I deleted Facebook, messenger and WhatsApp. Anyone who doesn’t want to use signal has my number to SMS text. Which is shit and chargeable. They may come around.

In the 90s I was a teenager and I took a friend with me visiting family in Japan. I can’t read more than about 100 kanji, probably less now.

We found a vending machine, a small one not the usual fridge size ones, just on the street. I was trying to figure out what it was selling, it didn’t look like anything I recognised. We both smoked so I could just about recognise the words for pregnancy and something negative or anti, like a health warning.

We were there for a good 10 minutes and a few elderly people had taken notice of us and were giving us weird stares, proper WTF faces. My virgin ass finally figures out they’re condoms, the kanji are the equivalent of Contra, Ceptive, and we bolt.

I was the oldest looking and tallest, so offy duty was mine.

I came out with a bright red and yellow bag with THRESHERS emblazoned across it, bulging with bottles of hooch.

Got on the bus, pointed right at it and said “believe it or not, I’m 15 years old. Single child fare please”

Driver laughed his arse off and did indeed let me on for ten pence or whatever it was at the time.

I honestly thought it was The Onion at first glance

I’m trans and I learned a lot myself from this. I might have brought up the 41% thing and not knowing its use, miscommunicated what I meant in support of trans rights. Glad to have read this, being trans doesn’t automatically make you aware of every aspect of the conversations.

My company had a client who did those financed schemes where people buy furniture and TVs and stuff and pay in installments. The one bit of information that stuck with me was they expected 50% of customers to default. They went under.

I was about to say how can you run a business like that but it just clicked. The execs were running a scheme on the company itself. The company tricks financially illiterate customers (I sympathise, not denigrating) into debt and bankruptcy, ruining their lives, while the owners pay themselves handsomely and buy cars and mansions running the company into bankruptcy. But they walk away with all their toys paid for by the broken finances of their victims.

Fucking parasites.

I can say from experience being mixed white and Japanese I’ll always be a second class citizen there.

Can’t speak for Russia but I knew a woman who once said she envied her mother because she was “pure”, pale skin and blonde hair, while she had dark hair and more eastern (Mongolian heritage?) features. That was really painful to hear someone say about themselves and if it’s the prevalent attitude I wouldn’t assume I’m welcome just by a blood connection.