Thank you!

Oh heck yes. That extra tip solves my other problem with fitbit.

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I love those silly scenes where someone has to take a dozen weapons out of various parts of their outfit before entering a room for a high stakes conversation.

Also kind of love when villains get adopted into the protagonist’s group.

And whenever there’s any kind of mini-universe/layered reality.

Seconding the comment about closed loop time travel.

Edit: also NONLINEAR STORYTELLING. I love that shit. Arranging plot points for symmetry and emotion or thematic resonance rather than just focusing on “what” happened.

I think many people in the U.S. do feel extremely shitty about it. People do care, people are upset, and many are protesting and talking and doing what they can to try to mitigate or heal or push back against the actions of their own governments in the ways that they can. I don’t know if you were around for the 2000s, but people protested then, too. It may not feel that way depending on what media you see or what people you know, but many people do strongly criticize their own government and feel awful about the way their tax dollars are used and the rhetoric that comes out of their leaders. I think most americans (offline anyway) do condemn war crimes, do feel icky about our own government’s involvement and motives, and are mourning the suffering on both sides of this conflict. If you’re seeing lots of disregard for human life around you, it might help to seek out some of the groups and voices and people who are feeling unsettled and are doing something. I know there are lots of donations happening and I’ve seen news about events mourning the dead and groups trying to help the people who are there. It might not be on every front page, but it is out there, if you look for it. The people loudly saying that death and suffering is justified for certain groups of people will try to make it seem like everybody feels that way. But in practice, that has never been true. Anyone with a heart hates this shit. So many people are trying to help. Don’t let propagandists convince you otherwise.

So there’s a big whole complex of online harassment, offline harassment, misogynistic attitudes, beliefs about dating, “strategies” for “getting” women to date or have sex with you, weird money related ideas about all of this, ideas about strategies to turn a no into a yes, etc etc, that is in the background whenever normal low stakes human interactions are happening. So it’s not the act of saying “hi, you seem cool, let’s get coffee” that is the problem. It’s the context. Tinder is making the context so, so much worse. It’s creating creating conditions that make an otherwise normal ‘hi’ seem more likely to be in bad faith, and sending a signal to malicious people that a new option for being malicious has opened up. So, even if the vast majority of people looking to meet humans this way are totally kind and earnest, it brings a certain vibe to the entire thing that will make many people, especially women who have had scary or unpleasant experiences in that vein, very uncomfortable, and cause them to think twice about that “hi”, because they know that access to their inbox has been sold, when that was never allowed before, to people who may be more likely to have bought into the aforementioned complex of bad ideas. It makes the “hi” not normal anymore.

Hey me too! High five!! It really is so maddening to watch people stay inside of and give cover to something that is so obviously not okay. If i think too hard about the people around my age in my family who will probably never leave, or stand up for themselves, or their own kids, and on and on forever, my brain breaks. Cult behavior.

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Thanks for linking this.

The incredible horror of tying self worth to romantic “success” and then charging people money for it, is awful on its face, but it leads to much worse things too. This is, in effect, charging money for people to have “access” to people who haven’t consented to being contacted, furthering the idea that money=access to people who can’t say no to you. Tinder is monetizing peoples’ emotional need for connection at best, which is horrible, but at worst it’s also propping up a whole complex of ideas that erode respect and consent toward potential romantic or sexual partners, and that the far end eventually leads to like, Andrew Tate shit. And why wouldn’t it work? People have had their self worth obliterated by the commodification of human beings that is mainstream heteronormative dating culture. Tech companies making themselves the mediator of human connection, romantic or platonic or in terms of activism, hobbies, groups, etc - and then charging money for us to know each other and meet each other - horrifies me daily.

I don’t think it’s any one factor. I actually think it’s dangerous to think that there iis - the idea that there is some inherent gene or trait or personality type or social condition or event that makes a person evil, has, ironically led to some evil things. The world is a complex web of cause and effect and belief and experience and different ways of reacting to emotion and different decision making and every person is located in a different relationship to all of those things. There’s no one type or person or type of environment or situation that causes bad things, just a series of complex things that are worth being nuanced and thoughtful about.

That, I can’t tell you - I tend to move to pen and paper for anything too sensitive, so I haven’t looked too deeply into that feature

Joplin!

Sudafed or death. It was unregulated when I was a kid, which was when I was constantly sick. I think my body must be like 30% sudafed at this point. I understand the regulations, but I do feel bad for sick kids these days. A box is not always enough to deal with a bad infection!

Rip

I am so tired of this dynamic, both in high profile cases and in my own local community. If people gave even a tenth of the support they give to accused predators, to the actual people they have hurt, the world would be a completely different place. I don’t understand the instinct here to shame and ostracize survivors but lionize the people accused of rape and abuse. I’m exhausted.

Edit: I want to add: People do deserve support while they work on changing, but this isn’t that. They were trying to help his case and rehabilitate his character, not help him take accountability and make amends. That’s what makes it so awful. You can support someone you love in taking responsibility for their their actions, without downplaying the seriousness of it or shielding them from what they did. This is the latter. People always say they’re doing the former, but there is a massive distinction.

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Bless you

Yeah…I was hoping by now that maybe they made mp3 players by now that could sync to phones or tablets. I’m not above transferring files slowly and a few at a time - I used to type in the song names manually haha so it can’t be much worse. CDs are trickier. But I’m glad to know it was annoying but feasible. They really have made owning media such a high effort thing. Sigh.

I hadn’t looked into it, as I’d gotten used to assuming that my phones won’t have the memory space for music - but that’s a smart idea. I’ll have to look into that.