Mate I’ve had some cracker first dates that didn’t work out in the long run but were absolutely part of the tapestry which got me to here.
The number of good first dates far outweighs the weird and shitty ones.
Some of my most treasured experiences are those quiet intimate moments just between two of you. An experience that just the two of you share. It is profound.
We are our experiences.
Asked a girl out on a date. She invited me over to watch a movie with her at her parents house (we were in our late teens). I arrived; her recently deceased family dog and incredibly distressed mother were both in the kitchen. Dog was a really big golden retriever that had been euthanized, and the mom had bought him home? Not sure why? Maybe to bury in the back yard or something? Idk
Anyway I offered to leave but she was insistent that we watch the movie together, which we did, on the couch, with her mom crying in the next room. Halfway through the movie the mom screams he’s still alive, he’s still alive. Go into the kitchen, she’d gone to move the body and it had expelled air and made some noise. I had to explain, with my best year 12 biology, what had happened. Five minutes of this woman losing her shit with grief out of her beloved companion dying.
Girl insisted we watch the last 10 minutes of the movie, it finishes with us watching in silence, I get up to leave and said something stupid like hey I’d love to do this again sometime and she says “I have a boyfriend”
I’m like alright well that’s that then and didn’t put in any more effort. Stupid me, she was hot and I really liked her. Being a dipshit I wrote a song about it, using the three guitar chords I knew, which takes me to act ii…
…five years later, I’m at a party, exchanging worst first date stories with friends and fellow partygoers including a cute blonde. I wait my turn, tell the story, she laughs her arse off and then goads me into singing the song, accompanying myself poorly on the guitar. I absolutely fucking nail it, everyone is in stitches, sit down next to her and the night goes from there. We end up leaving the party for a walk down to the local beach, made out on the beach, things get frisky, jump in a cab back to my house, in bed together, have drunken sex…which results in a broken condom. She lives literally the other side of town so we have to wait till (a) I’m sober enough to drive and (b) pharmacy is open to get a plan b, then have the most awkward drive back to her house. Get there, offer to walk her to the door, she says no, kisses me goodbye in the car, then texts me…to say she has a boyfriend.
Tricky, theirs is a cover version, so the original would still exist.
There’s a movie about that scenario with the Beatles. Called yesterday.
Don’t threaten me with a good time, baby
Hey - very much feel this one.
It will likely come from your kids in the future, the validation doesn’t come from society. They get to a point where they recognise what you did and say thanks.
You’re doing well, keep it up mate.
Diffuse can be used as a verb meaning “to spread out” or an adjective meaning “not concentrated.” It is often confused with defuse, which can only be a verb. The original meaning of defuse was “to take the fuse off a bomb,” but the word now usually means “to make less dangerous or tense.”
Mate you have to try it. It’s amazing.
If you want to step it up a both add vegemite. Legit off changing.
Thing that did it for me - world health organisation guidance that there is no safe dose for alcohol. Any amount has risk.
A lot of really tough grown up shit is coming. You’re going to have to make hard decisions. You kind of have to work it out as best you can.
Always remember that this, too, shall pass.
in answer to your question Marcus, because I paid attention in economics class and understand the concept of opportunity cost.
To paint the full picture, it’s $2,399 to pre order it in the country I live in (Australia).
The average wage in australia is 90k pretax, approx 70k post tax
2399 is mortgage payments, food or transportation.
Provides safety and rigour for the environments in which people work and provides a professional standard which indicates a person is trained / experienced / aware of the “right” way to do things.
Like at the very least, sexual health management, consent, grievances, injuries, comprehension of working conditions, rights, copyright, prevention of sexual slavery etc.
I know it’s onerous but the core of this is the worker and their health right.
Sex work is work. Decriminalise it, legislate it, create a sex workers employment category and taxation, require licensing and health checks, give copyright protections to content creators, to their images and likenesses.
To me porn is no more fantastical than acting is.
A simple way for any audio output device following the global standard used for the past 25 years to output sound directly from the device. Failure rate is one tenth that of any other external port. Use is so widespread in home audio that it’s absence is seen as a detractor.
The original Walkman has a 3.5mm jack. That’s how far back this standard has been in common use.
I can’t comprehend why anyone puts up with not having an audio jack.
Threshold.
In houses with mud floors, the stalks of wheat (thresh) were spread about as a kind of insulator and absorbative. A thresh hold was a block of wood at the entrance which stopped the thresh from getting spread through the doorway.
This grew to mean the boundary between the house and the rest of the world, to the point of symbolic ownership. When you cross a threshold you are going from one domain to another.
We now use it to mean a limit, or the how far you have to go before something changes or breaks. Kinda cool.
The other one is arrowhead. Terry Pratchett wrote a great piece on “ontic dumping”, where we use one word to mean one thing then associate it with another thing and the connection is just automatically known by all.
So ->
We know what this means right. Go in this direction, look at this direction, the thing which needs attention is in this direction. There are arrow heads everywhere. On signage, on interfaces, even on the spacecraft which we have sent careening off into the universe. If other species are out there, they might interact with an object which had an arrowhead on it and would have absolutely no concept of what it means.
Why does an arrow have a head anyway? Because that’s the way an arrow flies right. The pointy bit, which we call the arrowhead, moves in the direction that it’s pointing. Which is bullshit, because if you hold an arrow horizontally then drop it, it goes straight down. And it only flies in that direction if you apply force at one end of the arrow and propel it in that direction.
But WHY IS IT CALLED A HEAD?
It doesn’t resemble a head. There’s no body. Heads don’t usually “point” in the direction of travel. Yet we have taken a word that means “the bit that is important”, because we’ve determined that a head is an important thing, and the bit of a thing whxih does the most of the thinging should be called a head.
It baffles me.
I was young and naive, even a couple years later I would’ve done a bit of digging. You know, questions like what’s his name, how long you guys been going out for, shouldn’t he be here with you in your moment of need given your fucking dog is dead.