I wish I could say something helpful, but I’m tired too, and I know there’s nothing that can really be said to help. So I won’t try to help, and I’ll just stop for a moment and we can be tired and scared together.

“Or, you could keep whining about how these people have no empathy for you.”

When OP speaks of allies not being allies, it’s comments like yours that I think of. You use “we” like we’re on the same side here, but (ironically given you say this of OP) you have missed their entire point.

We’re not going to survive (let alone make progress) if we tear each other down like this. This isn’t me saying “they go low, we go high” nonsense, because you’re quite right that relying Trump voters to show empathy doesn’t look like a good strategy. I don’t see that OP was actually saying anything of the sort though. This is about how we (people opposing Trump and co.) treat each other. It would be easier for us to become practiced and educated if we could rely on the people who are meant to be allies.

I want to believe that you’re a decent person who wrote an assholish comment. It happens to the best of us. I hope that you’ll reread OP’s comment and your own and see how unproductive this approach is for everyone. But maybe I’m wasting my time here, in much the same way that expecting empathy from Trump voters is probably unwise. That’s up to you, I guess

I really like how you used spoilers here for rhetorical effect. It gives your comment a rhythm to it you don’t often see in writing.

It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)

Didn’t they sell off a bunch of the land that was going to be used for that? I remember being very upset at how spiteful of a gesture it felt

I read somewhere that someone’s attitude to furries is a great litmus test for how tolerant that person actually is (assuming that person isn’t a furry, of course). I’ve always found myself mildly confused by furries (and I used to be somewhat weirded out because I mainly knew of furries because a friend bought a house from drawing furry porn). Hearing the litmus test thing helped me to chill out a bunch and recognise that seeing lots of furries in and adjacent to my community was a sign of a healthy social ecosystem, so to speak

I hope the job treats you well, and you have enough time and energy for chasing your silly passions

A friend of mine lived with an electrolysis tech for a while, and she got basically all her legs done for free over the course of multiple years. I experienced it a few times — I imagine the pain is similar to how a tattoo would hurt.

For me, the cost was by far, the most expensive part. Sucks to be ginger

I don’t find it nearly as bad as facial hair stubble (based on experiences with partners). You are right though in that the niceness of shaved legs disappears pretty quickly. I tend to only indulge when I change my bedsheets because shaved legs against fresh sheets is amazing

I’m not actually doubtful of this, given that all it’s really saying is "We’re not going full enshittification… Yet "

“But students seem unlikely to let the incident go without further action to help girls feel safe at school. Last week, more than half the school walked out, MSN reported, forcing classes to be canceled”

Nice. Based students. That kind of collective action is great and takes a lot of organising (I say that as someone who tried to organise activist stuff when I was at school. If you don’t have enough people who genuinely care about the case, you can’t hit critical mass for an action like this. Mad respect for these kids.)

Edit: formatting

It’s definitely good, but I do wonder (and worry) whether increased usage of rail contributes at all to the increasingly abysmal passenger rail services; when you look at the data, it’s horrific how overloaded the train lines are due to chronic under-investment.

That being said, even if this scheme was impacting passenger rail, it’s probably still good overall, especially if it leads to more investment in infrastructure (i.e. passenger rail being drastically involved in the future); I have plenty of beef with Starmer’s Labour, but I also recognise that the trains getting as bad as they are now didn’t happen overnight, so will take time to improve. (Which reminds me: I should read more about the recent budget)

I love the hat Makes me want to wear it and sit cross legged on the floor somewhere

I used to do leathercraft commissions. My best customers were LARPers ordering armour, scroll cases etc., and kinksters buying fancy collars, cuffs and harnesses. Sometimes these were the same people

Nah. Some humans saw that and thought “if we can con enough people into working 40 hours weeks, I can buy a holiday home here”

starting to write and then cancel my post.

I get what you mean, I do a lot of that myself. Although it’s unfortunate that I often find it easier to hit send when replying to internet strangers than I do when messaging my friends. I suspect it’s because online feels far lower stakes, even though my friends would be far more charitable to a poorly articulated idea than the internet would.

If it helps, I don’t think you should feel bad about cancelling unwritten messages. Maybe sometimes you don’t actually know enough to have an opinion on a topic, so refraining is the wise thing. Maybe other times, you have Thoughts, but they’re still sort of fermenting in your head and they’re not quite ready yet. Or maybe you’ve distilled your Thoughts down so that you know what message you want to convey, but you don’t think that this particular conversation is the right time or place for them (possibly due to realising you’re in conversation with someone who isn’t arguing in good faith and continuing would be unproductive). These (and more) are all valid and good reasons to not actually submit a post or comment you start writing.

The advice that I try to give myself is that we’re under enough pressure as it is without helping more on unnecessarily. Sometimes that pressure is because we have something that we desperately want to say, but it’s hard to articulate it in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re dishonouring the meaning of what we intend. That pressure is hard to counter because it’s coming from the weight of the thing we want to say, but I ease it by reasoning that the important ideas will find their own way out of our heads and into the world, if given time, and that they will still be important.

I figure that there’s an infinite array of conversations on the internet that could’ve happened but didn’t. It’d be a shame if we let the conversations that never ended up happening distract us from other conversations that we’re actually having. Which is all to say that it’s okay if you start replying to this comment and cancel it. Maybe in the next life thread, eh?

I tend to play it at my friends’ New Year holiday, which is a context where we have like, 12 different decks of playing cards to pick from, which helped with that scoring issue. Regarding the cards taking a beating, that scans with my experience — there was a sort of communal pool of cards and games during the holiday, so it was fuzzy about who owned what, there were a couple of sets of playing cards that weren’t meant to be used to play racing demons (they did seem pretty fancy).

I seem to recall that an issue we faced somewhat (even with a pretty large diversity of playing cards styles) was that some styles were harder to read than others (such as due to stylised card designs, or low contrast colour etc.). We had 3-4 decks that were equally easy to read, yet visually distinct enough for scoring, so we were good most of the time. If there were more than 4 at the table, it’d start getting trickier and people would have to start using decks that were harder to read (I.e. decks like this. We tended to rotate the decks each game, so if there were awkward decks in play, it wasn’t the same person using it each time at least. I wonder if the other issue you describe with playing cards is this contrast/readability problem that arises when having to find cards with different backs.

I got a hell of a lot smarter when I allowed myself to not have opinions on things. Like if a friend asks me if I have heard of [thing], I am nowadays much better at saying “No, I havent, tell me more” or “I’m not sure. It sounds familiar though. Remind me?”. A big part of this is being in spaces where it feels safe enough to be vulnerable in saying “I don’t know”.

A cucumber does not have a flared base.

Yeah, this is a big thing. A sentiment that comes to mind is “we judge other people by their actions, but ourselves by our thoughts”. Sometimes I reread past comments of mine and cringe at how ambiguous the tone is.