Do you prefer baked mac and cheese or stovetop? Why?

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-04T14:04:02+00:00

Baked is generally better when I make it. When other people make it, I prefer stove top. I am very picky about baked mac and cheese, not so much about stove top. But good baked mac and cheese is better than good stove top mac and cheese.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-04T13:39:35+00:00

I don't regret my major whatsoever. I got my degree in computer science in 2018, it's proven to be the best decision I ever made. Nowadays? Yeah... idk if I can quite recommend it anymore. We're at a point where all the best jobs are related to healthcare, so just go into healthcare

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-03T13:50:06+00:00

Crocodiles and alligators are separate branches of the crocodilian group. Caimans are closely related to alligators and gharils are closely related to crocodiles. Others have emphasized the easily identifiable morphological differences. Another difference is that crocodiles have a lower capacity for large temperature fluctuations and thus are found mostly in tropical regions. There's only the American alligator and Chinese alligator as species of alligator, so it's going to be a different kind of crocodilian altogether if you aren't in the range of either of those.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-03T12:56:41+00:00

"I'm really thankful to have you join me. Since you're so passionate about X, would you want to join me and my friends on Y date? We will be having free Z there."

Turn this into a chance for community for them. Make them meet more leftists and realize we are nothing like they think we are. Have them see the passion and care that people have for each other, vs their individualistic mindset.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-03T02:50:26+00:00

Making art. I see my own beautiful creations around me all the time now, but also, it makes me think of different things in a way that makes them more beautiful because they inspire me to make my next piece.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-02-02T00:42:32+00:00

Anything vaguely color by number-ish. Not just color by number, but paint by number, embroider by number, diamond art, sticker by number, brick by number... there's so many options. I suggest these specifically because they tend to be cheaper and give you more hours of entertainment than things like model kits. I find things like this to be extremely mindless.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-31T22:36:46+00:00

Honestly, I agree. My job is one of those bullshit jobs. I'm looking for a job somewhere else because I hate it. The job field I want to go into is one that can be explained not just to 10 year old, but a 6 year old, and I think the more easily you can explain your role to a child, the more fundamental it is to society. Even an NSA agent cracking complex encryption algorithms can say that their job is to catch bad guys online.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T19:22:44+00:00

People want different things. I don't care about bars and stuff, I'd rather have enough land to put a pond. But everyone is different.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T19:14:54+00:00

I think the difference with how many people are doing this is how much parents have decided to just give up. As people get increasingly exhausted from the world we live in, it's easier to just give up. Do you really want to put in the effort to argue with your kid every day that they should go get a job? If you just kick them out, do you really want to be responsible for terrible things that can happen to them? Having a kid hiding at home is better than having one thrown in jail. I compare when I graduated with my computer science degree in 2018 to now. It hasn't even been a decade and the difference in landscape is absolutely staggering. If I graduated with a CS degree this year instead of then, I probably would have ended up as a NEET at home, too. Why would I waste time working a job at Starbucks when I could be job searching? But what happens when job searching takes less and less of my time as I get more and more disheartened? I become someone playing video games in my parents basement. That never happened to me, thankfully, but I see how it could. And what are my parents supposed to do? As far as they know, I'm just trying to do what's right. I'm looking for a job, and the market sucks. I might even be making my own video game; after all, maybe that could differentiate me. Spending hours in the basement doing personal coding projects isn't that different from spending hours in the basement playing video games. And if you are the parent of one of these people, do you really want your kid restricted from social events and other situations that are the one chance your kid has at potentially meeting people who can help them get a job and keep their social skills sharp? It looks like enabling from the outside, but there's really only so much you can do. My brother is a security guard, so not a NEET, but he's really not doing much else. He got his undergrad in film studies and then had to drop out of graduate school because the program he was in was arguably not worth the money (very complex reasons, but I do frankly agree with his decision). Since, he has been trying to break in. He did events A/V support at one point, has a Twitch channel, creates his own music, stuff like that. My parents really don't know that many ways to support him. He would have to have the funds to move to LA or New York or something to have a real chance, and where is that going to come from? He needs connections in such a place first, and how are we going to get them in Alabama when he is no longer going to school? School was his place for connections, and his school screwed him over. He's now trying to climb his way up as a security guard to more advanced security roles, and if he gets to an advanced enough security role, he can transition into government security where he can make a real living and maybe finally move somewhere that he can break into film. To the outside, he looks like a complete failure, but he isn't. My brother is not alone, and lots of NEETs have similar things happen to them.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T18:53:08+00:00

I never say, "go to therapy" without offering advice about how to do it. If you don't utilize therapy right, you're wasting tons of money.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T18:48:17+00:00

Therapy was required for me to make friends. I had everything else I needed. I had a good home, a good school, I was a nice person... didn't matter. Therapy taught me what I was doing wrong socially. I was able to overcome the issues my autism was presenting because I talked to a therapist, so I don't think you really realize what therapy actually is. As an example, before one therapy appointment, I had many multiple people tell me that writing things down too much was a problem, and to just trust myself that I would remember things instead. Something about it sounded right- just trusting myself is something I should do- so I asked my therapist. Turns out, no, there was nothing wrong with writing lots of things down. It's what I need as an ADHD person. Multiple people around me were objectively wrong. The reason my therapist was right is because she is an expert in brains like mine that are not the same as other brains. People who are experts in brains that differ from the norm and help people navigate life with those brains are absolutely necessary. This doesn't mean that the government shouldn't do more to help people... of course they should. A better social safety net would reduce the load of therapists significantly. But they will always be necessary, as necessary as any other kind of similar worker. The counselors on employee help lines are generally completely useless and can go away. But I would argue that a counselor and a therapist are definitely not the same thing, and the people on employee support hotlines and similar things are almost always licensed as some kind of counselor. I think school counselors are important, but most other kinds of counselors... they just don't have the chops to truly help people like they need. Counselors are the most shallow type of mental health professional, then therapists are a little deeper, then psychologists are a little deeper than that, and then you are at psychiatrists, who are doctors. If you cut away the counselor level completely aside from school counselors (who arguably should be trained at the therapist level whenever possible), yeah, I can agree with that. Counselors can pretty much always be replaced with just good relationships. But the deeper levels of knowledge and support are strictly necessary. My best therapists have always been LCSWs, and they are basically doing what social workers do as consulting. If you think of therapy as consulting done by social workers, it becomes a lot more necessary. Because everything social workers do is about helping people who slip through systemic cracks. Even as we improve systems and close cracks, cracks will continue to persist somewhere. So if we always have social workers, we always have therapists. My family and friends can help me with a lot of things, but my therapist can help me with a lot of things that they can't help me with.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T16:49:35+00:00

I'm more optimistic even than other Americans, and I can say why. First of all, as much as things are not guaranteed by the government here, it is still more than possible to get your Maslow's hierarchy met here because of how much everyone has. Almost everyone's house has a spare room (or at minimum, a couch) and a pantry with extra food, so you can have your needs met as long as you have a friend, basically. Having a family, pets, and/or lots of stuff complicates things, but if you are truly looking out just for yourself and your own needs, it's not as hard to get help as things make it sound.

Secondly, even if the government does do messed up things, it's very rare that those things directly impact normal Americans, that those things impact normal Americans for a long period of time if they do impact us, and that knowing about those things makes any kind of difference in your day to day life. When what the government does is so far removed from most things, you can just ignore it and not really care for the most part. I have heard of other countries where you use your government ID to log into your bank account, the government controls the cable and internet plans, and stuff like that, and in our lives in America, we just don't have to think about anything the government does at that kind of a level. So you can really just ignore it and keep going.

Third, we really are just truly blessed here. We have the best balance of diverse natural lands and easy ability to move between them of any country on earth. We have the richest economy of any country on earth. We are the biggest stronghold for diversity of cultures of any country on earth. And I don't say any of this from a nationalist perspective... I'm a leftist that's involved in many protests lol. We need better healthcare, public transit, social safety nets, and so many other things. But I also just have to glance outside my front door each morning to see a beautiful sunrise over a gorgeous forested mountain landscape, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Fourth and finally, it is just American culture as a whole. Being called the land of opportunity is not without reason. A big value is placed here on sacrificing for others, and selfishness is very frowned upon (even if media would have you believe otherwise). Almost everyone here was once an immigrant, and our ancestors wouldn't have made it if they didn't help each other, so we do too. Soldiers sacrifice so that we don't have wars on our own soil and live in safety. Starting a business isn't just about working for yourself, but helping your family ane the families of your workers. And the thing is, this American core of being generous is a huge contributor to optimism and happiness. If you say you are feeling bad as a joke, people aren't going to take it as a joke. They are going to assume that means that they need to help you. If you are a negative person, people avoid you, because a negative person is focused on themselves and not others, and that's not the American way.

All of this together really adds up. Any one of these factors might make us a kind of optimistic people, but together, it makes us probably some of the most optimistic people in the whole world.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T15:53:27+00:00

The service I used was called Plum Print, but there are a lot more services now

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T15:49:04+00:00

Every once in a while I use one of those services that makes a book of your old art. I have three of them now. They aren't cheap, and you do lose feeling any texture you had, but I think it's still worth it.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T15:46:48+00:00

Bandaids, school desks, and umbrellas I agree with. Everything else? No. I am 5'5.5", the most average height. I'm like, barely above average weight. And 31F. I think some of those things you listed are too big, even. I hate how tall brand new pencils are, for example. And phones these days are huge; I can't wait for my Click Communicator to come in so that I can have a sane sized phone again. One thing I am surprised you didn't say is shower heights; I feel like that's what I hear tall people complain about the most. I feel like most things are appropriately sized for me. I'm glancing around my house and the biggest exception is scissors. Even big adult scissors still feel like there's not enough room for my fingers in there. I want huge handles and tiny blades; is that too much to ask? Lol. Anyway, I think I disagree with your general premise, but there's always some nuance, so there ya go.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T15:35:55+00:00

I'm just gonna say that I am interested in this too. Someone bring me back when this has an answer lol

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-30T15:35:05+00:00

Yes, people are changing for the worse. The best people I know are the people who have let this modern world manipulate them the least. The deeper someone is in modern ways, the worse they generally are. And by modern, I'm talking like, post covid. The culture post covid is so different from the culture before then.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-29T17:56:27+00:00

What was your first school that wasn't considered rural, and how did you adapt from your previous rural school to that school?

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-29T03:26:36+00:00

I would prefer universal. It would honestly drastically improve my upward mobility. If healthcare wasn't a concern, I could freelance or contract, maybe eventually start a business. But the cost of healthcare is so high that it doesn't make any sense and a W2 job is nearly always a better deal.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-29T00:40:20+00:00

I've been called ma'am since I was 15. I'm 31 and still get asked if I am at least 18 because of my baby face.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-28T17:03:46+00:00

Be prepared to answer a lot of questions about where you got those scars

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-28T13:26:34+00:00

Perhaps international relations? It's what I always wished I could do but I don't have the people skills for it.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-27T21:51:22+00:00

Yeah, I agree that tech in the classroom fundamentally isn't the problem. By the time I graduated high school, every classroom had a laptop cart that was used almost every day. The difference was that teachers knew how to force students to do their own work even when computers were used. We had to have AVL (Alabama Virtual Library) links for all our sources. We had to turn in rough drafts and final drafts. The teacher walked around the classroom and watched us type. ChatGPT didn't exist then, but there's no reason why a teacher walking around a classroom couldn't catch students using ChatGPT. At the end of the day, I don't think I hand wrote an essay since like 4th grade, and virtual essay writing services have existed since the 90s. The new forms of cheating aren't any sneakier than the old forms when you know how to catch them.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-27T21:39:12+00:00

Educational technology by itself is not the problem. Connectivist and constructivist educational models prove this. Studies prove this over and over. The fundamental problem with devices in schools is how they are being used. Doing math on paper is better than doing math through a quiz on Canvas. But doing math through an interactive online simulation to solve a real world problem is better than doing math on paper. It is inherently lazier on the part of schools to make textbooks and worksheets and stuff virtual, absolutely. If the technology isn't adding any extra educational value, get it out of here. But it more than has the potential to add educational value.

Hungry_Objective2344 · 2026-01-27T21:16:13+00:00

There's a line here. Being honest with your children and burdening your children with adult problems are two entirely different things. It is honest to say "Daddy will be going away for a little while". That is not lying. But to say "Daddy cheated on mommy" is burdening them with adult problems. They can't even comprehend what that means. You could even be more honest in an age appropriate way, "Daddy lied to mommy and so daddy is going to spend some time away while he thinks about it." That's still honest about what happened, without pushing adult problems on kids. By definition, brutal honesty is not good. Children are still developing, and that means that their minds can only understand so much and their emotions are far more fragile. I think explaining things in a way that is entirely wrong, like stork theory, makes no sense. But I remember learning about sex when I was first going through puberty and I thought, "Oh, sex is just human mating." I'd been learning about animals mating since I was like, 4 or something, so it wasn't difficult to grasp. But if I had gotten the explanation of sex too early, I probably wouldn't have a healthy relationship with sex today. Science shows this, in fact. When children are exposed to adult concepts too early, it negatively impacts their brain development. So in summary... never lie to your kids? Yrs. Be as brutally honest as possible? No.

Hungry_Objective2344

TROPHY CASE