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schild
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Reply #39830 on: April 09, 2022, 09:54:14 PM

 Some people badly don't want to be seen at their bottom. The texting leads me to believe the dude is in a dark place.

I'd seriously get the __full__ details from the wife before proceeding further.
Tale
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Reply #39831 on: April 10, 2022, 01:10:32 AM

Some people badly don't want to be seen at their bottom. The texting leads me to believe the dude is in a dark place.

I'd seriously get the __full__ details from the wife before proceeding further.

I'm just off the phone with his wife and have debriefed my wife. Now f13.

They're all okay... relatively. Still have good jobs and both have nice apartments. Kid is going well.

It's the pandemic and it's alcohol. Two years of being stuck at home together amplified problems they'd always had (at this point, I think everyone can relate). She says he was basically living in his home office with the door shut. She gave him an ultimatum about certain things, she says he refused to make any changes, and they separated.

She says he has "an interesting relationship with alcohol". In decades of knowing him, I've only had two indications of this: one morning in about 2009 we took his kid to a street fair and I thought I could smell alcohol on him, so I challenged him (I had an alcoholic uncle and I know that smell). He denied it. Then about five years ago when we all had dinner together, my wife told me afterwards she could smell alcohol on him when we picked them up.

He also tells lies. In the sense of spinning riveting yarns that aren't true. He tells the truth most of the time, but sometimes goes all the way down the rabbit hole with a very well-constructed lie. He once convinced a keen sailor that he'd participated in an ocean yacht race and described everything in full detail with correct terminology... but he's never done that! That sailor is now the mutual friend I mentioned above. We know about his lies and we deal with it, because he's otherwise been a great friend throughout our lives. But his wife says the lies have become more of a problem in the last two years.

So I now need to push ahead with catching up with him ASAP and hear his version, and continue being his friend. It sounds like he's an alcoholic, which I can't fix, but I can be there for him and encourage him to get help with whatever he's prepared to discuss. He will need to look at what's next, not just shut it out, or it's gonna be downhill some more. Sometime later I'll also take my family to catch up with his wife and kid (we're now invited).
« Last Edit: April 10, 2022, 01:46:39 AM by Tale »
Rendakor
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Reply #39832 on: April 10, 2022, 08:32:31 AM

If you've got his address, I would say just go and see him. He's less likely to tell you to go away when you're at his doorstep. He might not want you there, but he needs you there right now. Maybe get the address from his wife, if he won't give it to you himself..

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
schild
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Reply #39833 on: April 10, 2022, 11:12:39 AM

Some people badly don't want to be seen at their bottom. The texting leads me to believe the dude is in a dark place.

I'd seriously get the __full__ details from the wife before proceeding further.

I'm just off the phone with his wife and have debriefed my wife. Now f13.

They're all okay... relatively. Still have good jobs and both have nice apartments. Kid is going well.

It's the pandemic and it's alcohol. Two years of being stuck at home together amplified problems they'd always had (at this point, I think everyone can relate). She says he was basically living in his home office with the door shut. She gave him an ultimatum about certain things, she says he refused to make any changes, and they separated.

She says he has "an interesting relationship with alcohol". In decades of knowing him, I've only had two indications of this: one morning in about 2009 we took his kid to a street fair and I thought I could smell alcohol on him, so I challenged him (I had an alcoholic uncle and I know that smell). He denied it. Then about five years ago when we all had dinner together, my wife told me afterwards she could smell alcohol on him when we picked them up.

He also tells lies. In the sense of spinning riveting yarns that aren't true. He tells the truth most of the time, but sometimes goes all the way down the rabbit hole with a very well-constructed lie. He once convinced a keen sailor that he'd participated in an ocean yacht race and described everything in full detail with correct terminology... but he's never done that! That sailor is now the mutual friend I mentioned above. We know about his lies and we deal with it, because he's otherwise been a great friend throughout our lives. But his wife says the lies have become more of a problem in the last two years.

So I now need to push ahead with catching up with him ASAP and hear his version, and continue being his friend. It sounds like he's an alcoholic, which I can't fix, but I can be there for him and encourage him to get help with whatever he's prepared to discuss. He will need to look at what's next, not just shut it out, or it's gonna be downhill some more. Sometime later I'll also take my family to catch up with his wife and kid (we're now invited).

In his defense, I also hid in my office for the first few months of the pandemic with the door shut.

I am not, however, an alcoholic.

I'm not sure I agree with Rendakor. If he's not a danger to himself and hasn't asked you to come, I'm not sure I would. I don't actually know how close you are despite these posts.
Rendakor
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Reply #39834 on: April 10, 2022, 04:47:05 PM

The phrase "best friend" led me to believe they were close.

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
schild
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Reply #39835 on: April 10, 2022, 06:21:02 PM

Yeah I get that totally, but like my best friend from high school and if I'd had a best man would be described as best friends but like, at 40 they ain't REALLY, not this kind. I'm just treading carefully.
Tale
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Reply #39836 on: April 10, 2022, 08:11:29 PM

The phrase "best friend" led me to believe they were close.

Wasn't sure whether Schild meant geographically close or a close friendship. I'm on the outskirts of Sydney and he's near the middle. Sprawling city of 5.3 million. I have a car, he doesn't.

He's the long-term friend I keep in touch with most. I've been more geographically distant for seven years after buying a house further out and starting a family, which inevitably leads to hanging out with other kids' parents and people who live nearby.

We've known each other since we were 12 at high school, when we lived within walking distance. At first I joined in bullying him, but by our late teens we had the same music taste and constantly saw live bands in the same group of friends. He was a minor band's drummer and I wrote some lyrics. We started at the same university... until we fell out over a girl (who didn't stay in our lives). We reconciled 5 years later, then he got married and I hung out at their place when I wasn't working or playing MMORPGs... They were my constant IRL friends.

The person I refer to as a kid is old enough to vote now. In their words, I'm the closest thing the kid/young adult has to an uncle. I've been further away from their lives recently, but (pandemic aside) we visit each other every few months and text/call regularly, send spontaneous YouTube links to some band's song, etc. When one has trouble, e.g. my father being in hospital in January, the other asks what he can do (though the answer was nothing then, and so far it's nothing now).
« Last Edit: April 10, 2022, 08:15:23 PM by Tale »
Tale
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Reply #39837 on: April 11, 2022, 05:02:57 AM

Been chatting in text to him tonight. I said flat out I'm worried that I can't contact him except in text when he's going through a difficult time. He says he's fine, although the situation is "not ideal", and he has a good one-bedroom apartment and is too busy with work to catch up right now. Still not calling me back though.

My kid has flu now (says the doctor) so I am not doing an in-person catch-up until I'm sure I don't have it. But we're talking about where to meet in his new neighbourhood.
schild
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Reply #39838 on: April 11, 2022, 05:55:14 AM

I know you're thinking it, so it may as well be said: he's not fine.

But he still may not want company. Depression/Whatever this Is is tough stuff.
Hammond
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Reply #39839 on: April 11, 2022, 08:30:50 AM

I echo schild's statement that your friend is not fine.  If he is a good a liar that you say he is then he is most likely lying to himself that he is fine and the situation is under control. Not a unusual thing in alcoholics to be good liars really.

And if he is falling back to "work is just busy" that is just a cover story.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2022, 10:01:21 AM by Hammond »
Sky
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Reply #39840 on: April 11, 2022, 11:40:18 AM

the nutjobs are driving the bus

 Ohhhhh, I see.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2022, 01:29:33 PM by Sky »
Samwise
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Reply #39841 on: April 11, 2022, 11:59:08 AM

Our very impressive brains evolved over a long period to be able to handle increasingly large social units, because large tribes of hominids had a decisive evolutionary advantage over smaller tribes of hominids; technology was just a byproduct of those big brains.  Our technology has continued to advance and increase the number of other hominids we can communicate with, but as far as our ability to trust and cooperate with each other, Dunbar's Number hasn't really changed since before the invention of agriculture. 

The Webb telescope isn't going to find any intelligent life because every intelligent species invents the Internet well before it invents interstellar travel, and murders itself sometime within the first hundred years of its Eternal September

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Khaldun
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Reply #39842 on: April 11, 2022, 01:27:04 PM

I kind of hate Haidt. He's a shitty social scientist who gets most of what he cites or talks about at least half-wrong, mostly because he's not terribly thoughtful; he's typically petulant when he gets caught out citing shit that has failed to be replicable or shit that hasn't held up very well since it first appeared. For example, there are a lot of critiques of Dunbar's number (some of them pretty rigorously statistical: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158).

I also think there's no need for just-so stories here about how our brains evolved for X or Y, none of which have any provable validity. But that's evolutionary psychology for you, making shit up and pretending it's science. (If increasingly large social units are always an advantage for social mammals, they'd all demonstrate growing cognitive capacity for large numbers in all species, which doesn't seem the case.)

But that's quibbling. I don't have any quarrel with the basic thought that we have no idea how to deal with the scale of the world we've built. I don't even think it's about murdering each other, it's just about all the shit that we make that has unintended consequences once it disseminates at larger scales. It's a self-solving problem in the sense that the world is going to rescale itself with climate change; a lot of what we've built is not going to survive what's coming even though I think people are going to survive as such.
Samwise
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Reply #39843 on: April 11, 2022, 03:13:02 PM

I don't even think it's about murdering each other, it's just about all the shit that we make that has unintended consequences once it disseminates at larger scales.

Like I said, at a certain level of complexity society just murders itself, which is not necessarily the same thing as its individual members murdering each other.  The link Sky posted (and then deleted like a coward) had a bit in it about institutions “shooting darts into their own brains” which is what we usually refer to around here as a “circular firing squad”.  In any case, it’s not a new idea.

A totally unrelated thing I learned today is that polar bears are invisible to infrared because their fur’s insulation is so good, and now I can’t stop thinking about how great it would be if that found its way into a Predator movie.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Khaldun
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Reply #39844 on: April 11, 2022, 03:55:40 PM

The thing is, I think a lot of the things we love about modernity are ALSO accidents of scale. That's the problem. We get great things that we love, weird things that confuse us, and deadly things that kill us and spoil the world out of the systems we've made mostly by accident. The idea that the world we live in is the intentional product of specific visions or controlling systems is just wrong. But it isn't always bad, what we get that way.
Tale
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Reply #39845 on: April 11, 2022, 07:01:46 PM

Not a unusual thing in alcoholics to be good liars really.

My uncle was a famous lawyer who won high-profile court cases. Luxury house in the city, lovely family, life of the party, could play ragtime piano by ear.

Lied all the way down. The perfect lawyer and alcoholic. Eventually he was a bad-smelling homeless man in fingerless gloves. When he was in subsidised housing I arrived one day and the door was wide open, with him passed out on the couch, until I cleaned him up and made coffee and we went out for a walk. But even in the gutter, it turned out my uncle paid life insurance on himself the entire time. For his kids.

That's the stink I thought I caught on my friend in 2009... I was like "did he just have a big night?" He managed to convince me he hadn't even done that.
Hammond
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Reply #39846 on: April 12, 2022, 08:51:53 AM

That's rough Tale. I have several cousins with similar stories although none of them as successful as your uncle sounded. I hope your friend finds a way forward.

schild
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Reply #39847 on: April 12, 2022, 10:36:30 AM

Not a unusual thing in alcoholics to be good liars really.

My uncle was a famous lawyer who won high-profile court cases. Luxury house in the city, lovely family, life of the party, could play ragtime piano by ear.

Lied all the way down. The perfect lawyer and alcoholic. Eventually he was a bad-smelling homeless man in fingerless gloves. When he was in subsidised housing I arrived one day and the door was wide open, with him passed out on the couch, until I cleaned him up and made coffee and we went out for a walk. But even in the gutter, it turned out my uncle paid life insurance on himself the entire time. For his kids.

That's the stink I thought I caught on my friend in 2009... I was like "did he just have a big night?" He managed to convince me he hadn't even done that.
I have a functional alcoholic overachieving person in my family.

He doesn't either bother lying about it, he just doesn't give a shit. It's wild.
Tale
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Reply #39848 on: April 13, 2022, 01:40:30 AM

I echo schild's statement that your friend is not fine.  If he is a good a liar that you say he is then he is most likely lying to himself that he is fine and the situation is under control. Not a unusual thing in alcoholics to be good liars really.

And if he is falling back to "work is just busy" that is just a cover story.

He rang me tonight, out of the blue. Said he couldn't talk long due to work, which was obviously a way of not having the conversation about what's happened, but he was buying tickets for him and me to see a band next weekend, and I'll find us a meal.

I can't do anything right now because I have my kid's flu, but we followed up with lots of texts about stuff, and he had me install an app to identify frogs by their sound, because they are another consequence of The Amount Of Fucking Rain This Month and apparently there are three different species outside his new apartment.

Onward.
Khaldun
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Reply #39849 on: April 19, 2022, 06:59:28 PM

I am normally so so careful while cooking but today I took a hot pan out of the oven, put it on the stove to reduce a sauce, and then one minute later forgot the pan had been in the oven and grabbed the metal handle for it.

It was not quite the guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark grabbing the medallion in the fire but it kind of looked like that for a second or two. Felt like it for sure.

Fucking stupid.
Samwise
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Reply #39850 on: May 03, 2022, 02:32:47 PM

From: Me
To: Recology SF
Subject: Cart Delivery

Please bring back my cart!  :(  https://www.dropbox.com/s/19nv870975imhqq/2022-05-03%2014.24.00.mp4?dl=0

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Trippy
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Reply #39851 on: May 03, 2022, 03:03:26 PM

Road trip!
Rasix
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I am the harbinger of your doom!


Reply #39852 on: May 11, 2022, 03:05:06 PM

Pop-up hobo camp at the end of my driveway. Yay.  Ohhhhh, I see.

-Rasix
schild
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Reply #39853 on: May 11, 2022, 05:38:17 PM

Pop-up hobo camp at the end of my driveway. Yay.  Ohhhhh, I see.

Stand your ground.
Sky
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I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.


Reply #39854 on: May 12, 2022, 07:37:08 AM

Hey, cheap blowjobs for everyone!
01101010
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You call it an accident. I call it justice.


Reply #39855 on: May 12, 2022, 12:06:56 PM

Hey, cheap blowjobs for everyone!

The medical bills, not so much

Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
Hawkbit
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Like a Klansman in the ghetto.


Reply #39856 on: May 12, 2022, 12:30:12 PM

My buddy had a six week experience here in Seattle. Woman parked her car in front of his house and lived there, dumping trash all over the street, berm and sidewalk. Within a week one of his little kids was running around with a used needle he found found in the yard, so after weeks of "negotiation" he ended up telling her to move the car or he would burn her car down with her in it. So she moved it about 20 feet but still in front of his house. He ultimately bashed all the windows of the car and called the city to remove a derelict vehicle. Luckily she wasn't in it when the tow came, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to take it.

I am so much less tolerant of homeless bullshit than I was five years ago. Recently overheard: "We really should stop using the term homeless, it has a negative connotation. Call them houseless, it sounds better". Fuck right off with that bullshit.
Samwise
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Reply #39857 on: May 12, 2022, 01:24:52 PM

Could be worse, they could be billionaires.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Khaldun
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Reply #39858 on: May 12, 2022, 06:23:17 PM

I have no problem saying "this is a structural issue caused by ridiculous housing markets" and also saying "oh fuck I really do not like that grifter who shits at the corner and sleeps right near my driveway".

I recently was visiting my brother and I walked back from the supermarket with a backpack full of groceries because the one car was in use and we all needed some food and I could see all the neighbors looking at me like oh great a new homeless guy, fuck it.
Samwise
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Reply #39859 on: May 13, 2022, 11:11:03 AM

I was waiting to have three in the queue before doing an ACKSHYUALLY post.   awesome, for real

A "hobo" is someone who has no fixed home and travels around looking for temporary work.  (Contrast with "tramp", which is someone who travels around but doesn't work, and "bum", which is someone who neither travels nor works.)  Supposedly one of my grandpas spent some time as a hobo in his youth (riding the rails).  If you have a stationary camp, you don't have hobos, as they are by definition itinerate. 

I'm sure someone out there uses "houseless" as an alternative to "homeless", but that's dumb because to the extent that "home" and "house" mean different things, anyone who lives in an apartment is "houseless" also.  Next time you overhear someone making that error, tell them that "people experiencing homelessness" is the commonly accepted term among educated folks.  It's more wordy, but it breaks the connotation that homelessness is a permanent/inherent condition, in a way that just switching "home" to "house" does not.

A "grifter" is someone who grifts, i.e. swindles.  If Elon Musk is shitting on your corner, that's a grifter; if it's someone with no home and no income, the word you may have been looking for is "drifter", i.e. one who drifts from place to place.


"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Sky
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I love my TV an' hug my TV an' call it 'George'.


Reply #39860 on: May 13, 2022, 12:12:26 PM

PC bullshit will always be PC bullshit.

Anyway, I enjoyed this and you may, too. https://scitechdaily.com/our-reality-may-only-be-half-of-a-pair-of-interacting-worlds/
Khaldun
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Reply #39861 on: May 13, 2022, 03:23:33 PM

Hey, I was talking hypothetical imaginaries. Could be a grifter drifter with a snifter who was a hobo and is now a bum. Imaginary people contain multitudes.
Brofellos
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Reply #39862 on: May 17, 2022, 04:18:01 PM

I was waiting to have three in the queue before doing an ACKSHYUALLY post.   awesome, for real



So the roadmap is to speedrun Elon all the way from grifter to a bum experiencing homelessness
01101010
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You call it an accident. I call it justice.


Reply #39863 on: May 20, 2022, 05:03:47 AM

90 and sunny on Wednesday, 85 and sunny on Thursday, winter storm warning on Friday with up to 12-14 inches of snow incoming till Saturday afternoon. I love crazy weather cycles like this. Looking forward to going for a long walk in it later.

update:


probably got 12 total inches, but the ground was so warm most of it melted off before finally cooling down enough to hold the rest of the snow. Very heavy and wet and most of the trees that had leaves starting are drooping over or the branches are simply breaking. Heard 2 large branches break this morning so far.

Merry Xmas everyone!
« Last Edit: May 21, 2022, 06:34:54 AM by 01101010 »

Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
Chimpy
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Reply #39864 on: May 22, 2022, 08:20:00 PM

And it will all be gone in 24 hours. Just like storms that hit Denver in the winter.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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