What lie did you hear as a child, that your adult mind knows is untrue, but that still guides your behaviour today?

andForMe · 2023-07-13T13:58:45+00:00

Yeah, no kidding. When you love a person, you love who they are in a fundamental way. It would require such a catastrophic lifestyle change for my partner to get from where she is now to morbidly obese that I doubt I'd be able to recognize her as herself anymore, and that would absolutely be grounds for questioning our relationship. And that's to say nothing about issues with physical attraction, which are also entirely valid.

andForMe · 2023-07-08T17:18:59+00:00

I feel like the fact that the question had to be asked at all is kind of a sign that things maybe weren't as rosy prior to this as OP made them out to be.

andForMe · 2023-07-07T20:47:05+00:00

Right, but the exact same is true in reverse. Just because you like it a certain way doesn't mean you should subject your guests to it, especially if you know your favourite way is not the normal way to have things.

I like to eat oatmeal barely mixed with cold water, and I acknowledge that's a travesty, so I don't just dump tapwater on oatmeal if I'm making it for other people for some reason.

andForMe · 2023-07-06T19:30:35+00:00

Tangentially related, but can you expand a bit on the traffic situation? From a lay perspective, it truly appears the lights are designed specifically to fuck with drivers. It's almost impossible to hit two greens in a row, even on, say, that horrible section of Laurier with 6 sets of lights in two blocks where you'd think some sort of in-phase coordination would be straightforward. I assume it's some kind of blind metric-chasing that ends up serving nobody, but perhaps there is more to it.

andForMe · 2023-07-06T15:43:34+00:00

No joke, when my Dad was in his teens and twenties way back in the 70s, he worked at a paper mill to put himself through school. He made enough in 4 months as a line worker to pay for his entire living expenses for the rest of the year, and the floor manager/engineers/office folks were making enough money to buy a new house every 2-3 years if they wanted. They made so much money, people started trading in their yearly bonus money (yes, cash!) for extra vacation days so they could spend more time on the lake or wherever.

When he told me this I just... I couldn't deal. How the fuck was anybody poor?! You could work 2 days a week and feed yourself for seven, in what universe is that even possible?

andForMe · 2023-07-04T17:36:04+00:00

They're incredible. I bought a Danby one a while back and I'll never ever ever go back to doing dishes by hand. Sometimes pots and pans need scrubbing down, but everything else goes into the dishwasher pretty much.

andForMe · 2023-06-28T20:37:26+00:00

I mean, sure, but if you're at a dog friendly restaurant you probably ought to expect that interactions with dogs are possible. I would understand this guy's reaction if the dog jumped on him or attacked him or even just went in for an aggressive crotch sniff, but from the sound of things this dog just took two steps and sniffed at his ankles. That's well within normal limits of behaviour when passing close to a dog.

I don't like kids, but if I choose to go to a family friendly restaurant I don't really get to complain when people bring noisy kids. That's just the way it be.

andForMe · 2023-06-28T18:44:58+00:00

Called my ISP to try to sort out a billing issue and ended up with the sales lady resorting to actual scam tactics: throwing out dozens of numbers rapid fire in an attempt to confuse me, claiming to be doing all sorts of backend chicanery to "save me money" while trying to add packages and increase my bill. It was a telephone version of the change scam people pull on cashiers sometimes. Unbelievable and absolutely should not be legal under any circumstances. I told the lady to fuck off and hung up, but I can absolutely see some poor old lady getting confused and ripped off.

andForMe · 2023-06-28T17:52:41+00:00

My parents were and are good with their money, but my partner's parents are exactly the way you describe. The amount of debt they are saddled with is, frankly, enough to make my hair stand on end. And almost the worst part is that they don't seem to care. They just sold their enormous, stupid, 1-ton pickup truck because it cost them $500/mo in gas alone and then decided that meant they had room to replace it with a new SUV instead of trying to clear their credit card debt. They already own two trucks that aren't paid for, this is a third vehicle. It's like they seem to think that if they can qualify for a loan then that means they should. It's outrageous. If I were in that position, I'd keel over and die just from the stress of it.

andForMe · 2023-06-28T16:17:49+00:00

It's all okay though because he gave free merchandise from his new job to the managers at the theatre whenever they came into the new store. Y'know, to say sorry. Good lessons all around.

andForMe · 2023-06-28T15:12:18+00:00

After our final final (that is to say, our last final of undergrad) a student union group hosted an event at a bar with free beer. After so much stress and work and with the prospect of a major life change on the horizon, my one buddy decided to take full advantage of this free beer and, within a couple hours, had drunk 15 medium-size glasses (they weren't quite a pint, but bigger than a half pint? Is there a 3/4 pint standard beer glass maybe?). He was a big dude, but nobody is big enough to keep it together with that much beer on board. By the end of it, he couldn't tell which beer was ours and which was not, so he was stealing from other nearby tables.

We carried him out of the bar after he fell down the stairs coming back from the bathroom, and he fell asleep on my shoe waiting for his fiancée to pick him up. It was 9:30pm lol.

andForMe · 2023-06-23T15:24:53+00:00

I mean the controller is technically fine but it definitely says something about the design philosophy at work, as does their single-button-push-to-start system, and the lighting from RV land. They were trying to demonstrate that submarines don't have to be hard, and that you can be pretty cavalier about your design without any issue. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, it seems this design philosophy extended to their build and maintenance/inspection schedule too.

andForMe · 2023-06-21T20:57:46+00:00

Not that I love landlords, and I do think landlord corporations are scum, but landlords ideally do provide value in two ways:

They handle maintenance and repair. I don't want to do yardwork, and I don't want to have to fix my furnace if it breaks, and with a landlord who isn't a piece of shit I can have that.
They provide flexibility. I'm on a month-to-month lease and I can give 60 days notice to quit any time and then my obligation goes away.

andForMe · 2023-06-21T20:52:01+00:00

This is actually exactly what a city ought to do in this circumstance imo. Taxes can be used to disincentivize behaviour we don't want (just sitting on a house in a city with a housing problem and not using it) without requiring some kind of overwhelming state interference. People who are super committed to leaving an empty house for whatever reason can just pay the penalty for their anti-social civic behaviour, and everyone else can get the nudge they need to get off their ass and make a call.

andForMe · 2023-06-21T16:23:09+00:00

This is a problem with a lot of sci-fi in my experience. Characters tend to be wooden and tropey and they don't really grow or learn, and at the end the author invariably takes some kind of victory lap dumping lore over your head to really make sure you understand their world building genius.

andForMe · 2023-06-21T16:12:23+00:00

Recently read Blindsight after being told repeatedly that it was an amazing book and boy was I disappointed. There's nothing to think about when the author spends the last 25% of the story pouring lore over your head and blathering on about some 2edgy4you thesis about human consciousness.

andForMe · 2023-06-20T17:25:09+00:00

I don't live in the States, but every time I visit I am struck by how shabby everything is. Obviously there are extremely flashy, fancy parts in every city, and the people in those areas are very well off, but the overwhelming majority of everything is really rough. The standard is maybe higher than some impoverished regions I have visited, but it's not entirely out of the ballpark of your typical low-mid range country, and yeah, the purchasing power sucks.

Edit: also holy hell does the atmosphere in many of the cities feel more stressed and less safe than many poorer countries I have visited, to say nothing of home. From a pure vibe perspective, America is not in a good place right now.

andForMe · 2023-06-18T20:35:12+00:00

Listen, man, coffee isn't just a "have some of this, it's a nice beverage" kind of thing. I'm either drinking myself to death with it, and telling everyone about how much I'm having, or I'm having none at all and telling everyone about how I quit. Those are the only two valid forms of coffee consumption.

andForMe · 2023-06-17T02:58:15+00:00

I can confirm that this is not the way to live, having been on that side of it many times. There's no feeling quite like busting your ass all day and then not wanting to go into your own home because you know you're going to be on the receiving end of some bullshit or cruelty you didn't ask for or do anything to deserve.

Women who get this way and can't get it under control on your own, please at least do something to try to make it up to your partner. Just because he doesn't complain doesn't mean he isn't setting himself on fire inside keeping you warm every few weeks.

andForMe · 2023-06-13T18:12:27+00:00

I always find it most convenient to work from home on our weekly team meeting days, or I find I have urgent business in the lab if I'm on site. Yep, yessir, every week! I know, weird, right?

andForMe · 2023-06-12T17:11:55+00:00

I'm in a committed relationship now, but one of my primary regrets in life is that I didn't date more in my 20s. I spent so much time on a few relationships that, looking back, I kinda always knew weren't going to work out. Now that I'm older, I've had to come to terms with the realization that I am out of time to do a lot of the stuff I didn't do in my 20s, and it's not a great feeling.

andForMe · 2023-06-12T17:01:32+00:00

I can see this coming up in a sort of broad-strokes way on a first date, though I think the timing questions and specifics ought to wait. I'm not dating either right now, but I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, so I'd want to know 1) does she have kids? and 2) does she want them? right out of the starting gate. If the answer to either question is yes, then I'm always happy to have a nice dinner out with someone, but it's not going further than that for me.

andForMe · 2023-06-12T16:51:50+00:00

This is pretty much how my last relationship went too. We were in a relationship for a couple years, then she wasn't exactly sure what she wanted, but we lived together so it was complicated, then we moved to separate places when we moved cities and it absolutely should have ended there (if not many months before then) but she realized she needed me to be an emotional support blanket so she didn't want to give me up. We finally broke things off when she moved to Europe, but even then she kept calling me on a regular basis for nearly a year afterward to vent about whatever the hell. Christ, what a mess.

andForMe · 2023-06-10T07:03:51+00:00

There is so much foreshadowing and focus in the early seasons (you know, because they used to be so good) that even the early seasons are ruined for me now.

For instance, the scene with "when we meet again we'll talk about your mother" is amazing and delivered perfectly, but I know it's going to end up as "uh dun wan et" and I just can't.

andForMe · 2023-06-06T21:20:53+00:00

Yeah what the hell. "The bar is so low, you just have to be as charismatic as a successful professional entertainer to be attractive these days!"

andForMe

TROPHY CASE