If only there were a drummer on stage

No, it’s a lot worse than that . Your friend is into you at the same time as not being capable of being honest with himself. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case here, but people get murdered in this situation even after being friends for years.

There is plenty of potential here for you to get hurt very badly if you pursue him, or worse out him, while he is trying to appear totally straight for his community. Once again, you did nothing wrong and the signals are pretty clear even to read, but this form of homophobia is very, very dangerous to both of you in every way.

Please don’t press him unless he comes out on his own, otherwise there is great potential for danger for both of you. It’s an awful situation and I hope you’re able to navigate it and go on to get everything you deserve from someone who’s available and safe.

This has everything to do with your friend and your status as a gay person, nothing to do with who you are. You can’t fix your friend no matter how much you may want to. Only he can come to terms with his own issues. It’s not fair that you are collatoral damage in his identity crisis, but it’s his crisis that you didn’t cause. You are only guilty of being a good enough friend to him that he felt comfortable exploring intimacy with you. Please believe me when I tell you the biggest issue you have now is the sunk cost fallacy. Again, it’s extremely unfair to you and it’s a shitty situation. Now that you know you can’t get what you need from him, you can either waste more effort on him or save your effort for someone who can reciprocate.

If anyone deserves to die, billionaires deserve to die more than anyone who has ever lived. Regardless, I personally don’t think anyone deserves to die. What I would prefer is that billionaires be put on trial for their crimes and sentenced to rehabilitation, and afterward live as equals with other humans. China made the last heir to the old empire a farmer who lived a happy life. That’s the happiest solution I can think of for everyone.

What would you be risking if you were honest? There’s a reason you believe you shouldn’t be authentic when you’re around others.

When you are dealing with people or institutions which hold power over you, it is an exhausting obligation to put on the performance that they want. No getting around it unless you find a different situation.

When you are with people who don’t hold power over you, masking is only a benefit if you are seeking to run confidence schemes. Unless you are seeking to deliberately defraud your peers, the best thing you can get from masking is that you will have to continue to perform the character they like and keep yourself suppressed to keep knowing them. If you are authentic around your peers, they will like or dislike you based on who you actually are, no acting required.

If you are suddenly authentic around the people who are exhausting you because they need you to play the character, they will not react well. You may be afraid of that. I promise you that losing your ability to connect to others because you believe you must always suppress yourself should scare you much more. It is a good thing to lose people who require you to not be yourself.

It’s marketing. Nintendo deliberately under stocks new hardware to make the value of the device explode on the secondary market. Scalpers know this and usually buy out most of the first run. When you can’t get the new Nintendo device because it’s unavailable and scalpers are selling it for 2-3x retail price, you are far more likely to buy is asap when it comes back in stock. They make less money initially but in a way that makes the value of the product extremely high, giving people extremely high motivation to buy while they can. Also, a sale to a scalper is worth as much to Nintendo as sale to a consumer. Nintendo is notorious for doing this every time.

I hope this wasn’t deliberate, but if it was Valve is going down the dark Nintendo path.

“What race are you?” It’s an extremely insidious, loaded question usually asked by someone who believes race is a biological reality. Things change however I answer this question, but nowadays my attitude toward the asker is what changes the fastest.

I remember before Snowden’s whistle-blowing people online assumed it was crazy to think the government would want to spy on citizens personal internet communications, too. Online privacy was tinfoil hat stuff for people who didn’t know better.

It is impossible. Everyone has free access to the List of All Famous People and took celebrity class in school. Every single person on the planet is aware of and interested in every famous person.

I have desired constant stimulation for my entire life and I get bored by a lot of media quickly. Media that has no silence or pauses is boring in its own way. Well timed, artful pauses and silence capture my attention and gets my mind racing as to what it could mean in the context of a well-told story. Creating engaging media is more than jingling keys.

Everything is politics. Avoiding thinking about or discussing consequential things is a political position which is well served almost everywhere else on the internet.

Americans have some of the best access to information on the planet. Americans aren’t stupid or ignorant, we’re performers. That’s why you give those friendly sounding Americans the benefit of the doubt. All those conservatives playing innocent like they don’t know exactly what they did are definitely enthralled, but a big part of it is manipulating others’ perception of them so they’re treated like innocent children who can’t be held responsible for their decisions. A lot of them even believe their own performance and free themselves from all accountability even from themselves. I’ve lived around conservatives for a long time. The only way to be an American conservative is to live exclusively in bad faith.

If there was an internet meme based on the premise that somone is trying to play a record with a bent needle, I would probably need someone from the generation familiar with common phonograph problems to explain that to me. I didn’t know bent needles were a common problem for phonographs until I looked it up just now.

I know I told you my vulnerability to being accused of things I didn’t do, but this tendency doesn’t apply to internet comments. I don’t expect to have good faith conversations with anonymous strangers. I wish you the best with whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

I don’t think you understood what I wrote. You are offended on my behalf and I’m not offended. If you have difficulties with emotional regulation as well and are offended for yourself, that would be perfectly legitimate.

As a qualified cptsd haver, I am in no way offended by this accurate portrayal of my defensiveness when I feel like I may suffer damages over something I’m not guilty of. I assume others get upset about this as well.