I have decided to go with “hair vignette.”

Not to deflect the conversation, but is there a name for that circle-hair-beard thing? “Tragic” isn’t specific enough, and so have to think there’s a name for it. I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen it in memes.

Okay, this post is only an hour old but it already has a ton of replies. I reallly hope you see this, though. I’m going to GBF you for just a couple of minutes.

First of all - girl, seriously? 40 year olds go out all the time for drinks. You should try going out with friends so you can keep an eye on each other, but every bar go to is filled with people our age. I’m ten years older than you, and I in no way feel like an old man in a bar. If you have a next day recovery concern, just limit yourself, or go on the weekends. Just make sure you’re taking an Uber and if you’re doing solo yolo let a friend know where you’re going and let them track your phone or something.

Second, apps can be toxic but they can also be gamed. You’re looking for a silver fox type, maybe with a bit of a dad bod is my guess. Put out for some headshots or other pro photos. There’s even a lot of amateur photographers who you might be able to find on insta who would be happy to do a quick session for a modest amount of money. Do yourself a favor and get a serious makeover and some new outfits first, because it will make you feel like your best self.

Third, it’s okay to just be looking to get dicked down even while looking for something serious. Don’t hang everything on finding your next life partner if you really are just craving physical affection.

There are tons of 40+ men who are single due to similar circumstances to yours. They’re at bars, and they go to concerts at local venues. They’re probably not going to be at the clubs the 20-something’s go to, but they have their own territories.

It really sounds like you have to see yourself as your best self, and up your game with that confidence.

I’d feel like you could get better advice if you give more details, and maybe ask about LGBT friendly cities in some of the LGBT communities.

ABQ isn’t bad, but it’s not homeless friendly, and it gets cold in the winter. You could live outside of Albuquerque in the east mountains for relatively cheap but would need a vehicle to get into town.

But seriously, there’s more going on there that I think you might be able to use advice on.

It really seems like you might have bigger issues than deciding between Albuquerque and Columbus. I can tell you about ABQ, but maybe you can give some more details about what’s pushing you to move, and why you’d look at those two cities in particular.

This isn’t the kind of thing you forget like missing a birthday. It’s a major directive from one institution to another, and it’s entirely possible it’s just being slow walked. These are all handled by working groups who may not be motivated to get it done.

I’m not sure if the situation might change if Trump gets re-elected.

I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.

Rod Serling, right?

Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.

And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…

But, again, that’s my point.

I see this argument a lot.

I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.

I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.

The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.

Planned Parenthood. The Trevor Project. My local LGBT resource center. ACLU. EFF. I’m also looking for trans supporting groups that can supply emotional and material support and community.

I hadn’t really been coming at it from that perspective, but your post got me thinking. I’ve been in the business one way or another since then in multiple capacities - hobbyist, military, government, academia, and commercial.

Back in the 70s, there was barely a major called “computer science” at most colleges. Most people writing software were largely self-taught, and software companies were a couple of dozen people. Going into the 80s, as the industry expanded, more computers were being sold (mid-sized and mainframes, with a small but growing PC market. Being a programmer would give you a solid middle class career. These were the days when Donald Knuth wrote the cost complete and comprehensive software for laying out text and equations available (TeX, now used via LaTeX) because such a thing wasn’t available and he wanted it to be. He was a professor at Stanford, meaning he had a salary already, so he just released it for free. Those were the days when people argued that software couldn’t be copyrighted because any piece of software is really just a mathematical equation, and you cannot copyright math. Anyway, many of the people writing software had a day job, “programmers” included a large proportion of people who wrote COBOL in tiny chunks for not very much money. There was a large chunk of people whose greatest dream was getting paid to do software for a living, and it was seen kind of people whose dream it was to be a professional librarian. Very few were in it for the money.

It all took off in the mid-late 90s when the industry got financialized. Fast forward to today, and no one on my team has less than a six figure salary, I make more than most MDs, and my bosses make far more than that. Because of our age demographic, few if any of them have even a bachelor’s degree, much less one in computer science. It was really that 90s transition when it started to be about money.

But I wouldn’t use the word greedy. The industry just changed, and so did the social relationships. I still have nostalgia for the days when it was more like Wargames and Real Genius than like Black Mirror, but I would never say it’s a result of the folks writing an app that want to do it for a living on their own terms. I think people like Christian Sellig (the author of Reddit client Apollo) represents the best of that earlier mindset, and I sincerely hope he made fuck-you money off of his app before spez shut him down. If anything, it’s people like Spez who are at fault.

Anyway, that was just a rant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Back in the olden days, there used to be a variety of free software called postcard-ware. It was free to distribute and use, but if you wanted to you could send the author a postcard.

Yeah, this statement is simply wrong. Men unconsciously notice a lot of things, and they might deny noticing even obvious ones because any acknowledgement of fashion is considered effeminate by some men.

I love the drag queen lashes that are so long they’ll take out the person next to you if you turn your head too fast.

It’s 0-255 when you’re indexing like that. 11111111b = 255.

Perchance programming with pointers has plunged as a percentage of programmers.

But thank you. I was hoping someone would notice that.

When you’ve eaten more than 50% of the hamburger, do you claim to have eaten one, or do you claim zero? Are you useing standard founding or are you using floor()?

This.

One of the reasons indexing starts at zero is because back when we used to use pointers and memory addresses, the first byte(s) of an array were at the address where the array was stored. Let’s say it is at 1234. If it was an array of bytes, the first data element was at 1234, or 1234 + 0. The second element would be at 1235, or 1234 + 1. So the first element is at location 0 and the second at location 1, where the index is actually just an offset from the base address. There may be other/better reasons, but that’s what I was taught back in the 90s.

Counting always starts at 1 (if we’re only using integers). You don’t eat a hamburger and say you ate zero hamburgers.

Hey! Welcome, and congratulations for making this post. It can be really tough, even given the anonymity of the internet. It can be tough just recognizing your own truth and feelings.

I’ve been involved with the LGBT rights movement since we called it gay liberation, and I marched with ACT UP to get the government to research AIDS. I remember those dark days, and I remember everything we went through to get to where we are. I got bashed multiple times, a couple of times very badly. I got bashed for being queer even before I knew who I was.

We’ve made an incredible amount of progress. We’ve gone from actors being terrified of being outed to queer media being embraced by all major content producers. We went from being shamed into invisibility to police departments and defense contractors wanting to march in Pride. We went from something like 3% of the silent generation admitting to being LGBT to survey takers to about 20% of Gen Z, if I’m remembering that stat properly.

At the same time, and as you well know, we are now the target. Again. The republicans, with absolutely nothing else they can use to appeal to people, have gone full Anita Bryant. The violence is ramping up, and the laws are being passed. Fortunately, they’re being fought in court with some success, but there have been setbacks. I expect to see a negative turn in public sentiment, although it’s still on our side.

First things first - be careful. Be less worried about genocide in the US and more worried about Bubba in his roll coal pickup. Be really careful about who you date, but even be careful about who you talk to. I’m cis, and I’m not going to speak over the trans community, but there’s going to be a number of things you have to consider including work and your social circles if you’re not out yet.

Second, though, is that you have to be your authentic self. Rejection and depression kill far more queer folks than homophobes and transphobes do, especially via substance use and bad reactions to life circumstances. Get in touch with the community, whatever it is where you are. You need to be able to talk to people who have been there and done that, as well as people currently dealing with it. You can even decide to accept the potential bitchiness and hop on grindr to find people just to connect to your local community.

If you’re in a dangerous part of the country and you have the ability to move, know that most if not all of the major cities have large and vibrant communities. Obviously, there’s NYC, LA, the Bay Area, and Chicago. If that’s not your speed, try checking out college towns in blue states. I don’t recommend places like Austin these days, because the “blue city in a red state” strategy is no longer viable at this stage of the culture wars. Also weird little towns like New Hope, PA.

Also, watch and read queer media. Shows like We’re Here are deliberately made to give people a sense of confidence and self-empowerment. There’s probably thousands of hours of movies and TV that can help you find and embrace your voice. If you’re afraid of someone seeing your history, try using an account from a friend you’re out to, or get your own subscription.

Find your people, find your heart, be careful, but be yourself.

The “paradox” here is that by being tolerant of intolerance, we are actually decreasing the overall level of tolerance when normally we’d expect tolerant behaviors to increase tolerance.

Compare it to the “death wave.” When someone stops in a multi lane intersection to allow someone to cross in debt of them, the pedestrian/vehicle can’t see around the stopped vehicle and this can result in them being hit by a motorist in the adjacent lane. It feels like you’re being safe and considerate, but you’re actually putting the other person in more danger than if you had simply followed the right of way. It happens often enough that a name has been coined for the phenomenon.

Tolerating hate increases hate, not tolerance. Tolerating hate in the extreme decreases tolerance not only relative to the hate, but because once hate takes over they eliminate tolerance (see Florida).