Great perspectives, thank you! Very informative and much more plausible than what I was saying.

Well thanks for the interesting perspective and I’m very glad to hear it wasn’t so one-sided everywhere, and that you’ve seen a lot more positives! Everything you said about causes of strife makes perfect sense to me and I would imagine those feature heavily for folks who try it out due to simple curiosity or pressure from a partner.

I would imagine, too, that sexual trends exhibit regionality and that they diffuse across regions over time and at uneven rates, much like any other cultural trend. Though of course a lot of cultural diffusion has gotten effectively instant thanks to tech - I remember “back in the day” you could travel from a (US) coast to the Midwest and find everyone basically 10-20 years behind cultural trends, from slang to hairstyles, to dress.

I wonder if relationships and dating and such, being a much slower process in general than changing styles of dress or speech, still have some of that interesting old-school slower diffusion, or more regional pockets anyway.

Anyway, enough baseless speculation from me - cheers and have a good one!

(Edit: I hope it didn’t sound like I’m calling your chosen romantic style itself a trend - I would never, when I call polyamory a “trend” I am referring exclusively to folks who did behave exactly as if it were any other fad that came and went, just with way heavier consequences)

Since you seem knowledgeable, maybe I’ll bug you about something I’ve wondered about?

Did you notice a significant (huge by my measure) increase in attempts at polyamory for a period of time? As in, that trend seemed to have almost a start and an end, and a real big swell in the middle. And if so, any comments on how that fits into your timeline overview above? Some of your thoughts sound like they may point to this but I certainly don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Anecdotally, it seems to me like I watched a huge chunk of my (significantly) younger sister’s generation get themselves into plural relationships, then realize after a year or two of various attempts (often including some serious abuse) that actually they didn’t like that idea at all.

And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely encourage people to try what they are curious about, it’s a tragedy to spend a life never exploring what one might like. But that phenomena with polyamory / plural relationships in particular stuck out to me, largely because many of the people I saw try it had never previously indicated even remote interest in similar, some behaved fairly jealously toward their partners actually. It felt like a strange societal motivation, some kind of soft cultural pressure among peers, to go for it. And I personally never witnessed a positive outcome, either (which is not me saying that no one should live that way if they enjoy it, or that no one can find it genuinely fulfilling, healthy, and preferable). And for those with clear gender lines in the plural relationships, it was always polygynous - never polyandrous (please let me know if those terms are offensive). Felt like weaponized sexual liberation, frankly, by horny dudes, but that’s me making some possibly unfair leaps and introducing my own bias into the interpretation.

I guess more than anything else I was just struck by what felt like a wave in popularity, followed by an accompanying wave of “oh, nah fuck that actually, forever”. Was interesting to watch. Any thoughts?

(Disclaimer: this can be a thorny topic, anyone should feel free to correct anything I’ve misrepresented, misunderstood, or just been unkind about, I’m not a jerk on purpose usually).

Doesn’t help that the English adjective “stoic” is used to describe exactly that, usually with a very positive connotation, to boot.

Couldn’t agree more with you both though, in my experience Stoicism offers some of the most broadly-applicable pragmatic advice of all the thought traditions I’ve encountered (with shoutouts to a few others, Buddhism being one, parts of which add up to similar practical advice).

The misunderstanding of it is kind of a sad tragedy, given how many of us could benefit from the teachings. Plus it’s very secular (unless I misremember), which ought to make it more accessible. Bummer.

Feel like saying more about what ya like?

Just in the name of completeness, I wouldn’t say that’s the only downside. I definitely have some stability issues with Bazzite, only when gaming though. But game crashes, occasional OS crashes, that hasn’t been exactly rare for me. But I will say, gaming is about the one thing in my life I’m almost unwilling to troubleshoot these days. Could be something specific to my setup that is uncommon for others, making my data point unhelpful.

And by and large, I’d absolutely recommend it for any Windows user who wants an easily transferable user experience and broadly fantastic gaming support with minimal fuss.

Would you be willing to say more about what you know / experienced about the removal of Discover? Preferences included? I only noticed it recently, been away from things for a bit, and you sound like your brief info would probably be at least as fruitful as the reading I was gonna look for :)

I’ve never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I’ve been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I’ve met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).

It’s expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).

Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t just glibly strait-jacket language, you’re part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.

Been using whatbox for a bit on recommendation from a friend who has used it for a decade or so. I could be crazy but I seem to remember them offering hosting right in the Netherlands in particular.

You could actually do it! If you founded a small dynasty of humans willing to type relentlessly for many hundreds of years, in succession.

“oh that? Yeah that’s my poopin’ wedge, wanna take her for a spin?”

I should definitely have not been left unsupervised as a teenager either lol. And yet, my mom wasn’t even in the same state some of the time lmao

Yep I’m this way and have recently come to realize that at my core I just don’t actually believe any other human has the right to tell me what to do. Full stop. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I should be allowed to do whatever I want, I understand my responsibilities, to my loved ones and society, better than most honestly. I just really can’t tolerate being told what to do.

And oddly it makes me a productive employee, a thoughtful partner, a good friend…largely to avoid scenarios where someone feels like they need to tell me what’s up.

But yeah, all the time society feels more and more like a constricting, stifling set of agreements…which I never actually agreed to.

Completely agree that learning about some of that made me kinder. Don’t agree about your reasoning for it not being scary, though.

It’s not “new” in the same way that using a computer wasn’t new when home PCs were introduced. However - home PCs massively increased the accessibility of computing and resulted in a huge boom in use, including by lots of people who never previously considered it. That’s what this is, that increase in accessibility, but for parasocial relationships with inanimate objects.

I’m not dooming so hard that I think society is in trouble via AI faux-mance in particular. But I do think it’s sad and troubling that many more people will now accept a (sometimes high) degree of self-imposed isolation, due to misplaced belief in a piece of technology, a false belief which the technology deliberately tries to engender.

And let’s remember, human social life is the original “network effect”. By that fact, it seems clear that taking more people out of IRL socialization (and replacing it strictly with simulation), is bad even for people who never touch the stuff.

Feels like a big increase in the ongoing general loneliness and atomization of society is headed our way.

I was just fooling around.

If you think you’re too good to get your hands dirty planting new-cat seeds, and you just want to enjoy them once they leave the vine, you’ve really got some thinking to do.

Interesting. Good to have a less rent-seeking option, not sure I love the idea of the Fed just (assumedly) having access to all my transactions, though.

To be fair, America’s Test Kitchen is a treasure of cooking information, I really like their cookbooks because they explain “why” for their recipes from a technical standpoint, which helps to understand substitutions where necessary. Plus they explain all the testing they did on variations and results, which helps troubleshoot my own dishes. The Cook’s Illustrated Meat Book may as well be named the Meat Bible (for the home cook).

These are arguments to refuse censorship much harder, not to comply.