It’s late and I need to sleep so I’ll just paste some links for now, but you are talking about such a wide variety of issues that’s it kind of hard to give a short, succinct answer.

Some privacy tips that I follow, by Naomi Brockwell: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt3zZ-N423gXV-0pdxnRn-nw0WzVKh4NY

Same, but by Rob Braxman: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKqVMfkpsufHUWAwU9nnkHnhSRH1TBgF3

I went to university in my home country in Europe. At first, I just wanted to pursue my passion, which was the Japanese language. I had no future plans whatsoever. While writing the thesis for my bachelor’s degree, I was asked to help out the university staff with teaching some seminars. That in turn made me realize that I love working with people, that I love teaching and that becoming a Japanese teacher would simply give me the best of both worlds. That realization led me to applying for a university in Japan, where I did my master’s degree in education. Also because the prefect at the university in my country told me that a degree in education from Japan would make me eligible for a full time contract as a Japanese teacher. After returning to my country, I learned that my government had implemented a policy that made it impossible for me to get hired as an adjunct (a teacher that only teaches and whose contract doesn’t require them to produce a certain amount of papers per year). I had no intentions of becoming a researcher, even part time, so I gave up on becoming a Japanese teacher.

Looking back at my choices, even though I do something completely unrelated today (probation officer and case worker), I regret nothing. Going to college connected me with the world. It made me academically smarter, emotionally more intelligent and it opened up my eyes to my ignorance and made me humble.

In my country, you are only allowed to own firearms if you are 1) a hunter or 2) an active member of a shooting club. I just registered and now I am on the wait list. 2026 will be the year I buy my first firearm ever. Some kind of pistol. Eager to learn! :)

The poor fucking people around you. You seem to know it all. 🤮

Wait… WHAT? Here I thought Pokémon are real too D: wtf…

I agree. In this particular instance, I was just unlucky that the girl didn’t take it too well. Others girl have simply told me no and that was that. In fact, I kind of appreciate that she felt that she is able to talk to our boss about it. I think it shows what an open workplace culture we have.

Yup, I learned my lesson. Ugh…

Yeah, I felt that atmosphere the other day…

Thanks for all the various perspectives!

Yep, I almost shat my pants when she told me off, so, no more office flirting…

Fortunately, at my workplace, at this level of inconveniencing a fellow female coworker, won’t get me terminated. I followed up with both the girl that got bothered by me and with my boss later on, and it really didn’t seem like a big thing. I think they just wanted to halt my behavior before it “escalated” or whatever.

Anyway, after reading your comment, I will never look at how office romances are portrayed in TV the same again. 🤣 It’s nothing to joke about.

PS: another coworker who heard about my situation said, “we don’t shit where we eat, okay?” I laughed my ass off at first, but I guess I’ll just treat the workplace as off limits.

I never ever thought of the future until I at the age of 21 suddenly, out of the blue, realized that I wanted to become a Japanese teacher at a university. The notion may have sprung from a fierce passion toward the language and culture, which I came in contact with during my first year in senior highschool.

One thing led to another, and I found myself taking a Master’s degree in education in Japan at the age of 28. Having met my wife there, we decided that if we want to start a family, we should move back to my country in Europe for social and financial security reasons. We got divorced even before she got her residence permit. At that time, I was 31. And even though my alma mater university in my hometown had told me to get that Master’s in education to be eligible for a full time contract as a Japanese teacher, my government had implemented new politics that drastically slashed the budget for universities to hire teachers. The new policy says that universities should focus on research, rather than education. What a load of crap… Anyway, I had gotten a job as a prison guard because I needed a job FAST to apply for my wife’s residence permit. Even after we got divorced, I continued working at several prisons and later as a probationary officer. Today, I do pre-trial reports, which simply gives the judge at the sentencing hearing a nudge in one direction or another. I appreciate this job since I have the power to change the lives of people - especially children - that are otherwise at risk. I also have use for my pedagogic skills. It’s not my dream job, but here I am.

I guess the takeaway is that you can only do so much planning. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

BUT! I cannot stress enough the importance of putting yourself out there. Especially into the worlds and societies that you don’t know. Or that you might be prejudicial about. And if you ever fear trying or doing something, do it just for the sake of it. Experience is everything.

I would recommend formulating your threat model before doing anything else. There is a lot of materials on the topic on the world wide web, but for starters, ask yourself and answer the question, what information about yourself would you like to keep secret and why.

Again, before anything else, subscribe to an email alias service - maybe there are free ones out there too, I don’t know. This way, you don’t have to share your real email address and you can turn off or even delete that attack vector at anytime.*

Finally, regarding Bandcamp, I have never uses it myself so my understanding of your situation is poor to say the least, but are not able to simply save the links in a text file? Again, I’m not trying to play down the situation, I just don’t understand it.

*This is basically what I do with almost all my services that need registration: I give them an email alias, a randomly generated cyberpunk name and create a 30 characters long password with a password manager. The only services where this doesn’t anonymize you are those that require your payment information, which is often tied to your real identity. Had I been living in the US, I would have used those anonymous prepaid debit cards that work like email aliases, but for your debit or credit cards.