The argument against cars also holds that people should live in places where cars aren’t necessary to avoid hermitude in the first place. You don’t need cars to socialize if you can walk to where people are, you don’t need cars for supplies if you can walk to where stuff is.

Long distance travel can have non-car solutions but also it shouldn’t be the default distance to be away from society.

I keep my head down. No legal consequences isn’t the same thing as no consequences.

Would you think less of a potential partner if they had momentarily lapsed in their reading comprehension?

Would you think less of a potential partner if they didn’t know how to chew properly?

Given how it started,

One of the guys (Bob) suggested that we create a group text

and how it continued,

Bob made a group text with only those who attended this event, asking everyone to text when they got home

the stakes of any course of action feel pretty low. These groups Bob's setting up feel pretty much like they were done on a whim from the start so I wouldn't overthink how to participate in them. Invite more members if that would make you more comfortable, disengage if that would make you more comfortable, and trust that other members will eventually do what makes them comfortable in turn until you all find equilibrium.

I'm reading the update and, according to these details, every single person involved including yourself is making it weird and you all seem to want the group to not be comprised the way it currently is. That the group is eight men and one woman isn't the problem, the problem is you all as individuals seem make for a bad group.

It’s only weird if it’s weird. Anyone making it weird?

A lie about having a girlfriend that spiraled so far out of control that it made the world a better place.

It went EVEN BIGGER.

There is something about my hatred for the Enterprise intro which compels me to endure it.

My parents were separated since before I started forming long-term memories and I was raised by my single mother. We used to visit my dad's side of the family for a week or so every other Christmas, I lived with him for a couple months as a teenager when my home life got particularly rough due to a profoundly toxic non-parent influence, and during stay that we ignored each other apart from the cliche "divorced parent and kid who don't actually know each other at all trying to act their respective parts but neither knows how or really wants to or frankly likes the other one but they both know it's polite to pretend" sorts of interactions (which were quite sparing even as those go). Neither of us has ever attempted to keep in touch with the other over the phone or in writing.

To be clear, I don't hold any of that against him even a little bit; that's all perfectly normal on his end as far as I'm concerned. That's all just there for context when I tell you that, now that I'm well into my 30s, I recently heard from my older sister who actually tries to stay connected to him that he's begun boasting about how proud he is for having shaped me into the man I am today. And, like, I'm not even on social media so I'm not a person he's even capable of keeping tabs on from a distance if he tried. He fully has no idea who I am. He not only doesn't deserve to take credit, he doesn't even know what he's taking credit for. I'm just so automatically an extension of himself by virtue of my DNA that he goes around telling other people that he's proud of me.

(A more technically accurate but less entertaining answer to the question is that he's politically a Libertarian.)

Spoilers for the newest game.