Perhaps unusually, I plan to take up gaming when I’m older, having never seriously tried it. I’m 48. I work in IT and I’m a nerd for retro computing, but beyond 16-bit platform shooters and Lemmings, I have barely dipped my toe into gaming culture. At work, I feel like an Irishman who’s never tried Guinness.

I’ve avoided it for two reasons. One is a mental block: a strange and unjustified prejudice against gaming culture. In 90s rural Scotland, where I was raised, you had to fight hard for your place in the social pecking order. I enjoyed football, but my friends were nerds, and I preferred their company to that of the jocks, so I chose my tribe early.

When puberty hit hard, I was already at a disadvantage by not being into sports. I loved my Atari ST, but I was socially aware enough to know that that definitely wasn’t going to attract girls. Fortunately, I also loved music. Nirvana was getting big, and I was hooked. Drinking, smoking, and playing in bands were my thing, and they held strong social currency for a self-conscious kid.

As a result, an almost pathological fear of being judged kept me from getting involved. I missed the whole GTA thing and, except for a bit of Portal, never bothered with it.

I also know that I’m quite prone to addiction, so if I were into gaming, it would eat my life.

So, when I do finally retire and find I’m unable to do much, that’s when I’ll jump on. I’ll be the oldest noob in town and I’m kind of looking forward to it.

I’m a Brit, and personally, I think a lot of the staples we are weirdly defensive of are not that exciting. A Sunday roast? Sure, it’s probably associated with family and comfort or whatever, but give me Thai, Mexican, Italian, Japanese food, etc., over it any day.

That said, the two I will defend to the grave are a decent fish and chip supper and an English/Scottish breakfast.

Here in the UK, I lease our EV. It’s £240 per month and electricity costs £30. Prior to that, I was spending £200 pm on fuel and paying thousands in garage bills to keep my 5-year-old generic family car on the road. The drive is better by an order of magnitude, it’s got insane torque, and I charge at home. I have no skin in the game; the decision for me was purely economical, and the benefits I’ve mentioned are more like a perk.

The only problem I’ve had with the EVs we’ve been leasing for 5 years now, is unsolicited criticism from EV haters. They seem to ignore the fact that I’ve been driving various diesel and petrol vehicles for decades. If my own lived experience of EVs was less rewarding than my previous ICE ownership I’d switch back. It’s not like a football team that I’m wedded to. They’re just generally better cars in terms of driving, torque, maintenance, cost to run and basically every metric that matters to me as a driver. Quite why that annoys people who in many cases have never even been behind the wheel of one is beyond me.

I’ve radically cut my news intake and it’s helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what’s happening. There’s that famous quote about how “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy” and I try to hold on to it.

Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.

However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it’s just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I’ve no interest in.

Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.

I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk’s soon to be trillionaire status (don’t ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for ‘lefty tears’ and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I’d like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.

Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don’t consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there’s a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever have a government that has and real decency or compassion at it’s core.

Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengaged from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that’s the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.

Wild. I feel positively virtuous when I have cottage cheese. It’s basically the only cheese that doesn’t feel like a sin. That garlic salt option sounds decent, will give it a shot.

Personally my guilty goto food is crisps (chips for most of you guys). I stopped eating them about 6 weeks ago and have lost nearly 2kg in weight. Not sure it’s worth it.

Sounds like a great name for a song.

Glasgow in the 90s. I live in rural Scotland, but while studying in Edinburgh I used to travel through to see my girlfriend. As soon as I got off the bus I’d get this weird, hostile vibe. I was approached all the time by folk trying to hustle me for money or crazies just being weird AF. The city aggressively prides itself on being friendly, but I always found it intimidating.

Totally. People would debate facts in arguments because you couldn’t just Google it. Okay, I know you might say it’s the same today with MAGA or whatever. But I mean like silly things like which car is faster, which country is bigger etc, who sang a certain song or played a certain character in a movie.

I liked the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Still do, actually. But yeah, smoking indoors is wild. Can’t believe thst was normal when I was a kid.

I said something mean to a big guy at school when I was 14, just because I thought it was funny. I recall the hurt, sad look on his face and felt instant shame and regret. That was 34 years ago, and the memory still occasionally pops up in my mind. I wasn’t even trying to bully the guy—I was just trying to be funny to mask my own insecurities.

Genuinely wild that democracy is propped up by private industry to ensure their own interests. Its farcical.

Completely agree

A gas powered car with its exhaust fumes poisons others way more than a smoker. Same rules apply?

Same for drivers of ICE cars presumably?

Just being told I was ugly. Objectively I’m fine (although, of course, it’s all relative) and it took a while to work out.

I’m not conventionally handsome, but I have been fortunate enough to have good looking girls be attracted to me when I was a younger man. It blew me away as I believed I was a troll, thanks to toxic fuckers who took it upon themselves to comment negatively on my appearance when I was a teen. I still vividly remember one day in class this spotty new guy went on a sustained and articulate tirade about how weird looking I was. I had to fight to hold back the tears. This was 30 years ago and I still wince at the memory of it.

I’d pretty much come to terms with how weird I looked, then I went to uni in the city I was staggered to find that girls liked me. And not just for being the funny guy or whatever - there were genuinely women that would come on to me in clubs. It freaked me out to be honest.

To this day I don’t know if I was some sort of ugly duckling or what. Or maybe my face was just wrong for my rural home town, whereas the city, with it’s wider gene pool seemed to like me.

I also don’t get why these pricks (all men) wanted to bring me down. Guess some people are just mean bastards.

Get it, and I am not a fan of the company, but we live in rural Scotland -and simply cannot economically buy all the thing we need locally. Prime has the ‘free’ postage, so we basically hold our nose and use it. Not proud of that, but it is what it is and Prime photos just works.

I’m in IT and have fucked around with various NASs and different RAID setups for decades. What will annoy my fellow nerds, but is an absolute truth, is that Amazon photos, which is ‘free’ with Prime is a far, far better solution in terms of convenience, usability and reliability than anything else I’ve been doing. We’ve tens of thousands of photos synched to it and, not only that, we actually go back and look at these memories frequently as it’s setup as a screen saver on our firesticks and other devices. We’ve literally watched a movie as a family and then spent half an hour after watching the picture slideshows that come up. Other than being part of the Amazon ecosystem which I know will garner righteous hatred (and perhaps rightly), I genuinely can’t fault it and sleep easy knowing that my stuff is safe.

It’s totally normal. You’re hard wired that way and it’s at its peak when you’re young. As long as you’re not actively staring then it’s entirely natural to be sexually attracted to other humans.

I think if I was 20 I could just backpack all over, get easy cash in hand jobs and fuck around for decades. However, if I’m sent back now at 48 being twice the weight I was at 20 I’d probably struggle as this late middle-aged oddball who has come from nowhere and has no period-specific skills.