IME the vast majority of women have no clue how to react to being rejected, because it almost never happens to them. As such, nearly all react badly or maladaptively regardless of conditions.
Conversely, for most men they have to endure rejection hundreds if not thousands of times before they strike it lucky. The small cohort that become maladaptive do so due to other social/societal reasons associated with the rejection, but vanishingly few react maladaptively purely because of the rejection.
As someone with deep roots in the sciences, and good access to the latest data and evidence surrounding anthropogenic climate change, I seriously doubt that there will be much civilization left by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. All indications used to point towards widespread economic, societal, and ecological collapse in the latter half of this century, well past my effective lifespan, but recent (and strong!) evidence has moved that up considerably to not much past 2035. So no, I am not worried in the least about “burdening” anyone with my collection. I seriously doubt that there will be anyone left who will care. The few who remain will be too obsessed with surviving another day to give two shits about books. I just want to live long enough to read most of them in relative comfort.
My mother
…WAT…
or sees a visible map of time in their head
Like how a day or a year is like a rollercoaster, coming down in the first half to rise back up in the second? It’s like a really odd sine wave for me.
eating hamburgers and hot dogs with flatware instead of on buns.
That sounds so German. I know the bun-less burgers as “frickadellen”, my own parents (both German immigrants who met each other over here) used to make them fairly frequently.
My goodness, I am so much like you.
I’ve been using a book tracker app since the iPhone 4s (2011) just to keep track of what I buy - I don’t track anything else - because even way back then I had trouble remembering if I had a book or if I had just browsed it elsewhere.
In 2018, various functions (search, sort, stats, etc.) took a permanent dirt nap just as I was nearing the 3K number of entries. And these are just the books I own.
The size of the DB backup file has nearly doubled since then.
Now granted, a number of books I get need to go straight into storage before I can even read them, as I have not yet built my library. It’s already gone through several redesigns to stay ahead of the size of my collection, and right now I’m looking at movable library storage stacks - the kind that roll on miniature railway tracks and have wheel-like dogs at their ends that a person turns to easily move them back and forth (opening and closing an access corridor between the stacks for access to the books). I’m hoping to eventually have almost half a linear kilometre of shelving in my library once it’s built.
I cannot imagine the horror of being even semi-illiterate, much less fully illiterate. I absolutely love reading.
Will have to look into that, thanks.
One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.
flip phone
Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.
I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.
If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.
I had a physics professor tell me about free energy. Having a degree is not 100% effective in curing stupid.
There are physicists that don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, and that is to be expected because that subject isn’t in their wheelhouse; it isn’t their bread-and-butter, and that isn’t their day job that they work on for 2,000+hrs a year for decades on end. So they are lacking a lot of the data that would allow them to make correct decisions regarding factuality.
But when most of an academic field is saying the exact same thing about a core subject that is at the foundation of their discipline, imma not gonna be arrogant enough to presume that they’re wrong. I’m going to take them exactly at their word.
sure thing, incel
Tell me you know nothing about that word without saying you are ignorant AF about that word, and are only throwing it around as a weapon in an attempt to publicly shame me into being quiet.
So: nice ad hominem. You clearly have absolutely nothing of substance in which to counter the message, so instead you attack the speaker.
Truly an effective way of winning arguments! /s
I would honestly say your friend misunderstood the message as well if that was her takeaway.
Unlikely - she was and still is a professor teaching women’s studies at the local university. Published, too. She’s hardly a nobody.
“Hey, want to go to spoons later?” isn’t going to result in legal action.
But making an unsolicited approach, and wholly lacking the experience and social expertise to recognize that the woman wants nothing to do with you, and is actually embarrassed by your presence, confers a non-trivial and very real risk of police presence.
And that is while also being wholly non-threatening and totally harmless. Absolutely oblivious to social conditions, sure, but also absolutely not a danger and receptive to clear and unambiguous language – which was never provided until the cops provided it for her.
Yes, actually saw this happen IRL. Poor dude was absolutely mortified, which likely made him think thrice of ever making another unsolicited approach and definitely nerfing any possibility of becoming more experienced at interacting with women.
These kinds of men don’t just spring out of holes in the ground, fully formed. They are shaped by supremely negative experiences like that one, which could have been trivially avoided by adequate communication on the part of the woman.
For the average man making unsolicited approaches, the latest stats I have seen tend to bounce between the 1-in-300 and the 1-in-1,500 range of a successful approach per total attempts. And this is just first-date-is-successful territory, it gets a good magnitude worse if you are looking for an LTR.
From what I understand, the flip side is a lot lower: an average women making unsolicited approaches to men seem to be hitting a 1-in-5 to 1-in-20 success range, depending on conditions
So yeah, being a man outside of the desirable 10% is indeed playing on hard mode. And from what I can see, things have only gotten much, much worse for the average man in the last few decades since I was young. I don’t envy young men these days, at all.
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong
You are suffering from a lack of experience.
Women have the ability to learn by proxy, when having intimate conversations with sisters, mothers, aunts, and other female role models. This gives them a massive buff long before they ever begin dating, because they are able to gain an emotional roadmap of how things go down, and then build on that with experience.
Men don’t have this same transfer of knowledge, nor are we even psychologically set up to build one, so in aggregate we are massively nerfed straight out of the gate. This means our only way of learning is via direct experience and sheer volume: you need to circulate and learn from your experiences in order to percolate. It sucks, but that’s the breaks. The rare guy will get lucky straight out of the gate. The vast majority, however, will have to approach and be rejected by many hundreds to even thousands of women before they “find their groove” enough to catch a break.
And your own insecurities are working against you: being nervous, desperate, or unsure of yourself is something that women - again, through that buff of intergenerational information transfer - are able to “smell” almost instinctively. If you want to vanquish those issues, you quite literally need to work on yourself, to focus on improving yourself and gaining confidence within yourself by overcoming obstacles and challenges that you set for yourself.
Stoicism can assist in helping you become a better version of yourself, in becoming intrinsically motivated such that companionship shifts away from being a clawing need to merely a value-added proposition.
It wasn’t “Do not, under any circumstances, speak to a woman”
Actually, as explained to me by a woman, it was exactly that.
This was well after I had married, somewhere in my fifth decade, so I was off that particular playing field for quite some time by that point. But on a lark I had asked a feminist what this “leave women alone” refrain meant. And some of it made perfect sense: don’t hit up cashiers or anyone doing their jobs, they’re just being nice and friendly because they are being paid to be polite.
But it also meant don’t approach women when they’re shopping for groceries, as they’re probably tired from work and just want to go home. Don’t approach women on public transportation, as they’re just trying to get home and don’t want to be accosted in a cramped public venue. Don’t approach women when they’re out with friends, because they are with friends and don’t want to be cleaved off like how a predator isolates a member of a herd.
This went on and on, to some pretty ridiculous lengths. Whereupon I asked, “how is any man supposed to do an unsolicited approach to chat up a woman?”, to which she said - and no, not kidding at all - “They shouldn’t. Any man who we’re interested in will understand when we’re interested in them.”
Like… telepathy.
Literal
f**king
telepathy.
Sure as shit, this is what a woman said to me.
Most men get absolutely zero life experience in decoding super-subtle hints, and now they’re supposed to miraculously become an expert in navigating a potentially life-destroying minefield, where the only two outcomes is magically getting it right, or risking a non-trivial probability of incarceration and a criminal record when they (invariably) get it wrong?
No wonder so many men are saying “thanks, but no thanks.” That the juice - the outcome - is just no longer worth the squeeze - all the effort and risk that is shouldered. I don’t blame them in the least. They’re the smart ones.
And those who are slightly less smart are at least asking the $10,000 question: why aren’t women making the first approach? I mean, isn’t that what this whole “equality of the sexes” shtick was all about? Why don’t women put their money where their mouths are, and ask MEN out, for a change? Because I can guarantee that while any normal woman will experience a certain level of rejection, it will still be several orders of magnitude less than what a similarly-normal man experiences.
or toaster can’t do its basic job offline
pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster
Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene
Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.
About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.
Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.
Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans
That’s actually a common misconception. We aren’t really all that nice. We just do passive aggressive really, really well.
That still doesn’t solve 99.9% of my issues, it just tries to solve a problem for which I already have a solution actively in-place: a KVM.
Our current western culture is one of violent misandry.
Women are being released from almost all historical expectations and constraints, which is wonderful and good. This is actual progress in action, however lopsided and gender-supremacy-like it might be.
Meanwhile, men are still constrained by all the historical expectations set out for them, yet have been completely stripped of all benefits that have traditionally accrued with those expectations being met. And yet, we are still being violently nailed to the wall - invariably by women ignoring and/or outright demeaning us - when we fail to meet those expectations.
This massive asymmetry that men experience is what is creating subgroups of disaffected men. Because 1ncels don’t just leap out of the ground, fully formed – they are a direct response to the unintended consequences of women trying to eat their cake and to have it as well. Think about that next time women refuse to date down, or demand a “666 man”, or expect the man to pay on the first date, or any other archaic and gender-bigoted expectation.