Two things.

First, dating and commitment is about matching and compatibility, not about some kind of objective ranking system of quality or merit. It’s about how a partner or potential partner rates on your own personal scale, not some sort of societal scale built by social consensus. So while it is ok for you to find a particular trait to be a negative, or even a deal breaker, your point is completely irrelevant to the advice being given, which is not to hide important traits of one’s identity.

Second, your own preference here is stated in unnecessarily condescending terms, as if your preferences are right and the opposite preference is wrong or the sign of some kind of disorder. Whatever your definition of “toys and dolls” are, it probably isn’t a very tightly defined term, and I’d venture to guess that you are OK with some kinds of “toys” but not others. People collect stuff. People develop emotional attachment to physical things all the time. And for you to gatekeep and say which things are acceptable or unacceptable is kinda an asshole move.

Any pizza can be a personal pizza if you believe in yourself.

It’s already a modification to the word to describe something smaller (a cake baked in a cup), so going back the other way seems like a redundancy.

Like a giant pygmy hippo.

With your knife/sword example, maybe the best analogy is describing the shortest longsword.

Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it’s a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.

The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.

If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we’re still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.

And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you’re still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.

Tim Whatley

My single, “My single is dropping,” is dropping.

My favorite of his are:

This commentary on Batman

The best things in life are free

The true meaning of Christmas

I don’t care what anyone says, Zach Woods as Gabe Lewis and James Spader as Robert California (aka The Lizard King) were fantastic.

And the single best cold open was from Season 8, when Erin faked Andy’s mother’s death to impress a client.

One day blinding stew

Conductor threw up on my kid

That’s kinda the thesis of the whole article.

Stories about rich people where their wealth is part of the plot are getting tired, but more insidiously, stories not involving wealth are still defaulting to very well-off people with expensive homes/furnishings/clothes/style/cars.

It’s True Wagner. He does flyers like this and they are pretty funny.

Obvious Plant puts products on shelves, and True Wagner puts flyers up.

He’s the same guy who did “one day blinding stew” and “conductor of this train threw up on my kid,” both instant classics.

404 is great, too, for coverage of those topics.

Defector is worth a special mention in large part because it’s one of the few places on the internet that still makes me laugh out loud. It’s ostensibly a sports site, but when they stray off topic it’s some of the best stupid shit on the internet.

Yeah, I agree. I drop in on CrossFit style classes from time to time, maybe 2-3 times per month (not actually named CrossFit anymore as my local gym de-affiliated from CrossFit itself). They help me identify things that I’m not good at, and give me ideas for programming in stuff to build in those weaknesses.

So compared to the typical regular CrossFit gym members I’m probably much stronger on powerlifting, slightly stronger on Olympic lifting, middle of the pack on steady state cardio like rowing or running, and way behind on metcon type workouts where you do a bunch of barbell or kettlebell or body weight exercises for time.

After I hit my strength goals this summer, I’m probably going to switch to 2 strength workouts and 2 metcon style workouts per week, specifically to address that weakness. And then I’ll have to program mobility and flexibility work, too, as that is another significant weakness of mine.

I think of it more as a set of skills that needs to be maintained, and is easier to do when regularly engaged.

There was a comment recently that I really liked, here, by @[email protected] :

I think people do not recognize the immense value of weak interpersonal bonds, like going to the same corner store all the time. But they are the glue that holds society together. It’s not the deep friendships, you can only have a few of those. It’s those people you are acquainted with, and look forward to seeing, people you wave to, all those little connections add up.

The little weak bonds help keep you grounded so that you can tighten and bolster the deeper and more meaningful bonds. I’m a better friend to my closest friends in large part because I have the experience and lessons learned from past situations with friendship: how to be supportive when a friend is going through a death in the family, a divorce, a period of unemployment, how to celebrate with a friend getting married, having new kids, etc. Each little situation presents an opportunity to be a good friend (and gives better information about what you can expect from your good friends), and just basically sharpens those social bonds and your ability to navigate them in a way that enriches your own life and your friends’ lives.

So it’s not a finite amount of juice. It’s a muscle that can be made stronger, and I’d argue is worth actively making stronger.

I’m making lifelong friends in this Wendy’s right now.

I’m baffled by some of the responses in this thread. Yes, it’s harder to make friends in one’s 20’s than in the teens, and harder to make friends in one’s 30’s than in one’s 20’s.

But to act like it’s inevitable, or even desirable, to not make new friendships after the age of 20 seems like overstating things.

The people you grow up with and befriend at a young age share those similar roots. That will always be valuable in friendships.

And the people you befriend later in life, through your hobbies, your career, your neighborhood, your mutual relationships also share those commonalities, and that will bring something valuable to those relationships, too. One of the most things I love about meeting, dating, and marrying my wife is that it mingled our two worlds of friends, and a lot of the friends I met through her in my 30’s are now some of my best friends today.

I rely on local friends for things that require geographical closeness. I rely on fellow parents for parenting support (including favors, advice, even jokes/rants). I am close with former and current colleagues, and we talk shop, careers, people we know, and sometimes refer each other to job opportunities or other work.

There is a certain richness that comes from multiple social relationships evolving and developing over time, including repeat acquaintances, superficial friendships, all the way to very close or very intimate friendships. We’re all just walking through life in different stages, and each stage has different needs and opportunities to rely on and provide support to your social network.

Is there a correlation, inverse or otherwise, between the quality of friendships and the quantity of friends?

Defector is fucking great. It’s the team that made Deadspin magical, who all revolted when Deadspin got bought by private equity and run into the ground, and banded together to form an employee-owned outlet whose authors are just all great writers.

The editor in chief of Deadspin, who fought the dumb decisions when private equity took over, ended up resigning in a blaze of glory by posting this article on the site as she left.

She also has a great new book out on how private equity breaks things.

The developers of the Lemmy software are the admins of the lemmy.ml instance and are problematic. The complaint is that the software itself can’t be separated from the priorities of the .ml instance.

Piefed doesn’t have the same issue, even if the flagship instance federates with .ml

No kids: I could wake up at 8:30 and be in the office by 9, but generally preferred to wake up at 8 and have time to slowly get going.

1 kid: I could wake up at 7:45 and get the toddler dropped off at daycare by 8:45, then be in the office by 9. It would usually be a harried morning, not at all relaxing.

2 kids: I wake up at 7 and try to get a few things ready for the slog of getting the kids to eat their breakfast, brush their teeth, get their clothes on, and on their way to a daycare and an elementary school. I roll into work at 9:30, and I take like 30 minutes to make coffee and get ready for the day. I’m now senior enough in my office that I can refuse routine meetings/calls before 10am, and nobody cares what time I come in or leave.

Note that I live within a 10-minute bike ride to my office. Most parents I know chose to move further from work so that they’d have more space for kids and maybe better schools, so many people have added even more time to their commutes for their kids. I consider myself lucky and privileged to be able to not have to wake up before 7, and still be able to pick up and drop off my kids.