Used hinge. It’s the least bad, as of this year anyway.

Most people who use dating apps are, frankly, bad at it. People send garbage messages with garbage profiles. People half-ass it and expect the other folks to carry the whole thing. I feel like I could write a short book on how to do it better.

Condensed into like three bullet points it’s

• Ask questions. Do not dead-end the conversation and expect them to do all the work
• actually ask them out. Like, in the first conversation after you clear any must-have deal breakers (eg: if you have a kid)
• put stuff you want to talk about in your profile. Don’t be “clever” and respond to “what are you looking for?” with “my keys”. This is where you give the other person topics to talk about. (Also if you are tired of people asking about the stuff you put in your profile, change it you doofus.)

Being “an introvert” doesn’t excuse you from being present and engaged. The other person isn’t going to be that interested in someone who responds every couple hours with “lol”. If you can’t muster up the energy to have a real conversation, you aren’t ready to date.

Ok so you’re probably correct but I also like seeing the opposite of the usual “omg socialism everyone in NYC is already dead!!!”

Out-groups to bind, in-groups to protect. That’s it. Often on a purely emotional level. Having the out-group be just out and about living life feels wrong to that kind of person. There has to be hierarchy, they feel.

Part of that falls under the “don’t show up when invited” umbrella, but mostly that sucks. I’m sorry you feel like your efforts and friendship efforts weren’t appreciated.

I’ve definitely had a couple friends (“friends”) that were lopsided. I remember posting about one way back in the 2000s on some web forum, and a guy with a otter(?) avatar told me “This guy, that flakes on your plans and only shows up when it works for him? He doesn’t respect you. Don’t put up with that”. Good advice from a small furry animal, I think.

Some people just aren’t worth it. Maybe they were in the past. Maybe they will be again. But I find it’s important to have boundaries for oneself. It can be hard to balance.

I always wanted to get one of my lawyer friends to play a devil in a DND game I ran. Just have him write the worst contracts for the players that are more air tight than I can come up with.

A lot of our behaviors and coping mechanisms come from our parents. So if they’re lonely and have no friends, you should examine why that is, and try to change it in yourself.

One of my friends realized after therapy they had a lot of behaviors from their dad. Stuff they hated when their dad did (lashing out when uncomfortable, mostly). Once they saw it, they were able to work on it. Before that, it had been a real source of friction with friendships.

Hah, a different ex that I’m still friends with responded with “you rank us??”

No, there’s not a full ranking. I’m still good friends with 2, there’s a lot of ones I have no hard feelings about, and then there’s this one stinker.

The other day I had to use a browser without any plugins to go to a site, and it was unrecognizable with all the ads. When I normally visit it’s clean and simple. These ads pushed content under the fold. Horrible.

“go home and look at Instagram” is largely a stand-in for “I’m tired and can’t muster the energy to do anything that feels more effortful”.

In my limited experience, the trick to getting out of the hole is doing the hard thing anyway. That and professional advice and medication as appropriate. You can’t to my knowledge willpower your way out of clinical depression. But ultimately if you want out of the hole, you have to climb out, regardless if that means therapy, medication, or being mildly uncomfortable. It’s not going to fix itself.

I usually recommend Meetup or similar. There’s a bunch that are just get togethers for board games or whatnot.

But you have to keep going. I think people expect to like go once and make a new best friend and partner. You usually need a lot of interactions to level up from “stranger” to “person I see sometimes” to friend.

I also ran a small meetup for a while before the pandemic. Made a few friends that way, but it’s a lot of thankless work.

Additionally they have to have time to play it.

And money to buy it! Wages are down. I was unemployed for a while so I just didn’t buy any games (or much else)

I leave reviews when the game does something exceptional (good or bad). Or sometimes when steam nags me to leave a review.

It’s funny: if you leave a negative review and keep playing it asks you if you want to change your review.

Been living without a car for (oh no I’m old) almost two decades. It’s pretty great. NYC is a rare city in the US with good public transit.

I wouldn’t willingly move somewhere that needed a car for day to day. I don’t care if it’s a little cheaper or there’s “more space”. I like density and walking places.

I comment. Reminds me of how I’d end up playing medic in tfc/tf2- someone has to do it.

I don’t post original stuff often, though.

I’m reminded of two coworkers. One I could just ask to do something and he would do a generally reasonable job of it. The other would make weird choices and introduce problems. Reviewing the latter’s work was sometimes worse than just doing it myself from the start.

They vote for their material interests in the same sense that a man walking at night with sunglasses picks the best path. He thinks it’s obvious but he really needs to take the sunglasses off and maybe get a flashlight. He’s walking a stupid path and will probably fall into a ditch.

Fox News is probably the sunglasses in this metaphor.

My mother told me she took some sort of business class in college as an elective. The professor said something like “there are no ethics in business. There’s only the law.”

She dropped the course in disgust.

Did a one shot in high school where to cast any spell you had to sing a relevant line from an extant song.

I don’t remember everyone’s picks, but one player pulled out a pretty enthusiastic Beatles’ “got to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time” for a heal.

I feel like a lot of people who bemoan the lack of friends also don’t invest in friendship. Don’t show up when invited, don’t organize anything themselves.

I used to run a book club and a board game club, and it was always kind of a struggle to get people to show up. The pull of “just go home and look at Instagram” is strong, I guess.

Many years ago I had to explain to a coworker how progressive taxation works. He was like “that’s a great idea! We should do that! It’s stupid that now your pay goes up but you take home less because you get taxed more”

I had to tell him, yes it is a good idea. It’s how it works now. You don’t get more pay and suddenly your whole income is taxed more.

He’d had no idea