Yeah, I hope things will get better in the future.

I’ve tried, but there are multiple reasons.

First, I have literally less than zero money. I’ve been in education almost all my life because people always told me that after [insert degree] you will have infinite options and a good job. Well that doesn’t really work if you’re grades are always shit and you need 9 years for a 6 year degree. Its almost impossible to sell yourself during job hunting if almost every class has a barely passing grade. I also have zero to none work experience. In my country minimum wage is not enough to support yourself, and I don’t qualify for unemployment checks. I’ve tried to find a job with my dogshit engineering bachelor’s for 6 months, 100+ applications, nothing. Starting an apprenticeship pays even less than minimum wave. I’m already falling behind on my masters degree, while hustling on the side. I barely manage living paycheck to paycheck. All this while stuck living in my parents house.

Second, I got nowhere to go. I’m an immigrant, there are no relatives I could go to, all my friends have their own families so I can’t couch surf, renting is to expensive. I would be fine with being homeless, but I got adult responsibilities now, that require residence.

Third, I’ve once been away for a few months, my dad almost cheated on my mom during this time but that’s beside the point. That’s probably the loneliest I’ve ever been in my life (granted it was peak Covid). There were times I haven’t left my dorm for days. I had to apologize to people for my voice cracks, because I’ve literally haven’t spoken a word out loud in days. I do not naturally seek out engagement, neither do people particularly miss my presence. I don’t want to leave because the speck of social life I have is tethered to my family or friends in my city. Sure I get along with strangers fairly well, but it’s all a facade, it’s learned behavior that I picked up through the years so I don’t get punched in the head for looking at somebody the wrong way (I apparently have a very ‘punchable’ face). I’m very carefull who I call a ‘friend’, and even then, the reason my friends are my actual friends is because we don’t talk about topics like this.

My way of living has really thought me to give others the benefit of the doubt, because nobody can ever tell at a glance what going on in a persons life. If somebody is being a dick to me I try not to be a dick back, because I don’t know whats going on behind the curtain. If somebody seems happy, I’m always asking ‘Are they really?’. This way I’ve never had a road rage incident, I’ve never got screamed at twice. I’m really good at disarming conflicts, which is an almost useless skill in day to day life.

Because since my early teens I had to babysit 2 adults in a loveless marriage. My mother is the most vicious human I personally know. She is the definition of a sociopath and narcissist. Every day of my life has felt like being on the receiving end of a Karen’s tantrum. Of course nobody knows about that, because the second a 3rd party like a friend or a stranger enters the situation, she acts like an angel with all the nice smiles and politeness we never get to see. My father is on one hand afraid of her and on the other hand still stuck in the fantasy of having a functioning and traditional family. I can’t leave them alone, because somebody will literally die if I do. We already had arguments where police had to get involved, and guess on which side the police ended up being on? After those particularly bad arguments I literally had to cook my own food or order take-out because I didn’t want to find out what mashed potatoes with fertilizer or rat poison tastes like. I have to be there and act as a witness to every argument because my mother already has shown that she will confidently twist reality to present herself as a victim to authorities. My father isn’t exactly a saint either so she has enough to hold legaly over his head.

My mother has completely ruined any woman’s image in my eyes. You know how most men end up with a woman that resembles their mother? Well, I’m so afraid of this happening that every time I meet another girl my brain goes on high alert looking for any similarities. And I always find some, which completely shuts me down emotionally towards this person. That’s how it’s been all my life. Now I’m to old to be in my first real relationship, because partners expect you to be reasonably well put together and emotionally stable, which I am not. I’ve long accepted my fate of life long loneliness as long I can keep my family drama contained.

I’m what would generally be described as ‘damaged goods’. That’s why I voluntarily keep myself far away from women. On that note though, I’m great with men, I can meet a total stranger and have him belly laughing and inviting me to their birthday party within the first 20 minutes. I treat women exactly the same, but they neither share a man’s humor, nor their common interests. Which works great for me, because I don’t have to show any romantic interest, neither does a woman ever see me in a romantic way. I get along ‘OK’ with women and that’s enough for me to make it through the day. Not that it really matters, as of this writing, the last time I’ve had an eye-to-eye with a woman (excluding cashiers, receptionists or my mother) was maybe a month ago.

It’s not like I’m completely numb to affectionate emotions. I still feel the effects of loneliness and isolation like anybody else would. But well… it is what it is. If anything, I try to educate my married friends on a relationships effect on a child’s development before they decide to have any themselves. Preventing a single child from going through the same shit I have to experience daily, is for me already a life well lived.

If there’s one thing I could say to my younger self it would be ‘I’m sorry this happened to you.’

‘I know’

FUCK NO. I hated driving lessons, but I love driving ever since I got my license. It took me almost a decade to figure out why. First, I hate other people telling me where to go. GPS, no problem, but Kevin over here telling me to take a left 1 second before I’m past the intersection iterates me so much. I can’t concentrate on signs or the road if I have to constantly anticipate so arbitrary direction.

Also, not driving my own car makes me anxious. It feels like the car is 2 ft wider on the outside but more cramped on the inside. My field of view narrows, and I get clumsy on the clutch. All because my brain is on a constant loop of ‘this isn’t mine, don’t wreck it, this isn’t mine, don’t wreck it’.

Driving isn’t stressful, doing it by the book is. On the road you just go with the flow. If you turn the wrong way into a one way street, you wave, say sorry and back out again. If you take somebodies right of way and nothing bad happened then you just move on. Its not like the police is waiting around every corner. Driving lessons hold you to a way higher standard then most people adhere to on the road.

You just made the reference meta.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to pay for their products, it’s the fact that you give companies the little finger and they take the whole hand. They want to have their cake and eat it to. They want you to overpay and to be satisfied with bad service. They re-capitalize on content that has already turned a profit 20 years ago. I’m sorry but if I pay the equivalent of a movie ticket for a subscription and have to watch The Godfather with JPEG artifacts, they can kiss my ass.

Another keyword is “easily reproducible” which is the essence of digital data. If I steal something from the store, I stole a unique physical thing with inherit value attached to it. But if I am presented the choice between paying for lower bitrate movie or downloading the same movie for free in theater quality, I choose the later. Somehow the prices for subscriptions go up every year, but the amount of content and the quality decreases.

Additionally all streaming services take the liberty of revoking your ‘license’ to a bought (not rented or leased) product at any time. If I buy a movie on Amazon prime, they don’t give you a .mp4, no you can only watch it on their app with their quality. They do not disclose that if I buy something with a one-time transaction, it is just a lease and I am in fact not owning what I paid for.

Over the last decade I paid thousands of dollars for subscription services, but I haven’t gotten enough use out of them to justify what I paid. Hollywood made enough money off of me, so now I’m just helping myself to break even.

I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in ‘meh’ quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They’re just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.

The shocking part is, the whole bottle is like $2.

The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you’re not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let’s be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.

Most of the people on the list have been successful actors/actress longer than Halle was alive.

Let’s not forget this simple aspect:

Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

Interesting character - Just some Chick

In the end studios want money above anything else. And big names rake in bigger money.

This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.

Really hard to adhere to quality if money is being pocketed at every corner and then spend outside the hellhole you created.

Old people when they see a staircase without a railing

My issue is that we are pairing nationality with skin color or ethnicity here. Those are not mutually exclusive. There are 2nd or 3rd generation Asians immigrants in Mexico, just as there are Mexicans living in Ireland, and Irish people in India, etc… Somebody could be a fully integrated national but not part if the nations major ethnicity. Even saying AFRICAN-American is kind of pointless, like it matters where your grand-grand-grand-grand-parents came from. They’re as much American as anybody else. We don’t call everybody else European-American for comparison.

As opposed to other industries, where everybody gets their fair share /s

Expect porn doesn’t require any education.

I’m confused whats going on down there. My belt prevents my pants from sliding off but my pants have belt loops to revent my belt from sliding off. Who’s the real hero here?

Nah it should be like fetishes, the more obscure the more expensive. But you can get John or Mark for free.

There’s no way in Hell a country with a population in the billions has lower incarnation numbers than one with a few hundred million. That is just statistically impossible. It all comes down to what you count as incarnated. This is like the US “solving” its unemployment crisis by not counting people who think about maybe looking for work sometime as not unemployed. These numbers are self reported, so they should be taken with a big grain of salt.