Pretend you are an alien and try to get a free soda from a fast food restaurant

This reminded me of a time that ecib and I showed up at a coney island around 2AM with just enough money to buy one hot dog.

ecib: Do you have, like a two-for-one deal on coney dogs?

girl behind counter: No.

ecib: Well, look, we have $2, I'm going to give it to you, and if we get two coney dogs for the price of one, that'd be cool.

girl behind counter: sigh... Order for two coney dogs.

We love you. You are like Hubski's surrogate sister/daughter/hellian and we are all happy to see you happy.

He's a good guy too. Super talented. I approve. You two seem very well suited for one another. I see a bright future! I shall toast to you both tonight as tonight is "date night." -you'll see... 11 years from now, you'll long for "date night."

For the record, I was totally the first person to badge this.

I'm crying, I'm so happy for you. I love that (thru social media) I feel like I have distantly observed the entire trajectory of your two's relationship. I remember when random user was just a really cute guy who kept making insom food on Instagram. I just really love that I have been able to watch you two develop to this. Let me know when you set the date because I just wanna send you a "happy wedding!" card or something. I just really feel that I have known insom as a person from way before this was ever a 'thing' and it's very beautiful to me that I have gotten to see that. Idk. Feelings n shit. Congratulations so much you guys!!

Ye gods that was quick — thanks so much! I'm now happily using the new end-point and loving it. I made public all the updates to my screen-scraping plugin Static Discussion via Hubski. This plugin is designed to be used with Pelican, a static website generator, but the code is fairly basic Python and could easily be cribbed for other purposes.

I also defined all the URLs in a conf file so that the end-points can easily be updated without revving the code. If you decide on a better name than "tree", I can just redefine the end-point in the settings.

That's a major part of my point. The culture of the site isn't immediately clear to new users, as it isn't with most sites immediately. But no one ever listened to the time-wisened knowledge of "lurk moar." Since we're so small, a ton of redditors will come in at the same time, believe we're a reddit clone, and will treat it like a reddit clone, none the wiser that what they're doing is contrary to what we are trying to do here. It's not their fault, it's just that since they came in with a bunch of redditors, their experience here is.... a bunch of redditors.

It's hard to try to quantify and lay out to people the difference too. Saying "we care about personal relationships with other users" and "your network of people, ideas, sites, and connections is a vital component here" and "the experience is truly more in line with a coffee shop, or a pub, or any sort of local hub with people you love than an internet community". These are abstract ideas, and ones that other sites will use, and ignore, and they think it close enough to reddit that people will start to get angry at central components of the site, telling the people who have been here for years that they're wrong for wanting it one way or being resistant to change. And don't get me wrong, we value new ideas, but the angry vitriol people come in isn't new. You know how many times we've had to fight users about the mute function? It's tiring. I understand not wanting to put up with another month of assholes coming in and ruining something you love. I understand having a socialist, feminist safe space cut out for you on the site, only to have it shit on by assholes who don't get it over and over and over as new people come in.

The important thing is the people like you who come here, don't want to step on toes, do want to understand, and do contribute a very large amounts of good quality. But that's such a minority on the internet. That's why we're small anyway. People will come in, self-centered, see a platform to preach their stale language from, and will be angry when they're not given voice. Reddit serves that masturbatory sense of ego, where here, if there are people who want to listen, they will. If people don't want to, they won't, just like in real life. If you have the self-awareness of "I've made bad habits", and "I want to learn", and "I would hate to step on the culture". you're a hubskier that we want here. That's what we strive for. If it's the people saying "I want to shape this place for my voice", get the fuck out of my coffee shop.

For the younger generations, I think it's a little more complex than being obsessed with work and tech.

For those that grew up in the bubble years, a large number of men seem to be looking for someone to take their mother's role. Someone who will be home when they get back from work, have dinner ready, the house clean, kids in bed and a hot bath ready - the stereotypical 50s housewife in American terms. More and more Japanese women don't want this - they want a career and to be on equal terms with their husbands. They also face little to no financial pressure to marry since a large portion of single Japanese people live rent free with their parents until marriage, so they have a rather large disposable income to do what they would like, either alone or with friends.

For the "millennial" Japanese, they have many of the same problems that generation sees in America - a lack of jobs. Japanese companies have moved away from the lifetime employment that used to be the norm, and more and more jobs are contract or part-time work. Especially for young men, there is an enormous amount of pressure to get a full-time company job like their father has, and when they can't meet this expectation there is a tendency to withdraw socially.

Combine both of these with the a culture that's still fairly bound in tradition and hasn't really accepted women's rights as a whole, and it's not really that surprising that women aren't just jumping to give up their careers to get married and have kids.

With that being said, most Japanese people still want to get married (somewhat older survey, admittedly), and Japanese people are having sex.

Japanese people definitely aren't having children, but this is more of a developed country problem than a Japanese problem. If you look at birth rate by country, Japan is one of the lowest, but depending on which data set you look at, Germany is lower, and that's with a much higher immigration rate that should help that figure go up. However, no one seems fixated on the idea that Germans aren't having sex.

Look at fertility rate by country. Per the CIA Factbook, South Korea is at 1.25 to Japan's 1.42, but no one seems focused on the end of South Korea as we know it.

Wacky Japan sells; panty vending machines, hikikomori, rabbits on leashes - we've built up an image of this weird place that is so different than what we're used to, and it's easy to type up a quick story on a slow news day. The truth is, it's not so different than anywhere else in the west if we weren't allowing a fair amount of immigration.

I agree that medium's font should be larger.

Good morning, everyone. You all know me. You should elect me for president.

Your choice today matters more than you think. Whoever you elect will influence and manage how much we spend to get (sport) to (event.) How we (allocate money) to (sport) and (club). How we (something something money). You'll still take the SAT, you'll still graduate, you'll still go to college - but whoever you elect will determine how much fun you have doing it.

It's a glamorous title for an ignoble task - the S.O. president is an accountant, a middle manager, a bean counter. It looks great on a college application, so the competition is fierce- but the proper candidate isn't an iconic seeker of limelight. The right S.O. president is someone with a knack for detail work and a love of compromise. You don't need a leader, you need an organizer. You need someone whose goal is coalition, not charisma. You need someone who knows that to lead is to get out of the way.

I've done this. I was class president last year. I was in the cabinet. I know the students, the teachers, the administrators that kept Tenafly third in the state. Right now? We're eighteenth. Are you happy with that? I'm not. I think we can do better. I think I can do better. Choose me, and we'll all do better.

My name is Pabst. I'm your best choice for S.O. president. Thank you.

A person to whom everything is freely given can never understand the value of those things.

Hardship can make a person worse. I'm sure we all know people who have become bitter because of the pain life has handed to them, and usually I find myself unable to truly blame those people. Hardship can break people.

But I also find that people who have never truly had to work [for something - not "job" work, all work], first do not understand the work that others have to do, and do not appreciate what they have. I recently read an update to a thread in r/relationships about a woman whose daughter was getting married for the third time and was pitching a fit because the parents didn't want to pay for this third wedding, as they'd paid for the first two and their following divorces. That daughter was handed money her entire life to subsidize her existence and it clearly had made her insufferable, entitled, etc. Some hardship is necessary, or we'd all be entitled assholes who think we just deserve everything to be handed to us.

I think hardship helps us to learn who we truly are as people. You don't know who you are until push comes to shove. I mean, that's what a lot of sci-fi and disaster fiction is about, right? How awful situations can either warp people into monsters, or people stick to their guns and their ideals. Hell, isn't that basically what The Walking Dead is about? (TV series, anyway, haven't read the comic)

At minimum hardship forces us to learn and examine what we truly value. "Is it more important to feed myself for six months, or use the food I've found to feed myself and three others for two months?" I truly believe we cannot know how we will react in these situations until they occur. We can attempt to predict our behavior based on our knowledge of ourselves but until we get to that point it's all a theoretical exercise, made from the comfort of a reality where currently, we are clothed, loved, and fed. (Presumably.)

We also cannot truly sympathize with people who are suffering unless we have suffered. Suffering gives us empathy. It gives us understanding and depth.

Sounds to me like Nietzsche suffered a lot and was trying to look for the upside, either that or he was a masochist.

I don't think anyone should ever seek out suffering and this quote has the danger of implying that because suffering can have positive effects, it should be sought out and relished. Yet at the same time, we should not flee from discomfort. If you use "personal comfort" as your compass to get through life you are not going to be challenged, and you are not going to grow. This parallels a conversation klein and I had about loneliness a while back. Don't hold up awful things as "noble." Don't cling to them because you think they make you better or special, a special suffering snowflake lilypad.

Let's flip the premise of your title and ask instead:

How can great personal growth be achieved outside of experiencing some type of hardship?

Is "challenge" a hardship? It could be taken that way.

No one needs profound self-contempt. When it is truly profound and all-encompassing I believe it prevents growth. Self-mistrust though - we should doubt ourselves. Not so much that it binds us from acting, but enough so that we see the room in our thoughts for other interpretations, reactions, etc. Enough so that we are willing to listen to others.

I prefer:

Per aspera, ad astra - through adversity, to the stars.

Previously

Check out http://www.belowtheboat.com/ as well.

Instead if reporting this, I badged it ><

Nope! kleinbl00: there's no collimation error (cool word by the way) or trackpadrunk inaccuracy. The logo's just not good enough, sadly. Otherwise these lines would align too:

Edit: I got it to work...ish.