Am middle-aged(ish) nerd, can confirm this would work.

Most settings, the key is paying attention to indicators of interest/disinterest. If someone isn’t engaging with you beyond grunts, looks visibly uncomfortable, etc. that’s your cue to gracefully exit.

This is the hard part for a lot of people, properly gauging interest after initiation and knowing when to move on. If it’s not intuitive, unfortunately there’s not much else you can do to improve this other than practice.

Sometimes you can find more casual philosophy-focused discussion/reading groups too - I know a few have a presence on Meetup in my area. They meet at a pub or something and discuss a particular topic for the evening.

Naw, screw that - we need more people trying to make this place fun. If by some chance it is Ottawa, I’m sure they’d find receptive folks at The Dom/House of Targ/Arts Court/The Mayfair/Rainbow/AskAPunk/Tuesday Club/PROBE/One of the festival committees (except poutine and rib)/Spectrasonic/Awesome Ottawa/Canada Council for the Arts/White Rabbit/SPAO/One of the Zine collectives/Gladstone Theatre/Ottawa Little Theatre/Brass Monkey, for some reason/T’s Pub/Swizzles/Enriched Bread/Absolute Comedy/Cafe Dekcuf/that one house in Barrhaven (iykyk)/CKCU/CHUM/probably quite a few others I’m not aware of. Heck, you could bug the Night Mayor, what exactly is he up to these days?

It all really comes down to what you consider fun. Are you going to have the same degree of options as you would in Montreal and Toronto? No. But if you want fun, there’s things to do, places to check out, people to meet and a not-insignificant number of folks who want more of these.

Off the top of my head:

1. Start researching your local ordinances and bylaws. Like someone mentioned here, there might be a reason your town dies after 2200.
2. Think about the kind of things you want to see in terms of nightlife. Does that mean live music? Block parties? Techno night at the clurb? Kink stuff (seriously)? Theatrical performances? Hash and coffee socials (sort of a joke, but thinking through the logistics of such a thing has been my daydream du jour recently)? Etc.
3. Find others who would be interested in the kind of stuff you’d like for nightlife activities. Start talking $ and logistics - are there any grants you could try and apply for? Fundraising activities? Where are you going to do this stuff? What do you need in terms of insurance? Do you need to address any pesky bylaws, and can start working with your local government to try and tackle that? And so on.
4. Make a plan and act.

The big starting point is really just defining one or two things you want to see, and working to get to the point where you see them. In the course of this you might be surprised by what you find (someone mentioned good ol’ Ottawa, ON as an image of the place you’re describing - but there’s actually a decent amount of stuff, both above- and underground, you can find when you start poking around).

What up, fellow Ottawan?

Trying to dive into the local music scene was my approach - mostly because I suck at trivia.

“@!#?@!, motherfucker!”

It’s a term that’s taken on some additional baggage/meaning. Originally it simply meant someone who was involuntarily celibate - wants to have sexual relationships, but doesn’t. Now it usually refers to someone adhering to a kind of peculiar set of ideologies around that (see: social value theories taken to some often ridiculous extremes; good ol’ fashioned misogyny/perhaps misanthropy; etc.).

There’s a kneejerk reaction to incels in the latter sense because so much that comes out of that is pretty awful. That and it’s often folks who engage with the latter stuff who are more inclined to identify with the term incel - most others who just fit the former definition just say they’re single.

IMO the latter usage is just more proof that we are failing and continuing to fail men, badly, in terms of community and mental health supports.

I am equally, if not more embarrassed to say this is an excellent idea and I need to steal it.

Eh, the hype around it maybe, but it can be a useful/unique experience for some - at least if you’re not the type where it’d be acutely painful, in which case do whatever gets you through the flight/whatever.

Think about modern life - how often do you find yourself in a position where there are no acute demands, no expectations for how you need to spend your time, and you can just sit with your thoughts for a few hours? Unless you consciously carve out some time for that, IMO it’s pretty rare. Multihour travel as a flight/train/bus passenger affords that time with no special effort.

I like at least attempting it for a chunk of the trip, if not the whole time - imagination starts running wild in cool ways, which otherwise doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to. Though in fairness, if it’s a plane the cabin noise usually puts me to sleep during the attempt.

I’ll put it this way - if you’re the kind of person that finds the idea of isolation tanks appealing, depending on why you may enjoy raw-dogging flights or other passenger travel. 100% not for everyone though, and that’s fine - different strokes and all that.

ChatGPT reaches the same conclusion thousands of teenagers who’ve ingested a psychedelic compound have reached at some point. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

True, but you can meet in the middle re: this kind of thing with the ring. Having established that it’s going to happen at some point, take a trip to a jewelers ‘for fun’. Pay attention to what she goes ‘oooh’ over - style, stone, cut, etc. Write this information down to search separately.

It’s a bit of a stereotype I suppose, but trust that your future wife knows what she’s doing on that visit (particularly if y’all don’t browse jewelry together frequently - it’s kind of an anvil of a hint). This way there’s still an element of surprise, but you’re not just picking something random in hopes it pleases.

MSN was for your friends and friends of friends, ICQ was gamers and pre-MSN friends, IRC was for pretending you were a 17 year old girl from California.

Used to love it, had too many weird promptless experiences, unplugged it and now it’s gathering dust on a shelf.

Though it was nice to say “Hey google, tell me today’s news” and get a few different news updates while making coffee.

Edit: Out of sheer curiosity, have you tried factory resetting it?

Got dang*

Ah, understood. Thanks!

Lol, fair. I’m still not well versed in inter-service ActivityPub stuff. I don’t know if you’ll see this or see any of the parent comments here on Lemmy.

Contingency plans if IA loses the appeal about the library stuff, or in general has something happen that puts IA’s collections at risk of being lost. Any thoughts on the matter? Also cool if it’s not something you want to talk about, I know you don’t speak for the whole org.

How do we archive the archive?

@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org Thoughts?

A little niche, but

It’s definitely not for everyone, but I’ve met a small number of disabled people who do exactly this, for similar reasons.

Wouldn’t offer it as a suggestion though, kinda feel like people have to come to that decision on their own.