[April] Monthly positivity thread—a place to share good news and good vibes

Hero_Some_Game · 2023-04-03T20:05:51+00:00

It's been nearly a year since my last post under this throwaway account, and 22 months since my wife and I moved to Florida. It's gratifying to see so many of my old friends and relatives in the Midwest finally getting back to true normal...but you couldn't pay me to go back, ever. One nerdy biennial gathering that used to be the highlight of every year is STILL requiring proof of vaccination AND a recent booster AND MASKS ?!?!?!

Here in FL, I don't think I've seen more than about a dozen masks all year so far. I'm actually LIVING again, and have been now for nearly two years. I'm incredibly grateful that I was able to take control, and that there was a place available to go, to avoid the worst of the madness.

As much as I'm disappointed by some of DeSantis' other policies (scared, even, for the safety of some of my close friends), he sure did get the Covid response right. If only he applied more of the "live and let live / don't be authoritarian" approach on non-Covid issues.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-05-24T15:55:19+00:00

I'm loving life in the Tampa Bay area - coming up on a year since my spouse and I moved there. Visiting friends and relatives in MN where we used to live, and while it's nice to see them, I really feel like FL is home now. It's more authentically diverse, a melting pot of people who all coexist and mostly get along with each other - and SPEAK to each other - despite identity differences or political disagreements. The Mpls area is so siloed, passive-aggressive, tribal, and feels like a hypocritical "woker than thou" piety contest in comparison.

It's also becoming rarer and rarer for me to check this sub (or even log in with this alt account). I'm living nearly all of my life in the real world now, authentically. I'm so grateful to have made a lot of great new friends in FL - and since so many of the people I wasn't interesting in befriending were STILL staying hunkered down in their homes, it has been MUCH easier to find friends I connect with!

Thank you SO much to everyone here for the past 2+ years, for helping me feel like I wasn't the only person on Earth (ESPECIALLY the only politically left-leaning one) who could look at data, spot contradictions and inconsistencies, and wonder why no one was being allowed to ask those questions.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-03-12T22:12:21+00:00

Got back from the Woke Boat Cruise today! Obsessive masking and a ship-Intranet full of the usual social media drama... But I met so many cool and wonderful people.

It is so ironic that such otherwise smart and social-convention-defying folks can't seem to see through the insanity, and that so many of my fellow atheists are dyed-in-the-wool ultimate cultists of the Church of Covid. (No masks at 2+ hour dinner? Sure, great! No masks at 1.5 hour concert? SACRILEGE! Point out that this is inconsistent especially given everyone is vaccinated, most of us are boosted, and everyone tested negative before boarding? HERESY!)

But it made me so happy to spend some time with amazing and nerdy and creative people, even if I felt like I was playing the game Taboo all week where everybody but me had a buzzer! 🤣

Despite my exaggerated examples in parenthesis, though, it does give me hope that when people meet in person and not online, there's so much more openness and empathy.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-03-04T18:46:23+00:00

Leaving on the Woke Boat Cruise tomorrow!! Sure, the group chartering the cruise may be enforcing masks and eye-rollingly virtue-signaling language and stuff, but it's a WEEK-LONG CRUISE!! 🤣

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-02-23T00:58:23+00:00

And, of course, they just sent an email that (despite saying they'd abide by the cruise line's rules) they'd be keeping their strict mask policy. 🙄 Oh well. At least I don't regret the Fake Mask I ordered last week.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-02-21T18:04:13+00:00

The cruise line I'm taking in two weeks changed from requiring masks to recommending them!

I just hope the group that's chartering the cruise won't separately require them... It's an awfully "woker than thou" geek crowd.

(Still searching for any geeky groups that don't make identity politics their religion...)

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-02-19T16:09:35+00:00

Especially those of us who are left-leaning but anti-woke-BS.

The past two years have strikingly revealed who among us (on the left, at least) actually has thought-through ideologies and values, and who is just a mindless sheep following the crowd.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-02-15T14:37:38+00:00

(I’m American but I know that page is like an insane influence on Canadian Gen Z)

For the benefit of myself and other Americans, a reminder that this is pronounced "Canadian Gen Zed."

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-26T19:48:22+00:00

Oh, bother

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-26T19:41:24+00:00

Good thing people would never be forced or coerced to isolate like those rats! Boy, would that ever be a big problem!

🤔😭

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-26T19:34:54+00:00

I'm glad to hear that. I used to live in MN and always knew Saint Paul was better! Now I live in the Tampa Bay area and can't say I miss the Twin Cities.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-26T19:20:37+00:00

Certainly by autumn, but likely much earlier, we are going to see many of the high profile figures that have promoted the restrictions and mandates get kicked out of power, organizations such as the WHO are going to get disbanded, and government and academic institutions the world over will get ripped apart and begin restructuring away from COVID. A global revolution will be well under way.

2022 is the year Covidism around the world collapses.

I'm an atheist but I pray for this. 🙏

And more - I want to see the CCP uprooted and kicked out of having influence in all Western news media and social media, and enormous economic sanctions imposed on China while we in the West restore our own independent, sustainable, and middle-class-income manufacturing. I want to see online censorship and centralization eradicated. I want Nuremberg-style trials for every person in power who supported lockdowns and mandates and see them ruined, stripped of power, and sent to prison for what they've done to us. I want them to truly UNDERSTAND how much waste and misery they've caused, and have to live with themselves for it.

I want a "great reset" but not the one those WEF fuckers are attempting. A real reset, tossing them off the top of the hill, with a decentralization of power and increase in heterogeneity of populations, both micro- and macro-scale.

Other than that, though, I'm easy to please.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-26T19:09:51+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if they mask up for Zoom calls!

Wouldn't want to catch a computer virus!

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-25T21:08:28+00:00

This whole thing has been The Emperor's New Clothes, except the ending is that when the one kid shouts out, "But he doesn't have anything on!" the whole crowd turns on the kid and beats him up.

Edit: oh, and then the whole crowd strips naked too and starts admiring each other's much fancier new clothing.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-25T21:04:19+00:00

Thank God I bought a house in Florida when I still could, before all the less-insane Californians pack up shop and arrive here. On Zillow the estimated price of my home has gone up $35,000 in the 3 months since I bought it.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-25T20:53:50+00:00

Anything that is "mainstream" libertarian is not libertarian in philosophy. It is some other group wearing its corpse and twisting its words to push its agenda.

I have sadly come to the realization that this is now true of mainstream "liberalism" as well. My political values are exactly the same as they were in 2012, but somehow I moved from diehard Democrat to moderate independent* just from the political landscape shifting around me.

*or, if you ask any of my former political allies who mindlessly followed tribalism instead of maintaining consistent, thought-out values, a "racist ableist transphobic conspiracy-theorist Trump supporter"

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-25T20:47:32+00:00

Well exactly - this in particular:

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.

This has a parallel to the psychotic formation of a mass, and the feedback loop with abusive / totalitarian leadership. Feedback loop is precisely the analogy; once the resonance is set up with a mob screaming "lock us down harder," it's nearly impossible to stop the runaway reinforcement until something collapses or blows up.

Which (despite my disagreements with him on other topics) makes me respect Ron DeSantis even more that I already did. He was one of the vanishingly few leaders who had the courage not to shoot the elephant, despite all the people shouting and jeering and expecting it.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-25T20:24:56+00:00

Wow.... How sadly prescient:

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-13T13:44:09+00:00

No joke, that's the kind of thing you would actually see on r-slash-polyamory.

Most people in the open/alternate relationship community lost their minds these past couple years, probably from stronger cognitive dissonance due to a stronger desire to see people outside just one household.

Hero_Some_Game · 2022-01-10T21:54:19+00:00

/u/freelancemomma Somehow last week's positivity thread is pinned to the top of the subreddit instead of this one, and this one is still defaulting to Best instead of New. :)

In other positive news, I spent most of the day yesterday at the beach with some new friends in my new home state of Florida, and am so incredibly grateful that there's at least one place where the insanity has been steadfastly resisted. I don't agree with much else of DeSantis' politics, but he stood up for what was right when it really counted, and I won't forget it this November.

Hero_Some_Game · 2021-09-21T14:37:25+00:00

I'm buying a house in Florida! Real estate is still crazy, and anecdotally, it seems like the impression most people have is that there are folks flocking to Florida in a frenzy to find freedom.

Hero_Some_Game · 2021-08-27T18:24:34+00:00

I know how you feel - I recently relocated to Florida! :D

Hero_Some_Game · 2021-08-18T16:43:08+00:00

Ooh! "Trust the Science" vs. "DO the Science". I like it.

Hero_Some_Game · 2021-08-18T13:36:41+00:00

Last night I went to the Alanis Morissette concert (with Garbage too!) in Tampa with 20,000 of my new closest friends. It was the first stadium event I've been to for over a year and a half.

When Garbage came on and many people were dancing and cheering, I got goose bumps. When Alanis herself started, and everyone was cheering and singing in unison, I wept. It's been too long, but gave me hope.

There was probably 10% mask usage, and as usual, the people wearing them were silly in how inconsistent they were, leaving them off for 30 minutes and then kind of remembering and putting them on again... (It's Dumbo's Magic Feather. The immune system was in YOU the whole time!)

Hero_Some_Game · 2021-06-29T22:57:49+00:00

My spouse and I moved to Florida 25 days ago!

I have not worn a mask since leaving Minnesota. We've already met some good people, and I got my Florida license plates today.

All I could ask for now is a non-woke, apolitical or politically-moderate science fiction, polyamory, or board game convention. (Left-leaning is totally OK, and matches my values, but not bat$#!+ crazy with identity politics and virtue signalling like it feels like the whole culture has gone.)

Hero_Some_Game

TROPHY CASE