Making intentions known is necessary. Flirting is just one of the preocesses by which intention is established. In that way, it is not strictly necessary, in the same way that cake is not necessary, but food is.

Flirting is a process which intentionally leaves ambiguity because it lets people avoid embarrassment. Being rejected, in many cultures, is embarrassing. By attempting flirting, a person can show interest indirectly, and the other person can show interest in return or show disinterest with quiet cues that let the instigator pull back without having to do something as vulnerable as explicitly stating intentions or experience embarrassment at being directly rejected.

Flirting, like anything else, can also be used as a display of quality, the verbal/intellectual equivalent of peacock feather displays.

How necessary these elements are is entirely contextual. Some partners despise the pretense of it. Others view it as incredibly fun. Some are deeply embarassed by the prospect of rejection. Some are not bothered by it at all.

Check out iyashikei as a genre if you like anime. Relaxed and wholesome is kind of the whole bag.

If you liked Corner Gas, also check out Kim’s Convenience.

Measure twice, cut wonke

I’m not such a fan of this view anymorr. Many of the people who go into the military actually believe they are going to do good things for the world but are ignorant of how much evil they will be asked to do most of the time, or like the idea of being of service but can’t get into other, better forms of service because those organizations prefer those who have gone to a university or work on a volunteer basis.

Here’s the fun thing about that question; it’s basically ‘Would you date someone you considered mentally insane?’ Whether you are atheist considering dating Hindu, a Catholic considering dating a Zoroastrian, or a Buddhist dating a nihilist, this is a person who has a fundamentally different understanding of reality. Here’s the real kicker; ‘Is someone who has a distorted sense of reality capable of giving consent?’ Can you even date them if you value consent?

Basically the only thing that really bothers me is a lack of epistemological humility, people pretending their views are objectively true.

I used to use purely Reddit. I stopped after the API nonsense. Now I’m purely on lemmy. I have no interest in any of the others.

The short of it is: western society has been pretending human behaviour is simple and easy to understand for ages, but can’t anymore, and that’s leading to a fight over how to think about it all.

Homosexuality was viewed as a choice. Gender was viewed as natural rather than cultural. Criminals were just evil. Addicts were just irresponsible. Etc. Etc. In the last century, the democratization of expression and the shift to individualism has shattered that illusion of homogeneous simplicity.

This combines with a primitive delusion of semantic authority (this word has a specific defined meaning, and it is the one in the dictionary/my head) so that people think the object is determined by it’s descriptors rather than the descriptor is defined by its context. People hear a word (e.g. man) and assume all the common entailments are mandatorily part of the definition. (e.g. penis, taller and broader than average, likes to have sex with women, likes to hunt/fight/sport, wants to be a father and provider, insert other cultural signifier of masculinity here) So, when someone sees a word being applied to someone, but doesn’t feel like the definition in their head matches, they feel it’s wrong. (e.g. He likes men. That doesn’t match my definition of ‘man.’ Could my understanding of the word ‘man’ be wrong? Of course not. They must be something else. ‘You there, stop calling yourself a man. You’re not.’)

The current battle is a battle to define what the next concensus will be for the definition of various words. Traditionalists want to go back to a more familiar way of defining things. (e.g. It had a penis at birth? Man. And he better act like one.) And they are willing to happily ignore the preferences of people who don’t feel like that definition matches theirs. Neogenderists (for lack of a better term) believe something is wrong with the gender concepts and want to change them, whether that means adding one neuter gender, adding 100 genders, limiting us to the traditional two genders but removing physical sex as a characteristic in favor of just the cultural elements/secondary characteristics, or seeking to abolish gender entirely. Some people are interested in making the language match people’s self-conceptions, some are not.

And all of this is still in flux. Who knows which group will be most prominent in 10, 20, 30, 100, or 1000 years? We could have a time in the future where people will die to fight for the idea that there are exactly four genders, ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘human,’ and ‘steve,’ differentiated mostly by hair color, with entailments regarding preferences for spicy foods, appropriate toenail length, and room temperature, and that the people who want to dye their hair are transchromists. We’d all like to believe humanity would have the wisdom to avoid it, but looking around doesn’t inspire much hope.

Hold on, there. You’re telling me there are other people, on the internet, sending you messages, personally, not as part of a mailing list, just sending you messages? Is that a thing? Is that even legal?

It was a great concept, well executed for its time.

It discourages the use of muscle memory altogether. One of the things that make it so good is that it requires focus. It’s not the sort of game you play while listening to music or second-screening a show. It doesn’t ask much, just a bit of care and attention, but it takes all of it.

I did not. I’ll have to check that out.

Gay Guevara

E

When reddit did the nonsense with the API I saw the term reddfugee.

Everyone behind the silver car at the parking lot entrance is illegally blocking the road. Regardless of the car culture problem or OP’s disingenuous use of a CoViD era image out of context, those people needed to go away. If you can’t get your coffee without parking in the street, you don’t get coffee at that location at that time. Safety is more important than someone getting their sugar/caffeine fix.

Asking a question and answering it in the next sentence… is there a word for that?

Don’t forget the third thing ads tell you: ‘Our product is, at best, no better than our competitors’, and quite possibly much worse, otherwise we wouldn’t have to spend so much on controlling our reputation.’

Kinetica - a racing game where the ‘vehicles’ are people in mechanical suits that make them look like sexy mecha, racing to old techno

Bloody Roar - a series of fighting games where you fight as people who can suddenly shift into other forms, some recognizable animals and some abstract, and with the ability in some arenas to kick people through walls or over ledges into new arenas

Forsaken - 3D hover vehicle battles

Tiny Tank - a game where you play as a sweary AI tank

Megaman Legends 1 and 2 - Megaman as a 3d adventure game with a storyline and characters

Gitaroo Man - a rhythm game I enjoyed, later imitated by some others

Shadow of the Colossus - more known but not cared for these days. A game in which there are only boss battles. A subtly told story. Part of the ICO universe.

Titan Souls - One boy, one bow, one arrow that can be magically recalled to the bow, and giant stone destroyers that he must conquer with nothing more. Kind of a 2D Shadow of the Colossus

BPM: Bullets Per Minute - everyone has the idea for a rhythm FPS. This is the only one that does a good job of it.

Receiver - a game in which you don’t just hit R to reload, but have to go through the full manual of arms, dropping the clip, holstering the weapon, loading each round into the clip, drawing the weapon, seating the clip, racking the round, checking the chamber to make sure it fed correctly, aiming, firing, clearing the jam, all while worrying about killer robots.

Valley - a movement game that has such an amazing feeling of freedom in its movement

Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician game

Never heard of those two being opposed.

The trade-off of security is widely known to be convenience, not privacy.