I run a social club for gay men, and we’ve talked about coming up with an app that’s run by a non-profit, with social workers on the board, that’s designed to actually connect people, not keep them glued to the app. Friendship, dates, activity partners, whatever.

I don’t know why no one has come up with the non-profit model here but if I can get enough steam, we’re doing it.

There are other causes here.

They’ve been talking for a while about how the low participation in dating by Gen Z women is because they’re tired of being the entire support system for men experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

It’s a lot of pressure for the women to be under, and so they’re withdrawing.

I’m guessing this is one of the driving forces as well. Lack of real, emotionally intimate human connections around them. Many men are quite fucked in that regard right now.

I got really into Six Feet Under 20 years ago. I kind of feel like The Good Place was like it’s surreal, light-hearted successor in some way. Life, death. One is messy and chaotic and dramatic and awful. Then death happens and everything gets really weird.

If you get an expensive one with both in and out ventilation through the window it can be good. But you’re spending a lot more than just a window AC at that point. The cheap ones actually vent your cold air outside.

I got a couple of $150 cheapo units at the big box stores to supplement our central air during heat waves, have been just fine. 5k or 6k BYUs at least.

Few years ago I got a Nest Secure to go with my other Google Nest gear. One day Google emailed me to tell me Assistant was now enabled on my security system. Oh, by the way, it has an undocumented microphone!

That’s when I realized what a privacy nightmare Google really is. I know Apple isn’t great but come on.

Came here to say what dreams may come, Beautiful but unbelievably sad movie that you will not want to rewatch.

And this is how children’s movies were until like 20 or 30 years ago when everything got soft round edges.

Stucco and food coloring, cause then the kid gets to keep it afterwards.

Mods acting capriciously and according to how mad they feel - banning you across multiple communities at once because you hurt their feelings - honestly this is Mickey Mouse as hell, but we are ruled by these people. *typo

You got a dog? Still smoke?

That was actually their lawyer’s argument, that “incognito mode” being private was just something people assumed and ran with, not their fault.

Front end, back end

Parenting books were serious business, whole generations were raised with Dr Spock for instance, who had fucked up ideas about childrearing.

It’s one thing to ask for tips on getting a baby to sleep, it’s another to ask it for formula recipes. Unfortunately I doubt most parents know the line where it becomes dangerous, but I am hoping here.

Makes me sad that I know exactly what you mean, this new glass shit has me nervously eying the Linux door.

The paper thing stopped being true in the past year around here. Name brand paper towels are now so thin, store brand is thicker at half the price. Q-Tips don’t have the same cardboard in the middle, less cotton Kroger brand is closer to the old q-tips (but still a step down from what I grew up with).

Toilet paper is basically a toss-up, the nicer store brands are about comparable to the non-specialty name brands now. For the extra strong or extra soft, name brand still wins, but it’s changing.

I pretend (in a non-grotesque sort of way) that the other person is “dead” to me and that I could “summon” them with a “seance” (text) but it’d be terribly unnatural and there’d be an awful price to pay.

Basically if I make my breakup Practical Magic, it helps somehow heh

When do we get to the part where a bunch of UNIX logs get projected, backward, on someone’s face

Correct. I have had this problem again and again - I like top energy but I want to, you know, top them.

First one, we were sexually incompatible (both tops) which only got worse over time. We opened the relationship which doomed it.

Second one, in progress: we’re both addicts, I got sober, he’s still struggling, but I think he won’t get clean until I am actually good and gone. Enablement is sometimes not something you can avoid doing once the systems are built… resentments the same.

Nationalization is the opposite of privatization, it’s how the US’s bureaucratic state was really built, we should absolutely do this and right now is the time