I struggle with this as well.

I wonder if maintaining a social life could be more difficult today, because the “social infrastructure” isn’t what it used to be. Your society’s habits don’t carry you as much as your parents’, so you have to do more work yourself.

And then you may even not know how to do the work - as other commenter here said: being social is a skill that is learned. I haven’t figured it out the puzzle myself. I’m a few years after college where many people just moved away and I’m in the same spiral that other people in my situation describe.

My coping approach has been more like “leave the house” rather than “meet new people” which sorta works for me, for now. Being around people is also humanizing. At the risk of describing something banal, I’ll describe my learnings below.

One of the first struggles I’ve come across is that staying up to date with what’s happening in the city is work. As I described in the beginning, the reason that building social capital for yourself is so hard is that the social infrastructure isn’t there. One of the best ways to learn what’s going on in the city is to have something mentioned to you in a conversation, or to be invited by someone who’s already going. You passively learn or participate by leaning back on the other person. It’s expensive to be poor.

The way reduce the amount of work is to find cyclical events. That way, you learn about the date just once then keep coming. I’ve found that the best way to learn about them is to subscribe to e-mail newsletters of cultural institutions (museums, galleries, operas, theaters, cultural centers). Some will never send you an e-mail, but some are pretty active. Sometimes the e-mails contain info that isn’t available anywhere else - my local museum holds free visits with a tour guide every Sunday at 9AM, but that isn’t mentioned anywhere. The benefit with e-mail is that you’re passively being poked by the institution about an event. What doesn’t work in such a way is e.g. Instagram, where you have to open the app and doomscroll through unrelated things in the eventual hope of finding some event.

Instead of e-mail you can also sometimes use RSS but completing the list of institutions, finding the feeds and then remembering to read through them is very work-like, as opposed to e-mail.

This of course doesn’t solve the problem of loneliness, as you’ll be going somewhere, but still alone. In spoonfeeding-a-social-novice terms, random events are a bit further in the social pipeline, where you’re “not supposed to” go alone, but where you’re going because you’ve already met people people to go with in earlier in the social pipeline in hobby groups.

Ebooks, because I can pirate that way (Kobo Clara BW). That way I can also take a light e-book reader for traveling and not read it instead of taking a heavier book and not read it.

I’ve been reducing my small paper book collection.

• E-mailing my library and asking if they are interested in any and they picked up four (still can’t believe they didn’t want “Algeria: France’s Undeclared War” wtf)
• Putting them up on a local auction site (if they aren’t already oversaturated with copies of what I have)
• For the ones where there are already many copies on the auction sites, I donate them to my library’s “give away a book” shelf, where other librarygoers just take them. Apparently the books disappear pretty quickly

I just wish they had an integration wtih a password manager like Bitwarden - e-mail alias integration docs. As you can see there are already many services integrated

Hey you there reading this, I already upvoted all the anti-Reddit comments in this post, you can go rest instead

“Big Bazooka” in headline

journalism has fallen

May or may not be interesting to you: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/

deleted by creator

Not the first time for me. For example, on the mobilism (apk piracy) forum, only known mail providers are accepted (e.g. gmail)

Sigh Guardian doesn’t let me sign up for their newsletter on a mailbox.org account, shame, was a nice article.

See also the complementary https://emjsmith.substack.com/p/is-technology-making-dating-worse

Kevin has been angry about this for a while, here’s March 2023: https://corporate.ryanair.com/news/ryanair-launches-eu-passenger-petition/

The picture you posted looks good to me. The stripe color on the shorts is faint anyway, so anything goes.

Obligatory Japanese nail clipper mention: https://www.feather.co.jp/en/g_Products/general03.html

I… cook in a terry cloth (“towel”) bath robe when I know I’ll go out after cooking. I guess it functions similar to a smoking jacket:

To protect their clothes, many men would wear their robes-de-chambre while smoking in private. These robes acted as a barrier against ash and smoke

Probably doesn’t help for not having your hair smell

Nie było jakiegoś artykułu w ostatnich paru miesiącach że to kwestia złego przetłumaczenia ustawy w j. polskim?

Chyba kiedyś już wrzucałem pod Twoim postem ale: https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/routers.en.html

(wyróżnienie moje)

a successful campaign for Router Freedom in Germany that resulted in the adoption of a law obliging all German ISPs to enable new clients to use alternative modems and routers to connect to the internet

Czyli nie tyle, że możesz podpiąć własny router za obowiązkowym routero-modemo-access-pointem od ISP (który możesz przełączyć w tryb bridge żeby funkcjonował tylko jako modem) jak to jest w Polsce , tylko możesz kupić swój własny oddzielny modem, podpiąć go do własnego routera itd.

Patrz https://helpdesk.vodafonekabelforum.de/wiki/Einsetzbare_freie_Endgeräte - to lista urządzeń które możesz kupić sam które wspiera niemiecki Vodafone - tj. nie musisz korzystać z tego co daje ci operator. Na samej górze są dwa czysto kablowe i na samym dole jest Technicolor TC4400 który jest najprostszm w świecie modemem, bez żadnych funkcji WiFi.

W Vectrze jest o tyle fajnie, że nie tylko pozwalają na podpięcie własnego routera (tryb bridge), ale w specjlanym trybie “open” (ustawiany z poziomu webui Vectry) podają też hasło do wydawanego przez nich urządzenia. Można tam sprawdzać statusy DOCSIS itd. Jak widzę że internet nawala to wchodzę w 192.168.100.1 i mogę sprawdzić czy modem nie stracił połączenia z ISP. Całkiem fajne, bo widać w logach jak jest negocjowane połączenie itd.

Isn’t this a screenshot of Truspilot reviews for the company called “Nothing”, not Fairphone?

Let’s contain the coming 3.5mm jack jihadists under this reply please

There are three features here:

1. D-ring closure (similar to d-ring belt)
2. Short inseam
3. Olive material, probably cotton twill

The inseam will be the most difficult thing probably, since I’m assuming you’re ok without the d-ring. Don’t be afraid to buy from the women’s section (men buy e.g. Patagonia Baggies from the W’s section due to shorten inseam and better waistband, but they’re a different style).

You could probably also get second hand skinny chinos from e.g. Dockers and cut off the material where you want it, then bring them to a friend or tailor to finish off the edge (cut off leaving a bit more material for the hem)

[1] https://www.americanpartisan.org/2023/06/don-shift-sends-why-cargo-shorts-will-kill-you-and-some-rhodesian-short-shorts-history/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3VO4IkoglIQ

[3] The “gun shorts” from here match in the inseam but not the pattern https://www.fireforceventures.com/search_adv.asp?keyword=gun+shorts&sort=relevance&page=1&pageSize=24

Pizza delivery companies hate this one weird trick