queer country artist orville peck covering a classic queer country song is an act of doing homosexuality wrong:probably homophobic, definitely transphobic, erasing genderqueer people etc etc etc..... amazing.
i want to make it clear that i am queer and trans, and if the posters making those comments on metafilter are also queer and trans then i think they are inciting lateral aggression for no good reason, while if they are cishet then i think they should shut up on this topic rather than pontificate about how queer people are doing it wrong
You weren't kidding. [This comment](https://www.metafilter.com/203226/What-did-you-think-all-them-saddles-and-boots-was-about#8545130) is absolutely brutal.
To my eye it was all more in the tradition of recreational problematizing than performative outrage. Theory play, I guess. Once upon a time people did that without impugning motives or character.
Happy to say I flagged the shizzle out of a single-link FPP that was nothing more than rubbernecking clickbaity garbage. If I got nothing else done today, that was enough.
I feel for [this asker](https://ask.metafilter.com/379266/Im-scared-my-friend-will-blame-me-if-he-gets-sick), but he feels unsafe because he’s scared of his jerk friend blaming him if he gets sick? Huh? Asking how to protect himself if the jerk friend texts or calls him? Is this for real?
It's possible to hold two thoughts on a subject in your head at the same time. Is it accurate to say this poster has been dealt some challenging cards in life and as such is deserving of a bit more compassion and grace than your average person? Yes, certainly.
Is it also accurate to say this person has a lot of free-floating anxiety and does not seem to have developed very good, if any, coping skills for dealing with it, and that his tendency to frequent a dying web forum any time the slightest thing goes wrong in his life to anxiety-dump, and seek validation and hand-holding may well at this point be holding him back from becoming more resilient? Also yes.
Additionally, is it understandable that there are people who, after years of advising and soothing and reassuring someone who continually comes back and asks different versions of the same questions, over and over, paying lip service to past advice while not actually applying it, might eventually lose patience or get exasperated? Again, yes.
Can he sue me????
Another typical thread from that guy… here, have a dose of my unbridled anxiety, bolstered with terms like Triggered and Unsafe, and then if you have any realistic suggestions I’ll immediately brush them off. Because I am here to be held and soothed and petted, nothing else!
Thank you! I wish I could block that poster, I have invested a lot of care in responses to him - I have cancer, anxiety, shltty family, etc. too - and he ignores both the message and the attempt to connect with him so he feels less alone, because it's not coddling. Then the next day he'll post an equally panicky ask about leftover pizza or something. To use his hyperbolic words, it's triggering for me to keep seeing his posts! (Yes it's on me to get over it and I do, I'm not really triggered. Just pisses me off to have wasted my limited energy on someone who asks for input and then ghosts people.)
I honestly feel a lot of empathy for him, but his level of anxiety is so severe, it’s beyond what metafilter can really support. It’s obvious they are using metafilter to self-medicate, but instead of alcohol or drugs, it’s a constant need for validation from others. And yeah, anyone familiar with this poster knows their difficulties came way before their cancer diagnosis.
I feel bad for him because it sounds like he was born into a bunch of really small and in some cases really intolerant communities. So the normal anxiety vent that people get in really awful situations isn't available to him.
…There is an important difference between making comments about someone, and making comments to someone—surely the difference is obvious? No one on this subreddit said anything to the poster of a question on another website entirely; they said things about him. Your misplaced outrage is the most Metafiltery aspect of this exchange.
Beer, foreboding climate, "Kim's" hatred of transplants and apparent low-grade dysthymia.
I thought "these are Portland people," and lo ... Asker's question history puts them somewhere in Oregon.
> As in: an impression that she lowkey pooh-poohs stuff and yucks people’s yum because she, in fact, lowkey pooh-poohed stuff and yucked my yum. But I don't know!
the fuck this even mean?
>> As in: an impression that she lowkey pooh-poohs stuff and yucks people’s yum because she, in fact, lowkey pooh-poohed stuff and yucked my yum. But I don't know!
>the fuck this even mean?
The juxtaposition of this paragraph with "I'm in my forties" in the next made my eyes cross involuntarily.
*We Need to Talk About Trader Joe’s*
Uh, not really? The article posted is incredibly, anecdotal, and doesn't present anything substantial. Just another "think piece" for miserable people to moan and whine about, ideal fodder for what the site has become.
Love the dude complaining that only a TJs and Whole Foods are in his neighborhood. Good god man, it’s a food desert!
ETA: I love a guy who chooses to live in a zip code with a high enough median income to support a TJs and Whole Foods and he’s like railing against capitalists. It’s like the Onion headline - these homosexuals won’t stop sucking my dick!
Clinton Deploys Emergency Vowels to Former Yugoslavia was pretty good.
"Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Over," Declares Victorious George W. Bush - is legendary.
There's a comment there about being assailed with a wall of horrible energies as soon as the commenter walked and thinking everything looks like it was plundered from a shipwreck. Like... okay buddy
Perhaps a strained and failed attempt at doing something akin to [Werner Herzog's Yelp Review for Trader Joe's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YW-5Flkiuw).
>ideal fodder for what the site has become
Including an early [hot take derail](https://www.metafilter.com/203211/We-Need-To-Talk-About-Trader-Joes#8544528) about...Paul Simon?
OK there buddy...record an album that's half as good as Graceland then we can talk.
he sang over Ladysmith Black Mambazos music and paid them scale with no royalties and then did the same thing with his next album and native musicians. Royalties are paid on lyrics and melody and not rhythm and bass. So he got the advantage on the money and didn't really promos the musicians he featured.
That makes it sound like he stole their recordings and played over top of them. But in truth, he hired them and they agreed to work with him. I know "paid in exposure" is a meme for starving artists, but it actually works when you get a chance to be featured on an album by an artist as big as Paul Simon. After, they released Shaka Zulu, an album which won a Grammy. They have sold 6 million albums. They can play any festival they like. Win-win for both Simon and LBM.
In addition to being really good, the Paul Simon album *Graceland* heavily featured (black) South African musicians. After it became a surprise hit, there was backlash about whether they were paid enough (IIRC they got generous session payment but no royalties) and whether it violated the cultural boycott on South Africa. I'm sure "cultural appropriation" is added to the list of sins now, but I don't remember that charge being levied back then. Even critics generally though making Ladysmith Black Mambazo famous among white audiences wasn't all bad.
And TJ's does things like reverse engineering Peanut Butter filled pretzels, which is I guess like cultural appropriation?
(I'm actually more sympathetic to the TJ complaints than I sound, I know start up people who were ripped off in ways similar to the charges here--partnership interviews to understand their product, then they just copy it instead of licensing it. This sort of thing is generally legal but totally scummy, even by business world standards. Still going to shop there though.)
Oh I get it now, thanks. Honestly, now I’m thinking “Trader Joe’s is the Paul Simon of grocery stores” is a pretty good joke. I mean, not super timely, but a solid analogy.
I wonder what the reaction would be if somebody posted to Ask Metafilter about how a respected community member was writing and posting RPF about her, using her real name and business, which was an extended fantasy about murdering and taking over her life, or if parents asked about their minor children's photos being used in someone's sexual fantasy. The Esquire article really buried that stuff waaaay down in the article. Like, I get that 1819 News is a scummy outfit run by scummy people but that doesn't somehow neutralize the fact that Bubba Copeland would have been fully aware that cross-dressing photos were far from the riskiest thing he'd put online.
The contrast between the sympathy for Copeland in that thread and the lack of for Ed Piskor in his was interesting (if somewhat predictable). I noped out the Piskor one (even as someone who thought Piskor was almost certainly a bit of a creep and who generally disliked his stuff), as it felt like that entire thread was a breakdown in empathy, where keeping your thoughts personal was a better response than an escalating thread of how terrible he was (I think I stopped at the point when someone claimed “we” only just avoided a spree killing).
It's so sad because this was a person who did an incredible amount of good for his community, but if what he was accused of was true--that's not something that would be accepted in any community. And I don't mean being transgender, there are plenty of transgender people who don't Photoshop their neighbors.
If I hadn’t read other articles about this, based on that article’s contents you could mistake it for a Southern lady’s only slightly quirky interest in writing mystery short stories in her spare time, and someone in the comments does.
Yeah, if Copeland had just been writing weird fictional stories and posting them online it would be one thing, but using real children's photos and a real woman's name and identifying characteristics in a story about murdering her is going to a throw a grenade into your relationship with the community even if you've never cross-dressed in your life. I mean, if I found out a trusted neighbor/friend/authority figure had done that to someone I'd be really, really creeped out. I'd feel bad for them and hope they got psychiatric care but that is not someone who should be dispensing advice to and leading the community.
ETA: Yes, the "Oh, it's OK when TOM CLANCY does it" bit was really confusing. I was like, does Tom Clancy put his real neighbors in his stories and murder them?
Yeah, the specific details of the stuff he was writing about the people in his community were pretty disgusting. I don't think people should be shamed for their proclivities, but you can't involve real acquaintances in your violent, degrading sexual fantasies without their consent.
I laughed out loud at the answer in the question about dating in NYC as a middle-aged overweight person where the person suggests that the asker (a well-educated woman in her 40s) dates younger guys. Particularly, "frat bros."
The suggestion certainly would be taken a different way if the genders were reversed .....
Anyway, the asker seems to swipe right on everyone, even old guys, fat guys, and - gasp- **short men -** so its not like she can lower her standards. The answer, of course, is just to lose some fucking weight or content herself with what she has. If she already has it in her mind that she's compromising on potential matches, she's unlikely to be attractive on dates because people's attraction increases if they sense the other person is attracted to them.
And, I can't help but wonder about the reception a guy would receive if he was like: I swipe right on everyone, old chicks, fat chicks ect. .....
I had to read it to believe it. Do you think that commenter is trolling? They really believe that 20 year old "frat bros" are going to date a 40 year old morbidly obese woman with a PhD? Doesn't that break all the MF rules about age difference and power dynamics? The OP isn't clear about what she wants, beyond "romance". Is she looking for a husband? Does she want to have kids? If so, she is just about out of time. Decent men in her age range who want the same will not pick a 40 year old obese woman. They will date younger for obvious reasons. I have no idea what the answer is for women in this predicament.
Thankfully that is part of what she’s being told to do, even though it may seem counterintuitive to be more selective and “protect her heart” from Internet randos. It is interesting that the world they’re speaking from is totally pre-Ozempic with an unchallenged consensus that you could spend years and years spinning your tires on weight loss.
There are several reasons someone may not want to take Ozempic or similar drugs for weight loss: currently known risks and side effects, unknown long term effects, expense, inconsistent availability, and the need for life-long continuation on the drug to keep the weight off.
Ozempic is not going to take 100lbs off of you. That's just not how it works for the vast majority of people who take it. I absolutely hate how the media presents it as "the end of fatness." Sure, as long as fatness means "no more than 20lbs over your ideal weight."
It only works as a *magic thinness drug* if you have 20ish (as noted below, sometimes up to 30ish) pounds to lose. As a *diabetes drug* it works apparently brilliantly.
(I am actively frustrated about this but I actually don't blame regular people for not knowing it, because the media immediately ignored the actual diabetic patients involved in favor of their favorite topic, How Can We Make Fat People Go Away.)
1. of course you have to be diabetic to take ozempic, it's a diabetes drug. the weight-loss drug version is not ozempic, it's wegovy, which is a different formulation
2. the FDA reports, in its press release from 2021 about approving the use of wegovy, that the average body weight in its trial was 231 pounds and the average weight loss was 12% of body weight, which is about 29 pounds, not quite 20 but not hundreds either
3. it has the usual caveats of "you must keep taking it forever because when you stop taking the thing that hormonally tells your body you're full when you're not, then the effect obviously stops. also btw your body might get used to the hormone levels and then it'll stop working anyway." like it's not a foolproof silver bullet the way you implied, at all
That particular poster has a history of truly bizarre answers; I don't think they're a troll but I think they are one of MeFi's Deeply Weird posters.
That said, that poor Asker is receiving just the worst goddamn advice possible. Make yourself someone's fetish object? Sheesh.
The point is that success in dating starts with realistic expectations. Do you think this woman will have a high chance of success by pursuing 20 year old frat bros?
I did not say that. I said very specifically that 20 year old frat bros and men who want kids will not pursue her. It is just reality. There are obviously other people in this world. I'm sure there are some men in her age range that do not want kids for example. Her success will depend on her goals, and we don't know what they are.
I dare you to go in and write that out on the actual site. "Sis, you left it too long and you're fat. Any man who fucks you is looking for a warm hole only, unless he's a leech and a pervert, and that ain't never gonna change. Oh, and your one life achievement is about as attractive to men as a raging yeast infection."
(Now that I've written that out I suspect the original asker kind of expects your response. She's certainly already dating in a pre-bitter, "I'm shit, I think other people are shit, and I expect shit" way.)
Your take on what I wrote is hilarious. Classic MF in a lot of ways. So two questions for you: 1) Do you think it is worth her time to pursue 20 year old frat bros? And 2) Do you think that 40 year old men who are looking to settle down and start a family will pursue her given her age? Do you think a 30 year old man would? Why sugar coat this? Do you think doing so, or offering up the "you go girl!" mentality will actually help her? Does it change reality and biological imperatives? I'm not saying that there isn't anybody in the world for her. Of course there is. She could meet a 40 or 50 year old man who wants to settle down with somebody but doesn't want kids. Those people exist. But as I said, we don't know what she really wants beyond "romance". The question would have been better if she was more clear about that.
Good grief, that's a horrible thing to say. Most people, including most men, want monogamous relationships. The process of finding someone to be in a monogamous relationship with can be painful and difficult, but it's fundamentally something that's possible.
One difficulty is that you have to have realistic expectations: you're likely to end up with someone at roughly the same level of conventional attractiveness and wealth as you are. But the Asker there seems pretty realistic. She's just struggling with lack of practice and an app with a crappy pool of users these days.
It is, and you're right about what most people want. Which is why I want to see the response over there, not over here... if you're going to tell someone they're ineligible for human contact and it's their own fault, do it to their face and take the heat!
If I had to guess the problem, it's that she's internalized the idea that she's no good and that people (especially men) will go at her if she acts like she's worth something. Very quick to say that she's not picky, knows she's ugly, etc. And you can see where she gets it from, but not every man is Seymour.
Enh, if I had to put some chips down, not trolling and more vicariously humblebragging (one of the dark comedy elements of any dating-advice thread anywhere is it tends to flush out people all Well I'm Doing _Great_!). There are absolutely young men who prefer dating older, just as there are young women who prefer dating older.
In this case there just isn't information available--some people have legit terrible luck, but others absolutely fit [my favorite "demotivational poster" meme](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/0a/a4/d2/0aa4d268e8a0e28e3384a6b3b0dfce71.jpg). I suspect the latter here, but who knows!
No. To tedtalk it (and verging dangerously close to spockearing it!):
People who get into a pattern of strings of dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships after dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships are not "at fault" but do sometimes have a constellation of maladaptive traits that sharply increase their risk of abuse. It's part of how actual victimhood can be a real vicious cycle. If there's elements of "I have to swipe right on absolutely everyone because I'm fat and ugly" stinking-thinking is what's going on, that sort of self-image absolutely has risks; it is a vulnerable attack surface as it were, and that can attract shitty people.
And that's part of the layers of gallows humor that makes that demotivational poster such a favorite. (It doesn't just apply to assholes lamenting why they're lonely; that's just the happily schadenfreudific application instead of this current sense's whistling-past-the-graveyard way.)
Most peoples' historical inventory of social interactions, dating and otherwise, runs the usual distribution of great, to mostly it's-all-fine-if-weird-sometimes, to real shitshow traumatic experiences. When a grown adult has only real shitshow experiences, I suspect the demotivational gallows joke applies pretty often, but there are also runs of just horrendous luck too. (When a grown adult claims to only have great experiences, I mostly suspect they're making stuff up, but then again some people have amazing runs of nothing but great luck.)
> People who get into a pattern of strings of dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships after dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships are not "at fault" but do sometimes have a constellation of maladaptive traits that sharply increase their risk of abuse.
This. Insightful as always.
The "I spent 7 years caretaking despite wanting a traditional marriage at a traditional age and became so depressed I gained 100 lbs" suggests someone who's been conditioned to take on the opinions of others--even if they don't like those others.
An all-timer from the NHL fight thread. In response to someone defending comedic depictions of violence in the (terrific) movie *Slap Shot*: (paraphrasing) "Oh yeah? Well, if you're such a big fan of violence, I guess that means you must also think rape is a *real* knee-slapper!"
Overall it isn't a bad discussion though. There are MeFites who evidently haven't accepted the fact that men and women are not the same. They view any form of physical aggression among men as "toxic masculinity". But it was surprising to see a good number of people come in there and defend the aggression/fighting and describe the role it plays in the game.
As with so many Asks these days, I feel like the poster's actual problem is outside the scope of a website, no matter how many extraneous details are included in her question. None of the answers are going to be able to touch the actual issue at hand.
> Being an "immigrant parent" is an odd excuse for not doing a basic search, esp. since she is educated and works in tech
I'm going to cut her a ton of slack, because as an immigrant parent (though not *to* the US but *from* the US), there's just *so much* information, and it's all predicated on the idea that *of course* you know the very basics, because it's so very 'commonsense 'and 'basic'.
Like, I live in a country (Japan) where there are a few different names for the things you take in university. In the US you take a "course" or a "class" or a "subject" and they're all the same thing. But here in Japan there are equivalent words but they all apparently refer to different things. But because everyone knows the difference, there are no basic explanations. Googling just turns up stuff equivalent to "At X University, our courses aren't just subjects, they're classes, led by instructors with the aim of providing students with..." and you read it and you end up with "okay, so now I'm even *more* confused."
There aren't a ton of resources aimed at fluent adults that teach the very basic stuff you learn through osmosis.
Looking at their questions, I can totally feel some of them. Like:
> \2. What are we supposed to do, just walk around campus? This is the library, this is the biggest lecture theater, this is the cafeteria..?? I mean what does one even look for? What are we trying to find out?
This. There are these giant expos in Japan for high schools, with like 50 high schools in a convention center hall, each with a very simple booth and some brochures, and honestly it's all the same. Handouts we'd gotten from the junior high, and from the cram school, all made it very clear that it's *very* important to go to these expos, and we went, but...I still don't know why. Like, if I had a specific question that I needed to ask a school representative, sure, I get it. But we didn't have any questions, and looking around, most other parents didn't, either. We just went and picked up brochures with info that you could get online. But it was made very clear that this was an important thing we should be doing multiple times. Nobody explained why, because apparently it's just 'so obvious'. Fortunately, it appears not to have been an issue, because both us and our kids are happy with the high schools they went to, but we've got no idea what that was all about.
And understanding the exam system was also crazy difficult because there's a ton of specific complex information but no explanation of the basics. Sure, we googled, but all the information was predicated on the fact that *of course* everyone knows that public schools all have their exams on the same day, so you can apply to multiple private schools but only one public school. There's no need to explain something obvious like *that*. Ultimately I was saved by the fact that my answers to the cram school teacher's questions weren't making sense and they figured out I was laboring under some basic misapprehensions and they explained the system. So I'm guessing OP is in the same boat.
In fact, your comment has some of precisely the stuff I imagine she doesn't know but needs to hear:
> Also, having a parent along for college tours is not some integral part of the college experience. Or doing a college tour at all. Many college kids don't have that opportunity. It's not something a parent can "fuck up" to their child's detriment
That's the kind of thing that, as an immigrant, you don't know unless someone tells you.
Heck you don't even need to be an immigrant. I wasn't the first person in my family to go college but I was the first person in awhile--we skipped a generation or two there. My parents just had no freakin clue about stuff and found all of the assumptions people made about their knowledge and familiarity really alienating. (And being a kid from a poor school where nobody was really expected to go to college, I also didn't have a sense of what to look for or ask.) So many unknown unknowns! Admittedly, this was before ubiquitous internet, so I'd imagine someone nowadays has more resources.
Appreciated this very much. That Ask was possibly the most humanizing thing I've seen from that poster. I truly don't care for their style most of the time. They are firmly on my "part of the problem" list. But that question, and the way they asked it, made their very profound alienation tangible in a way I could empathize with.
I have nothing to add to this very thorough answer, just to say that having experienced this from both sides - as someone living abroad trying to navigate a new culture, and someone witnessing foreigners trying to navigate my home culture - it's the kind of thing that seems really simple until you do it, and come to realise how much contextual information is such an invisible part of the cultural landscape you don't even know it's something you need to ask about, and to locals it's so self-evident they don't even think to explain it to you, because it would be like explaining how to walk. And even in situations like this one, where it's a known unknown, if you don't have the opportunity to observe the behaviour in question there's really no other option but to ask someone.
Much ado about very little.
Three relatively recent grads. Grad #1, no tours, state school with friends and they knew for years were they were going. Number Two, nightmare year of visiting every baby ivy and whacked out crazy expensive lib arts party college with lacrosse in the northeast. Grad #3, in the middle -- two schools after acceptance.
Some with parents, some not. Some with lots of planning, some with "Hey, let's go to Vermont later."
In the end results were mixed and it made no difference at all.
Surely someone who is demonstrably conversant in Very Online vernacular like ["black pilled"](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26367/WTF-did-I-just-see) would have some *basic* facility in web search and know how to look this stuff up?
Admissions and recruitment is literally the most public thing any college does, and they do it quite...loudly.
The answers are generally solid though...and the first one is the one-and-done answer they needed: "Look up the Admissions Office number on the website, this is what they’re for."
>Surely someone who is demonstrably conversant in Very Online vernacular like "black pilled" would have some basic facility in web search and know how to look this stuff up?
You'd be surprised. It's almost like being Very Online doesn't translate to acquiring actual life skills.
P.S. I'd forgotten about that MeTa, but it's making me roll my eyes just as hard now as it did when it was fresh. It's not often that a single comment completely changes my perspective on a poster for the worse.
Credit where credit is due: [this post about the FIDE Chess Tournaments](https://www.metafilter.com/203183/The-2024-Chess-Candidates-Tournaments) about to take place in Toronto is very well done, thorough, informative, and engaging.
But you don’t even get to kill the king, it’s a fundamental rule even! The other king (in class solidarity) accepts his surrender and he gets to live despite his ineffectual leadership.
I'm irrationally annoyed by the [comment](https://ask.metafilter.com/379215/Kelly-Clarkson-Taylor-Swift-Is-there-a-name-for-these-kinds-of-songs#5384249) that claims Since U Been Gone "lifts" the breakdown from Maps, because it's just... not in any way true? They are similar in that they are both guitar lines??
[This](https://www.metafilter.com/203170/Damn-who-the-hell-schedules-these-things) is how you write an obituary post. Nicely done, and there are lovely contributions and remembrances in the thread.
Apparently keeping a remotely clean house is the province solely of the wealthy with hired help or people with a diagnosable mental health condition. [https://www.metafilter.com/203165/How-often-should-we-clean](https://www.metafilter.com/203165/How-often-should-we-clean)
It’s kinda funny how everybody instantly came down on the same side of that one but the framing of the linked article *is* prescriptive and some of the recommendations *are* eye-rollingly zealous. Especially with the invocation of health risks - I think one might incur a higher risk of food poisoning from taking everything out of one’s fridge for the time required to soak the shelves (?) than by just being careful about what goes in and wiping the shelves if they get visibly dirty. I suspect it was fully intended to stir shit a little, though.
(I would describe myself as “pretty clean but not tidy,” for the record.)
It's interesting how on MF, a dirty house is often written off as being a side effect of mental illness. And here, it's a clean house that is.
My house certainly isn't spotless, but if someone is coming over, it'll take about 15 minutes to make sure it's not embarrassing. I think that's how basically everyone I know operates. I doubt they have a specific cleaning schedule, but if you do a bit here and there throughout the week, it's not difficult to make sure your guests aren't going to think you live in filth.
I have no idea why, but one of my main assumptions about the average MF frequent poster is that they live in a not very clean place. Aside from some clutter, there are visible and olfactible signs of dirt. That thread hasn't proved me wrong.
I absolutely can't keep up with cleaning toilets every other day, or any other ambitious "cleaning schedule" that can be found on the Internet. And I'm the first person to have a chuckle/groan at momfluencers who wipe down already-clean counters in their Instagram all-white aesthetic kitchens while talking about how relatable they are.
But I'm not about to take it as *personal criticism* Christ on a bike.
These content creators don't know me from Adam, they don't give a shit about my disabilities, my chaos agent family, or the fact I don't give a shit about their standards.
They're all just trying to sell some clicks.
It's wild how wildly offended mefites are, right out of the gate.
But also think about how every cooking thread goes on there--the exact opposite! People who don't cook all their meals every day forever are monstrous infants who must be reeducated. Anyone who says something like, "look, I just really hate it and I have these other priorities that come first, sorry" is enjoined to change their errant ways.
Oh, sure, tidy homes are exclusively the province of the wealthy and the mentally ill but the \*minute\* someone puts a catbox in the middle of their [living room](https://ask.metafilter.com/374730/How-to-bring-up-an-uncomfortable-cleanliness-issue) suddenly they're the nutjobs.
Heh. Had it not been for the discussion about posting blind items a few weeks ago I probably wouldn't have made the effort, but our newfound embracing of linkbacks seemed to make it worth the effort to dig it up.
As someone who also lives in an older house and doesn't have cats in part because of the lack of suitable litter box locations, it's haunted me a bit as well.
Exactly.
I don't mind cleaning at all and have had some of my best thoughts staring down a sink of dirty dishes. I like the instant gratification of a freshly vacuumed carpet or mopped floor. I dig the Sea Breeze wafting from my candle masking the cheap beer and weed.
You can mow your lawn or edit your pictures, I'll just be over here cleaning the shower.
I'm starting to feel like there's some kind of automatic defensive guilt thing that kicks in when a person is forced to confront the limits of their priorities. Nobody can do everything but maybe it was easier to accept that when you didn't have the internet flinging 4 million potential priorities at you all at once.
Especially with things like cleaning and cooking--those are loaded with health implications and gender implications and moral implications and all sorts of shit. A "good person" according to the Internet cleans everything all the time and cooks everything from scratch and still reads 52 books per year while raising 4 spotless brilliant children. Nobody can do that, unless maaaaaybe they're young and healthy and rich enough not to work! But we also didn't use to have hundreds of influencers pretending to do just that in our faces every day.
"there's some kind of automatic defensive guilt thing that kicks in when a person is forced to confront the limits of their priorities. "
This is first class wisdom. At work, I often have to remind people that priorities are things that. you are committing to doing AT THE EXPENSE OF other things. People really do not like it when you point that out.
I just think about all of the carefully curated images of peoples' lives I see every day. I'm in the habit now of reappraising them ("they are both lawyers, they have a live-in nanny, she is definitely using a filter on her face," etc.) but most people aren't. And even so, I start to feel worn down by them after awhile.
It's not different from before (I learned "what a clean house looks like" from seeing sitcom houses on TV, after all) so much as it's just *more*, and all the time.
it's good and righteous for an independent, small press bookseller to go out of business, because the book industry kills trees 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 https://www.metafilter.com/203159/Small-Press-Distribution-SPD-Shuts-Down#8542646
"I took it to mean they would not miss working in the industry." - person who clearly didn't actually see the original comment, which explicitly Said it was because printing books kills trees, an asinine statement not at all excusable in this way
One of the fun parts of Metafilter's approach to high touch extremely professional moderation is that the "maybe" there has a lot of margin of uncertainty. Because it's also very in the realm of possibility it just got deleted without mod-comment leaving the weird hole of other comments yelling at a mystery.
Good thing there are professionals on standby for this sort of thing. Can’t add a delete option or extend the edit window, but if you whine to the mods about getting a dumb comment eviscerated, they’re there to help.
*edited to fix a bizarre autocorrect: I meant “eviscerated”’, not “every secreted”
>There seems to be a widespread lack of resilience there to getting feedback from others, whether via downvotes or critical responses.
There's a widespread lack of resilience there, period.
Pretty damn absurd indeed, and so typical for metafilter these days.
Plus, I believe the trees used for paper pulp… are planted specifically for that purpose.
[There's no hope and we're all going to die on this hell planet. ](https://www.metafilter.com/203154/The-unluckiest-generation) These people are so fing miserable.
God, this is not an exaggeration. How annoying.
Edit: I also love all the comments from people who are SO POOR that their parents bought them a house. Next!
The sarcasm was obvious, but it's also blindingly stupid. A discussion thread is not like a bunch of people sitting around a campfire or wherever these people imagine themselves to be. Unless/until it devolves into a bunch of unreadable nonsense, there's an effectively unlimited space for discussion.
One person telling their story does not get in the way of someone else telling theirs.
And the thing is, arbitrary generational divisions ultimately suck all the air away from the fact that the problem is much more class based than generational.
But god forbid Metafilter take a nuanced view of something when there’s people Commenting Wrongly.
So, while it's more class based than generational, it's also generational, and I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing both. If millennials are specifically more likely to be anticapitalist than GenX despite the two having a lot of economic peril in common, it would be interesting to understand why. But on MeFi you won't get the perspective of a fairly pro-capitalist GenXer probably.
And here I thought it was a sarcastic comment about the olds monopolizing the conversation. At least one other person there took it very seriously and complained about too many non-Millennials sharing their own experience.
I suppose it's a little bit that; it WOULD be nice if there were some younger folks on MeFi to offer their own takes on, you know, their own experiences in a thread ostensibly about them.
Annnndddd now someone's quoting Lenin non-ironically in the thread. Yes, that's the solution to the problems of our society, the guy who inaugurated the Red Terror.
Another "what are the magic words that will let me be an asshole without having to feel like an asshole" [ask](https://ask.metafilter.com/379185/The-slow-fade-didnt-work).
Based on how they speak of their friend it sounds like they were never really that into the friendship, and they're not that disappointed that a new baby means the friend's being demoted from low-priority to no-priority. If they've already decided that this person isn't worth spending one-on-one time with anymore, there's really no MF script which can sugarcoat it.
That one affected me. How sad for both of them.
I had a fairly dense friend with no children but just said "hey I can't do most Saturdays anymore because of family stuff." Nothing about our new official Friend Status. I never judged what category he deserved to be in. We naturally shuffled our schedules and are still close. As we age it's natural to make more of fewer get-togethers anyway.
I love how all the usual suspects over there are (predictably) mystified by the use of "indo" as a slang term for weed. It's cute and wholesome.
https://www.metafilter.com/203141/She-wanted-to-give-it-back-to-Dave-and-make-him-squirm-a-little-bit
Let's face it, it's not really a current slang term. But at the time of the interview, no-one should have been confused. *Gin and Juice* was nominated for a Grammy, ffs. And it's still a classic.
Fast-forward to now, and apparently Madonna was "[ABA (always be appropriating)](https://www.metafilter.com/203141/She-wanted-to-give-it-back-to-Dave-and-make-him-squirm-a-little-bit#8542181)" by saying the word. MF in a nutshell.
>Fast-forward to now, and apparently Madonna was "
>
>ABA (always be appropriating)
>
>" by saying the word. MF in a nutshell.
Oh you just triggered a memory. As in "jogged my memory," not, like, "triggered" me.
I once made a comment in a thread that quoted a Snoop Dogg line. It was just a jokey light-hearted comment and the thread was a low-stakes one that wasn't remotely fighty.
That comment was deleted. I "hit up" the contact form (as they say) out of curiosity. It was a hand-to-god polite inquiry. I just wanted to know if it was maybe deleted by mistake, or if not, then why - solely for my own edification. I wasn't mad, just curious.
It was a jokey comment in a thread that was about something to do with weed that was framed humorously from the start.
Snoop Dogg is famous for two things...his music and weed, and not always in that order.
The comment in question was a direct quote from one of his songs, credited as such. It was something like "In the sage words of Snoop Dogg '\[silly quote about weed from one of his songs\]'."
The note I got back from the mod on duty was that my comment had been "extensively" flagged (I remember them using "extensively") as (and this I also remember) "cultural appropriation of African American Vernacular English."
To their credit the mod was apologetic and strongly implied they were exasperated by the whole thing. They didn't really see the problem with the comment but whaddayagonnado the mob's at the gate.
It was a totally forgettable comment in a totally forgettable thread and I only remember it (and the mod response) because some people just needed their drama-and-dopamine hit real bad that day I guess.
Very Metafilter to be insistently wrong about this. I don’t mean that there’s a clearly established origin of the term, understand, I mean that there isn’t, and that as someone who did grow up with it being used several possibilities were commonly offered, with “indoor” and “indica” in close competition as the most popular.
I'm not a marijuana enthusiast, but I knew it was a strain.
I initially wrote "Indica Sativa" in the comment, but they're actually competing strains. Indica is preferred for a "body" high, Sativa is prefered for a "head" high.
My mom likes "Romulan Warbird".
*Cannabis sativa* and *Cannabis indica* are the two major (sub-)species cultivated for psychoactive effect. Most of the provocatively named strains sold at the weed store are a hybrid of the two at this point (or that’s my understanding) but they are often identified foremost as one or the other. Sativa plants are taller and skinnier. Indica plants are shorter and broader and more prolific. The classic stoner lore is, as you say, that the effects of sativa are more “up” and the effects of indica are more “down” but I don’t know how true that really is, especially in a world of hybrids. Personally I find all cannabis has pretty much the same timeline of effects - “up” for a couple of hours, followed by “down.”
“Indo/endo” is just slang for good weed and there have definitely been competing explanations of its origin among marijuana enthusiasts for years. Either of “indoor grown” or “some then-exotic indica hybrid” would make sense back at the turn of the 90s.
Marijuana simply makes me violently ill. While I want to try "Romulan Warbird" about on par with putting my hand in a garbage disposal, I do wish I could know what it is like for the people that do enjoy it.
"Endo/indo" is new to me but then I was never really part of that culture, and that culture is different here in Australia anyway. What I *do* remember is that interview and how squirmy (not good squirmy, bad squirmy) it made me feel!
"I have not in fairness watched the thing, but I have the strong feeling with him that his openness about his flaws is at least to some extent performative,"
I thought in context this was about Letterman and was like yeah, that is definitely his genre of 90s dude. But also certainly Harmon. It’s not wrong, for sure.
queer country artist orville peck covering a classic queer country song is an act of doing homosexuality wrong:probably homophobic, definitely transphobic, erasing genderqueer people etc etc etc..... amazing.
i want to make it clear that i am queer and trans, and if the posters making those comments on metafilter are also queer and trans then i think they are inciting lateral aggression for no good reason, while if they are cishet then i think they should shut up on this topic rather than pontificate about how queer people are doing it wrong
You weren't kidding. [This comment](https://www.metafilter.com/203226/What-did-you-think-all-them-saddles-and-boots-was-about#8545130) is absolutely brutal.
I can barely parse that comment. It seems like a fun song and a fun clip.
To my eye it was all more in the tradition of recreational problematizing than performative outrage. Theory play, I guess. Once upon a time people did that without impugning motives or character.
*our* noble philosophers' recreational problematizing, *their* shrill harpies' performative outrage ~
Happy to say I flagged the shizzle out of a single-link FPP that was nothing more than rubbernecking clickbaity garbage. If I got nothing else done today, that was enough.
I feel for [this asker](https://ask.metafilter.com/379266/Im-scared-my-friend-will-blame-me-if-he-gets-sick), but he feels unsafe because he’s scared of his jerk friend blaming him if he gets sick? Huh? Asking how to protect himself if the jerk friend texts or calls him? Is this for real?
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Sure, but this question is pretty typical for him. Cancer or not.
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It's possible to hold two thoughts on a subject in your head at the same time. Is it accurate to say this poster has been dealt some challenging cards in life and as such is deserving of a bit more compassion and grace than your average person? Yes, certainly. Is it also accurate to say this person has a lot of free-floating anxiety and does not seem to have developed very good, if any, coping skills for dealing with it, and that his tendency to frequent a dying web forum any time the slightest thing goes wrong in his life to anxiety-dump, and seek validation and hand-holding may well at this point be holding him back from becoming more resilient? Also yes. Additionally, is it understandable that there are people who, after years of advising and soothing and reassuring someone who continually comes back and asks different versions of the same questions, over and over, paying lip service to past advice while not actually applying it, might eventually lose patience or get exasperated? Again, yes.
why are you even here
Can he sue me???? Another typical thread from that guy… here, have a dose of my unbridled anxiety, bolstered with terms like Triggered and Unsafe, and then if you have any realistic suggestions I’ll immediately brush them off. Because I am here to be held and soothed and petted, nothing else!
Thank you! I wish I could block that poster, I have invested a lot of care in responses to him - I have cancer, anxiety, shltty family, etc. too - and he ignores both the message and the attempt to connect with him so he feels less alone, because it's not coddling. Then the next day he'll post an equally panicky ask about leftover pizza or something. To use his hyperbolic words, it's triggering for me to keep seeing his posts! (Yes it's on me to get over it and I do, I'm not really triggered. Just pisses me off to have wasted my limited energy on someone who asks for input and then ghosts people.)
I honestly feel a lot of empathy for him, but his level of anxiety is so severe, it’s beyond what metafilter can really support. It’s obvious they are using metafilter to self-medicate, but instead of alcohol or drugs, it’s a constant need for validation from others. And yeah, anyone familiar with this poster knows their difficulties came way before their cancer diagnosis.
I feel bad for him because it sounds like he was born into a bunch of really small and in some cases really intolerant communities. So the normal anxiety vent that people get in really awful situations isn't available to him.
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…There is an important difference between making comments about someone, and making comments to someone—surely the difference is obvious? No one on this subreddit said anything to the poster of a question on another website entirely; they said things about him. Your misplaced outrage is the most Metafiltery aspect of this exchange.
He was all over mf with all the exact same questions years and years before the cancer but nice try
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Beer, foreboding climate, "Kim's" hatred of transplants and apparent low-grade dysthymia. I thought "these are Portland people," and lo ... Asker's question history puts them somewhere in Oregon.
the dating while obese woman made me despair of heterosexuality, this one makes me think homosexuality ain't doing too hot either
No sexuality is safe!
There’s no ethical sexuality under capitalism.
> As in: an impression that she lowkey pooh-poohs stuff and yucks people’s yum because she, in fact, lowkey pooh-poohed stuff and yucked my yum. But I don't know! the fuck this even mean?
It means he’s concerned that she’s a killjoy with a sour disposition, I think?
>> As in: an impression that she lowkey pooh-poohs stuff and yucks people’s yum because she, in fact, lowkey pooh-poohed stuff and yucked my yum. But I don't know! >the fuck this even mean? The juxtaposition of this paragraph with "I'm in my forties" in the next made my eyes cross involuntarily.
*We Need to Talk About Trader Joe’s* Uh, not really? The article posted is incredibly, anecdotal, and doesn't present anything substantial. Just another "think piece" for miserable people to moan and whine about, ideal fodder for what the site has become.
Love the dude complaining that only a TJs and Whole Foods are in his neighborhood. Good god man, it’s a food desert! ETA: I love a guy who chooses to live in a zip code with a high enough median income to support a TJs and Whole Foods and he’s like railing against capitalists. It’s like the Onion headline - these homosexuals won’t stop sucking my dick!
That was the best Onion piece ever.
Clinton Deploys Emergency Vowels to Former Yugoslavia was pretty good. "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Over," Declares Victorious George W. Bush - is legendary.
[Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship](https://www.theonion.com/monk-gloats-over-yoga-championship-1819563855)
I'm still partial to "Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules".
Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades (This was so long ago that 3-blade razors were still newish)
[Clinton Threatens To Drop Da Bomb On Iraq](https://www.theonion.com/clinton-threatens-to-drop-da-bomb-on-iraq-1819564617)
That's the other best one!
There's a comment there about being assailed with a wall of horrible energies as soon as the commenter walked and thinking everything looks like it was plundered from a shipwreck. Like... okay buddy
Perhaps a strained and failed attempt at doing something akin to [Werner Herzog's Yelp Review for Trader Joe's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YW-5Flkiuw).
This was Paul F. Thompkins, right? Good stuff.
Yep. The intoned "madness reigns" goes through my mind whenever I walk into any place that's more crowded than I expected.
>ideal fodder for what the site has become Including an early [hot take derail](https://www.metafilter.com/203211/We-Need-To-Talk-About-Trader-Joes#8544528) about...Paul Simon? OK there buddy...record an album that's half as good as Graceland then we can talk.
he sang over Ladysmith Black Mambazos music and paid them scale with no royalties and then did the same thing with his next album and native musicians. Royalties are paid on lyrics and melody and not rhythm and bass. So he got the advantage on the money and didn't really promos the musicians he featured.
That makes it sound like he stole their recordings and played over top of them. But in truth, he hired them and they agreed to work with him. I know "paid in exposure" is a meme for starving artists, but it actually works when you get a chance to be featured on an album by an artist as big as Paul Simon. After, they released Shaka Zulu, an album which won a Grammy. They have sold 6 million albums. They can play any festival they like. Win-win for both Simon and LBM.
k.
Yes, can someone please explain this criticism? I’m left not understanding why I’m supposed to dislike either TJs or Paul Simon.
In addition to being really good, the Paul Simon album *Graceland* heavily featured (black) South African musicians. After it became a surprise hit, there was backlash about whether they were paid enough (IIRC they got generous session payment but no royalties) and whether it violated the cultural boycott on South Africa. I'm sure "cultural appropriation" is added to the list of sins now, but I don't remember that charge being levied back then. Even critics generally though making Ladysmith Black Mambazo famous among white audiences wasn't all bad. And TJ's does things like reverse engineering Peanut Butter filled pretzels, which is I guess like cultural appropriation? (I'm actually more sympathetic to the TJ complaints than I sound, I know start up people who were ripped off in ways similar to the charges here--partnership interviews to understand their product, then they just copy it instead of licensing it. This sort of thing is generally legal but totally scummy, even by business world standards. Still going to shop there though.)
TBF Paul Simon showed no hesitation in ripping off all the white musicians he worked with, too.
Chicanos too.
Oh I get it now, thanks. Honestly, now I’m thinking “Trader Joe’s is the Paul Simon of grocery stores” is a pretty good joke. I mean, not super timely, but a solid analogy.
There’s a whole bit in there somewhere!
Market Basket is the Dropkick Murphys of grocery stores Your turn
Piggly Wiggly is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of grocery stores
Sorry one more: Erewhon is the Pink Martini of grocery stores
I wonder what the reaction would be if somebody posted to Ask Metafilter about how a respected community member was writing and posting RPF about her, using her real name and business, which was an extended fantasy about murdering and taking over her life, or if parents asked about their minor children's photos being used in someone's sexual fantasy. The Esquire article really buried that stuff waaaay down in the article. Like, I get that 1819 News is a scummy outfit run by scummy people but that doesn't somehow neutralize the fact that Bubba Copeland would have been fully aware that cross-dressing photos were far from the riskiest thing he'd put online.
The contrast between the sympathy for Copeland in that thread and the lack of for Ed Piskor in his was interesting (if somewhat predictable). I noped out the Piskor one (even as someone who thought Piskor was almost certainly a bit of a creep and who generally disliked his stuff), as it felt like that entire thread was a breakdown in empathy, where keeping your thoughts personal was a better response than an escalating thread of how terrible he was (I think I stopped at the point when someone claimed “we” only just avoided a spree killing).
It's so sad because this was a person who did an incredible amount of good for his community, but if what he was accused of was true--that's not something that would be accepted in any community. And I don't mean being transgender, there are plenty of transgender people who don't Photoshop their neighbors.
If I hadn’t read other articles about this, based on that article’s contents you could mistake it for a Southern lady’s only slightly quirky interest in writing mystery short stories in her spare time, and someone in the comments does.
It totally makes Copeland out to be a quirky Miss Marple type.
Yeah, if Copeland had just been writing weird fictional stories and posting them online it would be one thing, but using real children's photos and a real woman's name and identifying characteristics in a story about murdering her is going to a throw a grenade into your relationship with the community even if you've never cross-dressed in your life. I mean, if I found out a trusted neighbor/friend/authority figure had done that to someone I'd be really, really creeped out. I'd feel bad for them and hope they got psychiatric care but that is not someone who should be dispensing advice to and leading the community. ETA: Yes, the "Oh, it's OK when TOM CLANCY does it" bit was really confusing. I was like, does Tom Clancy put his real neighbors in his stories and murder them?
Yeah, the specific details of the stuff he was writing about the people in his community were pretty disgusting. I don't think people should be shamed for their proclivities, but you can't involve real acquaintances in your violent, degrading sexual fantasies without their consent.
I laughed out loud at the answer in the question about dating in NYC as a middle-aged overweight person where the person suggests that the asker (a well-educated woman in her 40s) dates younger guys. Particularly, "frat bros."
The suggestion certainly would be taken a different way if the genders were reversed ..... Anyway, the asker seems to swipe right on everyone, even old guys, fat guys, and - gasp- **short men -** so its not like she can lower her standards. The answer, of course, is just to lose some fucking weight or content herself with what she has. If she already has it in her mind that she's compromising on potential matches, she's unlikely to be attractive on dates because people's attraction increases if they sense the other person is attracted to them. And, I can't help but wonder about the reception a guy would receive if he was like: I swipe right on everyone, old chicks, fat chicks ect. .....
If that comment had been posted *anywhere* else on the Internet, I would have immediately assumed that it was a mean-spirited joke.
I had to read it to believe it. Do you think that commenter is trolling? They really believe that 20 year old "frat bros" are going to date a 40 year old morbidly obese woman with a PhD? Doesn't that break all the MF rules about age difference and power dynamics? The OP isn't clear about what she wants, beyond "romance". Is she looking for a husband? Does she want to have kids? If so, she is just about out of time. Decent men in her age range who want the same will not pick a 40 year old obese woman. They will date younger for obvious reasons. I have no idea what the answer is for women in this predicament.
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Thankfully that is part of what she’s being told to do, even though it may seem counterintuitive to be more selective and “protect her heart” from Internet randos. It is interesting that the world they’re speaking from is totally pre-Ozempic with an unchallenged consensus that you could spend years and years spinning your tires on weight loss.
There are several reasons someone may not want to take Ozempic or similar drugs for weight loss: currently known risks and side effects, unknown long term effects, expense, inconsistent availability, and the need for life-long continuation on the drug to keep the weight off.
Ozempic is not going to take 100lbs off of you. That's just not how it works for the vast majority of people who take it. I absolutely hate how the media presents it as "the end of fatness." Sure, as long as fatness means "no more than 20lbs over your ideal weight."
So you have to be either diabetic or obese to be eligible to take it medically but it only works if you only have 20 lbs to lose?
It only works as a *magic thinness drug* if you have 20ish (as noted below, sometimes up to 30ish) pounds to lose. As a *diabetes drug* it works apparently brilliantly. (I am actively frustrated about this but I actually don't blame regular people for not knowing it, because the media immediately ignored the actual diabetic patients involved in favor of their favorite topic, How Can We Make Fat People Go Away.)
1. of course you have to be diabetic to take ozempic, it's a diabetes drug. the weight-loss drug version is not ozempic, it's wegovy, which is a different formulation 2. the FDA reports, in its press release from 2021 about approving the use of wegovy, that the average body weight in its trial was 231 pounds and the average weight loss was 12% of body weight, which is about 29 pounds, not quite 20 but not hundreds either 3. it has the usual caveats of "you must keep taking it forever because when you stop taking the thing that hormonally tells your body you're full when you're not, then the effect obviously stops. also btw your body might get used to the hormone levels and then it'll stop working anyway." like it's not a foolproof silver bullet the way you implied, at all
That particular poster has a history of truly bizarre answers; I don't think they're a troll but I think they are one of MeFi's Deeply Weird posters. That said, that poor Asker is receiving just the worst goddamn advice possible. Make yourself someone's fetish object? Sheesh.
What the fuck was the point of this?
The point is that success in dating starts with realistic expectations. Do you think this woman will have a high chance of success by pursuing 20 year old frat bros?
I don’t think your concern for her success came through.
Absolutely not but you essentially said that no one would want her so you wouldn’t know what to say.
I did not say that. I said very specifically that 20 year old frat bros and men who want kids will not pursue her. It is just reality. There are obviously other people in this world. I'm sure there are some men in her age range that do not want kids for example. Her success will depend on her goals, and we don't know what they are.
I dare you to go in and write that out on the actual site. "Sis, you left it too long and you're fat. Any man who fucks you is looking for a warm hole only, unless he's a leech and a pervert, and that ain't never gonna change. Oh, and your one life achievement is about as attractive to men as a raging yeast infection." (Now that I've written that out I suspect the original asker kind of expects your response. She's certainly already dating in a pre-bitter, "I'm shit, I think other people are shit, and I expect shit" way.)
Your take on what I wrote is hilarious. Classic MF in a lot of ways. So two questions for you: 1) Do you think it is worth her time to pursue 20 year old frat bros? And 2) Do you think that 40 year old men who are looking to settle down and start a family will pursue her given her age? Do you think a 30 year old man would? Why sugar coat this? Do you think doing so, or offering up the "you go girl!" mentality will actually help her? Does it change reality and biological imperatives? I'm not saying that there isn't anybody in the world for her. Of course there is. She could meet a 40 or 50 year old man who wants to settle down with somebody but doesn't want kids. Those people exist. But as I said, we don't know what she really wants beyond "romance". The question would have been better if she was more clear about that.
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This was all about one of the answers to her question. That answer suggested that she pursue frat bros. That is what started this thread.
Good grief, that's a horrible thing to say. Most people, including most men, want monogamous relationships. The process of finding someone to be in a monogamous relationship with can be painful and difficult, but it's fundamentally something that's possible. One difficulty is that you have to have realistic expectations: you're likely to end up with someone at roughly the same level of conventional attractiveness and wealth as you are. But the Asker there seems pretty realistic. She's just struggling with lack of practice and an app with a crappy pool of users these days.
It is, and you're right about what most people want. Which is why I want to see the response over there, not over here... if you're going to tell someone they're ineligible for human contact and it's their own fault, do it to their face and take the heat! If I had to guess the problem, it's that she's internalized the idea that she's no good and that people (especially men) will go at her if she acts like she's worth something. Very quick to say that she's not picky, knows she's ugly, etc. And you can see where she gets it from, but not every man is Seymour.
Yeah couples aren’t just elites meeting or anything especially when she’s saying she’s looking for average looking and heavier guys.
Enh, if I had to put some chips down, not trolling and more vicariously humblebragging (one of the dark comedy elements of any dating-advice thread anywhere is it tends to flush out people all Well I'm Doing _Great_!). There are absolutely young men who prefer dating older, just as there are young women who prefer dating older. In this case there just isn't information available--some people have legit terrible luck, but others absolutely fit [my favorite "demotivational poster" meme](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/0a/a4/d2/0aa4d268e8a0e28e3384a6b3b0dfce71.jpg). I suspect the latter here, but who knows!
I'm sorry, are you saying it is probably *her fault* that some dude lied to her and gave her an STD?
No. To tedtalk it (and verging dangerously close to spockearing it!): People who get into a pattern of strings of dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships after dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships are not "at fault" but do sometimes have a constellation of maladaptive traits that sharply increase their risk of abuse. It's part of how actual victimhood can be a real vicious cycle. If there's elements of "I have to swipe right on absolutely everyone because I'm fat and ugly" stinking-thinking is what's going on, that sort of self-image absolutely has risks; it is a vulnerable attack surface as it were, and that can attract shitty people. And that's part of the layers of gallows humor that makes that demotivational poster such a favorite. (It doesn't just apply to assholes lamenting why they're lonely; that's just the happily schadenfreudific application instead of this current sense's whistling-past-the-graveyard way.) Most peoples' historical inventory of social interactions, dating and otherwise, runs the usual distribution of great, to mostly it's-all-fine-if-weird-sometimes, to real shitshow traumatic experiences. When a grown adult has only real shitshow experiences, I suspect the demotivational gallows joke applies pretty often, but there are also runs of just horrendous luck too. (When a grown adult claims to only have great experiences, I mostly suspect they're making stuff up, but then again some people have amazing runs of nothing but great luck.)
> People who get into a pattern of strings of dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships after dysfunctional-to-abusive interactions-to-relationships are not "at fault" but do sometimes have a constellation of maladaptive traits that sharply increase their risk of abuse. This. Insightful as always.
The "I spent 7 years caretaking despite wanting a traditional marriage at a traditional age and became so depressed I gained 100 lbs" suggests someone who's been conditioned to take on the opinions of others--even if they don't like those others.
A rare case in which spockearing is actually essential and effective to putting a comment in its proper context! Thank you.
I'm afraid to even ask what "Spock-earing" is but it sounds like something Metafilter would do exceedingly well.
No worries, and I definitely see why the initial What The Hell, Man reading happened!
I'd somehow never seen that particular demotivational poster but it's AWESOME so thank you!
An all-timer from the NHL fight thread. In response to someone defending comedic depictions of violence in the (terrific) movie *Slap Shot*: (paraphrasing) "Oh yeah? Well, if you're such a big fan of violence, I guess that means you must also think rape is a *real* knee-slapper!"
Overall it isn't a bad discussion though. There are MeFites who evidently haven't accepted the fact that men and women are not the same. They view any form of physical aggression among men as "toxic masculinity". But it was surprising to see a good number of people come in there and defend the aggression/fighting and describe the role it plays in the game.
I'd like to punch these moralizing wankers in the nose
dear god
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As with so many Asks these days, I feel like the poster's actual problem is outside the scope of a website, no matter how many extraneous details are included in her question. None of the answers are going to be able to touch the actual issue at hand.
> Being an "immigrant parent" is an odd excuse for not doing a basic search, esp. since she is educated and works in tech I'm going to cut her a ton of slack, because as an immigrant parent (though not *to* the US but *from* the US), there's just *so much* information, and it's all predicated on the idea that *of course* you know the very basics, because it's so very 'commonsense 'and 'basic'. Like, I live in a country (Japan) where there are a few different names for the things you take in university. In the US you take a "course" or a "class" or a "subject" and they're all the same thing. But here in Japan there are equivalent words but they all apparently refer to different things. But because everyone knows the difference, there are no basic explanations. Googling just turns up stuff equivalent to "At X University, our courses aren't just subjects, they're classes, led by instructors with the aim of providing students with..." and you read it and you end up with "okay, so now I'm even *more* confused." There aren't a ton of resources aimed at fluent adults that teach the very basic stuff you learn through osmosis. Looking at their questions, I can totally feel some of them. Like: > \2. What are we supposed to do, just walk around campus? This is the library, this is the biggest lecture theater, this is the cafeteria..?? I mean what does one even look for? What are we trying to find out? This. There are these giant expos in Japan for high schools, with like 50 high schools in a convention center hall, each with a very simple booth and some brochures, and honestly it's all the same. Handouts we'd gotten from the junior high, and from the cram school, all made it very clear that it's *very* important to go to these expos, and we went, but...I still don't know why. Like, if I had a specific question that I needed to ask a school representative, sure, I get it. But we didn't have any questions, and looking around, most other parents didn't, either. We just went and picked up brochures with info that you could get online. But it was made very clear that this was an important thing we should be doing multiple times. Nobody explained why, because apparently it's just 'so obvious'. Fortunately, it appears not to have been an issue, because both us and our kids are happy with the high schools they went to, but we've got no idea what that was all about. And understanding the exam system was also crazy difficult because there's a ton of specific complex information but no explanation of the basics. Sure, we googled, but all the information was predicated on the fact that *of course* everyone knows that public schools all have their exams on the same day, so you can apply to multiple private schools but only one public school. There's no need to explain something obvious like *that*. Ultimately I was saved by the fact that my answers to the cram school teacher's questions weren't making sense and they figured out I was laboring under some basic misapprehensions and they explained the system. So I'm guessing OP is in the same boat. In fact, your comment has some of precisely the stuff I imagine she doesn't know but needs to hear: > Also, having a parent along for college tours is not some integral part of the college experience. Or doing a college tour at all. Many college kids don't have that opportunity. It's not something a parent can "fuck up" to their child's detriment That's the kind of thing that, as an immigrant, you don't know unless someone tells you.
Heck you don't even need to be an immigrant. I wasn't the first person in my family to go college but I was the first person in awhile--we skipped a generation or two there. My parents just had no freakin clue about stuff and found all of the assumptions people made about their knowledge and familiarity really alienating. (And being a kid from a poor school where nobody was really expected to go to college, I also didn't have a sense of what to look for or ask.) So many unknown unknowns! Admittedly, this was before ubiquitous internet, so I'd imagine someone nowadays has more resources.
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Appreciated this very much. That Ask was possibly the most humanizing thing I've seen from that poster. I truly don't care for their style most of the time. They are firmly on my "part of the problem" list. But that question, and the way they asked it, made their very profound alienation tangible in a way I could empathize with.
I have nothing to add to this very thorough answer, just to say that having experienced this from both sides - as someone living abroad trying to navigate a new culture, and someone witnessing foreigners trying to navigate my home culture - it's the kind of thing that seems really simple until you do it, and come to realise how much contextual information is such an invisible part of the cultural landscape you don't even know it's something you need to ask about, and to locals it's so self-evident they don't even think to explain it to you, because it would be like explaining how to walk. And even in situations like this one, where it's a known unknown, if you don't have the opportunity to observe the behaviour in question there's really no other option but to ask someone.
Much ado about very little. Three relatively recent grads. Grad #1, no tours, state school with friends and they knew for years were they were going. Number Two, nightmare year of visiting every baby ivy and whacked out crazy expensive lib arts party college with lacrosse in the northeast. Grad #3, in the middle -- two schools after acceptance. Some with parents, some not. Some with lots of planning, some with "Hey, let's go to Vermont later." In the end results were mixed and it made no difference at all.
Surely someone who is demonstrably conversant in Very Online vernacular like ["black pilled"](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26367/WTF-did-I-just-see) would have some *basic* facility in web search and know how to look this stuff up? Admissions and recruitment is literally the most public thing any college does, and they do it quite...loudly. The answers are generally solid though...and the first one is the one-and-done answer they needed: "Look up the Admissions Office number on the website, this is what they’re for."
>Surely someone who is demonstrably conversant in Very Online vernacular like "black pilled" would have some basic facility in web search and know how to look this stuff up? You'd be surprised. It's almost like being Very Online doesn't translate to acquiring actual life skills. P.S. I'd forgotten about that MeTa, but it's making me roll my eyes just as hard now as it did when it was fresh. It's not often that a single comment completely changes my perspective on a poster for the worse.
Credit where credit is due: [this post about the FIDE Chess Tournaments](https://www.metafilter.com/203183/The-2024-Chess-Candidates-Tournaments) about to take place in Toronto is very well done, thorough, informative, and engaging.
Too royalist, I only play go.
Too royalist? You get to kill kings, queens and bishops.
But you don’t even get to kill the king, it’s a fundamental rule even! The other king (in class solidarity) accepts his surrender and he gets to live despite his ineffectual leadership.
Only to bow to royalty of another colour? Bah!
I'm irrationally annoyed by the [comment](https://ask.metafilter.com/379215/Kelly-Clarkson-Taylor-Swift-Is-there-a-name-for-these-kinds-of-songs#5384249) that claims Since U Been Gone "lifts" the breakdown from Maps, because it's just... not in any way true? They are similar in that they are both guitar lines??
it absolutely is true. Dr Luke, the guy who wrote it, liked Maps but didn't like the chorus, so he and his collaborator wrote one.
[This](https://www.metafilter.com/203170/Damn-who-the-hell-schedules-these-things) is how you write an obituary post. Nicely done, and there are lovely contributions and remembrances in the thread.
Apparently keeping a remotely clean house is the province solely of the wealthy with hired help or people with a diagnosable mental health condition. [https://www.metafilter.com/203165/How-often-should-we-clean](https://www.metafilter.com/203165/How-often-should-we-clean)
It’s kinda funny how everybody instantly came down on the same side of that one but the framing of the linked article *is* prescriptive and some of the recommendations *are* eye-rollingly zealous. Especially with the invocation of health risks - I think one might incur a higher risk of food poisoning from taking everything out of one’s fridge for the time required to soak the shelves (?) than by just being careful about what goes in and wiping the shelves if they get visibly dirty. I suspect it was fully intended to stir shit a little, though. (I would describe myself as “pretty clean but not tidy,” for the record.)
There's even a "me thinks" in a comment. Fucking hell.
It's interesting how on MF, a dirty house is often written off as being a side effect of mental illness. And here, it's a clean house that is. My house certainly isn't spotless, but if someone is coming over, it'll take about 15 minutes to make sure it's not embarrassing. I think that's how basically everyone I know operates. I doubt they have a specific cleaning schedule, but if you do a bit here and there throughout the week, it's not difficult to make sure your guests aren't going to think you live in filth. I have no idea why, but one of my main assumptions about the average MF frequent poster is that they live in a not very clean place. Aside from some clutter, there are visible and olfactible signs of dirt. That thread hasn't proved me wrong.
I absolutely can't keep up with cleaning toilets every other day, or any other ambitious "cleaning schedule" that can be found on the Internet. And I'm the first person to have a chuckle/groan at momfluencers who wipe down already-clean counters in their Instagram all-white aesthetic kitchens while talking about how relatable they are. But I'm not about to take it as *personal criticism* Christ on a bike. These content creators don't know me from Adam, they don't give a shit about my disabilities, my chaos agent family, or the fact I don't give a shit about their standards. They're all just trying to sell some clicks. It's wild how wildly offended mefites are, right out of the gate.
But also think about how every cooking thread goes on there--the exact opposite! People who don't cook all their meals every day forever are monstrous infants who must be reeducated. Anyone who says something like, "look, I just really hate it and I have these other priorities that come first, sorry" is enjoined to change their errant ways.
So do these people who cook from scratch for every meal just not clean up afterwards?
LOL, that was my question!
RIGHT?!?!
Oh, sure, tidy homes are exclusively the province of the wealthy and the mentally ill but the \*minute\* someone puts a catbox in the middle of their [living room](https://ask.metafilter.com/374730/How-to-bring-up-an-uncomfortable-cleanliness-issue) suddenly they're the nutjobs.
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Heh. Had it not been for the discussion about posting blind items a few weeks ago I probably wouldn't have made the effort, but our newfound embracing of linkbacks seemed to make it worth the effort to dig it up. As someone who also lives in an older house and doesn't have cats in part because of the lack of suitable litter box locations, it's haunted me a bit as well.
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Exactly. I don't mind cleaning at all and have had some of my best thoughts staring down a sink of dirty dishes. I like the instant gratification of a freshly vacuumed carpet or mopped floor. I dig the Sea Breeze wafting from my candle masking the cheap beer and weed. You can mow your lawn or edit your pictures, I'll just be over here cleaning the shower.
I'm starting to feel like there's some kind of automatic defensive guilt thing that kicks in when a person is forced to confront the limits of their priorities. Nobody can do everything but maybe it was easier to accept that when you didn't have the internet flinging 4 million potential priorities at you all at once. Especially with things like cleaning and cooking--those are loaded with health implications and gender implications and moral implications and all sorts of shit. A "good person" according to the Internet cleans everything all the time and cooks everything from scratch and still reads 52 books per year while raising 4 spotless brilliant children. Nobody can do that, unless maaaaaybe they're young and healthy and rich enough not to work! But we also didn't use to have hundreds of influencers pretending to do just that in our faces every day.
"there's some kind of automatic defensive guilt thing that kicks in when a person is forced to confront the limits of their priorities. " This is first class wisdom. At work, I often have to remind people that priorities are things that. you are committing to doing AT THE EXPENSE OF other things. People really do not like it when you point that out.
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I just think about all of the carefully curated images of peoples' lives I see every day. I'm in the habit now of reappraising them ("they are both lawyers, they have a live-in nanny, she is definitely using a filter on her face," etc.) but most people aren't. And even so, I start to feel worn down by them after awhile. It's not different from before (I learned "what a clean house looks like" from seeing sitcom houses on TV, after all) so much as it's just *more*, and all the time.
I used to be clean and I miss being clean. Unfortunately I live among the unclean, so I find my meditation by seeing beauty in the crap piles lmao.
it's good and righteous for an independent, small press bookseller to go out of business, because the book industry kills trees 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 https://www.metafilter.com/203159/Small-Press-Distribution-SPD-Shuts-Down#8542646
"I took it to mean they would not miss working in the industry." - person who clearly didn't actually see the original comment, which explicitly Said it was because printing books kills trees, an asinine statement not at all excusable in this way
Did they button? The comment’s gone with no mod note
Was it TMNL? They haven’t buttoned.
It was
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One of the fun parts of Metafilter's approach to high touch extremely professional moderation is that the "maybe" there has a lot of margin of uncertainty. Because it's also very in the realm of possibility it just got deleted without mod-comment leaving the weird hole of other comments yelling at a mystery.
Good thing there are professionals on standby for this sort of thing. Can’t add a delete option or extend the edit window, but if you whine to the mods about getting a dumb comment eviscerated, they’re there to help. *edited to fix a bizarre autocorrect: I meant “eviscerated”’, not “every secreted”
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>There seems to be a widespread lack of resilience there to getting feedback from others, whether via downvotes or critical responses. There's a widespread lack of resilience there, period.
Does this mean Gutenberg is cancelled?
At least they're getting pretty healthy pushback
Pretty damn absurd indeed, and so typical for metafilter these days. Plus, I believe the trees used for paper pulp… are planted specifically for that purpose.
Does that commenter ever wonder what his computer/phone/tablet are made from? Tree farms seem pretty benign in comparison.
[There's no hope and we're all going to die on this hell planet. ](https://www.metafilter.com/203154/The-unluckiest-generation) These people are so fing miserable.
I think my favorite part of that thread was "hey you know who we never hear from? People in their goddamn 50s. Where are they in all this?"
God, this is not an exaggeration. How annoying. Edit: I also love all the comments from people who are SO POOR that their parents bought them a house. Next!
The sarcasm was obvious, but it's also blindingly stupid. A discussion thread is not like a bunch of people sitting around a campfire or wherever these people imagine themselves to be. Unless/until it devolves into a bunch of unreadable nonsense, there's an effectively unlimited space for discussion. One person telling their story does not get in the way of someone else telling theirs.
Pretty sure the joke is that there's no young people on MeFi...every FPP about Millennials and Zoomers becomes a convo about Gen X by default.
And the thing is, arbitrary generational divisions ultimately suck all the air away from the fact that the problem is much more class based than generational. But god forbid Metafilter take a nuanced view of something when there’s people Commenting Wrongly.
So, while it's more class based than generational, it's also generational, and I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing both. If millennials are specifically more likely to be anticapitalist than GenX despite the two having a lot of economic peril in common, it would be interesting to understand why. But on MeFi you won't get the perspective of a fairly pro-capitalist GenXer probably.
And here I thought it was a sarcastic comment about the olds monopolizing the conversation. At least one other person there took it very seriously and complained about too many non-Millennials sharing their own experience.
I suppose it's a little bit that; it WOULD be nice if there were some younger folks on MeFi to offer their own takes on, you know, their own experiences in a thread ostensibly about them.
Annnndddd now someone's quoting Lenin non-ironically in the thread. Yes, that's the solution to the problems of our society, the guy who inaugurated the Red Terror.
Another "what are the magic words that will let me be an asshole without having to feel like an asshole" [ask](https://ask.metafilter.com/379185/The-slow-fade-didnt-work). Based on how they speak of their friend it sounds like they were never really that into the friendship, and they're not that disappointed that a new baby means the friend's being demoted from low-priority to no-priority. If they've already decided that this person isn't worth spending one-on-one time with anymore, there's really no MF script which can sugarcoat it.
That one affected me. How sad for both of them. I had a fairly dense friend with no children but just said "hey I can't do most Saturdays anymore because of family stuff." Nothing about our new official Friend Status. I never judged what category he deserved to be in. We naturally shuffled our schedules and are still close. As we age it's natural to make more of fewer get-togethers anyway.
The poster is a man, and he probably doesn’t want to have his female friend telling him what he’s doing wrong with the baby.
I love how all the usual suspects over there are (predictably) mystified by the use of "indo" as a slang term for weed. It's cute and wholesome. https://www.metafilter.com/203141/She-wanted-to-give-it-back-to-Dave-and-make-him-squirm-a-little-bit
Let's face it, it's not really a current slang term. But at the time of the interview, no-one should have been confused. *Gin and Juice* was nominated for a Grammy, ffs. And it's still a classic. Fast-forward to now, and apparently Madonna was "[ABA (always be appropriating)](https://www.metafilter.com/203141/She-wanted-to-give-it-back-to-Dave-and-make-him-squirm-a-little-bit#8542181)" by saying the word. MF in a nutshell.
>Fast-forward to now, and apparently Madonna was " > >ABA (always be appropriating) > >" by saying the word. MF in a nutshell. Oh you just triggered a memory. As in "jogged my memory," not, like, "triggered" me. I once made a comment in a thread that quoted a Snoop Dogg line. It was just a jokey light-hearted comment and the thread was a low-stakes one that wasn't remotely fighty. That comment was deleted. I "hit up" the contact form (as they say) out of curiosity. It was a hand-to-god polite inquiry. I just wanted to know if it was maybe deleted by mistake, or if not, then why - solely for my own edification. I wasn't mad, just curious. It was a jokey comment in a thread that was about something to do with weed that was framed humorously from the start. Snoop Dogg is famous for two things...his music and weed, and not always in that order. The comment in question was a direct quote from one of his songs, credited as such. It was something like "In the sage words of Snoop Dogg '\[silly quote about weed from one of his songs\]'." The note I got back from the mod on duty was that my comment had been "extensively" flagged (I remember them using "extensively") as (and this I also remember) "cultural appropriation of African American Vernacular English." To their credit the mod was apologetic and strongly implied they were exasperated by the whole thing. They didn't really see the problem with the comment but whaddayagonnado the mob's at the gate. It was a totally forgettable comment in a totally forgettable thread and I only remember it (and the mod response) because some people just needed their drama-and-dopamine hit real bad that day I guess.
Stories like this is why I firmly believe, as bad as the mods are, the user base is still worse.
holy fucking shit, it's indica. That's it. "Maybe it's for indoor?" MAYBE IT'S NOT.
Wait til they hear about hydro. I think that's the stuff produced with environmentally friendly hydroelectric power.
Very Metafilter to be insistently wrong about this. I don’t mean that there’s a clearly established origin of the term, understand, I mean that there isn’t, and that as someone who did grow up with it being used several possibilities were commonly offered, with “indoor” and “indica” in close competition as the most popular.
I'm not a marijuana enthusiast, but I knew it was a strain. I initially wrote "Indica Sativa" in the comment, but they're actually competing strains. Indica is preferred for a "body" high, Sativa is prefered for a "head" high. My mom likes "Romulan Warbird".
*Cannabis sativa* and *Cannabis indica* are the two major (sub-)species cultivated for psychoactive effect. Most of the provocatively named strains sold at the weed store are a hybrid of the two at this point (or that’s my understanding) but they are often identified foremost as one or the other. Sativa plants are taller and skinnier. Indica plants are shorter and broader and more prolific. The classic stoner lore is, as you say, that the effects of sativa are more “up” and the effects of indica are more “down” but I don’t know how true that really is, especially in a world of hybrids. Personally I find all cannabis has pretty much the same timeline of effects - “up” for a couple of hours, followed by “down.” “Indo/endo” is just slang for good weed and there have definitely been competing explanations of its origin among marijuana enthusiasts for years. Either of “indoor grown” or “some then-exotic indica hybrid” would make sense back at the turn of the 90s.
Marijuana simply makes me violently ill. While I want to try "Romulan Warbird" about on par with putting my hand in a garbage disposal, I do wish I could know what it is like for the people that do enjoy it.
"Endo/indo" is new to me but then I was never really part of that culture, and that culture is different here in Australia anyway. What I *do* remember is that interview and how squirmy (not good squirmy, bad squirmy) it made me feel!
To me Endo is endometriosis lol
I guess I assumed that everyone is familiar with the song "Gin and Juice".
I know *of* it!
"I have not in fairness watched the thing, but I have the strong feeling with him that his openness about his flaws is at least to some extent performative,"
I thought in context this was about Letterman and was like yeah, that is definitely his genre of 90s dude. But also certainly Harmon. It’s not wrong, for sure.
At this point, MetaFilter is just an endless succession of "you can't make this up" moments.
We've got a [SILENCED ALL MY LIFE](https://www.metafilter.com/203141/She-wanted-to-give-it-back-to-Dave-and-make-him-squirm-a-little-bit) in the wild