Tootfinder

My MOTM is easily Szoboszlai. He was very serviceable at RB, with his pace and stamina keeping a difficult situation from being a nightmare.
And his dummy on Rio's game winner? :chefkiss: I actually cried because it was so beautiful. Honestly, I did. 😂 Put that whole passing combination into a museum.
(And while Mo had a quiet and frustrating day, that was his second one-touch inward pass that created a big chance.)

Urban observations about #Winnipeg
-Why are the downtown streets so large? For a city built before car dependency, I find everything very large
-So many one-ways
-While it looks quite car centric, I see many people at bus stop. (I hope it means transit is decent and not that there’s isn’t enough bus)
-Sadly downtown has seen better days. Beautiful buildings but ma…

I just received a beautiful piece of cat art by @… through @… from #why2025 .
Thank you very much! 😍

The First Tree (Multi, XPd on PC)
Play as a mother fox trying to find her kits. As you explore the world, you'll also uncover the relationship of a son and his estranged father. Yep, it's a "feels" game, so be prepared.
Game is set in Alaska, and even tho the art style is quite "simplistic", it certainly conveys the feeling of remote snowy wilderness well. As you begin the journey, it becomes apparent very quickly that this game is all about the feels. …

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
MUTOID: Keyeira.
TRAVIS: You were very beautiful, very much admired. Shall I go on?
MUTOID: As you wish.
TRAVIS: [Obviously disappointed] This doesn't interest you at all, does it?
MUTOID: How could it?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/108/388…

The #UniversityOfGeorgia fall semester started yesterday (yes, we know, it's VERY early), and that means it's time to swap out the works on view in our study gallery. This fall, we're working with professors in art history, history (museum studies) and women's studies to pull works from the collection that their classes can use all semester long: Goya, Ronnie Goodman, a 19t…

Ridges are my thing, 360 views...
(Ammergauer Alps, November 2024)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Alps

going through my months-old screenshots and this motherfucker is a recurring pattern

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

I have a very beautiful king parrot and his mate that have, this morning, eaten every last one of my tomatoes, ripe, green, barely forming, under the net - the lot. They were there last night, this morning gone. Just a fat parrot on the fence burping.

#3goodthings I try very hard to find these on difficult days to make me look on the bright side.
1. I'm sitting in beautiful Leintwardine listening to the river race.
2. Fish and chips for tea!
3. Thank the gods for the NHS.

Continuing a bit with the #photos from our #schwarzwald #vacations : (unknowingly) we walked along the Western-way. It was pretty cool because the trail was very diverse as you can see on the photo…

October 23rd, 1989, 36 years ago, on #climate, we got the POV from outside. 🚀🌍👀
Atlantis Commander Donald Williams said:
“The world as we know it is a very fragile place.”
And mission specialist Ellen Baker 👩‍🚀 on the ozone layer:
“Our world is a beautiful place, and we do need to take care of it. You get an appreciation of how thin the protective layer is above the planet …

Shuttle to Land 3 Hours Earlier Because of Winds
The five astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis prepared Sunday to return to a planet they now view with increased awareness of its fragility, planning to touch down today at Edwards Air Force Base at 9:33 a.m., three hours earlier than planned.

Got my son a birthday card. It's very him. I love it.

It’s kind of stupid, especially as I feel very little attachment to India or Hinduism, but it really pisses me off every time I see the swastika co-opted for fascism (on top of the fascism itself, which doesn’t so much piss me off as fill me with anger).
It’s a beautiful thing and they fucking ruined it.

😂
„They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It's a disgrace. I don't see it. I think it is very bad. They're pumping. It looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little child, little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends and they pump it in.“
Ich bleib dabei, sein geistiger Verfall schreitet immer schneller voran. He‘s cooked.

Day 12: Laura Zimmerman
We're back to a YA author here, and Zimmerman has been floating in my list of people to include since the start. I've read "My Eyes are Up Here" about dealing with misogyny and just general logistics while having very large breasts in high school. It's both engaging & educational, but also very well written in terms of the pacing, comedic moments, and turns of phrase. That led me to check out "Just Do This One Thing For Me" which is extremely dark, *incredibly hilarious*, and so thick with dramatic irony it had me constantly amused. It's also really touching at times, and a beautiful ode to the bonds of siblinghood that made me cry as well as laugh. I won't spoil the plot at all, but it's one of the best YA books I've ever read.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Not quite Canadian Shield, but close... and at much higher elevation (~2300m)
(Another impression from the same region from yesterday's pictures, see description there...)
#MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography

So the next leg is from #mulhouse to #Bettembourg seems to be going well again. On time and smooth, very strange dog behavior in the seat in front of me but she got off at Strasbourg so that must be where they all go. Got a good 2 hours of walking in Mulhouse. It's not a beautiful town.

So the next leg is from #mulhouse to #Bettembourg seems to be going well again. On time and smooth, very strange dog behavior in the seat in front of me but she got off at Strasbourg so that must be where they all go. Got a good 2 hours of walking in Mulhouse. It's not a beautiful town.

Our apples are ready! The northern spys (the pair) are a little smaller and have a few more spots and things but they cut very nicely (in bowl) and they are very tasty. A little dry. Taste like pie. :)
The blushing delight is big and beautiful! Definitely an eating apple. A little sweeter than the N Spy.
Will pick them all tomorrow before the bears come!
#apple #portalberni #northernspy #blushingdelight

Saturday was beautiful in the #swiss mountains, while the city was in the clouds.
Got a very nice close-up show by a bearded #vulture!
#birdwatching #Switzerland #hiking