That’s fair, I also fell for it originally. It was a pretty convincing prank, I really should be more suspicious on April 1st.

I’m not sure if you’re doing a bit, but that was an April Fools’ joke.

One of the few sane people in this comment section.

I don’t want to want to judge OP too harshly but this is a common problem with women in STEM spaces where they’re treated as romantic interests rather than professional acquaintances. That alone is problematic, but it becomes a lot worse when the man expresses interest, puts his coworker in awkward position, and then treats her differently because she “rejected” him. Most men are not overtly hostile to coworkers who turn them down but it comes out in subtle ways that can disrupt a workplace. I’ve seen it myself, where a male coworker developed a crush on someone in the office that wasn’t reciprocated and the male coworker will not work with her because he’s offended or embarrassed about her not being interested. He hasn’t outright said that he refuses to work with her, but he suddenly becomes withdrawn and quiet when she’s in the same room as him.

It’s fine to be attracted to a coworker, but it’s best to keep those feelings to yourself. As a man in STEM, I have multiple female workers that I find attractive, funny, and interesting, but I recognize that they’re at the office to work, not to be hit on.

Aside from the creepiness factor of pursuing a coworker, it reinforces the idea that STEM is a boy’s club and that women are not welcome. That perception needs to be broken because we need strong engineers regardless of gender. To speak from personal experience again, the company I work at has a culture of making women uncomfortable in subtle ways, which has discouraged innovation and hurt our success.

It sounds like you’ve ping-ponged between two radical ideologies. Maybe you became so disillusioned with the lack of success from overworking yourself and now you’re angry at the state of the world, but lashing out at people trying to engage you in a discussion isn’t going to do any good.

I’ve been using Deezer for a while and I like its variety. They have a “Flow” button where you can let it play random music with favorites mixed in, but you can also select a “mood” (like Focus, Party, Chill, and others) or genres (like R&B, Alternative, Rock, and others). You can also have Flow lean more towards new music or already favorited tracks, but that’s been inconsistent for me in the past where sometimes it’ll only play my favorited songs when I chose to listen to new music or vice versa.

I’ve discovered a lot of new songs and artists by letting Flow do its thing on my drive to and from work. Although, sometimes Flow gets stuck in a certain style of music, like playing back-to-back-to-back Golden Oldies, and it’s frustrating trying to get it to play anything else without manually selecting a genre or mood each time you launch the app. That’s a small gripe because the variety is typically good, with favorites mixed in.

Just installed it, thanks for the recommendation. I like its interface so far, I might use this instead of Mlem.