My son started saying “what the sigma?” constantly. I’ve tried to figure out where it came from and only landed on some “Sigma Male” shit on youtube.

Drives me nuts.

Stickerbush Symphony - Donkey Kong Country 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lndBgOrTWxo

My son’s only 8 so I have no personal experience parenting a tween/teen. So take that into consideration with my advice.

How about the next time you’re watching with them, try this:

"I was raised allowed to moderate my own content because I was trusted to be intelligent and wise enough to critically select what I watched or read and learn from the mistakes I made if I consumed something negatively influential. I have tried to extend this same trust to you, but the constant repetition of what you hear and your inability to form a cogent argument makes me feel like your YouTube viewing habits are teaching you to accept concepts at face-value simply because they are popular.

If you will engage with me in a discussion on these videos, I’ll leave you alone and continue to trust you on this. However, if you continue to shrug and dismiss the conversation, I will have to consider blocking this content until you are ready to engage with me on a deeper level."

I know modern parenting advice tells us to prefer reward over punishment so if there’s a reward strong enough to motivate them to engage, go with that. But if punishment is a greater motivator, I’d say damn the modern parenting advice.

• Dedicated subs for anime girls (wtf y’all?)
• Sports
• Linux
• Subs not in english (nothing against them)
• Video games I don’t care about
• Furries
• City-specific subs
• AI Art
• Vegans
• Niche music subs

Pretty much anything where I’m not or never will be the target demographic

Hello fellow introvert. I too have struggled with these dynamics in the past.

Im introverted and have always enjoyed my solitude. Some people have complained that I don’t talk much, which is true, I don’t need to talk to feel good.

but jesus christ, others outright avoid even eye contact with me like the plague, even though I kept greeting them for at least 2 more days.

Sounds like you’ve met people similar to you. How would you prefer others handle you? I’m guessing it’s “ditch the small chat, and get to the point”. I’d say, treat these people like that. Focus all your conversations with them purely on the shared work and leave them alone otherwise.

I confess neither do I know how to react when people are friendly when I’m talking to a coworker they like but the moment this coworker leaves, they turn to a mute.

It’s likely that they have an established working relationship with the other person but not you and so they freeze up in a 1:1 scenario. Just continue to engage with them in group settings until you establish rapport.

It’s also a bit funny: 2 coworkers that the first day had small but normal conversations with me now look elsewhere when they see me… and I give them back the same treatment. Childish and petty? extremely, but I ask you: what should I do?

You don’t have to do much. Continue to be friendly with them and if they don’t reciprocate just engage with them on the work alone. If you need something from them, ditch the small talk, explain the problem clearly and explain what you need from them.

I think you’re trying to take a one size fits all approach here. You need to adapt to each individual. For those who want to be friendly and chatty, hit them up and engage with them. Find them to be boring? You pretend to care, ask them a few follow-up questions (people love to talk about their interests) and then glance at your watch and say “ugh, I’m really sorry to interrupt, I’ve got to <attend this meeting>/<finish this report>/<insert whatever it is you have due here>”.

I forgot about that. Good catch.

Youtube comments can be strangely helpful here, sometimes. If there’s a lot of “akshually” comments on every video, it may be a sign the youtuber is full of it. Not always true, but anything helps. Can also look up the youtuber’s credentials as well.

I spent nearly 6-7 years developing control systems applications in LabVIEW. While I loved working in LabVIEW, I don’t wish LabVIEW was more popular, but I would love to see a graphical programming language take off. The dataflow paradigm is really interesting to work with.

Counter-point… sweat, manure, and baby spit don’t mess with my allergies like perfumes do. Perfumes should be banned (and I also wouldn’t cry if smokers smelling like smoke were banned too).

I thought it was clear we were talking about marketing in general since you announced yourself as a marketeer and made no mention of your personal industry. We should ditch the conversation. We’re not going to see eye-to-eye at all here.

You are giving me explicit consent, though, as payment for downloading a whitepaper.

You don’t understand the word “explicit” do you? Unless I check a box that says “please send me bullshit”, I am not explicitly giving you consent to send me bullshit. You’re also not giving me an option to pay for the whitepaper to avoid being sent bullshit.

Or if you’ve been prospected, I have to maintain a reason for emailing you in the CRM, and I’d invite you to consider the ramifications of “businesses can’t contact other businesses.”

The ramifications are that your shitty industry dies over night, and I’m okay with it.

What if you need your windows cleaned? Or your fleet vehicles need to have their tires checked? Or you need a new warehouse to expand your business?

Okay, now I’ve lost respect for you as a person. If I need any of that I’m going to ask my peers for references because I trust references way more than some jackass sending me the same e-mail 12 times over 6 weeks. If I can’t get references, them I’m going to use a search engine. Did you forget that exists?

You personally in your every day role may not want that, but businesses, in general, do.

But for all your bragging about being able to drill down and locate very specific individuals, none of you drill down and search by “this person in particular NEVER responds positively to spam”. So until you start doing that, I’m affected by your immoral practices and I get an opinion too, whether you like my opinion or not.

I am emailing you about your job if you are in charge of expensive ($10MM+) software applications and are interested in downsizing your compute and storage costs. Are you those things? If you are a CDAO of a billion dollar company, you probably would like to consider the product I work for.

We’re having a conversation about your industry in general. Not whatever goalpost you move the conversation to.

It’s clear to me from this conversation that your industry is not able to morally justify themselves and instead of owning your shitty behavior you have convinced yourselves that you’re doing people a service. You are not good people. :(

Also, I did notice you conveniently ignoring my comments on sending 12 freaking e-mails. I’d love to see you justify that nonsense.

But I’m not giving you explicit consent to spam me??? You’re gating content behind me giving up an e-mail address and then pretending like that’s consent. Or worse, going and buying my e-mail from someone else. This is the part I find immoral.

And you’re being disingenuous here. You’re not “e-mailing me about my job”, you’re spamming lame brochures that I never explicitly consented to receiving. Whether you think that’s immoral or not, don’t attempt to rephrase it as if it’s some great service you’re doing me.

Edit:

I mean I’m emailing you twice a week at your work email address for 6 weeks about a product

I don’t want you to e-mail me at all, but oh. my. god. one e-mail is enough. I don’t need 11 more! Wtf?

I’m sure you don’t care, hear it all the time, and/or have no authority to change things, but this is shitty behavior on your industry’s part. Just leave people alone!

Edit: I do appreciate you sharing these insights with all of us!

Also, when we run third party distribution campaigns, a large amount of people, I can look at their hotjar journey and watch in real time their mouse movements as they download a whitepaper, then we call them and they say they never downloaded it.

This shit pisses me off. If I’m forced to enter my e-mail address to download a white paper, that should not be considered consent to spam me. My company gates our whitepapers behind e-mail/personal details as well. I just put in my marketing team’s personal contact info when I have to download something from our own website. Make them eat their own shit.

Code Geass is very death notey. Main protagonist is super smart and very good at planning and anticipating every detail. Ending was pretty clever too.

Our network had a program called “deep freeze” on every computer that was basically an automatic system restore point.

A friend worked for IT during the summer and got the password to turn it off. I could make any change I wanted and make it ‘permanent’. I didn’t do this much. My favorite hobby was opening word docs that students saved on shared drives and replacing the word “the” with profanity.