Last year, I called out a friend for excessively blaming the Greens for various local council decisions/inefficiencies. They had the impression that the Greens had far more seats than they actually did (iirc, they only had 2, out of a total of almost 40). When I pointed this out to them, they were surprised, and we later reflected that they had likely inadvertently bought into propaganda that scapegoats the Greens.

One of the projects that the Greens had most loudly been opposed to in the area was one that looked like some genuinely pretty dodgy developments as part of a failing scheme led by councillors who had approved a bunch of other half complete failures.

Damn it, the word “enshittification” has itself been enshittified!

(I am aware this is also an incorrect use of the word. That’s the joke I’m making. It is a bad joke.)

A friend of mine came out as straight to his parents, because he understood that this is someone one does when becoming aware of one’s sexuality, and as a young teen, he had his first crush on a girl. A few years later, he came out as bi.

Edit: just finished reading your story properly and it’s really sweet, thanks for sharing. I find the split model of attraction (romantic/sexual) super useful because of situations like your friend’s; like many bisexuals, I had a period of being “am I ace tho? What even is attraction?” and even though I’m securely bi now so nothing has changed, I appreciate some of the terms and frameworks I’ve picked up from the ace community. Invisible members of the queer community solidarity!

Memes that are autistic memes without explicitly mentioning autism

I haven’t self harmed for a long time

Your comment has made me understand this better than anything I’ve previously read has. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Ask her what her favourite episode is. Once you get small kids talking, it’s actually great, they tell such great stories.

Share (age appropriate of course) opinions of your own along the way. Like, don’t just say “have you seen [episode with pots and pans]”, expand it by saying stuff like you’ve not seen much Bluey, but you have seen the one with the pots and pans — does she know the one you mean? I suggest this because kids are actually pretty socially adept and I’ve found myself in analogous situations where I caused confusion by mentioning something I barely knew and the kid reasonably interpreted this as “this person wants to talk about this thing”, and then when I didn’t seem to know anything about the topic I had suggested, the kid seemed pretty thrown off and uncertain how to respond.

Or completely open ended questions, like “I know you like Bluey, but I’ve never seen it before. What’s your favourite episode?”, which could lead into asking for more details on what happened in that particular episode and why she likes it.

The thing about small talk is that I’ve found there’s a distinction between being good at it, and enjoying it. I used to think I was awful at smalltalk, before I realised that actually, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. I think to some extent, the point isn’t to enjoy it, but to build a conversational back and forth rally which builds initial rapport to figure out what common ground exists between two people (which can lead to more enjoyable proper conversation). Some people do enjoy small talk though. The rally model was useful for me because it underscored how I need to serve the other person options to hit back with.

For example, most kids go to school, so that’s a decent enough topic for if you’re running out of ideas. With kids, you can get away with clunky conversation starters like “What’s your favourite subject at school?”. Better than that though is something like “My favourite subject at school is science, what’s yours?” because it gives your conversation partner the option of responding either to your statement (such as with “ugh, I hate science, [teacher] is so mean!”), or your question, and having multiple options to hit back with allows for flow to help. Once you hit on a topic the kid is excited to talk about, you’re golden: just keep being interested in their perspective and give bits of your own perspective so they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.

Edit: This was a great question, btw OP — It’s led to a lot of interesting discussion, thanks for asking it

Okay, I think you win on the “insignificant decision” part of this question. That’s hilariously butterfly-effect. You tell the story well; I bet you’ve told it before.

Verbaceous is a great word. I’m adding it onto my “favourite words” list ,(even if it isn’t technically a word "

Bonus tip:

A distinction that I often find useful is that “simple” is not the same sad “easy”. Biggest example of this for me was when I needed to go no contact with a family member; despite knowing that it was what I needed to do, it took me a while to muster the strength to do what was necessary — it was simple, but not easy.

Another manifestation of “why didn’t I do this sooner” is when a solution is easy to implement, but it took a while to figure out what to do — this applies in complex situations, or ones where I have made past attempts that have failed, and I need to work smarter, not harder.

Both of these problem shapes benefit from the motivational interviewing technique described above. I think whenever we’re thinking about ways to improve ourselves, it can be easy to slip into a pattern of being unkind to yourself. Some things take time and that’s okay, because it needs to be — you can’t bullying yourself into change.

Fuck yeah, breaking the cycle \m/

I agree, I’ve seen the culture change over the years and I’m really glad to see it, because it would be easy for people who have faced gatekeeping to “prove” their belonging to a group by gatekeeping others.

"maybe throw horns \m/ "

Man, I love devil horns, it’s a great non verbal communicator. I remember seeing someone wearing a t-shirt of one of my favourite bands at an semi fancy event once. I wasn’t able to go over and talk to them, so I excitedly waved, pointed at my own t-shirt (which was plain), and then threw devil horns. They understood what I was saying and in that moment, a friendship was formed, although unfortunately we never got the chance to actually talk.

I just love the fact that I was dressed quite unlike I usually do, so didn’t have many alt aspects of my appearance, but this one neat hand gesture was sufficient to establish rapport between me and someone cool.

I’ve had a similar exchange happen twice. The first, I was asked to name songs from the band’s earlier albums (i.e. songs that hadn’t been played at the gig). The other time, it wasn’t asked as a question, but like “I bet you couldn’t even name [arbitrary number] of their songs”.

It definitely happens, and besides those specific instances, I’ve had countless gatekeepy comments that allude to me only [wearing band t-shirt/having video game pins/patches on my bag/being at a gig] to pick up guys because obviously I’m a massively slutty succubus who only haa hobbies to help me find prey.

Man, “too clever” is a phrase that always throws me for a loop, even though I understand what is meant by it; over the years, as I grow wiser, I learn to be less clever. Still weird to think of it this way though

Ha! This is a great complement to the OP, thanks for sharing

That’s a really interesting question, I don’t know what that might look like.

As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.

I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it’s cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together

I’m not sick of it yet, nor have I seen it reported in the news yet, so I’m gonna say not far enough

What would you say was the best thing you watched last year?

Season one is enjoyable as a package of just itself. There are some ways in which the ending could be seen as cliffhangery, in that season 2 won’t be starting from scratch and some of the characters’ arcs will be continued from what we’ve seen so far in season 1, but that doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger to me, more like natural continuation and new beginnings of sorts. That is to say that I think it’s a narratively satisfying ending that doesn’t require future seasons to be good.

I sympathise with your jadedness. I feel like a lot of Netflix shows end their seasons especially unsatisfyingly, almost as if they’re reasoning “if we wrap things up too nicely, we won’t get another season”, but then they get cancelled anyway. Regardless of season 2, I definitely think Blue Eyed Samurai is worth watching.

PowerPoint is Turing Complete