EllE

The American national anthem, please.

It's such a terrible song, and it keeps getting sung in weird ways by bad singers. I swear, as a non-american I'm subjugated to it more often than all other national anthems combined, including my own.

In 2017 I was coming out as transgender and looking for a job. Got an interview as head evening manager at a grocery store. Go in for the interview and am not sure if I'm out yet, but the store manager figured it out and was really open and said they had 2 trans people working there already, so I'm like fuck it, get the job and am out.

One of the other trans people is my right hand person like 2-3 days/week, store manager tries to enthusiastically but awkwardly introduce us.

Over the next couple of weeks everything goes to shit in the store; manager is fired, lot's of employees leave, severely understaffed, etc. I'm working like 80 hour weeks and every evening is a battle, and through commiseration and tough days a bond forms between me and the other person. Start meeting every time I have a day off and start dating like 6 weeks after we first meet, and 6 weeks after that we move in together.

Been together almost 7 years, now. Worked together for the first 3ish.

I think it's kinda like the old dating age formula; you can date people (your age) / 2 + 7 years old, and you feel like that's the age of an adult.

When I was 15 I felt like ann adult, but people younger than me were teens. When I was 25 I felt like an adult but people under the age of like 20 were just kids. Now I feel like people in their early/mid-20s are just about adults. I'm sure when I'm 50 I'll think back to myself now and consider myself barely an adult.

Common tourist places during tourist season are usually the worst. I took a 10 day trip to Paris one summer and it was a mix of the most popular tourist places (Louvre, Eiffel tower, etc) and some underground shit my sister found.

Every tourist place was jam packed with annoying tourists, costly and had tons of scammers surrounding it. Every less known place was really awesome, aside from one sketchy neighborhood we had to walk through where we were followed for a while.

I'd also say that Northern Europe has generally been much more pleasant to travel through, for me.

Funny you should say that; I went to Florence some years back and we took a day trip to Pisa and had to deal with the worst, most aggressive scammers I've ever experienced.

Courage still haunts my nightmares to this day. Excellent show.

Years ago I played an MMO with a guy called Tpyo. He was legally blind and decided to just get ahead of it and embrace it.

What the actual F? How is such a small % in a union? In my country 94% of employed 25-54 year olds are in a union.

I have literally never met anyone (aside from self-employed people) who told me or indicated to me that they weren't in a union.

I've been taking a short break from Malazan Book of the Fallen recently, by exploring some new, lighter books, especially while at work, but I think I'm going to get back into it in August.