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Ayo! Everyone is going to update us about their life now. So, I'll go first: my little one is turning 4. She's super cool. Her biggest hobby is reading with us and so she's now very much into learning how to read and write. I moved from the Netherlands to Cologne, Germany at some point. Just too late to meet up with @Korey when he was out in Mainz, not all too far away from here. Womp womp. Got married during the biggest COVID-19 Lockdown, and came out the other end of the pandemic all the more enthusiastic about each other, so that's solid as a rock. Some of my favourite books in her collection are everything by Anna Kemp & Sara Ogilvie (Dogs Don't Do Ballet, Rhinos Don't Eat Pancakes, The Worst Princess, ...), A Dress With Pockets (and it's sequel) and basically and book that features some kickass traditional roles defying hero(ine). Also Rob Biddulph (Penguin Blu, Blue Footed Booby, ...). But my wife and I are awful, as neither of us believes in budgetary limits when it comes to her books, so it's really kinda getting out of hand. She has multiple bookshelves full at this point (about 50/50 Germany/English, with some stray Russian and Dutch books). So obv. I'm open to more book recommendations. Did you know that @Shy actually wrote a children's book (amongst a tonne of other amazing work)? It seems awesome. I try to find it at book stores here in Europe, but so far no luck. I shall be accepting offers from the US. Super impressive gentleman, he is. Besides books, we're super duper into boardgames in this household (collection). So much so that we created an Instagram account about it (mostly to have one place to get updated). Any boardgamers here of any kind? Otherwise, I work in Online Marketing and Webshop optimisation stuff, probably mostly because I learned to abuse HTML tables for all sorts of stuff when that was trendy for RPGs here back in the day. Used that skill to make websites. I lead the marketing team here, and the pressure of being a Milennial Manager is real. But it's also rewarding to, you know, be able to help provide and protect a much healthier work/life balance and attitude to work for some people than I learned, just like I'm able to break some generational curses with my daughter. The weight of it all does get to me sometimes though. Can't compare it first hand with how other generations felt, but it feels like we're all doing a lot of the heavy lifting to fix stuff on many levels, that our parents' generation just dropped the ball on. The political climate doesn't really help either. The way the USA is rapidly devolving into the dystopian novels, as if they were instruction manuals, is not only alarming by itself, but it's also inspiring others around the globe, including here in the Netherlands and Germany, to be racist bigots openly. The whole thing sucks, man. Genocides and war out in the open world wide web for everyone to witness, unable to miss. And we're just supposed to pretend like we got our act together smile and recycle and smash the patriarchy and stuff? On these types of days I especially miss the days of just coming home from school or whatnot, logging onto my computer, and just getting my OB updates in.

She recently played catan Jr and LOVED it

Sorry to hear about your loss, K. Oh, I totally get that. Ever since I started working more in the Tracking & Data Analytics side of things of Online Marketing, my scepticism of the internet went through the roof. I also got rid of TikTok and Facebook and most other platforms besides IG (mostly because we have the the board game account) and Discord, and even there I severely limit what I share. i.e. we don't ever share the name, voice and face of our daughter publically (and insist others respect that), and really to keep her digital footprint to a minimum. For the same reason, we seldomly share a location of where we are at that moment. Did you know that, even before AI, there are companies who "openly" sell view-tracking for TV advertisement campaigns (so normally very difficult to attribute properly) by listening in on peoples' phones, and when their phone hears the video ad of the advertiser, it tracks it and sends the data back to the ad platform. So much fun. At some point it's hard not to feel paranoia about things. But yeah. Sharing online has become pretty unpersonal, with good reason. At the same time, it feels kinda cathartic to return here in the deep well of nostalgia and spill.

That was a great read @Boo thanks for sharing. I don't think I could share so intimately the details of my life as openly as I would have when I used to post here, but I'll give it a go. Basically, a lot happened in my life during and soon-after pandemic. A non-exhaustive list: My dad died. My wife and I got married. We bought a house in the suburbs. So I had to learn to drive a car. We bought our first car. Had our first son. Then our second. Changed jobs. Changed jobs again. Made friends. Lost friends. Lost touch with people who will always be my friends. Reconnected with people who have been my oldest friends. Disconnected from social media. Disconnecting from social media was a big one for me, actually. My phone is still logged in on Discord, Instagram, and all the big sites. But I basically use social media reactively; I stopped creating content after my first child was born. My YouTube channel has a video up from the hospital as my final upload. My Instagram might get the annual Santa Photo with my sisters but my wife and I intentionally don't have any pictures of our children online. We stopped sharing all updates of our lives like we did pre-pandemic so now the world doesn't get to know what I ate for lunch. Social media, and even this website, all feels too public these days. There was a sense is anonymity back in the day which is lost on the modern web. My career is actually also in software (Android app development) so maybe I'm seeing how the sausage is made too closely. I get to see how analytics data ties everything you do to your public identity. And, like you said, the political climate is so full of hateful rhetoric that I wouldn't want to make it easier for anyone to target me or my family in any way. I'm caught up on that last sentence and my usage of "you". I know I started this post as a direct response to @Boo, but the is a public forum. Others are able to read and respond to this response. It feels weirdly rude to continue directing my comment at only one person. I would have navigated this so confidently when I was active on this website all those decades ago. But, then again, I was always so confidently incorrect.