It was beautiful in the movie, but as someone who lived through that time, it feels pretty dated these days.
The new look is boring, sterile, and reeks of faux-minimalist wallet flexing. Not my thing either.
There’s got to be a happy medium between everything has extra detail and patterns and bad sci-fi set.
Don’t I know it.
My hairline is receding because my hair is marching down the back of my neck towards my ass crack.
It’s an easy way to drum up support from people who have never or rarely traveled, are already conservative, and have bought into the culture war that has been created to justify MAGA doing MAGA shit.
Yeah, there are people who will repeat the same talking points you’ve listed and even defend them with a surprising amount of anger, but they’re mostly ignorant, predjudiced dipshits confirming their biases and parroting what they’ve heard. If you’re a popular Republican and you blamed their problems on sunspots, they’d hate sunspots just as bad as they hate California.
It’s not that they hate blue states because they went there and had a bad time or because of some kind of personal history. They hate blue states because that’s what they think people in red states are supposed to do. If it someday goes out of style, they’ll quit talking about it.
Common folk, salt of the earth, you know… morons.
Does your partner make you happy?
That’s all that really matters. Define it in whatever way you’re comfortable with. Or don’t define it. You don’t owe the world an explanation.
If you’re worried about someone else questioning your relationship, you can always just reply: “I’m with [my partner] because I love them.”
Anyone who can’t accept that isn’t worth engaging in conversation on the subject anyway.
Grasping the idea that things don’t always make sense, and that’s it’s okay when they don’t, is like setting down a heavy load you didn’t realize you were carrying.
I have a bunch too, but the collection started by accident.
I like Godzilla. I like the old movies, I like the new ones. He’s a giant radioactive lizard, what’s not to like? I’m not a superfan, but I enjoy the franchise(s).
I’m supposedly hard to buy for, I think mostly because my interests lie outside the rest of the my family’s to an extent, and tend to be niche or technical in nature, so I get Godzilla swag and toys for Xmas and birthdays. I don’t mind, it’s fun.
Some people who are utterly tech ignorant and unwilling to actively parent their children might feel better about handing their kid a device so they don’t have to deal with them.
However, this is primarily the end game of both targeted advertising and those who want wholesale surveillance of the population (who are often the same people). Tying the whole of your online presence to your unique offline identity.
Same.
If I’m going faster than other traffic and already over the limit by a decent amount, I’ll move over once the middle lane is clear, but I’m not speeding up just because you’re impatient.
In fact, I’ll slow down just a wee bit.
I give no fucks.
But, the caveat to that is that I don’t loiter in the passing lane at ten under the limit. It’s the passing lane. I’m there because, you know, I’m passing people and not because I think I need to do 95 mph in a lifted truck just to assert my dominance over the morning commute.
You can make your own meaning, an act that is also inherently meaningless but often satisfying, or you can just relax and enjoy the things that are enjoyable.
I used to try and explain it in more detail, but I’ve failed to get the point across often enough that I wonder if it really can be explained. I think people just have to sit down and think about it until it snaps into focus for them.
To some degree, what is important, enjoyable, and satisfying to each of us is determined by something immutable, but if we apply ourselves many of us can examine, reason, and then understand things to a degree that we have broad control over what we let matter to us.
Focusing on what we choose to let matter to us is key to living without meaning. But we must also embrace the other parts of life, because without them, the things we believe matter most would lose their meaning.
Without the contrast of suffering, we would struggle to understand joy. I think that’s the hardest thing to accept for most.
Anyone who is passionate about what they see as a moral cause will be insufferable to at least a few people. Passionate Linux and FOSS advocates are insufferable in the eyes of WIndows fans, for example.
It’s not just vegans, it’s just how human minds work.
I’ve always joked that marriage is a lot like sharing your house with someone… so you should choose that person wisely.
But in a lot of ways it can be that simple. It’s making an effort to understand the commitments and courtesies that your partner needs to share a life with you that separates a marriage from a love affair. It’s an intentional commingling of your lives with the intent of mutual benefit, sharing affection, and having the grace to allow one another small mistakes in the process.
If the people in question have an understanding, then I don’t think that legal status, civil or religious ceremonies, permanent cohabitation, or even monogamy are essential, as you’ll find relationships that remain stable despite lacking one or more of these things from time to time. But, entering into and honoring that commitment to each other is.
Boiler room is slang for a room filled with shady stock brokers using high-pressure tactics to sell crappy stocks for fraudulent reasons.
When fund raiser time came around, his band teacher told everyone to take out their phones, call relatives, and try to get them to commit to buying x number of candy bars. It was like a little boiler room full of kids begging grandma to shell out $50 for mediocre chocolate.
Our policy was supervised / filtered only until early teens. Kids sites, educational stuff, games we purchased and approved of, etc. We were also late to give them phones, our son got his first because in his freshman year of high-school his band teacher set up a boiler-room to sell worlds finest chocolate and he was the only kid who didn’t have a cell phone.
When we had “the talk” we discussed masturbation and porn, why porn is popular, and all the negatives that go with it without condemning it outright. We talked about online predators and not sharing things with people you didn’t know, especially pics, addresses, etc.
My wife and I are firm believers that kids need space to discover who they are, so as they became teens, things went to semi-supervised. We paid attention to them more than their devices, but we had rules such as adding one of our emails as a recovery address to any socials they set up, so we could check up on them if we thought something bad was going down. Never had to use that, and I think just having it there made them think about what they did online.
Around sixteen/seventeen, no filter and no more backdoors into their accounts. Just a couple of long heart to hearts about how shitty things can be on the internet and how we’re there to talk with no judgement if they need us.
Exactly, and i didn’t mean to hijack your comment. It’s just that it’s something that bugs the hell out of me, but that I completely understand at the same time.
I’ve started heading it off with stuff like, “I don’t watch the news, that’s how they send out the subliminal messages.” You have to be careful with those though, you could start a micro-relationship that goes on far longer than you want it to.
Maybe no one needs anything anymore,
I’m guilty of dreading small talk myself, but no, this isn’t the case. Damn near everyone would be better off with more micro-relationships, more empathy, and more community support these days.
Problem is you never know if you’re going to have a nice chat about the weather, or get to listen to gramp’s reinterpretation of a talk radio political screed aimed at yourself or someone you love. And since so many things try to divert a large fraction of our attention to rage baiting political blurbs with no actual content, celebrity gossip, and outright propaganda, it’s not unreasonable to be wary of the possibility of getting more of the same from a source you can’t easily filter, turn off, or click away from.
People, especially those who are more introverted, seem exhausted by it all even while still responding to it. The psychological hooks are set pretty deep.
I’m enough of a conspiratorial thinker to believe this is by design. An attempt to move us away from empathy and community and teach us to rely on corporations and products for the kind of support you’re describing. Don’t wait for a kind stranger to help you change that wagon wheel, get a trail-side assistance package at the trading post before you set out…
Zugzwang strategy. You have to make move, there’s not even an option not to play.
It’s not just about capturing the mobile phone market and punishing alternate ROM developers, it’s also pushing people into the market that might otherwise choose to have a dumb phone, no phone, do things in person, via mail, etc. No android/iPhone? Good luck with online shopping, communicating with medical providers, checking your kid’s grades online, paying utility bills, taxes, etc. etc.
As the boomers die off, and fewer people do things the pre-internet way, there’s no incentive for governments, businesses, and so forth to maintain those processes and systems. Why would we have a receptionist take appointments by phone if she’s just typing them into the same web interface? Why print report cards when we can post them online? Why maintain a storefront and not just warehouses like Amazon?
Opt-in to surveillance or opt out of necessary parts of life, all under the guise of “convenience”.
Climate change deniers.
Is climate change bad? Very bad, existentially bad. Do I want it to happen? No. Do I try to take steps to mitigate it? Yes, I put my drop in the bucket and vote for people who support policies that would help.
But we’re eyeballs deep in Brandolini’s Law at this point and by the time we get ourselves out of the quicksand, massive change will have taken its toll.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t take action, but working ourselves in to a spittle-flecked outrage everytime someone says something stupid on social media is a waste of energy when we’re already in damage control mode. The battle lines have been drawn for decades and the backlash effect is a very real phenomena.
Economics is going to win this fight before logic and debate does.