I have somehow avoided Amazon all these years. It’s easy for me, nothing I require is connected to Amazon.

I’m sure there are aspects of the business that I can’t avoid that I don’t even know I’m being dragged into, but I don’t spend my money with them.

Anytime I can’t find something somewhere else, I just move on and forget about it.

The only times I’ve ever been bummed about it is when I’m working on some small project and the parts are half the price on Amazon. Most recently, it was parts for an arcade machine.

If I’m being inconvenienced, I don’t even know it.

I walked away originally when they acquired cdnow.com. I last visited the site when it began redirecting to Amazon.

I can’t imagine having something like this.

You know what kind of couples I have known who use it?

Yep. That kind. The constant accusation, constant fighting, constant chaos kind. The same kind who share a Facebook account and all that.

I guess my bias there would be that those would also be the kind of people who advertise it.

I was standing beside an old coworker one time when her husband called, “babe, don’t freak out when I start moving. The boss is sending me to harbor freight to pick up some things.”

I got a call from her in the middle of the night one time, “I’m sitting by the lake and I’m about to drive my car in and kill myself.”

She knew her husband didn’t like me so she thought I wouldn’t call him. Well, I called him. “That bitch is lying. Life 360 has her sitting at her mom’s house right now. She just fucking wants attention!”

Still, I called a friend and asked them to drive by and see. Yep. She was at her mom’s house.

As a parent, I didn’t want to mess my kids up and make them feel shame about natural things. I don’t know what the right way is, but I have tried to avoid that.

I have enough kids that I know some don’t do it early, some do.

My approach has been, “hey, that’s a private thing and no one here wants to be a part of it. Go to your room and shut your door.”

I have no idea if that’s right, and because of my own issues it doesn’t feel right, but that’s been my approach. I try to think about it logically and reasonably despite having to fight the feelings. My instinct was to say, “HEY! CUT IT OUT, THAT’S NASTY!!” All that did for me was give me an association with “nasty” and those feelings and all I had was my mind, and oh boy I wish I could erase the memory of the things I thought about as a kid.

My daughter is 16, and she’s overly open with me to a level that makes me uncomfortable because she isn’t ashamed of herself.

I also know that she will be healthy when she’s active because she feels comfortable talking to me.

She broke up with a girlfriend for pressuring her, and she told her boyfriend that she understands why he wants to do that and why he thinks about it, but she isn’t ready and if he can’t handle that he can go find a girlfriend who is on his level about it.

With my parents, you did not discuss such things. It was totally forbidden. As a result I had unprotected sex with multiple partners by the time I was 18 and I started when I was 13, started fooling around at about 9. I had some real weirdo adults in my life and I never talked to my parents about it because the thought of them knowing something so shameful about me was too heavy.

I had my first child at 16 years old. I do not believe that would have happened if I had access to education and I could have talked to my parents without feeling shame.

It feels like I’m going against my very nature when my daughter talks to me about things, but I grit my teeth and bare it, and she’s in a much safer and healthier place than I was at her age. She laughs and me because I blush and can barely look at her when she brings it up.

Maybe I’m doing one thing right in a sea of things I’m definitely getting wrong haha.

I believe we should feel shame about some things and that’s why we have to contend with it in the first place. We shouldn’t be ashamed of natural things though.

We’re here because of a long line of creatures and people banging. I don’t know why we freak out about it so bad.

Knowing is one thing, being caught cock in hand is another. :p

It was always there. ;)

I don’t understand how these kids get caught. They gotta be really slow or something.

I was caught 0 times as a teenager. My mom never found my porn.

My brother was caught a few times. My cousin was caught in the damn car on a family vacation with OTHER PEOPLE IN THE CAR just yanking his noodle under a blanket.

I was so cautious as a kid. I guess because I was caught and thoroughly shamed when I was about 4 years old. Maybe that’s why I never got caught when I was old enough for it to matter. That shame gave me a lifelong lesson.

I had a motion detecting toy dinosaur at the bottom of the stairs. When someone approached the stairs it would go, “raaaaaawr, raaaaaawr” and I’d be sitting at the foot of the bed reading a book by the time someone got upstairs.

If they suspected anything, didn’t matter. I was reading.

When I got high speed internet (as it was called in those days) I threw out the tapes and magazines. I had a separate hard drive I’d plug into my computer juuuuuust in case, and since I was always messing with and tearing into my computer, my mom never found anything. That drive had Linux, my mom was scared of Linux.

Now that I think about it, holy shit they fucked me up haha.

When they caught me as a little guy my mom said, “oh shamy, shamy.” And my dad said, “you keep messing with that thing and it’ll fall off and you’ll turn into a girl.” They spent the whole day giving me that, “oh you shameful creature” look.

Haha, man. Wow.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

It’s what I’d do if I were an ambitious, resource hoarding, ass pimple billionaire.

It’s obvious the way to Trump’s heart is to tell him he’s pretty and give him something .

Holy shit, this.

I’m constantly worried that what I’m seeing/hearing is fake. It’s going to get harder and harder to find older information on the internet too.

Shit, it’s crept outside of the internet actually. Family buys my kids books for Christmas and birthdays and I’m checking to make sure they aren’t AI garbage before I ever let them look at it because someone bought them an AI book already without realizing it.

I don’t really understand what we hope to get from all of this. I mean, not really. Maybe if it gets to a point where it can truly be trusted, I just don’t see how.

He did this last time too.

I was fortunately running top of the line hardware when Vista came out. I didn’t understand all the hate at all… until I sat down and did some work on my uncle’s computer with Vista Basic. Holy shit, even with all of the features that required better hardware removed from the OS, it was the slowest and most miserable experience I ever had on a computer. It was brand new and covered in stickers advertising Vista and it still wasn’t capable of running the damn OS.

That was true with nearly every computer I touched that had it on it.

Mine was awesome though. No complaints.

I haven’t used 11, but it sounds like they’ve done it again.

I had to do this today on my wife’s laptop. The settings menu just wouldn’t do it. It just sat there for a thousand years.

Oh no I don’t play games with money I don’t have. I’m ok losing what I already have though. Beats a lottery ticket.

I do not. I could probably qualify though.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose bud. That’s where I’m at in this moment. If I lose every penny I have I’m still poor. If I don’t, maybe I can get a start on a damn house or something.

I’ve been docking mine and using it as my primary pc. The only issue I’ve had is that I was able to play CSGO perfectly, and CS2 don’t do so good.

I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.

I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.

My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.

I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.

Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.

I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.

I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.

It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.

I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.

It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.

I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.

I exist because my mother told my father that she was taking birth control. My father hasn’t been a part of my life except on a few occasions where he wanted to be here and there, and I don’t hold a grudge. My mom proudly told me this when I was about 9. I don’t blame her either, she raised herself from the time she was 4 years old when her mother committed suicide. She did the best she could with what she had as a person with no education and no parents to guide her.

My father came for the birth of my oldest biological child. He came for a few Christmases. He showed up when I was going through a divorce and helped me fix a car for my now ex. He didn’t have to do any of that. I barely know him at all, and even though it bums me out from time to time, it is what it is.

Life is a mess for everybody haha.

Uh oh!

My tv is wonky as hell sometimes. I have to spray the volume button with contact cleaner from time to time or it turns itself up or down.

It’s fine other than that though haha.