Randrick Drow

Hi, I am human. I do human things.

[avery of roggeveen @avery_online]

people want to be a prioritized option. the majority of men probably would not mind be the "nice guy" or the "husband material" guy if that's what the woman has prioritized and finds genuinely attractive.

but no man wants to be the guy a woman finally settles down with after she's done "having fun."

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@NiiColaVT Thank you

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@dankusoofficial The "Pink Tax" only exists because woman won't buy the blue one despite being cheaper, but men would buy the pink one if the situation was reversed.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

Oof. See, this is why I’m not worried about “pure” LLMs in the long run.

There’s new evidence that the human brain doesn’t use natural language centers for logical reasoning at all.

Study just came out where stroke patients with complete aphasia (near-chance on written comprehension) performed….great on pure logic tasks! Even in healthy adults, fMRI showed language area activation didn’t scale with logical difficulty.

tl;dr words are too ambiguous for formal thought and our brain doesn’t use language symbols for logic

[Gait Analyst @gaitanalyst]

Have you ever talked to an alkie in denial? They'll be totally honest when they tell you that everybody they know crushes 6, 8, 12 beers a day. They'll refuse to believe there are people who don't drink at all.

[“paula” @paularambles]

unsurprisingly the website this is from is literally

cookingforengineers dot com

[memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus]

That’s two different guys though.

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@JakeRandall How did I not realize it works both ways before. That's hilarious

[🌿 Neo the Underking 🌿🍥🏴 (Anime Archival Arc) @VirtualAxiom]

This really bothers me on a human level, having been treated this way multiple times despite never giving a reason to have been, only ever having been genuine because I legitimately believe in the concept of true love as companionship and affection that friendship makes the strongest foundation for, and I have to just articulate it and get it out there. Not directed at anybody here specifically, more just venting about and breaking down the problems with the operating principle in this situation. A bit of well-deserved shade at people who have hurt me in this way, though.

There's no wondering to be done, unless that specific man has given you a reason to believe he's not simply telling the truth about how he feels, and thinking like that when he hasn't is objectively unfair. "Fall in love with you", implying affection and devotion out of a desire to please you and see you happy and safe because he cares about you and enjoys your company in addition to biological attraction, is completely different from "Had ulterior motives the whole time and never actually cared about you", and the behaviors will be VERY different between the two. They're even mutually exclusive in concept. Nobody falls in love with someone they're not sexually attracted to in some capacity. It's why not once in my life have I had romantic feelings for a male friend despite having close male friends on par with close female friends I've developed romantic feelings for through my trust and enjoyment in the relationship. Love in the romantic sense is emotional pair-bonding mechanistically, evolved for encouraging successful reproduction through close mutual care and physical intimacy between male and female.

One, an ulterior motive, is manipulative and a relationship-ender, self-serving pragmatic interest centered around sexual satisfaction at the expense of your trust and everything you've built as "friends". The other is one of the biggest casual wins you can secure in life because it means not only did you have a good friendship from his side all this time, you also were a good enough friend and both a compatible and safe enough person for him emotionally to win him over without even trying. Or at least he thinks so, which is why he's allowing himself to be that vulnerable with you in the first place. Because yes, for an honest man, that IS a big display of vulnerability, which requires a LOT of trust in you for many of us who have been hurt by people we thought we could trust before. It's not just women who can have a hard time trusting men because they've been hurt by them. Which is also why it's so devastating when it doesn't work out, even when we think it's safe. How a given man will respond to that hurt is up to him, but it still hurts unless you're in the manipulation category; but again, there are tells for that. Male behavior is very honest in one way or another.

The fact that attraction between men and women works the way it does mechanically isn't our fault any more than it is women's fault, and we're not defective or untrustworthy or otherwise in the wrong for having an inherent biological category called "Potential Mate" that means female friends we find physically and personally appealing have the ability to be more than just friends in our minds and feelings. Men with gay friends don't openly obsess over whether the relationship was really just about sex if two friends end up in a situation where one catches feelings, you never hear about that kind of thing. I don't think I've ever seen this raised as a problem among lesbians, either. It might make things awkward if one of them isn't into the same gender and now knows, but mature people can work these things out. Straight women catching feelings for male friends is also seen exclusively as a positive thing we should root for her success in. Somehow it's only straight men catching feelings for woman friends, a perfectly natural thing we don't necessarily control, that's treated like a problem, and we should consider how the woman feels about having to process that revelation. But again, ONLY when it's straight man -> female friend. Anything else is no big deal or a good thing, no question. Apparently.

Again, it's never even framed as problematic the other way around, where a woman catches feelings for her male friend, and he suddenly gets angsty about whether she had ulterior motives and was really his friend or not. We just accept it as cute and romantic and "You go, girl! Get your man!". Any normal guy would be over the moon for a girl he's already close to and enjoys having around and probably also thinks is cute or otherwise attractive telling him she's in love with him. It's a male fantasy for a reason. But when a man does it, it's suddenly a problem where he can be given no good-faith assumptions in his favor, he MUST be just trying to use her for sex. Because that's fair.

To specifically pathologize male affection for female friends, which assumes negative intent or plausible negative intent on the basis of gender is just sexist. Treating a male friend like he just wanted to get in your pants and that's ALL he ever wanted because he tells you he loves you is inherently sexist, and it's extremely hurtful. I wouldn't be able to continue being friends with a girl who broke my trust with such a horrible assumption about me when I was being vulnerable with her. Especially when men already struggle with being demonized and pathologized and treated like we have no value unless it's utility to begin with.

Wanting the safety and acceptance of a mutually beneficial romantic relationship with a woman you already value emotionally is healthy male behavior, and a trusted man you already enjoy the company of telling you he wants to be with you is something for women to be happy about, not feel used over. The latter response to a male friend being genuine and vulnerable is literally saying there's nothing good men can do that's right or acceptable in finding love, and we have to just accept being given permission to have feelings by women who choose us, which women largely don't actually do, because they have the standard that men should be approaching. Which they don't want men to do. But they do want men to do. Even though they say we shouldn't because no matter how we do it, we're creepy unless we get to know them as friends first. But getting to know them as friends first with the goal of a relationship is manipulation and setting unfair expectations and entitlement to something we're not entitled to, so we have to just...not have any interest at all when we become friends with the girl we're interested in, somehow, because that totally makes sense, because girls we're already friends with are off limits because that would be seen as a bad thing too, and even when we become friends with this new girl we're interested in but not allowed to have existing interest in when we become friends (Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed), we're not allowed to express our feelings even after a reasonable amount of time because it's bad to have feelings for your female friends, it means you were never really her friend and just wanted to get in her pants. Because that's not just fucking stupid in plain English.

You see the problem here and how brutally unfair this is to men? Just be happy a guy you like and trust enough to consider him a friend and not just an acquaintance chose you, unless he specifically as an individual gives you a reason not to be. That's how genuine, well-meaning men think with our female friends. Unless it's just about how hot he is or isn't that makes it a problem for you, which is bad because it's said to be bad for men to assess female interest based on this criteria and treat women differently based on physical attractiveness, so fair is fair. Women can't do it if men can't do it. If women can do it, men can too.

Bottom line, don't treat your male friends like predators or con artists for *falling in love*, especially when you have no reason to suspect he's that kind of person, and a complete stranger thinking you're attractive and doing the same thing would be considered romantic and exciting as long as he's pretty enough to not classify it as an unwanted advance. Your male friends are the FIRST place you should be looking for love, same as men should be looking to their female friends before random women. It's literally where you're most likely to find success if everybody's mature about it, which you should be selecting for in your social groups as a matter of good practice. Emotionally immature people don't make good friends, either.

Men have feelings too, and as I've observed growing up in a predominantly female FOO and having had the rug pulled on me and my trust damaged in various ways by more female "friends" than male in general, we're more honest about them than women are, for better or worse depending on the individual. All treating us this way does is teach us we're not allowed to be human and have feelings, that we're "sinful" for even considering it, and it ruins potential good outcomes by letting a relationship that's more likely than one between strangers to be a sure thing drown in a puddle of doubt, creating needless angst and resentment and reducing the total potential for happiness in the world in the form of relationships that could have been genuinely great, and instead resulting in pairings where both people are less happy than they could be with their true best friend. Once they have kids with the other person, it's over. There's no fixing the mistake. So don't be stupid and sexist. Feeling conflicted is one thing, but treat your confessing friend with dignity and grace and work it out amicably if you're not attracted that way and don't want to go further. As a matter of mutual respect, you as a woman owe an adult response and not abandonment or alienation or to make him feel like he did something wrong if YOU were really ever HIS friend, just like you'd expect from a man YOU confessed interest to. Fair is fair. Unfair is unfair. Whether you're one gender or the other doesn't matter. Be a decent human and treat your friends appropriately in general, but especially when they're being vulnerable about something major like this with you.

End of philosophical rant, I guess.

[Sulla @spqr_sulla]

Proof yet again that only men are the romantic gender

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@KirscheVerstahl The same reason you'd have sharks with freaken lazor beams on their heads. Because it's freaken cool Kirsche!

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

“The Amish? The people who have been in America since its founding, produce virtually no crime, consume almost no welfare, and don’t demand the country be changed for them?”

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

Revive the Stargate Franchise - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/VUbQYzaRLl via @CdnChange

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@Grxit It hasn't gotten better yet but I have gotten used to it. I jell jever jill jyself

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@QuinnyPig This is also the shit that the AI is being trained on

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@RespectElves She wasn't pretending, that's just the average lesbian relationship.

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@yuu579649 Well, of course I know him. He's me.

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@turboghosto It should be fine unless the spell itself is related to unsanctioned necromancy. If it is, you could try filing the paperwork for a permit anyways and see if it goes through.

[Randrick Drow @RandrickDrow]

@nikutaberuru Me and a friend of mine did it to each other in a karate tournament as a joke. I think most of the audience was just confused.