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Everyone knows that sometimes it's all too easy to scroll through walls of text, and get angry at someone for posting something, and forget that there's a real actual person there. It's too easy to create a mental caricature of the human being behind the screen, and imagine them to be an evil monster, when it's more likely than not that they and you have much more in common than things to disagree. I've created this thread because I thought it'd be a good idea to have a central place where D&D regulars can introduce themselves and humanize themselves, attaching a story to the username and avatar. Share whatever you feel comfortable sharing. I'm hoping that it goes a long way to helping cool heads and building empathy for your fellow posters. And perhaps be an interesting thread all on its own! Thread Rules
I'll start. I'm DrSunshine, a Vietnamese-American who grew up his whole life in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the East Bay side. I was born in 1988. Growing up, we were probably what you'd now call "House poor" - we had a house, but most of my parents expenses and wealth were tied up entirely in it. Even back in the good times, it wasn't cheap to live in the Bay Area! We never had a car, but thanks to the pretty good public transit infrastructure around here, we got by just fine. I grew up and went to UC Berkeley for my undergraduate degree, studying earth sciences because I wanted to get a job in climate change. I graduated right into the recession, and nobody was hiring for anything, especially not a newly-minted 20 year old with no job experience, and I didn't get into any of my choices for grad school. The Recession caught up with my dad's business and soon the home payments began to catch up with us. I can remember -- being the family's "computer expert" -- helping my dad for hours trying to get loan modifications and forebearances in order to keep the banks from foreclosing on our home (thanks Obama  ). But as it was, they foreclosed on our wonderful Berkeley home anyway, and we moved to a little apartment building in a city five miles north, where we live to this day, four people to a two-bedroom apartment that costs more than $2000 a month. I spent some years wandering, trying to find jobs and internships. I got a "compromise" graduate degree in library science just so I could get a safe municipal government job in libraries. In 2014 I managed to finally get one, a part-time job, and managed to work my way slowly up. But because of senior-managerial idiocy and mismanagement, I was never able to get a full-time library job! In late 2019, I finally made a lateral move into the private sector and got a good paying full time job at a Silicon Valley tech company, where I work to this day. It's decent, and a whole lot less stressful than my public sector job, and I finally make a decent income to save for a house for my family. In the meanwhile, I've done a lot of reading and learning. I read Marx and Kropotkin. I'm really into science, ecology, long-term survival, and existential risk; one of the things I'm grateful for in my undergraduate degree was getting an appreciation for deep time, thinking about the world in terms of millions of years. I was always on the left side of things, but my family's experience during the Recession has soured me on capitalism for life. In 2020, after Bernie lost on Super Tuesday, I joined the East Bay DSA. While I'm still learning, hopefully I'll be able to contribute something to society that will decrease our chances of going extinct this century. That's me! Who are you?
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Mar 4, 2021 16:22
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:13 |
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This is cute, I'm mostly a lurker but I guess I'll post just to bump this. I'm BougieBitch, a white gay from Indiana who hosed off out of the state as soon as humanly possible. Both of my parents were professors, so I had a privileged upbringing as far as education went, but my dad died when I was still in elementary school and I spent basically all of my school years coping with depression and ADHD. I got good grades despite that, and was able to get the National Merit Scholarship, which, at the time, was good for full tuition at a few institutions still, so I took the chance to move out to the northeast to get a degree in biology. However, full tuition didn't include room and board, and my mom refused to cosign a loan or otherwise help me pay for the other expenses, which I had been paying for out of the remnants of my dad's Social Security survivor payouts, so I transferred to my hometown college where I ended up paying less for (discounted) tuition, an apartment, and food than I would have for any one of the three. I finished in another year and moved back out to Boston to escape the sucking void of life and culture that is the Midwest, but I didn't manage to find a job that used my degree and I had to couchsurf for a bit while trying to find an apartment that would lease to me with no income stream. Literally the day I finally was able to move in somewhere I got a call from my stepdad telling me my mom had committed suicide by ODing on pain pills and so basically everything went back to square one. It's now 5 years later and I struck out on each of a series of attempts to become employable (couldn't get into grad school because I didn't have lab experience, had a terrible time with a teacher credentialing program, and just finished getting a second degree in computer science right into the middle of the pandemic), but things are mostly stable now cuz I got lucky with dating and am now married to someone who can support my dumb depressed rear end while I try to get my life sorted. I'd consider myself pretty leftist in terms of policy preference, but I tend to butt heads with the doomers and anti-incrementalists. Part of that is due to good experiences working within the system to get what I needed on the state level with Medicaid and on the national level with my dad's SS benefits, which obviously isn't typical for most posters/Americans. I also tend towards wonkish policy due to being from a family of eggheads, and I pay the closest attention to education, healthcare, and the Supreme Court. The threads I most regularly frequent are USPol, the Coronavirus thread, and the SC thread, though I also glance at the Israel/Palestine thread when it moves up to the first page and I've started reading the Poliwonks thread lately. Right now I'm working with a mutual aid org in my area to try to get food distributed to the unemployed and undocumented people in my city, which has been a lot more rewarding than repeatedly slamming my head into a wall with job apps. I'm hoping companies will start hiring more soon though, so I can at least have something on my resume before I'm 30. Fingers crossed!
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Mar 5, 2021 16:44
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Yay somebody replied.  BougieBitch posted:This is cute, I'm mostly a lurker but I guess I'll post just to bump this. Man that's rough. Sympathies. Glad to see you're stable and have help from your partner. Good luck with the job hunt! 
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Mar 5, 2021 19:04
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I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 13, 2021 19:07
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I'm Owlofcreamcheese, one of the most disliked/"ignored" posters on SA. In real life I grew up in rural Maine, was a stereotypical "gifted child" and went to school for computer science, then due to major anxiety/panic disorder didn't dare to move anywhere that had any actual computer jobs so ended up moving to even more rural maine and becoming the "technology coordinator" of more and more absurdly tiny and rural schools. Down to a three room schoolhouse with less than 30 kids total and up to one with 350 kids. At some point I didn't really have the same sort of anxiety anymore but still stayed in rural maine and was going stir crazy, so I started traveling as much as I could. Which was given the fake premise that I was going to "pet every cat on earth". So I've gone to quite a few countries over the years and pet a cat on every continent that has one. Politically I think the forums thinks of me as a centrist. But I don't think that is true. I think I grew up in a rural area, work in an even more rural area and have been all over the world and meeting a lot of different people feels like it has made me very focused on the idea everyone has their own perspective and thinks they are the good guy. So I feel like I am often sticking up for a "chud" as a person, without thinking the 'chud' idea is any good. (I've even gotten probations for saying how much I dislike the word chud as a general term outside using it for a particularly personally vile person.) Basically, I can go to a country and see statistically the majority of people I walk past are homophobic or antiabortion, opinions I think are really truly vile, but also see they aren't inhuman monsters, but also not see them as silly little children either, they are the product of how they live, as is the people in our country, as is everyone, as am I. So I tend to go to bat for (groups) of bad people as people, which is often interpreted as not feeling sufficiently outraged at their actually bad ideas or supporting their bad opinion or behavior. And I'll also argue against ideas that put "us" as being in a privileged position of virtue beyond just being factually correct.
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Mar 13, 2021 23:55
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I'm a horse, of course.
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Mar 14, 2021 00:19
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I'm a nobody. A statistic. Supported housing, diabetic, lymphedema, depression, officially marked with autism, overweight, stubborn, lonely, very much a beneficiary of the support system in place, read Private Eye, college drop-out, mixed race, male, vaguely distrustful of political parties("They're all alike-they don't care, they don't listen, and convert other people, even those who might want to help, into them"), political labels(Left, Right, islamo-socialist whatever. 'Just' stop handing the money to your mates/masters in business and fund the services). Don't go out much even before the Pandemic. Don't spend much, exactly. A lost drifting useless sort of person. I try to vote, but I tend to vote randomly because of distrust that any choice will mean anything. Vaguely concerned about lots of things, but lack the will and desire to do much. Just sit and do the same things over and over, or nothing at all. I don't matter, and I know it. Bloodly fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 15, 2021 |
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Mar 15, 2021 22:30
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:13 |
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Bloodly posted:I'm a nobody. A statistic.   Hope things look up for you soon, friend. Don't be afraid to check the C-SPAM mental health thread for resources.
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Mar 16, 2021 05:58
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