here since june 2026
Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.
A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.
Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.
something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
anyone can join with an email address. it is used to send you a code and nothing else.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.