urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17hr ago
I guess I’ll be the weird one and say I understand your objection. I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong with an 18 year old spending time with 30+ year olds, but it seems like the combination of gender, age, and general situation makes it uncomfortable to have her around.
Some of your other comments seem to suggest that women aren’t frequent attendees of this private group. The gay guy… going to the bathroom to talk about abilities? (Is this a common tabletop RPG thing?) with the sexual humor is an element I suspect would be difficult to sustain if you had a lot of female participants, it’s just not their kind of scene. For the record, I think it is entirely fair to be a male-only group, or “we only invite women if they’re chill with our vibe.”
It strikes me that you have a middle ground. There’s a public group and a private group. Tell her that this is a small public gathering of old friends, and while you enjoyed her company the transportation situation and private nature of the group means that you’d prefer she not join you in the future, and that you apologize but she wasn’t supposed to be invited to the private discord. You can make clear that she’s welcome at the public group and this isn’t a judgment of her character.
Anything that you say might be hurtful. But there’s no Konami cheat code out of saying hurtful, but true, things sometimes. Tact, and compassion, are important attributes, but ultimately you’re not responsible for how people feel about a situation if you’re honest and polite with them.
In America, Catholic=Mexican. If I'm walking through a neighborhood and I see shrines to the Virgin Mary or Saint Francis in people's yards, I know that this is (shall we say) a rough neighborhood.
This is the stereotype in the Southwest, and it's what I essentially believed as a Protestant. In the northeast and sprinkled throughout the country, there are a lot of Irish and Italian Catholics; one was my neighbor growing up, with the Saint Francis statue and everything. Another is a business owner and gives a lot of money to local charities, and of course church organizations. In the midwest, there are many German Catholics (alongside many German Lutherans, and historically-united-church Germans, of course), and in those parts of the country historically Catholic towns are often the nice, well-tended areas where people have civic pride, with "Jesus I trust in You" signs and Saint Francis statues in well-kept, green lawns with flower beds.
"Traditionalist Catholicism" is still decidedly schismatic
The SSPX is very loud, but most traditionalist Catholics are much more common than SSPX afficionados -- especially if we look at beliefs rather than strict "Traditionalist Catholic" identification. In Catholicism, traditionalism is something closer to, say, fundamentalism among Protestants: much maligned, often a boo-word, but descriptive of many conservative members in point of fact. Evangelicals are, almost to a man, fundamentalists, because they believe in the "Five Fundamentals," Biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, atonement for sin, the resurrection of Jesus, historical reality of miracles, even if they wouldn't describe themselves using the word. (And the current strain of neo-evangelicalism emerged essentially as an ecumenical movement among Protestants designed to resist the sepratism inherent in historical fundamentalism while preserving fundamentalist beliefs; many evangelical leaders like Billy Graham were known for warm relations with Catholics, as well as explicit outreach to Black Protestants.) In Catholicism traditionalism is tied up with the Latin mass, such that a guy who attends a Latin mass celebrated by a local priest with permission of the canonical bishop would likely be described as a traditionalist even if he thinks Vatican II is the best thing since sliced bread. Whereas, in fundamentalism... well, liturgy isn't considered as important as "pure Biblical preaching", although I suspect self-identified fundamentalists may be more likely than self-identified evangelicals to prefer old hymns and congregational singing.
"Traditionalism" in Catholicism emerged as a concept during the Catholic version of the same crisis that produced "Fundamentalism" in Protestantism: the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. As secular Bible scholarship and more liberal theologians wanted to "update doctrine to reflect modern concerns," Protestantism responded with polemic, schism, and bitter rhetoric, and Catholicism responded with Pope Pius X (much beloved by the SSPX) declaring a loyalty oath. Vatican II, and some scholars would argue this just as some conservative Catholics would disagree, served as essentially the partial victory of Modernism in Catholicism, although at the level of pure doctrine relatively few things were really changed. The "Fundamentals" remained intact, and it was essentially some elements of moral theology, especially around the rights of man against the state, that were revised, though the level of practice went far further than Modernists in the early 1900s would have ever imagined.
Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic Traditionalists, are, of course, often bitter enemies, because Protestant and Catholic doctrine is traditionally, fundamentally (heh) opposed to the other. But their concerns, the denominational specifics aside, were very similar: preserve fundamental supernaturalism in the Christian faith against scientism and metaphysical naturalism, preserve the inspired nature of the Biblical text against higher criticism, preserve the objective existence of the historical Jesus-God against Jesusism that attempted to proffer a Jesus not featured in the Gospels.
I take no position on the coherence of "traditional conservative American Catholic nationalism." Such a thing would splinter the religious right into many tiny pieces at the very thought of it.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
It's not taking off in the sense that everyone and their cousin are using it, but among the tech-oriented it's become aspirational. Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product. At the very least, Linux is often in the air as an option for young techy people, in a way that simply wasn't the case 10, 15 years ago. It's also riding the wave of PC building as a culture, which is dramatically taking off among zoomers, so much so that my sheltered rural cousin constantly bugs me for advice on what kind of PC he should build. In the same way PC building is "take charge of your computer hardware and do it up custom!", Linux for young tech-oriented people is "take charge of your computer software and do it up custom!", with stuff like Arch having an aura of technology empowerment that zoomers of this type find refreshing compared to the app-and-platform 'enshittification' culture of technology right now.
But I'm also in IT, so I see very tech-oriented people all the time. But it's striking that IT (especially in comparison to software engineering) used to be "All Hail Microsoft!" territory, and now, using Windows is considered the "basic bitch" option for personal use even as AD and whatever Microsoft wants to call cloud directory services/Entra this month remains the enterprise backbone.
I'm very close to the border between the two, and in some ways my personality and temperament is closer to a mid-millennial than my birth cohort. A friend once described me as "an old man in a young man's body."
There's also the complicating fact that for various reasons my parents were relatively late in life when I was born, so both of my parents are very clearly baby boomers. So I had similar parentage to many early-to-mid-millennials, and I'm sure that had an effect on me.
In addition to being one of the best games of all time, Star Control 2 also has the unique honor of having been released under the GPL in the early 2000s, under the name "The Ur-Quan Masters" (due to the trademark belonging to the publisher, not the developer, a fact which produced absolutely no problems and embittered legal disputes whatsoever). I encountered it through the open source community where it's talked about as one of the best open-source games. The game is even packaged in debian contrib! UQM may be old, but Linux is taking off among zoomers, and the game has a second life within those circles.
You may or may not have heard that a sequel is coming out, under the new series name "Free Stars." This makes it the third sequel to SC2 to be developed in the past 30 years, but we don't talk about the others. This one is the first sequel by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, although Paul has since retired.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I only got stood up once that I can remember, maybe twice, in the sense of 'arrive to the location after sending a confirmation text 24 hours before and receiving a positive response' which was then rescheduled for the next day since she overslept or something (It's been a few years, my memories are blurry). I went on approximately 50 first dates in a year, and found that 'girl ghosts/cancels on the 24-hour confirmation text and never meets after setting a time and a date' was maybe 10-20% of the time?
I think some level of this debate has to do with what people count as "flakiness." I've absolutely had "girl cancels on the day before confirmation text," and even "girl ghosts and blocks almost immediately after the day before confirmation text." I have had "cancels immediately before the date with reasonable-sounding excuse," which could turn either into ghosting or a rescheduled date, depending on many factors. I have, however, never been left genuinely stood up at a meeting location, but I also, when I dated, would never go to the meeting location unless I got day-of confirmation.
I also think there might be an element of age and/or attractiveness match level involved here. The men I most associate with making the "women be flakin'" complaints are also, often, the men I associate with "I like 'em young and hot," and, yeah, I'll readily agree that "young and hot" is a walking red flag for flakiness, because such individuals who are also eager to settle down and have a well-adjusted personality often end up in a relationship quickly, and long-term presence in dating indicates pickiness, chaos, or lack of serious desire to practically date. A 22 year old is dramatically more likely to flake, and to do it poorly, than a 29 year old. Men have similar dynamics, and young men are fickle as all heck.
There's also the "what does she think the date is" element. A woman who thinks the date is a hookup or a plausibly-deniable hookup is going to be more likely to flake, because that's a high stakes meeting, and "I'm not feeling it" can override any level of "keep to your plans." A woman who thinks it's low-intensity coffee will be less likely to flake.
I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?
I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.
Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.
All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.
What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.
You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?
Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.
It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.
I'm a zoomer.
I've had a lot of trouble getting friends to hang out and keep to a set time and place to meet up. Actually, as I think about it, women I've gone on dates with have been better at showing up than my male friends have been at keeping to a hangout time. That said, when friends don't show up, they generally call or text and have an excuse (sometimes a good one, sometimes something you can tell they made up off the cuff), while when dates don't show up, they ghost about half the time, and the other half is split between "has a good excuse and agrees to reschedule" and "has a good-sounding excuse and never indicates a desire to reschedule," with the latter presumably indicating a lack of desire to move forward with the connection.
I had some friends in the neighborhood when I was growing but none of them were good people -- my parents are white-collar professionals but the neighborhood is on the wrong side of town and very working-class, though there isn't violent crime and I never felt unsafe. The neighbor kids to the left tried to steal from me, the girl across the street nearly got away with stealing from me, and the neighbor down the street gave me the sense of a schoolyard bully. I consider that it may not be a good idea to be above the socioeconomic average of the neighborhood, much less to be seen as such.
The kinds of things you see depicted in old movies and TV shows -- meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for tea a drink, neighborhood barbeques... none of these really reflect any of my life experience. It seems nice to have that kind of thick social community.
I guess it's a combination of two things. First, Anglo culture in general is more reserved about hospitality than Southern European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Asian cultures in general. I can't speak to the careful divisions in Europe, but what I see online suggests the English are more hospitable than the Danish, but less so than the Spanish.
But the English at least have a tradition of having someone for tea, whereas in the US someone comes over and unless a party was prepared for the standard beverage is "uh, I think I have like a flat 2-liter of Diet Coke in the fridge." Americans pour a lot of social emphasis into the event, the party, the special occasion, and there are high expectations indeed for cleanliness, decor, even theme -- the neurotic curse of the middle class. I presume that poorer or more socially transparent cultures are more comfortable with a relaxed attitude towards socializing and entertaining, without the expectations of having a tip-top living space. "Keeping up with the Joneses" runs deep in the American consciousness.
Of course, it's regional, and temperament-based. My aunt from Oklahoma has a large family room and a dining room with many tables, and she has cousins and neighbors and church members and people I don't even recognize coming in and out of her house every time I visit her. She's gregarious, and socially transparent, and you go to her house, and you're family.
She's also a landlady, and most of her work is maintaining her properties (she's a landlady who cleans and maintains the properties herself, sometimes enlisting my cousins to help), so she's home much of the time, and can be socially transparent because she invests much of her time into cleaning and maintaining her home as much as her rentals.
That's probably the biggest explanatory factor -- people's homes and entertaining have traditionally been the provenance of the homemaker, and contributing to third spaces, leading private societies, entertaining guests, and general hospitality were the recognized space for women to hold up the social order. With the entrance of women into the workplace and the two-income trap that makes this a requirement instead of an option, the intertia of middle class entertaining expectations on top of working feels to many like exhaustion rather than pleasure.
"I'm working a 40-hour job, caring for the children, and maintaining the home all at once and my husband doesn't help" (the "double burden") is almost a stock phrase in "why I divorced" stories, and to stack the expectations that people feel about properly entertaining guests on top of those tasks means they're the first to get cut. Not to mention the tension that men and women working 40+ hours a week leaves very little time for anyone to socialize, stacking children on top makes that harder, and then everyone is exhausted and who wants to go do a thing when you could not do a thing, or catch up on sleep over the weekend?
Women from cultures where there is a greater division between men's and women's roles, even if the women in question work or live in a western country, tend to follow that blueprint, and so entertaining and maintaining social connections are higher on the priority list. It isn't irrational the patterns that have occurred, and most people are cutting what I also would cut given the constraints people have been handed, but there are knock-on effects like the decline in entertaining and hospitality.
Mass media also contributes significantly: first radio, then television, then video gaming, now the internet. I'm sure some critics of mass entertainment (which were probably women's groups -- women have been talking about social issues much longer than they've been voting) at the introduction of each of these technologies were sounding alarms about how in the future people wouldn't talk to each other any more, and society would degrade as a result. Cyberpunk as a genre is partially a sustained criticism of the concept of being 'jacked-in' to media at the expense of flesh and blood.
And while the warnings of critics are often overblown or exaggerated, they often have a seed of prescience, even one that is never realized or acknowledged until the time is far too late.
It's easier to entertain yourself now than at any point in history, and when people can entertain themselves, 'entertaining' others feels like effort unnecessarily expended. And given the crunch on time I explained above, why would anyone expend effort unnecessarily?
When the magic internet rectangle supplies nearly endless content, literature, social concepts, news, and parasocial connections with people far brighter, more gregarious, and more attractive than anyone in your immediate social circle, why would anyone go outside and touch grass, or stop to chat with the neighbor? What do I, an introverted Catholic-lite who quotes internet memes the way my forefathers quoted the Bible, who's more familiar with esoteric technical specifications than local restaurants, and whose opinions are so far outside the Overton window they might as well be called defenestrated... well, what do I have in common with my fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbors who hate the Catholics nearly as much as the gays? About what am I supposed to talk to them? The weather? That sounds far less pleasurable than throwing internet comments out into the void at all of you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that.
Genuinely the job of philosophers to critique the fundamental basis of things, but okay.
It’s not fake, although there’s a spectrum. Outright ghostings do happen (even in people who’ve met IRL), although I have no idea how someone gets to a point where this describes almost all potential dates.
As I’ve speculated before, it might be generational.
More options
Context Copy link