Agreed, none of the others are balanced properly or have good flow. Number two is the only option.

I bought a 1959 and wish I had gone further with my remodeling than I did, and I took out all the floor down to the studs in the main level and filled everything with soundproofing insulation before redoing the subfloor with 1 and a 1/4 inchs of OSB that I glued and compression screwed to the joists. One thing I’m very happy I did do was run Ethernet to most rooms while the floor was open, having all go to a central hub in the utility room where they’re connected to switches, one for the upstairs network, one for the basement network since I also made the basement a separate apartment. Long way to say I wish I had planned out every repair and remodel and upgrade I could think of before ever touching a hammer so I could just do all the demo and remodeling at once. Now I’m stuck wishing I could go back and redo all the old electrical and plumbing before I had done all the finish work. Learn from me young one!

Japan for a month in November! Been saving for and planning on going for the last 20 years and I’m finally going! I’m so freaking excited!

I know Japan is redoing it’s electrical system to have no overhead lines of any kind so when earthquakes hit there’s not live electrical lines dropping on people.
Either way the point isn’t that this specific house is or isn’t a shit hole, it’s the idea that any house sold for so cheap must inherently be a shit hole. It might be, but the situation in Japan is different than the situation here because of aforementioned population decline and condensation into cities. There are many challenges to buying a home in another country not least of which in Japan is gaining the right to live there permanently, but as long as you do the work to ensure you know what you’re buying and that you can live there safely and legally once whatever works needs done is done, there’s no reason to assume a home like that in Japan is 100% a shit hole by nature. Especially since technology has advanced to the point that power and telecommunications don’t require a direct line anymore to be effective and affordable. Solar power and wireless communication is only getting better and better. Again, I’m not saying that house specifically couldn’t be a shit hole, I’m saying that in Japan specifically there’s no reason to automatically assume it is one. It will have problems but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be worth it if you did your research.

The interesting part about a bunch of the homes in more rural Japan is that they’re not actually condemned or shit holes. They’re old and would definitely need some love and attention but their population hasn’t been at replacement levels for a long time and people would rather live in a big city where they have access to all of the things so slowly and steadily the outer Fringe population areas in Japan have ben getting more and more empty leaving perfectly good houses to sit vacant for years. That’s not to say that there aren’t shit holes that aren’t worth the time it takes to go see them but a large portion of them are actually quite nice.

I don’t know about a metal cord protector but here’s a different solution just in case it doesn’t exist. when my cat wouldn’t stop chewing on cables, I got bitter apple spray, collected all the cables in my house, put them all in my bathtub and sprayed them all very liberally with this bitter apple spray, let them dry then plugged everything back in. Now the only time I have a cable get chewed through is when I just got something and I forget to spray it cuz I guess she still tests them just to be sure they taste awful. And believe me, it tastes awful. I highly recommend wearing disposable gloves while handling the stuff, especially while it’s wet and then washing the bathtub and your hands thoroughly once the cables are dry and back where they go. Blegh!

Fair, I tend to think in terms of affinity rather than ranking, i have high affinity with some people and less with others. it’s not about rank, it’s about… Vibes? I guess? There’s probably a better word but codes it what comes to mind.

Isolation is painful, I know that very well. There is a vast difference between having no one in your life and feeling incapable of being ok without company. People need community, we are social beings. The best advice I have for seeking friendship is to join groups you have affinity with. If you’re particularly interested in politics, art, music, movies, gardening, anime, 3D printing, TTRPGs, whatever it is you love spending time doing, find people in your area who get together to do those things and try to join them.

If, on the other hand, you have friends and community but still can’t stand the time you spend alone, address what about being by yourself creates that anxiety? What are you getting from constant company that you don’t have alone?

Are you your own favorite person? If not, why not? What qualities about yourself make you feel like you’re not worthy of being the person you enjoy spending the most time with? If you are your own favorite person, why does it matter if someone else feels like they’d rather spend time with you over anyone else? I feel if you enjoy your own company when you’re completely alone then the relationships you develop with others become more genuine, because you actually enjoy spending time with those people, rather than just being desperate to not be alone with yourself.

This is the way 🏴‍☠️

ಥ⁠╭⁠╮⁠ಥ Why make feel?!

Here’s a would you rather! Would you rather have him be your massage therapist or be his massage therapist? No shaving or trimming or waxing is allowed in either case. If he’s your massage therapist he does a full body good deep tissue massage using forearms, fists, elbows, whatever tools need used to get the job done, not just the palms of his hands. If you’re his massage therapist, yes his body hair is long enough to accidentally tie in knots. What do you choose!?!

ಥ⁠╭⁠╮⁠ಥ YOU GIVE THEM SNUGGLES RIGHT NOW!!!

If it can be abstract I would snap away the acceptance of hierarchy as a method of social control, like historically speaking go back to the first people who decided that there should be a person in charge of all the things and have the people say “Naw, that’s fucked” and then that just not happen. Not that the idea of hierarchy not be in existence at all, because I think it would be more effective to have people recognize that it’s bullshit and intentionally build societies antithetical to hierarchy rather than to have society’s that are ignorant of its potential harm.

If it had to be a tangible thing that I could physically dissolve… Parasites? Would all parasites count or is that too broad? Cuz if we got rid of fleas and leeches and mosquitoes and ticks that would wipe out huge swaths of vectors of disease transmission. No black plague, no zika, no dengue fever. If we wanted to expand the definition of parasites even broader than the the bourgeoisie class might be included but I wouldn’t want to get my hopes up. XD

I theorize that it’s somehow based on skin undertone? Maybe? Just by my very limited personal experience, me and my mother have Olive tone skin and we get left alone and my dad and my other three sisters have pink toned skin and get devoured and I’ve seen that pattern play out in about 20 of my close acquaintances as well. I don’t know why that would possibly cause any sort of change besides maybe there’s some chemical makeup in olive tone skin that smells bad to mosquitoes? I don’t know, but me and my Olive friends seem to get left alone and the pink babies get munched.

Tldr: basically there are owners and workers. (this is of course leaving out all of the people who can’t or don’t work or work outside of wage labor but that is not what we are focusing on right now). In an ideal world there would not be people who “profit” off of the labor of others.

That is not to say people cannot work together make each other’s lives better and enrich each other, but it wouldn’t be in a owner/worker relationship, it would be in a co-worker/community relationship. If your friends own a business and make the lion’s share of the profit while employees who enable them to do their work only get a small share of the value created by their labor, they may be trying to help but they are still exploiting their employees for profit. A truly equitable company would need to have all workers treated equitably and no profit be generated for shareholders. This is 100% possible but it’s definitely not the standard model people are taught.

I believe what people mean when they say there is no such thing as a good billionaire is, it is impossible to create that much personal wealth without exploiting others and, furthermore, amassing that large an amount of extracted wealth is inherently harmful to the exploited workers on such a level as to be undeniably evil. You cannot gain that much wealth without explicitly and intentionally stealing from those who created it. Even people who work hard, who could be argued are the only reason that wealth is generated, (thinking of Taylor Swift here) if they were truly good people they would see the profits that are being made by the Enterprise that they spearhead and know that it would be impossible without the people who work with them and support them to create that wealth and that it should be distributed as equally as possible between all involved. If they are keeping such a large portion that they become a billionaire, they are inherently evil, regardless of if that wealth could have been created without them.

I suppose there could be some argument for a theoretical company that was so profitable that all employees involved in creating the value reached billionaire status, but I have a hard time imagining any business that could create that amount of wealth without their business being exploitative in some way, even if all parties involved in that business directly are paid equally. An example of this might be a investment brokerage. People who invest in the stock market and get rich doing so are not employers directly but they are indirectly, through the stock market, siphoning the value of exploited workers from corporate profits.

This topic is of course a ethical and idealistic one. Expecting everyday people who have invested in the stock market through their 401k to not use the wealth that they receive from those investments to live comfortable lives In their retirement would be ridiculous in our current system. In an ideal world that wouldn’t be necessary, people would be guaranteed food, housing, and healthcare for the entirety of their old age and retirement without requiring the explicit exploitation of wage labor, but there must be a division in our consciousness between what an ideal person in an ideal world would do and what an an evil person in our current world does and that it is the gray in between those two extremes that makes up the vast majority of the current population.

One last point to consider is that developing class consciousness is something that needs to be taught and learned and understood and that the current societal expectations and norms that we have instilled in us from a very young age need to be broken down internally before people are able to recognize how much harm the current system does. I guarantee that the people who profit the most off of their employees believe wholeheartedly that they are doing good by creating jobs for people who otherwise would have had nothing without the company that has been provided by their ownership. Getting people who benefit the most from our current system to see how harmful their “good fortune” is to others will be a daunting and thankless task and will take decades.

Yes, this, thank you.

Sigh, yes. A dream I have, for a world that isn’t as fucked up as ours, is brain computer interfaces that can just record your train of thought for you so that when you get a third of the way into a thought and you forget what you were thinking you can just replay your brain for a second and remember what the fuck you were thinking about. Or you know, walk into a room forget why you’re there and say “hey brain, why am I here?” and it will fucking tell you instead of just going “eat a dick bitch”. Or God forbid decide on a plan for a day or a week or goals that you have and want to focus on and then have some hope of and fucking assistance in actually remembering that thing that you wanted to do and following through on it instead of just “well your brain sucks and you forgot so I guess there’s no life progress for you!”

Same same. My work office is spotless and perfectly stocked at all times, my home desk is a collection box (pile) for important papers with some room for a mouse and keyboard. Kitchen and living room? perfectly organized, to the point I could tell you exactly where every tool and ingredient is within a 6 in square… My laundry however is… Dear God… I’m working on it. Medicine cabinet is a pile of so many random drugs and medical tools but directly below is the perfectly, and I mean perfectly, folded and stacked AND organized by alternating color, towels. The weird part is, even in the “chaos” zones, I could still give you a shelf coordinate that would be accurate to within 12 inches of the item you’re looking for. Ibuprofen? First shelf down from the top, front left side, next to the NyQuil, may need to move the bag of compression wraps out the way. The beeswax for candles? Top right cube of the laundry shelving, back left corner of that cube. Like… Wtf brain? Why u know dis!!!

I vaguely remember in episode 2 I think he mentioned he wished she was younger then she was and that 10 was young enough. The reason I was hoping for was that there was kind of an opposite thing happening with this dude, where he was a 10-year-old in the body of a 18-year-old or something so the alliance would 100% be political + it would be kind of funny that there was a 16-year-old in a 10-year-old’s body and a 10-year-old in a 18 year-old’s body or some shit. Seems like nope, he just liked little girls.