The main negative aspect of my ongoing experience (20 months so far) has primarily been in increased awkwardness around acquaintances and family members. I'm predisposed to that anyway, and actually doing something nonconformy (and not really having much sense of how acquaintances and family members feel about it, even those who are aware of the relationship) has heightened the phenomenon.

It's definitely net positive overall, though. :)

edit: deobfuscation

Nicer clothes. This one depends a lot on how style-conscious you and your usual environs are, of course, and probably a lot of people here don't need to be told this. On the other hand, I'm sure there are also people here like I was a few years ago, when I not only didn't care about style or fashion, I also basically just wore whatever was most cheap and comfortable in any given scenario. That was a mistake.

I found that having some respectably-nice-but-not-too-formal clothes can be a big plus in an environment where everybody expects a t-shirt with jeans/shorts. Think collared button-down shirt and slacks, with some nicer-than-everyday shoes. You don't need many sets of such clothes - the idea is to have something nice to wear when you expect it to be noticed, not necessarily to overhaul your whole wardrobe - but for things like a party that a friend is throwing where you know there will be people who you haven't met, it's worth the investment. This is especially true if you're looking for a new relationship.

It may take some work, if you're not used to it, to figure out the right balance of formality and style. That's OK. In my social circles it is often very easy to be the best-dressed guy in the room. A suit is too much. A coat and tie is too much. A $30 shirt and a $40 pair of slacks, plus some nice-ish shoes, will go a long way.

I'm going to focus more on entertainment in terms of real products as I expect this category to be underrepresented in this thread:

Spotify Premium: ~$10/mo, unlimited commercial-free music streaming (+ ability to sync to mobile for offline listening). They have an enormous library. I have essentially stopped buying albums because they are all available on Spotify (might not be as useful if you listen to really obscure music, but it's worth searching their library before buying a subscription. You may be surprised what they have. I just bought my dad (a huge audiophile and musician) a 6 month subscription for his 65th birthday and he just downloaded Rolling Stone's top 10 albums of the year that he otherwise would have bought and is really happy with it.

Netflix: Unlimited streaming is ~$7/mo, which is all I have. They have a large library and are starting to become content producers as well as just aggregators. Of course if you're easily seduced into binge-watching when you really want to be doing other things, it might not be a good idea. Personally, I get a lot of enjoyment out of it and it's cheaper than one movie ticket a month. Lots of classic movies as well as more modern stuff. However, it's relatively easy to "run out" of stuff to watch on Netflix, at which time you can just cancel your subscription.

Roku: If you don't have a Smart TV, it's the best of all of the 3rd party options (FireTV, AppleTV, Chromecast, etc.). Get the "Roku 3", it's under $100 and has access to a lot of streaming services. The best feature is "Universal Search" where you search for a title and it looks across all of the different streaming services and lets you find the cheapest (or free) offerings. (Not offered as far as I know with any of the other products because they all push their own content stores first).

Aux-port/Cigarette-lighter Car Bluetooth Adaptor: ~$30-$40. Gives you in-car bluetooth if you don't already have it. I recommend the Belkin one on Amazon. It's been well worth the price in terms of added convenience for me.

Windshield/Dash Suction-Cup Mount for Smartphone: Cheap. If you use your phone for driving directions, it's much more convenient (and a lot safer) than having the phone in your lap. Keep in mind that in some areas, it may be illegal to mount it to the windshield.

Radar Detector: ~$200 – $700. Get either a Valentine or a Cobra. They're about the cost of one speeding ticket and can help you avoid tickets. (This is not an endorsement of driving too fast of course). Valentine is simple but effective and indicates front or back direction of radar source. Expensive, but no bells and whistles. Cobra has a wide range of products with a wide range of prices. Not directional, but has lots of bells and whistles like learning false positives, traffic-cam alerts through GPS, and connection to a network for crowd-sourced data (think Waze, but for stuff like speed traps). Again, these may be illegal in your area—make sure to check first.

Tablet/e-reader: I prefer to read textbooks on a tablet and other books on my Kindle Paper-white. Had an iPad provided by my previous employer before I left and I'm really missing it more than I thought I would for textbooks. I'm looking into a new tablet and really want one with good palm-rejection and a stylus for taking notes (If anyone has suggestions, please let me know).

Textbooks: I give myself a monthly education budget and buy a new textbook (and sometimes solutions guide) every couple months. There are also free options of dubious legality like libgen.org or libgen.info. e-textbooks go great with tablets.

Wake-up light / Dawn Simulator Alarm Clock: ~$100 Some love em, some (like Eliezer) don't get any benefit from them. I kept a sleep journal for a month and it seems to work for me. I'm in a much lighter sleep when the alarm finally goes off (if I don't wake up naturally from the light). If you're techy, you can build your own with an arduino or raspberry pi pretty easily. On that note...

Arduino / Raspberry Pi: ~$30-$40. Very fun if you want to learn DIY electronics. Arduino is a microcontroller whereas raspberry pi is a full computer. I'm just getting started learning embedded systems and electronics myself (taking a class on edX starting this month called "Embedded Systems". If anyone else here on LW is planning on taking this, let me know).

My favorite fiction Novel (aside from HPMOR): The Shadow of the Wind - by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Great story, deep characters, a love story, a mystery, and some of the most beautiful prose I've ever seen.

Nice sunglasses: $15 - $300. Get some brown/amber-tinted, polarized lenses with a nice lightweight aviator frame. You'll never look back. May be a bit hard to find at the lower price point, but not impossible.

Hope some of this was helpful!

I'm pretty skeptical of how much good a month of martial arts will do you once you're off the mat. Most of the value of martial arts is in conditioning (both physical and mental, e.g. making you more comfortable around people acting aggressively towards you), not technique, and a month of classes isn't nearly enough to build a strong foundation there. Even on the technique side, that much time will give you a few neat tricks but won't allow you to systematize them or to generalize them to unfamiliar situations.

On the other hand, a month is just about enough time to get you past the boring introductory lessons (how to stand, how to fall, how to throw a punch that doesn't completely suck) and into the meat of the art, so that kind of time might be a good sample if you're on the fence about a longer-term commitment.

responds to a statistical generalization with 2 famous examples

I agree that this is wrong.

Scumbag Eugine Nier

Even though this is obviously a joke, with an over the top reference to popular memes, it still seems counterproductive for building a strong community.

My only experience with poly was negative. (There were details here, but I removed them for reasons.)

I have decided that poly is way too complicated for me and I have no intention of pursuing a poly relationship in the future. I left this feeling more like a piece in a collection than a human.

As a matter of principle I think we should ignore such worries. (I'm aware that that's easier for me to say, since I've been here for ages and have a reasonable supply of karma.) In response to intimidation attempts one should refuse to be intimidated, because that reduces the incentive to attempt intimidation.

I just got hit with ~30 downvotes in a row after posting something with a slightly leftish political flavour. I conjecture that we have Neoreactionary Mass Downvoting Syndrome again. NRx folks tend to disapprove of polyamory, and even though the title is "Negative polyamory outcomes" it's possible that someone wants to punish people for treating polyamory as socially acceptable.

(This is only a guess, and I'm not super-confident about it.)

Negative experience, I know all the people involved but didn't observe any of this firsthand and it happened before I knew some of them: A good friend of mine (call her person B, female, bi, married) and her husband (person C) once tried dating another married couple (also friends of mine, call the guy person D). Everything went swimmingly as far as the sex and the hanging out together as friends went, but C got uncomfortable about the growing romantic attachments and amicably broke off the inter-couple relationship. Unfortunately, B had already fallen hard for D (though not to the exclusion of C) and ended up cheating to have one more night with him. When she told C about it he got pretty mad, blocked D out of his life (and got a promise from B not to be alone with him again) and pretty much swore off polyamory (at the time). This was over three years ago, and it was only in the last year or so that C has started to forgive D and they've moved towards being friends again.

B and C are still married, though it was rocky for a while there (D and his wife aren't, for many reasons of which this cheating incident was plausibly one). B really doesn't do monogamy well, and the compromise for a while was swinging with other couples (just sex, no dating in the usual sense) every now and then. That seems to have worked out, though B wishes it was more often.

Related question: should I include swingers in the list of people I know in poly relationships? The boundary is a bit fuzzy but many people would count it as CNM even if it's just for sex.

Take a month of martial arts training (aikido, jujitsu, and judo are popular soft styles, Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga are two very different hard styles (TKD is fun and mostly useless for defense, Krav is super effective for dangerous situations but pretty grueling)).

Join the local swing dancing scene. If you don't have one, try salsa or Argentine Tango.

Take an art course. Start with a beginner class that does a little with lots of different of media types, then take a class focusing on the medium you prefer. Do this even if you feel you are bad at art. I am terrible but I still enjoy working with clay.

Buy an Audible subscription and fill useless hours with audiobooks. This can improve commutes and other boring tasks.

Buy either a stereo Bluetooth headset with playback controls on it, or a small mp3 player such as the Sansa Clip Zip that has easily accessible controls outside your pocket. This advice is mostly relevant if you listen to media a lot. Having playback controls very accessible lowers the activation energy of starting your music/podcast/audiobook.