It’s never, never too late. I’ve seen men aged 60-75 get GFs and wives. One of them even had children with his new wife. Talk of the town is that one of these men never had a partner before.

Geez, that reminds me of a former colleague that, when asked for “the numbers,” would just send screenshots of tables in the ERP system instead of exporting them to a spreadsheet. What’s even worse, usually a lot of values were plain wrong, on one occasion more than half of them.

And let’s not forget politics. When you’re golf buddies with the right politicians, winning those extremely lucrative public tenders will become a cakewalk.

Some people are in for a rude awakening if they think that the slight nuisance of “being shown targeted ads” is the biggest issue with dragnet data collection.

That, and internet in the late 90s started to get really fast. Some blokes sat in their rooms for days on end, downloading music or movies, as there were no laws against it yet. Or at least they were not enforced. In other words, those were the days when average Joe could still be one step ahead of The Man. You know, before he turned against us with a vengeance, everywhere, 24/7.

Strange, just for the last few days, I’ve been thinking just what a big cultural turning point 2005 seemed to be. From then on, everything started to circle the drain, and I put the blame on globalization and the advent of large-scale social media. Which might have left an imprint on product design and fashion.
And, as I wrote earlier in a different thread, the shift from 1994 to 1995 was the biggest one I’ve witnessed, and it was very visible in public spaces. Audible as well: It went from Metallica and ZZ Top as supermarket background music (imagine this!) to “Easy Listening” or whatever.

Life is better down where it’s wetter.

Yeah, it feels quite petulant and deconstructive at times.
But a lot of what you wrote is just a feature of any small online community. Then you end up with these bitter types who, if you rubbed them slightly the wrong way, get up at 6 a.m., downvote everything you ever wrote and report as many of your contributions as they can get away with.
I mean, downvotes and upvotes could be capped at -1 and +5, respectively, like on /. which has been going strong for more than 20 years with this concept, or there could be enforcement of some sort of netiquette, but that would put additional strain on the mods.

One girl sat herself across the classroom from me (we had a U-shaped arrangement) and stared at me all year long. (She also talked to me once or twice)
One girl who was at the same bus station I was at every morning asked me to share a cab with her… for a five-minute ride.
One girl asked me what it feels like for me when I’m kissing.

The third one, even though she was the oldest, seemed insincere and was way out of my league anyway, so I didn’t get the impression that she was after me until much later when a friend clued me in. In the other two cases, I did have an idea, but I wasn’t very much into either of these girls and the second one self-sabotaged her otherwise fantastic move by also inviting two of her friends who kept making a loud mess, so I couldn’t even talk to her during the ride anyway.
And so it took a long time for me to get a real girlfriend. Too high standards, in hindsight, plus I do have no difficulties with talking to girls, but with talking with girls. Turns out the vast majority is just not interested very much in the science-y things I read and did as a tyke, teenager and beyond. Not even in Hegel.

I feel you…

🎶 I can’t seem to face up to the facts
I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax
I can’t sleep 'cause my bed’s on fire
Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire 🎶

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A sixpack a day keeps the anal away.

Blame it on the rain.

Disinfotainment at its best.

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At Google HQ:
Boss: “So… this Reddit integration you’ve been working on?”
Developer: “Yeah, I think the first milestone could be ready in about six months.”
Boss: “Sorry, that’s been decided, go-live is in 1.5 days.”

he Beak Too Big For He Gotdamn Head

Reminds me of a dealership near me which actually had “The honest used-car salesman!” as their slogan.

Bela Koe-Krompecher spent a lifetime in Ohio’s vivid music and arts scene, with all its ups and mostly downs. I really like how he expressed this sentiment, both in his blog and in his awesome book “Love, Death and Photosynthesis”:

Nobody got famous, nobody ever really made a dent in any product counting mechanism like Billboard, The College Music Journal or MTV but we loved and cherished one another as if our lives depended on it, night in and night out. What we discovered was the result wasn’t the prize; the prize was the friendship and the making of art for fuck’s sake.

I’m not an artist myself, but I used to hang out a lot with a bunch of them. Maybe because of this, another quote of BKK resonated with me:

Our world was small but it opened up the universe where ideas bounced off of one another like bubbles in beer, we would have one ingenious idea flowing after another without a filter to identify the logical of said idea. Huddled around empty bottles and amplifiers the stage of the world was in the basements and living rooms of our lives.

It’s getting harder as you get older, and the same old stories you share ring more and more repetitive, but I still go out my way to stay in touch with my childhood and university friends, and sometimes I think, it’s the only thing that keeps me from going completely bitter.
BTW, I stumbled upon BKK’s story on the great “Local Waste Music” podcast which I heartily recommend.

We have explosive