I moved cities about 5 times between 18 and 30. Each time I had a pretty easy time making new friends in the place where I found myself, and learning a bit about myself and what I’m looking for in friendships, what I have to offer in a friendship, and the types of people I get along best with.

By the time I sorta settled down in my 30’s in one more new city, I had decades of building that actual skills of meeting new people, becoming good friends with the ones who got along with me, and then maintaining those friendships over time.

Now, in my 40’s, even with kids, I still make friendships at work, in the neighborhood, through my kids’ schools and activities, etc. Making the leap of “let’s hang out outside of the context where we met” grows easier when you’ve done it a million times before. And the act of scheduling friend interactions on your personal calendar becomes second nature over time, as well.

All this is to say that it’s a feedback loop, and you want to be in the virtuous cycle, not the vicious cycle. But if you are in the spiral, breaking out of it can pay dividends faster than you’d expect.

This is several of the plotlines running through Superbad.

I buy stuff from all sorts of places. I’m pretty serious about food and cooking, and I run through a pretty wide variety of cultures and regional variation in making my food. So for me, this is how I buy:

Fresh produce in season: street markets

Fresh produce out of season (greenhouse grown or shipped in from another latitude): Whole Foods

Mainstream American prepackaged foods: nearest big box corporate supermarket.

Day to day meat, dairy, and seafood (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp): Whole Foods

Specialty meat (aged stuff, unusual cuts): local specialty butcher, ethnic grocery stores

Specialty seafood (live seafood, less common items): specialty seafood shop

Fancy cheeses: cheese store in my neighborhood, occasionally Whole Foods

Various ethnic specialities (Kim chi, tortillas, paneer, certain types of Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese vegetables, Mexican/Indian spices) that are perishable: ethnic grocery stores

Unusual or imported prepackaged or shelf stable foods/spices: ethnic grocery stores, Amazon, other online stores depending on the item.

Maybe the real toast was the strokes we had along the way.

The current ratio is probably 10 to 1

In terms of compliments you give, what’s the ratio? Be part of the solution.

I compliment my friends all the time. It’s an easy way to support the people you care about.

I had the luxury of watching it twice in a week (was visiting family for Christmas that year, not a ton to do around the house but watch movies), and I thought that it was a really satisfying film to watch over two viewings. It’s definitely an interesting artistic choice to make a movie that benefits from a second viewing, and I can see why that turns people away, but I really enjoyed it.

I’m pretty sure his father gets arrested and he has to keep the family together by taking over their real estate development business.

I thought we were posting corn to return to actual shitposts, this one is too informative and interesting.

obversion

obsevation

I was hoping that by observing your comment these would collapse into the spelling “observation.”

What does “malicious” mean here? Structural racism often doesn’t have ill intent from any individual people, and nevertheless still affects people’s daily lives.

We think in terms of tokens, too, but we have the ability to look under the hood at some of how our knowledge is constructed.

For the typical literate English speaker, we seamlessly pronounce certain letter combinations as different from the component parts (like ch, sh, ph, or looking ahead to see if the syllable ends in an E to decide how to pronounce the vowel in the middle). Then, entire words or phrases have a single meaning that doesn’t get broken apart. Similarly, people who are fluent in multiple languages, including languages that use the same script (e.g., latin letters), can look at the whole string of text to quickly figure out which language they’re reading, and consult that part of their knowledge base.

And usually our brains process things completely separately from how we read or write text. Even the question of asking how many r’s are in “raspberry” requires us to go and count, because it isn’t inherent in the knowledge we have at the tip of tongue. Someone can memorize a speech but not know how many times the word “the” appears in it, even if their knowledge contains all the information necessary to answer the question.

Even if we are actively thinking in the context of how words are constructed, like doing crosswords, these things tend to be more fun when mixed with other modes of thinking: Wordle’s mix of both logic and spelling, a classic crossword’s clever style of hints, etc.

Manipulation of letters is simply one mode of thinking. We’re really good at seamlessly switching between modes.

On which scale? Because that kinda matters.

The rate of sweat I produce, in terms of ml of sweat per minute.

Italy was never a great empire.

Modern Italy does argue that it is the proper successor to the Roman Empire, but if you do look at the history of the nations (and city states) that rose and fell between the split of the Roman Empire into West and East/Byzantine around 395, and the formation of a unified Italy in 1861, that’s a bit of a stretch.

That trailer looks pretty intriguing.

Yeah, it’s funny either way, but would be even funnier if the answer had been correct.

“what you said was kinda racist”

“How dare you, I’m not a racist!”

The unacknowledged shift from the adjective form “racist” to the noun form “racist” is the best indicator that someone doesn’t really get what racism actually is in real life.

As an example of why that’s wrong, I can do something stupid without being a stupid.

Friggin euro steppers ruining basketball

The original screenshot is from Its Always Sunny, where the illiterate character has trouble pretending to be a philanthropist, because he can’t pronounce the word “philanthropist,” much less describe and understand what it means.

The comment you’re replying to is just riffing in their own way, completely unrelated to the scene where the screenshot comes from.

There are two factors for making connections through conversation. You’ve pretty much nailed the “showing interest” part.

But don’t forget, in addition to needing to show that you are interested, you need to show that you are interesting, too.

A good conversation will have some back and forth between both sides, on both factors. So merely showing interest may sometimes be counterproductive if you can’t tie that intense interest into something to reveal about an interesting side of yourself.

For example:

Statement: “I went to France last summer.”

Good response: “Ooh, that’s really cool, what were your favorite things you did?”

Better response: “Ooh, that’s really cool, I’ve always wanted to go. What recommendations do you have for places and things that I absolutely must experience?”

Similarly, tying things back to your own experiences may be helpful at generating some of that back and forth, even on topics that you don’t have any direct knowledge or experience with. For example:

Statement: “I was hesitant about the escargot/snails at first, and there just wasn’t a ton of substance to them, but it was delicious under all that butter anyway.”

Good response: “Wow that sounds like a fun experience, would you do it again?”

Better response: “Wow that sounds fun, so was it like linguine and clams where it’s as much about the flavors that get infused into the butter as it is about the clam itself?”

I know too many people who get stuck in a pure listening mode with strangers and forget to actually show their own personalities and why they’re worth getting to know, too.

Yeah, I don’t have any real trouble with scrambling on a cast iron. Even if it does stick a bit, it’s scrambled so it’ll all come together in the end anyway.