Stepos Venzny

Everything except pants. My legs are apparently within the bounds of normality but my head, hands, feet, and spine are simply too big.

You wouldn’t think being six feet tall would be such a hindrance to shopping. It’s not big enough to stand out in a crowd, so why is it so big as to be incompatible with mass production?

Either humanity gradually grows to despise you for your ancient morals

or they don’t ever meaningfully surpass where we’re at today.

I’d always suggest being direct instead of waiting for other people to take a hint. Tactfully, mind you. Phrase it in a relaxed, emotionally neutral way that doesn’t single him out. Something like “Really, I am doing fine. When I’m at work, I just prefer to focus on the work itself instead of talking with people. I’m more at ease that way.”

That being said, is this the kind of work situation where you’re one of many options to make friends with or is it more of a you and him stuck in a room together all day type of thing? He sounds like a lonely person and if the two of you are stuck together then the best idea might be to seek a social compromise between you two’s preferences, like designating some specific portions of the day as times when it’s appropriate to have a conversation. You try to be sociable for him when it’s on, he tries to be quiet for you when it’s off.

I’ve only met two people I would describe as narcissistic and they don’t align on this subject.

What they had in common was not feeling differently about cats than they do other animals, which is also true of almost everyone I’ve known that isn’t narcissistic.

Content, when referring to media.

I don’t mind people using “literally” to refer to things that they don’t literally mean because that’s just perfectly normal exaggeration.

What I hate is that the dictionary definition changed to formalize the nonliteral meaning as a literal meaning.

I’m playing Dragon’s Dogma II, taking the suspended tram into Bahkbattal or however you spell it. One of my pawns failed to make it into the basket before it started moving but they’re not a ranged fighter so they’re no use in driving off harpies anyways and I don’t bother turning back since I know from previous antics that they tend to find a way back to you.

A few minutes into the trip, dangling precariously in a rickety wooden contraption over a canyon, I hear the cry of a griffin. I spot it over the horizon, its eyes locked with mine. I am forced to watch helplessly as it approaches, drawing an arrow as if it could accomplish anything. The griffin slams into my tram, shattering it instantly and dropping the three of us to our doom.

That pawn that didn’t make it on the tram catches me in a bridal carry and sets me gently down on my feet, completely unharmed.

That’s why the game’s fast travel systems are made to discourage you from using them, because adventures don’t happen during loading screens.

That sounds apocryphal.

Training it on research papers wouldn’t make it smarter, it would just make it better at mimicking their writing style.

Don’t fall for the hype.

When they stop feeling clean. Why are you all counting days?

Does he think a tariff is a ban? Is that why he’s always so confused when people describe them as being like a tax around him?

I keep my head down. No legal consequences isn’t the same thing as no consequences.

Would you think less of a potential partner if they had momentarily lapsed in their reading comprehension?

Would you think less of a potential partner if they didn’t know how to chew properly?

Given how it started,

One of the guys (Bob) suggested that we create a group text

and how it continued,

Bob made a group text with only those who attended this event, asking everyone to text when they got home

the stakes of any course of action feel pretty low. These groups Bob’s setting up feel pretty much like they were done on a whim from the start so I wouldn’t overthink how to participate in them. Invite more members if that would make you more comfortable, disengage if that would make you more comfortable, and trust that other members will eventually do what makes them comfortable in turn until you all find equilibrium.

I’m reading the update and, according to these details, every single person involved including yourself is making it weird and you all seem to want the group to not be comprised the way it currently is. That the group is eight men and one woman isn’t the problem, the problem is you all as individuals seem make for a bad group.

It’s only weird if it’s weird. Anyone making it weird?

My parents were separated since before I started forming long-term memories and I was raised by my single mother. We used to visit my dad’s side of the family for a week or so every other Christmas, I lived with him for a couple months as a teenager when my home life got particularly rough due to a profoundly toxic non-parent influence, and during stay that we ignored each other apart from the cliche “divorced parent and kid who don’t actually know each other at all trying to act their respective parts but neither knows how or really wants to or frankly likes the other one but they both know it’s polite to pretend” sorts of interactions (which were quite sparing even as those go). Neither of us has ever attempted to keep in touch with the other over the phone or in writing.

To be clear, I don’t hold any of that against him even a little bit; that’s all perfectly normal on his end as far as I’m concerned. That’s all just there for context when I tell you that, now that I’m well into my 30s, I recently heard from my older sister who actually tries to stay connected to him that he’s begun boasting about how proud he is for having shaped me into the man I am today. And, like, I’m not even on social media so I’m not a person he’s even capable of keeping tabs on from a distance if he tried. He fully has no idea who I am. He not only doesn’t deserve to take credit, he doesn’t even know what he’s taking credit for. I’m just so automatically an extension of himself by virtue of my DNA that he goes around telling other people that he’s proud of me.

(A more technically accurate but less entertaining answer to the question is that he’s politically a Libertarian.)

As a similar “tech person,” me googling tech problems is exactly as lazy as the person asking me.

Their solution is “ask someone” and our solution is also “ask someone.”

I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.

The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.

The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.