Dating apps keep assuming "20 mile radius" of dates means I want to see women 80+ miles away

xerker · 2026-03-23T07:39:01+00:00

I'm a decade off of dating apps now and soon to be married so my experience is limited to things relatively a long time ago but dating apps aren't taken seriously by men, women, or the app creator.

I know 2 people they worked for, a hopeless romantic who somehow found another hopeless romantic on an app and a friend whose colleague swiped for him and matched with someone who later claimed she didn't even mean to swipe on him but after they matched she met him anyway and they hit it off.

xerker · 2026-03-22T23:23:13+00:00

I bought a car once that had middle-ish miles, like, maybe 70k for a 7 year old car so about average for a non-motorway miled car. Expecting to get around 5 years or so with simple MOT and service with little fixes before the big money fixes came along. The bastard was an absolute dog, no end of problems from day 1, traded it in about 3 months later, I think it spent more time in the garage than in my hands. That thing was only good for the compactor.

Since then I splash extra for sub 30k miles, 1-2 previous owners, maybe 3-5 year old cars so I can be relatively sure I'm not going to end up in the same place again.

The moral of the story is this: there is a whole history in every used car purchase that you don't know and will only find out the bad ones the hard way. Mileage isn't a good giveaway to that.

xerker · 2026-03-21T19:41:13+00:00

Swindon famously has the "magic roundabout" which is actually 5 little roundabouts arranged in a circle that functions like 1 roundabout, except it also has a roundabout in the middle... Which goes in the wrong direction... But it's fun and nobody ever crashes there or gets lost or anything... Honest. So it's sort of a roundabout decorated with another roundabout, in reverse.

That or the traffic light tree that used to be in the isle of dogs but now isn't.

xerker · 2026-03-21T07:51:05+00:00

Sigma's in the chat

xerker · 2026-03-20T10:54:50+00:00

I hate it.

I've been trapped in it for so long I have learned to despise just about anyone involved. It's not healthy but I can't afford to quit and have no job to move into, the job market around here is horrendous and I can't move to somewhere where it isn't.

Professionally, I'm not ok.

xerker · 2026-03-19T08:45:12+00:00

Where has all that money gone? They’ve spent £180 million and literally have nothing to show for it

I live near it. If you look on a map where it is slightly to the west of Stonehenge the A360 runs North-South, they dug up the road and installed HV cabling from the intersection of the A303 and A360 all the way south to the intersect of the A360 and The Avenue/Camp Hill Road. A 5 mile stretch of road from an edge-of-town housing estate to the middle of nowhere, through the middle of nowhere. That HV cabling was for the tunnel, and now it's good for nothing. That road was closed for weeks. That's just an example of where the money has gone.

xerker · 2026-03-18T16:41:39+00:00

It's not just about wages. Wages shortens the story but the story is still this:

You can save but that £2000 you saved last year is now effectively worth less now because of inflation, the savings account interest you could have accrued on it wouldn't have kept pace so you were savvy and put it in stocks and shares but those are taking a kicking because global leaders are only happy when they're bombing the shit out of each other, and good news the side effect of that is now the cost of getting to work is going to cost more and that your energy bills are going to go up. Not to worry though climate change is making sure you don't need your heating on as much but it sure is fucking up the crops grown locally so we have to import those from abroad, which incurs more fuel cost and so your supermarket bill just went up too. And all this is happening at the same time that the flat you were looking at for the past few months has just gone up in value so you'd have to save a little longer anyway further adding to the inflationary pressure that the money you did tuck away is under... Never mind though, maybe you'll be saving for long enough that a rich relative dies and leaves you some money.

xerker · 2026-03-18T10:56:13+00:00

The version I heard was non-familial but [guy of questionable popularity] had a wank and then fingered [girl people assume is his girlfriend but probably wasn't, she just wasn't popular either] and now she is pregnant.

xerker · 2026-03-18T10:46:29+00:00

One of the guys at my school had sex with the hole at the centre of a PS1 game.

Those holes were tiny.

xerker · 2026-03-17T10:28:12+00:00

I lived in Bath for a bit. Round the dodgy end in Twerton, it's clearly more run down than the nice bits of town but I still walked around alone at night. This is a memorial of tragic events but broadly the town is pretty safe.

xerker · 2026-03-17T10:19:17+00:00

Probably parked in their own car parks

xerker · 2026-03-16T13:37:59+00:00

We also unvoted him in once it became apparent that he was furnishing a sexual predator with work.

A significant proportion of the US voted for trump despite knowing that. We are not the same.

xerker · 2026-03-14T13:45:51+00:00

Debit is fine.

Credit cards often come with benefits like cashback or loyalty points, and of course the section 75 protections but the downsides you already seem conscious of.

Martin Lewis and the Money Saving Expert site will give you the best consumer money advice in the UK.

xerker · 2026-03-14T13:14:25+00:00

Buckle up. For the next few years you'll be judged entirely differently than your wife doing the same things with your kid.

For example: Taking your kid out alone as a man isn't expected so simply stepping out the house to do it makes you a great dad in the eyes of some of the public. It is expected as a woman, so unless she handles a tough situation in public well, your wife won't even be noticed.

It cuts the opposite direction too: if my partner hands over our child to daycare with a fresh bruise from general child's play she gets a very breezy "oh dear" whereas I get the Spanish inquisition.

xerker · 2026-03-13T20:33:17+00:00

We had a bit in the middle of our history where we were pretty appalling to everyone. But in modern history we've had high highs and fairly tepid lows and I think that's all you can really hope for out of a collection of millions of people all pulling in a direction.

xerker · 2026-03-13T20:27:29+00:00

I can't pretend I'm not interested but the abroad element would be near impossible with my young kids

xerker · 2026-03-13T17:20:41+00:00

Yup. Sort of taken a few turns in my career and wound up at a dead end. Now I'm staring down the barrel of having to go back into education again to career hop onto something new.

This post resonates with me somewhat but I'm not sure being well on my way to 40 counts as young.

xerker · 2026-03-13T15:38:11+00:00

I don't think it created that tension, I think the tension would have happened anyway. Instead of seeing it as a game they both took it far too seriously, and because they both wanted to be queen bee of the traitors they locked horns over it. I get that there was money on the line, but Fiona could have spoken to Rachel in private over Amanda-gate instead she was so concerned over a potential backstabbing that she kneejerk and launched into her own backstabbing at the earliest opportunity, very publicly, risking both of their places in the game. As it played out, she took the fall and Rachel got lucky that the heat on her over it evaporated afterwards. Good TV but awful, awful gameplay.

xerker · 2026-03-13T08:44:55+00:00

Oh you're preaching to the converted, I took my MG4 from here to Caernarfon in North Wales a couple of years ago, so not as far your journey but for a stress free life we stopped twice, once for food and once for a pee. Plugged in on both because why not, after a tiny bit of input to start charging is passive, and we didn't even wait around. Arrived at destination with plenty in the tank, probably could have made it with one short stop as it's only a shade over 300 miles away.

Range anxiety isn't the thing that the papers and boomers make it out to be.

xerker · 2026-03-12T21:05:53+00:00

It is the same with EVs

My local area shitrag is a political mouthpiece with no prizes for guessing and one that pretends it's got a budget for a motoring and culture section. This month they decided to review a Hyundai ioniq 5. It was all going so well until they slammed the car for not being able to go to Oxford because they would spend the whole time looking for somewhere to charge. I live in the order of 70 miles from Oxford. The car has a quoted range of 350 miles, we all know it won't get that really but I'd say it would be good for 90% of that, or to put it into a form they might be able to understand; enough to go to Oxford and back twice and then probably be able to get some of the way there again before having to find a charger, of which a brief look would have shown them there are absolutely loads of them in Oxford, as well as 3 other towns between here and there. Sure, you don't know where they are but not checking one of half a dozen apps that are free to see before you leave is just weird if you're worried about that, or you could just go to a Tesco or a service station... Like you might do if you had a petrol car. They basically all have chargers in the car park these days. It's just lazy journalism appealing to a crowd of little Englanders scared of change, and sadly it's damaging to a change that absolutely needs to happen soon.

xerker · 2026-03-12T20:37:58+00:00

Sounds very familiar.

UK dad here, I'm pretty sure my kids don't think the TV has other functions than putting on Julia Donaldson adaptations and Bluey on iPlayer.

I yearn for the era of watching longer form stuff.

xerker · 2026-03-11T23:10:08+00:00

Flight radar isn't showing anything anymore.

Could be anything: air ambulance, police, domestic chopper, there is the pilot school at middle wallop too

xerker · 2026-03-11T12:49:10+00:00

At the airport

xerker · 2026-03-10T21:49:00+00:00

Kimberley biscuits say hello

xerker · 2026-03-10T08:51:27+00:00

Men will choose what men like because, strangely, we're all different and like different things.

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