When I saw the headline, this was my first thought.
But damn, it could have been something cool if reality wasn’t so fucking predictable and ugly.
I mean, imagine a reality where a bunch of humans end up using the same service like that, between two countries at odds, and they realize that they have a lot more in common than they thought possible. It could be a bridge that changes a world.
Well, that world, because it sure as hell isn’t the one we’re in
I’d say it’s relatively rare.
The ability to feel anger, but not dwell on it, takes practice. Anger is partially chemical, hormonal. So you can’t eliminate it entirely. The best we can do is work towards a set of anger related goals.
First, there’s the skill of noticing anger in its very earliest start, so that you can prevent it from being enough to take concentration to control. That’s what stuff like mindfulness, meditation, and the like help with the most regarding anger. They give you the tools (eventually) to default to a more observant state, where you’ll notice the beginnings of anger and use mechanisms to divert it.
That makes anger management much easier because a lot of what gets people into trouble with anger is how long it takes for that rush you dissipate once it gets going. So you can apply anger management techniques to accelerate that cycle reaching its end.
That makes it more likely that you’ll resist any actions that might be spurred by anger until you can choose to make them if they’re useful and appropriate.
Pretty much all of our emotions are at least partly chemical. I’m not aware of any that aren’t, but I’m hesitant to say it’s all of them period. Some emotions are harder to resist than others, but not all of those chemicals are equal. Adrenaline, for example, is there to bypass conscious thought and control and spur us into action of some kind, even if that action is seemingly passive (like freezing up). Yeah, it’s more complicated than that, but we don’t need to cover every inch in this kind of chat.
But, and this is the key to successfully managing one’s anger, you have to be willing to recognise that feeling anger is neither uncontrollable, nor a reason to act on that anger. It’s a response to stimuli, but it also isn’t something someone else makes us feel. We can mitigate our responses when angry, and (no matter how much another person is intentionally trying to make it happen) it is an internal process.
The problem is that it’s a shit ton of work, and the learning curve is not a gentle one. It also is harder to work that curve the more reasons you have to be angry.
You know, I played around with this in my world building for my combined ttrpg/writing universe.
Some of the old gods fought for control over modern concepts like that.
Hermes ended up the god of messages in pretty much all forms, including SMS when that happened in the real world.
Elegua, aka Papa Legba ended up snagging control over the internet, though he eventually traded that power off because he found it boring.
Hephaestus did indeed end up as master of pretty much all manufacturing technology, particularly metallurgy, plastics, and eventually robotics. One of those low key gods that none of my players ever saw the real reach they had, and I haven’t worked out into any writing yet.
Zeus got killed, and Thor wasn’t interested, but also wasn’t willing to let any of the other thunder/lightning gods control electricity. So it ended up being a semi-sentient force of its own. Again, it never got developed, but I had the idea of it becoming a god along with a few other things like it. American Gods ended up covering the territory better than I would have, so it’s one of those things in the back of my head.
I would end up figuring out an in universe deity of things as I ran across a reason to think about it at all. Some things, I deemed to big for gods to control directly, or in total. Like gravity. No one deity could own that power because none of them was willing to allow any others to be able to rule it. Gaea, as goddess of the Earth could manipulate gravity up to a point, but not so much as to be able to disrupt the solar system. Same with Ra and the sun (where he also had access to a limited range of nuclear forces). The in universe explanation was that those particular kinds of forces were just too able to undo everything, even when darkness itself was a goddess, and chaos had a church. So, the gods just made sure nobody took over some things at all.
But, I probably would have taken something like distilling and folded it into one of the various gods that deal with alcohol in other forms. Like Ogun (also spelled Ogoun), who was specifically a deity of rum and rum making along with his better known aspect as a deity of smiths (though the term deity or god gets iffy with some of the African entities). Ogun is one of the few spirits, gods, or similar that specifically was linked to a distilled spirit of any kind, so that’s where I would slap all of it. With him also being a metal worker, it makes even more sense because distillation without metal is a shit ton harder.
I dunno, that’s probably past the point of being boring lol.
At least that one is believable, if poorly executed as fiction.
But, being real, part of the fun of that sub was playing along. If you paid attention to the average level of bullshit, it was hard to have any entertainment out of it all. So you go in knowing that the story is bullshit, but you pretend it’s real, or real enough for the purpose of discussing the idea behind a bad story.
The school thing, it’s so poorly done it’s impossible to suspend belief and go along. But the “name it after your brother” one, people actually do that kind of thing, so even though it’s poorly done (or so over dramatized that if it happened, it didn’t happen like that), you can still imagine the scenario and explore the boundaries it suggests
Well, that’s how I used the sub for sure, and I know people that have said the same, so not everyone is buying the stories whole cloth
Utter horseshit
The fact that they’re using the term drop charges, when the kid hasn’t been arrested shows they’re making it up.
A principal is going to have enough education they wouldn’t have used that term in relation to an in school disciplinary issue because it would leave them open to trouble.
I don’t believe it, though they would
Reports don’t just go to mods, they go to admins as well. And you can usually contact admins in other ways on most instances.
Eh, I just had a run-in with them again.
Trying to get every instance to ban them is a little crazy tbh, and I think you’re right that their entire goal is a blend of trolling and misinformation.
It isn’t crazy because they’re acting in bad faith. It’s crazy because just lemmy is already too big to try and organize a lemmy wide ban. Trying to get a fediverse wide one applied ain’t happening.
Best you can do is report them for the spamming in the instances they do it on.
Don’t believe everything you read or hear is what it amounts to. You’re getting highly selective, heavily filtered news, not the lives of actual people.
Only one way to find out
Holy shit! I learned a new word!
That may not seem like a big deal, but I’m a writer and word geek. Running across something in english that I’ve never even seen before is not a common thing at this point in my life. And, being a word geek, it’s hype as hell.
Yeah, me and my cousins kept mousetrap working for an entire summer back in the eighties. I liked it a lot, but as others have said, it was beyond janky. It was the idea I liked tbh.
Operation, I had forgotten there were cards at all lol.
I dunno man, if you accept a skewed paradigm, of course you’ll suffer from it.
But you apparently missed the point.
The point is that clinging to the idea that what you think of as attractive is detrimental to long term happiness. If you’re picking a life partner based on their looks, you’re fucking up. Nothing I wrote nwas specifically about whether or not you were attractive or not.
It still applies, but that wasn’t what I was writing about. The post i responded to was about wanting partners that OP thinks are out of their league. Without that context, you might as well read it as gibberish because it’s not framed in relation to other situations, even when they apply.
But, again, it does apply to your own looks. If you’re wasting time worrying about how other people perceive your appearance, beyond the basics of being clean and dressing to fit your form, you’re wasting life.
Anyone that is going to change how they treat you, whether or not they smile at you just because of looks is a douche. It’s an automatic filter to weed out assholes.
Yes, as long as you are trapped in the paradigm of looks first, the judgement of others will affect you. But we are not beholden to accept that paradigm.
See, those people that treated you better without you saying a single word? They’re the broken ones. They’re ugly in their heads. It doesn’t show until their behavior comes out, but they’re stuck in a mode of thinking that is self defeating.
Nobody makes it to old age looking young and hot. Nobody. They only question is when it will fade, and how far it goes. Happiness, long term happiness, is about getting there and having lived the best life you can. Having a partner that picked you because you looked good in your youth is a risky bet.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it or not, but this is coming from a sasquatch looking motherfucker. I’ve never been skinny, I’ve never been “pretty” by conventional standards. I’ve been balding since my twenties, and I’m hairy as fuck all. And I’m saying straight up that none of it mattered a bit. It still doesn’t, and it won’t. There are no leagues except in our own minds. There’s only people that have the ability to pick partners that matter, those that don’t, and the ones that don’t want one.
Is it me you’re looking for?
An incel stuck in a dead end job
Disorder, disoooooorder!
I never cease to be amazed at the drums in this track. The whole thing is great, but the vocals and guitar float to their greatness on that pounding sea of drum.
Gotcha :)
The biggest one is called epididymal hypertension. Aka the blue balls. It’s a real thing. While it can’t cause injury, and it isn’t the end of the world, it hurts lol.
The process of holding off ejaculation builds up the pressure that causes the pain. Given enough time, it’s not a matter of if, but when it will happen.
There’s the difficulty that part of arousal is mental. In theory, you can go indefinitely. In practice, you can run into limits because you’re losing interest. You just lose the erection entirely.
That, in turn, can lead to what I’ve heard called “sad cock syndrome”. Again, part of arousal and sex is mental. Your head game isn’t just about oral sex. If your mind isn’t present and engaged, the junk isn’t going to last. You can end up where not orgasming, or not ejaculating without intervention can become a mental block of sorts. Your subconscious gets the idea that sex or masturbation isn’t going to pay off soon enough, so it ends up just deciding to opt out.
In other words, it can end up where you accidentally convince part of your mind that getting an erection is a waste of time. Yeah, you’ll still get erections when asleep, and even orgasm then. But when awake, the sad cock refuses to crow.
Now, I’ve never had that happen myself. Nor have any of the guys I know that can do all this. But I have heard of it happening. In general, the process of learning to control your breathing and the related meditative skills gives you the inner balance that your subconscious won’t be that separate from your intent. But not everyone spends as much time on the inner growth as they do on the bare minimum to achieve their sexual goals.
Tangential to that, you run into issues with partners. Masturbation, you can go as long as your skin can take. But when you’re with another person, lasting too long is a thing. Not everyone enjoys hours of sex. Certainly not every single time. Some can’t handle even an hour of actual penis in body sex before they’re sore, or rubbed raw. When that’s the case, it’s wise to have also figured out how to accelerate orgasm (which is easy enough since you’ll array already know how if you paid attention to your arousal stages while learning to delay. It’s just using the muscles and breathing to generate the kind of spasms of orgasm under control and then letting them spread from there once the right phase of arousal is present).
There’s also a bit of a transitional phase sometimes. You’ll be coasting along, doing the muscle control parts, but because you aren’t used to it, you kind of wear them out. It’s like doing a bunch of bench presses and then your arms turn to rubber. The muscles just nope out until they recover. That means you’re there, hard and ready, but you can’t orgasm or ejaculate because the muscles down there are exhausted. That goes away as you develop stamina with them, but there were many times that happened to me lol.
Well, I’m going to approach this as friendly as possible. But you need to be aware that a lot of what you said in your post is just bad thinking, and there’s no way to answer it without making that point. It may feel like an attack because it’s essentially all saying that you’re wrong, but that’s not the intent. The intent is to guide you towards healthier thinking.
First, leagues are all in your head. They always have been and always will be, so long as where you live allows people to date/marry freely. Like, if you’re somewhere with a caste system of some kind where you literally aren’t allowed to be with someone of a different caste. I’m not talking about simple social pressures.
It is true that some people think in terms of leagues. They have their idea of what league they’re in, by whatever criteria they have, and they’ll make their decisions bases on that.
But that has nothing to do with you, or me, or anyone that chooses to ignore the fuck out of that kind of stupidity.
It is also true that attraction within your sexual orientation isn’t something you can choose. It is, however, something you can change. I’ll come back to that in a sec.
First though, our attraction to people within our orientation is not the same as orientation. Full stop, no bullshit, it isn’t something that is even remotely debatable at this point because there’s just too much evidence of it being the case. Being attracted to men, women, both, and (most likely, though there’s a lot less understanding of the whys and hows) neither is something that happens before you are born.
It cannot be changed, period. The most that can occur is someone realizing that their orientation isn’t as simple as they thought it was, then accepting that new awareness. Example: a gay dude may eventually realize there are very limited situations where he may be sexually attracted to a woman. This isn’t a change in his orientation, it’s simply a greater awareness of it.
So, please do absorb that and in the future avoid comparing your preferred looks/social status/whatever to sexual (or romantic) orientation. It’s just going to cause you problems, and in a way that will make it harder for you to find help with questions like this.
But, southsamurai, you say; how is it possible to change the rest? And, why did I have the attractions I have if it wasn’t a choice, but it’s changeable?
That’s a big hurdle to get past. Seriously, it’s hard.
Our ideas of what is and isn’t beautiful/attractive are formed before we even have the brain development to be attracted in any real way.
Now, there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to do in the way of explaining how I came across this all because it’s been in pieces over decades. I can’t link you to studies and publications because a lot of it came pre-internet on paper. So you’ll have to dig into it on your own if you want to connection or disprove any of this. I’m too damn old to do free reports, you dig?
Part of attraction is ingrained. We humans have a universal preference for two things) symmetry and adherence to the golden ratio. The Golden ratio is a little number that represents an ideal relationship between objects and their size. For example, if you look at someone’s ears, the ratio of them compared to their face width. The closer that ratio is to the golden ratio, the more attractive that face will be.
The symmetry is usually left/right, but it applies to other things too.
Now, you’re born with that level of preference. Even babies prefer looking at faces that are more symmetric, and closer to the golden ratio
But that says nothing at all about any of the other features.
So, what about things like hair and eye color? Where do our preferences for that kind of thing come from.
We learn it. Our exposure to other people when we’re very young influences it the most. We form our ideals of beauty by seeing our family, our neighbors, and eventually our teachers and peers. This all happens without conscious thought. It happens before we have the ability to even realize it’s happening.
It can even be formed inverted, where we reject some traits because of those early exposures. As an example, let’s say your aunt is mean as fuck. She’s blonde, so you end up not liking blondes. That’s over simplified, but that’s the idea of inverted beauty standards being formed. It doesn’t have to be that severe though.
There’s another aspect where familiarity is more likely to generate attraction. What you see most gets laid down as safe and constant. So you’re more likely to end up attracted to the familiar on average. It isn’t as universal as other aspects, and it can be inverted too, but it’s the norm. People tend to pick faces that resemble their early childhood exposure as being more attractive than otherwise.
Which means that if you’re surrounded by all blondes growing up, you’re more likely to find blondes attractive. Again, it can be inverted where you reject the familiar, and prefer everything else (which is supposedly about preventing inbreeding).
So, by the time you hit puberty, you’ve got this set of templates in your head that say “pretty”. Any person you meet gets placed against that template, and the closer they are to it, the prettier you think they are.
Okay, so how can we change that? If we start out only attracted to dwarf albino Basque women, we’re kinda SOL if we can’t change our standards of beauty. There just aren’t that many matches in the first place.
We change it the same way we formed it. We expose ourselves to variety. Given enough time, it will happen anyway. But you can speed it up by exposing yourself to images of other “types” in a controlled way. Get on the internet in a relaxed setting, with some comfort foods, or have a drink, or smoke a joint, or all of the above. The point is to set yourself up to be relaxed and feeling good. As you look at faces that don’t match your current preferences, you’ll be building up new layers of association.
This doesn’t apply just to faces. Works the same with bodies. Into super buff ladies? Do the same thing while looking at thicc ladies, super skinny ladies, or whatever, and you’ll eventually expand your tastes. Perhaps not to the degree that you’re as attracted to a skinny lady as you are to the gym goddess, but you’ll find that if you actually find a skinny lady and interact with her and it goes somewhere, that it will actually end up being your new preference, so long as you’re genuinely interacting with that person.
You can’t force attraction. But you can change your overall range. If you then act on that expanded range, and you get enough of those wonderful reinforcements like kisses and hugs and the holy grail of cuddles, your brain gets a massive dose of chemicals and positive experiences that rewrite everything.
But, how far does that go?
As far as you’re willing to take it. Truth is that even someone massively deformed, so that they aren’t anywhere close to the golden ratio or symmetry can be attractive to anyone. No bullshit, no being idealistic. Our brains are perfectly willing to ignore those facets so long as there are positives that counter them.
You ever see someone objectively unpleasant looking with someone that’s traditionally gorgeous? It happens. If you’re willing to abandon preconceptions, you can find anyone attractive. It’s all a matter of having those positive interactions that generate the right brain chemicals.
Leagues are imaginary. They’re lies we convince ourselves are true.
But, southsamurai you asshole, I’m ugly! How the fuck does that help me?
Well, you have to be able to interact with people in a way that generates those good feelings. The way to do that is to not treat people like a goal. You don’t think of them as something to gain or achieve. You don’t think of them as something at all. You discover who they are, while being a decent human being.
Part of that means abandoning entirely any concept of leagues. You have to eject and reject the concept that a person’s value is in their attractiveness at all. That means for yourself as well. If you’re thinking of things the way you are in your post, you have zero chance with anyone because you’ll only be capable of surface interactions. You could find the hottest model in the world, and get with her, but you’ll eventually lose her because you think of her as a hot model instead of “Jessica, this lady that is awesome”.
I promise you, if you abandon the concept of leagues, if you cut off the idea that “hotness”, beauty, sexual attraction, is important to long term happiness, you’ll be more attractive to everyone. You’ll have more friends. You’ll have partners. It may take longer to find a partner the more you diverge from symmetry and the golden ratio, because you have to encounter people that have gotten past the idea of looks being the center of attraction. But you will find them.
One of the great secrets of dating and sexual “success” is that the more you chase it, the less you’ll find it. The act of looking at other people as a goal to be achieved makes everything you say and do less likely to be attractive. At best, if you fake it well enough, you’ll fool people long enough to become someone they regret.
So, there you go my young homie. The collected knowledge of half a century of living, loving, and looking like a sasquatch while doing so.
When people say “work on yourself”, they rarely give useful advice beyond that. They’ll talk about maximizing your appearance, staying clean and dressing well, exercising, whatever.
But the stone cold truth is that none of that matters. Assuming we don’t get cancer or run over by am elephant, we all end up wrinkled, with saggy skin and aching joints. Ending up that way alone is horrible. You want another wrinkled, aching, saggy person with you as close to the end as possible. Looks ain’t shit. Looks don’t keep you warm at night.
Let’s hope it stays that way :)
We don’t get to actually interact much with chinese people in China, here in the states. The more all us regular people can get to know each other, the more chance we have of maybe breaking down the artificial barriers that keep us locked into our own worlds