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.
- 100
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
You're welcome. How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions? I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.
To be fair, the quotation-mark rigmarole is slightly more complicated than it seems at first glance. Unraveling it may be more trouble than it's worth, when the customary format is so ingrained into depictions of speech in literature.
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian," the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian", the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian, the Grandmaster lectured. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty.
"The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian [the Grandmaster lectured]. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."
Of these options, I am inclined to think that the fourth one is the least bad, but I still hesitate to actually implement it.
Anyway, regarding non-speech-related quotation marks: I don't recall whether I started paying attention to quotation-mark rigmarole before or after seeing a few online comments about "programmer quotation". But, once I did start paying attention to the issue, it was obvious to me that the standard format was execrably ambiguous. (It wasn't until years after coming to this conclusion that I started noticing the insane number of square brackets that judges are forced to use because they insist on keeping the standard format.)
It's all about avoiding ambiguity and confusion.
While I have noticed the difference between "professionally edited" and "professionally-edited", I haven't paid much attention to it. I think I've seen situations where the adverb is sandwiched between two adjectives, or between a verb and an adjective, and not preceded by a comma, so omitting the hyphen would lead to ambiguity regarding which word the adverb is intended to modify, but I cannot recall a specific example off the top of my head.
I occasionally make explicit differentiation between "you (singular)" and "you (plural)", in situations where the number is not totally obvious.
I have a habit of saying "year 2026" instead of "2026". Is it really necessary? Probably not.
While I was working as a civil engineer, people would get annoyed at me for differentiating between "I-295", "US 130", "NJ 42", and "CR 514" even though my employer's official style guide prescribed "Route 295", "Route 130", "Route 42", and "Route 514". To be fair to them, it is at least arguable that the differentiation is unnecessary in my state, because there are no duplicated highway numbers there (though I'm pretty sure there is at least one state in the US that does have such overlapping highway numbers). But IMO it is useful to know what kind of road you're talking about without having to look it up.
Et cetera.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link