This varies a lot.
I've often lived in places without sidewalks, and sometimes in places with a separate "mud room." My time in Southern Europe was in villages, where we were walking around the cow patties. The irrigation got out of containment the other day, and my whole driveway was just mud, I had to pre-wash the kids' bare feet from just playing on the porch.
It's usually pretty clear if this is the case, though.
Gaashk
4mo ago
Is there anything interesting happening out there in the world this week?
I probably wouldn't know, since I use this site for news.
The war in Ukraine drags on. The conflict in Gaza drags on. Pride month drags on. A few people were shot at Juneteenth celebrations, but not enough to invite a lot of attention. There are some marginal improvements in LLMs. The Supreme Court has ruled on some things, and some posters have done write ups for them. There were some blog posts put up as top level comments. They probably got more engagement than they would have on people's personal blogs, anyway. I vaguely remember some disgruntled writing about relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's just the message board, so much as the actual world that's in a bit of a slump.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I can easily imagine blocking the hell out of dozens of people if I were a female. The amount of thirsty horndogs online who figure Why not when considering whether to message a woman probably outnumbers the grains of sand on the beach.
I doubt the Motte, specifically, suffers from this problem. It does suffer from some posters with a very antagonistic and negative interpretation of women as a class, more lately than in the past as far as I can tell.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I blocked a user for a while because he was writing dozens of extremely negative blackpill comments a day for weeks at the time. He is still very negative, but sometimes has interesting things to say and not quite so constant, so I unblocked.
Gaashk
4mo ago
I think most women would recognize that a Porsche was expensive, but probably wouldn't recognize anything about a 90s German sedan, lovingly cared for and modded, other than that it wasn't new.
Even I can recognize a carefully maintained turquoise low rider and have a bit of respect for the effort (but know nothing about why they're beloved, or how they drive. There was a whole museum room dedicated to explaining why, which I couldn't force myself to read).
Gaashk
5mo ago
Once, when I was touring a house to rent from an acquaintance, he pitched it as basically: this house is a house. All the things you would expect to work do work, it's big enough, it provides shelter. That was true, and totally fine -- the house was totally adequate, and for the most part nothing leaked or sagged or burst while I was in it. This is also what I'm looking for in a car.
My current car is a hatchback with 7.5 inch clearance that can drive across Texas without breaking down. It can fit three carseats in the back if I pay attention to which ones I get. I am not very pleased that it tells me to keep my hands on the wheel even when my hands are already on the wheel. Grr. The lane assist and adaptive cruise control are nice, and I do not really want an experience when I'm trying to drive an 800 mile stretch of perfectly straight, flat road for a road trip. It will probably be annoying when the sensors start breaking down, I hope I will be able to afford just getting another car at that point or something. Perhaps there will be a model available that's fully autonomous on the freeway or something, which would be great.
My neighbor's son did something to his exhaust that made it roar to life at 4 am every morning for months, waking me up hours early. I don't know what it was, and when I tried yelling at his father about it (because the owner was slinking around avoiding me), he said nothing about the cause, but it was fixed within a week. I do not care at all whether that resulted in a less aesthetic driving experience.
I tried looking up 90s German sedans, and there seem to be different looks, but they all look just kind of like basic cars, maybe a bit ugly but not in a way that matters. The cars I knew as a teenagers liked to stall out at intersections and were too terrible to even drive on expressways; I have no impression of them other than that mostly they will move people around, but sometimes they're a huge hassle and not reliable. The air conditioner broke a lot, and I would be blasted with 100 degree wind. I'm not sure if I've ever known anyone who actually enjoyed the act of driving for its own sake, then or now.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Yes, they were especially excited about the huge elephant ear bulbs and the bugs. Though the almost 5 year old kept insisting on ripping off pieces of rosebush and burying it instead of putting soil in pots, which she's clearly able to do. Two year old did mostly help with things like that when asked.
Gaashk
5mo ago
I'm pretty sure I used to also behave this way before I had kids, it's just more obvious, because I can't just sit alone in a bookshop or park or something while being mildly depressed, I have to grudgingly get up and make someone else food. Which is, overall, not worse, possibly better, it just feels a bit worse.
Don't let the prospect of a chatterbox necessarily discourage you! There are options, I'm just not personally very good at finding and taking advantage of them. I hear kids used to find other kids in the neighborhood to play with, and then they would just go off and do that for hours a day. One of my co-workers is sending her school aged kids to three weeks of Parks & Rec discount camps, and maybe that will be me next year. Also, lots of kids are way calmer. I just seem to hang in the ADHD and autism spectrum part of society for some reason. My father built himself a detached study to smoke cigars and forbid his children from entering.
Gaashk
5mo ago
I'm on summer break, pregnant, with a hyper child and a toddler.
It would be good to work on cleaning my house and tending to my yard. I have seeds that I could plant this week, and will feel better if my house is cleaner. It would also be good to make some art. Instead I'm acting a bit depressed and sluggish, taking naps at random times and reloading message board pages about things I'm not even all that interested in. Child talks and talks and over-explains and talks and wears us out. I'm glad that I'm not trying to homeschool full time, we don't seem up to it, especially me.
Gaashk
5mo ago
My current lifestyle to money ratio is fine (could use a bit more money), but I suppose if I moved somewhere else to have a lifestyle more like that, I would see what the local monetary expectations were, and adjust accordingly. Like, if I didn't need a car there, I would need the car payment or insurance, so it would be fine to decrease pay by that much, minus whatever I would then spend on public transport. There clearly isn't any abstract answer, because most income is used to buy those things anyway.
Gaashk
5mo ago
The most obvious contenders are the kinds of people who write angry editorials about all the -ists in their country, and complain about how they aren't as wealthy as their parents, despite mostly contributing by spending college partying and deplatforming people and writing angry articles online. Many of these people are, nonetheless, probably smart enough, having come from successful, functional homes that were able to send them to the colleges in question.
Gaashk
5mo ago
You could, but then it would be a War Movie, not a Summer Blockbuster, and would appeal to fewer potential audience members.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Reading /r/combatfootage sort of shows just how hard it is to even come close to making modern weapons interesting storytelling, you walk around in a trench and then boom an artillery round killed you. No drama between you and the antagonist, just nothing nothing nothing dead.
Tolstoy did a good job of it where Prince Andrei was just walking around, pacing somewhere, and then boom, a cannon ball, then, because it's Tolstoy, FEELINGS, Universal Love, loss of consciousness. But that has probably never translated well to screen. Also the scene where (someone who's name I've forgotten) is in the middle of a battle, and it suddenly occurs to him that the other fellows are actually trying to kill him -- whom everybody loves! But it's really difficult to pull off inner monologues in movies. But, also, Tolstoy makes it pretty clear they weren't using much in the way of tactics, just throwing men at the problem, so it might not count. A relative has been watching drone footage from Ukraine, and it really just sounds depressing.
Gaashk
5mo ago
It probably depends a lot on what her specific complications and risks are. There seem to have been some improvements in screening and premature birth care especially somewhat recently, maybe enough to offset the being slightly older side of things (depending on what the problem was).
Gaashk
5mo ago
Yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that some women getting terrible relationship advice is the fault of the men in their lives. Like that article a few weeks back about college girls egging each other on to have sex right away with every guy they were a bit interested in, and then feeling upset about the results. It sounded like the girls in question had gotten a lot of really dumb advice from the women and female media in their lives.
Personally, I like it when my husband uses an interest to suggest an experience we can share, like he'll research some ruins and plan a day trip to go look at them and play tour guide. I don't like it when he tries to info dump about weapon usage in Ukraine or something, but that's at least half negative emotional valance of it being about ways to kill people.
Yeah, it probably was better to have a norm not to complain about one's romantic partner just because you got in a spat and are feeling angry about it. Healthy couples mostly seem not to do that. We seem to have lost some outlets, living so far from our families, -- I've called my in-laws to complain once or twice when feeling really outraged, and it was way more effective than complaining in the comments section of the NYT or something.
Gaashk
5mo ago
People can conceivably be interested in anything. I don’t bore women with discussions about anime and sports, if that’s what you’re getting at.
No, it's not. I meant the specific person you were talking to. Are they, specifically interested?
I do not pay attention to women unless I’m required to for work. My girlfriend also prefers that I not have female friends, which works fine given my preferences.
It's unsurprising that your young female colleague might be more sensitive to being talked down to than your middle aged male friend. Because you're not friends, for one thing.
I don’t know what the point of this question is, but no, I don’t pretend to be interested in things if I’m not actually interested in them.
Then it's hardly surprising that it would be more enjoyable for someone to learn about a topic from the internet than from you. I'm currently getting the impression that if I really needed the information you were giving, I would choose another source if possible, despite not generally being a "mansplaining" critic.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Things to consider:
Is the thing you're "mansplaining" something the woman in question might conceivably be interested in?
Have you shown a similar interest in hearing about things she's interested in and knows about?
Suppose you learn a lot about Roman military stuff, and she learns a lot about astrology, so you each have a lot of knowledge about an antiquated system. Are you as interested in what she has to say about birth signs as you hope she will be about your thing? If not, why not?
Gaashk
5mo ago
I wonder if there's much difference in preferences between younger and older couples, related to wanting to have children together vs it being too late for that. With kids, it would probably be good if one of us were a bit more present and patient, rather than always going on about culture war stuff all the time. My parents are both very thoughty, they met over Dostoyevsky philosophy classes, and get along great -- but there isn't anyone to keep things in order, and their house is absurdly terrible.
I've probably 'mansplained' a lot to my girlfriend, but she's never complained about it. In fact, she seems to enjoy it. We went out to dinner a few weeks ago and I was rambling on about the upcoming British elections, and she kept asking me questions ("Wait, who are the Tories?" "How is the Prime Minister elected?"), and when I apologized for rambling, instead of complaining, she just said, "No, I'm learning something here, I enjoy listening to you talk."
The argument seems to be that many women have been trained to act interested even when actually bored or if they already know more about it, in order to make their men feel better. I don't know how often that's true, I would guess occasionally but not all that often.
Gaashk
5mo ago
I listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson interviewing some doctors about it a few months back (https://youtube.com/watch?v=F2RnK23AWUE)
It seemed pretty far fetched, and also just not very useful (like most of Peterson's health stuff -- I like him in general, but his whole family has super weird health issues and opinions). The conclusion seemed to be something like that people with chronic health issues should do some kind of complicated alternative healthcare regime, and also move into a completely new house or something.
Gaashk
5mo ago
It looks like more of the hopeful comments come more from widowers, and the angry ones from divorced or never married women.
Gaashk
5mo ago
This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents.
It's more likely that the NYT commentariat is very highly selected, and more so for this piece.
I have sometimes encountered an attitude in single women over 60 that their mothers trained them to look after the house very neatly as a point of pride, and that they clash with younger women who consider it a personal preference that conveys no status. They would probably also clash with older men who were either raised with the expectation that the woman should keep the house, or men who are comfortable with a messier space. There seem to be several comments about cooking and laundry especially, and someone who just visits her romantic interest, but they keep separate homes. As far as I can tell, this represents both a gender difference (men are a bit less likely to be temperamentally orderly, and much less likely to have been trained in homemaking by their parents), and a generational one.
Gaashk
5mo ago
The comment in question:
I'm a woman. Recently joined the chess club at my senior center chess club as the only female. (one guy smugly announced that all the women who join quit because they "can't hang onto their queens"). At first everyone I played was all smiley, sort of flirting and trying to give me "tips" about developing the pieces and so on. But then they found out that I play like a boss and could crush almost all of them quite handily (I'm on a ridiculous win streak). Now none of these men want to play against me, and all their smiles have disappeared. Story of my 145 IQ life. Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago.
Indeed, I would probably not want to play chess with her, it sounds fairly unpleasant, along the lines of #2.
Gaashk
5mo ago
Does anyone like or "get" monotype printing?
I have some equipment for making and teaching mono prints with charming little presses and gel plates, but whenever I look into resources about it, the professional art is not inspiring at all. Lots of kind of boring stencils of elephants or birds, lots of leaves, mandala looking stencils, dots that look kind of like packing materials, all in acrylic, which is a huge pain to clean up. I do like plate and woodblock printing, but am not going to set that up, it's a whole different tool set. The most interesting gel plate pieces I've seen included using the gel print as a background and drawing over it in chalk pastel, but then it has to be framed behind glass because of the pastel.
I have sometimes gotten the impression that other people, my neighbors, in roughly the same environment as me, just have a completely different experience with the ground and their shoes than I do.
I run a children's art studio. I wear brown hiking boots there at all times, because there are children stepping on chalk pastels and whatnot. Sometimes a child comes in wearing new white tennis shoes, gets a drop of paint on them, urgently tries to clean them with paper towels, and then cries about it. Every time, I find this incredibly perplexing. These are shoes! That you have chosen to wear to art studio! How is this a surprise!?! And yet it is.
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