Toth

Well, I've been on a space game binge yesterday. First playing No Man's Sky. Was trying to farm credits by fixing up crashed ships, but after a while my game glitched and I came upon a crashed hauler that was somehow stuck in the lift-off animation and couldn't be interacted with, but the marker pointing at it still didn't disappear, barring me from finding any more ships. Quite a bummer. I guess I will have to move to the next system. Though I probably should give up trying to hope for an S-class ship this way and settle for an A-class. Already sold an A-class Explorer which probably could have been a neat hero ship. After that yesterday night I jumped briefly back into X4: Foundations. I installed the ridiculously impressive Star Wars Interworlds Total Conversion mod and took the masochistic imperial start where you have to explore the whole Star Wars galaxy in a TIE Fighter. Tried to make my way to the next shipyard to see how much I need to save up for a small freighter, meanwhile cramming plasma conductors into the glove box to fool a little around with trading, while at the same time I stumbled across three 'criminal' ships that the TIE was surprisingly able to one-shot. I suppose when you have no shields, barely any hull hitpoints and no FTL, you at least get some gnarly guns. It sure felt quite epic and were the easiest 1500 credits I made so far.^^ Unfortunately towards the end I figured out again how to do quests and found one where you have to fix leaks on a space station. OF COURSE one of them spawned on the inside of the model and I was unable to get to it without trying to glitch inside the station. Very frustrating. Especially after I had so much trouble getting to reach the ejection panel inside the TIE to go for that space walk in the first place. The cockpit is just so tiny and round that you can't physically reach it while standing up, you have to crouch towards it. But otherwise this mod is just astonishingly ambitious and makes quite a wondrous first impression. I had been slightly confused why New Republic and Rebel Alliance are both factions, but their website states that the mod is set early in the Legends universe and that the New Republic is still in its infancy while Rebel Alliance still nominally exists in order to free more systems from the Empire. Okay. Then it's weird that the Khaak have been replaced with the Yuuzhan Vong, that made me looking forward towards a NJO setting. I guess it's just an amalgamation of the whole timeline then. In any case, being at war with three factions (New Republic, Rebel Alliance and... Mandalorians for some reason) is bad for business, so I will try to figure out how to appease them. And maybe hopefully upgrade to an X-Wing as a hero ship, because that lack of shields gives me anxiety. Edit: Okay, managed to squeeze myself into some crevice and finish the mission! Yay! But unfortunately after that did a very long escort mission for a Banking clan freighter and all of a sudden when I was nearly there he just said "Thanks!" and the mission disappeared, without me getting any rewards. Booo! But hey, at least it gave me an opportunity to explore some new systems nearby.

Ha! But wow, making yeast sounds infinitely more elaborate than anything I have touched so far in my pointless experiments. Hat off to her! And well... next time if I'm going to make an attempt at it, I will actually take tiger nut flour, which... oddly seems also much cheaper than the whole tubers for some inexplicable reason. However because I bought in bulk to avoid shipping fees, I still have 1 kg left, so there will be some more experimenting until then. And please don't take it as an offense, but I'd very much prefer no happy birthday wishes. This whole scheme was an attempt to overwrite my discomfort about this shit day with presenting something unusual in an attempt that that may blunt my misery and may help metreat it normally. Without it I'm hit by the full brunt of how much I hate it and really don't want to hear anything about it.

Meh. So I ended up scrapping the 3400 years old birthday cake idea from above. As it turns out, trying to grind flour over the course of four days because you have too little time individually is a really bad decision. My initial idea was to grind the Tiger Nut flour on Wednesday and bake it on Thursday, but my mother urged me to start grinding on Sunday and do it every day for a few hours (it's really time-consuming to put it through the sieve five times to get fine enough flour and not do too much at the same time as to not break the food processor). However, when I went back to finish it on Wednesday, the flour was wet, oily and smelling slightly rancid. Wonderful... So I had to throw the whole batch out and frantically started a new from scratch, baking a small cake that same day. Unfortunately with it now being so fine, it... is after baking even softer than the first attempt, feeling as if it wasn't baked at all, even though I quite nearly burnt it. It also tastes crunchy, just like Max Miller of Tasting History says it should taste like, but my mother insists I'd make an utter fool of myself trying to offer something like this to people, so I scrapped the whole thing and went back to my usual behavior of keeping my birthday secret and just silently hoping the bloody day will end as fast as possible.

Well, I guess it's time for a little update on the Bumble front, given my current "Are you shitting me?!?" mindset, but... well, then again, it IS, online dating, so I really shouldn't be surprised that this is how it goes. First of all, I did expect absolutely zero visibility, which... I must admit would have been fine to me, but right now I'm in a weird spot where I DO occasionally get a like every few weeks, which... makes it look like I'm... actually visible, just... extremely unable to make any hearts flutter, which... is not unexpected, but it is still somewhat annoying to get reminded of. In any case, after the first match with that random Brazilian girl a couple of weeks ago I got two more likes that were not bots and who actually showed up in my feed. The first... okay, I suppose I'm again being judgemental even though I'm not in the position. But... next to the empty profile there were only pictures of a very obese woman whose face also didn't really endear her to me. I know I should absolutely not be picky, but I couldn't bring myself to swipe right even after looking over it half a dozen times. Then the other one was... weird. In that way that she put a bazillion filters over all her pictures, making it a nightmarishly fake face. I at first also just closed app, but eventually thought to swipe right even if only to be able to ask about that. Therefore we matched... aaaand she unmatched a couple of hours later without a word. And finally there is today. Completely out of the blue it said I got a match this noon. I looked the app up and... it was a Japanese dancer whom I swiped right for no particular reason other than thinking an opportunity to have someone help me practice my Japanese could be neat (yes, yes...). I didn't think it would actually cause a match anyway. In a way, I suspect she also only swiped because I wrote in my profile I'm learning Japanese. So I responded to her "Hi" in Japanese, saying "Aaaaa! What should I write?"- but then because I was fiddling with Gboard refusing to properly show me the kanji I was trying to write, the message got sent right there, even though I wanted to write some more. So I frantically added in German that I'm probably just making a fool out of myself trying to write in Japanese, but still wish a good evening. After a while she replied "Thank you! Good evening to you as well!". Admittedly, I couldn't reply at that point because I was busy baking a cake and helping my mother with her TV that just at this moment decided to die, so it once again took a few precious minutes until I replied "So what brought you to this site?", mostly because in her profile she checked "I don't know" as her goal and thought it would be wise to ask for how she interprets that. Aaaand got immediately unmatched. Sigh... yes, that exchange is the online dating world in a nutshell. I'm useless at this. As an aside, while it is something I have noticed before, I find it increasingly weird how I end up matching the majority of the time with foreigners. I suspect I really need some kind of exoticism bonus to get any attention whatsoever and without that am just below notice for any German women who know they can get better.

The issue is that their whole culture is rotten to the core by lies and distrust. I recently caught up on the much lauded analysis videos by Perun and what he said about what likely happened just fits the facts like a glove. Basically the scouts don't dare to get close to the Ukrainian positions, but still deliver a rough guess that underestimates the strengths of the Ukrainian positions. So the first wave gets sent in to take it, but get slaughtered because their force is far too small. Their officers, in an attempt to avoid punishment for their failure/to look good compared to the other officers reporting faked success stories, embellish in their report that they inflicted massive casualties on the Ukrainians and only need some armor for a final push to give them the rest. The general receiving that report has to think the Ukrainians are at the cusp of faltering, so stretched thin as the Russians are, sends in just enough reinforcements to finish the job, only for them to get slaughtered again. Then the officers of those reinforcements lie about what happened, rinse and repeat. It also feels just right when considering how many high-ranking generals we have seen inspecting the frontlines themselves in a brief window after the first failures and then getting HIMARS to the face. The Russian generals likely all suspect that all their reports are fabricated, but checking the situation themselves is too deadly to risk it. And dismissing these reports and give orders trusting their gut makes them personally accountable for if things go wrong this way. Therefore they act like they blindly trust the fake reports and send in the next wave to their deaths, knowing that when someone even higher comes knocking, they can say they gave out utterly sensible orders that fit to the picture they had, so those giving the intel were to blame, not them for giving the stupid orders. It is utter insanity, but... it's vranyo at its most insidious expression and the only rational explanation why the Russians keep running in small groups one after another against heavily fortified positions just about everywhere at the contact line. Amusingly I just had to think that I unwittingly used that same concept in one of my Star Wars fanfics. An Imperial backwater outpost with horrifically outdated equipment that skimped out on training exercises for a decade gets utterly trounced by Rogue Squadron. Later as a small subtle joke when Darth Vader reads the report that ticks him off to where the rebels are, the commander claims a massive Rebel Attack with capital ships that they heroically fended off, instead of a single squadron blowing all their shit up and escape unscathed. At the time I didn't really think that any real military would be doing stuff like that in the middle of an actual symmetric war, but... here we are. I guess I have lots of new material to portray the Empire as frustratingly corrupt in the next installment...

Because even when I'm trying to be normal, I'm trying to do something out there... I was considering making myself a birthday cake for the first time since... two decades or so. And tried out a 3400 years old recipe from Ancient Egypt for Tiger Nut cake, found in the tomb of Theban vizier Rekhmire: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/971086032424562718/1099262224721260564/20230422_105538.jpg Well, I must admit I got impatient during the grinding of the Tiger Nuts, it's still very chewy. And tastes like... grated coconut soaked in honey wrapped in dates. I think I can feel my teeth rot. XD

Yes. And? I'm a bit confused. All of what you are saying here is correct, but what does that have to do with your initial statement? Your statement that started this tangent was this one: But all the sources say that western diplomats, especially from Germany and the US, were concerned about upsetting the Soviet Union through expansions and Gorbachev taking it for granted that the US wouldn't do so... but then not making it explicitly a condition on any paper anywhere. And what I was getting at with my writing out the events that followed is that Gorbachev's grumpiness about the "spirit of the document" having been overstepped didn't really matter because at point different actors were responsible for the events. Clinton did try to prevent eastwards expansion even at a time when Yeltzin said he wouldn't consider it a threat. It is Putin who then turned around and used it as justification for aggressive retaliation after he was already for years in office. Though even in his behavior I got the feeling he doesn't really care about the Visegrad states because they turned to the West the instant they had the option to and there was no going back, but is particularly sore about Ukraine and Georgia seeking NATO protection as he thinks all the countries who remained closely tied to Russia now owe it unconditional allegiance and can't be allowed to break away no matter the cost. An assumption that means to me (and I think also most people here on the board) that past NATO expansions or feelings of actual threat didn't truly factor into Putin's reasoning (except maybe some soreness seeing how much better they do in the EU and that with the exception of Hungary they have no desire for ties to Russia) and that any attempt to seek any kind of western alliance would have resulted in a response from the Brezhnev playbook either way.

So what's the point? Baker's "proposal" (reading the actual document here: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-conversation-between ) reads like Baker on February 9th trying to gauge where Gorbachev stands... with the final agreement having been signed in September 12th, seven months later, with none of that being a part of it (mostly because NATO as an organization was not a party to it): https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/2plusfour8994e.htm So yes, it was a proposal made by a single diplomat as part of an ongoing process that then... was not put in the actual agreement. Gorbachev himself stated that he wasn't expecting Warsaw Pact to dissolve at that point, so from my perspective it makes sense that he only demanded no nuclear weapons to be put into former GDR territory, which ultimately was what was decided upon. An ongoing process, as you say. May have also been somewhat influenced by Gorbachev having other things to worry about at that time, what with that whole attempt to overthrow him. Meanwhile Yeltzin signed off on the first NATO expansion during a visit by the Polish president in 1994 who at the time was practically trying to blackmail Clinton to get allowed in: https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-boris-yeltsin-privately-supported-nato-expansion-in-1990s/ As you say, ongoing process. Clinton tried his best to keep the Visegrad states in the much looser PfP project to appease Russia, but faltered after 4 years of relentless pursuit of it by these states, only greenlighting it in 1996, with it happening in 1999. At that point Russia had a seat at every NATO table and later allowed Bush to wage his Afghanistan invasion from former USSR territory and putting ships under NATO anti-piracy command in 2004, so everything seemed peachy. Was Bush then "humiliating" Putin by telling Ukraine and Georgia "Sure, why not?" when they asked for NATO membership in 2008? Maybe. But I personally don't find it very civilized to see that as a main reason to invade a neighbor a few months later for fear of not being able to bully them into compliance anymore. I know very well that these wars happened because Putin envisioned the countries within Russia's "sphere" to stay there forever and join his Eurasian Economic Union pet project as a counter alternative to EU... but... alright, maybe... he should... come up with offering a better deal? Military action to prevent someone slipping away is so 19th century after all... shall we not regard the sovereignty of states as... well... a universal good that needs to be respected in order to not fall back into imperialistic bickering? As the UK proved... we aren't stopping anyone from changing their mind later after all...

I must concur with Ser Scot on that one, give it a chance! Andor doesn't indulge in (almost) any memberberries (I can really only think of one stinger to the Death Star under construction), everything else is about entirely new characters on entirely new planets, focusing on a very... mundane and Average Joe level portrayal of life under the thumb of the Empire, of various instances of its injustices (which all here always follow very specific and clear purposes) and acts of resistance committed (which also only get triggered in response to certain breaking points being overstepped). It's really all I could have wished from a Star Wars product in this day and age. The part that I like is that the Empire in Andor isn't portrayed as adorably incompetent clowns with cool toys, but as... an oppressive system of faceless bureaucracy trampling on everybody's freedoms, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally as a side effect to certain policies it's pursuing. And it is scary and terrifying throughout. Even when it comes to the shootouts... okay, the TIEs get a bit of the short end of the stick as they get screwed both times they engage with protagonists, but only through surprise countermeasures or pre-planned exploits of the environment to escape them. Stormtroopers... hooo boy, they get to shine here at the end swooping in and mopping the floor with good guys as eerily silent, faceless and disciplined special forces brought in when shit hit the fan for the still very humanized Army troopers that were holding the line the rest of the show. My personal theory is that all the Disney execs didn't care about a spin-off about a supporting protagonist from a one-shot spin-off and so the authors didn't have to deal with all the meddling and were able to work completely freely on a story about fascism that just happens to have the Star Wars galaxy as a setting.

Indeed. Even Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are part of that nostalgia addiction with their premises, but at least Strange New Worlds isn't quite as stupidly grim and tries to be an episodic show about exploration and Lower Decks just doesn't want to be anything other than a PG-rated Rick and Morty in the Star Trek universe, taking absolutely nothing about itself seriously. Those are their redeeming qualities that make me somewhat enjoy them, Lower Decks a tad more, admittedly.

Okay, I may be my usual party pooper self, but given that I wanted to watch the Enterprise F in action and I learned that in the last episode they actually canonized the Star Trek Online ship I liked so much, I kind of watched clips of the episode on Youtube and... yeah, even that gave me a headache about how nonsensical the plot seems to me. So do I get this straight: People can now get spontaneously assimilated without the need for nanites and implants, purely biologically, simply because people have been using contaminated transporters, which... is the result of modifications done to Picard as Locutus which they couldn't have possibly thought of at the time because their plan was still to throw Cubes at the problem, but also something that needed changeling sabotage for some reason, needs all Federation ships bundled together at one location, wasn't used to the fleet in Star Trek 8 or to the Enterprise E and somehow conveniently can't affect old folks, so that our reunited original cast can get away unscathed, except for all the trauma of the situation, which is completely overwritten by them fanboying about the bridge set. Again... the ENTIRE Starfleet has congregated at one location for a bloody festival. ALL ships, NO EXCEPTIONS. So all exploration, all diplomacy, all security, came to a screeching halt for weeks on end because every ship had to get recalled for a dumb parade. And all these ships... somehow had to be... networked together, somehow, because... it isn't like they had copious smaller scale catastrophes whenever they did that before, even in this same show. Why the need for superlatives? Wouldn't it have been sufficient to say all ships in the sector who had nothing better to do? Still would have been fairly catastrophic, but not ridiculously so... Remember Commander Shelby? Look how awesome she is now! BAM, DEAD, MUAHAHAHA, we are so damned edgy, gruesomely killing just another old character off for the lolz while still banking on you eating up all the nostalgia which is the sole life support of every big franchise nowadays! I'm so tired of this... why does Picard feel the need to be so horrifically grim all the bloody time? Of course the Enterprise, which had been stated as unsalvageable in Star Trek 7, had been salvaged, somehow. After it bounced through a mountain range and slid across the entire valley beyond, fucking its structural integrity up beyond the point where simply building a new ship from scratch would have been less of a hassle than to try to restore it. Yes, the saucer would need to get retrieved, the explanation was sound, but they probably would have to cut it apart and beam it up piecemeal. Something like that however happened, and a ship of the biggest Federation starship class until the Odyssey has been treated as the vintage hot rod pet project of Geordie and his daughter in some museum's garage, and somehow ended up in pristine condition with all systems and weapons intact AND rigged in a way that a single-digit number of old folks can commandeer it and probably will do so at max efficiency, somehow. I know I'm directing all the anger of... pretty much everyone towards me, who liked this episode and this show... but I'm sorry, I can't stomach that cynical nostalgia bait anymore, that combined with the childish edginess and the horrific lighting, where my first thought upon the bridge of the D being shown with all lights on was that it highlighted how you couldn't see shit anywhere in almost every scene prior. Yeah, aside Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, this new "Star Trek" still is absolutely not my cup of tea, even though this season is probably better than the garbage before...

Okay thanks. I must admit, I guess I didn't take into account that China would go for a first strike against US presence in the area, simply because the idea of a nuclear power directly attacking a nuclear power is just too insane and so expected to go for a speed rush like Russia did and hope the US would be too dumbstruck to intervene. I suppose it makes sense if there is something of a silent agreement that the conflict will be contained to the area...

Mmh... I guess my main assumption is that if this happens, it won't be much of a land war where this factors in heavily. If the US manages to neutralize the Chinese navy, Taiwan will win. If the Chinese navy manages to secure a corridor to Taiwan and establishes a beachhead, then China wins. Taiwan is more than sixteen times smaller than Ukraine, I may be naive, but I don't see much space where they could get bogged down behind the beaches.

Well, as long as they don't consider making them swim to Taiwan, that won't factor in too much. But they do have lots of toys to equip them with and even more industrial capacity to keep making more. It really just stands and falls with the question whether their navy is high tech enough to manage an amphibious assault while facing down the US navy without getting shredded in the attempt.

"Let them try."

Uhm, yeah. A community that calls a military "woke" sounds truly like one with common sense... It would definitely be the wrong lesson learned from Ukraine to start underestimating hostile countries. Personally, I doubt that China's military would be as much of a shit show as Russia's, given it's budget and that society doesn't seem quite as notoriously corrupt, at least when observed from the outside. There are of course a lot of question marks, given China's usual propaganda bluster, but I'd put my effort into signalling Xi that any wars of conquest on their end, no matter how much they want to pretend it's an "internal" affair, will bring on all the economic hurt and that the status quo would be much, much, much preferable to everyone.

Can someone just please give Macron a good whack at the back of his head? He seems to need it...

Okay, I'll be damned. I didn't think it was possible anymore, but somehow I still got a match. Of course she doesn't respond to my greeting, but... why should she? So no surprise on that front. For added hilarity, Bumble obviously didn't match me with a local, but with a girl from the other end of the world. Whom I was just about to swipe left when I noticed her name was almost the same as the love interest of a character I was cosplaying in one of my pictures, so I chuckled and swiped right as a meme. I was quite surprised to see her swipe right as well this morning. I suppose just for the novelty of it as well. Other than that, nothing new. I suppose it makes me question a bit whether I had been too harsh in swiping... but I guess spelling out again that I swipe left when the profile is empty or when there is only an instagram link, when there are only ultra professional pictures or when the person is clearly too pretty, makes me a judgemental prick again. Especially when I at the same time also have to note that I'm getting particularly badly reminded about the time I've lost when half the women my age on that platform start to look like they could be my mother... So yeah, I barely swipe right, or even when I see a profile that doesn't check any of the above boxes, I still end up just closing the app in indecisiveness. At the same time when I find someone have a series of pictures in different outfits doing selfies in different rooms of their apartment, I ended up finding that strangely endearing. XD Edit: Aaaaaaand gone!

Some Force voodoo place introduced in the final episodes of Rebels as a place where you can travel to different places in time. It's implied Ahsoka had been initially killed when left behind dueling Vader, but Ezra used it to snatch her away. Don't think too hard about it...

If it's used as an excuse to undo the sequel trilogy, I'm sure there are a lot of people who wouldn't be too concerned about that... Also if this is Joruus C'Baoth, I'm missing the pulpy shirtless scenes. XD

I said before that the Ahsoka show should just scrap all pretensions and just be a pragmatic adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy, but that "as heir to the Empire" line still made me cringe so hard. Andor was just a fluke, wasn't it?

Lol, I recently installed Pharaoh again and did a few missions because I suddenly felt that could be relaxing. And I am not talking about the remake! But oh well, my gaming endeavors have been quite crazy these days. Continued playing Skyrim a little whenever I have only little time. Also continued ESO. They now did back-to-back events which somewhat did distract me from the main quest... or the fact that I horrenduously overestimated how many skill points you get to put into your perks because you don't get any from leveling anymore after reaching level 50. And I put almost all of them into crafting, so my character is increasingly becoming a wet noodle in combat... I had also looked into The Crew 2 again for a new motorpass event, but... oh god, after playing Forza with its very "grippy" and comprehensible driving physics, I had an extremely hard time with the extremely floaty, prone to randomly oversteering and understeering cars that leave you constantly fighting against your own overcorrections. It doesn't help that, seriously, 90% of the cars drive so horrible that you have to ignore them for most events, since they all only consist of very narrow 90° corners where you end up hitting EVERY. SINGLE. DAMN. WALL. because your car refuses to react to your inputs. So no goofing around with silly cars in a silly car game... I'm also wondering whether I should go back to No Man's Sky. They have just dropped a new update reworking combat and introducing capital ship combat... I am very curious how exactly they implemented that given the passive nature of capital ships last time I had one.

You are assuming I'll stay visible enough to get judged by the right people, which is not how their algorithm works. You get a short burst of visibility after signing up and with every swipe left in that window your visibility decreases until they put you into the "hopeless" category and don't show your profile at all. So because I'm unattractive to the vast majority of women, my profile will be too obscure for anyone who might not immediately be turned off to even see my profile, buried beneath those who can sell themselves the best or have just bought the visibility. Of course, since I already was signed up... a couple of times... to abuse that burst because otherwise I would never have been able to get those three matches... I'm also assuming they have woken up to that abuse to their mechanics and kept a file on me so that I don't even get that burst anymore. That's what happened two years ago. I got all those likes only at the very beginning then came months of utter silence.

To be honest, I'm also in the doom and gloom faction. I'm fairly realistic that these apps try to wring you out for every penny by pretty much burying your profile instead of showing it to anyone until you pay up and then Heartofice is in that regard correct that the men outnumber the women vastly, so an ugly nerdy gnome like me has absolutely zero chance to get any attention from anyone. I remind you that the last time I tried that I was on there for half a year, got three matches and one meet-up... with a bored Chinese expat with no interest in a relationship, who then quickly broke off all contact. So me being there again is mostly a desperation act because two years of trying to get out more and focusing on making friends... has gotten me absolutely nowhere because I just suck so badly at everything social. I must also admit that at least I'm not... really hoping all that much to succeed, because while I've caught myself taken aback by how starved of intimacy I am recently (when in the train with my backpack on my lap I found that if I hug it and imagine I'm hugging a person, I actually can provoke a fuzzy feeling in my chest - something I never felt before and that horrified me for how pathetic I must be to be able to so easily fool my body...), I still have to consider how... impossible a task having a relationship looks like and how it still just doesn't mesh well with still living together with my mother and her plans for me to buy ourselves a house. I am well aware that every woman would run away screaming from a guy like me. With which I mean a guy with my looks, my backstory, my circumstances, my lacking work/life-balance and my interests. So anyway, I also won't be paying for this shit, because wasting money and still get crickets chirping at me out of these apps would be far worse than just... having an account and occasionally fool around with it with no expectation that anything would ever happen on there.

I may be the last one to ask, but... I also feel that it sounds a tad more proactive than only "impure thoughts". I guess a lot of it depends on how... serious stuff was described. If it's just fooling around with a friend, sure, but given that you seem concerned enough to post about it here, I'd wager there is some amount of guilt involved. So... in either case, I would judge it as a big misstep as an outside observer that you should make very sure not to repeat. Well, meanwhile I'm being stupid again. In a mixture of fear of my nearing 30th birthday, frustration about how my attempts to be more among people in RL were an utter failure so far and another suffocating burst of loneliness... I'm back on Bumble... What am I doing to myself? I guess I have better pictures now thanks to my con experiences, but... those of course are pictures at a con, which won't get me anywhere, quite probably. Amusingly I had a bit of a panic attack during the sign-in, suddenly fearing what would happen if a match actually happens, would I once again fail to be a social human being by either taking too long to respond to messages or by messaging too often? But then I signed up and immediately remembered that this is me on an online dating platform, so naturally I won't ever get any likes and... well, that was two days ago and so far my expectations have been completely confirmed. It is strange how that immediately put my mind to rest. Then again, somehow the site has gotten worse 2 years after my last attempt. Fair enough, the profiles of women are still the same. Three pictures of supermodels, an instagram link and nothing else. But you can now only filter after age and distance, all the other options are now premium. Also I pretty much instantly got told I've ran out of likes and need to buy premium for those as well. Rotten garbage site... Other observations: Thrice I saw pictures of women showing very prominently an engagement/wedding ring into the camera. What... am I supposed make of that? Also am fairly sure I saw two former students of mine. Both profiles were however as barren as the rest of them, which... makes sense. Those three matches I had in the half a year I was on there the last time also were pretty damn empty and I probably would have never swiped right on them because of that if they hadn't made the like first... In any case, I suppose that's the risk coming with my profession. I just hope I will never get shown to them. Amidst everything I then also perked up at a very good looking (but not... fake looking, if you know what I mean) woman who also had convention pictures and wrote about how she won't shut up about nerd stuff... and that she's just here for casual sex... Uhm... okay... sure... Damn... well, you do you... if you aren't a fake profile catfishing nerds of course. Sigh... once again, why am I doing this to myself?