New REBLOG Game
Just fucking lie about the previous poster
@witchoflight / witchoflight.tumblr.com
Just fucking lie about the previous poster
Wait, so you said that you can learn to trust others by building friendships, but how does one go about doing that? Wouldn't someone I don't know be creeped out or annoyed if I suddenly walked up and started talking to them?
Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.
It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.
I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.
If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.
Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.
In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.
Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.
This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.
If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.
In 2020 I wrote something of a primer on how to turn low-stakes interactions with neighbors and acquaintances into more meaningful relationships; check the notes of this post over the next couple days, I'll dig up the link and share it in a reblog.
Very annoyingly I can't find the post. Some of that is covered in this post about affinity networks, but step-by-step here is how you make friends:
Some tips:
It takes forever! It can be very stressful! I do seriously recommend seeing if you can become friends with people in regularly scheduled group hangouts if you can swing it because it replicates the way we form friendships as children - frequent proximity and increasing intimacy because of time shared together - instead of the "this feels like dating" feeling of trying to make friends with people you see occasionally.
Anyway sorry that's a lot good luck.
This is incredibly helpful, holy shit.
In case it helps anyone else, I’m gonna try to add something I got from a book on social skills (it’s by Daniel Wendler, written by an autistic person who’s learned the rules for autistic people who haven’t yet, highly recommend!) on the flow of conversation.
If you’re like me, maybe you struggle with infodumping and talking too much and forgetting to ask questions. If people don’t share as enthusiastically as you without direct prompting, you’ll accidentally dominate a conversation. Don’t worry, I get it! I thought, I’ll share what I want to share and they’ll share what they want to share, easy—right?
As I’ve had to learn…nope. 95% of neurotypical people (and a lot of neurodivergent people too!) won’t feel comfortable sharing without being invited to.
So, that “natural” back-and-forth of neurotypical conversation goes something like this:
You talk for a little bit. The less you know this person, the shorter your individual “blocks” of conversation should likely be in most cases. So if you’re at small talk stage, you say maybe a sentence or two; if you know them better you can get away with more.
Then it’s on you to pass the ball back. Your job here is to communicate “hey, your turn, I’m interested”, and to give them a cue of what to talk about so they don’t feel stranded and like they have to “come up with” an answer.
Not giving any cues is where awkward silence comes from, and it’ll feel to them like you’re communicating “I want out of this conversation!” So if your conversations with people often awkwardly peter out, check if you’re giving them a cue every time you finish talking!
There are, broadly speaking, two types of cues:
Invitations: these are questions, or otherwise direct prompts for the other person to speak.
They’re very direct cues, and they’re the easiest for the other person to respond to. That means that the less you know someone, the more you’ll likely rely on invitations (but not exclusively! That makes people feel interrogated. 2-3 questions in a row are fine, after that you might want to throw in an inspiration or two to break it up and be less intimidating—more on that below!)
Try to always keep invitations at the same level of intimacy as the current conversation—don’t talk about the weather and then ask where this stranger grew up and what the weather was like there. These are such direct cues that it’s inherently awkward for the other person to dodge them, so make extra sure your invitations aren’t uncomfortable.
Inspiration: this is essentially referencing things that the other person can easily latch on to for their response.
These are more indirect cues, and a little trickier in my experience. Essentially, you want to make sure that you end your bit of the conversation with something that’s deliberately easy to respond to—avoid ending on something that’s very niche that people can’t relate to or that’s very unique to you. If you want to mention something like that, you can, but tack something more general on after as inspiration (or just end on a question). Inspirations are still cues, they’re still meant to give the other person an idea of what to respond with, otherwise the conversation will feel awkward and unwelcoming!
What the other post mentioned re: offering slightly more personal information of your own often falls under this category. For example, if you’re talking about the weather as in the first example, but you mention where you grew up and what the weather was like, that can be inspiration for the other person to also talk about where they’re from!
But, unlike with a question, if they don’t want to share that information they can usually dodge it without having to make it extremely obvious that that’s what they’re doing. They can ask you something else, or shift the topic, and it might not be super subtle but it allows plausible deniability, so they’re not forced to either a) answer a question they don’t want to, or b) expose their discomfort (which is personal in itself!)
The more you know someone, the more you’ll likely automatically rely on inspiration to keep conversation flowing. That’s because you two have context for each other, something you say might easily have a bunch of things they could use as inspiration just because of past conversations you’ve had or things you already know about each other—anything can be a cue if there’s context! But with people you don’t know well, you’re gonna want to be a bit more mindful of it.
Generally, every time you talk in a one-on-one conversation, you want to leave some kind of cue for the other person to respond to!
Don’t worry too much about it though—if they want to talk to you, they’ll deliberately look for inspiration. If you throw the ball badly, they’ll still try to run to catch it anyway! It doesn’t have to be perfect.
But the less you know someone, the less you’ll be willing to “run” (because hey, that’s a lot of mental effort for a stranger who hasn’t proven they’re worth it, for all you know they might be an asshole!) and the more intentional you want to be about giving cues and making the ball as easy as possible to catch.
I’m very much still learning to “practice what I preach” here, but thinking of it this way has helped me enormously, so perhaps it’ll help someone else too!
This is so fucking funny
The first time I remember feeling suicidally depressed because I was certain I'd never have any friends and would die alone because I didn't know how to talk to people and everyone who acted like my friend was actually doing so in order to make fun of me or get me to do things for them was when I was ten years old.
That continued on until I was eighteen and happened into a scene that was full of accepting diverse, neurodiverse, and queer people that was A) quite welcoming and B) met once a month and C) had extremely clear social rules.
Once I found that group, I got a lot better at making friends and being able to act like a normal-ish person who could do things like hold jobs and talk to my partner's relatives without immediately coming off as someone dangerously unhinged.
To this day I have problems with trusting it when people are nice to me (because it always feels like they're setting me up for a public humiliation, something that happened multiple times in my childhood and something that made me very dearly want to grow up to be Carrie) and I have problems with overwhelming new people with too much information and too-aggressive friendliness.
So this is a guide written by someone who has had to painstakingly learn from the ground up how to trust people and make friends without letting myself get too hurt too often and without scaring people away constantly by coming on too strong.
Thinking about when I worked at the gun store that was next to the thrift store and I'd go to the thrift store before my shift and buy a novel to read every day for the first couple weeks because I worked at the register and was isolated from the guys at the gun and fishing counters and the manager pulled me aside after work one day and told me that everyone in the shop thought that I was stuck up and ignoring them and I was *SO* confused so I stopped reading during my shift and started drawing cartoons of my coworkers on the receipt paper and handing them out whenever I got a break from the register and could wander around the shop and then my coworkers started inviting me to go out with them on shooting trips and including me when they brought baked goods and snacks to the store.
I bonded best with the fishing guy when I cut off part of my thumb closing a knife that a customer had left at the register and he taught me about using self-adhesive tape instead of bandaids to close up hand wounds (using self-adhesive tape to prevent blisters and friction burns is also great, and also something he showed me); he tried to teach me to tie flies after that and gave me some paracord to leave at the register that he used to show me rigging knots.
It is STILL weird to me that they thought I was stuck up because I was reading at the register when I was too far away from any of them to talk for most of the day, that STILL feels stupid and arbitrary, but it was a good lesson for me about the kinds of things that will absolutely tank your ability to connect with people. They wanted small talk and a visible level of attentiveness, and since it looked like I wasn't paying attention to any of them they all thought I was a huge bitch.
if youre still taking requests: maybe sashisu all trying to squish into one of the tiny dorm beds to cuddle together...
The important thing is that Marcille did not learn to blaspheme against the natural order to save her girlfriend. She just happened to have studied the art of spitting in God's eye for wholly unrelated reasons, and when the opportunity by chance arose to employ that skill in service of girlfriend-saving, she was ready.
As a public service announcement, someone scraped every single text file on GameFAQS in March 2020 for archival purposes, and you can find it on archive.org with the title "Gamespot TXT GameFAQs - Full Archive." You can download the whole thing (it's about 2 gigs) if you want to spite Wikia's attempts to make themselves the gatekeepers of all fan knowledge.
I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?
CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY
this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)
OH HELLO
No more potatoes in medieval novels!
i think one of the most important things you learn about making connections with others is that a significant portion of the time people just do not know theyre doing what theyre doing
sometimes someone is acting selfish because they just didnt think you had any interest in what theyre hogging. sometimes you dont get invited to the movies because your friend could have sworn that you said no. sometimes you think someone is mad at you because theyre bad at hiding how little sleep they got. we are all like little worlds that briefly crash into one another from time to time and we just arent physically capable of seeing the whole picture at once in those moments. and learning that really changed everything!
In my head, I call this "vase of flowers" thinking.
See, when I started driving, I would get irritated by people who drove Soooo Slowly... like, the ones who slow down to 10 MPH to take a turn kind of slow. And then one day I was taking a vase of flowers to an event, and even though I'd strapped it in carefully you can bet I was taking the turns extra carefully to keep it from tipping over, slowing way down, and... oh.
And, like, there are definitely unpleasant people in the world. There are definitely people who are toxic, or just don't care about other people, or have a pattern of hurtful behavior. But there are a lot of people who are just trying to deliver a vase of flowers.
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a slapping,
As of some one gently flapping, flapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some fairy,” I muttered, “slapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Quoth the walrus, "Are you sure?"
Why not both?
Today in Dungeon Meshi: Kabru's group gets TPK'ed (again.)
CAPTCHALOGUE CARD BAG UPDATE:
sample number 1 is DONE!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAA LOOOOOOK AT THIS THANGGGGG
I should receive it in the mail in about a week!! so i’ll be able to bring it to requiem!!! no preorders just yet, because i’m gonna order two more samples from two other manufacturers (to compare quality, and choose the best one for preorders for YOU!) but AAAAA this is so cool!!!
if you see me at requiem on 4/13 with the worlds First and Only captchalogue card ita bag. say hi!!!!
gonna fuck around and make the NFL watchable
[image description: the first image is a tweet by @ JayCuda. the tweet reads as follows:
if NFL fields could be different shapes (like a golf hole) as long as they are 100 yds down the centerline...
you could get hail marys over the trees & kickers trying to fade or draw field goals over dog legs.
attached to this tweet is a rendering of a curved football field with a few trees around the edges.
the second image is the jupiter icy moons explorer, or JUICE, with a speech bubble overhead so that it looks like the original post is being said by JUICE. end image description.]
I bought this expensive ass yogurt as a gift to myself so that I could make little candles in the tiny terracotta pot it comes in and it turns out it is the best, creamiest, most buttery heavenly delicious yogurt I have ever tasted and I’m now addicted
sometimes things that are expensive are worse but sometimes things that are expensive are astronomically better and that’s where the real problem lies
Implementing strict out-of-bounds checking in my 3D platformer, but instead of actually forbidding the player from going out of bounds I just use it to create a demon that chases you around the OOB space, and if it catches you it engages you in a lengthy unskippable dialogue about the tabletop RPG it's writing, thereby killing your speedrun.
So. Like the ghost leviathans in Subnautica, but they all have your personality instead of being murder bois?
No, if the demon had my personality it would be explaining the plot of Homestuck.
(Well, okay, that's not accurate – if it really had my personality it'd be rambling about the intertextuality of Homestuck lyric AMV MEPs circa 2012, with a particular focus on one specific project where the editors had a public falling-out which resulted in there being like three different versions of the finished product circulating on YouTube, the most widely viewed of which notably contains absolutely no appearances of the character Jade Harley, and how this omission influences the interpretation of the work.)
calvin and hobbes is my favorite comic strip ever
I think people sometimes misunderstand why we come up with such elaborate justifications for shipping two characters together. I don't justify my ships because I feel that I need to; I justify my ships because squinting at the published canon with furrowed brow and asking myself "okay, how exactly would this work?" is my idea of a good time.
Verbing nouns is great, but for my money nothing beats adjectiving nouns. If I can find an excuse to describe something as "wizardy" it makes my whole day.
Arguably even more fun to adjectiving them with “ish”. A catish creature. A wizardish man.
Wizardine.
Wizardesque.
verb, he wizarded at me
adverb, she laughed wizardly at the novice
adjective, they look rather wizardish, don’t you think?
it’s already a noun, and any noun can be a pronoun:
wizard did wizard’s homework
interjection: “Wizard,” xe cursed, “i’m gonna have to start again.”
let’s go hardmode. those are all somewhat descriptive parts of speech, so it’s relatively uncomplicated to understand any of those usages. it’s gonna get clumsy from here!
article: wizard mage’s gotta do what wizard mage’s gotta do
preposition: it went wizard a hole
conjunction: that comes with a side of soup wizard salad.
hm, that just sounds like it’s a salad made by a soup wizard.
seriously, though. what does the conjunction wizard describe that’s somehow different that additive or exclusive. it’s a secret third thing, impossible to know.
wouldn't "wise" be the adjectivated wizard?
just as wizard is the nounized wise?
Unironically yes. The word "wizard" breaks down to "wise" plus "-ard", the latter being an archaic bit of English grammar known as the pejorative agent suffix; basically, it means "one who is in a particular state or condition", with a strong connotation that you're judging them so hard for it. (cf. "drunkard", "dullard", etc.)