So far, we seem to be doing exactly what Democratic Romania does best: jumping in right after America… (Edit: fuck Putin, too, just to be clear).

For me, the goal is managing to form as accurate a big picture view as possible. It’s a bit weird to me, too, as although my brain is famished for unnecessary details, when it comes down to the Overall (too early, don’t have a better word), it starts focusing on the essentials, trying to link everything it has gathered in a coherent mess. This may be related to how I grew up, I always had to be aware of the situation in our family for my own survival (know the players and how to play them).

Exactly, it’s like painting through engineering! That’s why I love it, the engagement it offers is incredibly nuanced if one goes beyond the instruction booklets and starts doodling with components! And there’s always a work-around, which is what I love even more in a way. I sorta’ go into a fugue state every time I’m building and end up with things which surprise even me!

Well, fancy that! I’ve recently decided to renovate my old place and turn it into my own little bunker on the ground and, same, I’ve started DIY-ing my way to success! It’s like Legos, but with more splinters! And, yes, art can be fickle once one starts focusing on skill, I’ve found. As the best example I can offer as to why skill has less to do with it than passion and openness, I’ve learnt my first ‘complicated’ bass line in a dream, on a 10-hour train ride, two months into studying the bass (a.k.a. owning and playing around with one). I basically didn’t even have skill of which to speak, just started forming it. All I had was a sense of rhythm and a desire to reproduce my favourites.

As for your last point, I must start with an apology, as I may have improperly expressed myself: it’s not stress, exactly, it’s… it feels like remembering pleasant times from earlier in my life, it really is just a benign sense of melancholy. Learning new things has always been a passion for me, the more varied the things, the stronger the kick! It’s just that the facts aren’t always pleasant (Shpoopiro was partly right, I’ll give him that - long live broken clocks, I guess…). And as for a goal, other than my (at this point) in-built instinct to try to form a big picture view, there is only the desire for truth. To me, truth is a sort of moral imperative, it’s strongly rooted in both my set of principles and my spectrum of values. Vast and varied Knowledge is the best path I’ve managed to find which leads to the truth, thus I have no hesitation.

I’m game! However, I’m not really using Matrix, I’m hesitant to dive into social networks too much, which is why I only use Lemmy nowadays :(

Yes… I tried to grit my way through it, but reality is undeniable: this is shit.

Stay Low/Mid weight and kite their backslam by walking around them at two character lengths (I’d say 2m in-game, but that may just make it more confusing…) They have trouble turning 😈

Good show, good show!

For some reason, this reminded me of the time when my mum decided to try trimming our long-haired German Shepherd for the summer. She just wanted to snip a bit off, ended up having to give him a once-over with an electric trimmer because she did it hilariously uneven while freehanding the grooming scissors. It wasn’t a buzz cut, not that close, but… pretty damned close!

My guy was a happy camper after that, though! I think he enjoyed the newfound nudity!

I used to feel that until I started meeting people who were just as interested in skipping the small talk, but far and very few between as of late…

I don’t have the energy to perform enforced social maintenance when the group doesn’t understand that I’m not paralysed in bed as a caprice, I’m paralysed in bed because the weight of the world is on my mind again. And then I’m the bad guy when I’m genuinely incapable of even mimicking a smile and I’m “bringing everyone down.” Yes. I know. I told you this outright, yet you insisted. Who is to blame, the radioactive metal, or the person who doesn’t heed the Geiger screech?

Plus, honestly, actual friends will still be there for you even if you disappear for years on end. I started moving back to my old city after a failed year-and-a-half experiment and people have already started reaching out - people with whom I haven’t spoken in years, people with whom I used to drink the night away, sharing worries and traumas. I was deeply surprised by and grateful for this, all the more so because we went right back to chatting about serious life stuff.

Oh, I tend to multitask that alongside the small talk, and it’s very difficult to play up the interest while nitpicking the hell out of the interaction.

Plus, honestly, I’m far more interested in Real Shit™ nowadays. I don’t even have a lot of small talk subjects, I either have niche, in-depth fixations, fetishistic levels of art apreciation (and I don’t care if that sounds pretentious, it hurts to feel the need to dissect a complex song and have nobody with whom to do it), (amateur) philosophy and psychology, and - the Conversation Killer (apparently) - politics.

I don’t care what shade of blue the sky was today when you got here (***except if you’re planning on incorporating it in a painting and you want to tell me about it, I’m all ears!), or who won the local football championship, tell me how life hurt you! Show me the scars, let me see your crazy, and I’ll gladly show you mine! And then throw in some morbid yet funny jokes as a bonus!

65% of my flakes are due to the fact that I’m in the dumps and I know I can’t “hold it in” so that I won’t spoil it for the others. The other 35%, something completely drained my social battery either days or hours before - I feel like I’d rather do a week’s worth of dishes than go through 3 minutes of introductory/catch-up small talk.

Dunno, I use “dudette” pretty frequently with my girl friends (and I don’t mean Egg Carriers™, nor do I have something better than “girl friends” - initially wanted to go for “chick pals” as a snappy equivalent, then I started feeling like That One Creepy Uncle). Actually use “dudette” more than I do “dude,” it has a nicer sound to it.

As I see it, “dude” is gender neutral when used as an interjection, same as “man” and “guy.”

I’ve had some of those, yes, but it usually comes after learning enough about the ‘affected’ subject to be able to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it would mean to risk seeking mastery of it. It doesn’t come as a fear of completion, it comes as a fear of it taking up too much space and leaving me with too little for everything else in which I’m interested. I genuinely don’t think completion in itself is ever possible, either from a practical or philosophical perspective.

To answer your question, I also like to write (journaling - which has slowly shifted toward writting essays for my own understanding, poetry), to paint, to draw, to mess around with Legos (which is, so far, the only medium which does an awesome job at accommodating both my artistic/intuitive and my rational components), to ponder (i.e. sitting in silence for a while and just chewing through the info I have, trying to establish new and useful connections between all elements), and reading a lot of fiction (primarily hard sci-fi). Oh, and I like to people-watch - which is somewhat improperly said, because I’m not there solely for the people, I like to observe the system of interactions unfolding

That is the flipside and my main motivation for constantly seeking new information. At worst, this entire thing leaves me with a sort of melancholy centered around the idea that one of my desires is slowly chipping away at one of my pleasures, even though the first will always trump the latter in this case (I’d rather suffer with the truth in my lap).

I can certainy understand your viewpoint, there are layers upon layers of unknowns. I can see how that Vastity can be overwhelming.

That’s what the Boeing CEO keeps saying.

(Seriously, though, I’m done with the dad jokes, thanks for the ops!:)) )

Ooooooh! Boy, do I feel dumb!

Gawd damn it!

Verily!

Human Moment™. One of my former professors in Uni, the one I respected the most because she was one of the wisest and most perceptive people I’d met at that point, confided in us that it took her however many years since their introduction to realise that the small light on some wall-mounted light switches was meant as a guidance light if it’s pitch black.