Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

A random thought:

Trump’s cognitive test: I looked at it. Tried it (and didn’t score 30, I have had some problems with recalling dates and numbers since childhood), but it was ridiculously easy.

Realised that – “Holy shit. People FAIL this.”

Don’t think anything has ever driven the sheer sorrow and waste of dementia home as much as that realisation, not having had personal experience with more than the normal eccentricities of age.

@WWTH

I’ve had plenty of drunk sex/hookups that I remember just fine.

😛

Oddly, been thinking about this, as very drunk sex happened more often than I’m terribly comfortable with, looking back on. Still, every one of them (bar one – a 15 hour layover in Hamburg and I didn’t make it as far as the Reeper 😛 ) had an agreed and enjoyable rematch when we were sober, so I’m not over worried about the consent problem. 😛

I can’t keep conversations going, for the life of me. They tend to go Hi, How are you? Fine, and you? Fine. … what else is there to say? Maybe some comment about the weather? Thing is, I couldn’t care less about what the Kardashians or the Steelers are up to lately, there’s no TV-show-that-everyone-watches anymore, nobody (to a first approximation) cares about any of the technical topics I know about, and any attempt to discuss politics or current events in the current political climate is like lighting a fuse on a powder keg.

There some sort of a knack to it? Or is it just luck, you have to have been born the type who finds the Kardashians inherently interesting or else you won’t be much of a conversationalist?

@Surplus

As much as I can sustain a topic, once I’ve said my piece, I’m usually met with silence afterwards. But that’s probably more a function of storytelling; if you’ve told your story well enough, usually there aren’t many follow-up questions.

I’m a geeky guy, but I’m really not a media hound. I’ve seen a popular TV show or movie here or there, but I typically watch YouTube and listen to podcasts, so it’s rare that I share cultural context with many people.

I find that taking a quasi-“clickbait” approach to a conversation gets people interested. Local stuff tends to work best. For instance, during my Christmas get-together, I talked about the early Toronto settlers that had been reburied at the nearby cemetery. Since everybody’s been through that cemetery (it runs through the Beltline Park, which makes it popular with joggers and cyclists), it had enough inherent context to hold their interest, particularly if there’s a section they had passed by, but never took note of. There are a couple of plaques outside both Mt. Pleasant and the Toronto Necropolis that mentions the original Potters Field where those settlers that didn’t belong to the Catholic or Anglican churches were initially buried, but I’m willing to bet that very few Torontonians know that the Potters Field was located at the busiest intersection in the city: Yonge and Bloor Streets. The two main lines of the Toronto subway intersect there; even after digging the subway tunnels, construction crews are still finding human remains that date back to the founding of the city. I’m willing to bet that the next time one of my step-brothers is switching lines, they’ll think about whose bones might still be lurking behind those tiled walls. 😛

Recent vacations can be a good source of stories. I mined my Nova Scotia trip pretty hard for spell-binding tales of interesting people and places.

In short, I find that hooking people in with either something unusual or a quirk of something familiar work the best for starting a conversation. Something local always works.

Gotta love the false dilemma between it being okay to coerce women into sex and expecting men to read women’s mind.

There is a secret third option where if a man’s not sure if a woman’s into something or wants to do something, he can ask her and then take her response at face value.

Radical thought, I know.

But yeah, I hate how we’re expected to pretend that men are somehow incapable of interpeting really, really basic body language cues.

@WWTH

“Radical thought, I know.”

What are you talking about, expecting men to speak? My uncle sat me down at 12 and put it on good authority that men are incapable of doing anything but grunting, and falling in love with anything that feeds them (which clearly explains that guy who had to call 911 because he got his penis stuck in the umbrella hole of his patio table).

[/troo fax] :p

I still worry about being socially awkward, but there’s a silver lining – I can write about the awkward conversations I have!

For instance, at a party in December, I told a complete stranger that I’d danced to Persian disco hits from the ’80s at my office parties. There was no context to this except that Greek music was playing, so I felt that [nationality] + music + dancing was something to be talked about. She looked at me a bit strangely.

Then, when someone I knew invited me to have a brownie, I asked whether there was pot in it. (I didn’t want there to be, because I needed to be alert the next morning.)

“No,” he said regretfully, “but they ARE whole wheat.” 😀

…The problem is, sometimes I’m too shy to leave home in the first place – I delayed going to my Finnegans Wake reading group* yesterday because I was anxious, and then I felt it wouldn’t be worth it to get there late. I likely missed some unusual conversations 🙁

*Not trying to be all Weirder-Than-Thou, this is just a hobby of mine.

Re:The Internet

1. @Katamount

“But really, when women or genderqueer people want to express themselves sexually and their prospective partners are a bunch of men raised on internet porn and 4chan, eeeech, I might want to get a bit sloshed too before fooling around.”

The “raised on porn” thing really sucks, because I like to have good sex, and a lot of men get strangely butthurt about getting any requests. It’s like they think that they’re supposed to just know a girl’s individual tastes. But, I’m an adult, and having shitty sex is just a disappointment. I’ll go on with my life.

My problem is that young boys aren’t only watching porn and learning unfortunately poor sexual technique; they’re on Return of Kings, watching one of youtube’s resident MRAs, or worse. And, to be clear, it’s not just older teens I’m talking about, it’s 6,7,8 year old boys now. (Remember, the norm is for kids to get smartphones in Elementary School, and for some of those boys have full private access to them- hey just read this thread). And while boys can unlearn any poor sexual technique once they get meatspace experience, I’m less confident that boys will unlearn the violent misogyny and general terribleness that populates the internet before they manage to cause significant harm to the girls around them.

I’ve been a teenager before, and yeah, there’s always been a couple of young men that are little shits. However, I don’t remember this kind of Machiavellian, let’s try to systematically drive girls to suicide, shit that my daughter seems to see. I remember that I still used to be a little shocked when I first read WHTM and saw how widespread actual violent hate was. Now I don’t know if I’d be more shocked than sadly reserved if I ever saw a 10 year old praise “Saint Elliot”.

(Obviously, it should go without saying, but #notallboys, or more accurately #notthevastmajorityofboysffs).

2. Youtube is not your child’s babysitter.

A. Logan Paul

I. @Pink Dearth Vader

“The original comment by mrex is of her calling other parents stupid for not being more aware of people like Logan Paul.”

To be fair, most of my judgmental sarcasm was directed directly at the clickbait article’s existence. This seems to happen literally every time some controversy concerning the internet and children occurs. An article will appear with a bunch of parents wringing their hands about how they have seen the light and will now supervise their children’s computer use. Then things settle down, until the next controversy brews up, and then another article appears with a bunch of parents wringing their hands about their children’s computer use, and so on and so on.

Honestly? I flat out don’t buy it. This isn’t 1986; the fact that there are questionable things on a site that uploads user content such as youtube shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. And, in the off chance that these parents somehow aren’t aware that there’s bad shit on youtube, then they’re guilty of not doing their due diligence. (And that’s a BIG part of parenting-due diligence).

These parents aren’t idiots for not knowing who Logan Paul is, they’re idiots for blaming youtube for not protecting their kids. There is LITERALLY more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s literally impossible to accurately screen. And even if it wasn’t, there is no computer algorithm, there is no team of youtube employees, that can know your child’s maturity, and replace your judgment. It’s 100% on you, the parent. Full.stop.

II. This was not exactly new behavior for Logan Paul.

He’s clever, and often funny, but he’s basically a dudebro fratboy with a youtube channel that makes fun of everything. His humor has repeatedly relied on misogyny, and other questionable shit, before. Honestly? I don’t think that Logan Paul being an asshole is really the only problem.

It’s like this; the viewers create the asshole, they reward the asshole with millions for making fun of serious shit, they get pissed when the asshole makes fun of something that THEY find serious, youtube kills the asshole, the viewers finds a new asshole to make fun of serious shit, the cycle repeats, etc.

B. Elsagate

It’s 2am and I’m so fucking tired that I’m just gonna dump a Medium article here.

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

@Katamount,

Thanks for linking to that piece; you’re right, it’s a good fit with the one I mentioned. And also slightly uncomfortable. There are doors opening that I think I’d rather keep closed.
Re alcohol: I’m the same as Weirwood on that (or I was, anyway, back in my hooking up days). I do know people who get seriously, roaring drunk before going out (most of my students for example), but moderate drinking as a dis-inhibition technique is also very common ???
(sorry about your liver, tho – eep).

@opposablethumbs,

@Mish I just wanted to say – I love what you posted about your son at the climbing wall. Seeing things like that in our kids is a sparkle of BestEver along the lumpy road of TryingToParent ?

Ha! That’s a fabulous way of putting it ?
(I missed your comment earlier because my phone is being stupid. Stupid phone).

@Skiriki
Good article, thanks for sharing

@Mish

Yeah, the liver thing is hereditary. Thanks, Gramma Katamount! 😀 But I actually consider myself remarkably fortunate that I’ve only got a mild case of this ailment. Just for context, this is the same illness that killed Walter Payton within months with cancer, so going on 25 years with the majority of liver functionality intact is a good sign. A yearly MRI to check the ol’ bile ducts and Katamount is right as rain. 😀

Checking out the comment sections on any Aziz Ansari related videos has been quite depressing. Men are apparently seeing themselves in Ansari’s actions to such a degree that they’re pulling out all the stops to handwave them away and put all the onus on Grace–“She went back to the apartment”, “she didn’t leave”, “she didn’t hit him with a rolling pin” etc.

Baked into all of this is the assumption that going to a guy’s apartment == sexytimes. Maybe she just wanted to learn more about the guy? Even if she consented to some fooling around (which I don’t think she did), that’s not consent to intercourse.

I think this is the frontier of the #MeToo zeitgeist that will be the critical test. Can guys actually face the fact that they, the average man in 2018, might have taken advantage of coercive tactics to get laid? Let’s see what the Magic 8-Ball has to say:

http://www.retroland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Magic-8-Ball.jpg

I actually consider myself fortunate in another way, as my sexytimes have all been after I first learned about the concept of enthusiastic consent, so I don’t have that kind of regretful behavior to look back on. But then, I was plugged into this broader world; average Joes not so much….

But this was expected. I say keep writing stories like this. Silence is what the status quo needs.