That’s a great journey you’re on. Takes a lot of guts to re-evaluate our worldview, even when the old one is making us miserable.

Managed to get to the stage with my job, where I just kinda resent having to go to work because I’d rather be doing other things, as opposed to deeply hating it because I’m freaking out constantly. This is a big step for me, I had to leave my last career after crashing and burning, due undiagnosed ADHD. Had a couple of years off getting myself sorted out and correctly medicated, and started back in a new role, but with a genuine question about whether I could have a professional career again.

The first couple of years were really hard, just so stressful and I needed to see a therapist at points to keep going. But I did, and now in my 3rd year I’ve hit a very manageable level of stress that seems normal and bearable. Interestingly, this isn’t because I finally started being organised and stopped leaving things to the last minute. Nope, I just embraced my terrible work habits, stopped beating myself up about them, and changed my expectations for work so that paperwork was minimized and doing all my prep at the last minute was fine. Much less mentally horrific for me and, despite ‘lowering my standards’ the quality of my work probably increased, because I was doing what I could actually achieve not pushing to do something amazing that never materialised.

I think there’s a way that society represents “what sex is” that is very different from most people’s experience of it. For various reasons, Hollywood/advertising/porn all promote skinny and heavily made up women. And even if they find those kinds of actresses or models hot on the screen, that’s not the kinds of women most men actually crush on.

The reality is most people have a fairly limited number of sexual relationships, and they’re often with people who do not meet some abstract societal idea of ‘hotness’. A lot of the time people are attracted to people because they like them, and they have good chemistry. Sometimes it’s more of a ‘type’ or whatever (knew a guy who was really into short girls, and then I met his tiny mother…)

Same with relationships or sex or whatever. People learn a bunch of expectations and assumptions growing up, and then as theynget older they realise that most people don’t actually fit that arbitary standard. Sure, some guysnare horny all the time and just want emotionless sex, and so do some women. But it’s not as ‘normal’ as some media would suggest.

If it’s a message to the household, shouldn’t the writing face the other way?

Just started playing this again for the first time in years. Trying out the texture upgrades from tfix, and they seem pretty good. Still feels very retro!

I generally play at least one of the Ultima games every year, mostly the late 80s and early 90s ones.

More of an app than a website but meow meow beenz from Community.

France. It’s great and i love being here, but I teach English so there’s a lot of having to speak English and not a lot of push to speak French. Things should quite down in six months and I hope to be able to focus more on French and start actually gaining confidence in talking.

Given that almost everyone in the world speaks one of a tiny fraction of world languages, there’s less than 0.1% chance that anyone you ever meet will be able to understand you. Google Translate only covers 250 of more than 7000 world languages, so there’s a 97% chance I can’t even use online tools to get my message across.

If it was weighted it would still suck as I’d need to travel to other countries based on what i happen to speak (if it changes each year). That doesn’t sound worth it, especially not for the rest of my life. If it changed after every sentence, it would be like having an awful speech impediment. Trying to have a conversation would involve repeating myself half a dozen times until I hit the right language, and only if I’m in top 5 langauge areas. If I was trying to speak french I’d need to repeat myself 20 times before I was likely to be understood.

And what’s the benefit? That I can understand lots of langauges but can’t functionally communicate?

You don’t need to actively kill people off unless you’re in a rush. Just let climate change render parts of the world uninhabitable while enforcing strict border control, and make sure your population don’t have access to decent healthcare and vaccinations so that prevmtable diseases reduce the local numbers.

I don’t know. It’s something I think about a lot, especially when I’m wasting too much time online. But it really isn’t that simple. I had lots of friends and saw them pretty regularly, but I moved countries to be with my partner and I’m very happy with that choice and our life together.

But I don’t speak the language here, I’m learning but slowly. So if I wasn’t in message groups, sharing memes and video chatting my friends back home I’d feel pretty lonely. And it would make the couple of trips home each year much more awkward. By keeping in touch so regularly it feels totally normal to spend the day with a friend, even if I haven’t seen them in 9 months because I know all the little things they’ve been up to or excited about.

On the other side, if I had none of that, maybe I would have worked harder at learning the language. Especially with the lack of distractions the internet provides (being able to watch tv in English instead of local stuff is probably the biggest hurdle to learning), but realistically we’re busy and live in the country, so if I had some intermediate language skills and was vastly more lonely I’d probably not have made any real friends. I’d just go to some more social events in the year and participate a bit akwardly and feel sad.

They’re all fine with some extendent. It really depends specifically what and how you’re cooking. I like cast iron for steak because you can heat it up a helluva lot, even without fat, while trying that with non-stick pans can damage the coating and make some weird smells. Similarly, I prefer it for frying eggs because I like to use a metal slice to flip eggs, and worry about scarcjing my non-stick. But I have both and happily use both.

I’ve probably done it occasionally, when calling them in a public space shouting ‘Daaad’ as an adult feels a bit weird. Same with talking about them to a third person, I might use their names rather than say “my mum” the whole time.

But face to face, talking with them? It’d feel pretty weird, too impersonal and distant. If I saw someone else doing it tontjeir parents, I’d probably note it as unusual, but would be shocked.

That’s a really good example, just a mix and regurgitate of older, better work trying to give consumers what they think they want.

Yeah, given that that account got deleted not long after that (if it’s the one I’m thinking of) then it quite probably was a bot…

Most insults are some attempt to link an aspect of a person or their behaviour with a negatively perceived thing. Most powerful insults also include breaking some form of social taboo.

Thus we have mild insults like “your argument is…” “weak-sauce” which associate the argument with the (presumably undesirable) sauce of insufficient strength; “shit” which is mild taboo but so widely used and conventional that it doesn’t hit hard; “loose stool-water, arse-gravy of the worst kind” which is both a bit taboo and reasonably novel (but wordy and pretentious).

If you’re trying to find insults that are going to impact someone, you have to find things that are upsetting / undesirable or them, so that association with that negative thing is bad and they want to avoid it. This is tricky if they have a different worldview, because what is offputting to you might be fine to them (eg. religious people insulting behaviour as ‘sinful’ or ‘satanic’ doesn’t really land for non-believers).

This is extra tricky if you don’t agree with what they find disgusting, because when you use something that disgusts them as an insult you are reinforcing the idea that it IS something to be disgusted by. Making fun of Trump’s ‘Lady-hands’ or ‘micropenis’ might be hurtful to him (or his supporters) but it also telling men that traditional masculine features and penis size are the qualities of real men. But that’s the problem, you can’t use someone’s beliefs against them while also challenging those beliefs as wrong.

So you can just accept that insults are problematic, and continue to call people ‘retarded fags’ because you know that has a negative association to them, ignoring the innocent minorities also hurt by that language. Or you can find things that are universally seen as bad and undesirable (mostly varistions on bodily functions) or that don’t really hurt the stereotyped group (“you’re whining like a little baby” is less problematic than “like a woman on the rag” or “like a little removed”). But these generally aren’t as impactful…

Moog Cookbook do covers of alt rock songs on (surprise) moog synthesizers. Always felt they sound quite Jellyfishy.

Most of the time you don’t even need to say it’s your middle name. I’ve known lots of people who went by their middle name, generally guys in families where they, their dad and their grandad are all officially ‘John’, but actually go by their unique middle name. Its not that unusual.

Oh man, that’s soothing. A recipe, for a meal, and it explains what I need to do, in the order I do it, and the pictures actually show the cooking. This is some next level stuff. I hope it catches on!

I remember those. Awful.