Toth

14 hours ago, Spockydog said:

I certainly wouldn't consider myself extremely attractive. I make the most of what I have. And you don't need professionally shot photos. Some decently framed selfies will do just fine, has been my experience so far, at least.

Well, good luck then! If it works, it works. If it doesn't, just be aware of how bleak it is.

14 hours ago, Spockydog said:

As an aside, I think that signing up to one of my Lazyscrog pilot schemes would do you the world of good. There will be quite a few women involved, we'll be doing regular zoom calls, and I'm pretty sure that your empathy for, along with your ability to care for, all kinds of plants, would score you many points. Something to think about, perhaps.

That's a really weird pitch. Sorry, but I pass.

19 hours ago, Spockydog said:

After far too long being single, I have just dipped my toe into the world of online dating.

Holy mother of god. What a scam-riddled shit show. 

Can anyone point me in the direction of one of the more reliable dating sites?

ETA: OK, one of my more worldly friends has told me to just get on Tinder and forget the rest. In the absence of any contradictory advice, I have created a profile.

Ladies of Enfield, hit me up @scrog_bae

Profile tips/feedback would be very much appreciated.

 

Mmh... I mean... depends how attractive you are. Are you extremely attractive and have very professional photos? Then you should be fine. Otherwise... well, it's a shit-show, just like you say.

Bumble I am hearing (and experiencing) is dying fast. I did try it out three years ago and had... not much success, but at least got three matches in half a year with no date. Last year I got absolutely nothing. I even had more luck on Tinder, where I had two likes that unmatched immediately after I liked them back and one match where the woman replied with a daily one-word answer per day for nearly a week before she unmatched.

I also tried Okcupid at the very beginning, hearing it has more unconventional people on there. Which is true. And it also allows you to connect much more freely, which I liked. Though still, the only conversation I had there was with a scammer from the Philippines.

I am hearing quite a lot about Hinge everywhere. I did sign up on it very briefly, but felt very overwhelmed, I must admit and deleted my account after just a few hours.

All in all I'd recommend just about everyone to just stay away from them for the sake of your sanity and instead try to find more connections in the real life.

57 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Well I guess I have a GF now. Wasn't expecting that today. 

Congratz! Crossing fingers!

So Tucker Carlson did an interview with a megalomaniac dictator intend on waging a genocidal war and radicalizing his people rambling about history. And that after his interview with Putin:

20 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

You need to get involved in the politics of your area.  Public service is the duty of every citizen.  We can't complain about what others do in positions of power unless we're willing to step up and do the work and make our voices heard.  

I know it's way out of your comfort zone, but it's exactly what you need.

There.  I hath spoken    

I... kinda already am. At least in a monetary way. My party is working hard to combat this and the part about the torn down garden plots I got from that neighborhood walk with my party. Unfortunately the day also told me that it's... extremely daunting to network even with people from my own party. And thus I don't have any means to help. It also doesn't help that most of my knowledge and interests are in national politics and about the local politics I don't really know much about and frankly don't care about most of it.

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Toth, considered getting a dog?

They’re excellent for socialising - since getting Penny I’ve found myself talking to neighbours I’d barely said hello to, not to mention fellow dog walkers in the park.

And it’s mostly just talking about the dogs, so little need to think of topics

Sorry, not a dog person at all. Also I don't have the space, my mother hates dogs and given my time constraints, I'm already guilty enough about giving my cat as little attention as I do.

Not to mention that I am extremely against talking with any of my neighbors here. The less they know who I am the better.

33 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

I'm a little surprised such efforts weren't underway back in Dubya's time when the US was attacking and occupying a sovereign nation based on the ludicrous belief that Iraq had financed the 9/11 attacks. Maybe they were, and went nowhere.

Mmh... it could be because Great Britain joined the Iraq War, while France and Germany opposed the war. So using it as a stepping off point to disentangle the EU from the US could have isolated Great Britain. In addition to this, the danger presented was one of the US abusing its position to go on a pointless revenge spree, but Bush wasn't questioning the security guarantees of NATO. Much the opposite, given how necessary it was for him to invoke Article 5 against Afghanistan. Though at least politically it caused tensions and it took quite a lot of effort by Obama to smooth over relations afterwards. Meanwhile Trump is openly threatening allies and tearing up treaties out of ideology and pique.

8 hours ago, Tears of Lys said:

They cut down oak trees??  Those M-Frs.  

Yeah, it's really bad here in the town at the moment. There is a central festival grounds where they also cut down all the trees a few months ago for no reason whatsover. It's just a huge empty field with now a bunch of stumps at the edges. Meanwhile a "Kleingartensiedlung", a settlement of rented small garden plots people use in summer, was dissolved and the tenants ordered to cut down all the fruit trees they had there because that's the law (which somehow stands in conflict with another law banning private people from cutting down trees without a permit). And in the next town over they had pruned the trees surrounding the roads so badly during the winter that some of them died. I really have no clue what the city administration is thinking.

I just realized I never gave an update on my dragon fruit cacti. Well: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/988019526346092544/1173590503372095608/20231113_124753.jpg

I have a whole army of these now. Not sure when I'll dare to put the rest of them into separate pots... Of the three I repotted early on, one of them died.

I had also planted four sweet chestnuts again, but again they looked really bad during winter. Fortunately two of them just got new leaves, but unfortunately the other two seem to have died.

Mmh... in the meantime I ended up doing a stupid yesterday again. But... I hope this time will work. Last year I did dabble a bit more with non-fruit trees, mainly planting acorn, beechnut and maple seeds... except one tiny decrepit acorn none of them sprouted and the acorn died during winter. On my way to work they cut down a whole bunch of really old oak trees to add a lane to a road and saddened about it as I was, I noticed that the ground around the stump was covered with acorns, some of them having already germinated and desperately trying to take root. I grabbed two of them, as well as one maple seed that I found that had already taken successfully taken root and now planted them in the pots of my last attempt. I'm particularly crossing my fingers I can make the acorns grow...

My date palm army is all fine, btw.

I'm not sure whether I got this even from here or not, but I felt suddenly reminded of these really good videos on the background of the Ukraine invasion today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exJ024Zdzdk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ_ZRBLFOXw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVmmASrAL-Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OFyn_KSy80

I had once again a conversation with one of the MAGA AfD pro-Putin students who wanted to tell me that Putin attacked because Zelenskiyy is a nazi because Putin said so to Tucker Carlson and after spending the entire break going through an alt-right podcast he's always listening to and sifting through its "sources" and how they boiled down to DailyMail, conspiracy theorists on twitter and more obscure alt-right sites making unfunded claims, with him eventually catching himself admitting that he's only listening to them because they confirm what he already things and is too lazy to make his own research, I ended up just... sending him these links as well. Am curious whether it's a mistake or not, but the style is certainly entertaining enough.

On 2/9/2024 at 3:49 AM, Jace, Extat said:

Go for it dawg. Just remember you're doing this to have fun and you'll do fine.

Sernpidal's moon ain't gonna fall on ya if you make a faux pass, baby. 

Well, Sernpidal's moon didn't fall on me, but I was dropped right into a firefight because I joined in the middle of an encounter and a Death Trooper quite nearly immediately one-shot me with a ludicrously unlucky double-crit.

Didn't really get to roleplay much because of that because it was just three hours of throwing dice before they had cleared a ship full of Imperials. Will be interesting to see where this goes, because the situation ended up quite bleak with everyone severely wounded, the ship shut down and all I attempts to gain control of its systems failing, with their own ship severely damaged and a Star Destroyer on their tails. That's what you get for taking on missions from the Rebel Alliance...

13 hours ago, Madame deVenoge said:

I’m still caught up on you self-flagellating on the English Language meet up. DUDE. Your English is FAR BETTER than many native speakers, many of whom I castigate on at least a monthly basis for potentially failing The Public. 

Uhm... okay, that's embarrassing then, because I actually wanted to get across that my English is too good to go to a language meetup to speak it. After all, I handle all my media consumption, communication and writing in English. And therefore expect odd looks why a native would go there, particularly if my French and my Japanese are too bad to actually have any kind of conversation in them. I'm thinking it would look pathetic to be there just to get to know people... And I assume the barkeeper was German because him just completely ignoring my existence when I approached him simply encapsulates German service quality. That was the main reason I bounced off and couldn't get a word out. Well, that and my pent up anxiety.

And my Japanese after five years of learning still being so rudimentary is a shame, actually. Last week there was supposed to be another meetup there (obviously, since it's a weekly thing) and a Japanese dude had signed up to it. Unfortunately it got cancelled. But then again, I've spent the last four days with heavy headaches due to shoulder tensions I probably caused myself by being so insanely stressed the whole week. And the week was free because of winter holiday! So I maybe dodged a bullet.

I still forced myself to go to a walk around the neighborhood with my party. The tour was extremely good and I didn't know that just two blocks away there was a huge swamp with beavers and stuff... Unfortunately I still failed with the social part and couldn't get to network at all. In some part because I did not know how, but mostly because my headache was just destroying be, despite feeding on nuts and a pouch of Ibuprofen the whole time. It didn't do anything... Initially I thought to afterwards go to a board game event at a hobby shop that I found on meetup, but I simply couldn't. Unfortunately I made the mistake to tell my mother of it and that I maybe go next month. She asked me where it is and then went on a rant about how dangerous the neighborhood is and then offered a plethora of alternatives I should do that don't involve going to unknown places, much to my annoyance.

I also signed up for an (online) pen & paper game. With the first one yesterday. That one I went through, even though I... couldn't make myself roleplay much because I joined the game in the middle of a firefight and got my character nearly killed right away.

Still need to figure out a way to actually go through with a meet-up thing to train more...

I think we shouldn't kid ourselves. The danger is not that Russia could ever beat NATO, even a NATO without the US, in any drawn-out conventional brawl. The danger is that Putin will think that a NATO without the US, too small a military and hampered by political infighting will be too gutless to defend member states for fear of nuclear retaliation. Russia doesn't need conventional parity for that kind of goal. Just enough forces to nab the Baltics and then threaten with nukes. It's a danger that comes purely from the messaging and Putin's thought processes that see Europe only as the powerless vassal of the US.

I'm sitting here just hoping that this doesn't mean a push for an offensive this year while Ukraine suffers from a dire ammunitions shortage. It sounds to me far more reasonable to focus on defense for as much as Russia seems eager to be throw an unreasonable amount of men away in its offensives. I always regarded the worst possible situation to be Russia deciding to stop being this stupid and dig in while still having manpower and ammunition advantages and while Ukraine is then unable to meaningfully push into these defenses.

Okay, this is developing scarily quickly.

Earlier today I did the step... I asked in a local tabletop discord whether there is any group willing to adopt a (near) complete newbie. And... somehow one dude PM'd me and after everyone else agreed, it looks like I'll play a game of Star Wars Edge of the Empire on Monday. I quickly found the rule book online (heh) and since I'm (still...) reading the NJO books right now, I pretty much instantly rolled up a character based on Droma, the guy who replaced Chewie as Han's copilot.

Now I'm nervous... of course the guy who invited me asked for a voice chat just as my mother was bustling around in the background, so I got awfully quickly reminded why I put playing tabletop off "until I live on my own"... I hope I won't regret this...

On 2/2/2024 at 1:08 AM, Poobah said:

I'm trying to keep a focus on the progress I've made but fuck does it ever feel like the more work I do the more work there is to do and it's all so exhausting, but I'm terrified of taking too much time to recharge because I know that if I ever stop pushing myself by stupid boulder self is going to roll all the way back down the hill like always. In particular recently as I've begun pushing myself out the door and into social situations more and more regularly I'm confronted by loneliness, and both the fear and reality of missing out a lot more.

I'm crossing my fingers, keep the fight up and I hope eventually you'll notice that your normal will have changed, even if the path towards it may look pretzel! That's... unfortunately kind of normal for this kind of endeavor. And you are not alone. Aside the media highlighting a loneliness epidemic, I've also ran into mentions of guys expressing the exact same struggle on other forums and am myself in this situation as well. That you are encountering people who seemingly have no issue with loneliness must be because we tend to not go outside all that much after all. Also part of me wonders whether it's just especially bad this time of the year when the days are short, cold and dark.

I myself have... admittedly cut most contact with my closest online contacts (from here...) because in my failure to help them in troubling times I've made them angry at me more often than not. Even though I didn't feel like I could bring up things happening to me in quite some years, particularly good things, for fear of making them feel bad. And yet I now feel more than ever that there are often moments where I have things I would like to share with someone, but... just have nobody to do so with. I guess I'm not completely alone, I obviously still have my mother and I'm her outlet for everything, so she regularly just rambles at me about stuff, but I barely answer because of my pent up resentment and don't trust her to say anything that is on my mind.

Last week I tried to push my boundaries again. I never had any real life friends, at all, and I feel it increasingly hard to believe that it is even possible to trust another person you see face to face... or for any person to give any sort of shit about you and not forget your existence the moment you leave the room. So... because I have heard that it's supposed to be a good tool, I've signed up on meet-up and looked for interesting things happening. I've found a language exchange meet-up. Months ago. I was quite struggling about whether I should go there, thinking it would be an odd look to have nothing to gain from it. Since I'm thinking my English is good enough, while my French or Japanese are too bad to hold any conversations in it. In the end I finally gave it a try... waited four hours at school for it to happen... go to the locale at a pub, enter, and... see that only two tables are occupied with three people near the entrance and four people at the back. I... I had absolutely no idea where and how to ask which group is the language exchange group, if at all. So I just stood there in increasing panic. Until I fled outside and walked up and down the road. Then another group of people came and went in. I was weighing whether to follow them, eventually I did. By that time they had already seated themselves next to people in the back. I still had no clue whether it was correct to go to them. So instead I walked to the bar. The bartender stood there leaning against the wall, staring straight ahead, never even glancing at me. So... I stood there, again. Until I stepped back again, looked around for a while and in the end fled entirely, this time back home.

Since then I am absurdly exhausted and irritable and had a near break-down in curses and self-flagellation when I accidentally dropped a glass of honey at the checkout of a supermarket. All the despair about my inability to "be social" just came rushing in to the point feeling a burning in my chest. Heck, the whole situation came with announcement. Just the day before we had some kind of training thingy at my school and the outside consultants started with a warm-up bingo of statements like "Has as many siblings as I do" or "Was in country I was never in" where you were supposed to go around and ask your colleagues these as questions until you got a bingo of names. I was the only one who ended the game with an empty sheet. I would walk up to colleagues, they would then ask me a question, I would answer them and then... they would walk away and ask the next person before I could ask a question myself. I had this happen three or four times before I gave up and just sat back down scrolling through my phone.

Heck, the only "successful" change I did was become more active in a fanfiction discord. Because at the end all I can do is talk digitally or professionally to people, but never socially. At least searching for a Discord for a niche you like is something I recommend anyone if there really are no alternatives.

Just had a debate on Discord with a supporter of the new Wagenknecht party because I mocked how in its preamble it already demanded lifting sanctions on Russia, stopping all weapons going to Ukraine, cutting ties to the US and disarming Europe and said it'll be curious to see where they got their donations from. However, this woman seemed dead serious in her support of her. I'm going crazy here. Is there a term for suicidal pacifism?

So she was advocating for all of the above, justifying it it with the past immoral actions of the US, that sanctions didn't stop the war and therefore could as well be lifted (and to my question to clarify that she wants us to finance Russia's war, saying that lifting sanctions doesn't mean giving money or tech to Russia, somehow), that having an army is just a waste of money, that nukes are immoral and not a tool for defense, that she is scared that an AfD government will use a rearmed Bundeswehr to wage an offensive war someday in the future and that war is just... generally bad and that we needed "some other way" than deterrence to avoid it because deterrence is a lie. Eventually she would type out her way to deal with an invasion: To just... invite the enemy soldiers to come live with us instead of fighting them... And upon me asking what to do if that wasn't making them drop their weapons, she proposed to just... build a huge wall around the country...

I just... sat there struggling to comprehend this. "Why do you think these things?!?" Obviously she snapped at me for being condescending when I wrote that this sounds dangerously naive and childish.

I guess I am currently again back in a Star Wars Legends mood. Went back to writing on my fanfic, continued my glacial New Jedi Order read-through... and booted the Empire at War mod "Thrawn's Revenge" again.

Damn, this game is just such an incredibly addicting curiosity cabinet full of obscure Star Wars lore. I always find it fascinating to keep open Wookiepedia and look up whatever stuff I'm using and see just how deeply they needed to dig to flesh out their vision of the factions and their balancing.

I first started the very small 16 planets "Inner Core Conflict" campaign as the "Greater Maldrood". Which, despite the weird name, is just an Imperial warlord faction with a focus on small-ish cruisers. Which... I found quite frustrating to deal with, because this frigate and cruiser roster only consists of different flavors of "some guns on a fragile chassis", which... is just a very costly way to wage war, particularly since this campaign is an only Imperial warlords brawl, so you have to figure out a way to counter Star Destroyers and Bellator dreadnaughts without any bombers, since the Greater Maldrood has no carriers whatsoever. In the early game I got hammered by a massive wall of ISDs, but thankfully that was just the starting units the AI had and eventually they ran out of them and instead got obsessed with building hundreds and hundreds of gunships. I ended up building only ISD-1s and Tector type Star Destroyers (essentially ISDs with no hangar, but extra armor) with a corvette screen, where eventually I switched out the ISDs with more Tectors, because the ISDs ended up too fragile for the continued onslaught and I had some battles where only the Tectors survived. Even then, defeating the Bellators forced me to build my own, because there was just no other way to take them down without receiving horrible losses otherwise. Somehow ground combat was more relaxing, particularly the MAATs proved super powerful. Those are repulsorlift troop carriers that are the successor of clone wars LAAT/is... which only appeared once briefly in The Force Unleashed 2. And yet here they became a crucial way for me to traverse the huge maps, drop Navy Troopers (since I didn't even have Stormtroopers for some reason) behind enemy lines and scout for bombardments.

After eventually beating that campaign, I went on with the "Corporate Acquisitions" campaign, playing the titular Corporate Sector Authority. Which has a fun ship gacha in form of the black market, where once a month it gets a random ship added that you can buy, with it ranging from tiny corellian corvettes to gigantic Mandator dreadnaughts. My motley fleet of hand-me-downs looks extremely silly, but it is quite funny to try out various odd units like Lucrehulk ball-pieces without the ring-pieces or combine various CIS, Republic, Imperial and Rebel ships in one ugly pile-up. Very recently I got lucky and the ship gacha put out a Tagge battlecruiser. What is that? An oversized star destroyer that showed up only in a comic from 1979, where it's the "strikebreaker" of an Empire affiliated mining company. And here I am using it as the bulwark of my fleet, soaking up damage while my other smaller ships dish it out. Meanwhile on the ground I have this weird mixture of multi-role police units, many of which can repair or heal nearby units as an ability, shielded by large swathes of old CIS battledroids. Which are still extremely useful, particularly the B1s with their sheer mass and the Hailfire tank droids because they punch really, really hard, even if they are fragile.

Okay. I'm fucking angry at myself for trying to do a programming project with one of my graduating classes in the era of ChatGTP. I tried to address the issue with particularly strict demands that recording their path to finding a solution was the task I made it depending upon whether the solution is theirs or attempted fraud. To give a perspective, this was the task:

They should program a short, easy game in python using only console input/output. For example Mastermind, where the computer thinks up a code of 4 colors, the players have to guess the code and after every attempt they should get the number of correct colors they already have. The students should analyze the gameplay loop, write a class card (since they were tasked to wrap everything into a class) and write two Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams for individual methods. Then they should attempt to implement it (where I wasn't even going to be particularly strict about whether they succeed) and while doing so write a protocol about every problem they encountered and how they went about trying to tackle it. They had three weeks of time for it.

That last bit... only one student did. The others just commented their code saying what each line does, apparently thinking that if they do this, they can copy as much as they want. Nobody of these students wrapped their solution into a class, which either means after a whole semester of object-oriented programming they still haven't figured out how to make classes... or that ChatGTP ignored this part of the task. Two of the students just blatantly 1:1 copied internet pages, so that was easy to find. However the solutions of the others I couldn't find and so have to assume an AI wrote this because they had perfect code, not fitting with their class diagram obviously because of the absence of classes, but the Nassi-Sneiderman diagrams were obviously just backwards interpreting their code and the code itself was using various shortcuts I had never shown in class, again, without any shred of a mention what divine inspiration caused them to write their code this way.

I at first was compelled to give the benefit of the doubt and still give points for the stuff that could be of their own making, but that would punish those who copied internet pages and reward those using ChatGTP. Also it would be unfair to previous classes where I made no exceptions towards plagiarism and would give the impression that cheating is okay when everybody all at once do it. I discussed it with their class teacher and she also agreed that I should give everyone except that one girl a fail and be done with it. Bloody hell, I'm never doing a graded project again, which is just such a sad state of affairs...

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I would play a WarCraft IV tomorrow but I have zero interest in the MMORPG. I've tried looking at the plot summaries but they are almost completely unintelligible. The only thing I've learned is that Chris Metzen should have been fired without a nanosecond's hesitation no later than 2004 and not let anywhere near a word processor ever again.

The words of a review of the Lich King expansion still stuck with me forever as it encapsulates my everlasting ire of WoW: "If I wanted to watch a bunch of colorful power rangers beat up a beloved character, I'd go to a Mexican child's birthday party."

My mind was running wild after Warcraft 3 of the opportunities it had created ending on so many dangling plot threads. I wanted to see Arthas return to Lordearon, ffs. And then it's just "beloved character gets mad and needs to be put down by a of bunch of randos using him as a loot pinata" over and over and over again.

2 hours ago, Darryk said:

Anyone have any recommendations for relaxed city-builders? My favorites in the old days were Dungeon Keeper and Settlers.

Settlers 3 was my very first game and shaped me till this day. And in fact I played Settlers 4 again last month, though I must admit it was a pain in the ass to get running on a modern computer.

Stating that:

I second Cities Skylines. It's indeed very relaxing and a powerful creative tool, though admittedly it couldn't catch my attention for too long.

Tropico. Literally every Kalypso Tropico would suffice, they all play more or less the same, but are absolutely fantastic and addicting.

Hit a GOG sale and get the fantastic Pharaoh or Zeus, or the more crude Caesar III or more obscure, but still fantastic Emperor. They are old school, but work out of the box and it is great fun to watch your monuments grow.

Stronghold or Stronghold Crusader. Every day, every time. Those games are absolutely fucking timeless.

On a more modern note, Anno, particularly Anno 1800 with its bazillion expansions gets a lot of praise. I must admit, I personally never could get into them because the space management and high punishment of inefficiency lets my OCD run rampant and I'm never sure whether I did everything correctly (and I never have).

On a more peaceful side, Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo are very relaxing park building games. Not quite cities, but certainly satisfies the same itch and they are both extremely powerful creative tools.

Similarly to Dungeon Keeper, I guess Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus are very much old school Bullfrog games, though naturally closer to Theme Hospital in theme. Granted, I haven't played them myself yet. Instead I played the much more serious Project Hospital, which funnily enough plays more like a Theme Hospital game that half-way through swerves into an episode of House M.D. when you have to personally guide patients through the diagnosis process because your doctors are toddlers.

On a more eccentric side, a few months ago I played lots of Railway Empire. I found it deceptively fun, if at times a bit difficult.

Okay, this is some of the most insane footage I have seen so far:

23 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Grassroots level recruitment problems. You were from Berlin, right? Greens usualy do not have that big problems in urban areas.

SPD? Oh, you poor soul. I am so, so sorry.

Well, the thing is I don't actually live in Berlin and so being a Green party member is a bit rough outside...

3 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Which party? Post Wagengeknechtete Linke?

Lol, no. I think in that case my Ukraine support would have already gotten me booted.

Okay, things are truly dire if I of all people get straight-up asked whether I want to candidate at the next local government election and that is despite having only been able to appear at one meet-up in five years of membership and otherwise it consisted mostly of picking fights with people on the inter-party media app and writing a mail arguing that the "hide in order to not get attacked by political opponents" strategy during the last mayoral election was a pretty stupid idea (with the guy who dismissed my concerns and now writing that invitation admitting that the outcome proved me correct).

And that after yesterday's meetup where I haven't been able to attend either because I was stuck at the time in the middle of nowhere for hours because of the train personnel strike and farmer blockades. And before that couldn't attend because I am now doing evening classes for adults on top of my regular lessons. Or had inconveniently placed conferences. Or didn't feel it right to attend to events where I missed out the previous three preparatory events... Yeah, being a teacher and getting involved in politics really doesn't mesh well at all when you work 62 hours per week.

10 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

This might interest some of you. I have a relative who is an elementary school teacher, and he was telling me that many of his students are into anime/manga, particularly the girls. Anime was very much present when I was a kid* but it was still kind of a niche thing, and it mostly appealed to boys. It’s pretty neat to see how the cultural exchange continues to grow. 

* I did miss out on K-Pop though

As a teacher myself, I... am noticing the same, but at the same time I can't but help but be annoyed that it happens at a time where everything's an Isekai now and particularly the boys latch onto this stuff because of the antiquated gender roles and it selling as power fantasies for a sexually frustrated audience. The girls in the meantime are clearly more into the K-Pop hype and cuteness of stuff... it's all just... so very stereotypical, imao.

Granted, on top of that I am also kinda annoyed when they ask me about whether I watch any as a way of hoping I'd answer and waste time, but that's with all weird personal questions. Don't really want to get put into a situation where I'm asked for recommendations, answer that and will regret that when it's used against me, eh.