sonya
1yr ago
Your English is actually quite decent, there are many native speakers who write worse than you. Some of them significantly worse. You could 100% pass for a native speaker online if you didn't mention that you're not.
sonya
1yr ago
I ponied up for a SimpleHuman trash can — though not an automated one — which felt outrageously expensive at like $150 but the mess-limiting design and build quality turned out to be soooooo worth it. I assume the automatic-lid cans are also good.
sonya
1yr ago
The problem isn't biting, it's biting hard when the target is inappropriate. You want to train a soft mouth. Yelp and act injured / upset whenever she bites hard enough to hurt you.
sonya
1yr ago
I think the paradigm you're looking for is "productized services." Here is a blog post about this concept (ignore all the calls to action, this guy sells SEO stuff but the blog posts are generally decent).
sonya
1yr ago
On a Daphne Du Maurier kick right now, reading her short story collection The Breaking Point after deeply enjoying The Scapegoat.
sonya
1yr ago
Exit rights to life are intrinsic, you just have to actually commit suicide. Granted, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either.
I tend to agree with OP that this slope has proven alarmingly slippery.
sonya
1yr ago
If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.
But like, they can. Nonetheless, people choose to own property, because it still affords greater freedom to do [whatever] than renting. The set of things you're allowed to do when you're renting is smaller than the set of things you're allowed to do as a landowner / homeowner. This remains true even though the latter set does not contain "literally anything conceivable."
sonya
1yr ago
I have no idea how to hire an escort.
I mean, if you were so inclined, it wouldn't be hard to find out. You can literally Google it
sonya
1yr ago
it's seen the same way as cutting, or anorexia nowadays.
These are still massive deals, you're just not a teenager anymore. I might be wrong but I'd even guess there's more of both now that social media has subsumed much of teenage socializing.
I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)
Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.
Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!
sonya
1yr ago
Based God (rapper Lil B) (who also has a KnowYourMeme page lol) is an example that predates the wider popularization of "based" and was definitely a reference to freebasing. I think this origin was quickly obscured as the term began to spread though.
sonya
1yr ago
These lines of argumentation kinda strike me as arguing that monogamy doesn't real because people cheat. Like, sure, the map is not the territory, but that's not a good reason to throw out the map.
My other thought is that race is a "thick" concept that bundles various things together — phenotype, ethnicity, culture (sometimes including nationality), and the emergent socioeconomic connotations of combinations thereof.
sonya
1yr ago
Nerd-sniped: You don't need to tumble Monero, that's the whole point! Tumbling is built in.
sonya
1yr ago
Advice from former avid vaper: Just quit, it's easier than moderating. Also cheaper!
sonya
1yr ago
Conversation is for asking people questions about themselves, not for telling people stuff. Do way, way more of the former and the latter will happen naturally in the appropriate amount (which is minimal).
sonya
1yr ago
Mentally ill people rummaging through garbage early in the morning or other problems occur even in expensive areas.
Not in the suburbs! I know OP was focused on city living, but still, I want to put a good word in for my preferred environment. Source: I live in a suburb, not even a particularly expensive one (by Bay Area standards anyway), and it's blissfully isolated from all manner of city problems, including a wide swathe of undesirables undertaking undesirable behavior. One perk of the car-centric setup is that you need to minimally have your shit together to own a car, and it wouldn't be practical to live here without one. (For whatever reason the hooligans who steal vehicles don't penetrate here often — perhaps it's not a particularly lucrative environment for thievery?)
sonya
1yr ago
Mine is more of a newsletter with a website — but I suppose most are these days. Here it is: https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/
I like the hosting platform Ghost a lot, but Substack is probably better if you don't have an established audience yet.
sonya
1yr ago
having used all of these methods, IMO the bidet is the clear winner. it's not even close
sonya
1yr ago
He blogged about it, naturally. Ctrl+F "divorce" for the relevant bits. Here's one:
My wife filed for divorce in the spring, but you should know that I believe she did the right thing, ultimately, because continuing in this ferocious pain after ten years was destroying both of us. It is a relatively amicable split, one that even our priests had suggested was finally the right thing. But even relatively amicable splits are terrible, and I beg your prayers for us all.
There may be other divorce-relevant posts in his archive but since I'm not a regular reader of Dreher, I don't recall.
sonya
1yr ago
Persian Fire, about Darius and Xerxes' attempts to conquer Greece. Very fun read, reminds me a bit of Carthage Must Be Destroyed (which I also enjoyed). I must admit, I don't retain a lot of the back-and-forth minutia, but nonetheless the texture of these ancient civilizations is engrossing. Our civilizational forebears lived in a much more brutal, visceral world than we do, coping with much starker material limitations. Yet at the same time, the more things change, the more they stay the same — humans gonna human!
sonya
1yr ago
Second paragraph would work just as well without quotations — you can simply leave them out.
sonya
1yr ago
Would the transgender tendency to document absolutely everything online
It may be a legitimate demographic tendency, idk, but this is like drawing the conclusion that all plastic surgery is botched because the plastic surgery one notices is botched. Sampling bias. The people who document and publish their lives online the most are the most visible.
The Crimean War: A History by Orlando Figes — good so far but it also puts me to sleep quickly so progress is slow. I'm still in the "context for the conflict" beginning section.
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