Huh. I didn’t know this was a feature Steam had. Weird!

At least part of it is self esteem and trust. That’s not to say that no poly people have self esteem issues, but if I am worried that my partner being with another person means I’m not good enough for them, then I’m going to feel resentful, insecure, jealous, or some combination of those. That’s not a recipe for success. But if I can feel like their time without me isn’t a reflection on their time with me, then there’s not as many feelings in the way.

But I think overall for me the philosophy is a rejection of Hallmark and Disney notions of love. I don’t believe any one person could ever be my one and only everything, and in fact it seems sick to put that much pressure on either of us. Whereas spreading the load around and having different people with different strengths seems much healthier.

So maybe a bit more “community” oriented, rather than individualistic or insular “you and I against the world”?

Or maybe I’m putting too much into this 😛

Copy some of it, or importantly reject some of it

I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?

Or is it one of their games that has gambling?

Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.

FuckyeahZZT!!!

So good.

Entirely unrelatedly, I think I’ve concluded that black men are also real women.

Congratulations, you’re the man they’re trying to forget exists for 10 fucking minutes a day in their off time!

The good news is that’s the first step to being maybe eventually okay at this!

Yeah! We call those “Cascading Failures”

They’re a nightmare! 😄

That’s totally fair! It was a little intuition, a lot of “going with the gut”, and a bit of flair, it’s true. But I figured if none of this resonates with OP at all, they can choose to ignore me as full of shit 😛

To piggy back off this one, because I liked it, I’d like to zoom in on the spouse’s reaction. Yes, it’s an expression of their love. But also, if they’re the sort of person that feels gift-giving is important, then they probably struggle with you being hard to buy for, because they want to get you something, because that’s how they demonstrate love and attention.

So probably they’ve been watching you, and they noticed you spend a lot of time with this item, and they thought if they got you a new or fancy version it would make for a great gift. They finally found something they know you’ll like! They’ll watch you open it, you’ll light up, and thank them for their keen insight, attention, and creativity. The perfect gift.

Obviously it didn’t go down that way, but I think in addition to just “rejecting their love”, I imagine there’s also a huge factor that is just shock and disappointment. They had high expectations, they were excited for the reveal, and what they got was so much worse than what they expected they just don’t even know what to do with this energy. They may even be a little embarrassed, both that they got you a bad gift, and at their misplaced excitement.

It’s just an emotional letdown for them, I imagine. Now depending on their emotional maturity, they may just need to collect themselves, realize this whole thing was their fault for getting their hopes up even though you’ve told them you’re not interested. They’ll realize you have good reasons to want to keep the old one, and that they overlooked the importance of it. And if they don’t have that level of mindfulness, then they may calm down, but they’ll still blame you fully.

Anyway, just wanted to point out what I expect the source of the “outsized”-feeling reaction might be. Acute, sudden onset, disappointment.

Sounds like Nemo needs to spend some time watching Matt Colville’s video on Community

Everyone should watch it, really… even if it is an hour…

One small step for ham…

The more typical words would be “husband / wife” or “boyfriend / girlfriend” which have gender built into them. Whereas “partner” is more popular with lefty folks who want to use the same word no matter what the gender of their partner is.

But importantly there will be gay men who say “husband” or “boyfriend” when referring to their partner, and lesbians might say “wife” or “girlfriend”, and some straight people will say “partner”, so partner doesn’t only mean homosexual.

Some straight people say it to provide cover for homosexual people who say it, so that it remains an ambiguous term, but also a lot of people of all sexualities like the term because it shows a commitment to their relationship without involving marital status. Like “boyfriend” can feel a bit new, or a bit highschool. But not everyone gets married anymore. So maybe you’ve been together for 12 years, but you aren’t married, so you can’t say “wife”, but “girlfriend” maybe feels a bit childish for this women you’ve been committed to for over a decade and live with and maybe even have pets or kids together. So even for straight people “partner” can be a mature, committed, term without relying on marriage.

Some people will use “significant other”, sometimes shortened to “SO”, as a different way of saying the same thing. That one feels even more… dry?.. to me. It feels like something you’d see on a government form. But some people use it and love it. And sometimes people will say things like “my better half” or something like that to refer to their partner, and that one is a little more folksy and warm.

So to wrap up, partner has been gaining popularity for a while, and has some advantages, but most of those advantages apply to non-traditional situations. The traditional version would be man meets woman and gets married quickly. So in some places and communities and cultures “partner” will be a very normal word, but in some more traditional areas it might make people suspicious when you use it because they’ll think “why did this guy not say wife… is he secretly gay?” or something.

K

For sure, I’ve been running Linux as my daily driver since… 2005? Fuck… and ran it on the side even before that. And I’ve been trying bazzite on my gaming PC and it’s been pretty cool. But I’m still pumped about SteamOS, not because I’m planning on running it, but because any success SteamOS has will be likely directly applicable to Linux desktop gaming in general.

Every game that adjusts something to test on SteamOS will make it better for me off SteamOS. Every peripheral that is built to work with SteamOS, all the user demographic numbers that set priorities withing the gaming industry, are all great.

I’m excited for the year of the Linux desktop.

I played Helldivers 2 on Linux literally last night

"Imagine appearing for a job interview and, without saying a single word, being told that you are not getting the role because your face didn’t fit. You would assume discrimination, and might even contemplate litigation. But what if bias was not the reason?

Uh… guys…

Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of unfairly treating a person or group differently from other people or groups on a class or categorical basis

Prejudice: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

Bias: to give a settled and often prejudiced outlook to

Judging someone’s ability without knowing them, based solely on their appearance, is, like, kinda the definition of bias, discrimination, and prejudice. I think their stupid angle is “it’s not unfair because what if this time it really worked though!” 😅

I know this is the point, but there’s no way this could possibly end up with anything other than a lazily written, comically clichéd, Sci Fi future where there’s an underclass of like “class gammas” who have gamma face, and then the betas that blah blah. Whereas the alphas are the most perfect ughhhhh. It’s not even a huge leap; it’s fucking inevitable. That’s the outcome of this.

I should watch Gattaca again…

Technically they are the 2fa. The second factor is something you have. I store all my passkeys in my password manager too, so I’m not faulting you, but technically that’s just undoing the second factor, because now my two factors are “two things that are both unlocked by the same one thing I know”. Which is one complicated factor spread across two form fields.

I know everyone complains about it, but fuck Google’s results have been absolute dogshit lately. I’ll write a query with like 5 or 6 words, and the results will make it clear it took about 3 of them and turned them separately into synonyms, ignored the other 2 completely, and then gave me a bunch of results that contain literally none of the words I asked for and are irrelevant to my search.

They even helpfully highlight words I didn’t ask for in the digest!

Sometimes I can still influence it into giving me what I want with some judicious use of quotes or something, but even that doesn’t always work these days. Sometimes I’ll search something like “Linux suspend bug” or something and it’ll give me results that don’t have Linux in it, and then there’ll be a little blurb under the result being like “yeah, this one doesn’t have Linux in it. Do you want that?”

Yeah! I gave you like 3 words, and you decided to show me results that ignored the most discriminating word I gave you? Yeah, use it, that’s why I typed it!

It’s like they tuned the engine to work on the terrible queries my relatives would type 10 years ago, and in so doing ruined my ability to be deliberate and precise…