I intentionally ended things with someone I had thought was a close friend recently. They had been flaky and fickle for probably a year or so now (basically every since they met their current partner), never really reached out and when they did it was always some weirdly hurtful way (for example, on my birthday they sent me a message that started with “as you know, I’m in [different country]”, despite not talking to me at all for a month or two)

I had a borderline mini-mental breakdown earlier this year, reached out to them for some support and whilst they were supportive, after meeting me for lunch I jokingly said that “next time we can talk about the stuff you’re probably interested in [i.e. the stuff that was getting to me]” and their response was “I literally don’t care about things people don’t want to tell me about”.

The final straw was when one of the two kittens I adopted a few months ago died very suddenly, and their response after my housemate and our mutual friend told them about it was to send me three tiktok videos (their only direct messages to me for probably a month or more, and based on the timestamps just them wasting time on their daily bus journey). I waited a few days just to make sure I wasn’t missing some context, then lost my temper and told them “I genuinely don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you that you think this is an appropriate response”, at which point they blamed me for not telling them myself and said they weren’t going to be my “emotional punching bag”.

I just decided they’re narcissistic enough that they thought the smallest token of their attention would make me feel grateful, blocked them on every platform I could think of and will probably never intentionally interact with them again.

The worst part is seeing mutual acquaintances treating them like they are good people - either they are and I feel shit because somehow I wasn’t worth it or they’re not and they’re getting the benefits of being a good person without the actual hard work. Hard not to take it as a really personal rejection of who I am as a person either way.

Introducing the new big bad, Asmoflayeus.

Everytime I had a problem, I’d cast Meteor Swarm and boom right away I’d have a different problem.

I think pure outrage viewers won’t switch over yet, the problem is that a lot of people have small outrage watching tendencies and once you hit a large enough overall community size all those little tendencies build up to enough to keep a community alive. Once that happens the pure viewers flood in and it becomes overwhelming.

A famous example of a deaf/blind person is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller - this article contains some explanations about how she was able to learn to communicate with the world.

Even if you work in permissive langauges like Java, if you start from the position of “this code will need to be thread safe”, its still not hard to do. The problem I’ve seen with more permsissive languages is that external libraries have bad systems built in and even if the code you write is threadsafe the external library csn introduce all sorts of weirdness.

For example in Java, the SimpleDateFormat class which is a fairly standard way of parsing/outputting dates and is the go to example in all number of tutorials is not inherently threadsafe (and that’s part of the JDK!). Someone can write sensible stateless code and get tripped up by this.