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I am currently listening to a gaming podcast made by some college friends I haven't spoken to in 10+ years, it is surreal. The internet is crazy and my life is bizarre.

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Damn, so I just started using Tinder as well, but I'm pretty clumsy initially. Just saw a woman who stood out as really really interesting and accidentally clicked "nope". Anything I can do there?

 

[edit] ouch, and now it says "there's no one new around you". I have one match so far.

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You can expand your age and distance range. For the clumsiness I recommend swiping instead of the buttons, swiping the direction feels more different than tapping one or the other.

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I took on the strategy of swiping right for everyone and then unmatching anyone who I wasn't interested in...

I sorta feel like an asshole for doing that but then again I still haven't had any legit matches to even unmatch anyway!

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A twitter friend visited Vancouver this week and we spent some time hanging out and I was happy for the first time in what feels like a long time.

 

 

She is flying home in a few hours and I can't stop crying, wtf is wrong with me.

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Nothing is wrong with you. Crying happens for a lot of reasons and it's pretty typical. It sounds like you needed to spend time with someone and connect with them and that's not a bad thing, it's a pretty human need to be filled. Crying sometimes is your brain's way of dealing with pretty intense emotions that might overwhelm you - I cry a lot when I am swept up in feeling vulnerable or angry. It's almost like a cup spilling over that's a little bit too full. 

 

It sounds like you're crying because you had a really happy time and now it's ending and you miss it. Nothing is wrong with you, you're pretty awesome. :) 

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I recently finished a stint of jury service. I do not recommend it. People who witter on about "seeing a real cross section of society" and "the drama of human life" etc., as if you couldn't guess already, are talking bollocks. I obviously can't share details of any trials or deliberations I was involved with, but:

 

You may end up in situations where making the right choice still have very serious consequences for other people.

You may end up rubbing shoulders with people who say things like "A policeman would never lie!"

Legal arguments feel odd and alien at first, but I could quickly see why they were constructed the way they were: to deal only in evidence and exclude extraneous facts or speculation. Really not a mode most people are capable of thinking or speaking in.

If you're in a jury that delivers a guilty verdict, it goes into mitigation where the defense and judge effectively barter over the length of the sentence. While at that point the defense can resort to all kinds of contextual and character information that was so carefully excluded from the legal arguments, the judge, while (I think) bound by sentencing guidelines, can suddenly voice any kinds of bias or speculation they have in relation to the trial, and freely factor them into sentencing.

"Probably guilty" isn't a good enough standard of proof to convict; British courts require juries to be sure or give a not guilty verdict. You'll be looking at a very specific list of charges that may or may not cover the entire crime committed. If you give a not guilty verdict and the trail makes the news, it will say "innocent" or "cleared of all crimes" when the truth of the crime, trial and defendant could actually be  a lot more complicated and a lot less innocent that that. It could be that the prosecution case or evidence gathered just sucked. I think that affronts a lot of people's sense of justice when it comes to crimes with victims, but I can see how it errs on the side of avoiding miscarriages of justice.

 

I met people there who'd done jury service before, and discussed non-specific aspects of it with them too. We learned a lot we didn't know about the British legal system, but overall, it was a harrowing experience. Not that it wasn't interesting in parts, but nothing there was joyful or fulfilling, I'm now deeply suspicious of anyone who's enjoyed the process, as well as anyone who says "I'd love to do jury service".

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Why would you be suspicious of someone who wants to perform jury service? Isn't the point of your post that you learned most of these things firsthand through the experience? How would you expect somebody who hasn't yet had that experience to alredy be aligned with you in their feelings about it?

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I think I probably expressed that poorly, but mainly the eagerness to be in that position of helping to judge. I didn't see a single judgement that was exactly cause for celebration, and the people who most seemed to relish the process, including some court staff, were kind of voyeuristic in a way that indicated they could psychologically distance themselves from the consequences, as if it was reality TV or something. I can see how that would be necessary or inevitable if you worked in a courtroom. As a juror it just seems really simplistic and naive though, and there were points where I saw far too many smiles.

 

There's nothing I was party to doing that I regret as such, but in a wider environment where incarceration is a dubious method of reforming people to start with, politicians argue for things like denying prisoners books, gentrification slowly changes likely jury verdicts in poor communities, and police forces are becoming wholly or partly privatised, I can't see any part of the process as fundamentally satisfying or enjoyable or desirable to do, even though I understand it as necessary and largely just.

 

My expectations going in, set by friends who've done it, was that it'd mainly be boring (it wasn't, because I enjoy reading), that I should take a load of books for the downtime, and that I might have to see some pretty fucked up and traumatic things. I didn't expect to see gaps in the system for prejudice to leak in, and granted, I wouldn't expect any yet-to-be jurors to see them either, but they're there.

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Once again, you're describing things that you know only after the fact, and using them to create suspicion of people who have not yet gained that experience. You're allowing yourself to be disillusioned, but expecting others to already know what to expect and thus express disinterest or apprehension.

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I think it's fair to be a bit wary of people who see it as a way of hearing juicy details about terrible events, or still consider the police an unequivocally good and righteous force, since it's possible and advisable to develop a more critical view of police and court proceedings without coming into direct contact with the judicial system.

 

Although, it is weird to say that you are now, after having completed jury duty, suspicious of folk who are all too eager about getting into it.

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A bunch of stuff I mentioned in my second post is stuff I knew before the fact. I met people who didn't think about or didn't care about any of it. If this didn't already clarify it enough:

 

People who witter on about "seeing a real cross section of society" and "the drama of human life" etc., as if you couldn't guess already, are talking bollocks.

 

I did not go in with any rosy expectations.

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I posted in a thread somewhere about something that was intensely emotionally troubling, but someone decided that would be a great opportunity to pick on my wording and turn it into a fun internet debate.

 

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I could have done so much with that time. I'm really going to hate myself if/when I hit 1000 hours.

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Bloody hell. I think that number exceeds my gaming time for the last 10 years.

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3000 hours is 125 days :tup:

Seriously, fuck team based games. If you put that time into Street fighter you'd be god like

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Yeah before Dota 2, WoW was my most played. I'm not sure if it still is. It might be. I've had two accounts, so it's hard to actually tell (also I don't want to download the game just to check my playtime...)

 

If I'd spent that much time in Street Fighter, I'd have quit video games. I hate Street Fighter. Team-based games are so much more fun!

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