In retrospect I think my comment sounds like I’m just excusing being sort of crappy if you’re humble about it.
I wish I’d included the sentiment that we’re all trying the best we can — because being a good partner should be the goal for any relationship.

Even though I’m currently only with my wife, I’m right there with you. I don’t want to add anyone to the mix unless their addition is very carefully considered.
I speak better in metaphor sometimes: It’s kind of like physics, almost. Imagine that we’re touching everyone in our life. If we allow someone to connect to us, they are going to impart their own momentum and direction. That is going to ripple through every connection we have, even if we aren’t able to measure or observe it. So we better make sure they don’t hit us so hard that pieces break apart or get damaged in the process.

That sucks, man.

I’ve been some stripe or other of non-monogamous for most of my adult life, and those types of relationships are often the ones that people experience first when they dip their toes in.
It’s honestly kind of maddening, because beyond making it seem like everyone who is poly/nm/whatever are all horny sociopaths (because almost everyone has something like that as a first story), it’s harmful. It’s physically and emotionally unsafe for the person who gets shafted. It treats people like they’re disposable and frankly, it’s selfish, insecure, and sometimes malevolent bullshit dressed up as a hippy-dippy love-fest.

It’s really fucking hard to be ethically nonmonogamous, and I wish people would stop pretending they knew what they were doing. No one knows, and it’s the faked confidence that gets so many people in trouble. People just trust someone to take care of them, and then the other person fails because they’re human, and humans fail. And yet… I can’t imagine not being this way, for some dumb fucking reason.

Toxic polyamory situation. A partner I lived with and was once very in love with fell away when she got interested in someone new. It was messy and shitty. I wound up dating someone new, who I had a great relationship with, and it was very physical. But I still lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with my ex.

My ex was a bit weird. She sort of viewed relationships as whatever things with no boundaries. Folks just do whatever they want in the moment and there’s no fidelity according to her. (Things I learned after I fell in love with her. Woof.) She also had intoned a few times that my new partner was a slut, which was sort of funny, given that my new partner had a pretty strong moral code.

My ex got a little less interested in her new guy, and tried to seduce me one night. And I rejected her. We had officially ended things, and I did not want to revisit that.
My ex sneered at me. “Fine. I hope you’re happy with [New Partner], and I hope [NP] is happy with you and your… magical penis!”

She practically spat that out at me, and… yeah. It was as funny then as it is now.

And for the record, it’s not magical. I just like to put top hats and little capes on it sometimes.

I used to play 1v1 Ticket to Ride matches against my wife using the app.

As background: I’m not a very competitive gamer, but I’m decent at problem solving. When I first learned TtR, I played with fairly … great players. One of my friends was (is?) nationally ranked. They routinely beat the ever-loving crap out of me. I think of the dozens of games we’ve played, I have won maybe 10-20% of the time?

My wife isn’t bad at TtR, but she doesn’t see things the same way in terms of strategy.

We had this one game where I drew a bunch of short routes all over the map, which blocked her early in the game, and a series of lucky route draws lead me to connect them, inadvertently blocking her at least twice, including on the last play, where I was just dumping cars to end the game.

She was always a little upset when I beat her, but this time the discrepancy was so bad and she was so upset. I just stopped playing Ticket to Ride - like, at all.

That’s when my mom became old enough to vote, and she was a real idiot.

It’s not, you know, the best theory, but it’s the best theory I can come up with while also doing no research.

Does this mean they’re going to pull it from YouTube?

It’s been available to stream there for years because no one was making any copyright claims against it.

Mind you, 4.1% reflects only people who are unemployed that have looked for a job within the last 4 weeks.

Let’s add in people who want a job, have looked for work in the last year, but haven’t looked in the last 4 weeks. And let us also add in people who want a job, but have a job market-related reason for not looking for one. The rate is now 5%. Still not bad.

Alrighty. What about adding in people who are working part time, but would rather work full time? The under-employed, if you will. Oh. Now it’s 7.7%

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cryin’ all the way to the bread line.

And besides none of the above discusses that the unemployment rate is non-comprehensive and does not measure the quality of the jobs - rather, how well those jobs pay people compared to CPI.

For the 5% of my adult life that I’ve had short hair and no beard: Quentin Tarantino. For the rest of my bearded, long-haired adulthood: Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus. But they need to have blue/green eyes and forehead wrinkles.
(Huh. On paper that just sounds like I look like Nick Offerman, but not really.)

Patron status is ok

Glad your friend is doing well! Send my regards.

My understanding is that they are focusing on adding in “AI” features in a big way, and that’s why they cut development on the other work. 🫤

Hey man, you’re harshing my good vibes. I’m gonna have to downvote you, those kids future health outcomes be damned.

You’re old fashioned.

I mean. It’s any website that has user communities, if their users skew that way.

Polyamory isn’t some niche kink.

I’m familiar with a convention that has been ongoing for a long time. It has been running for about 30 years, and they had their leadership and management down pat. They even had developed their own CRM software to run the operations of the convention. They ran a pretty tight ship, and have an actual board, with a coterie of dedicated volunteers.

COVID messed things up for them. They had to cancel a few years, but last year they returned to the hotel they’d used for a number of years (pre-COVID) that they regularly sold out. They had been debating moving the convention to a different city to gain access to even larger hotels. Last year was sort of a bust. They barely met their reserve with the hotel. The magic had sort of dropped out of the event. This year they did move to a city about 45 minutes from the original one, to a smaller hotel - hoping to save on costs as they rebuilt their fan base.
Unfortunately, the city they picked was where a preponderance of their dedicated attendees live. Their attendance did grow, but they failed to meet their hotel reservation reserve by a lot, because many attendees drove in, or crashed with local friends. After penalties were paid out, they had to tap into ticket sales (which fund the incidentals and the next year’s convention), and then into the scant reserves of the convention. Now, it may not be possible for them to ever field another convention again.

Which is all to say - Conventions are hard. And even committees with decades of experience can mess things up so dramatically that they just ruin the entire lineage.
A teenager? Even a smart one - I’m surprised they even got a venue.

lol. While writing that out, I had that thought too, but decided that saying it was more of a feeling was vague enough that I could hide behind that when someone inevitably pointed out it could apply to some adults, too.

I do feel it’s noticeable - an adult that has some sort of social struggle vs a kid. But it’s like… A kid seems to make statements that come from a place of naïveté, whereas an adult seems to make statements that come from a place of ignorance. Adults seem to couch their words in defensive language, while kids seem kind of blindly assertive. It truly is more of a feeling, I think.

A lack of understanding interpersonal interactions.

And it’s more of a feeling than it is any single behavior. You just… know it when you see it. They simplify too much, think values/morals/rules are shared, obvious, and uniform, and that getting along with others happens solely on their terms. They kind of act like everyone but them is an NPC - not realizing to everyone but them, they’re the NPC.

I must confess - aside from knowing there was a difference, I didn’t really know what the difference was until a few online searches yesterday.

The understanding I have is that winter/summer gas programs began in the late 1980’s.
My supposition is that they have been handled seamlessly to the point that unless you are involved in regulation or the industry, it’s relatively inconsequential to most folks. I imagine knowledge of the program’s existence is probably one of those things that people sorta ignore unless it randomly becomes a topic of conversation. (Like any number of random regulations that impact our daily lives that we just don’t think about most of the time.)

There’s a difference between summer and winter fuel for gasoline engines in some areas. It’s usually to do with smog restrictions.

The same octane can be reached with different blends of hydrocarbons. So instead of just ‘pure’ gasoline to hit a desired octane, refineries can mix together higher and lower octane fuels to reach the same overall octane rating. This increases the amount of refinery products that can be used to blend gasoline, so it can be made more cheaply. The trade off is that it’s less pure, and most importantly for this comment - that some components of of these cheaper blends may evaporate more readily, leading to smog.

In summer, when it’s warmer, some areas mandate gasoline must meet certain standards for evaporation. In winter, those standards are decreased, because it’s cooler.

Ethanol has a relatively low evaporation point. I don’t know the specifics of the commenter’s location, but I could see ‘summer gas’ having no ethanol to meet these standards.

More info: The Vapor Rub: Summer versus Winter Gasoline Explained — Car and Driver

Scary.

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