Actually, that Hertha Ayrton quote at the end? About the cats or whatever? That was actually me. I said that.

Forth

I’m not sure I understand. I have an ergodox moonlander and while it’s true there is no dedicated button for Function keys, that’s what the layers are for. It’s kind of the point of a configurable customizable keyboard.

So for me I have all my special symbols under my left hand while my right hand holds a special key. Takes some getting used to, but once I had practiced the special keys are actually closer than before because they’re all the normal keys. Similarly I have arrow keys under the keys labeled ‘hjkl’ when another key is held. My Function Keys are all accessible with special key and the number keys.

It takes some tweaking and tuning to figure out the layouts you want, but the whole point of a keyboard like this is that you can tune it to be whatever you need it to be. Now, if you don’t like to tinker and just want something out of the box, I get that, but even the default config has function keys, I think. Maybe you just didn’t read about how it works?

I already responded somewhere else, but I have more response that doesn’t make sense in that context.

First, about deepening conversation. I don’t know about this guy, so I’ll talk about myself. I have things I’m interested in, let’s call them “interests”, and I like to talk about them. And the only thing that stops me from talking about them constantly to everyone is the social understanding that they don’t want to hear about my interests.

So all it takes to have me talk about stuff is enough questions to demonstrate you really want to know.

“What do you like about blah blah blah?” will probably get a short answer because he’s used to people not really wanting to know more, so he’s giving the smallest answer that answers the question. But then, you ask a question about his answer. “Huh, how is that different than blah blah?”

Now maybe longer answer, you listen and ask based on that, and if you can manage it you could also circle back to a previous answer to connect some dots. That’s now a discussion! Now, of course, you do have to listen. Unsure if that’s a skill of yours or not.

As for the asking out, I think you should do it. But if you don’t trust yourself to deliver the speech live, you could write it down / print it out. Just make sure it contains escape hatches for him that assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t share your feelings, and that he can just tell you if that’s the case, and probably ends by saying he doesn’t need to necessarily give you an answer now and you’re just happy you could get it off your chest. I think going for something casual is better than something heartfelt and romantic, but I don’t know the two of you. The most important thing is that he knows, and the second most important thing is that you don’t want it to wreck things if feelings aren’t mutual.

And if you don’t want to awkwardly read it, you could just hand it to him and let him read it at his own pace. This lets you watch his face while reading, if he makes facial expressions and if you can read them.

I would recommend against an email or a text, though. It feels like, from the bits of your personality I’ve picked up here, the time between when you send it to whenever he responds is going to be absolute torture for you. Whereas he might just be busy and not have even seen it yet, you’ll already be inventing bad scenarios and deciding which new city you should move to since you obviously can’t stay here, etc, etc 😉

So probably best to deliver it in person, maybe at the end of a hangout, so you can be sure he received it and read it. And I know you may be scared, but don’t tell him to read it after you’re gone, because that’s now email territory where you can’t ever know if he’s read it yet! Just have him read it, assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t agree, and let him respond. And even if he doesn’t have an answer now, you know it’s done.

Good luck!

I’m a man, my wife made the first move, and I’m very glad she did! Taking the step from friend (or even just acquaintances) to more is risky for anyone. But, and maybe I’m biased here, I think it’s currently even more risky for guys. Word can get around, and you’re more likely to not just lose the one friendship, but to be labeled “creepy” generally if you’re wrong. Of course it’s possible for that to happen to a woman, but it’s way less likely for a woman to be perceived as a creep in general, and also men don’t talk amongst themselves the way women tend to.

Anyway, I knew my wife from a social space, and I didn’t want to be the guy who poisoned the environment and made it an uncomfortable location for women by pursuing any of them. So I was friendly and tried to be as non threatening as possible, which meant no asking out. So I was very relieved when she made a move!

Don’t know if your situation is anything like that, I’m just unsure of your source that says “active woman means short term”. I mean, think of all the dudes hitting on strangers in bars which either turns into a one night stand or a short fling. The averages have got to be better than that, right?

Yeah basically! There’s a reason most romantic comedies end with them starting to date. It’s because that’s the zany exciting bit. After that part, the next 40 years or whatever is a roommate who lives in your home with you, and you do taxes together, and you eat dinner together, and you go to your shared friend’s homes to hang out, and maybe you teach weird little gremlins how to be humans, and you talk after work about how your day went, and what you’re planning to do in the future.

And that stuff can be great! But looking like a model doesn’t make that stuff much better. Even people who live with models probably “get over it” pretty quick. You can’t be in awe 18 hours a day every day for 15 years. But, having a shared foundation of experiences and mutual respect does make those things easier. Liking each other’s friends does too.

You can learn to love someone, and you can learn to find an attractive person unattractive through interaction.

Can’t tell if trolling, quipping, or honestly asking…

I feel like some people who don’t want friends are often people with low self esteem who have decided their hypothetical future friends will abandon them, or not like them, or whatever, and so they convince themselves that they “don’t want that anyway” as a way of protecting themselves from future pain or embarrassment. In those cases, dating aside, the person should work on their self esteem.

If it’s not that, one could try casual hookup apps. These rely on a certain amount of work, and there’s no guarantee, especially if one lives in a less populated area, but it’s possible.

And the third option for someone who doesn’t want anything social and just wants sex, is sex work. This is exactly what it can be for! The only trouble is that in most places it’s illegal, which pushes it underground, making it both difficult to find and potentially dangerous… but this is the niche it’s meant to occupy.

But honestly… at least consider that it may be the first case, and see if you can search your feelings to figure out “why”.

One thing you could try, if you haven’t, is dating someone you connect with, and have a fun time with, even without “romantic spark”. Attraction can be important in a relationship, but in a long term relationship spark often doesn’t last anyway, and it’s other things that actually keep people together. Getting along well, working well together, handling stress in complementary ways, etc, are all more valuable long term.

So just as an experiment you could try dating someone for something “long”, but not actually that long in the grand scheme of things. Maybe 3 months, roughly one season. Even if you’re not physically attracted to them, try dating them anyway. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t actually lost anything. Just a bit of time. And you will have officially “had a girlfriend”, and gained some amount of relationship experience, even if it wasn’t the best.

And if it just so happens that you’re just not an “early term” guy, buf you’re actually a pretty good “mid-term” guy, then that’s great! Keep going! You haven’t got a lot to lose, in a sense, so you’re available for experimentation.

You’re not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy

Unnecessary info: “wan” is the Japanese equivalent of “woof”, and “ko” is a suffix meaning little. “wanko” is a cutesy name for dog, but essentially means “little woof”

I know it would be radical, but you could require that they release the server code open source. So it’s not their responsibility to run it, but if the community wants to run it, they can.

Or, if that’s complicated due to licensing etc, they could release a minimal server implementation that maybe doesn’t scale the same way, but at least has the interfaces covered so the community can take it from there. The game could at least still be played.

To be fair, we don’t see like reverse engineered printing. Printing is reverse engineered seeing. If we saw like this post is claiming shrimp see, and blue was blue and green was green and yellow was yellow, we wouldn’t be able to print by mixing three colours. We’d need one pigment per photoreceptor, same as we do now.

Small extra rant:

I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…

Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!

I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.

Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.

But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?

I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…

Thank you for your honesty! I’ve asked another followup question to OP on their response to my message which I invite you to answer as well.

But I have a question for you regarding cartoons! So, I have encountered, in my travels, fan art / cartoons based on shows where the characters would be young. Bart Simpson would be a classic example, since he’s supposed to be 10 or something, but there’s a tonne of Simpsons fan art. But they write on the front “all characters depicted are 18”, and more importantly he’ll be drawn with a huge, clearly adult, penis and balls. But otherwise his character design is the same, it’s not some “future” version of the character.

So my question is whether or not art like that – young characters with post-pubescent sexual features – is the sweet spot for you, or if instead that kind of ruins the comic for you because you were looking for a more child-like figure.

And feel free to not answer if you’d rather not, of course. This is the internet, after all!

Thank you for your honest and straightforward answer!

I imagine you’re more sensitive to it, as someone in the community, but do you ever hear someone talking about their attraction to a 4 year old (for example, as someone outside your range) and think “that’s so weird, I just don’t get it”? Basically, I’m asking if you ever feel towards them the way that most people would feel towards you? (at least in terms of confusion, ignoring the hate). Or is it closer to feeling more like a preference, where you’re more like “I guess I could see it, but it’s just not for me”, the way some guys might not find some celebrity attractive that other guys do find attractive.

Speaking of “deep child crush”, I have a more direct question which could get into uncomfortable territory, so please feel free to not answer this one if it feels too invasive.

People who are into adults tend to have sexual or sexualized characteristics that they focus on. The classics would be “boobs” or “butts” or “legs” for people attracted to women (though of course there can be others), and “hands” or “butts” again or “forearms / shoulders /muscles” or “voice” or “hair” or “height” for women (though of course there can be others).

Many of those are post-pubescent features, probably not by accident. So, what features do pedophiles find attractive in kids? What separates some random kid from a crush?

Children, in my experience, have relatively few boundaries or concern for social space. How do you handle a situation where a child runs up to you, or hugs you, or crawls all over you, etc? Especially if the parents aren’t aware of your preferences, and thus may not see the issue with “kids being kids”.

To draw parallels to my own experiences, I may not want to sexually assault random attractive women, but I don’t typically have them lay on top of me and hang off me non-sexually. It would at least be more temptation, I would assume… Adult women tend to keep a formal distance, because they know that attraction is present and don’t want to encourage it, if they can help it.

Also, if I can add another question on here, what age range are we talking about? Does the pedophile community have identity labels for people who are interested in particular ages? Or is there instead some “golden age” that basically all pedophiles are attracted to, and virtually no one is attracted to kids younger than that, for example.

I agree with OP. If there’s a puzzle in a game that’s clearly some kind of water puzzle, but I can make a boat to solve it in 15 seconds and bypass the obvious intent of the puzzle, maybe I feel a bit clever. But if I can solve every puzzle with effectively the same boat… what’s the point of doing the puzzles? I guess because I wanted puzzles? But on the other hand, if I know I can solve every puzzle with a 15 second boat, it feels kinda weird to pretend I don’t have an answer and struggle through anyway. Like, the victory is hollow when I know I could have solved it faster the dumb way.

The number of times in that game I thought “oh, maybe I have to jump up through the floor here to get through this door” and then I peeked through the floor and was like “oh, nope. It’s the damn final boss room again. Not supposed to be here yet, better go back through the floor and try another way to open this door” felt like I was babysitting the game so as to not entirely ruin the experience… and it kinda ruined the experience…

Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.