If voting did nothing, there wouldn’t be so much voter suppression and gerrymandering.

Personally, I would say absolutely do not stay home. If you want to abstain from the presidential vote or primaries it might not make a difference, depending on your state, but in the more local ballots you can make a difference for sure. Even better, consider getting involved in local politics, even just in the school board. Showing up to meetings and speaking can change minds. Shifting your town’s culture and making local connecions makes a bigger difference than a vote for Biden in most states.

Voting is not enough, but as someone else here said, vote for who you’d rather negotiate with. Additionally, when people like Trump get elected it sends a message to their sympathizers that they’re in the right, and it helps the overton window shift to the right. Look at the increase in hate crime after Trump won. Who is in power can cause cultural shifts that also make activism harder or easier, or even literally safer.

Not technically the first, but what got me into it was libre office. I was too broke too afford word so I was looking into alternatives.

I saw UFO’s. I don’t want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn’t believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one’s phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn’t match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I’ve ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO’s, and that scared the shit out of me. I’d love to find a non alien explanation, because I don’t want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn’t believe someone else telling me this story.