The thing is, most "kindness" is completely empty. It's just a facade. "If you need anything, don't hesistate to ask" should normally end with "I won't actually do it, mind you, but you can ask". It's what Susan Blackmore coined as "the altruism trick" - the desire to look kind, without actually having to do anything kind.

I might be blunt and straight talking, but everything you get is genuine. If I understand what you're going through - and I've lived a lot of lives, I often do - I won't tell you it's all going to be alright if it isn't. I'll acknowledge it hurts, I'll even admit it never really goes away, and I'll offer realistic expectations about how long it takes to start becoming numb to the suffering. I'm thinking of a specific incident that happened in the last couple of days here, but these rules apply pretty generally...and this is the ugly face of real empathy. The sunshine, flowers and happy thoughts people send you, that's not empathy, that's showmanship.

I find people prefer you to be brutally honest. They know it's genuine then. I also prefer people to be brutally honest with me too.

There's nothing worse than somebody telling you things will get better, then admitting a year or two down the line that they were lying, and it never really ends. That builds your hopes up for closure that's never going to come.

Basically anyone who was gigging in the late 90s to early 2000s. It was my job for a while.

The ones I booked myself to work at because I actually wanted to see the gigs, or those I've actually paid to go see include Christy Moore (with Declan Sinnot and with Planxty on different occasions), Billy Bragg, Nick Cave (Bad Seeds and Grinderman on different occasions), Meatloaf, Pete Seeger, Wilco, Dropkick Murphys, Great Big Sea, Natalie Merchant, The Pogues, The Popes (with and without Shane Macgowan), Antique, Tim Minchin, The Cure, Van Morrison, The Dubliners, Flogging Molly, none English acts you won't know, Prelsava, Anelia, Slavi Trifonov. And of course, Jimmy McCarthy. I leave Jimmy till last, because there's something tragic about him. He's probably the world's finest living wordsmith. He writes a song, and everyone thinks it's been around forever, it immediately becomes thought of as a traditional song, it's accepted by everyone as part of the collective consciousness...but he's not actually a very good performer. It's not until Christy Moore or Mary Black get hold of them that they come to life. I find that compellingly sad.

Quote:cat like creature

I have seen wild cats in Yorkshire, and I've told anyone who'll listen - which probably includes you lot - and I believe these are the root the the "large cat" stories of Britain. They're much larger than house cats - though not as large as pumas and such, which people claim to see.

I didn't get any images, unfortunately - they're fast, and skittish, and unless you've got a full team with you deliberately out to do nothing other than photograph one, it's just not going to happen...and if you have a full team with you deliberately out to do nothing other than photograph one, you'll scare it away before it comes anywhere near you anyway...but an increasing number of wild campers can tell you the same story, and given that they're extant in Southern Scotland, it's hardly a stretch for someone to claim they're not as extinct as we thought in Northern England.

I did put my money where my mouth is though - I took photographs of what I believed to be their pray, and passed them on to ZSL...who assured me my images were inconclusive. This was probably fair - but I am confident enough to have already approached the appropriate scientific body, I just haven't got enough proof to make it stick.

There are lots of Bitcoin faucets that pay you to play games.

Yes, really - because it had been operating in the same manner since the 1990's, and paid every month like clockwork until 2015.

Too large to embed really, so click.

To be fair, they did keep publishing those newsletters saying that advertisers weren't happy with their results, and explained the delays in payments with the reason that advertisers aren't happy with their results...it has been a bit obvious that it was going to die for a few years now.

I was sad to see it go...but I'm still waiting for my payment due in August.

I suppose the key to a good relationship is when two people hate each other so much, they refuse to leave each other, because they enjoy the resentment their mere presence causes the other person.

Even I get lonely sometimes. Me! But all I have to do is watch somebody who has a relationship for five or ten minutes before putting that idea out of my head.

I've said it so many times before, but I'll say it again, love is a chemically induced state invented by evolution by means of natural selection because your species is entirely incapable of forming a symbiotic relationship with another living organism without first being drugged.

You think that's bad? Some douche in my second level upgraded and gave me a free buck, for nothing. Ridiculous.

Still think we should all just have a fight to the death.

The longer this goes on, the longer you're all proving me right.

If everybody stopped doing surveys for money, we'd just go back to the olden days when you do surveys for free because a pretty girl stopped you in the street, and said "Excuse me, I'm not trying to sell you anything..."

I don't care which world it is, I just want it to burn.

Quote:Happy? I refuse to believe anyone is happy.

-- Hubert J. Farnsworth

That's an enormous font. Compensating for something?

On my platform, we've had a dislike button for 8 years. I just searched the database and it's been used 262 times by about 3,000 members in eight years.

The truth is, the difference between me and anyone else is I'll talk about you to your face, and they'll talk about you behind your back.

Well, that and having a dark, dry sense of huimour when nobody can ever quite tell (often, including me) whether I'm joking or not.

I don't think anyone has accused me of being a gentleman before.

You're all the wrong body type.

My, I'm a cyclist. My legs are bigger than most people's houses, and my upper body can fit through the eye of a needle. That's the shape men are supposed to be.