• 12 Posts
  • 340 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • If one really dug through my history before this comment and probably in to the future when I’ve long forgotten about it you’d probably find examples of me not practicing what I’m about to preach but, to an extent no one really is a loser because the term is subjective and meaningless in any practical sense. People might do “loser” things sometimes or even constantly, but still have capacity for change or posess redeeming factors that make them worth time and energy to at least someone. The question is whether they’re worth your time and energy, and whether you have reason to want them to redeem themselves in your eyes.

    If your father had been a much nicer spoken man, and also stayed with your mother, but still had the terrible money management and bad financial situation would you still feel inclined to call him a loser? Someone with no attachment to him and whose personal criteria for casting someone in to that bucket centres around material wealth might, but his own children maybe less so. As it happens he has been bad with money, has made a lot of decisions you disapprove of and persists in interacting with you in a reprehensible manner so it’s entirely understandable why you might not like him very much or feel much reason to indulge him or invest in a relationship with him. To me that’s enough, his “loserdom” status is immaterial, in fact it’s a distraction, because if you ever DID change your mind and wanted to attempt to repair the relationship, such value judgements might be hard to cast aside once they’re allowed to calcify and such a change of mind won’t be about his worth based on some extrinsic, arbitrary label but instead about what he is and continues to be to you.











  • I have seen payphones around… like, at all. I’ve seen the iconic bright pink lit up tops and wifi symbol so I can attest that they are indeed still around, but it’s very uncommon to see them. There’s not a whole lot left and to say they’re “everywhere”, I mean… I haven’t been interstate for a while but, what part of Australia are you in that these are a common fixture for you?





  • I reckon it’s probably to do with internally trying to downregulate the smile so it doesn’t look really weird or crazy or fake or stupid and you just overcompensate. You don’t know what you look like while you’re doing it and that information void gives rise to some self consciousness and pre-emptive embarrassment. Natural smiles don’t require you to think about how to do it at all so most people don’t really know how to smile in a socially acceptable way on demand with a few seconds notice. Some people are better at it than others, maybe they have a better intuition, maybe they have a better awareness of what muscle movements correspond to what changes on their face and also a really good grasp of which tiny subtleties lead to a photogenic smile or the grimace of a maniacal murderer. Actors are probably pretty good at it either through intuition or just a lot of practice. I should imagine you could train yourself to be better at it, but it’d feel weird and vain to spend your time doing that so a lot of us just make weirdly flat or stern faces in photos.

    If you can actually just enjoy the moment so it makes you smile as a result it’d probably get better results but that idea leads to its whole own self reflexive internal monologue trying to concentrate and force yourself to be happy that probably results in a frown while you summon that concentration.





  • The thing is, this would just be equivalent to leaving it on at all hours, because who would join such a chat room without the intention of switching it on. Even if you joined such a chat room and had some restraint and decided to wait till the moment you thought would be most amusing, someone else would definitely just decided that it should be on now and basically the only lull would be if the number of users was relatively limited and mostly in the same timezone so everyone is sleeping.