It wasn’t a meeting. It was a presentation. I think it hit 26 before someone figured out what I was doing (I didn’t tell them what I was doing) and they started listening instead of talking.

I didn’t do the fist thing. I rolled in one of those “next customer” counter things instead and every time I was interrupted hit a button. That was fun!

The biggest fashion trend I hope never comes back is … fashion itself.

I hate it.

It’s changed for the better since the '70s/'80s even. It’s also backslid a couple of times since then (and we’re in the middle of a massive backslide right now in much of the world).

You can order live Asian giant hornet nests in NYC?

I note you didn’t address the implied question. I’ll ask it straight up.

Are you compliant with rule #1?

But as a man…

…you don’t think you need to follow rules laid down by women?

Wuhan, China.

1. I can live car-free. Not feasible anywhere I’d ever lived before, but here I have lived without a car for a quarter of a century and never really felt the need or even desire to own one.
2. The food. The sheer VARIETY of it within a 10-minute walk of my apartment door is astonishing to me. Take that to 20 minutes and with public transit and it’s mind-boggling.
3. The technology. I haven’t carried cash in well over a decade and a half. I can find and order the weirdest, most obscure things imaginable and it will be at my door in two to three days. (Without paying for “prime” service; paying extra sometimes gets you overnight.) How weird or obscure? How about a full, live, Asian giant hornet nest? Or liquor made from sweet potatoes at a guy’s farm? Or Daoist “fulu” (magical charms, basically) blessed by a Daoist priest at a “famous” temple? Or … you get the idea.

I came here “for a year or two” in 2001 and haven’t gone back beyond three short visits since.

This is such a weird response to me.

It’s the kind of response you get from men babbling in a group whose very first rule is, in fact:

I mean that literally. As soon as I saw his response, I had him pegged as not being a woman and it was trivial to find the evidence thereafter.

All these bachelorettes, showers, giant weddings and whatnot are performative bullshit pushed by a very cynical industry with some really great (in the sense of skilled) marketeers with the morals of alley cats.

I will attend a wedding of someone close. I refuse to attend bachelorettes, showers, or weddings of vague acquaintances who only invite me to pump up their numbers for bragging rights in bourgeois circles. If they want to pump up their numbers, let them hire actors and do something good for starving artists at least.

And still, after you see the rules yourself, in your client, you post to a group in which the rules specifically say you SHOULD NOT POST.

You are literally posting in a group whose very first fucking rule is “women only”. And now having had this pointed out to you, instead of shutting the fuck up, you persist in posting against the rules.

Telling you you’re in breach of the rules of the group you’re posting to is not “harassment”. It’s telling you you’re breaking the rules. You utter berk.

This weird over-sensitivity made me suspicious. So I looked. And I unsurprisingly found.

I’m a tall male, so if you aren’t you might enjoy a lower dose more.

Dude. It’s literally two words. Which one did you not understand?

I think that may be the only legitimate use of #NotAllMen that I’ve ever seen in my life.

I’m dying here!

When I sit down to play with any of my woodwinds or kalimbas or such, I can find myself realizing that two hours have gone by without noticing.

Oh look! Another guy who thinks that his opinion on women’s lived experience is:

1. informed.
2. Welcome.
3. Intelligent.

This never happens! This is by no means a tiresome daily ritual that gives our poor mods daily overwork!

Let me flip that around.

Why do men (and let’s be honest here, almost always specifically white men) simply have to comment where:

1. They have no meaningful lived experience outside of “I think i saw a woman in porn once”.
2. The people who are talking don’t want to be constantly correcting and educating the ignorant.
3. The group in question is a single fucking group out of literally THOUSANDS OF GROUPS where they are unwelcome?

Doesn’t that just make you cringe a little, being so fucking whiny and so fucking self-centred that you can’t stand a single fucking space that doesn’t want you?

Note: these questions are for you to ponder, not reply, because:

1. Answering it is against the rules. Don’t be the kind of whiny shit that breaks the rules because your ego got bruised.
2. I won’t see the answer because nothing is more of a turn-off for conversational purposes than a whiny manosphere twit. You’re getting blocked the moment I hit “Reply”.

Anytime someone says “do X from nature” they generally have little knowledge of what nature has.

Huh.

Well, damn.