Brandon Allen

Gamer, Anime Lover, Comic Reader, Bookworm, Freelance Journalist.
I'm trying to build a future, not rebuild the past. Age = Level 24

[goma @soigomaa]

My "Roman Empire is the realization that my life is a lottery win. Somewhere in Sudan, Pålestine, iran, Afghanistan, Iraq or Congo, there is a boy smarter than me. He is more disciplined, more resilient, and holds more potential in his single finger than I do in my entire career.
The only difference? I am siting in a train and he is sting in the rubble of his dreams.
My "bad days" are his wildest dreams.
My "burnout" is a luxury he can't afford because his only job is staying alive.
It's geographical luck and it's a haunting injustice that we all refuse to acknowledge and look away

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

According to psychology, being the "good, low maintenance" child isn't a sign of innate maturity. It is a survival strategy known as parentification or fawning. You subconsciously recognized that your caregivers were too emotionally overwhelmed, volatile, or fragile to handle your age appropriate needs. You swallowed your own childhood and became invisible just to keep the peace

[‏ً @itsnwts]

My man recently just said something to me that really stuck.

He told me, “I’m not here to control you. I’m not your dad, I’m your partner. You’re free to make your own choices. Just understand that every choice has consequences. If you choose something that damages what we’ve built, that’s on you.”

He said, “I’ll always tell you when something hurts me or crosses a boundary, because that’s what healthy communication looks like. But if you keep stepping over the line after I’ve shown you where it is, then you were never really protecting us to begin with.”
And honestly, that’s what accountability in a relationship sounds like.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Asha Sharma had never made a video game. Microsoft put her in charge of Xbox in February anyway. Her mom worked at a department store for $7 an hour. The gaming press was skeptical.

Phil Spencer, who she replaced, had been at Microsoft 38 years. His deputy Sarah Bond was the obvious heir. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, picked Sharma instead.

Sharma grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. Her parents divorced when she was young. She took her first job at 17 and earned a business degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011.

Straight out of school she joined Microsoft in marketing. Two years later she left for Porch, a Seattle startup that helped people hire handymen and movers. She was running it as second-in-command within four years.

Facebook hired her in 2017. She spent four years running Messenger and Instagram DMs, the chat tools people use to message friends privately. Billions of users.

Instacart, the grocery delivery company, made her second-in-command in June 2021. She ran the app, deliveries, growth, and marketing. She took it public on the stock market in 2023. Her stake was worth $19 million that day.

In 2024 Microsoft hired her back to run CoreAI, the team behind Microsoft Copilot. She ran it two years before getting Xbox.

Same pattern every job: take a product used by millions or billions of people, fix the money side, make it grow. Xbox needs exactly that.

Xbox console sales fell 32% in the quarter before she walked in. The PS5 has outsold the Xbox Series X 84 million to 34 million. Last October Microsoft hiked Game Pass by 50% to $30 a month. People canceled in droves.

On April 21 she cut Game Pass Ultimate back to $23 a month, a 23% drop. PC Game Pass went from $16 to $14. The catch: new Call of Duty games no longer come to Game Pass on launch day. Players wait a year or buy the game for $70. Call of Duty on Game Pass reportedly cost Microsoft $300 million last year. The math works.

On March 5 she announced the next Xbox, codenamed Project Helix. It runs on a custom AMD chip and plays both Xbox and PC games on the same box. Test units ship to studios in 2027.

This week she renamed the whole division back to Xbox and killed the “This is an Xbox” ad campaign. The slogan had tried to claim any device streaming Xbox games was also an Xbox. Fans had been mocking it for a year.

In her first memo to staff she promised Xbox games would not be filled with cheap AI-generated content. Games stay made by humans. She also picked up a gamertag, AMRAHSAHSA, and started playing for the first time.

She still does not know games. She knows how to take a product used by a billion people and make them feel it is worth paying for. That is the bet.

[Asanwa.sol @Chizitere_xyz]

Most people aren't actually doing the deep "inner work" they claim to be doing in their single era. They are just becoming so incredibly selfish and rigidly set in their routines that they are now entirely incapable of basic compromise. The absolute second a relationship requires them to make a small sacrifice or function as a team, they panic, self-sabotage, and claim the person is "threatening their peace.

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

My coworker texted me on Teams:

“First deadline is very close. Email me immediately.”

There was no deadline.
There was no email.

That was a code.

“First deadline” means: Boss is approaching.
“Email” means: Stop what you’re doing. You’re being monitored.
“Excel” means: You’re safe.

My coworker mentioned “first deadline” and “email” on Teams.

I didn’t ask questions.
I didn’t text back.

I just closed all the open tabs on Chrome.

Then, right in front of my desk, there was my boss asking about a project report.

I had already submitted it, so he went back to open it from his side.

My coworker stared at me from the far end of the office. Then typed Excel.

When we met in the parking lot at the end of the day, he said quietly:

“Boss suspected you were not working and headed straight to your desk.”

He drove home without adding another word.

Neither did I.

Saving a coworker from a bad situation is better than being loyal to a boss.

[goma @soigomaa]

I saw one today where a woman admitted to calling ICE on her husband after she "thought" he was cheating. He was actually planning a surprise for her and the co-worker she accused him of messing around with was helping him because she worked as a travel agent on the side. He's been held in an ICE detention center since December and she still hasn't told him or their kids that she's the reason he's in there

[Brandon Allen @Naieros]

Alright Oba Femi. It's your time. Break some shit.

[Asanwa.sol @Chizitere_xyz]

The internet has completely ruined our ability to accept healthy love. We have started weaponizing therapy speak against perfectly normal men. He isn't "love bombing" you; he’s just actually excited to date you. He isn't "codependent"; he just wants to spend time with his girlfriend. We are so terrified of being played that we are actively villainizing men for doing exactly what we begged them to do.

[alpha man @alphaman_111]

Look at the relationship difference

90s:

• Meet in real life
• Talk face to face
• One partner at a time
• Loyalty was expected
• Fewer options
• Effort meant everything
• Love grew slowly
• Privacy was normal
• Stay and fix problems

2026:

• Meet on apps
• Text more than talk
• Multiple options always
• Loyalty is questioned
• Endless choices
• Effort is rare
• Love is fast, fades faster
• Everything is public
• Leave at first inconvenience

[Jordanreviewsittt @jordanreviewsit]

>be born in the 50s and 60s
>get a paper route to save for college
>nice, tuition is only $200 a semester
>graduate and get real job by giving firm handshake
>buy a house which is only 2x your salary
>work at same company for 40 years
>retire with a pension
>become a shareholder and get rid of pensions (stock price goes brrr)
>home “value” goes up 1,700%
>make no upgrades, refuse to sell under asking to new family; sell to Blackrock instead
>lecture every subsequent generation about work ethic

[Frankie جاي Bleau @FrankieBleau]

I can not stress this enough!!!

Use your credit cards instead of your debit cards and put the money aside. 15 days before your statement generates pay it down to about 16 percent utilization. When the statement generates, pay the balance in full. This is how you create strong credit.

[Yves ౨ৎ @yvessirae]

i don't know who needs to hear this but in order to become a better person, you must first realize how horrible you really are. not in the dramatic sense, but in the quiet ways you sabotage yourself, repeat unhealthy patterns, hurt people who care about you, or tolerate what wounds you. you cannot grow if you keep pretending you’re innocent in the story you created

[Maryam @hell_line0]

When I first got married, I called my mom to complain about some argument my husband and I were having. My mom stopped me right there and said, "unless you are in danger, dont ever let anyone into your marriage, not even me". Its was the best advice I could've ever received as a young wife. It allowed me to take my concerns directly to my husband, think thru how I really feel without someone projecting themselves on me. Gatekeep the marriage.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain literally processes text differently after age 25.

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully myelinate until your mid-twenties. That’s the region responsible for abstract reasoning, long-term consequence modeling, and emotional regulation. When your English teacher assigned you The Great Gatsby at 16, you were reading it with a brain that couldn’t yet simulate regret.

This is why rereading hits so differently. You’re running the same input through fundamentally different neural architecture.

At 16, your brain processes Gatsby’s obsession as plot. At 35, your amygdala fires because you’ve lived through your own version of chasing something that was already gone. The text stays identical. Your pattern-matching library has 20 more years of emotional data to draw from.

There’s a compounding effect here. Every major life experience you’ve had (grief, love, failure, parenthood) creates new associative networks that literature can activate. A teenager reading King Lear has zero reference frames for watching a parent lose their mind. A 45-year-old who’s watched a parent decline reads it and their entire autobiographical memory network lights up.

The smartest readers I know reread more than they read new books. The ROI on rereading increases every year you’re alive because you are the variable that changed, and the returns compound with experience.

[Brandon Allen @Naieros]

@GrumpyCatterman People that don't actually listen and only hear what they want to are so fucking annoying. He never said anything even remotely resembling toxic positivity. Criticism is valid, toxicity isn't.

[Brandon Varnell @BrandonBVarnell]

If straight men didn't read, I'd be out of a job.

Community reading is just not something straight men do often, but that doesn't mean they don't read on their own time.

I write harem light novels for straight men. More than 90% of my reader base are straight men with a handful of women thrown in.

This is a gross generalization based on incomplete data. It would be like saying “women don’t play video games” because you only checked Call of Duty voice chat and ignored literally everything else.

[Dave @GamewithDave]

The story of FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

It wasn’t a hack. It was a leaked Windows XP volume license key.

Because it was whitelisted, XP skipped activation entirely no phone-home, no timer, no watermark. Once the volume install media leaked too, XP could be distributed “pre-activated” and fully functional.

One of the biggest piracy moments ever, caused by trust in early DRM not cracking.

[Hera Kita 🪓🐾Final Girl VTuber @xHeraKita]

We should normalise just not vibing with people. Not hating someone for no reason. But maybe I just don't vibe with you.

If someone approaches you and goes "I think so-and-so doesn't like me" more often we should respond with "okay, and?"
So WHAT?
It's more weird, in my opinion, to get on with every single person you meet.

No, I don't care if you vibe with me. If the feeling isn't mutual I'm not interested in stringing you along just so you can feel validated that you're enjoyed by every person on the planet.

Being civil and offering simple hello and good byes isn't being fake. Being cordial in a mutual space isn't being fake. It's being an adult, and more people need to realise that.

This goes for Vtubing and irl.