That is what they’re wanting: Confirmation that breaking up is the best option. That dealing with the short term fallout is gonna be worth it in the end. It sounds easy when we’re on the outside looking in, but people are finicky and are more than one trick ponies. There’s a connection you develop in any relationship t…

Without joking whatsoever, he’d probably be better than Trump. From what I heard, Yankovic is really, really smart. He also is by all accounts a decent human being. That’s not everything, granted, but both factors would put him ahead of Trump.

To be fair, while Roger isn’t a jerk for feeling what he feels, he is kinda a jerk for telling LW he loves him, then pulling a “I don’t know what you think you heard...” the next day. Doubly so given that LW had reacted poorly the last time Roger wanted to ratchet down the relationship. If you know that someone wants…

It’s always delightful when you read these letters, and it’s like, “The LW pretty much solved the problem in the process of writing the letter, yet they felt compelled to send it anyway.”

Ditto - and, the letter writer for the quad thing seems like a *lot* of work. If someone else isn’t as invested as you are emotionally, you can either be patient or end things, but they aren’t a jerk for feeling what they feel (or not feeling), and being a drama queen isn’t going to improve anything.

Co-signed. I’m wary of anyone who has lines of sex he’ll have with women he’s in love with that he doesn’t have with women he’s not in love with. “I like kinky stuff but not with the future mother of my child” = “women only matter to me in the ways they personally fulfill roles in my life, and thus should only be…

Hm. Well her apology is a bit circuitous, but then that’s judithbutler.txt. Still, one wishes she’d come down on the side of supporting the victim a bit more clearly.

Meanwhile, Judith Butler was asked the same question by the New Statesman and positively ethered the interviewer:

this is a nice burn though

Man, if an artist isn’t interested in participating in mainstream popular culture, I think they’re usually a little full of themselves, but fair play. But if an artist *participates* in mainstream popular culture while crowing about how empty and pathetic it is, I just have no time for them at all. Get a job, dink.

This reads like something a freshman in college would say.

Apparently not a huge amount of personal disappointments since playing at the Oscars was “the most traumatizing” thus far.

I think those guidelines are a good place to start. What I was trying to get at and maybe didn’t communicate that well is that I think you also want to build in a lot of outs for the person you’re telling if they think you’re overreaching or you’re just wrong (How can you ever know 100% that someone is not in a top…

Yeah, I’ve read waaaay too many advice column letters of “my relationship is dead but I love my partner’s kid, how do I get to keep seeing them if I break up?” and “my relationship is dead but my kid loves my partner, how do I avoid breaking my kid’s heart?”

What does “in the beginning” even mean within the context of that timeline???  The first two dates?

“Just a single chapter” is such a bizarre phrasing. And for sure, she’s managed to drag it out into at least two chapters: Chapter X, “In Which I Meet an Attractive Person I Think Is Nice” and Chapter X+1 “In Which I Try to Extricate Myself From a Relationship In Which I Feel Trapped.” Good job!

This is the tamest, most SFW Dan Savage I’ve ever read.

Oh my god, just man up and do the decent thing. Marry her, then dedicate the rest of your life to exacting revenge through nonstop passive-aggression. 

That is what I tell people: breakups are not a negociation, you are not there to convince the other person of anything. Hard to stay on-message, though.  I wonder now if I got that from Dan years ago and forgot the source.

The bottom line is that Maze keeps conspiring to hurt and backstab her innocent friends for her own gain. That is a fundamentally unsympathetic trait to give a character, no matter how awesome or kickass she’s supposed to be. I can only imagine the uproar if Lucifer ever tried to pull such a scheme, even once.