domain:dualn-back.com
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
It's hard to give "best" explanations without knowing the facts. Like, do any those people actually want to murder John? Have they tried to do it already, or have he been accidentally CCed on an email with the subject "Re: Plan to murder John, Phase 2" saying "so far everything proceeding as planned, keep doing as discussed in the last meeting, we're close"? In that universe, is it common for people getting murdered by coworkers? Does John know anybody who has been murdered by coworkers, and did it happen because the coworkers were too annoyed by that person heating up a smelly fish in the microwave and incessantly complaining about work schedules and parking spaces? Is John a diagnosed schizophrenic? Does he have some other condition that could influence their cognition or decision making? Is John a sociopath and does accusation of murder bring him some benefits he otherwise can not attain? Too many variables.
100ProofTollBooth
3hr ago
just that one must be careful that it may not apply to everyone,
Then let me be explicit; my advice may not apply to everyone
and if it doesn't work for somebody, it doesn't mean they are even more of a loser than they thought
Nowhere did I say this. You did. My introductory "loser" comments were caveated upfront.
but that there are other ways that would be better for them.
How can I possibly know this about another person who I have never met?
Like, for example, find communities online where once could practice talking with various people.
This. Isn't. Talking. To. People.
Maybe even with people of female persuasion without trying to score with them ;)
OP is literally asking for ways to get better at dating
just maybe not jump right into that if that's not what you're comfortable doing.
What is more important to OP? Developing comfort with current situation, or seeking to change current situation? I suppose that's a question for him.
That depends a lot of what you mean by "said".
Dude.
What was the first thing for which you used your face hole to send sonic vibrations to her?
Whenever there's a line-by-line quote-response breakdown in the replies, it's always because someone (in this case, me) has taken issue with what they feel to be a very bad argument. I freely admit this is the case.
None of what you have said is in anyway wrong, debased, or could be considered offensive. But I think literally all of it is ineffective based on what I believe OP's goals to be. I know I'm getting close to Jordan Peterson territory here and I'll resist the urge to start shouting "MAKE YER BED." But I think that most gradualist self-improvement advice is ineffective and is ultimately a road to developing new and fun copes for bad situations. All good self-improvement advice is a variant of "you're going to have to do things that aren't comfortable, but then things will improve for you." So, that's what I'm offering OP. That it may not be comfortable for him is precisely the point. Now, to try an find some middleground, if OP really does believe my advice will also be ineffective, he's more than free to ignore it.
I believe you haven't offered any advice that is more effective. I believe you had only offered advice that is ineffective. I believe you have prioritized comfort relative to the current state over absolutely improved future state.
I will await your reply wherein you tell me "Well it must've worked! - I'm married!"
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3hr ago
Why not pay for some good photos instead?
Also there isn’t much magic to small talk on the apps. Very basic opener, move off the app asap (instagram or facebook gives the woman a bit more confidence you won’t murder her if you have a normal profile), don’t keep texting for long and ask her out for a date. Also get used to being ghosted at any step of the way.
Once you have decent photos you should definitely pay for the apps.
Also the good apps change a lot depending on your region. All I know is that tinder became an absolute cesspool in most of developed world and there are some competing alternatives. You need to find the app(s) from which the middle class young women don’t get the ick yet.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
If so, it's their biggest failure ever; there's a serious possibility of civil war, and even if unrealised that threat is contributing to other threats such as a potential WWIII over Taiwan.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4hr ago
This seems like the inverse of reality. With football or basketball, so much is happening so often that the odds of me missing something very cool (an athletic dunk, a field-flipping interception, a clutch three-point shot from a mile away, a nifty trick play) is astronomically higher per minute I’m away than with soccer.
Even if something exciting does happen in a soccer game, it often takes several minutes to develop (i.e. even after intercepting a pass, a player has to actually make it all the way upfield and usually wait for some team support before attempting to score, giving me plenty of time to get out of the bathroom before missing the best part) and frankly isn’t usually all that visually appealing even when it does finally happen. I would say the average soccer match includes maybe five or six interesting moments. An average basketball game includes like twenty.
That depends a lot of what you mean by "said". We communicated online for quite a while before we met physically, and even longer before we decided that we belong together. Of course, it was the time before Twitter, when people actually had conversations online :)
I am not implying the advice is given with bad intent - just that one must be careful that it may not apply to everyone, and if it doesn't work for somebody, it doesn't mean they are even more of a loser than they thought - but that there are other ways that would be better for them. Like, for example, find communities online where once could practice talking with various people. Maybe even with people of female persuasion without trying to score with them ;) It doesn't mean never talking to meatspace people - just maybe not jump right into that if that's not what you're comfortable doing.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
If it's about money, how about staying in the house and getting housemates? (I assume the house if big enough for that - I don't know DFW market but $380k sounds like it should buy some decent space?) Once you marry and ready to start that adventure in a new house, you can sell this one, or keep renting it out - by then you'd know if it works for you.
100ProofTollBooth
4hr ago
What was the first thing you said to your wife?
"I don't think your advice will work for me," Is a valid thing to say. I offered my best possible advice with genuine intent.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
There's an obvious flaw in this model. If all you need is a shag, why pay the middle-man? If what you need is long-term, how do you expect to sustain it once Cyrano is out of the picture? Of course, if you're just bad at passing the initial nutcase filters, it could help, but the prerequisite would still be to be able to survive the first date in person.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
Start by making short observations at checkout lines.
I am an introvert. Note, I am happily married and do not need any dating advice, but this one sounds to be a bit like: "want to get strong? It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden". I'm sure for some people that sounds like a reasonable advice, to me it looks so remote from my world and my character as a proposal to take a nice quick walk to the moon. I suspect it'd sound the same to many other introverts. My problem with it is not that it might not work - some people do bench 300lbs, so it might work for them - but that you make it sound like it's trivial for every normal person to do it, so when a person for whom it is not trivial reads this, they would only think it's because they are some kind of special extra-hard strength loser that go below even normal definition of loser. And that's just not the case.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4hr ago
Except for a few long shots and obviously composited shots, it didn’t trip my uncanny valley sensors. I thought most of the close-up work looked practical, possibly with ape suits with green faces. I’ll look forward to a Making Of, because it honestly looked like real talking apes for most of it, and I stopped caring about a tenth of the way through.
The story and drama was, for me, as much worth it as the spectacle. The idea of what makes a civilization runs through the entire film, more than any previous entry in the series. Any lingering questions I had about the setting, by the end were answered in spades.
Quantumfreakonomics
4hr ago
Still on Human Action.
Given how much I like Austrian Economics, I figured I should actually read(listen to the audiobook of) this.
The entirety of the first 90 minutes was spent belaboring the same two or three points about human nature. Yeah, these points are foundational to the entire discipline, and some core insights are genius, but I stand my my take that SBF was right about books.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
The approach that I've seen posted on /g/ is to use the "PLUSNIGGER license", which consists of adding to the license a clause stating that the word "nigger" must always be included.
100ProofTollBooth
4hr ago
I'm reading Hesse's Steppenwolfe right now and it strikes me as the self-aware version of Underground quite a bit. Not finished yet, so it could change.
It's fun reading Underground at different points in your life. The extent to which I sympathized with the protagonist as I douchey college type is now pure chuckle-memory to my now Based Giga-Chad self. Ah fuck I see what I did there.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Fellow DFWite- you should rent it out. The DFW real estate market is absolutely brutal to transition from renting to owning in; I’m assuming this is a northwest Dallas location in Dallas ISD based on what you told me, which means your home should increase in value a lot if you hold on to it, giving you a massive head start when you and your future wife buy your forever home. A good property management company is a must, but your house is unlikely to sit vacant.
I’m not sure why you’re moving into an apartment when rents are absolutely insane right now. I will also caution you that the fun part of town(if you’re young I assume this is deep Ellum or maybe uptown) is much less fun to actually live in. I would advise you that living in your house is the best move, renting it out while living elsewhere is a distant second, and selling is a bad idea unless you’re moving out of town or buying another house immediately.
100ProofTollBooth
4hr ago
I am a loser
What makes you say this? I'm not trying to give you an internet pump-up speech along the lines of "you're probably pretty great!"
No, I will accept at face value that you fucking suck, loser. Now, let's identify the problem.
Are you short and skinny? Do you smell and dress bad? You say you have a fair bit of money. Did you earn it or did someone die an leave it to you?
The point is that getting out of loserdom is really just a project like anything else. Identify what is lacking, create plans for compounding improvement, execute those plans, track and log progress, adjust along the way.
Here's a generalize bullet list that 99% of dudes benefit from:
-
I'm a physical loser ---> Go to the gym. There are a million beginner lifting routines. Do one. After six months, add a competitive sport. Doesn't have to be MMA / BJJ, just something where there is a definite winner and loser and people take it seriously. Don't do beer league softball.
-
I'm a social loser ---> Get good at small talk. Start by making short observations at checkout lines. Try to make simple jokes. If it goes poorly, you're in a checkout line and the interaction will end in literally seconds. You'll know you're getting good when it becomes almost second nature and you can get a chuckle most of the time. Next step, start going to bars and doing this with the bartender (doesn't matter if they're male or female). Most of their day is spent making small talk to medium talk (i.e. bullshitting with regulars about their jobs or whatever). They're pretty much on autopilot and also paid to be nice, so they'll help the conversation along even if you still kind of suck. This will help you get better at developing a few quick "lines" into full on conversations. An option but not really recommended step is to do this at strip clubs. Again, I don't recommend it but have great stories. I digress.
-
I'm a loser loser, meaning I have no confidence in myself ---> Paradoxically, one of the easier ones to solve. Confidence comes from exactly one process; demonstrate competence in a difficult task. You will pick a medium term task or project that seems hard, and then you will do it. Build a website, build a birdhouse, organize a party, train for an complete a 10k, something that takes around 90 days. Pick it. Do it. Write about it as you are doing it in a journal style. At the end, after you do it, read the journal, relive the emotional journey and realize "I did it even though it was hard along the way." Boom, confidence.
-
I'm an internet loser. This is guy code for "I watch porn." It's easy - stop.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
Since as it seems virtually nobody cares for both Russians' privatized victory day and their shenanigans on that day - at least the mentions of it in Western press seem to be rather scarce - then paying attention to whether or not they successfully performed those shenanigans would also be counter-productive. In this particular matter, ignoring them seems to be the best course of action. Of course, declaring the new large weapons shipment to Ukraine would be a better reaction, but that seems to be beyond hope now.
100ProofTollBooth
5hr ago
akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy
"Defense in Depth" means something very different in the cyber versus the traditional military context.
It's a real shame that the term was re-used but then also redefined. So, unfortunately, I think your analysis is confused and self-contradictory not because of a failure of your personal construction, but because the terms and the concepts underlying them can't be swapped out as easily as you may have assumed.
Directly answering your intro question - hard no. Conspiracy theories about the all-powerfulness of the amorphous "intel" cabal of the USA I always dismiss out of hand because the axiomatic assumption underpinning it is that they're all powerful. "Could an all powerful entity do ... stuff!?" Yes, yes it could.
The sad fact of the matter is that the really cooky progressive stuff is the result of a Long March through the institutions paired with the kind of narcissism that can only result from the most prosperous generation of all time (boomers) failing to introduce their children (millennials) to reality. If you grow up richer than all other humans and never leave the suburban never-never land (even into college), tinker belle starts talking about polyamory, and then everyone starts calling your green tights gay, then, yeah, maybe cheering for the Islamic Death Cult helps you work through those emotions.
Phrased differently; social progressivism is make believe that has survived as a political ideology only briefly. Remember, 10 years ago we were in lame duck Obama years and looking at an at the time probable Bush-Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo contest in 2016. Then the Orange rolled down the escalator and changed the game. 10 years in politics / social ideologies isn't nothing, but it isn't that long. The hard left is dying quickly before our eyes (big caveat here: the overton window has been shifted so much that the non-hard left is still pretty nuts.)
MAGA types are going to take multiple victory laps as the hard left continues to decline, but they've problems of their own. If the hard left is political make believe, the hard right is nihilistic fatalism. We had Walt Bismarck around these parts not too long along. Reading his substack is both worth it and difficult. Worth it in that a lot of his highlighted problems are very real and very well analyzed. Difficult because a lot of the solutions are heavily caveated "...but, even still, I don't think society is recoverable."
Looking in the mirror, earlier this week or last week, I got called out for unintentionally recommending a Benedict Option. That one made me think. Nihilism and fatalism aren't self-sustaining ideologies for obvious reasons. Worse, they don't actually cultivate pro-social and pro-growth behavior in a constituency. I saw a funny thing during the heart of the pandemic; my progressive friends were barricaded in doors wearing their CBRN costumes during zoom meetings - they mostly got a little fat, posted on Twitter more, and got good at home brewing anxiety. My MAGA friends stayed outside, went to spring break --- and got constantly shitfaced without a second thought. They definitely "owned the libs" at their end of the world party. And now, even those who think Trump: Deuces Wild is inevitably going to premier in November walk around very much like a doomsday cult that had their D-Day come and go without the rapture and are now feeling empty, fearful, and unprepared.
And none of this is the real threat to America.
Because that's China.
Quantumfreakonomics
5hr ago
It's the old MetaMed problem. Anyone who understands enough about the object-level issue to weed out the total scams is someone who understands enough to just do it themselves.
If it's any consolation, I was pretty notable around these parts for not having much luck with women, but I did eventually meet my current gf on Bumble. Your experience may vary, but I don't think the apps are quite as bad as everyone says.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
Clearly the buyer's agent wants to steer the buyer to a more expensive property
It's not clear at all. The buyer, if they have any sense at all, would already know the state of the market and how much, in broad terms, houses they look for cost. Not precisely, but in certain boundaries. Sure, the agent could show them houses that are a little cheaper and a little more expensive, but the marginal gain would be in hundreds of dollars, while the price of the whole deal is for them in tens of thousands. So the incentive of the agent is to make a deal. It is true that it's not always correct incentive for the buyer (since the agent focused on making a deal first may push for the buyer to compromise on things they wouldn't otherwise compromise) but it much, much better for the agent to get a deal at a slightly lower price than to lose a deal at higher price. So the buyer agent would steer you enthusiastically to any property they think you could potentially buy, but the marginal incentive of showing you only the expensive ones - unless you are so rich the price is obviously not an issue at all for you - would be quite small.
I've been shopping for houses in the US a number of times, both successfully and unsuccessfully, and I didn't notice a lot of drive to only go for top expensive properties. Of course, price is correlated with quality and desirability, so the agent won't show me a half-ruined cheap house while they could show me a pristine new one for slightly more, but I did not notice the overt push that often. There are a lot of agents that understand the above, and if a particular one prefers to lose tens of thousands to gain hundreds, then you get a smarter agent instead.
It'd be hard to fix the incentives completely, since а fixed-price agent would be as interested in getting to the deal as quick as possible. I guess one should get an agent that would be able to keep themselves in check and work for the client.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it.
I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points TD / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.
I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
5hr ago
No, I think if someone was acting according to your intent it would be more akin to beating a kid to the point of hospitalisation to 'toughen him up'. American cultural resilience is not anti-fragile.
Boarchariot
5hr ago
You do you. I don't see the cost. If you want to write, write. Make it public if you want the chance for people to read it.
It starts slow, like the original Heston film, and builds its pieces one by one. It earns every bit of spectacle through steady worldbuilding, and is character-driven from start to end. Even the seemingly random twists are explained in retrospect if you pay attention.
The core of the story is heavily intellectual, and I really shouldn’t give any spoilers because the story is a delight when seen through the main character’s eyes, but they’re readily available if you go looking.
I think I’ll go see it again, in a bigger-screen theater.
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