Notices by The Dread Slender Gnome (gnomeshatecheese@spinster.xyz), page 2

@Piss_Ant @AbolishPregnancy Doesn’t help that there actually seem to be hordes of teens and post-teens online self-diagnosing into mental illnesses, in plural, for … clout I guess. Or even neurological disorders. Like that one woman who became quite big on TikTok pretending to have Tourette’s.

@kj00 @Piss_Ant Do you get to name your characters?

I looked the game up and am actually considering buying it. I have to say your vignettes are doing nothing to dissuade me.

@kj00 @Piss_Ant Well if I decide to buy it, I’ll name one character in your honour.

I am really tempted. I love CIV and other such games, and this looks like it could run on my old home laptop. Not that many games of this sort do, and I like the idea of the game generating stories.
Does it take a lot of continuous attention, or can you leave it running and come back once in a while?

@kj00 @Piss_Ant What game is this?

@kj00 @Piss_Ant I think you probably should know about this.

@Piss_Ant I thought the libs aren’t allowed to talk about weight loss anymore, certainly not in positive terms. Isn’t it now fatfobic?

Or is that now passé too?
I just can’t keep up.

@Marshall Do you mean feminine agentives (these exist in English, basically “a person who does something or is something but is female), or do you mean a more general feminine (? “feminitive” isn’t a word I’ve heard in connection with grammar in English) word? Like the in German, die Einladung (an invitation, a noun with feminine grammatical gender).

The reason English is called gender-neutral, is because it lacks true grammatical gender. It has some ways to indicate the sex of a referent, but not grammatical gender the same way e.g. German or French do.

Feminine agentives are basically -ess ending words, like “actress”, “dutchess”, “waitress” etc. In principle you could turn any agentive into a feminine agentive, though some words just don’t work well with the suffix. Just like some adjectives don’t take the -er comparative suffix, but rather are used with more…. So typist would sound wrong as #typistress and would instead be female typist. And some forms have become decidedly unfashionable, like I don’t think you’d be very likely to hear doctoress these days.

@tangleofsnakes You think they have something against tank top?

Hmmmh, personally I’m not so sure. Seems a bit ambiguous to me.

I figure that’s where terms like “man cave” and, more recently, the “she shed” came about lol.

Oh and btw, one of my three conditions for moving in with my spouse was that I must have my own room. That was never negotiable. Personally I think every cohabiting couple should have their own spaces, if at all possible. But some people do seem to still be weirded out by that idea.

@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether My point was that these are all unusual things for our demographic. It clearly demonstrates that they are capable of making choices as opposed to just drifting in life, so assuming that they’re just drifting in one aspect is questionable. I could’ve also mentioned some newer old friends who are single, but that’s much less rare outcome than any of the ones I mentioned. In fact, it’s common enough to be quite unremarkable in our context.

And frankly, there’s also the possibility of people being overwhelmingly couple-bonding creatures and that being a strong innate drive on average.

from my pov, living with a romantic partner is a form of communal living.

That’s the thing, I think. I’m pretty confident that most people I know wouldn’t consider living with a romantic partner communal living, or even living with one’s own spouse and children to be that. It comes back to there being a qualitative difference in the relationships between friends, lovers, family members and partners. The relationships with family members and partners would allow for living together much more so than relationships with friends or even lovers. And communal living would very likely be conceptualised as living without those kind of relationships being involved.

I should emphasise that I’m definitely mostly speaking of Finnish people here, because those are the ones I know most about with regard to living choices and relationship outcomes. It is possible that my takes are reflective of how personal space and emotional distance is conceptualised in Finnish culture.

I’m having to read bits of a bunch of masters’ thesis for work.

It’s So Incredibly, Mind-Blowingly BORING.
And I can’t avoid it, it has to be done.

And these people write SO fantastically BADLY.
If Satan existed, he’d definitely have a hand in these atrocities committed against language. As is, I have nothing to blame but the indifferent cosmos.

@Piss_Ant Contact the local uni. There’s bound to be some student there looking to make another boring masters thesis.

(See my posts if you want to know what my current peeve is about.)

@GalacticTurtle Caveat: “dating” in the American sense isn’t really a thing in Finland. But I’m going to assume this means rather just starting to get involved with boys/girls in a romantic sense. Whatever form that may take.

I started at 20, largely due to lack of opportunity before that.

Would’ve liked to start earlier, but it was out of my hands.

@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether Where I grew up anything between 14 and 17 would’ve been a “normal” age to start getting romantically involved. You wouldn’t have been considered a late start until 20ish or so.

very idea to consider dating someone was more likely due to outside influences (like how people date on TV shows) rather than any genuine desire to pursue a distinctly different relationship type from friendship

I mean… that’s the whole point of “dating” or stepping out or whatever. That it’s something different from a friendship and gives you something friendships don’t. You can have a truckload of friends and it still isn’t the same as an intimate relationship. And the interest for the latter is completely different from the interest for the former, not least because it involves the sheer physical desires as well. And as soon as you start developing that interest for a different kind of relationship, you start thinking about, well, “dating”.

@EmmyNoether @GalacticTurtle Ah yes, you just said the quiet part from my post out loud.

@EmmyNoether @GalacticTurtle Ok, so here’s how I would break this down, when it comes to evaluating people I like.

Do I want to share fun things with them? If yes, friend.
Do I want to share sexual things with him? If yes, lover.
Do I want to share my life with him? If yes, partner.

Note that the last point requires both the first ones to be true, but the first two don’t require any other points to be true.

@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether One of the previous presidents of Finland lived separately “with” her spouse until her term in office. They both owned a flat in the same building, with one flat being above the other. They only moved in together when she moved in the official presidential residence.

You know, even if I didn’t want to bring in men (which I would if I were single) or didn’t drink alcohol at home, the mere fact that someone else had set those rules would still be a problem. If it’s my home, I expect to be able to set the rules, at least to the extent that it’s possible. And the older I get, the more strident I become with that expectation, rather than mellowing out.

I do think a lot of people drift through life decisions, either because they lack a strong internal compass or because they don’t care that much overall and therefore tend to choose the easily available solutions. But with those people who don’t, the results can be quite different.

For example, one of my old childhood friends definitely bucked the trend in some ways, as she and her husband live in an extension built to her childhood home, with her parents just next door. This is a very unusual solution in Finland, but she loves the place and that’s what she wanted. I on the other hand always knew I wanted to see the world, and ended up without a traditional career, with no kids, and having lived in several different countries and having worked lots of different jobs, only to settle down abroad. This also a very unusual life path for people with my background.
And yet another childhood friend ditched her traditional career in a city to go live with a farmer, they have no kids but happily raise dogs. This friend was fully on track to the typical normal life, when life took a turn, and she had enough sense to move on and not look back.

But you can’t really tell which people are just drifting along, and which ones are making conscious decisions, not by just looking at where they happen to be situated. For that you’d have to really get to know someone, and even then you might not know for sure.

@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether It’s not so much that I prefer solitude, it’s that I don’t like sharing my space with people. I do like having company, but I want to have it on my own terms. I lived in a block of flats for about a decade and I could almost feel the presence of the neighbours, and I didn’t like it. It’s not that I was avoiding relationships either, I just knew that I’m picky and didn’t think it very likely that someone tolerable enough would come along.
My preferred living arrangement would actually be adjacent houses, or a bigger house divided in two with one half for each, but that’s still not exactly feasible. Back then one of us was going to leave the country and so the options were to split up, or live together. The brain chemicals only came to play in the sense that I didn’t want to split up, they had little to do with the living arrangement itself (that was essentially a question of money). I would still like it if we both had our independent spaces, but that’s not realistic. Nor is it feasible to live without any neighbours within about two kilometres, which I would like even better.

I just expect we’ll all abide by the overall rules and expectations set by the house

Well yes, that’s the rub. I don’t want to live by rules set by anyone else in my own home. And I don’t want to have to compromise with others in my own home. Now, I realise that living with one other person does include some compromises, and I’m not exactly a fan of that, but at least with just one person it’s mostly manageable. Plus since that person is a romantic partner, I’m more motivated to manage that, than I would be with flatmates or friends.

Also it’s not a question of expecting to get along with everyone else swimmingly, it’s a question of not wanting them around. As in at all. Like preferring to live without any neighbours even. Again, it’s not that I don’t like company, but I want to have company on my own terms, and that’s not possible in a communal living arrangement.

@GalacticTurtle @EmmyNoether Well, see here’s the thing. I don’t like living with people. And I’m not particularly keen on building/sharing a life with people either.

That also applies to homes for multiple people.
There are very few people indeed in this world whom I like enough to actively want to live with them, shared values and expectations or not.* By the time I realised these things I was fully expecting to never live with anyone, it just happened I came across someone whom I tolerate enough that I can live with him, and circumstances were such that it was either living together or parting for good.
As things are, the idea of living in a shared residence with a bunch of other people sounds to me like an absolute nightmare. It would make absolutely no difference if that was a women’s residence.

So basically in order to want to live with someone, that person has to hit all the three factors; friend, lover AND partner. If any of those are missing, I have no interest in living with someone as long as I have a reasonable choice.

*I’ve lived with flatmates in the past, because that made economical sense at the time. But whether I became friends with them or just happened to partially occupy the same flat as they did, depended entirely on the person. It was fine at the time, but I always expected it to be a temporary solution and I would never choose it as a permanent arrangement, as long as I had a choice.