I've wondered before what it means to be anti-racist. I recall once asking online and got a not so helpful response of "well maybe you should think about that". But today my friend exemplified the idea.

He was sitting in a bus in San Francisco when an older white man started yelling racist shit at someone else on the bus. My friend is a model citizen. The kind of guy to call in issues to 311 as he's walking home. A frequent volunteer as well. So when he saw this altercation he stood up and got in front of the yelling man. That was enough to interrupt him. But more action was needed. Justice was needed.

He just so happened to have a need to relieve some gas. And so he aimed... and fired right onto the guy. When he walked off he turned to the racist and said "To be clear, I farted on you intentionally because of what you said". I'm told the face he got in response was exactly the same as Hide the Pain Harold's.

We should all strive for this level of bravery. And maybe, one fart at a time, we can end racism.

A problem I have every summer is either going to sleep cool and waking up in the middle of the night hot or going to sleep warm and waking up in the middle of the night cold. I used to have a similar problem in the winter, but I was able to solve that by getting a down comforter. Any recommendations for a good summer blanket for midwestern summers?

Kings of the losers

Incels imagine a world in which they can only lose. The result: no girlfriend, ever. We met them in the saddest places of the internet— and in real life.

A report by Philipp Daum: https://www.zeit.de/autoren/D/Philipp_Daum/index
Translation of the online version, last updated May 30, 2026 08:55 UTC+1 by @Grzmot.
Originally published in German in ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 22/2026.

Gifted link to the German original: https://www.zeit.de/digital/2026-05/incel-bewegung-internet-maenner-depression?freebie=84491b05

1. Rejection

The boy was new in class. A shy teenager, interested in hiking alone and watching anime. He had the telephone numbers of two classmates to talk over homework. No friends otherwise. One day, a girl asked him in front of the entire class if they wanted to do something together. He was immediately suspicious. He thought: if I say yes, everyone will laugh. Later, it turned out that the girl lost a bet.

He said no. The class laughed anyway.

This boy is a man today, 29 years old. To this day, he hasn’t forgotten this story with the girl. In this text I’ll call him sprixxles, by his username on Reddit. No one in his analog life knows,that he is an incel, and that shouldn’t change.

Sprixxles remembers when he came across the term incel online. He remembers thinking, “I hope that doesn’t describe me,” and how he slowly and painfully realized that it did.

Incel means involuntary celibate. Men who can’t find a woman and believe they never will because they are too shy, too ugly, not worth loving, but also because they believe that women today have way too high standards. In the past, men hid their virginity. From that the internet forged a collective identity.

Incels carry within them something shameful, apparently full self aware. They gather in online forums, Discord servers, and on reddit. They have usernames like subhumanDNA or invisiblebeta. Scroll a bit through those forums, join some discord servers, and soon you’ll see someone celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Someone posts a video where a woman is beaten up. The incels do everything they can to enrage the normies, which is what they call us.

But their world also contains surprising places. Essays and philosophical debates, where incels respectfully debate feminists. The American journalist Naama Kates once described the incel world as “multi-layered, eloquent, incredibly funny, enraging, and deeply heartbreaking.”

When I was a teenager, I let my hair grow down to my shoulders. I listened to sad music and played The Dark Eye with my other long-haired friends. We sat at big tables, imagining, in week-long planning sessions, dwarven warriors and elven mages, and rolled dice with twenty sides to play out their complex battles. The dark eye is the German variant of Dungeons & Dragons, on which the musician Marilyn Manson once commented: “If a cigarette shortens your lifespan by seven minutes, then every game of Dungeons & Dragons delays losing your virginity by seven hours.” We played every weekend, sometimes three parties spaced out across two days.

What exactly differentiated incels and me? At which crossroads of life did we take separate paths?

2. The revelation of FaceandLMS

In 2016 the user FaceandLMS uploaded a video to YouTube, that “changed the internet forever and which very few people ever realized.” At least, that’s what a comment under the video says.

Hailing from Britain and identifying as an incel, FaceandLMS disguised himself as an attractive man on the dating platform Plenty of Fish. He named this persona Carl. He used pictures of a male model. With this experiment he wanted to contradict what society tells shy men, and what my mom always told me too: women like someone who’s friendly and confident, someone with good character.

Quickly, Carl is overwhelmed with requests to talk. He chats with many women at the same time and tries his best to do everything wrong. He writes that he is on antidepressants, that he is incredibly insecure, that he’s broke. He is unfriendly, sometimes racist (”ching chong chang, do you want to bang?”)—and still successful. The lesson appears clear: women pretend that they care about character, but really they only value good looks.

At the end of the video, FaceandLMS reveals what makes a male face attractive, with drawn in lines, angles and squares that should show the ideal proportions of different parts of the face:

• Short philtrum (the tiny valley that connects the upper lip with the nose)
• Predator-animal-like eyes
• A high facial width-to-height ratio; the higher the value, the more attractive the man is
• Defined maxilla (upper jaw), mandibule (lower jaw), and chin
• Body fat percentage between 10 and 12 percent

A commenter under the video is impressed and writes: “The true godfather of the black pill.”

The black pill is the ideological core of the incel movement. Summarized, it means: forget status, forget money, forget confidence. Good looks are everything, and for those that aren’t attractive enough, the search for a partner is over before it’s even begun. The metaphor is a reference to the film The Matrix, where protagonist Neo has the choice between a blue and red pill. Blue means he keeps living his life, happy to be lied to and naive. Red is harsh. Brutal. It means looking reality in the eye.

Black is the pill of the incels, because black is the color of hopelessness. Destiny and your bone structure can’t be changed. Or can they?

The first who told me of the black pill was Luis. 23 years old, he was the first incel I talked to. I met him on the subreddit DebateIncelz. The interview was conducted via video chat. He lives in Southern California, in his parents’ house. The sun shone through the window; a cat prowled through the room behind him. Luis was one of the few incels who showed me his face. Most disable the camera.

Luis has a fine, slightly feminine face and long, wavy hair. He reminded a bit of young Keanu Reeves, if Reeves had parents from middle America. A lot better than I imagined meeting my first incel.

He grew up in a working-class home. His mother comes from Mexico, his father from El Salvador. “I love my mom very much,” he says. “I love my sister very much. I do not despise women.” Luis didn’t appear hateful at all, a trait he shared with many incels I would later talk to. He appeared defeated.

He was an insecure, overweight child. He was bullied a lot in school for his looks. As a teenager he discovered FaceandLMS during the pandemic. Luis was fascinated by his clarity and logic. He told me: “It offers me a framework to understand how dating and life even work.” The well-meaning advice from his immediate surroundings (“go out and be around people,” “talk to a girl if you like her”) didn’t land. “I need numbers,” he says. “I need logic.”

Luis says that he spent a lot of time on Looksmax.org, a forum where men rate each other’s looks. There he was graded as a high low-tier normie. So fairly average, which surprised him in a positive way. He also learned that his philtrum was too long, that he had a receding chin, and that his upper incisor teeth covered his lower ones too much.

Incels really only see two ways to react to the revelations of the black pill. Either they accept that they have a low chance of success as unattractive or very average men, or they try to change their appearance.

Luis chose the latter. He started looksmaxxing. He lost weight. Bought medication against hair loss. Bleached his skin. “On one hand I couldn’t believe what I was doing to myself, but I knew that looked better afterward.”

Luis finished every step possible when softmaxxing. He took all the options of changing his appearance without surgery. Now hardmaxxing was supposed to begin. Luis had a whole list of planned surgeries: multiple jaw surgeries, hair transplants, transplants of his own fat, correcting his ears. And then? “Then I’ll look for a partner.”

Luis did what many women already do: he looked at his own appearance without mercy.

Why is Luis so convinced of his own bad appearance? I am fifteen years older than him and grew up at a time when beauty standards for girls were hard, but less so for boys. No boy from my school class went to the gym. I wasn’t on any social media that bombarded me with rock-hard abs daily. Back then it was impossible to inject Hyaluron into your jawline on your lunch break.

Like Luis, I was insecure; I didn’t feel pretty. But I was not reminded every single day, how much more beautiful other men were.

3. The scientist

For a long time, the public and academic researchers talked about incels, not with them. That changed a few years ago, when Andrew Thomas, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Swansea in Wales, found a way to talk to them. Until that point, researchers had stuck to analyzing online forums where incels met. When I talked to Thomas, he said that approach is like looking only at the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the posts in forums stem from a few super-users. If you only base your research on those, you won’t understand what’s going on in the heads of most incels, only what their most extreme representatives write about.

Thomas interviewed 561 men from the United States and the United Kingdom for his study. He learned that incels are pretty diverse: some are working class, some upper class. About half of them are people of color: Latinos, Black Americans, Arabs. Politically they placed themselves slightly left of center. They were pro-gay equality. They supported a well-equipped welfare state. On one point they held similar views: the overwhelming majority of incels rejected feminism. Many made light of rape.

How dangerous are incels? Thomas says that the highest danger is in the digital space. Some incels abuse women online, sending them hateful emails or comments on social media. Most of them are so repressed, they rarely become violent outside the internet.

Deserts of love

There are exceptions. Incels have produced terrorists. The most infamous example was Elliot Rodger. He killed six people in 2014 in Santa Barbara, California. He left a manifesto behind, where he complained that he was still a virgin as a 22-year-old college student. He wrote: “I will punish all women for keeping sex away from me.” As if women owe men sex. It’s an ancient pattern: a man talks to a woman, is rejected, and feels ashamed and hurt. He channels those feelings into hatred against women.

But most incels, Thomas says, internalize their emotions: they develop immense hatred against themselves. Terrorists form a vanishingly small part of the community. Even men who commit sexual violence are rarely incels. “Many studies show: it’s the sexually most successful men that commit the majority of sexual violence,” says Thomas.

Then Thomas talks about the suicides. Incels who participated in his study were often deeply unhappy. Forty percent of them reached the threshold for a clinical depression in questionnaires. A fifth thought about suicide daily.

4. 80/20

I talked to a user called bright spring. An Indian man, 20 years old, he told me he studied English and lives at home to take care of his ill father. Bright spring is the name of his latest Reddit account; the previous were banned. In the past, he moderated some subreddits, which also got banned. It wasn’t easy to convince him to do an interview, but at some point he wanted to talk. He wanted to, he said, correct the record on “what most incels think.”

What he thinks: dating apps changed everything. An overwhelming amount of matches went to a few percent of the most attractive men. Those not attractive enough—too small, too dark, too autistic—had no chance. That’s not an opinion, he says, that’s a fact. The entire incel worldview is built on data. Statistics. “Brutal statistics.” He only hinted at his personal story in our conversation. Supposedly he’s very social; he just doesn’t fulfill the minimum standards to even be noticed by women.

At some point he complained. It’s a “softball interview.” He wished for more confrontational questions. We agree to a second round. I show him posts from the community that he supervised as a moderator. In them, men disparage women as “foids,” “female humanoids.” He says that it’s a loud minority and that I’m cherry-picking four cases out of thousands of posts. He overlooked those posts, or he would’ve deleted them. He is strictly against dehumanizing women in posts. It does nothing for the cause. Then I show him a post which he wrote himself. Women are incapable of loyalty. Romantic love is an invention of men to humanize women, like how many people humanize their pets. He laughed nervously when I read him the post. He said that he gender-swapped a misandrist post from a feminist subreddit. He couldn’t show me the original.

He was angry back then, he says, about the posts in which women complain about white men, about Indian men, about neurodivergent men, and are celebrated for it. He wanted revenge.

This dynamic rules many parts of Reddit. Many incel subs are dedicated to posting screenshots of women that denounce men on Instagram or TikTok. Places like inceltears in turn live off sharing the most hate-filled comments from incel forums. I ask him: you keep this vicious cycle going, right? He responds: “I try to avoid it. Sometimes I don’t succeed.”

All incels I talked to told me of their experiences with dating apps. The digital rejection seems to be a core building block of every incel biography. One tried it for one week only: “I got a single match, and she never responded. I guess she matched by accident.” Another one told me he needed years to get a match. “You swipe for hours and nothing happens. Dating apps are a wonderful way to hate yourself fast.”

In 2015 an anonymous author wrote a blog post detailing the spread of likes on dating apps. He described Tinder like a national economy based on attractiveness. He surmised that the most attractive 20 percent of men receive 80 percent of all likes of women, while barely anything is left for the remaining 80 percent of men.

The post’s factual basis is very narrow at 27 female profiles analyzed. But even more dependable studies show that attention is very unevenly divided on dating apps. According to a study from Queen Mary University of London (PDF), likes from women are seventeen times more likely to lead to a match than likes from men. An analysis by the dating app Hinge (which was later deleted off their own blog) came to the conclusion: if female Hinge were a national economy, then wealth there was divided about the same as Western Europe. Male Hinge would be among the top ten worst performers in regard to wealth parity. Put differently: dating apps are great for attractive men. For average or ugly men, they are deserts of love where nothing ever happens.

The Medium post was canonized into the 80/20 rule, made it into the Wikipedia article on inequality, and appeared in the Netflix incel drama Adolescence, a story of a student radicalizing on the internet and murdering a female class mate. Many incels believe in the 80/20 rule. They’ve constructed their entire belief system around it: a majority of women is into a minority of men, whom the incels call Chads. The less attractive men, the betas, can hope for a lukewarm relationship without real passion. Unattractive, shy, neurodivergent men are damned to a life as incels. There is no hope for them.

And, as it so often goes with viral things on the internet, sometimes they contain a grain of truth.

5. Men as office staplers

The scientist Andrew Thomas told me of the matching hypothesis. Men and women try, when it comes to long-term relationships, to find partners that are similar to them: similarly attractive, intelligent, similar sense of humor. Attractive long-term partners are friendly, potentially good parents, financially stable. Men and women look for identical things.

It’s different for flings. Thomas says: “Women become pickier and men the opposite.” Traits desirable in long-term partners are less important for one-night stands. It’s not that important how nice someone is, and completely irrelevant how good of a father he’d be. What matters: how attractive someone is.

Women, on average, are less into casual hookups than men. For them, casual sex is also less casual and more dangerous: they can get pregnant. They are often weaker than men and expose themselves due to that. They can also contract sexually transmittable diseases that lead to infertility much more often than in men.

Andrew Thomas told me: “Because casual sex is connected to more risks, the thought goes: I’ll only accept this risk for someone that is exceedingly attractive.”

The exact opposite happens for men. They lower their standards, because they’re more into casual sex on average. So they’re fine with sleeping with women they wouldn’t marry.

“The 80/20 rule has a grain of truth.” says Andrew Thomas, but the crucial mistake of incels is that from this strategy of selecting short-term partners they create an immutable psyche that all women supposedly possess, and in that one move exclude all women who did not meet their partners through apps. Who were friends first, who met them through mutual acquaintances, where they meet regularly and first impressions can change. That is also an important finding of psychology: attractiveness is not static. The more time people spend with another, the more attractive they find each other.

Dating apps complicate everything. They are, no matter what they try to market themselves as, apps for casual hook-ups because their basis is the optical first impression. Women there get so much attention from men, they have to radically filter. Andrew Thomas hints that this isn’t moral calculus; it’s not even a matter of taste; it’s simply a strategy to deal with an oversupply.

Andrew Thomas also works as a therapist. He has incels as patients. Sometimes he conducts an experiment with one. He asks him to search for office staplers on Amazon and narrate it step by step. Okay, says the patient, there are ten thousand results. So he filters; 4 or 5 stars, not too expensive, fits at least two hundred tacks, only in the color red. “And then I tell him: you picky bastard! What’s wrong with the blue staplers? How can you be so narcissistic and have such high standards?”

6. Digital cutting

The incels disappear. One user called fuckitall responds to my interview request: “Go fuck yourself.” Another does the same and appends that I should get a real job. Another posts a photo of me and calls me a soyboy: a man feminized by the overconsumption of soy products.

I had about the same experience as an average-looking man on a dating app. I sent a lot of messages, got few responses, and in the end got only one meeting in reality: with sprixxles.

I had huge expectations. Then I see him standing at the entrance gates to a park in Vienna and think again: that’s how an incel looks? (He had his camera off during the video interview.) He waits in front of the gate, in a shirt and sneakers, well dressed, a little grungy, a little hipster. He has a narrow chin. He wears designer glasses. He appears friendly.

We stroll through the park, and he narrates. He was a shy kid, a teenager with “nerd hobbies.” No friends in school. He moved for college, from the rural farmsteads into the big city, where it was equally difficult. He had time. A lot of time. A lot of time he spent on the internet.
It was, he explains, the peak of his inceldom. His days spent on the 4chan board r9k, where anonymous users share pictures and texts. It is one of the most culturally influential places on the internet. A favored way to express oneself there is so-called green texts, short stories about failing in social situations, filled with sarcasm and self-deprecation. The mood is extremely negative, but the place had a strange pull on him, says sprixxles. “This form of negativity can be addicting.”

One motto of r9k is: you are here forever. If you’re a young student reading posts from men in their 30s saying that it’s just not going to get better, you think, “Fuck, that could be me.” He felt something similar to an adrenaline rush, excitement over how pointless it all was.

“Sounds like digitally cutting yourself?” I ask.

“One way to put it.”

During those times he visited a therapist a few times, but she couldn’t really help him. Looking back, he likely was already severely depressed.

That’s behind him. He’s 29 now and works in a big company. He spends barely any time in the incel community. At some point the constant bemoaning and complaining became too much. “At some point it’s annoying.” He doesn’t have any time for it anymore. He rarely visits, mostly out of sentimentality. He never understood the hatred.

He lives in a small apartment in one of those old but well taken care of Vienna buildings. The center is a large kitchen. Against the wall, a vinyl record player. On a shelf, old game consoles he collects. On a large desk, filling out the entire wall, two computer screens.
He loves getting lost in details. He taught himself Japanese to better read manga. He also says that he has “autistic tendencies.” Sometimes it seems like our conversation tires him out a great deal. He swings his legs back and forth, runs his hands through his hair and wipes across his eyebrows. He never looks into my eyes for long. He yawns a lot.

Hope is vulnerable

He’s been living in this apartment for ten years. He can’t imagine living with someone else any more. Alone he doesn’t have to care about anything. He can cook at night, if he wants to. Freedom, it appears, is something he cares about a great deal. Maybe it’s also a shield.

Sometimes colleagues ask him if there is someone in his life. He responds with sentences that sound good in colloquial Austrian. Nothing right now. or You know how it is. Face-saving words making it sound like there was something, or that there could be something again.

I meet him three times, in the evening after work. He’s stressed and tired. Problems at work; he has to work overtime. I see him rush through his life, which he fills, like many of us, mainly with work. In the evening he quickly goes to the store, cooks, eats. If he has time, he plays some video games, reads, takes care of his Pokémon card collection. Then he sleeps.

Soon, he’s 30. If it keeps going like this, it’ll all be fine, he says. By now he’s noticed that life is more than missed-out-on relationships. He has his hobbies. He can travel. He makes money and doesn’t have any worries. He doesn’t plan on dating.

But sometimes, something flashes through. A life, how it could be. Eight years ago he kissed a woman; it was the first and so far last kiss of his life. She was a little smaller than him, dark hair, nose piercing, wearing a cardigan over a striped dress. They didn’t know each other; they started talking because she found his drinking choice of gin and tonic unconventional. She leaned against him. He was drunk. I’ll try, he thought. So he kissed her. “With tongue?”

“Yeah, like one does, first time round. Not very elegant.” He imagined his first kiss as a more romantic one. Not drunk in the club. “But it was beautiful.” He says, “It was great.” He went home without asking for her number, and was happy and relieved to have put this milestone behind him.

7. Crab bucket

I realize that dealing with incels and the black pill changes something within me. Within the editorial staff at work, I begin studying the faces of my male colleagues. Who has the most defined chin? Whose eyes look the most like a predator animal? At some point I uploaded a selfie to a website that determines the facial width-to-height ratio. It answers with a 1.7. My face is too long, like a horse.

I reduce men to their looks. What did Hamudi say, one of the most famous incel YouTubers? I don’t see people anymore, I only see genetics.

When you deal with the incel definition of attractiveness, you will develop an inferiority complex. You keep comparing and keep getting smaller and smaller.

There’s a discussion within the scene: who is a real incel? Who belongs? Is someone fucked enough to qualify? Multiple times my interviewees mentioned that they might not be “real” incels after all, because they have been on dates, for example. Because they don’t have an autism diagnosis, because they, god forbid, kissed a woman before. Online, men accuse each other of being fakecels or nearcels. Only who has tried everything without success is a real incel, a truecel. A subhuman.

Aside from this social Darwinism, there’s also surprisingly woke vocabulary in the community. Feminists are accused of gaslighting lonely men, talking them into believing that their solitude is their own fault. There is talk of “privilege,” like female privilege or sex-privileged men. Lonely women who want to belong to the community are accused of committing cultural appropriation. My culture is not your costume. I even discovered an inceldom pride flag. Lots of black and shades of gray.

Boys find each other on the web, the boys that in their class are at the bottom of the hierarchy. What do they do? The same that groups always do: build a status pyramid. They just invert it. The guy on top is the king of the losers.

They protect this inverted hierarchy too. Occasionally there are stories of incels developing hope or believing in themselves, and they are kicked off the forums. This phenomena has a name: the crab bucket.

Throw a few live crabs into a bucket and they begin to crawl up the walls. They step on each other. In their attempt to climb, the lower crabs pull the upper ones down. The same thing happens in incel forums. Those who hope are ridiculed, those who develop a strategy insulted, and those who make progress banned.

Incel culture is growing. Its engine is hopelessness.

I once talked with an incel that embodied this well. He lives in the north of Germany, his user name on Reddit is remarkable box. It was a joy to talk to him. He didn’t mention any studies; he talked of his “boys”: his friends, his sisters, college sports, loving parents.

I noted: “Happy incel?”

Then he said that if you put a thousand men into a room and him next to them, he’d surely be the ugliest.

Remarkable, 23, has stopped talking to his parents or friends about his relationships with women. They’d only encourage him. They’d tell him that he’ll find someone, that he’s attractive enough. He says it hurts him.

Hurts?

Remarkable fights with himself a little. If someone encourages him, it only causes the opposite. He could grow hopeful, which in turn leads to trying again—and getting disappointed again. To be sure of the future, that’s got a worth of its own.

He explains with an example. “The winner of the silver medal always looks sadder than the guy with bronze on the photos, right? I’m the guy with bronze. I’ve accepted how my life is.” With “his life” he means his friends, his sport, the good relationship with his family, and the fact he’ll never have a girlfriend. “If I start believing now that I could truly win gold and fail in the attempt, then I would be the guy with the silver medal. I’d be less happy than now.” So he doesn’t try. He keeps his bronze medal.

Remarkable exchanged hope for security. That’s the promise of the black pill. It protects: who doesn’t try can’t fail. Incel scientist Andrew Thomas told me that incels share a psychological disposition. They posses, what psychologists call “external control conviction”: the idea that what happens to you in life doesn’t have anything to do with you, but that outside forces are responsible, immutable forces: your own ugly bone structure. The impossible-to-fulfill standards of modern dating culture. That’s why incels collect hoards of studies. That’s why they built their own wiki, with an entry titled “The scientific black pill.” If you copy it into a Microsoft Word document, it’s nearly 300 pages.

All this work just to prove that they will fail, no matter what they do.

The black pill isn’t really a collection of studies. It’s not science; it’s not even ideology. It’s just the conviction that it’s safest at home. It’s depression, disguised as a way to view the world.

8. Intelligent, empathetic and cute

In Vienna, while meeting sprixxles, I started talking to a Russian woman on Reddit called pristine cost. Months back she dove into the incel world, seeking to understand these weird, unhappy men living in the privileged West. They are a puzzle her: how can intelligent men believe such a thing?

The smart and empathetic posts from sprixxles impressed her. She messaged him. They chatted. They became friends.

I wanted to talk to her, so we called on Discord. She told me she really likes sprixxles, that there are a lot of good things about him. His biggest problem is that he’s locked up emotionally. “He doesn’t show anyone how great he is.” It’s really difficult to break out of this pattern. He needs a helping hand. A shove. In the conversation it became clear that she understands herself as the woman to shove him. She encouraged him to buy new clothes. She’s gradually encouraging him to follow his dream of a doctorate thesis.

Believing in yourself doesn’t happen through thought, but through experience. By leaving your room and doing things that are hard and wonderful. By achieving things that could also fail and learning that you are stronger and more attractive than originally believed.

My roleplay friends and I, we once were crabs in a bucket. We tried for a long time to climb out of it. We even started a band; I was the bass player, because everyone knows how to play bass. A friend taught me the guitar and told me that I have a beautiful voice. On some weekends we no longer played role-playing games, but guitar. We sat around camp fires, in large groups that weren’t just boys. With one of my friends, we went on holiday, where we met two women, nearly thirty, both telling us how they had had enough of men. The hotel was otherwise full of old pensioners, and we had brought our guitars, so we helped make their evenings more interesting. After one such drunken guitar evening we both lost, as elderly men at the start of our 20s, our virginities. As if we had agreed to a pact to make it all appear like the plot of a high school comedy.

We climbed out of the bucket, but we offered each other our shears.

After my conversation with pristine, I met sprixxles a last time. I told him that pristine finds him intelligent and empathetic and nice. “She also said that you’re cute.”

“Okay,” he says and laughs in a shy fashion.

“And that it’s insane that a woman hasn’t snagged you yet.”

“Okay,” he says again.

Recently he hung up a full-length mirror in his living room. Pristine told him to work on his style. Could this perchance be a careful small step back into dating?

“Probably,” he says.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Let’s see,” he says.

In the near future he has to solve problems at work.

Of course, pristine said, one can live life without romantic love, and be even satisfied with it. But with sprixxles, she says, it’s just a question of time till he finds a woman. “It’s just impossible not to, with him,” she says.

Let’s wish him luck.

As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.

I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.

Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.

Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.

I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.

Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.

He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.

Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.

The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.

That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.

The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.

As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.

I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.

It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.

To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.

This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.

The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.

That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.

A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.

During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.

The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.

Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.

After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.

Okay, wipe your tears.

When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.

Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.

After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.

The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.

This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.

I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.

So now you can too.

Hello,

So, it is more and more evident that I need to do something about burning my head and squinting when facing in the general direction of the sun during summer.

Ideally I would wear something like a straw hat but I don't think I can, there is something about them that are intolerable to me.

The things I imagine I'd like with straw hats is that they protect face, eyes, scalp and neck (if appropriately sized) while still being fairly cool (as in temperature, not style!).

So, that's the requirements: some kind of garment that would protect my head from the sun, while not overheating my head, ideally giving some shade to the eyes, and not being a straw hat!

I don't care much for social norms but if you recommend something it would be nice to let me know if it is supposed to be worn by specific groups in specific circumstances (for example men attending sporting events) and what breaking those norms could result in.

I understand I could get sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses but sunglasses are in the same category as straw hats and sunscreen has to be replenished (both as in the buying more bottles and applying it on myself).

I'm up for different kinds of hats, hat-ish and fabrics, I just don't really know anything about them, yet!

Hi tilderinos! We all love a good relationship drama thread, so I wanted to add my own. I'm posting from my main account because all this dirty laundry is already open and out between both my partner and all my friends and family. Thank you for any advice or support you can offer <3

The current problem

My partner and I are going through a very difficult point in our relationship, and I would really appreciate some outside perspectives.

The short version is: my partner of nearly four years recently told me that our relationship has always felt suffocating to her. She said she has tried to look for positives from the last few years and cannot find any. At the same time, she cried heavily while saying this, has booked herself into therapy, and says she does want a partner eventually. She just does not know whether that partner is me, or whether she can be in this relationship as it currently exists.

I love her deeply, but I also feel ignored, pushed away, and emotionally starved. I am trying to decide whether I should stay and give her space, leave, or take a formal break by moving out for a few months.

Background / how we got here

For context, I have had three serious long-term relationships before this one, and I think I have become much more emotionally mature through them, though I’m sure I still have plenty to learn. This is my partner’s first serious relationship. She has not dated much before, and in my opinion, she has also not had many deep, emotionally close friendships. She is also strongly suspected to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, though she has never been officially diagnosed.

We met online and were extremely into each other. When we met in person, the chemistry was great, and afterwards we missed each other constantly. After almost a year, I started asking how we could make the relationship work long-term. She said it felt like a big jump, but we talked about it a lot and she eventually seemed fine with the idea.

Not long after, I moved in with her, which also meant moving country. To her credit, she was extremely helpful and considerate during that process.

Just before I moved in, she broke her leg badly and spent over a week in hospital. I helped as much as I could, but it was a very stressful start. I was moving country, taking on more chores, and trying to care for her at the same time. I did it because I love her, and I knew she would physically recover eventually.

What we did not expect was how much the recovery would affect her mentally. She became quite depressed, which is understandable, and it really took the wind out of the first year and a half of us living together. She had very little energy for me or the relationship, and intimacy was limited. I was not getting my needs met either, but we talked a lot and I felt like I understood what she was going through.

Around a year ago, things started to improve. Her mood was better more often, she seemed more present, and when we were intimate, she seemed to put in more effort. I was still the one initiating anything physical, which bothered me, but I hoped that would improve over time. Dates, time together, and our general friendship also seemed to be getting better. I felt like she was slowly trusting me more and letting me in.

Our living situation probably has not helped. I work from home all day, every day, in a room next to the living room. It is a very public space, and I think neither of us has really felt alone. Sometimes I would also play video games after work in that same area, which meant I was still in her space.

Her emotional difficulties

One of the hardest parts is that my partner has extreme difficulty understanding her own emotions. She talks openly about this. She often says she bottles everything up and does not really understand what she feels or why. She has also said she used to feel a lot more when she was younger, but at some point her difficult relationship with her parents caused her to start repressing things.

She often cannot answer direct questions about what she wants. Most of the time, her answer is “I don’t know.”

Sometimes, if we sit down and talk through it slowly, I can help her get to a clearer answer. But it takes a long time, and it is obviously hard work for her. I am also worried that this dynamic can become almost like therapy, where I am trying to guide her into understanding herself. I do not think that is healthy for either of us.

Another thing that scares me is that she seems unable to hold onto positive emotional experiences. We have had romantic dates and close moments where I know she felt something. I could see love, warmth, energy, and joy in her. But if I ask her about those moments a day, week, or month later, it is like the feeling is gone. She will just say, “It was fine.”

That makes the situation very confusing. When she lets her guard down, the relationship can feel genuinely loving and connected. That is part of why I am struggling to walk away. But she often makes an effort to avoid these moments.

I also have a strong suspicion that I might be the first supportive relationship with anyone she's had in her life before. Her family and her close friends (the same friends all the way from high school) do not offer any kind of emotional support or affection. They are the kind of people who don't say "well done!" but "...You could have done this better." There's been lots of instances during the relationship where she's reacted with confusion or surprise at what I would consider basic levels of kindness and support. 

The recent breaking point

This past winter, her mood dropped again. She became increasingly cold and shut me out. We went a long time with no physical contact, not even cuddling. She did not seem interested in anything I had to say, whether it was important or not, and she had very little to share with me either.

After a few weeks, I sat her down and asked what was going on.

That is when she told me the relationship was too much for her, and that it always had been. She said it felt suffocating and that she did not know how to “come up for air.” She said she had tried to find positive things in the relationship but could not find any, not even one, from the last three years.

At the same time, she was looking me in the eyes and crying extremely hard. We talked for hours, and I think she got a lot of catharsis from finally saying it.

After that conversation, she immediately booked herself into therapy because she said she needed someone to help her understand herself. I think that is a good step. But it also feels very much like an “I need help now” decision, rather than her having any clear long-term idea of what she wants.

She has admitted, through tears, that she thinks she would be lonely and unhappy alone. She does want a partner. She just does not know if that partner is me, or if she can be with me in the version of the relationship we have had so far. Honestly, I agree that the relationship as it has been is not sustainable.

What has changed since

Since that conversation, we have drifted apart. I am sad about it and I miss my girlfriend, but right now it feels like we are two separate people living in the same building.

The first practical thing I did was move my office outside the house, because I thought that would give us both more breathing room. I think that was a good step, but it has not fixed the deeper issue.

She has also become completely glued to her phone in a way I have never seen before. She still uses her usual apps, but she also downloaded a random stranger-chat app, similar to Omegle, where she talks to people about their lives. She seems fascinated by it, almost like it is a real-life sitcom.

I was obviously concerned by that. I challenged her on whether it was appropriate to be using an app like that while our relationship was in such a bad place, especially when those apps can easily become sexual. She said she deletes anyone who gets sexual and that she just wants to talk to people, but does not know how to do that any other way.

She offered me her phone, and from what I saw, the conversations were shallow and non-sexual. I do not think she is cheating on me. What it looks like to me is that she is seeking low-pressure connection with strangers while avoiding the pressure and emotional weight of our actual relationship.

She does not seem able to tell me what she wants from me or the relationship. When I ask whether she wants to stay together, move apart, take a break, reduce contact, stop physical affection completely, or work on things, the answer is usually “I don’t know.”

For my part, I want to support her, but she is not really accepting support from me. In fact, I think my care may sometimes make her feel more pressured, upset, or resentful. I have stopped being romantic and I am not initiating physical touch. I am trying to give her as much space as possible. But even small thoughtful gestures, like making her a cup of tea, can be met with coldness or irritation. I understand why she might feel overwhelmed, but it still hurts.

What I am considering

The practical side is not a major barrier. I have a good financial buffer, my job is secure and remote, and I could rent an apartment or potentially move in with someone we know. I have options, and moving out would be reasonably low-risk for me.

So I think my options are:

1. Stay, give her space, and support her when she asks for it.

   This might give therapy a chance to help. But it could also leave me waiting indefinitely for someone who may never be ready, or who may eventually decide I am not her person.

2. Leave.

   This would hurt both of us, and she would lose a major source of support. But it might also be the cleanest option if she genuinely cannot be in the relationship and I am only prolonging the pain.

3. Take a formal break by moving out for a few months.

   This feels like a possible middle ground. It would give her space to understand herself without the daily pressure of living with me, and it would give me some emotional distance too. The idea would be to check in after a set period and keep only light contact in the meantime.

What I need advice on

What would you do in my position?

More specifically:

• How much space is reasonable to give someone who says the relationship feels suffocating but cannot say whether they want to leave?
• At what point does being patient and supportive become abandoning my own needs?
• Is it appropriate to push her, even gently, when I feel like I know how to help?
• Is there a better option I am not seeing?

I love her, and when things are good between us, the connection feels rare and real. But those moments are not happening enough, and I am struggling with how cold and uncertain things have become.

Hey all!

I'm currently cleaning out the basement and rearranging some things after my brother in law has moved out. He spent the better part of every afternoon down here working out and (I'm assuming) sweating (figuratively) gallons. I pulled the mats up to move em around and was hit with a deep earthy smell which made me IMMEDIATELY panic. There was only one super dark spot which was immediately washed off with warm soapy water and steel wool. There are other places that don't look too bad, but I am seeing markings on the floor elsewhere that match the pattern of the interlocking mat.

I'd like to keep working out down here, but I'd also like to not cause mold problems in my own house. Can anyone think of a way to essentially insulate the mat from the cement floor without creating a different problem where the plastic bottom ALSO creates an environment for the mold to grow? It's also possible that I'm WAY blowing this out of proportion...

I'll include pics on a follow up post

I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay.

This is not the first pet I've lost. Several childhood pets, but those weren't really mine, they were my parents', and so I didn't have the same level of responsibility over the animal as I did with Willow.

Even of my pets, this is not the first loss. In 2022, I adopted a retired working dog Yukon and an elderly cat Gomez. We lost Yukon in May 2024 (aspiration pneumonia due to megaesophagus) and Gomez in May 2025 (renal failure). The renal failure was a prolonged decline, and so while we tried to manage the disease we had some time to come to terms with things. The pneumonia was very fast decline and more of a shock. I loved them both, but this now feels much worse. I guess because I only really knew them 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively. I feel guilty about that, like it shouldn't matter and I should have grieved for them the same, but I don't.

This was the first pet that was mine, in the sense that my wife and I have had full responsibility for her the entire 10 years we've had her. She was the best behaved dog I've ever had. Always by my side at home. Especially when I worked from home during/after Covid lockdowns I took her with me wherever I could. Loyal. I just killed her.

Well, I didn't do it, we took her to a vet and they did typical euthanasia. It doesn't feel like the difference matters.

Willow also had renal failure, which we learned about at stage 3 (already severe) in January. The past few months have brought back a lot of pain about Gomez since it was the same disease. Realistically, the fact she made it all the way to May still walking on her own is remarkable. Meals have been challenging for the past month or so. Since late last week she refused to eat, and her condition deteriorated quickly over the weekend. We knew this was coming, but childishly it somehow felt like she'd just keep going forever because she'd been doing so well. Of course that's not how it works, but I guess it's easier to imagine that things are normal.

I think we gave her the best final day we could. We took her to the same pet stores, park, restaurants we used to take her to when she was in her prime. I got her some drive-thru chicken nuggets, her favorite, and she actually ate all of them! She must have been hungry. I want to believe I could have kept feeding her fast food for a few more days or weeks or months, but I know it's simply not true. She moved slow, but still walked on her own at the park and pet store. By the time we arrived at the vet she seemed satisfied, tired, and ready for a nap.

I don't know.

As I say, I've done this before and I roughly know the "usual" advice about grief and how it seems to work for me. My wife and I support each other. We still have other pets, and it helps a little to hold them. Enduring a death the same month three years in a row is taking its toll. All our other pets seem healthy and relatively young, and I'm not superstitious, but some deep emotional part of me can't help but fear May 2027. I think I'm just tired.

Our cat Pinto, still a 9-month old kitten, we've had since she was newborn and abandoned by her mother. We think she was abandoned because she couldn't latch properly to nurse, so we fed her on bottle day and night. Given how much it hurt about Yukon and Gomez after just a couple years, already old when we adopted them, and how much it hurts now about Willow after 11 years, who was a young adult when we adopted her, I am terrified of losing Pinto. I know it'll happen. I don't know what I'll do.

The quality of the pain doesn't really feel new, but the quantity is so much worse than I expected. Feeling guilty about that is new. The fear is new. Not really sure how to process it. You're not supposed to have favorites but I guess you do anyway.

I don't really know what I'm trying to get out of posting this. Pity? Not really. I guess I just need to get it out of my head. I'll probably look back at this thread in a few days to see what people have said but I think I just need to get this out and step away from it for a while and process.

https://i.imgur.com/U1Nq7X8.jpeg

Hi everyone,

On one hand, I'm very lucky: last year my partner and I purchased our first house! It feels great to hop off the renter hamster wheel.

On the other hand, we had to make some compromises when we bought the house: I wanted to limit our search to houses that already had central air (heating and cooling), because we both work from home and I really want our house to be comfortable year-round. Unfortunately, in Northern New England, that eliminates around 90% of houses. So we compromised and bought a place that has a furnace with ductwork, hoping to eventually add cooling using the same ductwork. Last year, I reached out to a couple of contractors to get a vague sense of how possible that might be. Consensus? Potentially expensive, but feasible.

My situation:

• our house is small, ~1100 square feet in the finished upstairs
• half of the upstairs has shit insulation, other half is decent after renovation
• we currently have a 100k BTU oil furnace that absolutely keeps up. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's massively oversized -- even on the coldest nights (around -20 or so most winters, including this one), it only kicks on ~50% of the time
• we used around 500 gallons of heating oil from September-May (the heating season)
• our furnace is awkwardly tucked between the outlet chimney and three walls, which makes accessing it a pain (and complicates installing a coil on top; I'm not sure if there's enough room).
• thanks to a nearby massive hydroelectric dam, our electric rates are about half the average New England electric price (and come from a pretty environmentally-friendly source!). So the more heating and cooling I can do with electric, the better IMO. I'd rather pay a bit extra to heat with clean electric than save on propane/oil if fossil prices come down (big if).

With the warm season upon us, I'm feeling the heat during my work-from-home days and trying to get cooling installed before the temperature really starts cooking. And, despite having a furnace with existing ductwork that covers every room in the house (90% of which is directly accessible through unfinished basement ceilings), every. goddamn. contractor. has. recommended. minisplits.

But I don't want minisplits. I know it's easier for them. I know it's cheaper. I know most contractors in the area have installed hundreds of minisplits but very few central systems (let alone a combined heating/cooling setup where you have to worry about balancing summer dehumidifying with extreme cold efficiency). I know I'll have to clean out and insulate my ducts. Minisplits would surely work OK, but I really don't want to install one in each of our three bedrooms, plus one (or more) in our open-layout kitchen/living/dining space, and then still deal with no direct cooling in the bathrooms. Aesthetically, my partner and I both find minisplits ugly, and our house is small enough that most minisplit designs would make the tiny bedrooms feel even more cramped.

Ideally, I'd rip out our existing furnace (and oil tank!), install a cold weather heat pump in its place, insulate the ducts, and call it a day. But every contractor also advises that I "keep the old furnace around" in case the heat pump breaks (seriously?) or in case the heat pump can't keep up on the coldest days (fair enough). And then we take a look at the existing furnace, conclude it would be hard to add cooling on top of it, and they tell me to think about minisplits again.

So I guess after all of this, I'd really appreciate some advice from tilderinos with more home improvement experience than myself. Should I think about this differently? How on earth do I find a contractor who knows what they're doing with central heat pumps who doesn't push me aggressively towards minisplits or keeping my dirty, noisy, expensive furnace around? Should I just roll over, give up on my central cooling dreams, and install some minisplits?

Do you have a dream job/one you've always thought about doing?
Do you work your own dream job? If you do, what is something you'd like to change about it to make it even better?

This question popped in my head this morning while not wanting to dive in to a weird work thing and after a quick look, it's been ~4 years since the last time a similar question was asked by @kfwyre (who posts awesome discussion questions!), and I thought that it's been long enough to ask again for new Tilders to chime in or for whoever answered last time to come back and see if their answers are the same.

I recently started a new job and have realized I'm not entirely sure what the scope of work is. I applied to a role that I was very well suited for and had a very clear objective. I went through like 8 rounds of interviews for them to decide that the team I applied for was CET and I am PT, which likely wouldn't work. So they made me a position with a team on the US west coast, be it a very different one. The salary is still wild so I took it, particularly in this job market, but now I'm having a hard time sussing out what the extents of my position actually are.

Has anyone been in this position before or have advice on how to narrow the scope of your work if it's a bit amorphous? Cheers!

Earlier today we had a post about dream jobs, and that had me thinking, what was the best job you ever had? Why did you leave that job? Did you know it was the dream job while you were at that job or did you only realize it years later?

I really don't know where to put this, so feel free to move, but I have this issue. I carry a LOT of shit on my keychain. Two sets of keys of four each, a SIM removal tool, a tiny retractable box cutter, a USB drive full of installer ISOs (you never know), an AirTag, a CPU with a hole punched through, a 3D printed whistle, and that may very well grow.

Now the problem I have is that the lanyard that I currently have has, over time, widened the gap on the karabiner to the point that I'll regularly lose a key ring in my pocket when pulling it out. Nothing major's happened yet, but it's a matter of time.

So, clearly, I need a better one. A higher quality one. But going on the eTailers of today I really only get garbage. A pack of 20! For ten bucks! Well, thanks, but we all know they'll suck. And frankly, I really don't know how to get my hands on a high quality one. I bet they're out there, I'm sure, but where do I look? What's good, what's bad? I really don't need the high-end climbing gear, or do I? Is my key lanyard a candidate for buy it for life, and if so, am I ready for that commitment?

Looking for any and all advice on this.

PS: I don't wear the lanyard. I'm one of those assholes that puts the active end in my pocket and lets the lanyard itself dangle out.

A few months ago someone posted an article on the male loneliness epidemic. I had shared my thoughts in the comments on that post. But I think that article and a lot of comments are under the impression that "redpill" content/ideology is still in vogue or relevant in today's world. It still has its followers and influencers for sure, but it's not at the forefront of cultural discussions anymore. To think otherwise is outdated, the redpill era died around 2022/2023 and was replaced by a more incel-derived "blackpill" era.

Thanks to TikTok, what was once relegated to niche internet forums became mainstream. The biggest influencer from this internet phenomenon is Clavicular, who is currently getting articles written about him in press outlets such as The Hollywood Reporter and People.

I am no stranger to talking about looks (side note: I would have taken more time to write that out and discuss broader topics, such as "types," if I had known it would have gotten as much attention as it did). And I have been around looksmaxxxing spaces on the internet since about 2022. I'll try to make this as brief and simple as I can.

What is the blackpill?

The blackpill is a deterministic outlook on life. It states that your genetics determines the quality of your life, and if you were not born with advantageous bone structure and height, then "it was over before it even started." You won't be successful in life, you won't find love, and you will end up a lonely, pathetic person wishing you'd been born looking better.

How does this differ from the redpill?

The redpill has some overlap with the blackpill. Both believe that men are the true victims of society. That feminism has been detrimental, this and that, and the other. The redpill, however, insinuates that you can self-improve. There's almost zero focus on improving looks, and it's almost entirely focused on making money and increasing your status.

A core belief of the redpill is that all women are gold diggers, and in order to get laid, you need to make a ton of money. The blackpill does not entirely dispute this, but it does say that if a woman chooses you for money, she will never actually love you. And that you are paying a lot of money for affection and attention that an attractive man gets for free.

I think that explanation in and of itself should show you the difference between the two.

What's looksmaxxxing? Are looksmaxxxing and the blackpill interchangeable terms?

They are not.

Looksmaxxxing is what guys do to look better, to increase their rankings on the looks scale. So that they can start getting laid (primarily) or start to "mog" (i.e., outshine everyone in a room).

In certain blackpill spaces looksmaxxxing is seen as cope, since, again, your life was determined by genetics and there's nothing you can do to fix this.

You might think looksmaxxxing consists of losing body fat, getting a skin care routine, dressing nicely, hygiene, and cologne. And that is part of it, all of that stuff is considered "softmaxxxing" but there's also "hardmaxxxing" as in surgeries and other more serious treatments such as steroids and peptides (which technically occupy a grey area between soft and hard maxxxing). An example of a popular surgery is double jaw surgery, here's the subreddit for it so you can see examples. If your jaw was not properly developed and you have a recessed chin (or a pushed-in chin), then a double jaw surgery is something you can do that would greatly increase your attractiveness. Although it does carry quite a bit of risk. There are other surgeries that people do on their eyes, their noses, ear pinning, there's a lot.

It is essentially a belief that your best investment is going to be in how you look. It's a bit of a running joke that instead of going to college, you should invest in plastic surgery, and that will do more to make your life better than a degree.

How do they view women? How do they view themselves?

The belief is that women are hypergamous. That they will only want to date up, and it's significantly easier for women to date and get laid, even if they are below average looking. And that even an above average looking man will have trouble since they aren't the holy grail of attractiveness.

Here's a brief explanation of their rating system.

• Sub-5

5 is considered average; sub-5 means below average. Not even that you don't get attention but that you get negative attention from the people around you.

• Low-Tier Normie / Low-Tier Becky
• Mid-Tier Normie / Mid-Tier Becky
• High-Tier Normie / High-Tier Becky

The "normie" categories are all average categories. Ranging from on the low side of average (LTN) to above average (HTN). The High Tier categories are where a lot of attractive actors sit, think romcom leads, the boy/girl next door types.

• Chad/Stacy

Essentially unobtainable beauty. Taylor Hill or Henry Cavill.

Depending on who you're talking to, someone would say that "life starts at HTN" or that life doesn't exist unless you're "Chad." And that if you're anything below that, you might as well not even exist.

How did it get popular?

The first instance most people probably heard of it was likely in 2014 when Elliot Rodger committed a mass shooting at a University. He was a member of a looksmaxxxing forum (the original looksmaxxxing forum, I believe), which led to the site being shut down and thus delaying any chance of its popularity. If you go back and watch and read what Elliot Rodger believed, it makes more sense in today's context now that this thought process has been more normalized.

In 2023, TikTok started promoting this content. Primarily from "edits" here's an example and coinciding with that were also the rise of a few influencers. All leading up to Clavicular, and how dominant he is on social media (thanks in part to funding from Peter Thiel). He was a kid posting on looksmaxxxing forums, was a micro celebrity in the niche, became a slightly bigger internet celebrity on TikTok before streamers started bringing him on leading to his insane fame.

Conclusion

Going back to the initial tildes post that I linked to. That whole thing was essentially saying, if you're just a good person, then someone will want to date you or fall in love with you or want to have sex with you or whatever. And I think part of the reason why looksmaxxxing stuff has taken off is that it feels more honest. It's not coddling you, and if you do improve your looks, you're going to see better results in dating than if you read feminist literature or something. So the takeaway ends up being that one of these places was telling me the truth.

Like, on a broader scale, it's a response to the body positivity stuff from the 2010s. When everyone was being told that it's okay if you're obese, it's healthy, it's beautiful. And there was just kind of a sense of performance to all of it.
The effort to change what people are attracted to, or to shame people for not being attracted to a certain thing. Has it gone too far? Probably, but I think that's why it took off initially and why it grew so quickly.

I obviously have my own personal experience about this, and so I very obviously know that it's not just what's inside that counts. Normal everyday people will make assumptions about you based on the way that you look. And I don't think it's a morally wrong thing to acknowledge that it happens, nor do I think it's a morally righteous thing to pretend like it doesn't.

I've been thinking on this for a while, and was inspired to ask about it while reading through the blackpill thread. I don't intend to actually look for a relationship for a while; it's been six months since the breakup, and my ex and I didn't agree to no-contact until two days ago, so I still have a long healing process to get through. But I have a lot of... dread? around not having a life partner forever, with the key factor being not having a close friend like my ex was pre-relationship. If I could emotionally and financially handle all life matters on my own that would be beautiful, but even just thinking about getting to the place I want to be financially while still maintaining a certain lifestyle is anxiety-inducing on its own. So again, even as I do not actively prepare to download any app and put myself out there, I'd like to take some notes as someone who has never used an app and whose previous relationships were by chance (classmates while in school, ex was from MMO).

For starters: I'm a cis woman, early 30s, and identify as lesbian, demisexual, demiromantic. I don't know where I am on the scale of conventional attractiveness. I'm extremely short and skinny. I've never really gone through the initial "dating" process (I knew my exes before getting in a relationship with them so we kind of jumped into being exclusive/"official").

The demi- bits mean a lot to me. I feel it makes sense to just seek spaces for activities that I enjoy and go on from there, but I feel like it's a difficult numbers game because statistically most people will be straight, right? And I don't think I exude any non-straight energy either, if that's even a thing. So this brings me to why I feel I inevitably will need to use dating apps - I fear the environment, I have never applied makeup on myself and couldn't tell you the difference between mascara and eyeliner without Googling, and the blackpill thread is filled with commentary on how these apps really cultivate a landscape with a focus on appearance. But simply being not-straight makes me feel I have to use an app for the basic filter of gender preference.

I don't see myself going to a gay bar (prefer not to drink). I can see some queer-friendly dating-focused events in my area that sound okay but I fear my issues with social performance will keep me away (I can perform for one person but the few events I see right now are speed-dating or casual mixers). Also some of them are hosted at wineries/pubs and I get that alcohol is normal, but I really don't like the vibe of bars themselves (too loud).

I also don't know if there are... things to "know" when trying to date as a lesbian? Like when folks talk about being masc/femme, those things don't really mean anything to me - I have male-dominated hobbies and don't wear feminine clothing, but to say that any bit of me says "masculine" in any way just doesn't seem right. I also honest to god do not know what expectations are regarding trans women. I can't write them off as I've never dated or been romantically interested in a trans woman, but I do fear that the... equipment, for lack of better phrase... might matter to me, and I don't want to offend too late? Is it transphobic to say I'd prefer to date cis women?

Apologies as I realize that this is definitely becoming more of a ramble on "how date, I've never dated strangers" and less on advice for use of dating apps specifically. But at the end of the day, yes, I feel that I will need to use dating apps but fear the experiences that I read about from using them.

I was talking to a dear friend of mine who told me years ago how he has been physically abused by his wife and how hard it was for him to share this, because so few people believed his story. Or laughed when he dared to share. Yesterday we talked about how hidden these stories are. He believes it is a lot more prevalent than it seems. People are just to ashamed to share or afraid they won’t be believed.

I recognised his trouble. I was abused by my mother for years, physically and mentally, after she separated from my dad (who she abused as well). In my life I have shared this story to only a handful of people, often being disappointed by their reactions.

What made this especially difficult was how my mom managed to convince me and the people around my family that my dad was actually the aggressor. ‘Woman gets beat up by man’ is just a lot more believable.

In hindsight, it feels like such a twisted dynamic, where my mom as a female abuser used the stories of actual female victims to hide or defend her own abuse.

Of course I do not in any way want to diminish the aggression that women experience. It is a lot more prevalent, and this issue needs all the attention it can get.

I was just wondering if there are any other men here who are victims from female abusers and if you recognise the difficulty in sharing your story as well.

hey there tildes. i’m moving out of texas in august no matter what and am trying to decide between chicago and portland. i was wondering if anyone here has lived in either (or both) locations and could help me decide by sharing their experiences.

i’m currently in texas and by the time i move, i will have only been here 1 year but this was always supposed to be a temporary stop for a job (that is very much not working out due to the owner of the company — i’ve posted about it a few months ago and struggle with it in my mind to this day).

i’ve moved around a bit, both in the same cities and across several states, over the past 5 years. im tired of moving and starting over, so im really going to focus on making the next place work for at least 5 years. the world is too chaotic for me to pretend to see farther out than that.

i had been reading and watching a lot of videos about chicago over the past month or two and now wondering if i should give it a try? i just assumed i would move back to portland by default because i liked it well enough and now im not sure if i should fall back to something familiar or try again somewhere else.

just want to say that i know moving wont magically make my life great and i know i will have to put in a lot of work to make everything work regardless. greener grass and all that.

portland

i’ve lived in portland before (2 years) and visited many, many times in the 7 years before moving there. i liked it for the most part.

things i didn’t like (mostly my opinion/experience)

• PNW gray, dreary weather for many months. im prone to bouts of severe depression and it’s a lot of work to keep healthy during the dark months. was in for seattle for 7 years prior to living in portland so i was maxed out with the gray perhaps.
• cost of living is kind of high for the size of city and offerings
• it’s a very slow, sleepy city that feels more like a very big town than a small city. sometimes i liked this about the city (less traffic, crowds) and sometimes i didnt (less “things going on”, especially later at night)
• the sheer amount of unsheltered people and seemingly no solution or even progress. when i lived there, it was really, really bad (2021-2023) and i’ve read that it’s actually gotten worse since ive left. it’s heartbreaking.

things i did like

• green year round, even if it’s gray and winter. beautiful outdoors/hiking, swimming in the river
• proximity to seattle (i have friends there)
• much more agreeable politics for me (Leftists everywhere)
• great food options, fun bars, interesting shops
• very bike friendly (newly into biking, was not when i lived there)
• decent public transit
• relatively friendly people though i did struggle with making deeper connections
• very positive towards folks who are queer or generally nontraditional. that’s important to me
• seems like a lot of creative folk live here

chicago

i’ve never been to chicago. i’ll visit in june to check it out. i also don’t know anyone there. this isn’t a huge deal since i have done this kind of move (only visiting right before moving and not knowing anyone) i guess 3 times now.

reasons i think i will like it

• liberal city
• great public transit
• big, dense city
• diversity
• seemingly decent cost of living
• people say midwesterners are friendly (?)
• job opportunities just by the fact that it’s such a huge city

things that are/may be negative

• brutal winters. i am not used to real winters. seattle/portland had very mild winters and even denver’s were honestly not bad at all. i hear lots of talk about chicago winters.
• crime. no, i don’t think i will be regularly mugged or killed like the US media makes it sometimes seem, but compared to everywhere i’ve lived before, it’s has a higher violent crime rate.
• friends/community. i’m in my mid 30s and it’s harder to make friends the old i get and that’s sort of my number one goal each time i move to a new city. also never really had “community” and would really like to have that in my life.
• politics. i know that portland is generally much more left and chicago is more generic democrat. this isn’t the end of the world and i don’t expect everyone to be as far left as i am but i want to be able to live in the same reality as my community.

huge wall of text, i know, so thanks for those that read it. i’m not great at organizing my thoughts in these posts, but i’m just tryin’ to figure stuff out!

if anyone has anything they want to share based on my likes/dislikes and your experience, please do! i really enjoy reading what the folks here have to say about things.

Hey all,

I'm a computer science major, and I'm about to graduate at the end of April. My general life situation is a bit messy, so unless I can find a job this month, I am going to have to look into some less-than-savory options for housing and feeding myself.

I've applied for ~280 entry-level software engineering positions thus far and have had a few calls back, but once the company realizes that my graduation date is a month out, I never hear from them again (I follow up anyway, just in case.) I also have been working an internship through school for about two years, and expected to get a return offer, but that recently fell through. I can continue to work there past graduation, but I'd still be an intern for the foreseeable future, and that will not be enough to cover rent.

I haven't given up, exactly -- I'm still networking rather aggressively, and, even though it makes me feel bad, I'm milking every connection I have to try to find something. I just don't feel like the chances are good that I land a software job in the timeframe that I've got left, so I want to start looking at what else I can do with just "a degree" as opposed to "a computer science degree." Obviously the job market is horrible for everyone right now, but wider nets catch more fish and all...

So, any suggestions?

Feeling pretty discouraged after taking yet another spin around the tech interview circuit for naught
I was feeling pretty good this time around as I've interviewed with this company before and was runner up for previous role. The hiring manager contacted me for this new one, and again I aced it until the final stage where I got punted for the all nebulous "culture fit" reasoning. My mood isn't helped by the constant AI doom clouds hovering overhead that makes me wonder if I need to make bigger career changes.

How's everyone else fairing out there?