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Whatever, Let's Have A Goddamn Blog Thread, But Try And Keep It Reasonable
KvP:
30 Rock!
fatty:
kvp: in my opinion, the best way to talk to a stranger is to have something to say. I'd be much more comfortable talking to a stranger to ask him for directions then to ask how the weather is. Find something you have in common and make it worth responding to.
benji:
--- Quote from: KvP on 17 Nov 2008, 14:34 ---Also, I need advice, specifically in how to talk to total strangers. How do you do it? What is a reliable way to start a conversation with someone you don't know?
--- End quote ---
From personal experience, I would recommend that you avoid starting the conversation with a comment on the attractiveness and general sexual prowess of the stranger's immediate family. Also, sniffing the air and asking "do you smell burnt fish sticks?" in the thickest Appalachian accent you can muster seems to be a bit of a faux pas as well.
EDIT: Sorry for being a smart ass today. A real answer: most people like talking about themselves, so starting with a question that they can answer easily, and that they will enjoy talking about is usually the best approach. In the US, the classic example is to ask somewhat what they do for a living, but asking a student about what they study, or someone about their family can also be a good start.
Slick:
That is it about macs. They have ace advertising and marketing, they work reliably and easily with music, videos, and cameras (yes, people bitch about iTunes on windows, but on Macs it works just fine) and they work. I have heard about issues with more recent macs but for as long as I've been using them they're been solid, reliable machines. You know their QA process for their monitors used to involve boiling them and they still worked?
There probably are cheaper equivalent options, but for people who really don't like having to work at making their computer work, they are good. That is why I think more technical-minded people end up playing with PCs and people who don't care for that go with mac. Maybe it is not as bad as I remember on windows, but at any rate, Windows has a well-established image of being a stubborn, annoying asshole to work with, while Mac has a reputation of being a pretentious-yet-very-functional asshole who comes in a lovely box and makes you look smart.
KvP:
Hmmm, yeah, that's good advice. But it doesn't seem very proper to just walk up to someone and ask them about their life. It's the starting of the conversation that's my problem, I think. Ice-breakers and the like.
--- Quote from: fatty ---kvp: in my opinion, the best way to talk to a stranger is to have something to say. I'd be much more comfortable talking to a stranger to ask him for directions then to ask how the weather is. Find something you have in common and make it worth responding to.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, that's what I need, generally. The reason I bring it up is that when I went to see a show with my best friend she tasked me with having a 5-minute conversation with someone I'd never met, because she generally does these things. I ended up having a 2-minute conversation with the merch booth guy about Nels Cline, because he was selling an album that featured Nels Cline. But that didn't really feel like it counted, since it's easy to speak to someone whose job it is to speak with you.
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