I wonder if so many using it almost as the default way of dating makes it harder to find someone for those who want to avoid it.

That absolutely does happen. They’ve done a lot of astroturfing on social media to discredit the idea of meeting someone in person organically. They created this stigma that people who try to do that are “creeps”, when that’s how nearly everyone found their partners until about twenty years ago…

Yeah, can’t help but notice how a lot of their subsidiaries try to pigeonhole people into racial categories…

The article doesn’t say what you’re claiming it says.

While it is not ditching the requirement for women to make the first move, its female users can now send a template question such as “What book or film changed the way you think?”, using the site’s Opening Moves feature.

I’m going to ignore all the problems in the article, like how it pretends that putting in effort to message someone first and not getting a sufficient reply is some new phenomenon that uniquely affects women 🙄 holy shit

Except third spaces have been systematically dismantled by capitalist interests, and the dating app industry’s astroturfing on social media has done a lot of damage to the perceived validity of meeting someone in person organically.

You can’t just say dating apps are necessary because there’s nowhere else to meet people and ignore the fact that that very problem is socially engineered. It’s manufactured scarcity.

Like if nestle were to poison a town’s water supply so that they could sell more water bottles. After buying out deer park, dasani, and aquafina. And patenting the idea of selling water in bottles. You wouldn’t say “actually it’s necessary to buy their water bottles,” you would say “that’s fucked up and should be illegal.”

Someone needs to patch that hole but we know the current government won’t…

People would be so fucked.

That would be a good premise for a movie though.

They say you shouldn’t give in to peer pressure, but people who don’t learn to conform to social pressures wind up being ostracized from the herd, unable to find work through social connections, and ultimately live in reclusion as shut-ins.

I can’t quantify the damage done to my life because so many teachers growing up said don’t give in to peer pressure, and I was seemingly the only one who took it to heart. I made a point not to do things solely because it’s what people expect of me, and it’s made me a very dysfunctional adult.

Teachers should be teaching their students to give in to peer pressure, while also teaching them what kinds of peer pressure to give in to, and what kinds to ignore.

No because avocado is a berry but potato is a tuber

I don’t understand the issue. I’ve been using Linux less than a year but I started with a KDE desktop so it came with Kate, Kwrite, and Nano. I’ve literally never needed anything else.

I’ve tried out a couple IDEs like Codium and Geany, but I don’t see what they offer that Kate doesn’t.

I’ve also at least opened Emacs but I didn’t get much further than that.

I use Nano in the terminal when I’m editing config files because I read somewhere that it’s safer.

I installed Neovim and Micro but I haven’t explored those at all yet. I don’t have any problems with Nano.

I tried Pluma but I really only use it for dumping lists.

For the most part I use Kate, but for simpler notes I use Kwrite just to keep them in separate spots on my launcher.

I don’t see why this is such an issue though.

If you want to watch porn, you know where to find it. There’s no reason why people who sit down to watch a movie should be surprised to find out one of its scenes is literally porn.

If you need to use nudity to make your audience feel something, then you’re a shit director and need to quit your job and transfer to the porn industry.

And if you require nudity in order to feel emotion then you’re probably a porn addict and should get therapy.

Yeah, at least their government was handing out bread… I don’t think the US government would do even that much if the roles were reversed.

Holy shit, even in the 90s, Dems were already doing shit like resting their hopes on a catchy theme song being enough to “rally the party faithful, inspire the crowd and get the campaign off on the right note.”

Man, if only Kamala had known that all she had to do was play Despacito at all her rallies, the world today could be a different place… 🙄

Or maybe, like, if you’re a doctor giving a rectal exam then maybe your patient shouldn’t walk away feeling as if he had just been anally raped. Even if you think he’s too young to request a screening…

It’s been recommended to me a few times in this thread now so I’ll have to give it a shot

Ah, now this is going to need a spoiler tag but I can’t not say it.

Okay, soapbox over.

It’s interesting that Sanderson was aware he didn’t do Mat justice. The self-awareness is to his credit as an author, in my view.

I’ll definitely give him a chance. I’m willing to acknowledge he may have simply been out of his element finishing the story in Jordan’s world, and that his work in his own worlds could be better.

I need to wind down for a bit after finishing WoT though. I’m not ready to start another series that will take me a year+ to get through. It would feel like remarrying too soon after a divorce, if that makes sense. I need time to grieve before I move on.

I’ll probably read Earthsea next since it’s shorter and definitely within my comfort zone since I read some a few years ago and I liked it. I’ve been meaning to finish it ever since. Then maybe Ring World because it’s lighthearted fun and I don’t need to commit to reading the whole series in one go. After that I’ll likely decide between Farseer or Mistborn

It’s funny that you mention Mat, because his character as well as Nynaeve’s I felt suffered the most in the last three books. They both have such complex characters, though deceivingly simple on the surface. It seemed like Sanderson picked up on their surface simplicity without reproducing the underlying depth.

And yeah, I really liked Androl but he felt different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. So it makes sense now that you say he’s mostly Sanderson’s work. I can see that, how a newly introduced character gave Sanderson the creative liberty to write him in his own way. The result was a character that didn’t quite seem to fit inside the world, yet was still a good character in his own right.

Not sure if I’m explaining that well. I liked him, but maybe something in the way that so much depth and backstory was packed into the last three books felt a bit unnatural, when all the other characters took so much time to develop in their complexity. Not in a bad way, just different.

But if he’s an indicator of Sanderson’s characters in his own series, then I think I could get into it.

His characters are flawed and relatable and feel real

That sounds promising. The characters’ flaws in WoT is what makes them so interesting to me. Mat would have been bland if he wasn’t a scoundrel, and Nynaeve would have been bland if she wasn’t a bossy-pants. But when the two interact, their flaws create such an interesting dynamic. And the way it slowly develops from a mutual antagonism into deeply appreciating and caring about each other in a really wholesome way was one of the highlights of the series for me.

It’s funny though, because now that I say that I realize I can’t think of a flaw for either Moiraine or Egwene, and those were my two favorite characters. My third favorite was probably Birgitte, but of course she has a reason for being flawless. Eh, love is blind though, maybe they have flaws and I missed it. Oh and Bela. Bela was flawless.

It is often described as epic fantasy, and as a character-driven and introspective work.

(from wikipedia)

Sounds interesting enough, I’ll check it out. Thanks!

I was paranoid once in my early twenties so I asked a doctor to check my bum for cancer (I didn’t know much about it at the time other than that it’s a thing that people do and apparently it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but I was also a bit of a hypochondriac).

Well she probably thought I was too young for that and just being a weirdo, cause she made it HURT as badly as she could, and I’ve had a thing about avoiding doctors ever since.

For some reason your comment made me crave loaded baked potatoes.

But yeah, it’s next to impossible to have an intelligent discussion in the US. Not just because the education system is sorely lacking and anti-intellectualism is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness, but also because so many terms are so loaded that you can’t even use them according to their precise technical definitions without everyone assuming you’re exaggerating and hyperbolizing because vitriol and mudslinging are so much the norm here.

The inherently polarizing nature of a two-party FPTP electoral system is partly to blame, but so is the concerted effort the right-wing has made in recent years to discredit all political discussion by using all these buzzwords so disingenuously that they lose their meaning.

I think they did it on purpose. The whole projection/every-accusation-is-a-confession thing was a deliberate tactic to preemptively make anyone sound crazy who accuses them of doing the shit they really do, because they’ve already been so busy accusing everyone else of those things!

No, those were the first ones I’ve read by him and I just finished them. I can see how finishing someone else’s series wouldn’t allow his strengths in worldbuilding and story structure to shine.

The prose was one of the issues I had. How are his characters and dialogue in his own series? I can see it going either way, where his worldbuilding and narrative arc could create strong characters, or his weakness in prose could create weak dialogue. But characters and dialogue are so inherently intertwined that I’m not sure how well one could be done without the other.

If everything else is good and just the dialogue is lacking though, I could probably suspend judgement enough to enjoy the story and the world it takes place in (including its magic system).

Robert Jordan I didn’t find particularly prosaic, but his characters were so well-done that I didn’t mind as much once I decided to look past it. His plotline and worldbuilding were okay, although some aspects of both were really well-done, and the different civilizations and their histories/cultures, the underlying political currents among the nations and different factions were interesting enough to redeem the shortcomings. My point is that the characters are really where his work shines in my opinion.

If Sanderson does worldbuilding and story arcs really well, then those could be the things that shine for me and if so, I can look past a few weak areas as long as they’re not too painfully bad.

I don’t expect every series to have the same strengths. For instance no one could match Tolkien for prose, but politically his world only goes surface-deep. There’s good guys and bad guys, and while there is some treachery and nuance, for the most part everyone is on one side or the other. Still a masterpiece though.

I’m finding it hard to walk away from the WoT though, partly because it’s the most recent one I finished, but also particularly because the characters being the strong-point, I felt deep personal connections to some of them and was invested in their development, only for the story to end abruptly with no way to read further. It was like losing several friends at once. I experienced feelings similar to grief afterwards (and it wasn’t just because some of my favorite characters died).

So it might take a gear-shift, and maybe a period of mourning, but if Sanderson has the strengths you describe then I could probably still get into it…