Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Inspiring controversy on Reddit today is an extremely long-winded comic, "I Don't Like My Boyfriend". Each of its 12 panels was posted as a separate image, so here are some consolidated renditions for your convenience.
One image, millions of colors (11 MiB)
One image, 256 colors (2.3 MiB)
Text (5.8 kiB)
In this comic, a woman contemplates how she doesn't like her boyfriend (who is drawn as a short, fat Chudjak). She finds him boring and annoying. However, he is smitten with her, and she has never had any friends, let alone romantic partners, other than him. She wonders whether she is just an unlikeable person, and should be more grateful for having hooked a person with such low standards. The general opinion of commenters seems to be hatred for the woman.
This actually matches my personal experience with attempts at friendship (1 2) somewhat well! I eventually couldn't tolerate my pseudo-friends any longer and kicked them all to the curb, and the commenters seem to think that the woman depicted in the comic should do the same with her romantic partner.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic?
I appreciate your usual output of strange court cases.
Well what was the issue? They didn't want to fill out your forms or they didn't want to send you a form to fill back?
I think a friend is just somebody who is willing to give you a little piece of their day in exchange for the simple pleasure of spending time with you.
You can be friends with different kinds of people in different ways. Maybe there's somebody who you only talk about sports with, or anime, or strange court cases.
If you already thoroughly know somebody, how are they going to surprise you, how are they going to teach you anything? Making them fill out a form to give you the information you care about is in a way spoiling the fun out of the friendship. Ideally this is somebody you can be sincere with and you can be humble with, you are not worrying over the way you are phrasing your thoughts not to sound dumb or offensive, in a way one would rewrite a paragraph to avoid modding on themotte.
If the spreadsheet-filling game is a core friendship need for you, I'd suggest frequenting fans of map-coloring or 'productivity' games like factorio, I assume they'd be more likely to be into spreadsheets.
I hated myself more and more for continuing to interact with them in a close, friendly manner despite disliking them. (See my flair.)
I think you've misunderstood what I said. The participants in my pseudo-friendships didn't send forms full of questions back and forth. Rather, we sent each other questions and answers via Facebook messages, perhaps one to five at a time. The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally, rather than allowing (or forcing) one person to spam a zillion questions.
While I was not necessarily implying that you were literally making people fill forms, sending questions back and forth is loosely similar, considering that that is not how people usually communicate.
Consider how people go to a therapist for talk therapy, not 'answering questions' therapy, which could potentially be a more effective way of systematically diagnosing and treating mental illness.
The ideal conversation for me is that they tell me something sincere, that matters to them, that strikes my interest and for which I can find an interesting aspect to ask about. Then they can fill in some details, and perhaps I have some kind of related experience I can bring up that could be of interest to them. If they don't respond in a way that indicate that they have interest in what I'm bringing up, then we can stay silent, or go back to the previous topic with a different angle, or try something else.
Reading some of your questions, I don't really know where the conversation possibly could go from there.
Are we trying to find out if I have some kind of touch sensitivity? Unless you're a genetics researcher looking for people with a specific phenotypic trait to sample, I don't get what's the point of this question.
Why did you dislike the people you attempted friendship with?
You clearly have a social side considering your communications here, but you have standards I don't understand and you're not satisfied with what you're getting.
That particular question actually was asked by the other party (Pseudo-Friend Six), not by me. (I'm referring back to the original spreadsheet in saying this, as I did not copy from the spreadsheet to the Pastebin text file the identity of who asked each question. Remember that approximately half of the questions in that text file were asked by each party.)
It's been more than a decade since all my pseudo-friendships were terminated, so it's hard to remember specifics. But in general: In the long term, there always end up being far more reasons to dislike (or at least distrust) a person than to like him.
Example reasons to dislike a person:
Is religious
Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender
Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)
Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)
Has authoritarian political views
And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.
Aren’t you the one who said he was suddenly and puzzlingly depressed?
Your social environment appears to be painstakingly curated to cultivate depression. Maybe I’m misremembering your level of confusion. It could be you wish to keep starving yourself socially while beating back the predictable physiological effects. I wish you luck. We probably wouldn’t get along.
Previous discussion
The pseudo-friendships were terminated in the 2015–2016 period (shortly before I graduated from college). I did not begin to suffer from depression until 2022. And the "physiological effects" of forcing yourself to associate with people whom you have grown to strongly dislike cannot be ignored.
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Religion and political views makes sense to me. I know a certain kind of libertarian/classical liberal type likes to pride themselves on it not mattering to them ("As long as they are respectful, I could be friends with a neo-Nazi and a woke progressive") - but it's harder to relate to someone when you have a different map of objective reality, and it's harder to feel comfortable around them when they hold moral intuitions you disagree with.
As for the other examples...
Seriously?
Not saying your overall conclusion about friendship not being for you is wrong (from my own experiences, I weakly suspect long-term platonic friendship is a bad use of time, as a general human truth), but I don't think non-standard/non-canonical speech / writing (and similar trivialities) has anything to do with it.
Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions. Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto). Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.
Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike. But, after seeing hundreds of authors on ArchiveOfOurOwn and RoyalRoad use line breaks as improper substitutes for paragraphs (and use paragraphs with nonbreaking spaces as an improper method of increasing paragraph spacing), and after seeing dozens of appeals judges use hyphens in wacky ways, I have reached the limits of my patience.
What do you mean by line breaks? Are you talking about hitting Enter (which your posts seem to be using in duplicate as paragraph separation, the TTBOMK standard internet practice), or more-special formatting?
@FlyOnTheWall, singular "they" irritates me too (as in, if someone requests to be referred to as "they", I will point-blank refuse). Probably an autism thing.
The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.
Wikipedia:
The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).
The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.
That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.
HTML specification:
CommonMark specification:
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I have not absorbed normal formatting conventions, and I don't think anyone I know online/irl has either.
Again, I did not know this, and I'd be surprised if anyone I know irl/online knew that either. When I write text on a computer, sometimes I want to make a vertical space, and I just do the first thing that works to make that space (here, I do use paragraphs instead of line-breaks, but that's because paragraphs happened to be the first tool that worked)
I cannot remember a time where I was unsure about the number of people "they" referred to in a conversation. In pretty much every case the "they" is initially going to be introduced as something which is clearly singular but of unknown gender (friend, cousin, teacher, student, etc)
I'm saying it merits nothing, except maybe a piece of fun trivia about the difference between line breaks and paragraphs.
If this is really the reaction you have to formatting/grammar quirks, then I guess you just have an extremely unusual set of sensibilities. So fair enough.
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Speaking of hyphens, using a hyphen to join an adverb to an adjective ("professionally-edited") is incorrect. See e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 5.93 ("A two-word phrasal adjective that begins with an adverb ending in -ly is not hyphenated").
I have not yet come to a firm conclusion regarding whether I agree with this particular rule. But I do appreciate your drawing attention to it.
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I find it amusing that you'd have such criteria when 2 or 3 of your other criteria sound like something a grammar-nazi would care about. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suppose you can find some grammar-appreciative people to be friends with, perhaps in the editing or copy proofing world?
I used to be more mindful of language rules myself.
Now there are language mistakes that I like. How my daughter says 'bloopy' instead of 'bluey' and calls her brother by the second half of his name. How endearing! Perhaps if you care to not be so hung up on what most people consider trivial language mistakes, taking up a foreign language would help?
When you are the one desperately trying to express yourself in a foreign language, begging native speakers not to immediately switch to English or ignore you, perhaps you will feel more inclined to be magnanimous toward others' mistakes?
What's the problem with that? We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.
Distrusted in what sense?
Do I trust that they will keep the AC at the exact 'right' temperature when I'm not around and they have control of the thermostat? Perhaps not, but why 'dislike' them for that?
I think it's important to respect that other people's preferences might be as arbitrary/determined as mine, and I shouldn't dislike them for that. Unless we're talking about extreme levels of causing discomfort to others.
Me neither, but unlike for typical religious claims, we have:
polar bearsEdit: penguins - I actually checked this time)Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography (aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?). It could be AI-generated for all I know.
This is not as odd as it sounds. There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.
'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.
But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.
Yes it does, and that is reasonable. I guess you're gesturing towards the argument of "if we are willing to believe sources like photographs, then why not also believe the Bible/Church too?".
My acceptance of videos/photographs as evidence is something I'm willing to generally apply (even to stuff that I don't like) - but I don't think stuff being written down is similarly strong evidence (and I don't think you do either, since you probably don't believe in the Quran)
No I don't believe in souls. And I'm pretty sure that even Christians, who believe in souls, don't think cameras steal them.
Good point, I think eventually photos/videos will become untrustworthy, maybe they are already untrustworthy. But I remember seeing photos of Antarctica years ago, before realistic AI image generation was a thing.
I assume you are referring to transgenderism? That's really not what most adherents believe (speaking as someone who was firmly pro-trans, and who is still broadly sympathetic to it) - given that most of us are atheists.
Some liberal detractors of transgenderism liken it to a religion by arguing a gender identity is functionally identical to a soul because lots of pro-trans people struggle to define what "womanhood" means explicitly.
But it can be done: a "trans woman" is a man who wishes to be a woman, and one's "gender identity" is just the gender/sex they wish they were (and then we redefine gender/man/woman/mother/father/etc to match gender identity instead of sex, and discourage mentions of sex) - no appeals to the metaphysical, just the phenomena of human beings having desires.
As I explained above, transgenderism boils down to the mundane claim that sometimes men want to be women, and vice-versa. I am almost certain that angels don't exist now, and never existed in the past - because I've never seen an angel, seen photographs of an angel, or heard any other convincing evidence they aren't made-up.
Sounds like you're gesturing towards the fact that atheism has no objective morality, which is a good point that I think a lot of atheists don't address. Without a God, there is just people's subjective moral preferences - "sacrificing children" (i.e. killing them for no good reason) feels immoral to me, and to many others. But if someone felt otherwise, I can't actually prove they are wrong by pointing to a line in the Bible, and they wouldn't even be "wrong", they'd just have a different taste to me (and that would be horrifying to me)
And it might even be true that humans need a God to maintain a stable society long-term. But none of that has anything to do with whether God, angels, etc exist in the first place.
Also, nice try, but I see what you did there: the pro-Clancy defence is that she was mentally unwell so it wasn't her fault. People who believe in abortion don't believe the fetus counts as human, so it's okay to kill it with full awareness of what you are doing.
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>Antarctica
>polar bears
Hmm…
There were polar bears in Antarctica until the elder things ate them all.
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People who make things worse for everybody else:
Those who deny the validity of scientific investigation (including supply and demand)
Those who don't bother to avoid ambiguity (i. e., foisting onto others the burden of reconstructing their intended meaning) in communication
For Alfred to assume that his random classmate/coworker/whatever Beatrice agrees with him on everything is charitable, but naive. Inevitably, if Alfred interacts with Beatrice, he will learn that she disagrees with him on minor topics—perhaps a few, perhaps a zillion.
If Beatrice disagrees with Alfred on a zillion minor topics, those minor disagreements are not in themselves sufficient cause for Alfred to dislike Beatrice. However, those minor disagreements do indicate an underlying difference between Alfred and Beatrice, and should lead Alfred to assume that Beatrice probably disagrees with Alfred on a zillion major topics as well—i. e., to distrust Beatrice. Even if those major topics are not known to Alfred, it is well-advised for him to assume that, if he bothers to learn more about Beatrice, then he eventually will come to learn her opinions on those major topics, and to dislike her. Familiarity breeds contempt.
I gotta say that this has been a fascinating thread looking into your psyche.
Kudos to @disparagus_impact for sussing it out. I don't think I would have gone this deep.
I somewhat agree that familiarity leads to finding disagreement which leads to some distrust.
I'm libertarian and atheist, if I believe anything about polling I'm bound to have major disagreements with just about everyone. I never wanted to limit my friendship and dating circles so heavily though. I take friendships and relationships as a journey for me and another to discovering the maximum amount of common ground agreements.
By the time someone knows about my most contentious beliefs I want them to know a dozen other things that paint me in a positive and agreeable light. This is also a minor way of spreading my beliefs. The human mind is very social. If someone knows a bunch of cool and friendly x-itarians their opinion of x-itarianism is likely to go up. Conversely if they only know a bunch of grumps and assholes their opinion will go down.
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Well there's all kind of scientific investigation. Is scientific investigation the highest course of action no matter what? Should we be scientifically investigating something right now instead of having a conversation?
There's a trade-off between avoiding ambiguity and time. Users of this website are obsessed with avoiding ambiguity but it makes every discussion longer to read / longer to respond to.
The implication being that if you get to know somebody you will inevitably end up disliking them. While I don't think that is necessarily true, if you do believe that to be true, why do you want to speedrun that inevitability by throwing lists of questions at them?
You should enjoy not knowing them that well for as long as you can.
Also if you stopped constantly inquiring about various topics you would be less likely to form an opinion that would lead you to dislike somebody over it. ie touch grass
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