Millenial/GenZ borderline here. Perhaps not wise, but I have the modern dating experience and I can give advice about that.

Apps are completely useless. There are way too many guys and way too few girls who regularly use these apps, and that leads to awkward interpersonal dynamics, as though you’re interviewing for a job. You should never feel like you’re interviewing for a relationship. Even if you “pass,” it’s never a good sign that the start to a relationship is built upon checklists, transactions, and being the “best candidate.” I honestly expect that this is where a lot of incels get their strange dating worldviews from.

The hard truth is that there is no easy answer. There’s nothing you can do that will guarantee that you find someone nice. All I can say is that there are things you can do that will destroy your chances of finding someone. The best that you can do is to not do any of those things and hope for the best. Here’s a couple tips that might be helpful:

• Don’t spend your time online. As mentioned above, dating apps are worthless. Beyond that, though, it’s pointless to find anyone when everyone is anonymous. It’s ok to use the internet, but you also need to spend equal, if not more, time outside. Touching grass is a real, underrated advice. If you don’t have a reason to be outside, find a reason. Whether it’s a job, or a hobby, or a club, or some other commitment, you need to have a public presence. It was easier to be outside back when the internet wasn’t a thing, now you have to be intentional about it.
• Find in-person communities to be a part of. Goes hand-in-hand with the tip above. You need a public presence. Have in-person friends that you see regularly, have people whom you know well enough that they recognize you and know who you are. I was part of a for-fun orchestra group, but you can also find gardening groups, or sewing groups, or any other number of formal or informal groups that might host regular in-person meetings
• Know your neighbors. Your neighborhood is a community that you’re already a part of. It’s quite easy and low commitment.
• Find new hobbies and expand your horizons. You should have a wealth of experiences, not just an autistic-level depth of a single experience. If someone asks you what you do for fun, you better not have only a single thing to say. Not only does this make you a more interesting person, it increases the chance that you’ll encounter someone that you connect with. ie, you’ll be part of more communities and therefore encounter more people, but also for any one person, there’s a greater chance that you share at least one interest.
• Never stagnate. Builds off the previous tip. Always look for more things to do, more communities to join, more people to meet. There is too much to do in life for you to stagnate. Not only does this make you a more culturally rich person, it also gives you an excuse to be outside.
• Take some time to evaluate and reflect on what sorts of incel mindsets you have inadvertently adopted. A lot of internet and modern trends have fundamental roots in incel thought, and it’s very easy to get subtly influenced by those ideas. Having any sort of incel ideology is a major red flag, so you’ll need to self reflect on how you have been influenced by these ideas. Many people that I know who are single use incel or incel-like terminology or have expressed incel-like ideas. They’re not bad people, and they’re definitely not incels, but they have been subconsciously influenced by incel ideology from the internet. Meet enough of these people and you can start to see why it might be hard for certain people to find partners compared to others.
• Don’t approach someone who doesn’t actively indicate that they want to be approached. It’s rude and possibly creepy to do so. It’ll immediately destroy any chance of a connection with that person. It’s a false stereotype that people in the past got relationships through cold-approaches. At any given point in time, very few people want to be approached. There are only 2 solutions to this. First, meet more people so that you run into more people who want to be approached. Second, be more targeted with where you spend your time. If you are at a community meeting, the people there are significantly more likely to want to be approached than people that you find randomly on the street. Even so, read the room and determine if they want to be approached or not.

You don’t need to do all of these tips, but the more you do, the more appealing you become and the higher the chances are that you find someone. With a long enough time, you’ll get lucky and find someone that you connect with. I won’t lie, it’s hard. In a sense, it’s like losing weight or getting fit - you have to be intentional about doing things that you know are healthy. Except in this case, you’re building social health, not physical health.

I did notice something similar. Presumably, selective breeding at work. I read that brussel sprouts used to taste different not too long ago - the flavor and texture changed due to selective breeding. It wouldn’t surprise me if something similar is happening with fruits.

That being said, whatever is going on, it’s definitely not happening with strawberries. Still sour as fuck.

It’s a project that’s designed to discourage AI scraping. The idea is that every time you access a website, your computer must solve a math problem before it can access the website. For a user, this is trivially easy and wouldn’t affect your browsing experience much at all. For a scraper, though, it accesses so many websites so quickly that the time spent doing the math problems starts to add up, and the scraper ends up spending most of the time just doing useless math problems.

As a side note, a similar protocol was apparently proposed in the past for emails to discourage spam emails. Clearly, it was not adopted

My first exposure to the internet was at a time that I like to call the “early modern internet” (early 2000’s). I do have some nostalgia for that time, but I think times were also simply different.

For instance, there’s just less content on the internet at the time, and whatever content there was was harder to find. The positive is that the internet felt more genuine. Nowadays, I think people have gotten into the habit of self-censoring, presumably at the gentle pressuring of big tech companies, and that has led to even indie content creators producing what feels like safe, corporate content.

My personal belief is that culture is shaped by logistical challenges. The challenges of the early modern internet are not the same as the challenges now. We don’t need to return to a 2000’s-era internet, and I don’t think that’s even possible. But at least we can reintroduce genuineness by resisting corporate influence where we can. Presumably that’s why we’re on Lemmy

Manjaro vs. SteamOS, likely no benefit. My speculation is that the company probably wanted to develop their own software but didn’t have the technical expertise to develop for Linux. Hence, they partnered with Manjaro. As for why they went with Linux in the first place, it’s likely because Windows is a mess and they likely considered that Linux would be a more marketable (and cheaper) operating system.

And yes, these products aren’t particularly expanding the market, but it seems that companies would still like to throw their hat into the ring, if only because getting in early means that they’ll have a more dedicated fanbase for their later handheld products

First, make sure you’re never alone with her. It’s important to have someone be able to vouch for you that nothing bad happened. Even if it’s not her intention, rumors spread and mutate in the most unexpected ways, and you’ll want to make sure you’re in the clear if it ever comes to pass that people start to suspect that you are having a relationship with her.

Second, you’ll want to speak with her. Make it clear that you are serious and that this is a serious talk. Whenever you see her next, just say something like “we need to have a talk.” Might be cliche, but the cliche aspect of it reinforces the serious nature of it IMO, since most people already associate that phrase with something serious.

You don’t need to be rude, but you need to be very clear where you stand on the matter. Make it clear that 1) you are not in a relationship with her, 2) you do not wish to be in a relationship with her, 3) you don’t appreciate her saying that you’re in a relationship with her. With talks of this nature, there’s no point beating around the bush. She may be temporarily hurt, but there is a difference between being hurt due to rejection and hurt due to injustice. She will come to appreciate the honesty in time.

The thought has never crossed my mind, and it would have never crossed the minds of anyone I know. I have no urge to cheat and neither does my partner. I have generally thought that it’s a very unusual and uncommon phenomenon for someone to cheat, and I find it surprising how many people here think otherwise

Chemistry might not be much better. It’s because scientists generally assume that readers already know how to do the techniques, and so the only information they would care to provide are the ones that wouldn’t be considered obvious. Such as equipment brand, the name of the technique if there’s multiple techniques that do the same thing, or experiment-specific modifications to the technique.

My understanding is that it’s a holdover from older times, when scientists were charged per word, and so methodology would be cut down to remove anything considered “general enough” knowledge

If you’re asking scientists about writing protocols, you clearly don’t know how scientific protocols work. If anything, scientists need to take lessons from recipe writers on how to write protocols. Scientific protocols are notoriously difficult to replicate.

Here’s a burger recipe written like a scientific methodology:

Raw beef patties (Carshire Butcher) were prepared on a grill (Grillman) according to manufacturer’s instructions. The burger was assembled with the prepared patties, burger bun (Lee Bakery), lettuce (Jordan Farms), American cheese (Cairn Dairy), and various toppings as necessary. Condiments were used where appropriate. Assembled burgers were served within 15 minutes of completion.

Gamers: this game is unplayable on the Steam Deck

Valve: OK, this game isn’t playable on the Steam Deck

PCGamesN: VALVE JUST MADE THEIR RATING ACCURATE I WILL NEVER TRUST VALVE AGAIN

What kind of logic is this?

I don’t like feeding the hype beast. The same thing happened with Cyberpunk, where there was no physical way that the game could have met the hype.

I expect Silksong to just be another Hollow Knight, and that’s good enough for me

I honestly really liked the Zen garden in Plants vs Zombies

It’s not even about narcissism. If this man gets back, he gets to talk to media about his experiences, which will likely turn a lot of people against Trump’s plans. Trump’s fascism is contingent on people being complacent about the things he’s doing

My understanding is that that was the original intention of the phrase. It’s meant to be ironic but then the irony was lost as the phrase got more popular

Going to repost a comment I made on another post, since it seems like people are misunderstanding the situation:

My understanding was that this game was not covered by the strike, and so the voice actors decided to withhold their work for essentially no reason and with zero union protection. I saw on another article that the voice actors involved knew that the game was not covered by the strike and decided to strike anyways. I’m not entirely sure what they expected.

I’m not saying that the union or Mihoyo are bad, but this issue seems to stem from something else entirely (individual voice actors going rogue and doing an unofficial strike)

Pretty sure lunar effect is a real, scientifically confirmed thing, just known by a different name. Perhaps not the full moon specifically, but we do oscillate according to the moon phase. It’s called circalunar cycles. The name might sound familiar to circadian cycles because they both derive from the same word structure, ie circa-dia (“around a day”) and circa-lunar (“around a month”)

At minimum, I’m quite surprised that Wikipedia lists this as a pseudoscience, because my impression has generally been that circadian researchers acknowledge circalunar cycles as a given

The other comments cover things pretty well, but I feel like I should also pitch in as well. I’m in my mid-20’s in a stable relationship of over 3 years (at least a part of which was long distance), so I could probably offer some more age-specific advice.

I find that a lot of younger people (ie, people at or below my age) put a lot of undue emphasis on social media. Liking a post, not liking a post, follow, not follow, whatever. These are all contrivances. They are a game designed by social media companies to keep people doomscrolling on their platform. It’s important to see and really understand that it genuinely does not matter what someone does on social media. Your boyfriend seems not to have interacted with the Instagram model after he got with you. So that’s good right? If that’s what’s really important to you, then why does it matter if he still follows her?

And even if we assume that he was still actively interacting with the model, that’s still fine. It’s important to know that there is a difference between attraction and love. Love is the very specific feeling of caring about the other person and wanting the best for them. Many younger people think that attraction and love are the same, and so a lot of drama gets started because neither side realizes that they’re mixing up their ideas of what a relationship should be like. One common issue to be aware of (and most relevant to this situation) is that being attracted to someone else is not love, and it’s not cheating. It is ok to find other people attractive, and likewise, you should not find it offensive if your boyfriend finds someone else attractive.

I will also caution that many younger couples have this expectation that their partners should allow them to go through the other person’s phones. This is extremely toxic. Don’t do that. People have a right to their own private life, even when they are in a relationship. This applies to social media as well. You shouldn’t be looking through your boyfriend’s Instagram just because you want to see if he’s following anyone that you don’t like. Remember that a relationship is built on trust, and that means that you need to trust your boyfriend to be loyal.

You might be thinking that if you shouldn’t look through people’s phones, then it’s really easy for your boyfriend to cheat for a long time without you knowing. And that’s true. That’s why cheating hurts so much. But that possibility doesn’t give you the permission to intrude on their privacy. Have faith in your boyfriend.

Finally, practice open communication and mindfulness. I find that it can be quite difficult to identify what exactly is bothering you, and talking to your boyfriend about a vague sense of jealousy isn’t going to be productive at all. In fact, it’s probably going to get him defensive. When you’re angry, disappointed, upset, jealous, etc., it’s important to take some time to think things through yourself first. These negative feelings tend to result from the feeling that one of your personal rights was violated. If you’re angry or upset, which specific action caused it? Which of your personal rights was violated by that action? It is really important to identify this, since the difference between toxic behavior and valid anger is oftentimes just based on how valid the answers are to those questions. For instance, the “right to your boyfriend’s attention” is not a real right that you have, and so if you were to get angry that your boyfriend isn’t giving you enough attention, that would, in fact, be toxic behavior. And if you do have a right to be angry, then knowing which of your rights was violated makes it easy to prove your point, so there’s no downsides to this approach.

You should be aware that there are many reasons why a guy cannot get hard. Being dehydrated, for instance, makes it really difficult to stay erect. Many guys can get pretty insecure about it, so his reaction sounds about right.

I would recommend that you not blame him for not getting hard. It just happens sometimes and that’s just something that you two will have to work around

It is significantly more acceptable to slow down and stop talking than a lot of people think

There’s a concept in Japanese called chuunibyou, which translates to “8th grade syndrome.” Basically, teenagers (and especially early teenagers) are exceptionally cringe. Frankly, I feel reasonably confident that everyone has at least several memories that keep them up at night from that time in their lives. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.