KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
You sound completely unhinged, and while I agree that getting off the internet will do you a lot of good (as in, getting out of your own head, getting away from the hope-crushing discourse around dating/relationships/attractiveness, etc), getting that far off the internet will probably kill you. Find something directionally similiar but maybe 1/10,000th the magnitude and do that first.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
Ironically, the NATO tweet invoked just about everything but Indy: https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687961477750790#m
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
How long did it take for things to "kick in"? I am starting with a different GLP-1 agonist and while the initial nausea has passed I don't feel like my appetite has dropped that much.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
Nobody breaks the mold here a bit by making you think "who is this schlub?" before the plot really kicks off. And I think it's better for it — you then find that he has the friends in high places, and the strongly-held principles, etc.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Rotten Tomatoes turned off reviewing unreleased movies just before Captain Marvel came out, but claim that they "definitely" didn't change the site to protect Captain Marvel. Given how much fudging of everything has happened in the world since then, I wouldn't be surprised if they are now willing to make up review scores to protect favored films.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
One model I've seen activists use is the spectrum of allies: classify people/organizations into "active ally", "passive ally", "neutral", "passive opposition", "active opposition". Other presentations I've seen on this also advise activists to try and move target groups only one step at a time.
Most people who object to the LGBTification of everything have been cowed into "neutral", or at best "passive opposition", but serious right-wing culture warriors (e.g., Rufo) have been able to bring back some "active allies" on the right. OP's friend's company seems to have been moved from the left's "active ally" to "passive ally", at least in its public-facing stance in the US. The spectrum of allies model does not distinguish between true believers and greengrocers, but I don't think that matters too much: the page also quotes that "movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting the support out from under them." If the non-grifter right wants to stop losing, I think that's a sign they are starting to make some headway.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Ursula's character is also deliberately modeled on a drag queen and very interested in corrupting young Ariel. I am surprised that I haven't seen anti-groomer culture warriors run with this.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Can we talk online dating strategy? I've been away from it for a while, but the rest of my life has been running well for a while, I have recent pictures of me doing cool things, and it's probably time to re-add it to the ways I try to meet people.
First up: goals. I'm male, late 30s, never married, no kids, would like to change the last two of those. Had a few short-term relationships over the years, most from various partner dance scenes. You can probably infer a lot of my hobbies from the fact that I post here: nerdy, wordy, techy. Which platforms are doing the best for relationship-minded people these days? Last time around I signed up for Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder; and had the most luck with Hinge, then Tinder, then Bumble.
I've seen a lot of advice about tailoring a profile to specific sections of the dating market, so that the women you want to be into you are more likely to want to start a chat. For those of you who have had success online, how did you decide who to tailor for? There are a few different sides to myself that I could see myself enjoyably sharing with the right woman: I could enjoy camping/climbing/bouldering/etc with an adventurous outdoorsy woman, sharing a table with a nerdy boardgames type, etc. I feel that if I try to list everything, I make a profile that stands for nothing, and doesn't really excite anyone. But I feel also that trying to present one narrow side is inauthentic and makes it more likely that the profile's Elo will tank (more women will dislike it).
Second: I've become pretty right-leaning over the past few years. Not as far as some of our especially based posters here, but probably near the edge of my city's Overton Window. Is it correct to assume that answering "conservative" or even "moderate" for the "politics" question is a kiss of death? There was an interesting thread the other week about political compatibility between partners, and the extent to which people are tolerant of heterodoxy with an established partner. That made me think it might be better to omit it in the initial profile but also not hide it from the women I do meet when it comes up. I don't want to give up my principles for a shot at a relationship (that way leads to lies and ruin), but I also don't want to screen off people who I could actually get along with, had we spent some time learning about each other before diving into politics.
Third: Has all the language model/image generation stuff further warped the dating app landscape yet? I can imagine the bot problem being a lot worse now. Alternatively, have you used it to tune your profile/messages? If so, how did that work out?
I'm very interested in other people's success/failure stories (on-app or off), as well as suggestions for IRL places to meet people.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Back when I was dating (online or no), I had the most success with (once we'd got to the point that a date was on the table) suggesting place, time, and activity all at once. "Let's get a drink after work at [place]. How's Wednesday at 6?" It's not clear from your post whether or not you're trying that, but I found that it opened up better "yes" and "no" responses — fewer flakes on "yes"es, as well as "no, but I can do [other day]", "no, I'd rather not do [activity]", "no, I'd rather go [somewhere closer]".
The average woman on a dating app has like a zillion unread notifications and a full schedule, so batching that stuff up is more respectful of her time and there's less chance for you to fall out of her loop of guys she's talking to. Win-win.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Sigh. I take solace in the fact that men are often just as frustrating and incomprehensible to women as women are to us.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
I didn't know new Ursula was based on a different one, I only know about the "Divine" connection.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Thanks for concise and actionable advice. I'm astonished that "proof of teeth" has to be on your checklist.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
First, congratulations! Second, thank you. I think your advice about not messaging too long and saying "I got it" when the bill comes (and then either splitting or saying "you can get the next") match my experience back when I did take women out on dates. Your remarks about politics and children are also sensible, so I think think that most of what I'm doing wrong must be in the profile and photos.
Height. Sadly, this is the most important factor. If you're average, you're fine here.
I'm about 5'10". Not tall enough to honestly put that magic 6'0 on the profile, but probably not so short that it's going to be a massive problem online? Given the amount of fudged numbers on people's profiles, maybe the better thing is to omit the number and have a bunch of photos which don't make me look short?
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Your example is a wholesale, cohesive reimagining of a setting. That's really common with Shakespeare's stuff, as opposed to WotC using a dartboard to decide what characters to swap.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
The old place had Mafia games, and while I didn't participate, I endorse this precedent.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
The Sandbaggers. Someone on the old place recommended it, and it is the best spy show ever made.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
What if it was radical rather than gradual? Why leave triggers for old habits around while you're trying to break them? I suggest instead a series of larger jumps.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Congratulations. May you have many long and happy years together.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners
There's a "Zero to One" sort of effect here, though: once you have a legal mechanism in place to effect something like this, expanding the program looks like a small tweak to an accepted policy instead of a radical shift.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
The flute definitely is girl-coded, and yet: Ian Anderson.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Great work. Can you summarize what you've been eating, particularly anything that's been good for your satiety? I struggle with appetite, and while I've tried a GLP-1 agonist, I desisted: I felt like I wasn't seeing much loss and felt like my appetites were drifting back to what they were before I started. Given the horror stories I'd heard of people having insatiable hunger after ceasing a different GLP-1 agonist (semaglutide), I decided to quit while I was ahead.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
I think your reading is correct because it matches a theme that Lewis revisits in other forms. The Inner Ring is a short essay about it:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
And one of his novels, That Hideous Strength, is in large part about a man almost completely unmaking himself by trying to get into the inner rings:
In his homily “The Inner Ring,” Lewis warned about people who become scoundrels by degrees, making increasingly serious compromises of their integrity and values in order to make their way into an exclusive inner circle. Mark Studdock is quite clearly a victim of the inner-ring syndrome as he tries to gain acceptance at N.I.C.E.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
"But I've been far worse than you know. I really believed it was him— [Aslan], I mean — yesterday. When he warned us not to go down to the fir wood. And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I'd let myself. But I just wanted to get out of the woods and — and — oh, I don't know. And what ever am I to say to him?"
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
It would have cost too much money to take the other three all to America, and Susan had gone. Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she "would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters".
At the end of your post, you write:
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back.
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
How does one get a Google account these days that isn't tied to an existing identity?
The CW thread is fast-moving and a top-level post can sometimes fall off the bottom of the page once the post above attracts enough replies. These effortposts look like they're going to add a lot of intellectual variety to the discussion here, and I hope they'd attract enough discussion that we'd be sad to see them disappear before their time.
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