just handed it to me, and asked her what happened to Rusty. My mom immediately broke down crying, which made me cry, and we both just hugged and cried for a while.

My mom was furious that some lady just handed off a dead dog’s collar to a 9-year old instead of finding an adult. She explained what happened to Rusty and said they were going to bury his remains in our backyard. She absolutely refused to let me see him, though. She said she wanted me to remember him as the childhood friend I grew up with, not as a corpse run over by a car. I wasn’t allowed into the field out back behind my house until my dad had finished burying him.

So yeah, my first experience with death was with my first dog, and my mother could’ve handled it much better. But getting a good cry out with her did wonders for helping me deal with it.