BougieBirdie

Showing her you’re interested isn’t about making you more attractive to her. It’s more about signalling that you’re receptive if she’s also attracted to you.

If she’s attracted and knows you’re attracted, the relationship can proceed.

If she’s attracted and doesn’t know you’re attracted, she’ll either be in the same position you’re in now, conclude that you only want to be friends, or move on to someone who’s attracted to her.

If she’s unattracted and knows you’re attracted, everyone can get in front of their feelings before you feel like you’re wasting your time or she feels like she’d be losing a friendship by not being romantically interested in you. The longer you withhold your feelings from her, the more difficult you can be making things for both of you.

All that said, I think it’s totally reasonable to hang out with her a few times to see if you like hanging out with each other first.

If writing is an option, then keeping pen and paper handy can facilitate communication.

An abundance of patience is useful. You can never really be sure what’s going on in someone else’s head, and that’s doubly true for someone who can’t tell you if they wanted to. People tend to mirror other people’s energies though, so if you remain calm and relaxed that can keep things smooth.

Something to consider: if you can’t speak, then body language becomes your primary method of communication. I wouldn’t be surprised if expressions and emotions become exaggerated because it helps get your point across. Mild annoyance could be perceived as anger if you’re sensitive to it.

Something else to consider: being able to lower the price is one of the easiest tools for pleasing a customer, but if you start at the lowest possible price then you’ve got nowhere to go lower if your customer already had reason to be irate. Plus if haggling is expected then your customer might not really know that you’ve started at the lowest price and might think that you’re refusing to haggle with them. It can be a tough nut to crack - I’d also want to give them the best price. If you have additional discounts, coupons, or gifts you can add to the transaction then that might be an option.

To be honest, muteness is a pretty rare condition here. I’ve worked retail for many years and can probably count on one hand how many mute customers I’ve had. But I have had a couple of regulars and we seem to get along. Treating other human beings how you’d like to be treated is usually the best way forward.

I’ve seen enough Christmas specials to know that richness from spending times with your loved ones, cultivating relationships with your community, and enjoying what you have.

If you somehow don’t feel rich with your fabulously wealthy lifestyle, then I’m afraid you never will. In fact, you probably have too much stuff to feel rich, because richness doesn’t come from the pursuit of things.

Don’t despair friend, I have a solution. Send me the deeds to your houses and factory and I’ll make sure someone who can appreciate them will enjoy them. Working through an agent like me will be far less scary than being visited by three ghosts tonight.

I’m having a hard time finding a job that aligns with my ethics. I was a software developer, and it seems that everything that’s hiring right now is stuff that would make me feel like garbage.

I considered taking a job as a help desk for an advertising library. I figure I could do a really bad job of it, and take a big chunk of my salary to donate to adblockers.

I earn about 30% of what I did five years ago, and prices have only gone up. I’ll probably become homeless if things continue, that’s pretty darn inconvenient.

I just want to make dumb little video games to feed my family, but I’m too burnt out from my soul crushing minimum wage job to make dinner.

I’m of the opinion that anyone who supports the police probably hasn’t had an interaction with the police.

Like seriously, any time I’ve been the victim of a crime, the police have been the worst part of it. I guess I’m probably biased, maybe there’s some place where cops don’t suck, but I don’t live there

I think people probably like the idea of the police: someone you can call in an emergency when you’re in danger. But their response does not reflect their branding

I pay over a thousand dollars per year for water in canada.

The water in town would not be safe to consume without treatment (lots of heavy industry here) and it’s nice to know that my toilet flows somewhere else

I know you wanted the parents’ perspective, but this is something I struggle with regarding my own suicidality. There’s even a meme that people don’t kill themselves because “mom would be sad”

I often think of the family I’d be leaving behind. Mom would never understand. Dad would probably get it, but suicide has a funny way of being contagious and I’d worry it would push him over the edge. My wife says she’d hate me forever.

Grief is really fucking hard, and when people kill themselves the survivors play the blame game with themselves. Surviving your child is probably the most difficult thing a parent can do, and to torture yourself with the fantasy that you could have saved them seems like a special kind of hell.

When I’m at my lowest, it feels like bullshit. Like honestly, my life has been so terrible that I want to end it, and yet people will carry on like they’d be the victim if I did. Maybe if you blame yourself and think you could have helped me, you could do it while I’m alive and asking for help.

When I’m calmer I realize that nothing they could do probably would have helped. It still burns me up though - people talk about suicide like it’s the most selfish thing a person can do. When you’re already miserable it sure isn’t great being made to feel miserabler. It makes me feel like I deserve to suffer - and that means continuing to live.

Anyway, I’ve been suicidal for just about thirty years. I figure I’ll give it another thirty, by then I’ll have outlasted my parents. Plenty of time to find meaning before then

I would generally lean towards nay, but I know there’s reasonable exceptions.

The biggest issue comes with the dynamics of the workplace. The most obvious one is that the workplace is usually hierarchical, and if you’re ever on different levels of the org chart that opens the door to problems.

Hitting on your subordinate puts them in a situation where they might not feel they can refuse because it could impact their job. Hitting on your supervisor could put them in a situation where they start worrying about a sexual harassment suit, or that it might bring on scrutiny where your coworkers start thinking you’ll get preferential treatment.

Even if you both hold the same title, it can become problematic. What happens when one of you get promoted? What happens when HR is aware of the relationship and will skip over you for promotion because of the risk? What happens when your employer unjustly terminates your partner and they pressure you to also leave your job because your employer is a bastard?

Those questions are assuming you enter a relationship. But what happens when you keep flirting with a coworker who does not reciprocate your feelings, but feels they have to keep the peace because of they reject you they still have to see you forty hours each week?

Depending on your job, if you do start up a relationship you might get sick of seeing each other all the time. Or you might have opposite shifts and then never see each other even outside of work. What happens when the relationship implodes and you still have to work with your ex?

Pretty much the only situation where I think it’d be worth the risk is if it’s a very casual job that you wouldn’t mind leaving if things got ugly. That could maybe apply to a casual relationship instead, but people often have very different ideas about what that means and it’s not uncommon to for people to get unhealthy in their relationships no matter how “casual” they say they wanted to be.

If your boss had to tell you to stop, then it’s clearly a problem. Heed that warning

Disney just announced yesterday that they were investing a billion dollars into OpenAI. I have a hard time believing any AI company is respecting copyright because infringement is their business model. This sort of reads like “the competition’s product is worse than ours.”

It’s hard to know who to root for in a battle between giant AI firms and equally giant entertainment companies.

You’re allowed to root for nobody. Sometimes everyone sucks.

I really enjoy the explosion at the end.

Through the rest of the movie the effects are timeless and suck you into the movie. Then you get that finale and remember this movie came out in the 70s

To hang out together intentionally, outside of work, more than once. If you no longer ever want to hang out, they’re probably not friends anymore.

I have a few coworkers I’m tempted to call friends. At the very least, we’re friendly. But I also know that once either of us leave the job, we probably won’t see each other anymore.

In a more general sense, I call a lot of people “friend” without necessarily considering us friends. Mostly strangers and customers, and it’s meant in a disarming way, like “Sorry friend, we’re sold out.”

I’m friendly with most people, but then to consider someone a friend feels like taking the relationship to a new level.

I don’t think I could be a police officer either. I’d have a hard time restraining myself from popping a smart-mouthed, troublesome, and reckless cop in the face.

Apparently it’s been “and it works” for most of the company’s history, but I remember it being “but it works” too

I’m surprised I couldn’t find a video, but I’m pretty sure there was a string of ads in probably the mid 2000s that all had the same spokesman, and his delivery sure sounded like “but.” They were on TV all the time in the period where I was still watching TV

This is fascinating though, I’m not sure I’ve ever personally witnessed the Mandela effect. I mean, I’m sure I have been before, but to actually catch it in action is new to me

I have a hard time watching new movies and shows. I guess I usually look for a show to unwind with, and nostalgia is a pretty strong factor there.

If I’m watching a new show with somebody because they want to see it, I’ll generally enjoy myself. But lately I find that I’m pretty quick to reject anything made after 2020 or so

Another way I look at it is that there’s an awful lot of crap competing for my attention, and with the rise of gen-AI, writing for streaming, and other icky things, a lot of it really is crap. I’d rather watch the crap I already know I like

Any old westerns you’d like to recommend? I’ve been watching a lot of 70s era and earlier movies lately, seems like I’ll stumble into the golden age of westerns sooner or later

For a more modern show (geez, 15 years old already) I really enjoyed Hell on Wheels

It’s interesting that the phrasing here is that the younger people shouldn’t be allowed to date the older people. The issue with this kind of age gap is the imbalance of power, and whether you realize it or not you’ve just placed the stigma at the feet of the person who’s most likely to be victimized.

Anyway, banning this kind of thing doesn’t work. It happens at a scale that would likely be unenforceable, not to mention that rebellious people will do things because they’re banned

A better approach to harm reduction is education. Meet people where they’re at without shame and explain the risks realistically. And even then, some people just won’t learn until experience teaches them

At the end of the day, if your daughter wants to work out her daddy issues by getting railed by an older man, no amount of pearl clutching is going to prevent that

I’d argue that racism is a symptom of some of these other things.

An imbalance of societal power leads to - or is caused by - manipulative politics. Those politics are increasingly being pushed through addictive technologies, and indeed, are using racism to divide us at the cost of democracy.

Racism is a symptom, but understanding where it’s being pushed from has value. It’s like saying someone died of heart failure - just about everyone dies of heart failure, but it can be more useful to know what caused the heart to fail

So it bothers you when people vocalize their question marks, eh?

Only on the fediverse can I expect to see someone explain how to manage their kitchen with a computer analogy and not the other way around

It’s good advice though, I have no notes

It’s a common turn of phrase that people use when explaining something to someone who seems unclear on a subject.

I hope this clears things up.