Thanks for sharing this story. The care you feel for him comes through strongly in your comment. I appreciate being able to have a small insight into the life of one Iranian person; it’s not much, but I’ve found this kind of thing to be a helpful way to anchor my concern around the current conflict in compassion for my fellow humans, rather than disconnected geopolitics.

I think this story will stick with me. I wonder whether the weight of your worry will feel a little lighter now that you’re not the only person carrying it. I hope he and his family are doing okay. I hope he is able to someday see a world where his art can reach more people like you.

Don’t worry, I didn’t get the sense that you were saying it in “we have it worse” kind of way. I was just giving some additional perspective from my side of the aisle — because solidarity is always good when facing something a bit grim

I don’t think it’s necessary to have to put too much thought into clicking “like” on people when online dating; The landscape pretty much requires casting a wide net, regardless of gender. Some people go way overboard on that though — they treat people like they’re pieces of meat at the market, and then they mope about how lonely they are.

I have met good people on these apps, but man, it sure does take a lot of effort to get past the initial “vibe checking” stages (which can include the first in person date or so). Fortunately my profile is weird as hell, and whilst that doesn’t put off the creeps, it does draw in the people who are like “damn, this chick is weird…I bet we’d get on!”

Eh you can do better, have another go at it.

No, thank you.

One time, I was on a discord call with a bunch of friends, and one friend took their headset off to get something from the other room. Usually the noise cancellation means that their cat’s meows were rarely audible, but this time, we could hear her quite clearly — it seems she had decided to investigate the headset. When we realised this, we called out her name, which caused her to become even more vocal, and for us to have a full on conversation with this cute kitty.

My friend could hear the meows from the other room and was curious as to why her cat was so vocal. They found it hilarious when they came back and realised what had happened. It’s not too surprising really — sometimes when my friend was cuddling their cat with their headset on, we would call out the cat’s name to see if this would induce “helicopter ears”

For someone who is excited to go and have fun playing with this tech that’s apparently everything you’ve been waiting for, you seem weirdly eager to get angry over other people being angry?

What men have to offer is that they are people, who each have their own unique, inner world, shaped by their life experiences. They have the capacity to learn and grow beyond their past, and to learn how to facilitate the growth of a partner.

Some men won’t allow themselves this kind of growth, and will condemn both themselves and the people around them to being miserable, but you can’t force people to change. But there are many men who relish the chance to be something other than the narrowly defined ideal enforced by the pressures of hegemonic masculinity.

Yeah, that scans with my own experience. I’ve known plenty of poly dudes who aren’t necessarily “conventionally attractive” (ugh, I hate that phrase) who have multiple partners and/or lots of casual sex. All of them are pretty charismatic and sensitive, and that’s a big deal even if we’re just looking at sexual relationships.

Recently I’ve been trying out online dating, and something that has been super striking to me is the number of guys who end up being terrible in bed because they go into things with a sort of guidebook, treating “good at sex” as being some kind of objective trait, and measuring their self worth by whether or not I orgasm. That’s one “archetype” I’ve stumbled across a bunch, but the other is much more like the kind of guy who successfully does polyamory, regardless of their physical appearance. Their “strategy” involves actually listening and being open to learning what makes me in particular tick. You used the word “vulnerable” in your comment, and that’s exactly it — in my view, that’s an essential quality, even in more casual relationships. You’ve got to be comfortable in your own skin.

And for some people, going to the gym does help with that. I know that I felt a lot more confident when I was more of a beefcake. But it’s certainly not the only way to do it

Getting loads of matches isn’t necessarily a boon. I’ve had quite a few times where it turns out that a person I’ve matched with actually doesn’t find me attractive at all, but they were just liking profiles en masse to maximise their chance of getting likes.

Although, I prefer the people who are honest about the fact they consider me ugly than the ones who consider me unattractive but go on a date with me anyway, because I’m better than nothing. I once even ended up finding out that a dude was 0% attracted to me after we had been on a few dates and I had ended up at his place; he was unable to maintain an erection, and this led to him confessing that he wasn’t physically into me at all, but that I was the best option available.

I’m far from conventionally attractive, but I also know that I’m not the repugnant ogre that these instances made me feel like. It’s exhausting to do online dating because even the excessive number of likes just ends up being a source of stress: “is this person actually into me, or am I functionally a fleshlight to them?”

It’s especially frustrating because dudes who are like this are also making it worse for other men on the app who actually want to meet someone. It puts women more on guard, and makes us feel overwhelmed, which makes it less likely that we’ll have the emotional or mental energy spare to message back someone who’ll end up being genuine

When we consider how many people there are who are seeing a large number of posts over time, then it becomes inevitable that there will be occasional coincidences like this. I know that I have personally experienced a few instances where a post presented the perfect opportunity to regale people with a story of something incredibly improbable that happened to me.

There are also a few of those instances where I have had practice writing about them, because that kind of thing can help with trauma processing.

Ultimately, we can’t know, but for harmless things like this, I tend to prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt

Evangelising the Fediverse on Reddit is not for me, but respect to anyone who does try that (I save my evangelising for my irl folk. I’m wearing them down)

Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There’s a surprisingly amount of data that’s released and is in a sensible format.

During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I’m proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one