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 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.

I worked in a local butchers shop when I was 13, for an hour after school every day. I fucking hated it. I had to clean the knives and cutting boards, then sweep up. On Saturdays I had to do all that, plus disassemble and clean this big mincing machine. I got shit money. That was 35 years ago and I can still smell it.🤣

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.

The Swindon lot are little slugs, little slugs with no personality who are just jealous of us because we’re better than them at everything.

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.

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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.

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.

No worries - it’s not the end of the world and I only drink soda as a treat anyway. Coca-Cola is still the same, and there’s carbonated apple drinks that are ok. I usually just stick to fruit juice with soda myself.

Don’t feel stupid - you’re in the majority.

Here in the UK they’ve reformulated almost all soda to include Aspartame or Acuflame K.

The vast majority don’t give a fuck, as they taste the same as before.

It’s only people like me who, through a hilarious quirk of genetics, actually taste some sweetners as bitter and unpleasant, that are effected.

For a small (but significant when you scale it up) percentage of the population, these drinks have been entirely ruined and rendered basically undrinkable.

Even my ‘national drink’ Irn-Bru has been wrecked.

It’s kinda funny as most people I meet don’t taste it at all and probably think I’m being weird about it or that I’m making some sort of moral stance against sweetners. But it’s genuinely not that. It’s just that all the soda I liked has been replaced with weird tasting garbage.

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.