Ixrec

It's been a very long time since I even tried a forum that had signatures on it, and tbh I find it really distracting when every other signature on a forum has huge images (or gasp gifs!) in it, so for now I'm leaving it blank. If I'm still here in a month maybe I'll have something worth putting there, or maybe I'll just leave it blank forever. On the other hand, every website ever wants an avatar, so that's the one I put a modicum of effort into. But I usually never change avatars either; at least for me the point of an avatar is to be more easily recognized, so changing it more than once in a blue moon kinda works against that.

Depends on a million unspecified factors. Do I have a job in either world? Do I need a job in the fantasy world? Is there a transdimensional internet? (in real life basically all my friends are online, so we might as well be in different dimensions as it is) Was I doing anything interesting with these magic powers before I left? How close am I to these human "friends"? And so on. If the idea is that friendship (and any other kind of meaningful interpersonal relationship) is somehow categorically impossible while doing stuff in the fantasy world, then yes of course I'd stay in the human world. But that'd be a very... unusual fantasy world

I have relatively few possessions and rarely break things, so... my glasses, but it happened right at the beginning of lockdown (which was... I don't even know any more, February-ish?), so I haven't had a chance to get the repaired yet. Thankfully the broken part is just a nose pad, so it's not falling off my face or anything, but still irritating.

"If they were such an advanced society, they should all be nudists!"

Chocolate Oranges and Milk Duds. Which one wins seems to flip-flop depending on how much of the other I've eaten recently.

Most of this thread is using "military time" as a synonym for "24-hour clock", which basically means times go from "00:00" to "23:59" instead of from "00:00 AM" to "11:59 PM". Technically a 24-hour time like "08:00" or "8:00" is not quite what "military time" means. I've never served in the military myself, but iiuc the military time would be written "0800" without the colon, always with the leading zero, and pronounced as "oh-eight-hundred", often with "hours" after it (sometimes abbreviated as "hrs"). I assume these little differences are all designed to make it harder to misread or mishear a number without realizing it, but I'm not sure.

Yep, this is 100% the correct attitude. I've probably had half a dozen crushes on fictional characters at this point. I've been in conversations where I used the term "waifu" to refer to them, but only because I knew no one would think I meant the weird extreme cases everyone's alluding to here. There's really not a whole lot else to say about it; these things come and go like any other phase. I'm not sure if this was your intent, but this makes it sound as if introverts typically want a fictional girlfriend instead of a real girlfriend, which really isn't how introversion works (if it matters: I'm an introvert, most of my friends are too, and many of us have or had real girlfriends, myself included). But I agree with everything else you said.

Only thought about it enough to discard it. Maybe if I'd been born in a very different time period the whole "serving your country" narrative would've resonated with me more, but definitely not in this one. My immediate family has no history of service anyway; we're all nerds with classic STEM jobs like chemist, electrical engineer or programmer. And there's no way I'd meet whatever physical fitness requirements they have. Although my dad joked a few times that if I ever did join the (US) military they'd immediately put me in the Corps of Engineers anyway.

Here's an unusual one: Once at the beach I found a nearly complete molted crab exoskeleton, which was too cool to pass up. Somehow I've never found any "natural" seashells that wowed me more than storebought ones.

Of course, weird is relative, but relative to the culture I grew up in... probably the weirdest would be octopus. When I got so deep into anime/manga that I taught myself Japanese, I made a point of trying a handful of Japanese foods at least once, and the okonomiyaki place I tried happened to include octopus in theirs. Didn't have a strong opinion on the taste either way. Also, is it just me, or are half the posts in this thread about octopus? Maybe that one shouldn't count as weird any more

Most of the points in the OP aren't unique to the US and have been around for an extremely long time. Fractional reserve banking for example goes back millenia. For the most part, money existing and having the uses it does (i.e. medium of exchange, store of value, etc) just makes it a tool that can be used for good or ill, not something intrinsically "dangerous". Most of the money-related problems we have these days are really about what we (or our governments) choose to spend money on, e.g. why has inequality gotten so bad that the richest 1% own >40% of the world's wealth, which doesn't have much to do with the concept of money itself (it'd still be bad if it was >40% of anything else). The fact that you can get yourself in trouble by spending money you don't have is fundamentally no different to the fact that you can get yourself in trouble by promising three barrels of cider you can't deliver. "the accomplishments of an individual" and "the respect an individual received" are unquantifiable, so we'll never be able to represent them with anything you could reasonably call "money". You can try, and people often do, but it inevitably leads to gaming of flawed metrics until the metric becomes totally unrelated to what it was supposed to measure. Just think about how much our behavior would change if these forums started handing out a dollar for every brohoof. Of course, there's plenty of real issues with US macroeconomic policy, but they're all far more complicated than "should money exist", and most of them are about a lot more than just money (e.g. how low should interest rates be kept for how long to help deal with the coronavirus?).

I can see a rainbow In your tears as they fall on down I can see your soul grow Through the pain as they hit the ground (I finally set aside enough time to finish buying up/downloading all of the official MLP:FiM music I liked. I'd completely forgotten how good the movie songs were!)

Librarian by day, Princess Impersonator by night

Anthropomorphized animal characters do come up frequently in the media I enjoy, but that's probably mostly because I've always strongly preferred fantasy/sci-fi settings to realistic settings, and there's obviously a lot of overlap there. I've never identified as or considered myself a "furry" because a) everyone uses that word differently, so it's more confusing than helpful, and b) if I had to guess, one of the less wrong definitions might be "actively participates in the furry fandom/community" which is not something I've ever done. If the MLP fandom keeps my interest for long enough I could see myself with a ponysona someday, but that'd be a ways off.

Depending on the anime, I'd be one of: - the team leader and protagonist - the team member that keeps everyone organized and everything from falling apart while the protagonist charges ahead and gets in trouble (by far the most likely in a typical shonen anime) - that secondary character who can't help directly until the real protagonists accomplish something first

There are very few animals I don't find at least intriguing, and basically no mammals I don't find cute, and yes bats have a certain coolness factor on top of that. If I could draw, one silly thing I'd want to do is make a Fluttershy spoof of the famous "Yes, father, I shall become a bat" scene from Batman: Year One. As good as it was in context, out of context the parodies practically write themselves... You're right that there are no "bat skills" involved. The standard explanation in modern Batman comics (i.e. at least since Batman: Year One came out in 1987) is that he chose the bat look to intimidate criminals, because skills alone weren't cutting it, but "criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot" as he loves to tell us. For a long time he intentionally avoided doing anything too public or in broad daylight because he wanted to keep "the Batman" more of a myth and a legend so it would stay scary. And at least in the comics, it still freaks out the average street thug pretty reliably. Since the outfit is all most people ever see, if that, that's what everyone named him after. A standard argument in comic forums is whether this explanation makes any sense or not.

This is probably fairly unique to me, but I haven’t done much meditation simply because unstressed, relaxed, unburdened with worldly concerns or whatever is kind of my default mental state. My ex once said I was the most Buddhist-like non-Buddhist she knew. Which is a double-edged sword: I would never get around to petty worldly concerns like taking out the trash or exercising if I didn’t make a conscious effort (until it becomes a habit). Or non-petty ones like seeking out actual friends instead of simply rewatching FiM again. The one time I did seriously attempt meditation was to try and get control of my sleep cycle. But nowadays it’s pretty clear that my sleep cycle is actually very consistent, and when it does get thrown off it’s always because I did something silly like staying up until 2 am reading ponyfics.

Since my last name is “Hitchcock” people sometimes ask if I’m related to the director Alfred Hitchcock. But nope, no one famous in our family.

I'm good with both. Back when I lived in the US I had to pause whenever I ran into 24-hour time, but now that I'm in the UK and have gotten used to it I find it generally easier to reason about and communicate with. The real trouble is time zones.

For me it's been all about eurobeat since long before I knew anything about ponies, because every song needs 20% more bpm Odyssey - Leave Me In The Dark Odyssey - Luna's Future (Euro Cast Mix) A-One×TUMENECO - Uncover the Universe (Eurobeat Style) A-ONE - 秋意浓 〜Qiū yì nóng〜 Ayumi Hamasaki - Boys & Girls (A Eurosenti Mix) (yes, one of my favorite songs was an MLP remix years before I watched any MLP)

As others have said: AppleDash (intentionally ambiguous canon is still a kind of canon!) Adora and Catra from She-Ra (when S5 made it fully unambiguous canon I basically had the RD omigosh-omigosh-omigosh reaction) Ruby and Sapphire / Garnet from Steven Universe (if you hadn't specified "couples" this would be all the Gems in general) And for a new one, my favorite LGBT comic book couple is easily Wiccan and Hulkling from (originally) Young Avengers: I'm helping!

My experience is that there's no way to know how long I'll be active on a forum/chat until I've either long since forgotten it exists, or one day the local moderators tell me I get to be a princess moderator too and it hits me that I've been active for years. Realistically, there's only so many ways to say "ponies are cute!", and I tend to have better luck on chat rooms than on forums for discussion/friendmaking in the long run, so I may only be here long enough to find links to stuff that holds my interest longer. Or maybe this will be the exception; no way to find that special someplace without trying out a bunch of different places for a while.