Omg I love your pixelated outlines, I was about to be completely lost without the labels in that picture!! I got into trees (literal sense) for a while and I loved the sense of adventure where even the most random places (like an office park) were suddenly more interesting because I could try to see how many species I recognized.
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A thought
And some meta
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Aināt that the truth. And youāre very on point with runners making it part of their identity. Iām very much prone to that. Which is why Iām glad I spent some time exploring other interests. Helps me with perspective and makes me less likely to forget that there are all these other things out there that are pretty, frickinā awesome to immerse yourself in.
Visited your site, and was nodding along when reading You realize this sucks for everyone else too, right? Came across that NYT article the other day, and had to take a couple of breaths to fight the urge to post a hottake. Reading your measured take reminded me just how glad I am that Iām happily married and have stepped away from social media.
Tsunamis and Artfight and Cookbooks, Oh My!
Long overdue post from me!
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Thank youāit means a lot to hear Iām not the only one who had the same reaction to that article. (There was a similar article in yesterdayās NYT, too, but this time I fought the urge to rageclick 
). I think my take could problem have been a bit more measured but it is really exasperating to see a very popular and well-reputed newspaper spreading a negative, cynical message about men that I have been fighting for my entire life.
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This link doesnāt work for me :(
Whoops! Fixed it! Sorry about that.
I decided to rave about some of my favorite aliens and linking it back to contemporary science and culture.
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This was fascinating! Iām an avid science fiction fan, and Iām always looking for weirder experiences out there. Iāll definitely be checking out the books and Youtubers you highlighted here!
It also reminds me just how much I need to get around to reading Blindsight. Iāve read the first of the Rifters trilogy, and it made me love Peter Watts. I follow his blog at the moment and the rest of his books have been on my to-read list forever.
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I had been sitting on this for a few days, before deciding that Iād put it up, consequences be damned.
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Weird afternoon today, lol.
Hey, you put into words all the various frustrations I also see as an off the market man, with great sympathy for my single friends.
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I just read your post about aliens, @CaffeineAndLasers. Good stuff!
Probably a mistake on my part, though, because while I have a copy of Armored Core VI I didnāt get far enough to know about Ayre, but no biggie. A plot point out of context isnāt a huge deal, because I still havenāt see the lead-up to it.
Oh shit thatās me lol! Thank you for writing this. Your take is a lot more thorough than mine.
I have also found the job market analogy to be an effective way to help straight women understand that the dating market also sucks for men, just in different ways. But I have also grown wary of deploying even this sort of metaphor because it can reinforce the āmen vs. womenā culture war aspect of the debate and play into pre-existing cynicism about the need to strategize or game the market.
I am trying to find common ground in the underlying forcesāperfectionism, anxiety, toxic positivity, whatever you want to call itāthat seem to be stress factors on both sides. IMO the asymmetry we see in the dating world reflects gendered ways of dealing with these stress factors, rather first-order gender characteristics.
Yeah, I didnāt want to tag you here because I wasnāt sure how my post would play to this crowd or how youād feel about me using your post as a springboard, but this is something Iāve thought about on and off for a long time. I was thinking of dating as a job search back in the 1990s when I was just a cynical Xennial (or late GenX) teenager.
Those are fair points, but Iāve found that if I worry overmuch about what sort of meaning people might find in my words and how that meaning might diverge from the meaning I intend to convey, I might not write anything at all.
I find the job search metaphor useful precisely because it isnāt just men who have a hard time finding decent jobs nowadays. Hell, if I was single today Iād probably have a marginally better chance of finding a forty-something woman whose company I enjoy than I would a job that pays a decent salary and doesnāt demand the sort of servile devotion expected of a high-ranking Scientologist.
Of course, I donāt expect people wrapped in their own pain to empathize with that of others. They want validation for their own suffering, and generally donāt care about anybody elseās. But thatās what friends are for, and I am nobodyās friend.
Iām not sure itās a matter of asymmetry. Like I said, everybody gets a raw deal when it comes to dating. Itās just a different raw deal depending on gender. What Iām seeing, and what I saw back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is that the old protocols donāt work any longer. They probably didnāt work all that well for most people before then, either, but there wasnāt much anybody could do about it.
Besides, this isnāt my field of expertise. Even if my understanding of the problem is on the money, I have no idea how to fix it. Going back to the old ways wonāt work, because they didnāt work for most people. It wonāt happen no matter how much crybullying right-wingers do. The world has moved on, and people have to move on with it.
If I was going to suggest anything, itās that we need more āmain character syndromeā, not less. We need more people exercising agency in their own lives, taking the leading role in the stories of their own lives, and not settling for being supporting characters in everybody elseās lives. Men should still approach women they find attractive, and be honest about their desires and intentions. However, women should also approach men they find attractive, and be honest about their desires and intentions. Nobody should be passively waiting to select from a pool of suitors whose only common quality was that they had the nerve to make the first move. Everybody needs to cultivate patience and learn to take rejection graciously. People need to go for what they want, instead of hoping that dating works like the fabled cat distribution system.
Like I said, I wasnāt looking when I met my wife, but counting on that sort of luck or serendipity isnāt going to work for most people. It shouldnāt have worked for me, to be honest.
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