Cheerios are turning the frogs gay though.

Honey, if crumbs are your hard limit, referring to it as “coital activities” is entirely appropriate and I hope you meet the Mormon of your dreams.

Grindr alert noise

Okay, this post is only an hour old but it already has a ton of replies. I reallly hope you see this, though. I’m going to GBF you for just a couple of minutes.

First of all - girl, seriously? 40 year olds go out all the time for drinks. You should try going out with friends so you can keep an eye on each other, but every bar go to is filled with people our age. I’m ten years older than you, and I in no way feel like an old man in a bar. If you have a next day recovery concern, just limit yourself, or go on the weekends. Just make sure you’re taking an Uber and if you’re doing solo yolo let a friend know where you’re going and let them track your phone or something.

Second, apps can be toxic but they can also be gamed. You’re looking for a silver fox type, maybe with a bit of a dad bod is my guess. Put out for some headshots or other pro photos. There’s even a lot of amateur photographers who you might be able to find on insta who would be happy to do a quick session for a modest amount of money. Do yourself a favor and get a serious makeover and some new outfits first, because it will make you feel like your best self.

Third, it’s okay to just be looking to get dicked down even while looking for something serious. Don’t hang everything on finding your next life partner if you really are just craving physical affection.

There are tons of 40+ men who are single due to similar circumstances to yours. They’re at bars, and they go to concerts at local venues. They’re probably not going to be at the clubs the 20-something’s go to, but they have their own territories.

It really sounds like you have to see yourself as your best self, and up your game with that confidence.

This is seriously the most adorable cat I have ever seen!

Just curious because I’m only half-remembering how it’s determined - Would a clone of the kitten have the same colorations?

This isn’t the kind of thing you forget like missing a birthday. It’s a major directive from one institution to another, and it’s entirely possible it’s just being slow walked. These are all handled by working groups who may not be motivated to get it done.

I’m not sure if the situation might change if Trump gets re-elected.

I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.

Completely agreed, and none of this is directed at you. I’m responding to more of the overall sentiment in this post.

Jewelry and designer fashion is expensive very much on purpose. Yes, there’s an obvious quality element. That doesn’t mean that a Christian Siriano gown is going to last like a Carhartt jacket or that those Louboutin boots will outlast a pair of red wings. It’s wearable art, and it also makes a social statement.

We’re not even talking that level, though. The average cost for an American wedding is about $30k, so $35k all inclusive is absolutely in the ballpark. You can obviously get married for far less, but this article is talking about the reality of the “American dream” - which is really just a middle class lifestyle - versus various average expenses. The point isn’t that you can’t get married at the courthouse for $50, or even that you shouldn’t. The point is that people who subscribe to the concept of the American dream expect to be able to live an average lifestyle. Modest house. College for the kids. A “proper” wedding. Retirement. Leaving something behind. Those are increasingly moving out of reach.

You could hop over to Tiffany right now and find a nice necklace for $10k that would make a lovely Christmas present. That’s not what this article is talking about. It’s going beyond the basic “basket of goods” economists use to look at things like inflation and cost of living to include expenses that the average middle class family has traditionally expected. That’s exactly the approach many of us wish more people would take.

He was just tucking his shirt in.

Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.

And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…

But, again, that’s my point.

I see this argument a lot.

I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.

I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.

The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.

I hadn’t really been coming at it from that perspective, but your post got me thinking. I’ve been in the business one way or another since then in multiple capacities - hobbyist, military, government, academia, and commercial.

Back in the 70s, there was barely a major called “computer science” at most colleges. Most people writing software were largely self-taught, and software companies were a couple of dozen people. Going into the 80s, as the industry expanded, more computers were being sold (mid-sized and mainframes, with a small but growing PC market. Being a programmer would give you a solid middle class career. These were the days when Donald Knuth wrote the cost complete and comprehensive software for laying out text and equations available (TeX, now used via LaTeX) because such a thing wasn’t available and he wanted it to be. He was a professor at Stanford, meaning he had a salary already, so he just released it for free. Those were the days when people argued that software couldn’t be copyrighted because any piece of software is really just a mathematical equation, and you cannot copyright math. Anyway, many of the people writing software had a day job, “programmers” included a large proportion of people who wrote COBOL in tiny chunks for not very much money. There was a large chunk of people whose greatest dream was getting paid to do software for a living, and it was seen kind of people whose dream it was to be a professional librarian. Very few were in it for the money.

It all took off in the mid-late 90s when the industry got financialized. Fast forward to today, and no one on my team has less than a six figure salary, I make more than most MDs, and my bosses make far more than that. Because of our age demographic, few if any of them have even a bachelor’s degree, much less one in computer science. It was really that 90s transition when it started to be about money.

But I wouldn’t use the word greedy. The industry just changed, and so did the social relationships. I still have nostalgia for the days when it was more like Wargames and Real Genius than like Black Mirror, but I would never say it’s a result of the folks writing an app that want to do it for a living on their own terms. I think people like Christian Sellig (the author of Reddit client Apollo) represents the best of that earlier mindset, and I sincerely hope he made fuck-you money off of his app before spez shut him down. If anything, it’s people like Spez who are at fault.

Anyway, that was just a rant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Back in the olden days, there used to be a variety of free software called postcard-ware. It was free to distribute and use, but if you wanted to you could send the author a postcard.

Not to say that it’s not good to self-reflect and improve, and not to say that there’s nothing you can improve, but there might be other factors at play.

I don’t have the numbers to hand, but going off of my own experience and my memory, younger people are far more likely to leave a job than older people. You can try to find the stats - I’m sure they vary by country, for instance, but I changed jobs relatively often early in my career. As my career progressed (and changed from industry to industry), I tended to stay longer.

Basically, what you want to do is establish the baseline. Is it a you thing, is it a company thing, an industry thing, or just the natural process? It might be a mix, but until you know what you’re dealing with, it’s going to be hard to fix it.

This is my position, too. I’m pretty sensitive to social homophobia and transphobia, and this headline, to me, is calling out Bobo and not her boyfriend (although I would question his taste). Now admittedly, you’d have to know who Bobo is in order to get that. If it was about AIC’s boyfriend owning a gay bar, that’d literally be a different story. However, I don’t think you can squeeze too much context into a headline without using a queerty or the root style headline like “Fame-hungry homophobe Boebert caught publicly masturbating gay bar owner in children’s musical!”

Honestly, I’m never sure how much of their crap is performative and how much is serious, but honestly even the serious stuff is actually performative.

To me, that’s like the people who complain that gang-related shootings count as gun crimes. Not everything has to be Columbine/Las Vegas/Sandy Hook/Virginia Tech… (too many to list, honestly too many to keep track of, and I read the news daily. They’re all symptoms of the gun problem in the US. A lot of fun crimes are done by criminals? What a shock! But they have drug dealers and gang members in other countries, and we don’t see the levels of gun violence we do in the US. America is literally off the charts when they do international studies.

A shooting at a school is a shooting at a school, period. I can’t think of anyone who would defend calling it anything else. It doesn’t matter if it’s two kids fighting over who gets to sell drugs or just someone who doesn’t like Mondays.

The “paradox” here is that by being tolerant of intolerance, we are actually decreasing the overall level of tolerance when normally we’d expect tolerant behaviors to increase tolerance.

Compare it to the “death wave.” When someone stops in a multi lane intersection to allow someone to cross in debt of them, the pedestrian/vehicle can’t see around the stopped vehicle and this can result in them being hit by a motorist in the adjacent lane. It feels like you’re being safe and considerate, but you’re actually putting the other person in more danger than if you had simply followed the right of way. It happens often enough that a name has been coined for the phenomenon.

Tolerating hate increases hate, not tolerance. Tolerating hate in the extreme decreases tolerance not only relative to the hate, but because once hate takes over they eliminate tolerance (see Florida).

Then I’d just make it $100 and call it a day. $100 seems like a very generous amount in gift card form (like you’re less likely to forget it in your sock drawer), while $100 cash doesn’t seem like as big of a deal.

I’m not generally big on giving gift cards, but if they’re asking for one it’s going to be appreciated.