Stepos Venzny

I’m just looking at jolly cornbread.

There’s not really any value in determining whether labels like good person or bad person apply to you. Either option tends to end in the same result: an end to the process of introspection and a continuation of the same behavior you’re already doing. “I’m a good person so I don’t have to change” or “I’m a bad person so there’s no point in trying to change” but change is the only thing that will actually affect the feelings that are inspiring you to ask the question.

The update looks like a step in a healthy direction. You felt scared so you looked for support and you felt guilty so you looked to apologize (and reimburse). Stay focused on the process of feeling better and stop stressing about absolutes.

There’s always going to be more dust but more than zero isn’t as big a problem as more than a layer.

For me, the answer is vacations. Not in the sense of “time off work” but in the sense of “travel somewhere special during your time off work”. There is nothing less relaxing than being pressured to spend your free time correctly.

That rule was designed to discourage you from faking it.

Oh, you mean you’re a cook. I thought you had a custom burger.

Arby’s, ironically enough. Not having burgers used to be their whole identity.

I’m interested in also having it your way. What’s the burger?

Because that’s more effort and most people don’t care.

Sour grapes.

There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.

To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.

These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?

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?

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.”