CocaKoala

It eliminates the times you uncontrollably think about a past event - note that voluntary recall isn't affected. So it's saying that this lets you process the trauma in a controlled environment when you're in a position to deal with it, but otherwise resume a life that isn't interrupted or dominated by it.

I'll occasionally see cars like that - bright pink, or some other bright colour, and they always make me smile. I've taken to describing them as "a car that I'd never want to own, but I'm really glad it exists". Like the pink camo-wrapped Dodge Charger that I occasionally see tootling around town - do I want to own a Charger and do it up in pink camouflage? Absolutely not. Am I glad that the option exists and somebody has availed themselves of it? Absolutely yes.

I disagree that it's bad advice - it can certainly be applied badly, but so can anything. You meet somebody, you become friends with them, you start dating them, you get married - that's an extremely natural arc. You shouldn't ask all your friends on dates (just like you shouldn't ask everybody you meet on a date) and you should be cognizant of hints that somebody isn't interested in dating you, but to say that somebody is EITHER a friend OR a romantic partner and there's no overlap between the two is strange to me.

And this isn't the only way to get dates - dating apps certainly try and short-circuit the "be friends" part. But I've been friends with every girl I've dated before we started dating, including the woman I'm now married to. If you're not friends with somebody, even a little bit, why do you want to date them?

edit: And of course, if you're going into friendships with the intention of trying to date the person, that might work out poorly. Meet somebody, be their friend, and if you're both open to something developing, it can happen. Asking them to have lunch is a way to start that.

The question was "how to get dates" - "how to get friends" is a different question. The easy way to get dates is to ask your friends on dates, and the easiest way to do that is to ask a friend to get lunch with you. What part of that reduces to "get lucky"?

Absolutely I'm trusting that stated expectations are the same as real expectations - if somebody lies to me about what they want in a partner, then we're not going to be a good match anyways and so that serves as a useful way to thin the potential pool.

> I agree that it's hard to judge the reasonableness of other people's decisions, but I think that if they either fail to find what they are looking for, or expect more than they offer, the expectation may be unreasonable.

Sure, but the article also says that the group of lonely single men is growing so on balance it sounds like the women are finding what they're looking for. Who's got the unreasonable expectations, here?

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to sidestep the argument but I'm also clearly not understanding what you're saying. I read your statement as "Women say they want emotionally available [etc etc] men and yet I see women paying attention to men who are [high status/beefy as hell/richer than god/etc etc] - there is a disconnect here" - is that approximately right?

I'll address that argument, but if it's not what you're trying to say then please correct me. There are many different women, and they all want slightly different things, at different priorities. That said, I think that focusing on mental health, communication skills, and emotional availability pays dividends for everybody independent of whether or not it gets them a relationship.

You are correct, the advice to achieve the third level of Maslow's Hierarchy does not address what you have to do in order to achieve the first two levels.

It's hard to say that somebody's expectations for what they want in a parter are reasonable or unreasonable - you're allowed to decide who you spend your time with, and if that means you don't spend time with anybody, you're either satisfied with that or you change your expectations. If somebody says "I want to date somebody who is emotionally available", it's not anybody else's place to say "Wow that's completely unreasonable of you".

Same thing when somebody says "I only want to date a man who's rich, taller than me, conventionally handsome, and will cater to my every whim" - do you meet that criteria? Maybe not, but they've decided that they only want to date exactly one person in the entire world and they're gonna hold out until they find exactly that person, who are you to tell them they're wrong? It's their life.

There's no magic bullet that will get you through "any door" - every person is different, and every person has different things they want in a partner. There are some people who will absolutely refuse to date somebody who isn't taller than them, and if you're too short, then yeah - nothing you can do will change that.

But there's nothing you can do to change that, so why get hung up on it? There are plenty of other people (I'll drop the dehumanizing metaphor of doors here because it's not needed) who have different criteria that you could meet, and focusing on the things about yourself that make you happier (like being emotionally available, being able to communicate, and having a clear sense of your values) seems like a pretty reasonable way to go about meeting those criteria with a side-benefit of making you happy.

I'm honestly curious, can you point me to the lines that you think say "men suck" and "men should decide to stop sucking"?

My read of it is that men should focus on their mental health and consider getting therapy if they need it, which I'm pulling from where it says

> Level up your mental health game. That means getting into some individual therapy to address your skills gap.

The skills gap it mentions is where it talks about how women express a desire for partners who "are emotionally available, good communicators, and share their values" - none of that is a value judgement in my reading. Those all seems like fairly reasonable things to want in a partner.

Ask your friend if they want to get lunch with you - problem solved.

"That's not a date" Why not?

"My friends are all in relationships" Make more friends.

Curiously, that's not at all what the article says!

> I hear recurring dating themes from women between the ages of 25 and 45: They prefer men who are emotionally available, good communicators, and share similar values.

You'll note that none of the three traits listed as preferred are "mediagenic appearances"

What's bad about the advice? It seems to flow pretty logically from the article.

"Women want to date men who are emotionally available, good communicators, and who share values" means that your starting point to search for a relationship should be that you are emotionally available, good at communicating, and you have a clear concept of your values so that you can determine whether or not you share them with a potential partner. The advice to get to that state is "focus on mental health, including getting therapy if you need it" - that all seems correct to me.

It's not relevant for getting dates, but getting dates is easy. It's extremely relevant for any stage of a relationship, including the early ones.

I had exactly the opposite experience! I drove an automatic Mazda3 for ten years, it was the car I bought straight out of college, and I never viewed it as anything other than a tool which got me from point A to point B. A couple years ago, I traded in the 3 and got a 2020 Miata with a stick shift, for the simple reason that my wife has two cars of her own (a 2020 BRZ and a 2008 Lotus Elise) and they're both manual transmission, and it felt stupid to have cars in the family that only one person could drive. Any time we took the Elise out somewhere, she had to be the dedicated driver, which did in fact mean that at one point she had to drive herself to urgent care while I sat in the passenger seat and felt like an absolutely useless asshole.

I figured there were two options - either she could get rid of her manual transmission cars and replace them with automatics that I could drive (which wasn't a great solution because she really likes her manual transmissions and it seems dumb to ask her to get rid of something she loves) or I could learn how to drive a stick shift, and I knew the only way that I was _really_ going to learn how to drive a stick was if I was doing it every day, with no other options. Otherwise, I'd learn the theory of driving stick (clutch in, shift, clutch out slowly while you give it gas) but never actually be able to put it into practice at a time that it mattered.

Hence, the miata. My wife had to drive it home from the dealership when we got it, because I couldn't drive it myself, and I spent about a week trapped at home because I couldn't reliably get my car to start moving at traffic lights, but once I figured out how to reliably get from point A to point B again I realized that actually, it was kinda fun to get from point A to point B, and that there was no reason I couldn't just make a trip where point A and point B were the same place, driving just for the hell of it. Now I autocross once a month, go on drives with the local miata club, and put new car parts on my car to change what it does or how it sounds or how it feels, things that I never would have imagined I'd do back when I was driving an automatic just because I felt so much less connected to the use of the car.

One of the things I think is really neat about F1, and which doesn't show up in any other sports that I'm aware of aside from other types of motor racing, is that F1 isn't one competition - it's two separate competitions running in parallel.

The first competition is the obvious one: The drivers all want to be the fastest driver and get the most points in the driver's championship. The second competition is similarly obvious: The constructors all want to have built the fastest car, and get the most points in the constructor's championship.

But crucially, these two competitions can't exist without each other! The drivers can't be fast if they have a good car, and the best cars won't be fast unless there's a driver who really understands how to wring the most performance out of it sitting behind the wheel. So there's this constant (and in my opinion, fascinating) tension where the constructors are trying to build a) fast cars, but also b) cars that their current drivers can effectively use and the drivers are trying to a) drive the car fast but also b) find the constructor who will build a car that can go fast and is suited to their driving style.

In other sports there's some amount of equipment preference (e.g. different golfers have different brands of clubs, different tennis players might use different brands of rackets or different shoes), but the equipment manufacturers aren't literally competing with other manufacturers - they're just trying to supply an industry.

So if you give everybody the same car, then yes - it becomes a transparent display of driver skill, but that doesn't necessarily make the race better, because now you've lost half of the competition. F1 (and motor racing) history is full of bits where somebody managed to figure out something neat about aerodynamics, stuck a new part on their car, and then _lied to everybody else about what it was_ so that nobody would be able to figure out why their car had gotten so fast; the ground effect lotus '78 comes to mind, as does the discovery of the gurney flap.

I had forgotten about this, but a friend of mine has been streaming his first playthrough of Secret of Monkey Island recently and he got to this gag yesterday. I completely lost my shit laughing at his expression.

You say "Many we know in our town have to pay for this. How sad." but then you go own to observe that "If you join this ministry you essentially get a 'tax' each month".

So it's not that you didn't pay for it - you did, and continue to. But your support is contingent on following the rules of the community and maintaining your welcome, while the irreligious people in Portland had a more straightforward transaction.

> Who decided that Freedom of Speech _only_ applies to government suppression

Which freedom of speech are you referring to? Because if you're thinking of the first amendment, then the people who decided that are the ones who wrote it, and it's pretty clear in the text.

One of the things that I really appreciate about his blog posts is that they don't just cover the game design aspects like "what is a good card vs a bad card or a strong card vs a weak card", or even "How do we make cards which are intended for play in specific formats", but also product design issues like "If somebody buys a booster pack and looks through the fifteen cards they get, what do we need those fifteen cards to communicate about the unique mechanics of the set, and how do we construct a) the set and b) the booster packs to make sure this is expressed in the way we need?"

> how would one _not_ take a political stance?

A non-political stance would be one which has zero side effects on anybody other than yourself. As soon as the actions you make and the decisions you take have an effect on somebody who isn't you, it becomes political.

Actually _taking_ a non-political stance is an exercise left to the reader.

Christopher Tin also did the soundtrack for Offworld Trading Company, an economic RTS.

The soundtrack is, if you haven't heard it, utterly amazing. I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giqNtBAukbg

edit: I'll also note that "economic RTS" doesn't quite do justice to Offworld Trading Company - it's a real time strategy game, but the only warfare and combat is economic. You place structures which mine resources: water, iron, carbon, and so on. These resources can be purchased and sold on the open market, or you can refine them into more advanced resources (which requires having the structure to refine them) and sell the advanced resources for a larger profit.

But of course, the price of resources will constantly fluctuate based on supply and demand. Do you need to sell glass to make a profit, or can you just sell silicon to the person who wants to make glass? If your opponent has gone all in on producing steel, why not just buy all the iron on the market, corner the supply, and sell it back when the price goes up?

A game with similar vibes that works really well over conference call is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Even better, only one person need own a copy of the game for others to play with them.

For anybody who's unfamiliar, the game is thus: one person is stuck in a room with a bomb. They can pick the bomb up, manipulate it, and interact with it, but a clock is ticking and the bomb is going to explode. On the phone with you are the Bomb Defusing Experts, who are armed with a Bomb Defusing Manual for the bomb in question (free PDF, www.bombmanual.com if you're curious). Unfortunately, the manual was written by somebody who loves inscrutable graphs and hates the person reading it.

The person with the bomb has to describe the modules on the bomb, e.g. "I see three red wires, a blue wire, and a white wire". The people with the manual then need to instruct them on which wires to cut in order to defuse the bomb correctly, e.g. "Three red wires? Cut the second wire. Wait, hang on - does the bomb have a parallel port? Okay, cut the third wi-WAIT, how many batteries does it have? Did you cut the third wire? thank god, definitely don't cut that one."

The bombs can get hard and stressful, but it's a fun asymmetric game that works really well over voice chat.

Now I find myself wishing Max Gladstone would feature venture capitalism in his next Craft Sequence book.

You could play Limited, where everybody gets six booster packs. Everybody opens one pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their left. Once the first pack is all picked up, everybody opens their second pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their right. Repeat until you're out of booster packs.

Now you have 6*15 cards, and you need to compose a deck of at least 40 cards out of them. You can add as many basic lands as you want. Play your deck against everybody else's.

This avoids the idea that you can just buy strong cards to win, because you only get what's in the booster packs. And if you take only the strong cards from each booster, there's no guarantee that your deck will actually function as a deck - do you have a good mana curve? Are all of your cards the same colour?

Even once you start drafting to put together a deck instead of just grabbing all the strong or rare cards, you have to figure out which colours the people upstream from you are drafting so that you can try to draft the colours they're passing over, otherwise you'll be competing for the cards they want.

Yep, I've seen some ones like that too. The NN is quite good at knowing what people look like, but it's much worse at knowing what people tend to be next to and sometimes you get some horrors.

Yeah, you can definitely look at the list of schedule 1 drugs and get a strong sense of "one of these things is not like the other".

Getting permission to do research on a schedule 1 drug is pretty tricky, from what I understand? Since marijuana is schedule 1 it's termed as having a) no medical benefit and b) a high potential for abuse, which puts you in something of a catch-22 situation: you can't justify the research on medical grounds because the drug has no medical benefit (or it wouldn't be sched 1), and you can't justify research for exploratory purposes because of the potential for abuse (or else it wouldn't be sched 1), and then it becomes hard to find research that says "Actually, weed has medical uses and isn't nearly as abusable as heroin" because no research can be conducted.

Edit: To clarify, that's not to say that marijuana _should_ be schedule 1, only that it _is_ schedule 1 and moving something out of sched 1 is challenging because the research position is tricky.

If I had to rent a pickup truck on short notice, I'd hit up U-Haul, who has a bunch of them.

Last time I had to leave my car in the body shop after it was hit, my insurance got me a rental car from Enterprise. The only rentals available at the time were F-250s, so I drove a pickup truck to work and back for a week.

Why do you think that pick up trucks are unrentable?

That might be the case! I haven't read SMBC regularly for a very long time, so if there was a name change in the past, i dunno, five years or something, I probably wouldn't have noticed!

Mild sidenote: How to Invent Everything is by Ryan North, the cat behind Dinosaur Comics; Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is done by Zach Weiner, a different person.