Skulldrinker
No bio...
User ID: 1874
Eh, I've got a personal story to share.
A few months ago, I ran into someone at the pub I'm a regular at and worked for during the span of a festival. She was tall with grey eyes and a strong jaw, a spacey stare-right-at/past-you expression and a throaty dreamy voice with a tiny hiss in it; a few sideways teeth. Kinda Debra Morgan-looking. She was also a regular and barbacked occasionally, otherwise she did merch distribution at festivals and venues. We both sperg'd out on eachother about this-or-that subject. Her stuff was Electric Cello, Cannibalism, Fullmetal Alchemist deep lore (what the fuck is Father? Our conclusion: the closest analogy would be a luciferian fallen angel). We were talking about Tieflings throughout the editions and character trope stuff, I said I like the Half-monster-guy-who-hunts-monsters-and-is-conflicted-about-it schtick, like Hellboy. Turns out Hellboy is her favorite/comfort movie that she throws on when she's down. I immediately know why. She shares some music she's working on with me, says she hasn't shown it to anyone else, even her best friend. Says I'm easy to talk to. Says she'd wondered if she'd run into me that night. I'm more a Show, Don't Tell sort of person, but I'm obviously internally smitten. In case you can't catch the hint, she's not 100% neurotypical. Neither am I. I mean, I post here.
I got her phone number so she could tell me when she'd be doing a cello set somewhere, but her set didn't pan out and she didn't reply past that, so I didn't keep at it, but she kept Liking my instagram posts (nature/wildlife/bugs and RPG sessions).
She posts about going to a House of the Dragon S2 watch party at another bar for her birthday, and I formulate a plan: Turn up at that party and give her a laser-guided gift. I have an extra copy of the Hellboy paperback that's the main source for the film (she hasn't read the comics). Inside the front cover, I write "all us freaks have is each other" (Like I said, I know why we both love the film, and DelToro in general). I also fire up my filament printer and print out three full-size tooth faeries from Hellboy 2 in blueish-green plastic, assemble them, and color in the eyes and teeth. (This isn't that big of a project for me; I've played Warhammer in the past)
I turn up to the watch party, which is full of goddamn Kneelers who shout "woo, matriarchy!" which causes me pain. But it's still a decent time, a kid gets his head hacked off. Afterwards I run into her; she'd arrived after me and I intentionally wasn't looking for her during the episode. But we both make a big deal of running into eachother. I run back to my car and come back with a cardboard box full of faeries. She loves them, she's cooing over how cute they are, how they all have different heads, she's giving them names, she's showing them off to everyone around her. She spontaneously hugs me when she sees the dedication inside the book.
As an amusing aside, after the watch party this bar had an open-mic stand-up event. And everyone was terrible. Like, reddit-tier generic terrible. There were boos and groans. Some boilerplate edgy jokes (I think one guy joked about Gays for Palestine getting thrown off of buidings. It was just fucking inept). At first I think this is a huge windfall; I'm actually funny. But it'd be hours before I could get on and school these fools. My crush and her crowd get up to head to a different bar, because they're so affronted. I'm invited along, even though I'm slightly worried about the prissy reaction, I steadfastly hold to their work being bad because it's bad, not because its offensive.
The company my crush keeps is slightly worrisome to me. Many are fat feminists of the "Men, amirite?" sort, but I don't have the impression they're close friends, just acquaintances. I later find out that she's a preacher's daughter and was an activist from an early age, part of OG Occupy (she's in her early 30s, I'm in my mid-30s). I carefully talk around the subject and express my own frustration that activism these days is more about being seen having the right opinions and hating the right people than furthering a worthy cause, which seems to resonate with her a bit. There's a careful future conversation to be had, but at least she remembers a time before IdPol infected every cause.
She goes outside to smoke and asks if I'd like to join her. She smokes American Spirit; the same cigs I smoke, which I only do socially (too much time at bars in the smoker's pen; that's where all the cool people and cool conversations are) They last forever. She talks about how she loves pretending she's in a noir story when she smokes. I ask "Yes, but in this context, who's the jaded alcoholic detective and who's the dangerous dame?" She smiles as I take a cig, I reach for a lighter, but she beats me to it. "Pretty people don't light their own cigarettes" she says, with that same smile.
A few minutes later, I kiss her. We spend a little time just holding eachother, enjoying the closeness, and head back inside.
The evening continues. I try not to monopolize my crush and let her hang with the rest of the people there. We go back outside for another cigarette, I kiss her again, she pulls away a bit when I get over-enthusiastic, we talk more, I decide to dial it back. Typically my conversations with women are like pulling teeth; I ask open-ended questions and get yes-or-no answers. They never volunteer information or start a topic or ask me about myself or even talk about themselves; I get the impression that they're playing dead to make me go away. Maybe that's just what normal people are like. This evening isn't normal, we're chatting. She says things that surprise me, which is disappointingly rare in my interactions with people. We can talk about stories and ideas and random science facts. She gets my jokes. She makes her OWN jokes. We're both creative in our own ways. She talks about her job, how it forced her to learn social skills, which is something she struggled with for a long time; she's had to put the effort into learning stuff that other people seem to just do without thinking. The feels feel so feel I have to fight to stop my eyes from getting wet. I'm very much being hit where I live.
My crush starts mentioning how tired she is, people have been buying her drinks all day. I note she's acting even spacey-er than she typically is, and resolve to not push for anything. I also find out she's just landed an awesome tour contract where she'll be handling merch at a succession of festivals all summer and autumn; she'll be gone for six months, and she's got to pack tomorrow. But there's a few shows that are happening in the city, so she'll be back in town a few times.
People start clearing out, she's very tired, she talks about calling an Uber. I offer to drive her and save her $10, since my car is nearby and I haven't had any drinks for a few hours. We walk back to my car arm-in-arm, all cutesy and formal. There's hand-holding. There's continued verbal telegraphing of tiredness, and she's not escalating anything. I get her back to her place, unload the box of faeries, kiss her one last time and say "I wish we had more time together," then leave. Send a text the next day expressing how great it was getting to know her, how nice a time I had, how I'll miss her and hope to get together again when she's back in town.
A day later, I receive a reply:
Just so you know, I'm unhappy that you made out with me while I was drunk. That wasn't how I wanted my birthday to go, and I'm really upset about it.
I reply saying I'm sorry, I might have rushed things when I realized you'd be leaving town for a while, how would you like me to comport myself towards you in the future? I'm trying to say "If you never want to hear from me again, please just say that." I never receive any further reply. She hasn't unfollowed me on instagram; I've hidden her posts so I don't see them unless I go looking, so as to avoid further pain. I'm confused in addition to shattered; is there a rule that you're not allowed to flirt with women when it's their birthday? She wasn't so drunk that she couldn't have cogent conversations about wide-ranging topics, I sure as hell felt encouraged. I thought I was being gallant by not asking if she'd like to show me her place or otherwise head inside for "coffee" or to see etchings. Fuck, how much worse would this have been if I had?
I wonder where those tooth faeries are now. Thrown out? In a box in a closet? I can't imagine her scattering them on shelves like she planned if they're just going to remind her of that time she got molested.
This is what my life is like. Nothing ever, ever works out, and whenever I think I'm making an emotional connection with someone, reality itself seems to realize a mistake has been made and steps in to correct things. I have a day or two of emotional torment as I accept that I am going to continue to be alone and to feel arbitrarily alienated. I am not allowed to do the things regular people are allowed to do. I don't get to be human. If I try, even other weirdos reject me once they sober up and invent new rules regarding birthdays.
Someone else in this thread complained that a girl didn't text him back, and I thought to myself "Hold my beer."
Edit: I appreciate the condolences, but I kinda despair at the caliber of some of the replies, and its damaged my view of the remaining userbase of this place. I don't need regurgitated /r/Redpill advice about shit tests. I'm lucky enough to have spent most of my (albeit limited) intimate time with women in actual relationships with another human being that I like and respect and who likes and respects me, instead of some retarded power game with a bratty child. You can miss me with that gay shit.
Skulldrinker
1mo ago
I've been reflecting lately on how downright unhelpful and unpleasant my experiences with dating/flirting/sex were earlier in my life, and what a weight around my neck the still are. In my previous life, there was no such thing as flirting, women were just "being friendly," and would curl their lip and give you a glare if you let slip that they'd been socializing with someone heterosexual by doing something so crass as asking for a phone number. "Ewwww, a man is speaking to me, make it go away" was what happened if you spoke before being spoken to. The attitudes of the women I knew socially bounced between "Just talk to people silly, it's not that hard, you're so nice," "chuh, why do you feel the need to not be alone, there's something wrong with you," and "Fourteen out of twelve women will be sexually assaulted by eyeball-contact at frat parties by niceguys before they even get a job that pays them 70 cents on the dollar compared to a man."
I once had a woman approach me at a new years party at a bar (small, bob cut, I can still remember the contours of her shoulderblades), something about trying to find her friend, but the friend never got mentioned again. We got another drink, she asked to dance once she got back from the bathroom. While she was in the bathroom and I was holding her drink, a fat redhead got in my face, demanding to know who I was, who I was here with, if I even knew her (bob cut's) name. I was taken aback, said her name is [name], I'm holding her drink for her, then we're going to dance, oh, there she is now, bye. BobCut came out of the bathroom, didn't acknowledge fat redhead, took her drink and my hand, and dragged me out onto the dance floor. It was 11:50pm. At 11:56pm, security appears and separates us, the fat redhead is screaming in my face demanding to know who I'm with, a security guy is asking the same questions while she screams at me. Bob cut is nowhere to be found (probably being given a foil trauma blanket while still trying to figure out what happened), no I'm not allowed to speak to bob cut, no I'm not being kicked out, no I can't speak to bob cut, who am I here with, no, bob cut doesn't count, no I'm not being kicked out, who am I here with. I'm getting increasingly frustrated, I'm not particularly sober, fat redhead is still in my face, her head jerking around on her flabby neck like some kind of righteously affronted parrot. I can sense a blowup looming, the front door is conveniently nearby, and the future of me doing the new years countdown and making out with someone has evaporated. I leave, and I ring in the new year of 2017 walking down the snow-dusted sidewalk of Milwaukee, cursing my awkwardness and cowardice.
The bar was a nerd/geek/gamer pub, of course. Nowhere else would the act of a man dancing with a woman be treated as some sort of crisis in need of calling security. I never ran into either of them again, the pub itself closed shortly thereafter. Since then, every time a woman flirts with me unprompted in a social setting, I go into a quiet panic and look over my shoulder for whatever third party will arbitrarily decide I am not worthy of happiness or love.
My point is that I keep failing to get phone numbers or contact info, or I collect contact info and do nothing with it, even when women are blatantly eye-fucking me, because I still have the lingering trauma of living in 2010s geek culture. And I still run into snippets of it every now and then, but with a current-year leftist flavor. (I've been in conversations where women will make some reddit-y crack along the lines of "straight white men, amirite?" but turn out later to have been into me, scrabbling for contact info or a kiss as I try to politely take the hint and leave.)
I just want to go for a stroll in the park with someone and bang them later, then do that again with the same person for the foreseeable future. And I hate that the world and I both conspire to make that much more difficult than it should be.
Skulldrinker
6mo ago
No political party or subculture at this point can in good faith claim to be the one who's "chill" about things and confused as to why other people are so bent out of shape, there must be something wrong with them. Everyone has gotten dirtied up at some point.
Also, being performatively concerned about something is not the same as being afraid of it.
The other day I had a conversation with someone who used to work for a Non-profit who's whole thing was getting Asylum-seeking migrants in Chicago as many resources as possible. She left that job because most of it was telling them (the Migrants) to lie to get more stuff, and coaching them on exactly what to say. Her take was that the whole thing was just moving people around and extracting money from the city so the Non-profit could continue to pay its directors their cushy salaries and justify the non-profit's continued existence, while dumping Guatemalans in the city's shelters and public housing so the men could be layabouts or thugs while the women deployed their kids to sell candy in Fulton Market (trendy restaurant district).
So not anything we didn't already know. Just funny to hear it from the horse's mouth. Especially an ethnically-mexican horse
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
Every young Canadian I've met thinks "America, Amirite?" Is the peak of humor and social commentary. They aren't going to move somewhere with guns and racism, which of course define the US.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
When I think of "Normies," this is the concept I have in my head, maybe a bit less gendered.
I have a huge amount of sympathy for the women who have been my friends, close friends, or lovers, because they have universally been rejects or outsiders of this culture and I recognize the marks this experience left on them.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.
So their conversations don't even pass the Bechdel Test.
I get that this is a different country with its own rat-race social problems, but I roll my eyes at the fear of men who hate women. Most men who hate women hate them because women won't get anywhere near them, so they never have an opportunity to hurt a woman apart from mean comments on the internet. Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable. Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.
Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.
Skulldrinker
1mo ago
In retrospect, the biggest "win" of DOGE was cutting off some of the federal funding that was paying the salaries of ideologues and activists.
Several times now, I've had text conversations with women where they seem to scare themselves off.
One kept pushing me to ask her sexual compatibility questions, which I answered as delicately and dryly as I could. She'd rave excessively about how attractive I was and how she's looking forward to seeing me again (we met once, briefly, and she tracked me down on social). Since I know it's a bad idea to build up a date this much and set sexual implications, I complemented her back but kept it light and fun.
Then the day of the date, suddenly a co-worker got fired and she has to work a double. Also "You're not expecting sex for this meeting, are you?" Well no, I was not, despite everything you've said being suggestive of that, because I was going to take it slow. I reply "Light canoodling at most." There's mutual availability tuesday, and thursday, but she suggests thursday, mentioning "she'd like more planning, usually." Now I haven't heard anything from her since.
Before this, the shape of the exact same thing happened. She started talking as though she was already assuming we'd be in a relationship with her "adding spice to my life and shaking things up." This is way, WAY more than I'd typically send when I haven't even met someone in person, it assumes too much. Then suddenly she was astronomically ill from "allergies," which continued for several days, her apparently being home from work, yet replying less than when she was at work, until I stopped texting.
I want people to turn up for an in-person date. I very carefully don't say things that create too much pressure or assume things about compatibility, because it comes off as pressuring and dishonest ("OMG I'm so into you" ...we haven't actually met yet, miss, maybe save that for after the first date). But then they themselves do that exact thing, bail the day before.
Fucking everything I do is tiptoeing around not triggering anyone's anxiety so as not to be treated as a threat, then they trigger their OWN anxieties, treat me like a threat, and presumably pat themselves on the back for having spotted a manipulative predator who was Only After One Thing.
What the fuck is going on here?
When I interact with someone in real life, I get really confused and anxious whenever they start praising me. Then they get confused as to why. This is why. Because whenever someone gives me unprompted compliments or raves about me, they swiftly ditch me, which is why I don't believe what anyone says anymore.
Edit: we made plans on Monday for Wednesday, I was ghosted on Tuesday.
This was not online dating, btw.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
neurodivergent
This one really, really bugs me, I see it as stolen valor. Also, they're still unforgiving of the neurodivergence of others.
Skulldrinker
4mo ago
I'm happy that a Borderline vaguely associated with the geek scene got dragged into the light and meticulously proven as (mostly) a liar where everyone can see. These monsters are real.
I feel bad for the fiance. Everyone else's suffering in this is just funny.
Skulldrinker
7mo ago
AI slop detected. A human would get bored meticulously laying out the same obvious ideas over and over and assume the reader can draw a conclusion or two. The next step in LLMs will be them being able to pretend to get bored with things instead of being eternally patient and obsequious.
Also, couldn't conditions of extreme danger and tightness of resources create a society of extreme communalism where no one's allowed to do anything without group approval?
Or a society trained to military order. Maybe Fremen would be a better model than an IQ-jerkoff fantasy.
A man's body is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.
Skulldrinker
9mo ago
Obviously the kung-fu master's power was psionic, not physical. He was only using it on the cop, erasing him from the cop's perception. I'm disappointed in his creativity.
Skulldrinker
5mo ago
My experience of observing a serial-monogamist male feminist was that the "feminism" was just one element of the omni-leftist persona he had adopted in his quest to marry an affluent (preferably) white woman. It was a combination of tech startup agile corpo-speak, DNC volunteer, radical Marxist revolutionary, and Blackness (lots of talk about "Bodies" and playing up the Childish Gambino schtick). He also spent some time declaring he was non-binary (which apparently meant wearing a midriff-bareing top once or twice). Women apparently lapped it up, he didn't need to pester anyone. (Seeing all this made me hate the world)
He'd be emotionally manipulative to a pointlessly psychotic degree once they were in a relationship with him, though. Despite all this, he could do no wrong in the eyes of leftists, because how could a gay black feminist communist be a bad person? The very statement is an oxymoron.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
I see outdoor maskies every day, and they almost always have leftist signifiers.
Mask requirements for businesses didn't end in my city until...well, I got so frustrated that I left for six months in January 2022. When I came back in 2023, they were finally gone.
I had predicted this at the beginning of the pandemic; people don't generally understand that even the yearly flu vaccine is ~70% effective. By the time they get a vaccine, they'll be so wound up and terrified that it won't be good enough; like a neurotic, there is no threshold of proof that will make the anxiety go away.
I remember the day the CDC officially ended the pandemic, a customer at work said it wasn't over for him. Gay. Corpo Tech job.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
I won't belabor the point around pandemic response, but there is simply no reason to believe that the Dems would have done categorically better than Trump, and some reason to believe they'd be worse.
Without Trump, there might not have even been a pandemic...because the media and institutional apparati wouldn't have been so motivated to belabor the crisis and keep it going. The COVID Death Counter only got removed once he was out of office. Under Trump, every event got magnified into a crisis to keep people wound up and deranged.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
I can't really see it happening. The cabin-fever Extremely Online rage just isn't in the general pop like it was before; this has become boring and everyone is going through the motions in a timeline no one wanted. That's my vibe, anyways.
Skulldrinker
9d ago
A random person in real life described Sinners glowingly then talked about how it was about how evil white people are. Im disinterested watching it now, I'd rather see Near Dark again.
I get the same thing from Jordan Peele films.
These films are for white people who for aesthetic reasons want to see black people. The Peele stuff in particular gets a lot of mileage out of showing black people in peril to distress white liberals without actually hurting a Black Body.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
I remember "Musk Man Bad" starting before he tried to buy Twitter, I could believe that from his perspective the leftists started gunning for him back when he was nominally apolitical.
I know I saw some screed about colonizing mars being bad because it was colonialism, and colonialism bad, in 2020. When there's genuinely no native people to exploit, or even a biosphere to damage, all that's left is tall-poppy slave morality and braindead word-association snarl.
Skulldrinker
7d ago
The bulletproof suit enables lazy writing.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
Grassroots mail-in ballot "Harvesting;" Everyone had too much time on their hands and mail-ins were convenient; especially if it got the wokescold in your life to stop bothering you about if you voted or not. Lots of small-time activists agitating in their community to get every warm body to send their mail-in ballot out.
There's a lot of people out there that truly DON'T engage in politics; they have manual jobs that keep them busy and don't require ideological posturing, they don't consume political entertainment media, they're not radical hipsters trying to out-radical other radical hipsters. They're hard to spot because by definition they're not posting X or Facebook politics screeds. Whatever combination of being too dumb to read, too grounded to get fearmongered, too unhip to get peer-pressured, too lazy, too disorganized, too busy, too enlightened. Only easy pandemic mail-ins and the omnipresent media narrative got them to vote, then things went back to normal.
That's my pitch, anyways.
Skulldrinker
11mo ago
You should have made plans with her at the party. Then instead of ignoring your message, she'd text you to tell you she needs to wash her dog and her hair ate her homework.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
Trump was Hitler and we got Wokeist nonsense.
Wokist nonsense was plenty present before Trump. I suppose it was juuuuuuust sub-normie, but anyone at least moderately online was either a participant in it or deeply hated it.
Skulldrinker
8mo ago
fighting a war against Israel in the future.
Typo or Freudian slip?
The last new star Trek movie came out, what, 10 years ago, and they weren't particularly woke anyways (by Star Trek metrics). The beef with them was they were shallow James Abrams action-fests, not that they were too woke. Star Trek has always been progressive. It just wasn't always so #CurrentYear.
My beef is with Star Wars, anyways. I very specifically got accused of "being against strong role models for girls" when I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good, and I've kinda never forgiven the world for that.
There's still a set of critics and influencers who will clap like circus seals at anything that vaguely alludes to capitalism bad or hwiteness bad,
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