No, just a few people in corporate culture in the early 2020s. Too much time in linkedin and not doing useful work.

Manslaughter is a crime for a reason. Extreme purposeful negligence that caused a literal death is a decision they made, and you shouldn’t be ideally rehabilitated to avoid the situation happening again.

That’s fucked. Dating apps are pretty much a universally bad time, and it can really suck the soul out of you. Good luck to you.

Oh! Oh! What about THE METAVERSE!?!

Man fuck the metaverse. Everyone I met hyping it hadn’t used VR once in their life.

I’ve had thoughts about this for a while, and my conclusion is that the problem with Mary Sues isn’t what people actually say it is. Most of the time it’s an inaccurate attempt to describe a frustration with poor writing. How much sexism depends on the person generally.

The problem with characters that are hyper competent, likable to everyone in the text, perfect in every way, is that we’re somewhat hardwired to hate those people. Jealousy, finding them boring, hating them for the effect they have on the story, whatever you like. Characters like that are often even specifically used as villains for that reason.

The way to balance hyper competence is with some genuinely huge flaws. Light is an egomaniac who is constantly nearly being caught out. Iron man is a narcissist with a huge drinking problem and emotionally unstable. Superman is a huge dork with confidence issues. Spiderman is lower class.

There’s a kind of karmic balance that’s struck, therefore it works better in people’s minds for a number of reasons. It helps humanize them, it better matches people’s lived experience, it makes the character pop.

Here we get to the main problem: Writers are phenomenally bad at writing women. It’s cultural at this point. Women are rarely if ever depicted with internal struggles, ideals, or even flaws beyond superficial ones. If they lack that depth to achieve the aforementioned karmic balance, they can’t become well rounded characters. You essentially nailed on a power fantasy to a wooden board. I would argue that weakness is where the huge systemic sexism comes in, but I digress.

Case in point, my understanding is in the new superman movie his cousin shows up, pretty much the same power set, and she’s just a huge mess. I’ve not seen an iota of Mary Sue accusation about that character, because she’s balanced in that way. Wonder woman might be a better example as a main character, because she has concrete flaws, and they actively have consequences in the story. Her inability to navigate the world and it’s rules is both a blessing and a curse for her, and the story reflects that. Harley Quinn gets away with so much, but people don’t mind because she’s a nutcase.

Something like Rey, not only does she not really have flaws, she barely has a character. It’s not entirely one dimensional, but poor Daisy ain’t got much to work with here. Because the story is suggesting we should like and root for her, but not giving us much to actually humanize or relate to her, we tend to reject that mentally, and it often bothers us that the story insists that she’s the real deal. Contrast that to Kylo, who’s on the same level, but a hot mess who can’t keep his cosplay straight, and he’s considered to be the best part of the sequels by many.

Korra from LoK is a slightly different case, where the character has flaws, but the story often fails to honour their consequences. If she’s constantly screwing up, but never really being punished for it, if feels fake, like the story is cheating, and people hate that as well. I personally think it might also have something to do with how the show structures her emotional growth through the series, but I don’t want to get down that rabbit hole.

I think there’s an ease of writing men that comes with practice, as a society. Just like stories have the heroes journey, artists have colour theory, and character writers can write flawed men. There’s a whole world of good male characters to draw inspiration from, and most writers can’t tell when a women character doesn’t work because we’re frankly not used to them yet. As such, Gary Stus are honestly easier to spot, and don’t tend to survive the editing process I imagine.

Ooh that’s a tricky one. There’s a lot of different ways to flirt, it all depends on a few things. I’ve also never had to write this down so I’m working backwards from my own learned experience here.

Flirting is pretty close to just acting regular around someone, at least in the context you’re talking about. You need to work with implied intent, like she is with going out of her way to be around you, if it is something she’s doing on purpose a few times. You’ll have to be careful if you’re in a workplace like it sounds, don’t take it too fast, and always leave room for her to gracefully disengage. I’ve never been brave enough to risk my work for a potential connection, but that part is up to you.

First, be yourself. I know that one gets thrown around, but it’s incredibly important that you don’t suddenly start acting like someone you’re not, or do stuff you otherwise wouldn’t. If they’re flirting with you, they must like you being yourself already, and if they don’t like you being yourself, it wasn’t worth pursuing anyway.

Obviously, as you don’t know if they’re into you, you don’t want to come on too strong. In general being playful is the key, slowly becoming more comfortable with them as time goes on. Keep it fun, easy, at least initially. Light teasing, jokes, a bit of eye contact. Whatever is most comfortable for you.

In general, I would make sure they know you appreciate that they’re around, especially if they’re putting themself out there to you like you suspect. Smile at them when they turn up. Go out of your way to initiate conversation and hang out with them in turn. Comments/compliments on they way they go out of their way to spend time with you, stuff like saying it’s good to see them when they turn up. Veil it as jokes, or just be upfront with it. Be a bit warmer with how you talk to them, maybe a small gift. You want the subtext to be that you’ve noticed they put the effort in, you appreciate it, are into it, and willing to reciprocate. This is also key because this signals to them that you’ve taken their intentions as flirting, and if they weren’t going for that, they have the opportunity of de-escalating.

Keep compliments generally about stuff they have control over, stuff they’ve obviously put effort into. Jewellery, hair, clothes, how they act, their competencies. Don’t go for stuff like body or attractiveness until way way later, like after a date or two, or they do it to you first.

You can also leave casual touching a bit later, generally after you’re actually on a date, things have been going well for a good while, or if they already break the touch barrier. Women get to be a little looser with that, but if you’re a dude it’s incredibly easy to come off as creepy if they’re not 100% into it. Keep in mind there’s often a power imbalance, testosterone will likely make you stronger than someone without it, so by default women need to be careful around men. It’s important she always feels comfortable around you, coming on too strong can really torpedo things. It should be fine by the sounds of things, but just to be sure you know.

If all is going well, at some point you’ll have to turn it from subtext to text. That is, you’ll actually have to say to her face that you’re enjoying this, and want to spend more time with her. Dating is a different topic, but similar rules apply. Don’t leave it too long, but it sounds like it’s already going well, so it should be fine.

Take it easy, enjoy yourself. You might mess up, consider it an education for next time. It’ll get easier as you go.

1 in 8 billion is pretty good odds though.

It definitely can be. Question is, do you know how to flirt back in an appropriate manner?

Had my 2 front ones done, full posts into my skull. Had to actually get them redone semi recently actually, just the teeth not the posts. I can tell you that while it is intimidating, I’m pretty happy with the results. Then again 2 front teeth is a pretty big difference. The cost was also fairly huge as well.

I legitimately forgot how bad it is in America. I’m like why don’t you take the train to somewhere for a nice walk? I forgot you guys can’t really do those things with your infrastructure.

Technology is not inheritly evil, even stuff like cryptocurrency, NFTs, social media, LLMs, all of that has really interesting technology behind it, but has been used by people for nefarious means.

You can most certainly engage with technology without facilitating things like fascism and surveillance still, though arguably it is harder. But conversely, things like fediverse are happening where by their nature they are much harder to be taken over by corporate interests or fascism. It’s an always changing landscape, and you’re likely going to need to be a bit of a nomad until things get better. But I think they will get better.

That one’s pretty fair, each version of the text has pretty blatant differences

The math you just did terrifies me and I have no way of verifying it, so I’ll just say good job and leave it at that.

Thanks! I think it sounds better than it spells but the spirit is there

Fauxding

Amazing

It already vibrates so

I’m not looking it up, but there was a thing I remember seeing a little while ago that there literally is a biological motive towards women seeking out men with pathetic traits.

It’s to do with seeking out potential partners that are either submissive or dominant, depending on what you’re into. It’s a non specific to gender desire to form a pairing with a clear dominant party. I don’t think it’s universal or anything, but it’s something people are into.

Pretty sure I saw this through a look into why women are into waterboy from dispatch actually.

Multiplayer is fine, there are specific multiplayer cards that can really change up how you play. I wouldn’t say it’s earth shattering or anything, but it’s still a good time.

That’s pretty much it, instead of having everything planned out ahead of time you just kind of let it flow, growing like a garden. It helps because sometimes preplanning can be a bit restrictive, you tend to get more varied responses by garden style instead.

Winds of winter is the next book in the “a song of ice and Fire” series. It’s been well over a decade since the last book. The fan consensus is that, amongst other reasons, he hasn’t finished it because in the last few books he let the story grow wildly out of scope, and is having huge difficulties resolving everything in a satisfying matter. Hence my caution on the style.