In a world where we all have phones, I see no reason we all can’t have sad violin music at the ready for these occasions.

I see your point, but I still think a little thinking about what the ‘real you’ actually is is still warranted for the OP statement to work its fullest benefit. Sometimes it can be hard to suss out what’s actually ‘real’ or what was simply adaptation to specific circumstances to present a certain facade that was useful then, but harmful now. We humans are great at lying to ourselves so often it starts to feel like truth.

But agreed - don’t intentionally be disingenuous when engaging with others, because you’ll likely need to keep that up to keep them in your circle, and at some point the dissonance will bite you in the ass.

There’s some merit to this idea in general, but it begs the question: who are you? It can be argued that the ‘real’ you is a set of behaviours developed through your upbringing, education and social history to date. That might carry with it some unpleasant or maladaptive behaviours that, on the one hand, you may want to reject as not being the ‘real’ you, or if taking a tack of self-acceptance without thorough self-reflection, part of the ‘real’ you that you can and should change but which now seem like immutable traits.

Some time should be spent on figuring out what the ‘ideal’ you is - for no one other than yourself - to bring that closer into the field of being the ‘real’ you, then suss out which elements don’t fit from that ideal vision. It should also be noted that the ‘real’ you, despite maybe being based in some pillars that are resistant to this, can change over time - and that can be OK.

Signed: Guy who twisted himself into pretzel over the last decade and a bit, and is tasked with figuring out this whole ‘real you’ thing again. Only core pillar I’m not questioning is “Kindness is key”, though with new modifier “but you must protect yourself from those who have no appreciation of it, and be able to read and acknowledge those signs from flatterers and other folks who benefit unfairly”.

Another point on the ‘return to monke’ scale.

IIRC from the Pokemon days, there were a lot of concerns around the ‘prize’ scoring system, with the idea that you’d take the opponent’s prize cards when you knocked out a Pokemon. Misunderstanding/holdover from Pogs, I think (where getting the other player’s pogs was a thing).

Couple that with stories of kids getting knifed over holo Charizards, and I kinda get why schools were concerned (putting aside the ‘that’s not how the game works’ + ‘that was one disturbed kid’ elements).

Ngl an art installation at BM that is literally a pillar of salt would be funny as shit.

I know for some folks it’s a barrier, but this always sounds weird to someone whose registration experience was “haha, funni name” ➡️ types in two fields and presses one button ➡️ fediverse citizen.

Edit: it is somewhat more complicated these days, in that there are now three fields and a captcha.

I don’t have enough space, good enough acoustics, enough money, distance from my neighbours or appropriate zoning to let bands play in my house on a regular basis. So alas, I must leave my house once and a while.

Edit: And the people outside my house make way better tacos than I do, though this can be worked on.

I second mycoboutique, it is cute as fuck.

Sometimes, I think about the fact that if I post something really useful here, our traffic’s still so comparatively small that it probably won’t come up in a search engine query.

But that’s the way I like it, baby - I don’t want to live forever.

So I’ve since quit, and I understand why even what I’m about to describe doesn’t exist anymore where I am, but right at the tail end of smoking indoors there were businesses/buildings doing totally walled off, wellish ventilated smoking areas. Those seemed ok to me, and when I (stupidly) took up smoking I was sad those were gone.

The only, and last, one I saw when I was a smoker was in an airport, which was an unexpected godsend because my fuck does it suck to be a smoker waiting for a flight.

(Yes, it’s a gross and deadly habit that’s also unhealthy and gross for the people around you and the employees who had to work in/clean such spaces, and it makes sense to have no smoking indoors).

adds to ‘Things to do on your last day to burn all bridges if you magically come into wealth’ wish list

There’s a few people I know who use it for boilerplate templates for certain documents, who then of course go through it with a fine toothed comb to add relevant context and fix obvious nonsense.

I can only imagine there are others who aren’t as stringent with the output.

Heck, my primary use for a bit was custom text adventure games, but ChatGPT has a few weaknesses in that department (very, very conflict adverse for beating up bad guys, etc.). There’s probably ways to prompt engineer around these limitations, but a) there’s other, better suited AI tools for this use case, b) text adventure was a prolific genre for a bit, and a huge chunk made by actual humans can be found here - ifdb.org, c) real, actual humans still make them (if a little artsier and moody than I’d like most of the time), so eventually I stopped.

Did like the huge flexibility v. the parser available in most made by human text adventures, though.

Give this a shot maybe? I know there’s some other archive collections as well you could try digging into.

https://geocities.restorativland.org/

So real talk, what exactly is the angle here? Are these rogue instances in the links? Truly just trying to bait in the lonely and gullible to eventually solicit payment down the line?

It just seems … weird for a romance bait scam. Average looking woman (though could be to lower guards), links to Fediverse service profiles rather than botted DM exchanges, etc.

I could just be being naive, but idk. There’s a very particular brand of fishy to this, beyond the obvious. The other probable scammer I dealt with at least came with a sob story that I could see being more effective (end of his rope humanitarian worker in an African country, children dying due to lack of $ for the program).