For disability, try to find a disability lawyer if you can. I don’t know if they have them in Maine, but here in Washington there’s a lot of lawyers who specialize in helping you sign up for disability and representing you in court. They don’t ask for pay up front, instead when you finally get paid out from disability, you will get a lump sum backpayment back to when you first applied. They will usually make an agreement with you to take a portion of that as their payment. My agreement is for 25% of the backpayments, which I feel is pretty reasonable for legal representation, especially when it adds up to being a lot cheaper than a standard lawyer fee. I strongly suggest researching those lawyers, ask around, find which ones get results and have the most success getting their clients declared legally disabled, and then go have a consultation with them.

I am hoping I can get mine through before I lose my medicaid, just crossing my fingers on that though.

January 2027 unless I am officially considered disabled there will be work requirements.

I have done the the math, the likelihood is that even if I am able to find a job and get 20 hours a week that it will push me over the income limit and I will be kicked off medicaid. If I don’t find a job that lets me work only 20 hours a week I will also be kicked off medicaid.

The goal of this setup put into place by Trump’s big bastard bill is obviously to kick people like me off medicaid whether we get a job or not because getting the job will push us over the income limit and boot us off and not getting a job will boot us off.

I’m sorry you feel the need to drink, as others have pointed out, it’s not going to help, so I’m not going to focus on that.

Women very rarely respond to openers that just focus on their physical attractiveness.

Practicing social skills means noticing her to begin with, paying attention to her existence. You are in a shared space and obviously both are pursuing healthy bodies through exercise at the gym. Don’t be obvious that you’re paying attention to her, but just try to notice and take note of details.

Does she bring a book and read it on the treadmill? If she listens to something on her phone instead, try to catch a peek of what it is: music? podcast? television? movies? Find something that you can talk about as an opener, something you also actually enjoy, don’t force it.

Once you have noticed the details, you don’t open with “you’re pretty” you open with “Hey, I noticed you’re reading X/listening to Y/watching Z and I was wondering your take on subtext/meaning/musical structure/how funny it is/etc.” You need an opening that gives you a reason to talk to her other than being pretty.

Once again, don’t go out of your way to spy on these things and get marked as a weird stalkery creepy, but when you have a chance, take a peek into what’s going on in her life.

Hell, you can even talk shop about gym and the kind of exercises you both approach. “I noticed you do some weight training, I’ve been meaning to get into that, do you think you could show me the ropes. My name is Blite.”

It all comes down to starting with treating her like a person not like a romantic object of beauty. I know you didn’t intend to be off-putting, but that can be off-putting and make someone feel like all you see is the outward shell and aren’t interested in the inner person.

The final thing is that this means if you never have an opening to work with… well, sadly, let it go. You can’t win em all, and sometimes the “you always miss the shots you don’t take” attitude hurts more than helps. Maybe you just never had enough of a peak at their inner life because they’re a private person, or maybe you just genuinely don’t have a lot in common with them. Whatever the reason, let it go and look for someone you can find a personable, humanizing opener with.

The bottom line is women are people and they generally want to be treated like a person first, which means talking to them and treating them the same way you would trying to make any friend of any gender. Because it has to start with enough mutual respect to see them as a friend first, find common ground, and then after a while of getting to know each other in the shared space (maybe a few weeks of talking to each other and getting to know one another in the gym) then ask her out on a date.

I really hope this helps. You’re not hopeless, you just need to change up how you approach this kind of situation. You also need someone willing to help walk you through it instead of just focusing on the drinking. Then you won’t need to drown your sorrows because you’ll have an actual path forward and be learning and executing better social skills.

I only discovered them somewhat recently and I’m still obsessed.

No, mine was some generic nonsense from Fred Mayer years ago that isn’t available anymore.

…am I really the only one who bought fucking metal straws with silicon tips and the tools to clean them years and years ago now?

This seems like a solved problem.

As someone who has no one at all, this is just so heartbreaking to me. If I was lucky enough to be in a poly relationship, and my partner came to me and told me they felt like you have explained, I would do everything I could to try to reverse that feeling. Why would I be in a relationship with them at all if I didn’t want them to feel loved?

Your feelings matter, and it hurts me immensely that he isn’t taking them seriously or giving you the kindness and support you deserve for being open about your feelings. I wish I could give you a hug right now. You deserve comfort and understanding, not blithe dismissal like you got. I’m so so sorry that you’re going through this.

This makes me sad. Have you talked to him about how you feel, to see if he is willing to work with you to make you feel more valued in the relationship?

each non-technological activity we participate in has become an act of micro-revolution.

Not to be a nitpicker but… Tapes and tape decks are technology? Just like… 50 year old tech? In the scheme of the history of human technology that’s a blip. Not using technology would be like sitting in the grass staring at the clouds. Written language is technology, books are technology, and so on. They’re just early, simple human tech but they are still tech.

Weapons of Math Instruction

Which is why they wholeheartedly embraced Bush and then Obama’s drone wars, because it was safe for our soldiers.

You can ramble all you want, it still amounts to “I’m glad we didn’t actually do anything to stop this because stopping it would have been worse somehow.” Fucking grow up. You act like it’s a foregone conclusion that things would have devolved, when it’s categorically not. Brazil and South Korea were able to handle these situations without this pissing around “wE hAvE tO fOlLoW tHe pRoCeSs” because their processes actually fucking worked when the “process” in the USA has been broken for fucking decades already anyway. We already had two justice systems, Trump just made it visible to fucking middle class liberal white people who are somehow shocked that the shit that’s been happening to minorities for fucking decades is now the norm. The system was already broken and built so the rich and powerful could exploit it and due to that we needed someone willing to throw a monkey wrench in the gears of that broken ass fucking system, not people piddling around and going “we just need to trust this totally fucking broken system that lets the wealthy buy their way out of consequences literally every time.” Biden had that chance, he squandered it, and now you and him are both whinging about how fucking bad it is while taking zero responsibility for the fact that he fucked up majorly in numerous ways, including ways that didn’t have to take four fucking years if we’d had an AG that wasn’t a fucking “gimme” to the Republicans because he didn’t get his Supreme Court spot. Oh boo hoo for Garland, he deserved that consolation prize so he could slow walk everything so he didn’t “look political” while looking deeply political in helping fucking criminals get off scott free. Maybe if we hadn’t been handing that motherfucker a consolation prize we might have an AG that did their fucking job and did it fast and with the seriousness it deserved and wouldn’t have even needed Biden to get directly involved. There were so many fucking chances to do this within the bounds of the broken system you keep choking on the dick of, and yet, somehow, none of that happened because we hired the biggest pussy in history to be AG for no good fucking reason except to glaze the same Republicans who are busy trying to put us in camps. Jack Smith could have and should have been deployed day one not two fucking years later after pissing around going “shucks I just don’t know what to do!” The fact that he wasn’t is part of the evidence that the system is broken and built to fail everyone except the wealthy and powerful to begin with.

Ah yes all his horseshit about the bot problem and how he needed concrete numbers to solve the problem or “die trying.”

Since he still hasn’t even begun to solve it I really hope he just fucking dies… Trying? Yeah let’s go with that.

Yeah real glad we can see through it while people are being black bagged in the streets and held without cause and worse.

Get your fucking head out of your ass.

How many peoples lives need to be ruined so you can feel smugly superior?

Do you mean DisplayPort?

Your Pixel

Limited to Pixel 8 and newer devices and no 4k yet.

Oh, so your Pixel, but not my Pixel.

You act like that shit isn’t happening right now under Trump. I am pretty fucksure we are all well aware of the dangers.

The point is not realizing if they didn’t break some rules to stop him, Trump was gonna stomp all over every rule and has literally turned the DOJ into his own grievance chasing law firm.

So yeah, it’s literally happening right the fuck now so why should I give a shit about someone breaking the same rules to STOP this from becoming the norm. It sure as fuck is the norm now.

Yanis Varoufuckass, former Greek finance minister and economist in residence at Valve studying digital markets leading up to the loot box explosion.

After the RT reviews of Melania came out it became impossible to argue that they aren’t gamed to hell and back. No way to trust their reviews anymore. I would trust even Plex reviews over these.

Absolutely, it was at the height of the “software as a service” phase and they were doing rolling updates for the Windows Insider program. For a hot minute they absolutely planned on it just being “Windows” from then on.