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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2224 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 13, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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People of the Motte, what does your social life look like these days? What would you like for there to be more or less of? What is working well? What would you change?

Here are the social things I did in the last week. Of note, I am engaged, and so my fiancée (F) gets of my social points.

  • On Saturday, F and I went to Saturday church service, and then we went to a church festival elsewhere of a different church. (I tried to win at the "throw a beanbag at the bowling pins" game, but only hit the target 1 of 3 times. Poor showing.) We bought some stuff at the rummage sale, and listened to the local cover band play '90s hits.
    • Review: I would have liked to talk more to the people at church; instead, we left after the service ended. I want to increase those bonds. I think later this month I will attend my church's book club, currently reading Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman. Going to the festival with F was a lovely time that I would repeat without reservation.
  • On Sunday, F and I went to a charity gala sponsored by my employer. We made small talk with a few people, listened to guest speakers, and watched an auction.
    • Review: This was somewhat tedious, but I was honored that my employer picked me as one of just a few representatives to the gala. I would do this again, but I would not really look forward to it.
  • On Monday, my friend S came over to my house. We drank some bourbon and he beat the piss out of me at chess. S is a computer science student at the local university; I met him at the church I attended before I moved out of that neighborhood. S is a 2000+ rated player on Chess.com. He was happy to explain his moves, and my moves, and the implications of each while we played; and I learned a lot.
    • Review: This was a lot of fun and I would like to do it more often. However, overall I'd rather rest on Monday nights than do social things.
  • Wednesday is me and F's scheduled weekly date night. We opted for a quiet night in. On this occasion we read the pre-marriage book we're going through together, made some pumpkin cookies, played with my cat, and watched Gunsmoke.
    • Review: An enjoyable preview of married life, which generally reflects my preferences in every way.
  • The one other usual activity, is that I typically play tennis once a week with J, a man in his 50s who I met at a Meetup.com meetup. J has a moderate mental disability of some kind, and as a result has a mental level that I would say is about 12 years old; and it is very hard to understand him when he speaks. Nevertheless he's actually a pretty good tennis player, and he also likes to rant about the current political situation in a way that I find quite entertaining. Anyway, I bailed this week because I'm trying to get over a bunch of minor injuries.

Additionally, I have perpetual text or e-mail conversations going with: three friends from high school, two former coworkers, and my mom.

My assessment of my own social life: I do wish I had some more groups of friends based on similar interests, but this has never worked out for me before. I could start going to the local chess club or something; but every time I've gone to some sort of interest-based group in the last ten years or so, it's been dominated by strange people with poor social skills, who presumably are only able to socialize with this captive audience. I would like to become engaged with local political entities, and I might go to a dinner hosted by the local political party club in two weeks, just to see what it's like. And sometimes I think about joining a fraternal organization, and letting that be a place where I go to watch baseball games and drink beer socially in the summer; perhaps I will do that.

In general, I am plagued by the idea that I can't find high-quality, interesting, enjoyable people to hang out with - I have the ones I already have, but I can't seem to add to their number. It seemed so easy in college (as everyone says), but maybe my standards were just lower. In adult life, I seem to meet them basically at random, scattered about all different places and activities

My social life feels a bit full, but also I haven't seen enough of some of my long time friends recently.

I have friends from: neighborhood dads, underwater hockey, college, libertarians, and friends of friends. Its easy to see the neighborhood dads and underwater hockey people on a regular basis. Some of my favorite people are ones I didn't meet directly, but met through friends of friends, and I've missed three of the last invites from one of them and I feel bad and need to fix that somehow.

Some of the funnest people to hang out with are often the people I have very little in common with, except an easy going personality and good social skills. My wife is in that category, where we basically like none of the same things, but talk easily with each other and make each other laugh.

More of my social time is being eaten up with kid activities, and meeting parents of my daughter's friends. Generally its not so bad, people in my area that have managed to settle down with a partner and have kids tend to at least have a basic level of social skills.

I do wish I could get more people to play video games with me. I will maybe start putting out feelers on TheMotte closer to when the new Factorio expansion comes out. But if anyone is available to play Starship Troopers I'd like that as well.

I'm currently refreshing on Factorio in preparation for the expansion, let's coop?

I'll play coop when the expansion drops. Don't want to get burned out on the game before then.

Deal, see you then.

Motte Factorio Space Age Coop Campaign?

You in too? I'll save these comments

I'll probably be in the wrong time zone and busy with dad duties and whatnot, but if the stars align - sure!

Is the factorio expansion looking promising? Stuff like the quality modules seemed like a visit from the ☼Good Idea Fairy☼

It looks extremely promising. I've already thoroughly enjoyed the space exploration mod that was created by the guy leading the design for the new expansion (the factorio company hired him). Their Friday blog series has managed to track down and kill some of the slightly unfun parts of the game, or just optimize it to perfection. There are game mechanics in factorio that felt fine because basically no other game really has them. Things like creating circuits that set programmable behavior (other game have circuits stuff, but rarely to this extent). They streamlined it all.

Quality modules are option as far as I know. But I also plan to heavily use them. Right now factorio kinda lacks an endgame resource sink to get awesome stuff (you can sort of get it with research, but it doesn't quite feel right). I can't wait to pour massive amounts of resources into a legendary suit filled with legendary modules shooting legendary guns.

I'm excited about creating another multi planet factory system.

Did they integrate better AI into it ? Rampant seems pretty computationally simple but it works very nicely and depending on the setting and your bad habits can eat all the resources.

Never cared about pollution in normal Factorio, why would you? In Rampant I'm greener than the Germans.

Check out this enemy spoilers for the new expansion: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-429

Pretty cool. They're really getting everything out of the engine.

Oh yeah, looks like you'll have to wait for nukes to start just not caring about pollution anymore with that thing around.

that thing doesn't care about pollution. it uses a new system of territory, and only goes hostile if you build in its area. Pretty sure the lava planet doesn't have pollution at all, since the air is already a toxic stew.

I don't know if they changed the original biters. I know they changed some of the turret behaviors.and each planet is going to have its own unique challenges and enemies.

I do wish I could get more people to play video games with me.

What games do you like?

I like some PVE games. Survival, factory building, killing bugs, etc.

Deep Rock Galactic might be up your alley. It's a 4 player class-based PvE game (horde shooter?) where you play as a dwarf and you kill bugs and mine minerals on The Most Dangerous Planet In The Galaxy.

It's mission based. Missions have a primary objective that must be completed, no timer. They take roughly 20-40 minutes on average, but difficulty level and teammates and the specific mission push it lower or higher.

Man all this sounds dry as hell. The game is fun. Shooting bugs, working with your team, navigating the caves. The caves are procedurally generated, which works well due to each class' traversal tool. The driller can drill through anything at walking speed, the gunner can place ziplines, the engineer can place platforms, and all of these synergize and help the team. A mineral deposit high on a sheer wall is no issue, even with randoms, because of the pinging system.

It might have the best pinging system in any game. You hold a button to pull up your laser pointer. It has a little screen that tells you what you're looking at (mineral type, generic Common Rock, name of the bug chasing you, etc.). Press another button and you ping what you're looking at. Other dwarves can see both the ping (through walls) and the laser pointer. It's brilliant, and I think it's a big piece of why the game works so well even when you play with randoms.

As mentioned upthread, my social life is basically nonexistent at the moment. Downsides of living out of the way, with my colleagues mostly commuting in from the big city. No real opportunities to meet people outside of work unless I decide to haunt the local pubs.[1] I presume it'll get better once I move, be it from having opportunities to hang out after work, or simply by proximity to people who share my interests.

Luckily my girlfriend is doing her PhD at St. Andrew's, and I'm being gently coaxed into her social circle, but that's barely begun. They seem like nice enough people!

[1]The Scots have their priorities straight, the place doesn't have a GP or anywhere to buy clothing, but it's got 4 bars. And apparently had 27 servicing a mere 7000 people before COVID culled 'em**)

** The bars, that is, evidently it didn't cull the elderly enough if my patient pool is any testament. It gets awkward when one of the better bars is next to a care home that houses many of them, I could swear that I can spot a few of them who absolutely aren't supposed to be drinking in the clientele.

Nice rundown. I’m not in the US so the church-based focus of this is quite alien to me. A lot of people here go to Church but it’s down from probably 90%+ in the 1980s/90s to 30% now. (Guessing on these numbers but the fall off has been huge in a generation or so…) And the only people who use Church as social outlet are people aged 80 and up. Sad but that’s just the way it is, and probably a natural result of abuse scandals and coverups.

Could you explain what you mean by “ fraternal organization”? [Yes I can ask Google but just wondering what exactly they look like for you…]

For me (40s, married almost 20 years, two teenage kids) social life is quiet. I still live close to where I grew up but drifted away from all school friends (drift took place all the way through 20s, by the time we were all 35 we had nothing in common anymore). And I haven’t replaced those friends.

I’m involved in management teams of my old football club so it’s good to still be a part of a group of 20-30 year-olds trying to get the most out of themselves and each other. (It’s amateur but serious.)

Otherwise I run but not part of a club and prefer to do it alone. Also a member of a tennis club but it’s a strange social set, plenty of older richer people who have it made and are just enjoying life and I don’t have much in common with them, while the people my age and younger are sort of poor, a bit “drinky”, whiny and unambitious.

I’m after people my age with drive, energy and ambition - next stop might be a golf club. I love lots about the game but my game is crap and I haven’t yet got over the ego hump of getting lessons and putting in the hours to improve.

My wife and kids spend a lot of time together. I work from home, wife works near home, so we’re together 7 nights a week for an hour or two at least, but we haven’t done much socially. (Wife and son are mildly autistic and hate crowds so happier sitting silently with books, art or games at home.)

I’m much more extrovert but haven’t had much of a chance to explore that part of me last number of years. I like things like horse racing and poker but don’t have any friends to go/play with, went alone a few times and actually enjoyed it but still hard to get over the feeling of being a loner (I see other loners kicking their heels and looking smelly and friendless and would hate hate hate to be like them.)

I also write some poetry but have zero time for the poetry/spoken word scene. Full of self important dicks who think capitalism is to blame for their shitty lives and want to take it out on the world with snarky writing that has poor scansion and no rhythm.

Thanks for the question. It made me think about something I’d really like to improve.

Thanks for your response. I enjoyed reading it and commiserating. We're a bit apart in age but there is a great deal of common experience here.

For me personally - the church thing was certainly an intentional decision on my part to start using the "church subculture" as a primary social outlet. In my 20s, my socializing involved much more of "people in bars," "people at concerts," etc. It is true, though, that being in America means that it is at least somewhat viable to go this route as a younger person; but I would note it's still very much a minority position, even here. Where I live, you can safely assume that most under-30s you meet will be secular leftists who would not consider going to church.

"Fraternal organizations" are a somewhat unique thing. They are organizations that meet usually for charitable endeavors; and they have club houses in each neighborhood where they exist, where you can go and hang out. Generally speaking, they will have a bar and maybe a kitchen, and if you're a member, you can go there and drink very cheaply if you want to. Some of them are: the Fraternal Order of Eagles; the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks; and of course the Freemasons. It was a very common thing in America for men to join these up until maybe the 1970s or so, but they declined with the advent of television; Robert Putnam writes about this a lot in Bowling Alone. If you're a reader - the novels of Sinclair Lewis from the 1910s and 1920s have lots of characters who are members of these orders.

Anyway, like seemingly every voluntary social activity outside the home, these orders are mostly the reserve of provincials and the aging now; but I went as a guest to the local Eagles lodge a few times last summer, and it was really nice. If these exist near you (or whoever is reading this), they are absolutely a viable option to be your "third place," but many people don't even know they're there.

drift took place all the way through 20s, by the time we were all 35 we had nothing in common anymore

I am 35 now, and I'm experiencing this. I think it is more me that has changed, than them, but I suppose it is inevitable that one or the other will change. I continue to fight it, because I like still having an existing connection with the people with whom I formed pleasant memories; but the memories and the connection are fading together.

I love lots about [golf] but my game is crap and I haven’t yet got over the ego hump of getting lessons and putting in the hours to improve.

You and I have this in common as well. It does suck a bit, to try late in life to take up something which will require hundreds of hours to get good at; with golf I'm trying to decide if I've given up on it. I hit a lot of great wedge shots somehow, but everything else is just frustration, and that's simply because I haven't practiced and learned enough. As I mention elsewhere, I've taken up chess, and at least I can practice that substantially at home. But yes - I've kept up with tennis because I already invested the hundreds and thousands of hours to get good at it: I did this in my teens and 20s. Now it forms one of the limited number of "things I am genuinely good at," which is a number I may be unable to increase now.

I also write some poetry but have zero time for the poetry/spoken word scene.

I was a very keen fiction writer up until I was about 30 or so. Now, yeah, I no longer like the kinds of people that I could potentially share and discuss it with; and feeling like I have no possible audience is quite demotivational. Perhaps I'm best off roping in my friends and family to suffer through that.

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