The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'm looking for advice on how to fake being a football fan.
I call myself a fan of Arsenal because, when I played Fifa 2001, I'd end up picking them because I thought the cannon on their flag looked sick. I'm reliably told that they peaked right about then, and I've had decent mileage telling people I stan Arsenal because then they give me pitying looks and don't ask followup questions.
Courtesy of drinking at Scottish pubs, I feel at risk of more detailed grilling, and I want to get better adaptive camouflage. So far, I've come up with:
"What was the coach even thinking?" and "They keep trying to walk it in this year", but I'd appreciate more personalized advice to shake the trail.
If you're trying to put more detail into defusing and avoiding the conversation while seeming normal, for nearly every sport you can nearly always say something along the lines of "I used to LOVE it when I was a kid, but nowadays I just can't stand the [foreign or billionaire money/social media/diva players/lack of loyalty/lost spirit of the gameall of the above] so I don't really watch it like I used to." The purity play will actually position you as more of a football fan than your interlocutor: you love the real game not the spectacle of today, like refusing to go to a novus ordo mass positions you as more Catholic than the pope.
If you're trying to fake actually watching sports for networking or social purposes, I recommend the SbNation network of blogs, they do all the American sports and most of the big European teams. Each blog is independent, run by fans, but in general they're pretty decent in quality. Arsenal is here, I can't certify quality as they're all fan-run and the blog varies by team. I follow the SbNation blogs of the teams I follow pretty religiously, and they will both give daily/weekly news summaries and game recaps, that will take you five or ten minutes to follow daily and fifteen or twenty to summarize weekly. With that knowledge, you can hang in a conversation with any fan for as long as they want to talk.
Hey, I might not be a Real Fan™, but even I know about the whole Qatari stadium thing that Gooners moan about! Unfortunately that's an issue more than 2 decades old now, so I'm not sure how seriously people will take me if I complain about how things have been since I was less than 10.
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