Great point!

Hey!

I saw your post on my mobile yesterday and it struck a chord. I saved the link so I could go home and type on my laptop and give my reply the time it deserves. I know I’m replying quite late, but I hope my perspective helps anyway.

First off, everything you’re feeling is understandable. I don’t know if I’d say it’s “normal”, but I empathize with everything you’ve written. I have a 2-year old daughter, and it’s not been easy. But my most important takeaway from your post is that you’re trying. You’re doing everything you can to support your wife and kid, and that alone puts you in the “good dad” category.

Look, it’s not going to be easy. Your 3-week old is essentially a lump in human form. All he knows to do at the moment is drink, sleep, and poop/pee. He doesn’t recognize you, he doesn’t love you, he doesn’t reciprocate anything you do, and he doesn’t acknowledge you except when you’re feeing him. He can barely even see you (kids that age have eyes that haven’t learnt to focus yet). And that’s how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. Having a kid this age is mostly a chore (or a job, like you described). Try to think of it as an investment for the future. All the hard work you’re doing now pays off in the future when you have a healthy, happy child who loves you and knows how to show it.

But for now, it’s going to suck. Your wife is probably going to go through post-partum depression, she’s going to have mental crises about being a terrible mother about something or the other. I don’t know if it’s because of hormone imbalance, stress, lack of sleep, and/or a combination of all these. You’re the one who’s going to have to be there for her at those times. Your baby will (hopefully not) develop colic, or there will come a day when he cries for no reason and nothing you do will stop him and you’ll start thinking about taking him to the doctor/ER and in your desperation, you’ll hold him in a new hold and he’ll suddenly quieten down because he loves being held like that. Some days are going to be a rollercoaster of activity, frustration, joy, etc.

And as for love … in the last 2 years, there hasn’t been a single moment that’s hit me like “I NOW LOVE MY KID AND WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR HER.” I mean, I would die/kill for her, but that’s just family.

BUT – there have been moments. Like one time she half-woke from a nap, saw my face, broke into a smile, and went back to sleep. One other time when she was very young and she ran into my arms. One time she absolutely insisted that only dad would help her put her shoes on and not mom. These are small wins that build. The more interactive they get, the more your relationship with them grows, the more in love you’ll be. It’ll take time. I’m not there yet, even with my 2-year-old, but I know I’ll get there. I know I love her, even if I don’t “feel” it yet.

In the meantime, sorry … tough it out.

The only other advice I can give you is to ask for help. If your mom or some other family member can come help you and your wife out, it gets a little easier. Even if it’s only for a weekend or a week at a time. Just having someone else at home who can change a diaper, or even just watch the kid while you take a nap or play a videogame for some time, will help.

All the best, you got this, don’t sell yourself short.

EDITED TO ADD:

Newborns fall asleep very quickly, even in the middle of a feeding session. We used to tickle the bottom of our baby’s feet to keep her awake during feeding times, both at the breast and with the bottle.

Also, try to find someone you can talk to about the stress you’re feeling (if you can’t do it with your wife). Your mom or a best friend, or just internet strangers. Hopefully it’ll help you through the toughest times.

Any of the Naughty Dog games fulfill this criteria, especially the Uncharted games. They are mostly linear, all about exploration and combat, and very little fluff.

Indiana Jones & The Great Circle is pretty good too. You don’t unlock skills or abilities through experience but rather through finding books throughout the maps. The maps themselves are not too large and worth exploring.

FWIW, I’ve been using ublock origin, too, and it’s mostly worked fine.

Until a few days ago, when Youtube started detecting it and showing down the site and telling me I can only watch 3 more videos before it cuts me off. That hasn’t happened yet, but I definitely feel the slowdown. I’m hoping a ublock upgrade will fix it soon.

Got a link?

Hey, I’m upvoting you and all but I gotta ask how do you do the spoiler thing? I’m using Apollo and it made me click to expand your comment so I could see the spoiler part. How did you format it?

Anthony Mackie

He has zero charisma and was largely responsible for bringing down the quality of Altered Carbon S2 (though the writers did him no favours) and was the most boring part of The Falcon & Winter Soldier.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the new Captain America movie mainly because of him being in the lead role.

I think it holds up. But I’m biased because it’s on my top 5 movies of all time.

He’s the future president of the United States. Be careful, China!

That first one is called petrichor

Just out of curiosity, how many of them are brown? Did you get a chance to see how they behave with brown people?

It’s not racist.

If you paint an entire population with the brush of the experience/anecdote of one person, that’s generalization.

But this thread is NOT doing that. This thread is only asking people to share their experiences of places they have visited and people they found to be friendly. It is not meant to pass judgement on everyone from that place.

Are you white?

BG3 is definitely one of those games with good (even great) voice acting. But there are more of them out there.

RDR2 has some of the best writing and acting performances I’ve ever encountered in a game. The Last of Us is in a similar vein. The Uncharted series has some of my favourite voice acting, especially Claudia Black (Chloe) and of course Nolan North (Nathan).

Claudia Black also voices Morrigan in Dragon Age Origins, which is chock full of stellar voice performances. I’d argue that Dragon Age 2 and even Inquisition had some memorable performances but The Veilguard sucked.

The answers have returned the conversation to dullness. Talking about the specifics of coffee grinders … yawn

Sometimes. It’s usually about helping people get closure on things that happened quite a long time back, usually by helping them connect with someone they lost contact with or helping them do something they have been meaning to do. But to be very clear, this is not a show about helping people deal with long-held traumas or PTSD or things like that.

There are some really heart-warming tales and the narrative style is filled with humour.

Some of my favourite episodes:

• Ep 2 is about the host’s friend who claims he lent a budding music artist some CDs and that person used some of their music to make an album and didn’t credit them. And now the host’s friend wants their CDs back. Oh, and that music artist and his album? Moby - Play (and Moby actually features on this episode)
• Ep 12 is about a guy who got hit by a car and that changed his life. Now he wants to connect with that driver and thank him. The episode covers how these 2 people’s lives changed after the accident and when they finally meet after so long, how that meeting goes.
• Ep 45 is about a woman who mistakenly taped a Billy Ray Cyrus concert over a recording of her father’s tv interview after getting injured in Vietnam. The showrunners try to help find another recording of it.
• Ep 52 is a sad one. It’s about the passing of the host’s once best friend and chronicles their childhood and how they drifted apart and got close again just before the friend passed, etc.

In many episodes, they don’t succeed in what they originally set out to do, but the endings are usually very good regardless.

Do yourself a favour and find and listen to all the back episodes of Heavyweight

I was crushed when they announced that Spotify cancelled the show but a recent update says they have found a new home and they’re working on a new season.

No other show has made me feel so many feelings so strongly.

Reply All was my favourite podcast and I miss it so much.

PJ Vogt started Search Engine and Alex Goldman recently started Hyperfixed which are both pretty good but neither come close to having the humour and chemistry of Reply All, not quite the interesting content.

Search Engine, for now, is s the better of the two, having done its feet since it started much earlier then Hyperfixed.

I agree. I’m a pretty happy Firefox user. I am not a power-user of tabs anyway, I try to keep my open tabs to a minimum.

This is just a list of browsers with apparently good tab management.