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EdenicFaithful  Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw  1yr ago (text post)   3143 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 23, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, 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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Does anyone here have an idea how to make good male friends? Doesn’t have to be IRL, online is fine. I don’t feel a burning desire for socialization for its own sake, so going to a local X club would really be pointless. Ideally I would like motte-like friends, but for 1:1 discussion which I find much more interesting than subreddit style discussion. I have tried friend-making subreddits and /soc/. Soc users are generally seriously mentally defective, and redditors are well….redditors. Not to mention that any friend-making space online is really just repurposed as a dating space by horny men, ruining it for everyone. Does anyone have close motte-like friends? How did you make them?

Hobbies. People who want to socialize for the sake of socializing are usually messed up (and holy fuck /soc/ is a parody of that, I thought you must be exaggerating).

Find forums (not subreddits) for things you like, get involved, and make a group of friends you can start meeting up with. Twitter is surprisingly good for generalist hobbies, because discovery is so easy and people will notice you through reputation networks rather than the spastic twitching of reddit voting mobs.

Just do interesting things that attract other people who do interesting things. All my lasting friendships came from niche hobby communities, even in cases where we both ended up dropping the hobby.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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