That’s fair, I also fell for it originally. It was a pretty convincing prank, I really should be more suspicious on April 1st.

I’m not sure if you’re doing a bit, but that was an April Fools’ joke.

I recognize Lulu, Corki, Veigar, Tristana, Yuumi (relatively new and I think she’s a cat rather than Yordle), Rumble, and Teemo. I’m not sure who is on the left middle.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67662/sound-running-water-puts-beavers-mood-build

One of the few sane people in this comment section.

I don’t want to want to judge OP too harshly but this is a common problem with women in STEM spaces where they’re treated as romantic interests rather than professional acquaintances. That alone is problematic, but it becomes a lot worse when the man expresses interest, puts his coworker in awkward position, and then treats her differently because she “rejected” him. Most men are not overtly hostile to coworkers who turn them down but it comes out in subtle ways that can disrupt a workplace. I’ve seen it myself, where a male coworker developed a crush on someone in the office that wasn’t reciprocated and the male coworker will not work with her because he’s offended or embarrassed about her not being interested. He hasn’t outright said that he refuses to work with her, but he suddenly becomes withdrawn and quiet when she’s in the same room as him.

It’s fine to be attracted to a coworker, but it’s best to keep those feelings to yourself. As a man in STEM, I have multiple female workers that I find attractive, funny, and interesting, but I recognize that they’re at the office to work, not to be hit on.

Aside from the creepiness factor of pursuing a coworker, it reinforces the idea that STEM is a boy’s club and that women are not welcome. That perception needs to be broken because we need strong engineers regardless of gender. To speak from personal experience again, the company I work at has a culture of making women uncomfortable in subtle ways, which has discouraged innovation and hurt our success.

uYouPlus on iPhone through AltStore has SponsorBlock (plus normal ad blocking). It’s a pain compared to Android but it’s still super nice to have.

It sounds like you’ve ping-ponged between two radical ideologies. Maybe you became so disillusioned with the lack of success from overworking yourself and now you’re angry at the state of the world, but lashing out at people trying to engage you in a discussion isn’t going to do any good.

The HR team at the company I work for absolutely advocates for me and my coworkers. Their job is to protect the company’s interests and the workers being empowered is in line with the company’s interests. A close friend and coworker had a PM try to deny her benefits (both PTO and insurance) and HR stepped in on her behalf and forced the company to give her what she was owed. The HR team is always available to answer questions about how insurance works and how to plan for retirement, plus they go out of their way to host a yearly Christmas party and other major events. The companies you worked at might have had bad HR teams, but that doesn’t mean every HR team is bad.

I’ve been using Deezer for a while and I like its variety. They have a “Flow” button where you can let it play random music with favorites mixed in, but you can also select a “mood” (like Focus, Party, Chill, and others) or genres (like R&B, Alternative, Rock, and others). You can also have Flow lean more towards new music or already favorited tracks, but that’s been inconsistent for me in the past where sometimes it’ll only play my favorited songs when I chose to listen to new music or vice versa.

I’ve discovered a lot of new songs and artists by letting Flow do its thing on my drive to and from work. Although, sometimes Flow gets stuck in a certain style of music, like playing back-to-back-to-back Golden Oldies, and it’s frustrating trying to get it to play anything else without manually selecting a genre or mood each time you launch the app. That’s a small gripe because the variety is typically good, with favorites mixed in.

VeggieTales is still relevant after all these years: https://youtu.be/j4Ph02gzqmY

I’ve seen the original post a few times but never the follow up, thank you for including that.