southsamurai

One problem

Batteries.

I’ve used old devices as many things: security cameras, a form of intercom, digital picture frames, etc. The real problem is that the batteries eventually go bad, and become dangerous.

For the few devices that have realistically replaceable batteries, that’s no big deal, but how many of those are left now?

No thanks to the potential fire, I’ll pass. The few devices I have left that I can swap batteries out are becoming harder to find new batteries for as well, so that’s an issue beyond their anemic hardware (I’m talking really old tablets at this point)

Every time I go to my kid’s school, I am amazed at the difference between my day and now.

That time I went, there were kids just in pajamas and slippers. Not just one or two, dozens, and it wasn’t some special day.

Then there’s the dressier kids in lounge pants and whatever giant tshirt they pulled out of a drawer (or laundry basket) that were obviously their version of pajamas. Shit, one girl had very obviously rolled out of bed, thrown some leggings under her nightgown, slipped into crocs and jumped on the bus.

It’s pretty cool tbh. Just no fucks given for meaningless frippery unless the individual kid/family wants it. Most of the kids were relaxed, nobody giving them shit for the way they’re dressed, staff not even noticing at all. That’s the way it should be imo. Whatever gets the kids in their seats and keeps everyone relatively engaged.

Yeah, there were still plenty of jeans and t-shirt sorts, a few of the button up shirt variants, and a handful of clothes hounds. But nobody was giving anyone shit about the clothes. From what my kid says, that wasn’t just the case for the hour or so i was there that day.

We insist on clothes that are weather appropriate and acceptable for an emergency, but beyond that after seeing the norms there, we stopped giving a fuck.

Unless they’re fascists. Because punching nazis is a net positive for the world

Eh, it doesn’t start out about looks, based on my experience and talking with the serious lifters I used to lift with.

A lot of the guys that end up roided out like that don’t start with that look as the goal. Some do, yeah. The ones that do tend to come from a place of wanting to look like their fictional heroes (wrestlers lol), or from having looked up to previous body builders.

But a lot of them start out ranging low wanting to get strong. It starts because you can feel and see the progression from being a fairly normal strength to being the person people call when a fridge needs moved.

But you always hit a wall. How far you can go is mostly genetic, with nutrition being the next biggest factor. The way over that wall is hormones. You bypass your genetics and push.

Along the path of getting strong you end up seeing so much change in your body. And you’re getting all those move chemicals from pushing your body harder and harder. It turns into a form of addiction and part of the “fix” is seeing your work in your body.

So lifters start out getting strong and getting natural big as the goal. This kind of extreme, steroid driven body is what happens when that becomes an obsession.

Now, my ass was not willing to use steroids, so I didn’t get to this extreme. But I know guys, and a few gals, that did. I’ve never actually met anyone that started out wanting to go this far, but plenty that ended up there. But I can tell you from my personal experience that once you start feeling your body develop, the thought of maybe trying to go there is an easy one to have.

No bullshit, once I hit my personal wall power lifting, it was disappointing to not really be able to make major gains the way I could the first few years. And I was never into the bodybuilding side of things, and definitely wasn’t competitive.

Now, body dysmorphia also factors in. Can’t say otherwise because it’s a massive thing with the folks that go to this extreme. This guy might not see himself in the mirror the same way other people do. Tbh, at my peak, I sure as hell didn’t see myself accurately. There was still that kid inside my brain that was never strong enough, never big enough. I had to have my suits custom made, but I never saw myself as being as big as I was. My personal self view wasn’t as skewed as it gets with some of the serious guys that go to this extreme.

It isn’t that you don’t look in the mirror and see a lot of muscle, you do. It’s just that it never looks right. Again, my version of this was mild as hell, but you can’t imagine how often you’d see a dude like this, flexing into a mirror and saying something like “man, I just can’t get my pecs big. They’re so flat.” It can be so extreme a disconnection between self image and external reality that this dude could possibly think he’s too small still, that he needs to get bigger. I don’t know this guy, so please don’t think I’m speaking for him in specific, I’m coming from a general place.