I had to come here after foolishly looking at news articles via my FB feed, just to get some sane takes. I’m hoping it’s mostly bots, but the number of comments online praising him is sickening. Deluded sycophants and bootlickers are seemingly everywhere. I have stronger negative feelings toward these pricks than I do Musk himself, which is saying something.

Drink beer. To excess, at least once a week.

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.

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 any 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, disengage 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Love that the only thing stopping you from being a massive slut is your mortality and fear of venereal disease!

Getting by, just. Which sucks as I have a relatively decent wage and feel like I’d be in the 2 foreign holidays, 2 cars and a big house crowd a few decades back.

It’s actually still around in a weaker ‘original’ flavour that has all the sugar but is less fizzy and has no caffeine. It costs more and you don’t get the buzz, but it’s drinkable.

I’m essentially a socialist and believe in taxation and public health

However, what I despise about the Sugar Tax in the UK is that the drinks companies used it as an excuse to reformulate the vast majority of soft drinks, swapping sugar for Acuflame K and aspartame.

A small percentage of the population (but a significant number of people) taste these sweetners as bitter.

I am one of them. Basically all soda that’s been reformulated is undrinkable now to me. I’d describe the taste as a sort of soapy, chemical flavour that’s extremely bitter and artificial.

They even wrecked my national drink Irn Bru, which is basically the worst thing to happen to Scotland since Thatcher!

Only a handful of drinkable beverages remain. Coca-Cola refused to reformulate (likely a hangover from their 80s PR disaster), and you can get a few imported drinks at specialist stores at a premium price.

Unfortunately the majority of folk can’t taste the difference so we are where we are. I guarantee you, if everyone tasted this shit like we do the sales would plummet.

Forty was fine. I didn’t feel old at all and was in a decent place mentally. I’m now 49, and I have a feeling 50 is going to be somewhat jarring. It just feels undeniably mature.

‘Reality hits you hard, bro’

I have a song in my head, almost all the time. Invariably it’s some 90s jingle from a TV commercial. I habitually repeat certain phrases. Pretty sure I’m autistic in some way, but I mask like a pro. I’m popular at work, socially and adapt to people quickly. I retain eye contact, but I’m actually staring at a point just above their eyes as I find eye contact insanely intimate.

I don’t think I’m a complete psycho - if anything I have an almost paralysing amount of empathy. I even sympathise with people who really don’t deserve it (politicians etc). I’m pretty happy now I’m pushing 50 and have a family, but I still use alcohol in excess most weekends. It just makes the world make more sense to me.

I analyse almost every social interaction I have. I feel a sense of triumph when it goes well, and shame / responsibility when I doesn’t. I’ve been told I’m very agreeable and easy company, but the truth is it’s not easy for me and I feel like I do most of the heavy lifting in conversations.

I envy those who can just sit in their own awkwardness, but I feel like I have to perform and make people like me. It usually works, but when it doesn’t I stew on it endlessly. Anyway, no idea why I unloaded all that. Cheers!

It’s one of the great scams that industry pulled off - deriding staying home with a family as somehow failing and getting both parents out to the grind. Then selling it as progressive. I’m in favour of equal opportunity in the workplace, but we’ve been left with the worst of both worlds.