Samantha Fulnecky is a bag of trash and her last name really invites jokes about Charlie Kirk’s ending.

Used hinge. It’s the least bad, as of this year anyway.

Most people who use dating apps are, frankly, bad at it. People send garbage messages with garbage profiles. People half-ass it and expect the other folks to carry the whole thing. I feel like I could write a short book on how to do it better.

Condensed into like three bullet points it’s

• Ask questions. Do not dead-end the conversation and expect them to do all the work
• actually ask them out. Like, in the first conversation after you clear any must-have deal breakers (eg: if you have a kid)
• put stuff you want to talk about in your profile. Don’t be “clever” and respond to “what are you looking for?” with “my keys”. This is where you give the other person topics to talk about. (Also if you are tired of people asking about the stuff you put in your profile, change it you doofus.)

Being “an introvert” doesn’t excuse you from being present and engaged. The other person isn’t going to be that interested in someone who responds every couple hours with “lol”. If you can’t muster up the energy to have a real conversation, you aren’t ready to date.

Ok so you’re probably correct but I also like seeing the opposite of the usual “omg socialism everyone in NYC is already dead!!!”

Out-groups to bind, in-groups to protect. That’s it. Often on a purely emotional level. Having the out-group be just out and about living life feels wrong to that kind of person. There has to be hierarchy, they feel.

Part of that falls under the “don’t show up when invited” umbrella, but mostly that sucks. I’m sorry you feel like your efforts and friendship efforts weren’t appreciated.

I’ve definitely had a couple friends (“friends”) that were lopsided. I remember posting about one way back in the 2000s on some web forum, and a guy with a otter(?) avatar told me “This guy, that flakes on your plans and only shows up when it works for him? He doesn’t respect you. Don’t put up with that”. Good advice from a small furry animal, I think.

Some people just aren’t worth it. Maybe they were in the past. Maybe they will be again. But I find it’s important to have boundaries for oneself. It can be hard to balance.

A lot of our behaviors and coping mechanisms come from our parents. So if they’re lonely and have no friends, you should examine why that is, and try to change it in yourself.

One of my friends realized after therapy they had a lot of behaviors from their dad. Stuff they hated when their dad did (lashing out when uncomfortable, mostly). Once they saw it, they were able to work on it. Before that, it had been a real source of friction with friendships.

Hah, a different ex that I’m still friends with responded with “you rank us??”

No, there’s not a full ranking. I’m still good friends with 2, there’s a lot of ones I have no hard feelings about, and then there’s this one stinker.

“go home and look at Instagram” is largely a stand-in for “I’m tired and can’t muster the energy to do anything that feels more effortful”.

In my limited experience, the trick to getting out of the hole is doing the hard thing anyway. That and professional advice and medication as appropriate. You can’t to my knowledge willpower your way out of clinical depression. But ultimately if you want out of the hole, you have to climb out, regardless if that means therapy, medication, or being mildly uncomfortable. It’s not going to fix itself.

I usually recommend Meetup or similar. There’s a bunch that are just get togethers for board games or whatnot.

But you have to keep going. I think people expect to like go once and make a new best friend and partner. You usually need a lot of interactions to level up from “stranger” to “person I see sometimes” to friend.

I also ran a small meetup for a while before the pandemic. Made a few friends that way, but it’s a lot of thankless work.

Been living without a car for (oh no I’m old) almost two decades. It’s pretty great. NYC is a rare city in the US with good public transit.

I wouldn’t willingly move somewhere that needed a car for day to day. I don’t care if it’s a little cheaper or there’s “more space”. I like density and walking places.

I comment. Reminds me of how I’d end up playing medic in tfc/tf2- someone has to do it.

I don’t post original stuff often, though.

They vote for their material interests in the same sense that a man walking at night with sunglasses picks the best path. He thinks it’s obvious but he really needs to take the sunglasses off and maybe get a flashlight. He’s walking a stupid path and will probably fall into a ditch.

Fox News is probably the sunglasses in this metaphor.

I feel like a lot of people who bemoan the lack of friends also don’t invest in friendship. Don’t show up when invited, don’t organize anything themselves.

I used to run a book club and a board game club, and it was always kind of a struggle to get people to show up. The pull of “just go home and look at Instagram” is strong, I guess.

I only learned like last year that you can keep convening grand juries until you get one that indicts. Seems kind of strange to me

I did a lot of stupid stuff as a teenager but most of it is forgotten.

Someone tricked me into stealing my unique gloves in diablo2 once. Felt real stupid after but they just blocked me and I never saw them again. (I think it was that if you die when the item was being moved it drops onto the ground, so they told me to swap my gloves in a pvp fight and then killed me)

I had an ex partner get upset because I used a period at the end of an innocuous text. This is among the reasons why they are my least favorite ex. Just a mess of anxiety and arrogance, where they’d worry about bullshit but be completely convinced that they were right and their way of thinking about things was the only sensible way.

Unfortunately they’re still distantly connected to the friend group, but luckily I haven’t run into them in years.

Social media users on text platforms are probably above average on reading skills. I’m convinced the average person is only semi literate, and there’s a shocking amount of people who can barely read at all.

poor people never could live in cities.

Many poor people live in cities.

and the people who live in impoverished neighborhoods in urban areas, also don’t have access to any of that.

People who live in poorer parts of New York City, at least, can take a bus or train to other parts.

I don’t know where you live but one of the popular bars near me in NYC is $18 for a show tonight. They also have a free DJ show of some sort. A smaller spot that does shows I know of has one for $14. That’s just two spots I know off hand. There are many more.

I feel like you’re messaging me from some other world. I’m mostly speaking from living in NYC. Where you you speaking from?

There are rich people who think the poor should be exterminated, but they’re (hopefully) a minority and not likely the people in this thread.

I really don’t think those ultra rich snobs are the people going to see a local band play to 75 people in a bar. “Cultural events” doesn’t exclusively mean like Opera and Broadway. It’s also “three people put out an EP and are playing it live at Stingy Pete’s tonight. Tickets are PWYW, $5 recommended”

No one here is lecturing the poor about how to live their lives. The argument was that poor people should be allowed to live in cities, if they desire, in part because there are many nice things that come with living in a city.

I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t be alive. I don’t know where you got that from.

I don’t understand why you’re mad at all here.

Who’s telling you that $150k salary is shameful? Are you conflating poverty and shame?

The argument was that cities have more opportunities for cultural and social events. That’s undeniably true because those scale directly with the amount of people. A town of 10,000 simply doesn’t have the bodies to support a metal scene a punk scene a hip-hop scene and EDM scene all at once. Thus, telling poor people that they must move away from cities is denying them those things. It’s saying sorry, you’re too poor to participate.

You can feel bad for people like me for ‘suffering’, but what you don’t get is that to us it was never suffering. it was a normal life.

Many people live what seems normal to them but by outside perspectives would be seen as impoverished. No running water. No indoor plumbing. Child labor. Women denied rights. “It was normal to us” is an extremely weak argument.