Jimmycrackcrack

Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn't go there very often because, well, it's just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I'd see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I'd never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it's disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.

A few years later I returned there, I can't remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it'd gone a lot more normal. It's a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it's useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it'd settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there'd been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I've not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn't have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it's gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.

Yeh that definitely sucks they've rigged it up in a way that's unusual for this type of work and also forces you in to this situation. Redirecting is good and probably your best option, canny and sensitive people will notice you doing this and take it for the hint that it is but dense or uncaring people will probably carry on steering things in to places you don't want to go. If you're forced to eat with them then yes redirecting the conversation will work up to a point but it is a subtle skill to do so non-obviously. It's hard to advise specifically what to say like a script, though I would say if you just totally ignore the question altogether and switch topic very bluntly it's going to come across strange and prompt confusion and questioning. You'll need to somehow maintain the initial thread of their topic as lip service and then turn off down an unrelated avenue fairly smoothly. It's what politicians do professionally. Reading the other responses to your post I think they've got some really good ideas on how to deal with this if you really get forced in to conversing against your will. It's a subtle art of contributing basically nothing and rephrasing their same question back to them. I think another commenter suggested something along the lines of "I don't know much about that what about you?" and similarly bland and useless resonses. This is friendly enough not to piss anyone off and lame enough to be totally uninteresting which hopefully invites little follow up. If they continue on their original track, you can combine this with seguing to another topic.

I didn't suggest this to you initially because it doesn't sound like your natural style and I think advice is best if it allows the recipient to handle things mostly in their own way while helping to avoid pitfalls in doing so. I guess you'll have to navigate this daily frustration in a way a little outside of your comfort zone by carefully appearing to engage whilst really not and hopefully they'll find you so boring they don't bother anymore. Hopefully you don't mind this giving the impression that you're a boring person to the remaining 50% of your peers that don't bother you so much but sometimes it's a necessary evil.

You'll likely run in to a little bit of trouble because you're having to make explicit what would have been better for them to have inferred and when it's made explicit like that, it will come across as very weird to people and they'll probably have some trouble not taking it personally (even if they shouldn't).

Some understanding of the general tenor of how this group talks would make for better ways to communicate what you want to say but as general advice, your proposed ways of addressing this seem like they're on the right track in spirit but you're phrasing them in ways that imply a note of contempt.

This is probably because you really do harbour some contempt for these guys given the way you described them, like calling them childish for example. If you actually want to express some of that animosity then your suggestions are probably fine but if you're concerned about the "right" way to set these boundaries you might want to try and keep it neutral. This is also good if you don't want to earn their contempt either which is probably advisable even if you don't like them very much since you have to work with them and if they feel offended and hold a grudge it could risk spilling over in to the actual work.

I like your idea of saying outright that you're not a talkative person, hopefully they'll feel a little guilty about having forced you in to having to say that and will not try to drag you in to the conversation so much from then on. The additional bits around that concept don't seem advisable, you don't have to chastise them for not realising you don't want to talk, that's likely to be unproductive, the point is you don't want to talk. Similarly the "and I hope you respect that" addition is good for being firm but also comes across a little aggressive, best deployed only if you've already made your wishes explicit and they're clearly not respecting that.

Eating elsewhere, if that's an option is great, it you can already opt for that do it, you can avoid even having to bring anything up and the physical separation makes questioning you about it really inconvenient. If they ask you about it later that's when you can say you need time to unwind and that's also by far the most socially acceptable and understandable reason that people are less likely to take personally. I don't know if you resent the idea that your reasons have to be socially acceptable to these guys or should have to be massaged to avoid them taking things personally, but ask yourself this: do you want to teach them a lesson and demonstrate your contempt for them, or do you want to just be left alone to work and to continue to work effectively with them? Pragmatism over principle would make sense here.

If it gets to the point where you have to actually say to another adult, in a work environment, "leave me alone" then odds are it probably won't even work and your coworkers are complete idiots that need to be fired. However if that's really the case, saying that, even if it doesn't work is probably good since at that point things are probably going to escalate and at least no one can say you did or said anything inappropriate.

In short, take the easiest route if possible and just eat somewhere else at lunch and redirect the conversation back to work if they keep talking to you during work. If you end up somehow having absolutely no other remaining options but to explicitly tell them you don't want to talk be careful to communicate in a way so you only express this simple desire and don't imply some sort of judgement or contempt towards them. Try to be nice about it.

I guess it doesn't help you to say it now, but this was a terrible way to deal with a slight nuisance from what has to be a small group of stupid people. This has the potential to cause far greater intrusion and judgement from your coworkers than your lack of marriage and kids ever would have done, and this especially with a crowd that love gossip. You've potentially handed them the juiciest gossip they'll likely ever get and given how dull the workplace can be, they'll be milking it for years if they find out.

I think you're pretty much in it for the long haul now, which will take work to maintain, and also depending on how long you work at this place with these guys, you better hope your unusually youthful appearance stays at a consistent 18 years behind your real age and doesn't hit a sudden inflection point where it suddenly all catches up because that'll be tough to account for.

What? Why?

So, if I'm to take their message as intended, in addition to avoiding sports and education, I ought to avoid religion too? Are there more pages to this saying something along the lines of "... Except my favourite religion?" Otherwise, I mean, I'm confused what they want me to do here?

Yikes wtf? That's a terrible idea, recipes for fan forced already compensate the temperature so everyone will be getting it wrong. That's crazy.

Never heard of anything on the playlist before and I doubt I would have really stumbled on it normally because it's not the style I normally seek out but so far it all slaps. How is it they're allowed to include this stuff on their website?

Yeh Graphene is the plan long term but I have to stick with stock for the time being.

It sounds like it but, in general I prefer to have 1 maybe 2 home screen pages of stuff I know I'll use all the time right away and anything else I'd rather just search.

I suppose if you have only enough apps to fill maybe a single home screen page then by that standard I'd have a lot as between my less frequently used apps and all of Google's pre-installed ones that's probably a few pages, but generally I try to be sparing with them.

That does it. Thanks mate.

Planning to switch to Graphene OS for several reasons, but I have a reason why it will be better for me not to do that until a bit later so until then I'm just trying to be comfortable with stock.