Skulldrinker
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User ID: 1874
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Not so much a question as just me venting.
A while ago, I made the mistake of poking around the /r/OLD and /r/Tinder subreddits, and noticed a new bit of advice being given to women, (apparently) by other women: don't give out your phone number, use the app instead. Advice from men to men to switch to texting as soon as is reasonable also attracted these replies.
The reason given for this is apparently that "men will try to get you off the app so that they can be abusive or unpleasant to you without you being able to Report them." Stay on the app, where it's Safe, and They can't Hurt you with mean words, which is what they all want to do.
(To my understanding in all online dating: Getting off-app is supposed to be an escalation of intimacy. It's admittedly in the self-interest of men to be in Text notifications rather than lumped in with Tinder notifications; every time she opens tinder to reply to you is a chance for her to notice a message from some other hotter guy. I've also had women provide me their phone number unprompted with some non-reason about notifications not working or hating the lack of threading, but really because they just want the interaction to move forwards faster. I'm pretty sure women use this themselves to sort good suitors from Eh ones).
I think of it every now and then when I mess around with the apps, or when I need to remind myself to stay away from Reddit in general and certain subreddits in particular. It just struck me as perversely obstructive. Why does Reddit have to make everything worse? It's like warning job-seekers that employers offering in-person interviews are a ploy to kidnap you.
Years ago, it felt like there was an ideological arms race in Geek Dating to sabotage men in exciting new ways, by giving them bad advice and warning women away from them. That arms race seems to have continued in my absence. I suppose I'm just still annoyed that I spent my formative years surrounded by this cautiously cringing crap.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I aggressively don't care. Everyone should stop paying attention and be less sensitive to slight changes in rates of deaths; we got into this stupid situation due to exactly this sort of anxious over-sensitivity.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.
I'm not sure this is the case anymore. They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?" card for a while, and demonizing space travel as a way for rich (white) people to escape earth. I don't hear much futurism from them anymore.
Buuuut, I was surrounded by particularly-inconsistent leftists for way too long.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Except that female writers also write female characters as one-dimensional Mary sues, because yaaas queen slay.
The dynamic I notice in media today is that there's lots of Representation, but none of the minorities being represented are allowed to have negative character traits or be unsympathetic antagonists (for the same reasons as above), so straight white male characters wind up as sinks for all the narrative negativity.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
The black guy was an older brother, not a father, and the Chinese guy is technically some manner of fascist.
I do have a beef that the Commune(ists) don't get any critique compared to the pastor and his pseudo-cult or the QZ revolutionaries (who could possibly uncharitably be said to be coded a bit MAGA-y).
It's just so damn annoying that no one ever tells the story of how communes descend into bickering committee backstabbing. Even Dying Light 2 barely touched on it.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Wait, did they really get so mixed up that they think what's bad about colonialism is the "going somewhere else and building a home there" part, and not the "muscle out and exploit whoever's currently living there" part?
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
That sounds more like PH women being super-interested in marrying a white guy and moving to America, or just being interested in someone taller, richer, and hairier than the local men. The local dudes might still be being treated poorly.
I'd be interested in stats that indicate that Tinder in places other than the USA/Europe is "healthier," but I'm not sure what those would look like.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
It could be less acceptable than it currently is to casually vilify men.
I have a suspicion that women are over-exposed to media and memes that shit on men for cheap hurrahs, and the young ones in particular never actually get the firsthand experience of men that might justify the shitty attitude; the equivalent would be a bunch of 16-year-old boys who think their female classmates plan to marry them then divorce them and take away their money and children that they don't actually have.
But women aren't magnetically, viscerally attracted to men the way men are to women, and women also dictate what status IS; if you tell women that men are low-status simply for being men, they'll believe it, and enforce it, and then be confused as to where all the "good men" are.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Buzz it down and grow a beard.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Another one is that the women who give out dating advice or write about relationships (and thus who's opinions you see in online discourse) are either useless or non-representative:
1.way inside the basic normie female bubble. Cosmo-tier advice.
-
Extremely online and ideological (or cynical). Giving Dating Advice is really just them finding a soapbox to talk about how Men Need to Do XYZ. Often it's tuned to attract clicks, not to be useful to anyone, male or female.
-
Extremely online and incredibly anxious and atypical, (and also ideological). Girls who think dating game begins and ends with avoiding being raped.
There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.
"Mirage" was an MTG set from the early 2000s that was heavily african-inspired; most of the humans on the cards were black, and the ones who weren't were swarthy north-africans. Teferi originated in this set, a good-hearted trickster wizard.
Jammura (the africa-analogue continent on the main plane, Dominaria) has been almost completely untouched since then, apart from the small, unbeloved expansion Prophecy and a few random mentions, and characters like Kaervek getting timeshifted cards. Oh, and in the set where they go to the Egypt plane, lots of people were very black, because Kangs and Sheit.
Instead of making anything resembling a fantasy Africa plane or doing a nostalgia-trip or re-make of mirage (like Coldsnap for Ice Age or the Brother's War flashback set) they've just been throwing in random black vikings and froofy-haired planeswalkers like Kaya.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
The vision of the moral superiority of black people and the moral inferiority of white people is in itself repugnant, especially and particularly if you don't care about race. I can't quite tell if you're trolling or shit-stir-ing or devil's advocating.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I've noticed that recently; progressive women claiming to be autistic in addition to their various other identities and maladies. As someone ambiguously spergy, it bothers me slightly. Apparently one of the symptoms of autism in women is being incredibly intolerant of anyone else's autism.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Well, I've heard it said that The Dresden Files are harlequin romance novels for lonely 20something men. But, women who encounter the books also tend to really really like them.
Similar to The Witcher, which is really just a bodice-ripping sex romp with some fantasy monster-hunting thrown in, and also has a sizable female fan base. Maybe this is more a case of dudes getting tricked into reading romance novels.
Both series are also very Detective Noir, so maybe that's the secret gender fandom crossover element.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I used to think “nice” was an insult
Years ago, I got so sick of being called "Nice" by women around me I eventually had a Do Not Call Me That moment. I now feel slightly vindicated.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
When an android like Data comes on screen he starts to identify with him instantly, that's the character that's going to act like me
I noticed the same reaction in myself a while ago, but I'm a big fan of AI/robot tropes, and the real-world AIs we have so far don't have much thematic similarity to Wall-E, Data, Iron Giant, Bob the T-800, or Johnny-5. Most of the genuinely human AI fictional characters were never intended (in-universe) to be human. Iron Giant was a gun. Wall-E was a garbage collection unit. Data is maybe an exception, depends on what the intentions of his builder were, but the attempts at humor and the cat and the flute and such probably weren't intended in his design.
Narratively and IRL, Robots are not to be trusted unless they're acting WAY outside their intended parameters.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?
Yes, but in the course of the legal proceedings for domestic assault and kidnapping (technically, preventing someone from leaving by blocking a door or taking their keys counts as attempted kidnapping, so it sounds like a drama-filled domestic spat), there was a bunch of fishing around and apparently he made some joke about a 14-year-old fan being Jailbait while interacting with said fan. Which also turned him into a groomer and a pedophile according to Reddit. So legal exoneration now doesn't do much for him. Plus he generally has a drunk-texting habit, which provides additional examples of being "creepy," the ultimate sin.
In the course of this, there were also claims that he hadn't actually done any in-person work apart from voice stuff on any of his shows or projects since Rick&Morty Season 3, which I'm slightly skeptical of; it sounds like all his friends and co-workers distancing themselves and claiming they never liked him anyways and none of those projects should suffer cancellation because they don't represent his work. Buuut, you can tell on the Season 3 R&M commentary that he's less involved; there's a lot more guest writers and randos and vapid LA circlejerking; and there's no Season 4 Commentary, which is consistent with less engagement from him. It's also consistent with someone who was muscled out of his own show by Dan Harmon. Genuine shrug here, the evidence is ambiguous, everyone involved has motivation to lie or elide.
My own hypothesis is that guys who luck into fame and success (and the sexual opportunities that come with it) later in life often don't know how to handle it, they're the eternal underdog who finally caught the car. Famous men who haven't lived through decades of sexual deprivation before becoming famous have better OpSec and don't fall for Crazy so easily.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
I'm sorry this happened to you.
Either she's fallen down an over-thinking self-help rabbit-hole, or she just wants to leave you but doesn't have a "good" reason to do so and is laying the groundwork for making it your fault. You didn't support her becoming a whole-er person or something, the marriage failed because you weren't okay with her not loving you, rather than because she stopped loving you.
I don't know, man. This comes off as overwrought gibberish to me.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
This seems like another example of someone having a personality disorder, but no one noticing because they express it by shouting political slogans. You can see Borderlines acting as attack dogs for political activism all the time.
"Smithers, release the crazy bitches."
"Bitches do be crazy, sir."
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
The Dungeons and Dragons film was genuinely good, way funnier than I expected. Charming. Felt like a film from 2012. In many ways it was Firefly, but not in space (ensemble cast does stuff while snarking). Ignore the emasculation quote from the writers; I think journalists force the people they interview to say stuff like that at gunpoint now.
Skulldrinker
1yr ago
Because kids are great? It's a hard sell these days, but kids actually can be a fun, rewarding life project.
One thing that's changed about having kids is that it used to be more fun. Your friends had kids too, the kids could be left to their own devices for most of the day while the adults hung out. You were allowed to have a life and identity outside of your children.
Now, children demand all things they see advertised at them, subject everyone around them to their obnoxious media habits, expect the adults to entertain them, or sit like a lump on an ipad and scream if it gets taken away briefly. All your childless friends don't want to spend time in a child-safe house full of child-friendly media. If the children do actually go outside, it must be in the form of organized events with signed waivers and fees and disciplinary talks when one kid makes physical contact with another kid. Kids have become a thing that you buy ipads for that resents you for being straight and white and killing the planet.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
I'm going through another bout of anger over my experiences of "dating" in my 20s.
During, and post-college, the worldview I was presented with by my friends, social circle, and the women I encountered was that the explaination for all behaviors of women was "Feeling Unsafe." If something didn't go well on my date, it was because somehow I made her feel unsafe. If a woman didn't respond well to me flirting with her, it was because she was afraid I was about to assault her. The reason that a woman said "I've got to go to the bathroom, wait here, I'll be right back" was that she felt unsafe and was trying to escape in a way that wouldn't make me fly into a rage. Stood up? She Felt Unsafe. Woman I'm on a date with leaves with another man? She wanted the other man to protect her from me.
In my social circle, women's favorite topic of conversation was how much they hated men flirting with them, speaking to them, or even looking at them. Every outing to a bar was presented as a desperate struggle to Just Hang Out With Their Friends.
Then I got a little older and moved away from my college town. I had two relationships with women who actually HAD run into dangerous men, who had genuine trauma in their history. They didn't talk about Feeling Unsafe, they didn't go through life claiming constant fear of men, and they were universally confused at my low-self-esteem. One of them ran into a woman from my old social circle and was left aghast. "I didn't think all that stuff you said was real, but holy crap, is that what you were running into before you met me?"
Now, at 34 and stuck "dating" again, I just feel emotionally crippled and incapable of putting myself out there anymore; every time I do, I get flashbacks and all the old pain comes back, combined with the new pain of having loved and lost.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
I use these sorts of bikes occasionally. They cost x¢/min, starting when you unlock and totaled up when you relock. If you don't re-lock the bike, the meter just keeps on ticking. I'm not sure what happens eventually, maybe the rider who's account checked it out gets billed for the "stolen" bike. But the way the QR system works, it isn't particularly possible to grab someone else's bike by mistake. It is possible to be grabbing the last bike (or the last "good" bike, all the rest having flat tires or rusty chains or the like) and someone else to take issue with that. I don't think that happened here. I think a group on young men wanted to grab a free bike, and were expecting to get it through some combination of the target's niceness reflex, confusion as to how the unlock system works (while the target is trying to figure out how the "misunderstanding" happened, the bike is already gone), and the implicit intimidation of a group of agressive youths. In this case, it didn't work, she froze up, got confused, knew something was wrong, and tried to attract bystanders. Then a helpful person re-locked the bike, completely ruining the young men's intent to get a free bike that someone else will be billed for.
Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.
I also see these bikes left in yards in my (shitty) neighborhood. Now I know how they got there and why the rider doesn't care about being billed for them.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
Those views fall outside of Sociel Democracy as practiced as a social scene, wherein all cops are bastards etcetera.
Not quite a nootropic, but I find psilocybin does similar stuff long after a mild dose; clarity of thought, insight, integration of logical reasoning with emotional reasoning; I find myself "trusting my feelings" in the Jedi-y sense.
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