Yes, SMS usage is quite frequent. I use some other apps for groupchats or talking to foreign friends. It depends on your social circle, I have groupchats with SMS, GroupMe, Matrix/Element, and Kakaotalk.
In Korea I never used SMS, just Kakaotalk 99% of the time.
Yes, those are a bit more nuanced. As noted in the sibling comment, part of this is also coming across as someone who listens when people voice their concerns.
For the dress issue, it really just depends on the context and your relationship with the person. If it's your -friend- who you actually know makes custom dresses as a hobby, why would they be upset at a (genuine) compliment? My friends who pay attention to clothes and I give out (genuine) compliments to each other all the time. With a stranger I don't do that unless it's like something that truly stands out. I've been genuinely complimented on my coats and blazers by random strangers numerous times and I think nothing of it. But social environments like bars and cafes are quite different from contexts like office environments, particularly male-dominated workplaces.
I don't know the exact reasoning about the "ethical workplace" training, but I imagine it's a blanket thing since some people just don't know how to give compliments without being creepy about it, or just use it as a proxy to hit on the person. Of course companies large enough for ethical trainings would want to play things as safe as possible. Idiots ruin things for everyone else.
Anyway, I find it hard to believe anyone would take offense at something like "hey, did you make that dress? That's awesome!". But this is also why working at a large corp is probably my least favorite option when selecting a job.
"Males would get very direct, sometimes harsh, and detailed negative feedback, whilst women would get the far less usable vague sugar-coated version of it."
This is definitely an issue and I don't really know how to deal with it other than not hiring people who would take offense at something like honest feedback. That is more of a company-level cultural issue where people are afraid to give honest feedback lest they be accused by an idiot of being <X-ist>. I don't think that culture would develop if they had higherups who they could trust to fairly evaluate the situation. Higherups who are not afraid to go "yeah, no, that's not being <X-ist>, that's just the same level of feedback everyone else gets" if that's truly the case... or higherups who reliably can go "yeah, there seems to be a discrepancy here based on gender and we should take appropriate measures".
...this is a lot of words to basically agree that sometimes edgecases require some additional pondering. Context is very important, and knowing who you're dealing with is also very important. None of this matters if you're dealing with people who assume everything is done in bad faith and you're out to get them, etc. Life is short so just say "alright", and move on. Now, if multiple people start saying similar things... then maybe it's time to do some self-reflection.
Well, sure, those things exist. What I'm getting at is that the % of it that happens purely because I'm -male- (or another natural property about me) is basically zero. Either they're just being belligerent in general or they perceive me to be underperforming (rightly or wrongly).
Whereas when I play with women who e.g. use a mic, very frequently it's like a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do. If we start losing the round (in e.g. Overwatch), they start blaming the female players unfairly, etc.
Obviously this is all anecdata but from everyone that I've spoken to it's a very common experience, hence most of my female friends just eschewing the mic entirely or only playing with specific groups instead of general matchmaking.
"it's common for men to talk down to men on video games too"
This is very tone deaf.
I have spent probably thousands of hours playing games (with a mic) and the % of times I've been "talked down to" is very small, and it was never because of a natural property about me (that I'm male, etc).
Literally every woman that I've played with who has used a mic or otherwise presented themselves as female has faced vitriolic harassment (and/or sexual harassment) for no reason other than that they were female. I've been in lobbies with them and suddenly see men becoming -far- more judgemental and critical about the female player's ability/skill than usual. This is why a lot of women don't use mics at all or otherwise identify themselves as female in online games.
The "talking down" (or just general random toxicity) that men sometimes face from other male players is not even remotely comparable.
How hard is it to not make inappropriate comments about someone or their body? It's -exceedingly- easy to not be a creepy dick to one's coworkers and fellow human beings.
One only has to act like a robot if they have zero social awareness or tact.
Check out the frequency response curves yourself of the airpod pros [0] and say, an open-back sennheiser hd650 pair [1]. The airpods have a huge bump at about 1.5kHz to 3.5kHz (mids), while the sennheisers are more neutral in low frequencies but also have a bump at ~3kHz to ~7kHz.
Nothing will beat open-back headphones on a good system, but apple's stuff as of late is plenty good.
I agree. Aftershokz changed my running completely. I pair them with my garmin fenix and no longer have to deal with wires or being isolated from my environment.
I recommend etymotic research ones. They cut frequencies more uniformly. The typical foam ones are slightly better at noise reduction, but they make everything sound incredibly muffled. I haven't had issues with any particular brand of foam ones though, if just cutting out noise is your goal.
The best would be custom molded earplugs, but those are fairly expensive.
That and we can’t displace black people anymore to build national highways thru residential areas. /s
However I do agree. Our politicians prefer to wank over unimportant things instead of working on things that actually would benefit the people. And the government contracting system is horribly broken.
There is no incentive to putting in the hard work to accomplish projects like before.
My issue usually has been with random indie games just refusing to work. Like Party Animals, which either refused to launch for me or my friends or had horrible performance. Among Us as well.
Also any multiplayer competitive games that use anti-cheats are impossible to play. Valorant, for example.
IMO it is well worth it to maintain a dualboot for windows games.
"If you use Windows only for gaming then just buy a console, it is cheaper."
It's cheaper to spend money on a console, controllers, games, and a yearly online subscription than to use my existing pc? I find that hard to believe. Especially with games routinely going on sale and overall costing less on pc. Even on my Switch, games are more expensive on average.
I game as much as I can on linux (debian bullseye) but dualbooting to windows for specific games is rather easy. Unrelated, but I would not recommend debian for gaming purposes. Steam didn't even start correctly due to some static dependencies until about a month ago.
In Korea I never used SMS, just Kakaotalk 99% of the time.