3, but the pajamas erasure here is unfortunate.

This comic has always resonated with me. THIS is how we incorrigible know-it-alls of the world can use our powers for good, or at least for not actively evil, LOL.

If it’s within your means, could y’all take a long trip out that way?

This is a very good idea, again, if they have means, though it’s probably not absurd if he’s looking to buy. AirBnB’s in Wyoming aren’t super common, but there are options, and frankly most of them are probably “easy mode” in the sense that they’re close to SOMETHING. Get a feel for what it would be like to be stuck there doing your shopping, finding something to eat, finding something to do. Drive to the nearest hospital, then imagine doing it frequently or while in a lot of pain.

Maybe it will be fine, even for ten or fifteen years, but they’re absolutely right to take this one slow and be wary. I know Massachusetts is pretty built up, but it’s not fully paved. I wonder if OP might float the idea of moving another 20-30 minutes farther out and finding a little patch of ground? Or doing something SUPER crazy like moving to New Hampshire? 🤣

As another alternative, if he’s determined to have mountains, something just outside Denver or even, sigh, Salt Lake City would blunt some of the biggest issues. Wyoming has almost literally nothing. Cheyenne metro has around 100k people, smaller than Lowell, MA.

Just to add, my very bookish aunt and uncle moved to the Appalachian foothills outside Charlotte after they both retired from government jobs in DC. After a couple of years of dealing with rural bullshit like annoying neighbors and poor infrastructure, they moved into suburban Charlotte and seem happier.

As everyone else has said, this is a pretty normal hangup, and if it’s really where you plan to live for the foreseeable future, only time will wear down the edges of that anxiety. It sounds like your parents raised you to be very open and you have an honest relationship with them and open invitation to live with them until you find a path that takes you elsewhere. Frankly, that’s great. My own daughter is a pre-teen but honestly I think we’re on a fairly similar path, but that’s more because it’s what feels like the right thing to do and the right way to treat someone, compared to the arbitrarily rigid households my wife and I grew up in. It doesn’t make make it magically not-alien.

It’s only been a month and he likely grew up in a different style of household. Honestly, in the US at least, the communities that most commonly do multi-generational living are very much not the ones okay with unmarried partners staying over. That’s a pretty significant cultural disconnect, and it’s going to be a while before he gets over it and truly believes that your parents are as okay with it as you claim. It’s probably going to require them to be almost comically over the top about it being okay (which has its own social hazards, LOL), or else it’s going to require baby steps. A trip together could help, as someone else mentioned. Or, a movie night that runs long and he stays in a spare bedroom. Eventually, with exposure and with a relationship between the two of you that proves to be solid over time, he may come to feel that it’s less awkward or disrespectful. He might also be a bit (overly?) self-conscious about the slight age difference in front of people whose primary job over the last 20 years has been keeping you safe.

So yeah, he’s sort of bringing his hangups into the relationship in a way you likely find frustrating, but I wouldn’t worry about it, certainly not until it’s been a good bit longer. It’s a common thing, coming from an honest place (and as mentioned, anxiety+expectations could create a lot of issues around the very intimacy you want to promote). In the meantime, it’s fairly easy to work around, especially since you do have the kind of relationship with your parents that makes staying at his place unremarkable. Eventually, yes, he should grow to trust you and your parents enough to believe you all when you say it’s fine, and if that’s still not enough then to have the kind of open conversation with you as his partner to understand why it’s not going to happen. For now, just keep doing things to make him comfortable at your place, but for the most part I’d let this one go.

The lyrics are out of order though. The original starts in about 1949 and moves roughly forward in time, never backtracking by more than a year or two. The FOB lyrics are all over the place from the start:

• Captain Planet 1990
• Arab Spring 2010
• LA Riots and Rodney King 1991
• Deep Fakes 2015ish as a media thing?
• Earthquakes without more context? Lame!
• Iceland volcano, probably the 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull

It drives me nuts that this is not roughly in chronological order like the original. Makes it feel half baked and way less impressive. That said, Billy Joel’s chorus feels like some serious Boomer deflection these days.

If I bowed out early, would that make me a Dik?

Corb Lund is great, and that album is one of his best.

The easy example is to think in terms of chatting with a Christian: Jesus died, but Jesus is not dead.

I find that I want some politics, and the politics that leaks into News and elsewhere is just about right. I un-subbed from anything specifically with the word politics in it and I mostly avoid .ml, and generally I find it very pleasant around here.

I have mine, and frankly I still use it to read about college football and Star Wars and check AskHistorians and post about keyboards. For shitposting and actually engaging with humans – yes, many of whom are my political speed or even further left – I really prefer it here. I “left” during the Mod Rebellion and APIpocalypse when it kind of became clear things were not going to be getting better. If it dies, it dies. We got beans over here.

I guess there is a Ford F-350 chassis under all the train shit and somehow it’s street legal. I also read that the stretch of highway where it happened is poorly designed, and it’s completely possible that a overcorrecting to avoid something in the road could lead a large vehicle to jump the very narrow median.

There’s constant running commentary and speculation, and biographical segments, and sometimes a little drama when surprising things happen, or expected things don’t, and a large group of people simply care enough that they want to know as soon as a pick happens, though how organic the growth of that group has been is certainly open for debate.

So it’s basically a combination of everything that everyone else has said.

1. NFL is by far the most popular sport in the country, but it also only has 17 regular season games (versus 82ish for NHL and NBA, 40ish for MLS, and 162 for MLB), and the entire season is spread over only 6-7 months of the calendar year, versus 8-10 for the others. There is an appetite for any content at all that materially affects the most watched sport.
2. College Football itself is probably the fourth most popular sports “league” in the country, though its organization and economics are WAY different (for now) than the normal pro leagues’. There’s huge overlap in general of course, but the Draft brings all of the fans together as CFB fans see where the top players will move.
3. Going back to number 1, the NFL and media companies, being what they are, noticed the gap in the sporting calendar (after March Madness, before NBA and NHL playoffs, very early in the MLB season, MLS well… (LOL, I love MLS and it’s a miracle it’s stable but it’s still not an important “TV sport” in this country). They also noticed that a certain segment of die-hards have been watching the draft for 30 years, and they saw an opportunity to tap that dormant interest for months of “segments” and a big day of ratings and revenue, so of course they did.
4. More recently, seeing that their hype efforts were working, they’ve moved it out of an auditorium near League HQ and made it a travelling road show, goosing local attention and furthering the image that it’s an event.

As to why all that worked, I like the posts that talk about the optimism and renewal that the draft represents. The NFL is unique in how it handles player development, in that it mostly doesn’t because it has an independently-popular lower league that will do it for free. Since that lower league is effectively the sole source of players, and since the NFL is an American-style sporting cartel, the Draft becomes the single biggest infusion of talent that a team will see in a given year, some of it ready to contribute on the field right away, and the teams that need the talent the most usually have the best picks and therefore a real chance to improve quickly, though the same bad management that gets teams in a bad place will often squander that chance.

For those who follow European football (soccer, not the niche gridiron leagues over there), imagine a single day (okay, three days now, but Rounds 2-7 are still for the nerds) that combines the anxiety of a promotion playoff final (though with deferred results) with the excitement of the summer transfer window (let’s consider NFL free agency the equivalent of the winter window).

Oh, you can still be mad. It was clearly a tactical retreat so they could continue to fuck over anyone with a complaint even tangentially related to the media itself. They’re evil, but usually not stupid.

They gave that up within a week, mostly because pushing it that insanely hard would have ended up setting a precedent that would have been used against them in the thousands of closer cases they probably deal with every year.

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)

I mean, we don’t really notice the BMW drivers who are acting sensibly, and it’s probably the vast majority. But that being said, outside Germany they attract a certain enthusiast demographic that will include a statistically relevant minority who think every trip outside the neighborhood is Gran Turismo.

I don’t drive a BMW, so yes, I do use my blinker.

I’m never gonna financially emotionally recover from this!