16 April, 2022

A lopsided friendship happens when one friend is more active in maintaining contact and the other friend is more passive about keeping the connection going. It’s understandable to be sad or upset if you’re the one constantly reaching out, sending thoughtful messages and asking if you can schedule brunch or happy hour together. According to a 2010 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, social rejection can feel as distressing as physical pain.

“We live longer if we feel connected and supported,” says Kasley Killam, a Harvard- trained social scientist who specializes in connection and loneliness, and founder of the nonprofit Social Health Labs. “So when someone expresses that they’re perhaps not as interested in being friends with us or they need a break or whatever, that can trigger this innate fear inside of us that we’re going to be alone or that we’re not of value.”

Psychologist Ayanna Abrams says having a lopsided friendship doesn’t automatically mean that your friendship is unhealthy or toxic. It’s only a problem if someone is feeling negative emotions about the pattern. To help figure out whether you’re in a lopsided friendship and how to deal if you are, Vox spoke with four friendship and connection experts.

Resist the urge to make assumptions

It’s easy to jump to conclusions and assume that if we don’t hear from someone as often as we’d like to, Killam says, “that means they don’t like us, or they don’t value our friendship.” More likely: The other person is just busy — it’s not that deep.

It’s seductive to tell yourself stories when a close friend has gone quiet. “Once that seed is in our minds, it is hard to let go,” says Danielle Bayard Jackson, a friendship coach and host of the Friend Forward podcast. Concocting a narrative about why your friend isn’t reciprocating is a common reason, she says, for a lot of friendships ending prematurely. People think to themselves, for example, “Oh, I guess she’s not as invested in this friendship as I thought. I guess her new boyfriend’s more important.”

“All of that stuff is a self-generated story,” Jackson says. You might find yourself behaving in response to a story you made up out of thin air.

The solution? Challenge these beliefs, which are likely way off-base. Are these negative thoughts based in reality, or is this your insecurity speaking? When clients express these worries to Abrams, she asks the person to imagine what their friend would say about the friendship. Next, imagine the demands and commitments the friend is juggling. This exercise usually helps bring the temperature down so the client can see that their friend is likely busy and isn’t intentionally blowing them off.

Invite, don’t accuse

People often wait to alert their friend to an issue until it’s boiled over from annoyance to full-on anger. The best time to address the issue “is when you begin feeling that distance or imbalance in the relationship,” Abrams says. She recommends pinpointing what you want more or less of and then verbalizing it.

You might be tempted to blurt out, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you in a while. What gives?” But that could put your friend on the defense. Instead, “let them know you’re reaching out to them out of a desire for their company, and not accusing them of what they’re failing to do,” she says, “which doesn’t really feel good to anyone and is not a good motivator to get them to act.”

Jackson suggests proposing plans using what she calls the movie trailer method: You should preview the experience so the other person has a taste of what’s to come. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s get together sometime,” with them replying, “Absolutely,” and then crickets for two months, maybe say, “Hey, do you wanna get together Saturday around 7 for an hour or two? We can try this new wine bar in town. Let’s get dressed up and sip something bubbly.” In doing this, you’re giving a visual of being there, like a scene from the movie that will be your Saturday night hang.

Designing the plans that way makes it easier for people to commit. “And if they can’t, a friend who is equally interested will negotiate with you and say, ‘Dang, I can’t do Saturday, but let’s try Tuesday,’” Jackson adds.

Be flexible

Your friend may be feeling like this is more of a logistics problem, and isn’t aware that you’re open to changing your established routine. So the next time you reach out, you could say something like:

Your friend also might prefer to change the mode and frequency of communication. Maybe texting is better for them instead of taking phone calls. Or they might want to talk on the phone once a week instead of exchanging DMs on a social platform they’re no longer using. Ask!

At this point, if you’ve tried a few different strategies and you’re hearing radio silence, Vellos says you should assume the universe is telling you to put your attention elsewhere. “That could be another person, another friendship, another hobby, whatever,” she says. Redirect your energy so you’re not wasting your time and getting your hopes up for something that’s unlikely to happen.

If you’re the one who can’t prioritize your friendships, be upfront about it

Lots of people may find themselves on the opposite side of the spectrum: They’re the ones who are too snowed under to invest in their friendships. In this case, it is your responsibility, as a friend, to let the other person know about what they can expect from you for the foreseeable future. It saves a lot of heartache for everyone if you tell them the truth about what is going on with you, Abrams says. Know that you don’t have to be in a stressful or busy place to explain you need space; you can set boundaries around your time and energy even if you technically could hang out with this person more often.

When Jackson was pregnant, she messaged her friends and let them know her availability was shifting but she’ll be back soon. She communicated, “I’m thinking of you. I want to get together. I can’t for the next few months, but man, I cannot wait to see you soon and catch up then.” Her friends not only appreciated the heads-up, but were reassured that she valued their bond.

If you need to let a friend know you won’t be as available in the future, Abrams suggests saying something like:

The important thing is to be open, honest, and focused when you do connect. Aim for quality over quantity here — so when you do engage with your friends, they’ll feel valued and secure, knowing the friendship is meaningful to you too.

What is the multiverse? A world full of endless potential; multiple parallel universes spinning in synchronicity; and the possibility of alternate, powerful, seemingly better versions of ourselves. At a time when a pandemic, wars, and political cruelty have become constant, inevitable presences in our daily lives, it’s the ultimate fantasy for this moment. And that’s not just because Marvel, the most powerful entertainment company in the world, has gone all-in and made the multiverse a cornerstone of its current storytelling.

Rather, Marvel is just one take, one depiction of a limitless and alluring fantasy that’s impossible to pin down. Movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future, Sliding Doors, About Time and even It’s a Wonderful Life have all played with the idea of alternate or parallel timelines and futures.

In an attempt to better understand why I was so moved by Everything Everywhere All at Once and also ascertain just how realistic the idea of the multiverse is (and ostensibly how invested I should be in the idea of a better, more successful me existing in a non-pandemic timeline), I reached out to Spyridon “Spiros” Michalakis, a mathematical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He studies how the universe works at a quantum level, and actually served as the science consultant for Marvel’s Ant-Man, a movie about a man who can shrink, and who can also affect space and time.

Which is to say, Michalakis’s scientific knowledge informed Marvel’s multiverse. While he possesses a vast understanding of physics that dwarfs mine — at several points in our chat I told him he was absolutely blowing my mind — it was his very human understanding of the multiverse and the hope it presents to worn down, burned out humans that made me understand it, and, I think, my own post-movie delirium, better.

Thanks for speaking with me. I know you’re busy and have World Quantum Day tomorrow!

Absolutely! The multiverse is my bread and butter. In fact, I may be responsible for it.

I’m the science consultant for Ant-Man and I introduced the quantum realm there. Then it was also in Ant-Man and the Wasp, and then Avengers: Endgame and everything else. So you’re talking to the right person.

So as you know, the multiverse in Marvel is based in the idea that there’s a central timeline, but every decision made — more or less — sprouts off new timelines. Everything is constantly breaking off from that central timeline. Could you talk a little bit about your initial ideas of the concept, and how you infused what you know from science into it?

The irony of all of this, is that the multiverse may have emerged literally from the tiniest of places. When I consulted with Paul Rudd and Peyton Reed, they wanted to know what happens when you shrink.

I think if you really shrink — this gets really interesting — you get to the source code of reality itself. That’s what the quantum realm is. Space and time just don’t operate the same way at that level. I tried to infuse the movies with as much actual science as possible. At some point, the writers were more excited about the real science than the hocus pocus-like stuff.

The multiverse emerged from there, from the fact that you have a very basic concept in quantum physics known as quantum superposition. Quantum superposition basically says that what we think of as a single universe, the quantum superposition, is the interference of an infinite number of universes. Each one of them has different things that are happening at some microscopic level. When you zoom out from our microscopic human perspective, we get to see certain patterns like space and time and matter emerge, and particles that have some more definite positions, in both space and time.

Marvel took to heart the idea that we can use the quantum realm to reverse-engineer that single universe and split it apart into threads, and then explore each of these timelines individually, for dramatic effect.

I want to ask you about “real science.” Is it super silly for me to think that there’s a different Alex in another alternate universe? Or is that a leap too far?

But I do want to know — what we see on screen is one thing, but what’s the actual science like? Can you please explain it to me in the simplest way possible?

This is one of the famous quantum experiments, before quantum was even a thing. This gave us an inkling for the first time in human history that something was amiss with the way we thought about the universe.

We thought you could shoot single electrons or photons, just single particles, toward a wall where you had put two slits. They could go either on the left side or the right side, through the slit, and then hit a wall behind it.

You can imagine, like bullets or billiard balls, a bunch of them would either go through the right slit or through the left slit. Then you would see, on the back wall, a bunch of them hitting the right or the left. They actually tried to do that experiment, and what they saw was that on the back wall, you did not have the pattern you expected.

You had waves — you had the electron or the photon going through both slits at the same time, interfering with itself behind that wall, and then hitting the other wall as if it was a wave.

Think about it like you have water waves going through these two slits, and then you can see the crests rising and falling, depending on how the interference flows. That’s what was happening with actual physical particles, one at a time.

I think I got it — the outcome wasn’t expected, and everything, including the probability, was off. Full disclosure: The last time I took physics was in college.

So, they’re thinking: How the hell is it possible that one thing was going through two places at the same time?

Then, [Nobel Prize-winning physicist] Richard Feynman was like, Wait a minute, what if we had a third slit, and the fourth one, and the fifth one?

Sure enough, you would see an even more complex pattern in the back as if the electron was going through all four or five of them at the same time. He realized, wait a minute, if you keep making slits, at some point, the wall with all the slits disappears and becomes just the empty space through which light and matter travels anyway.

It travels through everything — it takes every path, at all times. It’s actually a perfect analogy to the title of the movie. Like, the title of the movie is scientifically accurate.

That is exactly how the universe works. Space and time are one single, singular construct. There’s not like you have space and then time; it’s space x time. Moreover, quantum space time is a superposition: a quantum superposition of an infinite number of space times, all happening at the same time.

This illusion — basic physical reality — is the fact that human beings have very specific points of view, ways of observing the superposition.

We all agree that, like, there’s a car in front of us, or a screen we’re looking at, or that somebody’s talking. Other points of view, though, you can access using quantum computers. We’re developing those things, at places like CalTech, where you tease that apart, where you get to see underneath the hood of reality.

I mean, I get it in very broad terms. Basically, if we all have the same perspective, we share a view on reality and how we see the world. But, based on your perspective or point of view, that could easily change. Like that wall with the slits!

And you wouldn’t know about those other perspectives, right? That’s the beauty of this. You wouldn’t know, unless you’re also flickering between two different realities. Which can happen also, because again, the frame rate of the human mind is so low relative to the frame rate of the universe, right?

Holy shit. What? Frame rate? So, like humans are missing an entire sequence?

Let’s say we only perceive 100 frames per second, something like that. We can be aware of our lives and choices we make, but then the frame rate of the universe where you could be flickering between different timelines is 40 orders of magnitude above that. It’s one with 40 zeros.

We’re all trying to figure out the plot of the universe by just watching the beginning and the end of the movie, the first and last frame. We’re just reconstructing the in-between the best we can. That’s where the multiverse hides; it hides there in between frames. Honestly, I think that the frame rate of the universe truly is infinite, not even finite, very, very large. And we’re so far away from that.

The whole point, and what we’ve seen, is that our intuition just breaks so badly, so badly at every scale. We’re just missing most of it. But we try to make the best theories about it as we can.

What’s fascinating to me, listening to this, is that we’re all essentially blind- guessing — and again, I’m not a physicist so this could be way off. Obviously this is all relative, but I have my intuitions or guesses about how the universe works. You do too, and your knowledge dwarfs mine exponentially because of quantum physics. But then yours — your frame rate, intuition, your knowledge — is dwarfed by the infinite magnitude of the entire universe.

The universe is going like 100 million billion frames — exactly. Making fun of all of us.

I want to ask you, and I think you may have answered this implicitly, but why do you think everyone’s so fascinated with this concept?

First of all, from a franchise point of view, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been probably the most successful movie franchise of all time.

And the multiverse is, at its foundation, its essence, a fresh perspective: What if I had made a different choice? What if time itself is not one-dimensional? What if it is a million-dimensional? What if you can jump left and right and up and down or just back and forth in time? And if you can do that, then it means you’re basically going to other realities — that may look very much like yours, or different.

For scientists, we’ve become better at explaining concepts to our friends across the aisle on the entertainment and the Hollywood side. They feel more empowered to tell good stories, based on time travel and things in fiction like that, like the multiverse. They have the GPUs and now render these beautiful things: the multiverse, quantum realm, everything in between.

You know, being able to hop in the multiverse is also a superpower. It’s such a powerful visualization, to not just break the laws of physics in this universe, but to have almost infinite choice of who you are. To escape yourself and become someone else.

I think the key word here might be “fate.” A lot of storytelling wrestles with the idea of destiny and our choices, and whether we have control of our future. The multiverse seems like it offers a freedom from that, in that your fate could be anything that you choose, or whatever your quantum superposition is.

It’s the idea that you may not be aware of it, but there is a power of choice that you have at some microscopic level that defines your identity as a citizen of this reality, versus a parallel one: where your most important choices you made are kind of your fingerprint. This is what separates you from this other version of yourself. You made a different choice, and maybe you made the best of that other choice.

But the thing that is also pretty powerful is the possibility that you could learn from the other versions of you. What if you could meet them, and all of a sudden, you realize that you have all these latent powers, potential within you, that were actually explored? And they flourished in this other reality.

What if you were a spy over there, or a fantastic cook, or an amazing writer? Or all the things you may have wanted to become, or even better — what if you could be all these things you thought you would never be good at? It’s a fantasy of your best self.

The reason why this is so important, and why I was trying to introduce these ideas, is that the dream of these possibilities makes such a huge difference when everything is going to shit around the world. I’m not gonna go political, but you know what I mean: everything in the pandemic, and now what’s happening in Ukraine.

At some point, there’s a really tempting choice to just be cynical and say there’s nothing I can do and that no version of me makes a difference here.

I want people to know — especially young people trying to figure out where they fit in this world — that they have power to make anything happen, and make that world where they can do amazing things. They can really take control and become that version of themselves that unlocks their true potential.

I get that. I feel like the buzz phrase over the past two years has been “existential crisis.” There’s been a general feeling of like, I don’t know why this matters. What does it even matter if I exist?

The multiverse fantasy, to me, feels like the inverse of that. There’s something beautiful in the idea of existing everywhere all at one time. The idea that this life, your life, everything everywhere matters so much right now.

There is something very powerful about just knowing, even though you may not know how, but just knowing that something is possible. Often it’s heroes that are the ones that first believed something was possible, and that fate was not set. Just knowing, or at least believing so strongly that something is possible, then allows you to mess around and experiment and figure out how to actually make it possible.

That’s what science tries to really do. It takes a science-fiction idea, something humanity would love to be true, and then says, let’s try to understand. First, we have to believe it’s possible, then try to understand what we need to tweak in our understanding to get to this new point.

From The Hindu: Sports

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From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

A couple want to have children but the wife can’t get pregnant. -

A couple want to have children but the wife can’t get pregnant …so they go to see a priest for advice. The priest tells them they came at the right time, since his superior just sent him to Rome for 10 years, and he’s leaving tomorrow. ‘As soon as I’ll get there, I’ll immediately light a candle for you,’ he promises. Time passes and the priest returns to the little town after 10 years. The first thing he does is visit the couple’s home. He can hear a crazy loud noise when he knocks on the door. The wife opens the door; three little children on her arms, a couple of them hiding under her skirt, and others behind her playing around. The priest counts as many as ten of them! ‘Well this is quite a pleasant surprise,’ exclaims the priest. ‘It seems like God listened to my prayer. But where is your dear husband?’ ‘My husband traveled to Rome,’ says the wife with a tired look on her face. ‘To Rome? Why on earth would he go to Rome?’ ‘To blow out that bloody candle you lit!’

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Whats good on pizza but not on pussy? -

crust.

edit: yall keep making better jokes in the comments LMAO

possible answers : red sauce, white sauce, yeast, cheese, senior discount (wtf), crabs, hot sauce, mushrooms. damn yall are just funnier than me lol

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They say you cannot hurt yourself whilst masterbating -

But I managed to pull it off

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I once dated a girl who had a twin. People asked me how I could tell them apart… -

Lisa painted her fingernails red & Bob had a cock.

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A cowboy rode into town and stopped at a saloon for a drink. Unfortunately, the locals always had a habit of picking on strangers, which he was. -

When he finished his drink, he found his horse had been stolen. He went back into the bar, handily flipped his gun into the air, caught it above his head without even looking and fired a shot into the ceiling.

“Which one of you sidewinders stole my horse?!” he yelled with surprising forcefulness.

No one answered.

“Alright, I’m gonna have another beer, and if my horse ain’t back outside by the time I finish, I’m gonna do what I dun in Texas! And I don’t like to have to do what I dun in Texas!”

Some of the locals shifted restlessly. The man, true to his word, had another beer, walked outside, and his horse has been returned to the post. He saddled up and started to ride out of town.

The bartender wandered out of the bar and asked, “Say partner, before you go… what happened in Texas?”

The cowboy turned back and said, “I had to walk home.”

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