cobysev

I used to use Gboard. I still do, but I used to as well.

It used to be my default. Every time I got a new android device, I would immediately install Gboard before doing anything else.

But lately, it’s been garbage. It’s been getting words wrong that I never had problems with previously. It randomly capitalizes normal words in the middle of sentences and I can’t seem to train it not to do that. Like “Ever” is the standard capitalization now. I need to manually fix it every time I use that word.

It’s been forgetting my name, which is annoying because I have a very unique first and last name and I had previously trained it to swipe my name.

It’s also just sticking with variations of a suggested word instead of giving me words in the same swipe area to select. Like if I swipe “food” and it autocorrects with “good,” my options to correct the autocorrect are things like “goodness,” “goody,” “God,” etc.

I’m trying to de-Google my life right now, so finding a new digital keyboard seems like a good idea. I’m gonna try some of the suggestions in this thread. I am definitely NOT recommending Gboard.

Thinking in terms of words and sentences always felt really slow and tiring, so I took the “picture is worth 1,000 words” metaphor literally and just visualize thoughts instead of using words. I could spend a few seconds/minutes piecing together a scene or conversation with words, or I could just instantly see it in my mind and have an innate understanding of the concept or situation, almost immediately.

Of course, this makes it harder for me to communicate verbally (especially since I’m an introvert), so I’ve had to spend years practicing conversations out loud. And since I think in terms of images, I’m basically translating visuals to words every time I open my mouth. So I can be a bit awkward and fumble over words sometimes. I spent a lot of my youth just lost in my own head, because dealing with the real world was like trying to translate a foreign language in real time. It was exhausting, so I was just the quiet kid growing up. Kept to myself, for the most part, and just absorbed information about my surroundings.

In the novel Hannibal Rising, they explain Lector Hannibal’s brilliant mind as a sort of visual hallway, with many rooms branching off of it. Any time he needs information, he takes a mental stroll down the hall and into the various rooms, where he’s filed away all sorts of knowledge. It’s how he can recollect fine details about almost everything he’s exposed to; he visualizes filing it away in a particular room in his mind, so he can go back to retrieve it anytime he wants.

I always loved that concept of a visual recollection, but I feel it’s too complicated a visual for myself in particular. It takes time to take that mental stroll down a hallway and go through files in my mind, so I keep it simpler and try to just jump right to the visual I need. If I can’t find it, then I can’t find it. Trying to keep mental files of everything just seems like way too much work for me, even if it would work as a shortcut to memory recollection.

When puberty first struck me (about 25 years ago now), I found myself in a strange battle for control over my mind. I felt split in two directions: my intellectual side, which I felt was my true self. And my instinctual self; the impulses that tried to betray the strict moral compass I had in place. Almost a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing, now that I think about it.

I actually had a mini-struggle with this concept of a mental “self” when I was in elementary school. I was obsessive about details and had to do things in a particularly structured way. But I noticed that my peers were very lax about details and just did the bare minimum to accomplish tasks, sometimes very messily. It bothered me, and I spent several weeks agonizing over whether I should relinquish control and just be a messy, disorganized person like my peers, or if I should keep suffering under my mental structure and discipline. I didn’t want to stop hyperfixating on minor details, but I felt like life would be less stressful if I could just give up trying and go with the flow. Little did I know I was already suffering from ADHD, even way back then. I wasn’t even diagnosed until I was 37 years old.

But as I started to mature both physically and mentally, that split between being “normal” and being “organized” became my instinctual and intellectual sides, and I spent many years fighting to hold true to my morals and personal beliefs. ADHD won in the end, and I refused to give in to my instinctual impulses all my life. And the older I get, the easier it is. As my hormones and testosterone cool off with age, I get less impulsive drives. I’m more careful and more patient, with less effort.

In regards to OP’s mental “depths”… I don’t like to avoid topics just because they give me a negative vibe or emotion. I’m a realist, and I’ve always wanted to understand the world I live in, including the good and bad. I don’t want to trick myself into a false understanding of the world; I want to see it as it truly is, so there’s no misunderstanding a situation I find myself in.

So unlike OP, who has layers of their mind where they tuck away negative thoughts, I prefer to process and deal with them up front, come to some level of understanding, and then file them away. Once I’ve processed it, then it doesn’t hurt me as much in the future and I’m able to deal with it in the moment without freezing up or suffering from emotional reactions when I least expect it.

It makes me more adept at handling real-world situations as they come at me. Which was really handy when I served in the US military. When you’re being attacked by an enemy force, you don’t have time to be horrified at the carnage around you; you need to be present in the moment and focused on the next step to survival. If something truly shocking happens, I can set that thought aside while I focus on what needs to be accomplished first. Once everything’s said and done, then I can sit down and process that shocking situation I dealt with.

TL;DR - I visualize thoughts instead of speaking or forming words in my head, because it’s much faster. Also, my ADHD mind is a battlefield, wrestling for organization over impulses. ALSO also, I’m a realist who prefers to process everything up front, good and bad, instead of just tucking away negative thoughts and emotions and not dealing with them.

Meh, don’t feel confined to the sidewalk. Be adventurous. There’s a path to the left there, where others have continued their walk.

My pet peeve is when a show or movie ends and they immediately try to play a trailer for another show. I actually enjoy reading the credits! Or maybe I’m looking for the mid- or post-credits scenes. Either way, they give me like 10 seconds or less to cancel the next preview.

Oh man, since setting up my Plex server, I almost never use streaming services anymore. I mostly just keep them because my wife is obsessed with true crime shows and I don’t have any of those on my Plex server.

So it’s totally fine to chug a beer, huff some glue and eat a can of cat food to help you fall asleep; As long as you otherwise eat healthy.

I see you, Charlie Day.

Yeah, I was pretty jaded by the end of my career. Couldn’t wait to retire, which is why I left as soon as I qualified for retirement. I served exactly 20 years and 6 days.

I only made it to Technical Sergeant (E-6), but it was my ideal rank. I had enough rank and authority to manage personnel and resources, but I was also the technical expert and could get down on the ground level and do the work alongside my Airmen and NCOs. All career fields operate differently, but my IT field specifically didn’t allow Senior NCOs to do the job. They were upper-management; they always got put behind a desk and made to do paperwork, pass down orders, and oversee projects.

I didn’t want that for myself, so I stopped trying to promote once I made TSgt. I expected I’d have to keep working once I retired, so I wanted to stay technical and keep my IT certifications and experience strong, so I could transition into a high-paying gig on the outside.

Little did I know that I’d earn that coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating. Now my medical and dental costs are covered for life and my monthly VA check is bigger than my pension, so I’m essentially making a little bit more money than when I was serving, just to sit on my ass all day. So… yeah, I’m enjoying that hard-earned freedom right now.

I tried the smoothies route once, about 2 years ago. I bought a Ninja blender, so I could make a personal smoothie to-go and not have to clean up a separate blender every time I made it.

Turns out I suck at making smoothies. I thought it’d be simple. Just throw some frozen fruits in a blender, along with some ice and a liquid like milk or something to help it mix. But that was horribly bland. I tested a bunch of other recipes online that also mixed in kale, honey, flavored protein powders, and/or other ingredients and they also came out weird.

I eventually found one recipe I liked that a friend recommended. But by that point, I was kind of burnt out by the whole thing. I only found one good recipe overall, and hunting online to test more recipes was getting to be a chore. This was supposed to be quick and easy! And now it’s consuming too much of my time, just trying to figure it out.

So… my blender has been collecting dust in my kitchen for the past couple years now.

I served in the US military. I was in the Air Force, but my profession was IT, so I spent my whole service working as a sysadmin.

You can officially retire and collect a pension after only 20 years served. I joined at 18, so I retired at 38 years old. Normally, a 20-yr pension isn’t enough to fully retire on, but I got a bit messed up during my service. The VA gave me a 100% disability rating, which includes a monthly pay bigger than my pension! Plus. My wife also served and was medically discharged with a 100% disability rating as well. So she gets the same medical benefits and pay as I do (minus a pension).

With all three sources of passive income, we can live without working. We’re not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but we pull in enough to live comfortably and have all our basic needs met.

Like I said, I could go back into the IT field and double my current income (or more), but then I’d be stuck working all the time again, and I don’t want to do that. The military was a 24/7 gig for 20 years. “Service Before Self” was one of our core values; we always had to prioritize the mission over our personal lives, and we could be recalled to work any time, day or night. So it’s nice to actually have some “me time” now, where no one can make me go anywhere or do anything. Not looking to go back to work and give that up so soon.

I did work in IT, but now I’m retired young. I could go back to work and make double my income, but I just don’t wanna. I’d rather have less income with a stable, comfortable life and the freedom to do whatever I want every day, than spend all day stuck in a job just to have no free time to enjoy the extra money I’d be bringing home.

Retired at 38 and living childless with his wife in the countryside… What will he do with the rest of his life? #7 may surprise you.

When I was a child, my mother had to travel to Kentucky for work and I told everyone who asked that she was at “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

My dad pointed out where Kentucky was on the map, and I almost immediately saw the chef and pan in the state shapes. I’ve never forgotten where Kentucky was since then.

Unless it was translated in the '90s and before. A lot of early manga translations, they just digitally flipped the pages so they were a mirror image to the original manga, then added English text in the bubbles, which were now facing left-to-right.

I specifically remember Ghost in the Shell and Akira were flipped for American reading order. Maybe Battle Angel Alita too? I bought the English-translated books, but had to find fan translations online to read it in its original orientation.

Fun fact: Ghost in the Shell (the first volume) actually had a couple pages of an explicit lesbian threesome on a yacht, which were edited to a few girls hanging out in bathing suits on a yacht for the American release. Too spicy for '90s American sensibilities.

I don’t know exactly when SpongeBob SquarePants first released, but I was about 19 when I first discovered it. I was working night shift in the US Air Force and my fellow night shift crew discovered it was playing on TV every night, so we watched it pretty much every night. We worked a 24-hr IT help desk, and no one called us at night.

I just turned 40 last month.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

Electricity still needs a specifically built medium to pass through before it can form a consciousness, though. You can’t just send electricity through a tree and expect the tree to suddenly become conscious. Electricity is just a key ingredient of consciousness, not the full picture.

Bodies have neutral pathways that allow electricity to simulate consciousness if regulated properly. Same with computers and circuitry.

This is actually my life right now. I retired from the US military at 38 years old and received a pension which I will collect monthly for the rest of my life. On top of that, they messed me up enough that I got the coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating from the VA. So I’m getting free medical and dental for life, plus a monthly paycheck from the VA that’s bigger than my pension. My wife also got the same VA deal (she was actually medically separated from the military), so we have double the VA benefits coming in.

All this passive income means we don’t have to work for the rest of our lives. I just turned 40, and after spending the last couple years getting settled back into civilian life, I’m starting to invest my free time into hobbies and projects.

My father just passed away a few months ago and I inherited his house (my childhood home) and its 6 acres of property. My dad didn’t take care of the house or land (he was a bit of a hoarder), so I’m working on fixing up the house and cleaning up the property. That takes up a lot of my free time during the summer.

I wanted to get involved in my community, so I’m on the parks committee and communications committee for my local township, where I help to improve our local parks and trails, and ensure information about our local area and its events is disseminated to all our residents.

I’ve been playing a lot of video games lately. I have a steam library of over 3,400 games and I’ve been picking through my library, trying to discover hidden gems that I’ve missed. My library is so huge because I’ve been a Humble Bundle subscriber for a long time now, so I get nearly a dozen games a month. I also play online co-op games with some old childhood friends of mine every week.

My wife and I picked up Duolingo again recently and we’re trying to learn a foreign language. I’m juggling both Japanese and Norwegian right now. I learned some basics of Japanese when I was stationed there 2 decades ago and I really love the language, so I’m hoping to master it. Plus, I have living descendants of my ancestors who still live in Norway and I’d like to communicate in their language one day instead of forcing them to use English to communicate with me. I also took 4 years of French in high school, and I was stationed in Germany for a couple years, so I have both of those languages cued up to learn if/when I get bored of my first two.

When I was 13, I discovered I was a prodigy at the piano. I taught myself how to play because I heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and really wanted to be able to play it myself. My wife is actually sore about it because her bachelor’s degree required that she take 4 years of piano lessons… and I’m still better than her at piano, without ever having a single lesson. Unfortunately, I haven’t touched a piano in nearly 2 decades, so all my skill has gone to waste. So I bought an electric piano recently and plan to re-learn how to play. In my childhood, I had to read sheet music and sort of figure things out myself, but in today’s world, there are all sorts of training and tutorial programs and videos online that I can use, so I imagine it’ll be super easy to get back into it.

My wife and I watch a ton of movies and TV shows. If we’re ever tired and just don’t want to be productive for a day, we’ll just sit on the couch and binge shows or movies all day. When we’re extra lazy, we’ll order DoorDash so we don’t have to cook. We live in the countryside, about a 15 minute drive from the nearest town, so it’s easier to order DoorDash than head into town for food some days. We always tip extra for the drivers, because we know our home is out of the way for them.

When I used to work, I always looked forward to the weekends. But now that I’m retired, I actually find myself hating the weekends and looking forward to weekdays. On the weekends, it’s always so busy in town. So many people running errands, eating out with their families, partaking in local events, crowding parks and trails, etc. But during the weekdays, everyone’s at work, so the town is quieter. Sometimes I like to go downtown and sit in a coffee shop or restaurant for a few hours and just idly browse my phone or read a book. Or go for a walk or bike in one of our parks and just enjoy the peaceful nature. Or browse some stores, knowing it’s just me and the shop owner. I’m not bumping into other customers, I can chat with store owners, etc. I’m starting to understand why old people like to chat up employees so much. It’s kind of nice when it’s not busy.

As a 100% disabled vet, I get free passes to all national, state, and county parks, and there’s a public park with a beach just a couple miles from my home, so I go there in the summer to swim and try to build my strength back up. It’s especially nice on weekdays because there’s no one there. I can swim laps and not worry about bumping into people. And since it’s just down the road from my house, I can head over there anytime, all summer long.

I have a few other hobbies and projects on the back burner. A buddy of mine wants to build furniture and I’ve always been interested in woodworking, so we’ve talked about maybe starting up a workshop in my garage. Plus, I was a pro at electrical engineering stuff in my high school years, so I’d be interested in learning more about that field. My house is in rough enough shape, my wife and I have been talking about just tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch, so we’re currently designing our dream home right now to see if that’s a feasible project. We have enough land that we’re interested in learning how to garden. Ideally, being able to live almost completely off our own produce. I’d also like to set up a giant solar panel array in our back field, so we don’t have to pay much (if anything) for electricity anymore.

Plus a bunch of other little interests that I want to indulge in over time. In the meantime, I don’t have much of a schedule. I go to sleep whenever I’m tired and I get up whenever I naturally wake. I’m a night owl, so that means I’m usually up most of the night and then sleep until almost noon most days.

I dunno what else… I guess I’m just living in the moment now, trying to focus on what makes me happy each day and not worry about trying to be productive or accomplished. I did all that when I was working, and now I can just focus on being comfortable. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that I have no commitments outside of my control. My wife wants to go back to work one day, but I think I’m done. I much prefer the ability to plan my own days on a whim and not get tied down with long-term commitments. Every day is an adventure that I get to choose.

Yeah, that’s the one. Since I didn’t qualify for it, I didn’t pay much attention to it. They always just told us it’s kind of like a 401K, where you contribute up to a certain amount and the govt matches your contribution.

If you have a government job, pensions are still very much a thing.

I just retired from a government job 2 years ago (US military). I received a pension, but only because I was grandfathered into the old pension plan. The military stopped giving out pensions in 2017. They switched to the BRS (Basic Retirement System), which is basically their version of a 401K.

When they switched, they gave all service members with less than 12 years of service the option to switch to the BRS or stick with the old pension program. Anyone who joined after the switch doesn’t get a choice. They’re automatically enrolled in the BRS.

I had 15 years of service at the time, so I didn’t qualify for BRS. It wouldn’t have benefited me anyway; there’s no way I could’ve saved up enough money to retire on in my 5 remaining years. I much prefer my monthly direct deposit for the rest of my life.

I remember when this meme was about the early '90s. I just turned 40 like a month ago. Now I just feel super old.