About 10 years ago I told my dad I was gay and living with the guy who’s now my fiance. He just kinda went “ok” and changed the subject to where he was working construction nearby where I lived. Honestly, it sounds weird, but it really worked in the context of everything and our relationship. I couldn’t imagine it being the sappy cliche just because of the type of guy he is.
He later met him and they get along great with each other to this day.
Wasn’t me but your story reminded me of my fiance on the bus a few years ago.
He was riding the bus with headphones on. All of a sudden he sees everyone on the bus start ducking under the seats except him. He’s like hm that’s weird what’s goin on. Like 5-10 seconds go by and he takes his headphones off and realizes someone was shooting a gun outside and a stray bullet went straight through the bus. Nobody was hurt.
I live in Pittsburgh. They don’t call it the rust belt for no reason. If you go to a junkyard you’ll see tons of perfectly working old Toyotas and Hondas as far as the engine and things go, but they’re all rusted out to the point of not being worth the repairs. This part of the country sucks for owning any car. Tons of potholes, snow, ice, salt, etc. A lot of roads are just fucked in this state. Can’t even avoid the potholes when your whole car’s suspension rumbles down the road the whole time. Highways are a little better but not much. There’s plenty of uneven roads on them too.
Sucks tryin to stick to older cars considering all this. Unless you get something out of state I guess
I’ve thought about selling my house and everything I own and skipping off to the other side of the world too, haha. But I’m 33 and want to move to Australia and work as an electrician in the mines. It’s 2 weeks on, 1 week off, they fly you in and out of the mines (FIFO), set you up with a free dorm, cafeteria, gym. We have a friend in Melbourne so we’d probably live there. The week off regularly sounds great if I wanted to hop around SE Asia and check out Vietnam for a week or something.
We currently live in Pittsburgh. I have a lot of experience in industrial electrical work and am fine with hard work and long 12 hour days over and over. But my future husband just works crappy food service jobs. He’s been working in a commercial kitchen, basically just like a tiny factory for grab and go food for small businesses around town. Idk how feasible it is for someone like him to immigrate to Australia without any kind of marketable skills or whatever they look at. He dropped out of high school when he was a teenager.
Skilled trades have been flushed with folks who are green and have no experience that they’re becoming very competitive to secure an apprenticeship and long-term employment. It can be tough finding something in plumbing or electrical with no prior experience. Even moreso in the unions. If more office-level workers start getting laid off and start competing for those jobs, it’ll be even harder to make the switch into something like that.
There’s a massive shortage for skilled journeymen and people with lots of experience. I love electrical work to death, but I hear “I’ll just be an electrician or plumber” a lot which grazes over the fact that any company training you is taking a hit for the first year or two of you working there.
Man there’s obviously some exceptions of really good shows and games but there was a ton of garbage shovelware type crap in the early 2000s in both mediums. Video games had tons of movie to game entries that were terrible, plenty of no-name games that were incredibly generic with bad mechanics or ripping off other more successful games, way too many sports and racing games, I could go on.
Older games really had more of a “spray and pray” approach where they developed so many more games and hoped to get people’s attention in stores rather than everyone knowing every detail about everything right as it launched like today. This had pros and cons for sure. The developers of GTA:San Andreas said that they had 2 years to make the game and they already had the engine from Vice City. They finished it and had so much more time they just started brainstorming new ideas and things they could put in, which does stand out looking back at it now.
This point could be said doubly so of the previous generations of games in the late 80s and 90s. Take a look at a list of SNES or Genesis games. There are hundreds if not thousands of just absolutely terrible sidescrolling platformers that are not worth anyone’s time. You walk, jump, and shoot or punch and they all play the same way.
TV I feel like was pretty bad in the 2000s as well. Cable TV was still the default method of watching shows, and that meant crappy sitcoms with laugh tracks, cop dramas like CSI, reality TV, and so on. I didn’t see the sopranos, which is arguably one of the best TV shows to ever exist and came from this era, until 2020 when I was 28 years old. Even if I wasn’t a kid back then, I didn’t know any other family who had HBO. Now everything is at everyone’s finger tips, going back decades if you do want to watch something old like the office or whatever. Back then I just had to sit through whatever was on TV, with commercials, or censored movies, or I’d have to watch something on DVD that I had already probably seen too many times.
Anyway this is getting kinda rambly, but all I’m getting at is nostalgia can be a helluva drug. There’s so much crappy media, games, tv, music, movies, whatever made all the time since art has ever been a thing. A lot of it sucked back then, and sucks now. And that’s fine. One day someone will be reminiscing about 2020’s games like Clair Obscur and saying stuff in the late 30’a suck lol. And there’s plenty of good games and shows coming out now, it all depends on your taste. I love a ton of indie games and anime for example. There’s so many good examples from all eras, and everything is more accessible than ever before in history.