Yeah, and somehow it just gets worse once you’re just scheduling a full calendar of scrims a week in advance and treat it like work that way. The pugs were at least entertaining in some way, but the rest of it was only ever going to be satisfying if it lead somewhere instead of being a clearly misguided wasted effort from the start

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

Thanks! That’s surprising. We’d actually use the equivalent of “to” here too. Weird how our foreign language intuition works. I go by how sentences “taste” when I read them and it’s usually correct, this time somehow it has a weird encumbered taste with the “to”, yet it is correct.

If only the day-to-day autopilot part of the mind would work from what we’ve learnt literally as opposed to some weird personal associative “feeling”. Or maybe that’s just me…

Anyway, thanks!

Believe it or not, I’ve been a part of it since I was born. I didn’t just come to be in a vacuum. I’ve influenced the society as much as anyone, we work together to make it better, we are a team, we protest. We sign petitions. We vote. We talk and talk and talk and have kids that will, too, become a part of what we’ve worked hard for and against and with.

Being proud of the team, of yourself, or the fact that you with your team are actively succeeding in not becoming a fascist shithole like the US or Russia for example. It’s not nothing. It’s worth being proud of. And takes effort, work, input every single day of every single month of every single year.

Yeah. I’m proud of myself and everyone around me. But I’m also proud of what we’ve worked together to build. This country did not stay this way by itself. It’d be ruined by capitalism and fascism the second we, the people of this country, stopped fighting against it and making this nation something to feel proud belonging to.

I think most people who are sensible but claim pride for some collective achievement or team or whatever, do so outwardly mostly because it’d be tiring to always include a philosophy lecture about distinction and differentiating between one’s own and others’ achievements. When we think about it actively, we can realize the faults and the details and could put them in words, but who the fuck has the patience to go in depth about all that each time they state they are proud of their team, their friends, etc.?

It’s just easier to say I’m proud of team xyz and hope the other party has the mental facilities to understand that it’s not a simple matter when you break it to pieces and start philosophing about it, but it’s just convenient and more prudent not to go into details or full analysis mode on all that every time…

One can be proud despite its shortcomings. Nothing is perfect in this world. But there are things worth being proud of, despite understanding its flaws and being consistently critical of it as a whole.

I am proud of my nation and its progressive, socialist nature, yet I am fully, and painfully so, aware of it’s shortcomings and problems.

But despite the problems, it’s extremely hard for me not to feel pride for the way we handle things within and without, especially in comparison to the rest of the world. We’ve been consistently at the top of the most socially progressive charts of the world, having also been denoted the worlds happiest country for over 5 years in row, and so on.

I do have my own prides, things I’m not ashamed to claim being very good at, and I do have a lot of very loud criticism against my nation too. But I remain overall proud just because we dare to be, against most odds, progressive and socialist.

I would defend my country, even picking up arms, because the chances are, the invader will simply be worse. Lead to worse overall situation here. Anyone surpassing us on either social or progressive counts, would be almost certainly not invading anyone, let alone us.

Maybe I am the fool the quote talks about, the good-at-nothing simpleton falling back to national pride for lack of any of my own. But I do not feel like one and I certainly have a lot more, explicitly outside the concept of a nation and this specific nation too, prides and accomplishments to be proud of.

I don’t think national pride is all that bad. I think it can be reasonable if the nation is best at its class on things most important and dear to you. Of course most national pride around the world is rooted on shitty stuff, and most nationally pride people usually being neo-nazi assholes, yet I still remain steadfast in my opinion that it need not be so.

It can be fine. I am sure of that.

English isn’t my native language, but to me it sounds like there should be an “on” in place of “to” there? Is it correct grammar? And if it is, does it still sound equally “wrong” to someone natively speaking English or is this some weird quirk of the second language experience?

I would have never known better had I not gone to read the comments and see this…

Really can’t seem to understand how this works.

Never did any “magic eyes” or whatever books as a kid, so maybe I just don’t have any practice in this, but whether I try to cross my eyes focusing beyond the screen, or “above” the screen, I can’t get the resulting middle image to look like anything other than a blur.

Perhaps my eyes are somehow odd on the other hand. I don’t need glasses though, so I’m a bit skeptical that’s it.

I tried all the guides I found in this thread, including the floating hot dogs, attempting varying distances both with the screen and the finger, then trying the wall-eyed variants too for all of them, none of them work for me.

So odd. It seems it should work. No idea what I am doing wrong here.

Or is this the joke? To get people to squint for minutes on end on their screen?

I still use a few profucts with a similar concept, though the beads are of cellulose or similar fiber as opposed to plastic. I’m not aware if they’re problematic or not, so I thought I’d comment in the hope that perhaps someone who feels strongly about these things might educate me if they are indeed bad for you or the environment or something.

Just as a side anecdote, but I’ve found that having desired outcomes is a surefire way to get disappointed and let down.

I mean that as in a singular desired outcome for any given action. The more specific the outcome or its prerequisites, the better you’d be not to expect anything and just go do the thing without overthinking it. Note: not abandoning or giving up on the doing of the thing, rather just go and do it and adapt to what universe and chance gives you.

Never heard of such a thing. I’d try different brands, does not sound normal that the paper would shed.

But I think just about every bathroom would get regular dust buildup pretty quickly especially if it’s a flat (not a house) where one of the only outward air vents would usually be there.

Just mentioning that because a lot of people don’t seem to clean their bathroom floors — or other surfaces for that matter, that aren’t the actual toilet seat or the faucet — all that regularly. We’ve just recently had this talk with a friend of mine who’s a bachelor and was complaining about how his bathroom is somehow built wrong or faulty because it gets so dusty so quickly, and used ours as an example of how easy we have it because his would need constant cleaning to look similarly decent.

Had to tell them that unfortunately we are cleaning it, out of this very same necessity, very frequently and that’s the only reason it looks like it does as opposed to theirs…

Just a thought: Maybe others just clean it more often and that’s why there isn’t dust visible. You’d be a visitor on other peoples’ homes, so they very likely do some extra scrubbing right before you visit. Maybe you just don’t happen to see the place as it is in an average day, if not actively and frequently kept clean, and that’s why you think others don’t have the same buildup. You witness your bathroom every single day after all, others only occasionally.

Well, it’s been a few years now, but there used to be a fairly active hookup scene in this town, though that wasn’t my scene. It’s all things local at least here. Often people would just message you for various reasons, whatever you post, and sometimes it’d just lead to things once you chat a bit. I don’t think you could post memes or whatever back then, you could only take pictures with camera, couldn’t attach arbitrary images (e.g memes).

Re: the consent: I was initially confused like you, but while I’m not OP and can’t say for certain, I’m pretty sure they extend the concept of consent to also include being a target of lust, as in the target isn’t intending to, or consenting to, being a target of lust. As in using an image of someone/something not consenting to that use case, as material for self pleasure for example. I think.

Weirdly enough that isn’t something I’ve ever thought about actively. In a way it makes sense to extend it thus though. But then again it seems like a complex topic I’ve no expertise in, so I’ll just leave it at that.

They are doing an awful job of it, if that is the case. Most of my last few relationships, serious and casual alike, were from tinder, and those few that weren’t, were surprisingly enough, from jodel. But tinder has been the cultural standard here for a longish while now, and most everyone I know, friends and acquaintances, have met their partners from there. And after passing 30, not many are single anymore, and only very few in casual/serial relationships. So most are in stable committed relationships, of which most were from tinder.

Personally I never spent any money there and I don’t know any that have (though they could just be omitting it or it never just came up, I digress), yet I don’t really know many single people anymore either thanks to it.

So if their intention is keeping people searching, they really make it way too convenient and nice an experience to meet people and fall in love.

Could this maybe be a thing that EU somehow makes better here, versus e.g the US that I can sadly imagine would actually give all the tools for the companies to actively make it an eternal search… it feels to me it’s too good an experience for most I know for our experience to be the outlier. Why would people use it anyway, if it didn’t work?

I am in this picture and I don’t like it

Words to live by. Well put.

I think it’s not about money. It’s the audience.

Maybe this arc leads somewhere better though. He might be big enough to cause a paradigm shift eventually.

A very fundamental part of that is the amount of moving parts. Every person in the chain that is required for the thing to happen, has to either support the thing or otherwise follow through.

This very concept is what has saved us from nuclear apocalypse so far. Very literally so.