We once did something really amazing along these lines. Only once, it was a crap ton of work.
We were fighting this giant demon wall thing. We made it out of Graham crackers and chocolate decorations, which we attached with melted chocolate as glue, basically. It was super creepy - I made demon eyes, oozing blood stuff, it’s was great.
As we damaged the wall, we would rip parts of and eat it. It was like a solid 2-3 freaking pounds of chocolate and other assorted things. It was glorious to devour the enemy like that!
It’s annoying when monogamous people act like we’re all lying about experiencing compersion.
Man, do I feel this. Why is it so hard to believe that people can feel differently about things?
No, I’m not jealous and afraid my wife is going to leave me if she has sex with someone else. She isn’t when I do that, either.
We’ll eagerly discuss all the juicy details. She loves hearing about my adventures. She’s more shy, so I hear more about who she’d like to be with rather than actual adventures. We both giggle and discuss people we’d totally bang and there really actually isn’t an undercurrent of anxiety about it.
If I found someone that I started to fall in love with, isn’t that an awesome thing? Love is wonderful! And the sort of person that I could love would be someone that my wife would, at the very least, like. How does this not sound like a wonderful situation to people?
Monogamy doesn’t make sense to me, though I respect people’s right to feel the way they do. If they feel jealousy, that’s allowed. If they think it’s better to have jealousy, then I’m confused, but whatever.
It’s just weird that feeling differently gets such negative reactions and accusations of lying.
This community is for people who have a special neuronal configuration and I’d like to hear how you discovered it. Were you told? By who? How did you take it? How is life today?...
I’ve been going to a psychologist on and off for “social dysfunction” since I was like 3. My family wasn’t well off, so it was more my mom trying to do what she could with evaluations or whatever every few years.
I was diagnosed with ADD back when everyone was diagnosed with it, despite not meeting pretty much any of the criteria. My mom tried to argue about it, but random not-quite-poor person vs psychologist, she was blown off.
I used to fantasize that there was an alien civilisation that was trying to understand earth and so created a human-alien mental hybrid to try to make sense of humanity. It’d mean there was nowhere I truly belonged, of course, but it’d also mean there was a reason, a purpose, to me being surrounded by confusing aliens.
Mom ended up going to medical school and learned about autism (and Asperger’s, at the time) while there. She was furious. I was a textbook case of a woman with Asperger’s syndrome, but in my youth, psychologists frequently didn’t consider it possible for female patients to have Asperger’s.
She wasn’t sure if she should mention it, since by that time I was an adult and on my own. I discovered it through a video game, actually - To The Moon, an amazing story in which one of the main characters has Asperger’s.
I mentioned it to her as a “holy crap, I looked into this and I feel like I’ve been seen!” And she mentioned what she’d learned in school. It kinda annoyed me that she hadn’t passed that along, but between her support and what I’d seen, I pursued options and got diagnosed.
Now it’s just autism and not Asperger’s, but whatever. Still, it was blatantly obvious my entire life. I had a rough childhood. I didn’t manage to actually make a friend of my own till I was 17. I had a few friends before then, sort of, but they were a thing where I was kinda adopted because I was easy to manipulate, and not any real connection.
I could be defiant as hell, but I was so lonely, I’d do anything for those who called me friend, so… yeah, not the best friendships, in hindsight.
Really wish those psychologists would have identified my issues back when. My life would have been vastly different.
It’s been a number of years, and I’ve found my way. Found someone truly amazing to get married to and she’s done a lot to help me out. I still suck at making friends, but my wife helps bridge that gap.
Interestingly enough, tabletop roleplaying games, like dungeons and dragons, helped me more than anything else. I could practice different ways of interacting with people and get actual feedback on how I came across - people will criticize characters I’m pretending to be in a way that they won’t for my real self. And it has lower stakes - if I screw up in that context, it doesn’t matter. If I freeze and don’t know what to do, I can just roll a die and make the problem go away.
I appreciate what you and your wife are doing. If it weren’t for my wife, I’d probably really be in need of that sort of support. Thank you.
Yes, omg! And the world building idiocy drove me absolutely insane.
Like, this one part where the were-something (might have been a werewolf?) was like, “only the first born of any pair of weres will also be a were” or something, and the immediate reaction… was to wonder why the were population wasn’t taking over the whole country or whatever. And the were took that seriously, saying the only reason their population wasn’t huge was a large number of stillbirths and such.
They try to backtrack that a few books later, and deal with the actual consequences of the fact that they literally can’t increase their population without polyamory - clearly someone informed the author of how stupid that was - but still, that initial response was some of the most obviously not-thought-out world building I’ve seen.
… okay, maybe that’s not true, but some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a book I continued to read, anyway.
I mean like I accept who I was born as but if given the choice I’d choose to be born a woman, yk? Idk but I kinda envy them a bit but i’m fine being an unsexy man...
I consider myself a woman, but I’m pretty apathetic about gender all told. I think I’d adjust to being male pretty well? It’d be weird and uncomfortable for a while and I’m sure I’d find things I’d miss about being a woman.
But between the male privilege and biological advantages (no periods, easier strength, etc), it sounds like a deal to me.
Totally makes sense. I mean, it’s surely more than that, but that’s definitely a frustration.
I’m a woman who’s into video games, science stuff, tech things, tabletop roleplaying games (like DnD), etc, among other things. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but I definitely wasn’t properly welcome.
I was rarely told that I wasn’t welcome as a woman, but if, for example, I mention that I’ve been playing DnD for 10 years, it doesn’t exactly feel welcoming to have them try to take my dice to explain them to me.
Men practically never have to put up with that kind of bullshit, as I understand.
I used to love physical books, but I just can’t do them anymore. It’s eBooks all the way - on my phone, namely.
I love to read so much and the ability to have my book on me at all times is irresistible. Going to the bathroom? Waiting at the doctor’s office? A few minutes break at work? Snuggling in bed at night and I don’t want to turn on a light and disturb my partner?
I’ve tried a few times to read physical books in the last few years, and having gotten addicted to the pleasure of reading whenever the hell I want, I just can’t anymore.
Audiobooks are great for long car drives, but I rarely do those, so they’re a very occasional treat for me.
You’re saying that 10% of the population being awful means that a “huge number” are deeply broken.
So then 90% are being good! Mind, it doesn’t take too many assholes to wreck things for everyone, but it is nice that the majority of folks really are trying to do their best. A sizeable majority, even!
Oh, no denying that at all. It is a problem, especially in aggregate.
When looking at the big picture, those rotten apples really do spoil the bunch and it can be depressing.
But also people can take that big picture awareness of problems and hate on people a little universally. Saying things like humanity is awful and a plague on the earth and maybe shouldn’t exist. There’s absolutely reason to see things that way.
But we are also a species that dolphins can approach for help when they’re injured. Or that will fight tooth and nail to help a wild creature. Or who will sacrifice their own well-being, not just for friends and family, but for strangers. Who will take other creatures, like dogs, into our homes and hearts and love them with all we have.
We can suck as a species, absolutely. We need to fix it. But it’s important to remember the joys of humanity, and not just the failures. Both are extreme, for we are a rather extreme species!
It’s saying that some men are complete assholes when they’re rejected, and so it’s not a simple and straightforward thing to reject men.
Don’t invalidate the experiences of women who have had reason to have trouble. Don’t say stupid shit like “just say no, why do women gotta do things like ghost people,” etc.
And if you do hit on women, don’t give them a hard time for rejecting you! They’re allowed to say no, for any reason, and they aren’t required to justify themselves to you.
But absolutely continue to pursue women - respectfully.
Florida’s attorney general is one among many from red states across the country threatening Maine with legal action as the New England state considers a shield law that would protect those seeking abortions and health care from criminal repercussions in Florida....
I get where you’re coming from and why, I really do, but I think saying stuff like that is really unhelpful.
I’m about as left wing as they come, but I grew up in rural Florida. All the bullshit you see about the place? That’s my family. None of them specifically have shown up on the news, but still, it’s them - their beliefs, attitudes, etc.
The issue isn’t deception or manipulation from regular conservatives. When my grandparents / cousins spit out that sort of bullshit, that’s not what’s going on.
The issue, rather, is a complex one that is, among other things, a thing of trust.
They believe, honestly and truly, in Fox News. They believe in their preachers. They believe that homosexuality is a demon that possesses people, and by interacting with “the gays,” you “open the door” to demonic influence in your life.
That last bit is an example of something I was outright taught.
When my grandparents talk about how it’d be good for America to round up all the gays and put them in concentration camps, what they’re feeling is protectiveness. They want to protect people from Satan’s influence, and if someone has accepted the enemy to the point of being proudly gay, then why should people be sympathetic to them? Get rid of them all, obviously.
Yes, it’s insane and hurtful and stupid and so frustrating that I haven’t spoken to my extended family in a few years.
But they’re not trying to trick people. They don’t need to think about what they believed before, they don’t need to second guess what’s right, they know what’s right. What’s right is believing in the authority figures they’ve been trained to believe in. What is right is to listen, to obey, to fight as they are directed to fight, for the good of all.
It’s horrifying from the outside, but from the inside, it’s a safe little bubble where you don’t have to wonder and worry about what is the right thing to do. It’s easy - the only hard part is acting on it. Do what’s right, and everything else will fall into place. It’s simple and feels good.
To challenge that way of thinking, to suggest that they have to figure it out themselves - that’s a huge ask. Going against what they’ve been taught their whole lives, and for what? To have to deal with moral uncertainty and unsolvable moral dilemmas? That’s hardly a reason to change.
Yeah, I’ve run into that plenty myself. Hell, I’m a woman and I have a wife, and I was once accused of being homophobic… as I was trying to explain why I was happy about living thousands of kilometers from my family.
It really bugs me when people accuse people like my grandparents of being “hateful.” If my grandparents see that, they’ll just see more “proof” that left wingers have no idea what they’re talking about.
I can’t do anything to fix the issues on the conservative side of the fence - I really wish I could - but I can hopefully help on my side of the fence, with fostering better understanding and communication.
My break from conservative thinking was… uh… perhaps best described as a violent psychological event. I went from thinking we were the good guys, to maybe getting some things wrong, to suddenly realizing I’d been unknowingly on the side of evil my whole life. Meeting someone who was gay and hearing his story, about the abuse he took from people who acted exactly as I’d been taught to… Stars above, that ripped out my heart.
And if I hadn’t already had my beliefs cracking and under pressure, I’d have blown off his story as pure manipulation.
It’s a whole thing, for me. I can only hope for reconciliation of some kind. My family members aren’t really evil people - they mean well, even if they only consider people who are straight, white, and Christian to be fully people.
But calling them things they aren’t won’t ever get them to listen.
Not that I know what would get them to listen, beyond convincing their pastor of things…
That is an excellent point. Yeah, PSI would totally read as pounds times square inches which would be something else entirely. Adding in the extra P would fix it, too. PPSI. Suppose it’s another thing that people just have to get used to, haha.
I’ve explicitly taught this concept in my English classes, actually.
A run on sentence, for example, is a fantastic tool for expressing overly excited rambling from a character.
It only works for that purpose if the rest of the writing isn’t full of run on sentences.
You have to know the rules and follow them well in order to break them for effect. I told my kids that if they obviously broke a rule for effect in their writing, I wouldn’t hold it against them, but it’d only work if they were otherwise near perfect with that rule.
I had one take me up on it! It was cool. She also wrote a postscript explaining what she did and why, which was hilarious, because it was pretty obvious. She’d used sentence fragments to show incredulity. It was great.
It’s complicated. Short version, over a small amount of time.
In the case of water, how it kills you is by diluting your blood, basically. Your kidneys will be working extremely hard (and quickly) to empty out the excess water, so for the most part, you’ve got to drink much faster than your kidneys can work.
That said, it’s not just speed - other stuff gets cleaned out with your urine, like certain vitamins and such. Drinking excess water over a long time, but significantly more than what’s on the chart, will drain you of certain nutrients / electrolytes, and that’ll screw you, too.
Drinking sports drinks in that quantity could actually sidestep that particular problem, drastically raising the amount of water you can take in.
One way or another, though, while it’s possible to hurt or kill yourself from drinking too much water, you have to bring it to some serious extremes and your body should be vehemently complaining during this process.
If ever you think you’re doing something extreme and might possibly be slightly risky in this regard, just drink some electrolyte heavy stuff instead for a while - Gatorade, Powerade, etc. Then your only risk is basically outrunning your kidneys and your stomach should really be making you throw up if you try that.
You might have had bad teachers and bad admin, true - but more likely, the school can’t do anything.
I’m a teacher, and I cannot tell you how incredibly frustrated I am at how tied my hands are. The admin can’t do much, either.
My options: talk sternly to the student. Talk sternly to the parent/guardians. And… that’s it.
Send them to the office? Sure. The principal also has those two options, for the most part. Suspending students is something we only do in very rare circumstances, but they really, really try to avoid it, because so often, kids are acting out because of stuff at home, so suspending them only makes the behaviour worse.
We can’t do detentions after school or on weekends - we can’t force parents to bring their kids in then. Lunch hour detentions, we can’t afford dedicated staff to run them, especially since we’d also need them to chase the students down, because it’s not like they’ll go just because they were told to. We can’t fail students any more.
Our district has also even gotten rid of prizes for achievements - no more honor roll, no awards, nothing. Apparently this makes the low performers feel bad, and we couldn’t have that.
And talking to the parents? Most parents are honestly great, but also, I never talk to them, because the kids with the great parents, I never need to call home. The asshole kids? Their parents are almost always a nightmare. And it’s a waste of time to talk to them.
One kid last year, went after another kid’s field trip paperwork with a pair of scissors. Ripped into her like no one’s business. Sent an email home describing the situation. I was pretty sure, based on her history, she wasn’t really going to destroy his stuff, she was trying to get a rise out of him, so I said something like, “while I believe she was only intending to annoy him, not actually destroy property, it is critical for her to understand that this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour” or something like that.
So rather than telling her kid off, mom goes to the principal to try to get me in trouble for calling her kid annoying.
In application? Doesn’t matter what the teachers or even admin want to do. The district, province/state, and country have taken away practically every carrot and stick, when it comes to students with extreme behavior.
In that case, yeah, you’ve got an admin problem. I’m sorry - that really sucks. The entire system desperately needs an overhaul. The education system in Canada is a dumpster fire, and the US is even worse. Dealing with behavioral issues is one of many major problems…
Or maybe it’s a joke on a kid pretending they’re an adult and ready for a TTRPG with adults? Because that is definitely annoying. I haven’t played random online pickup games in forever, but I was extremely opposed to playing with kids, for many reasons. Teaching them how to play is one thing - I helped run a DnD club at the school I work at - but that’s definitely sharing the hobby rather than games that I actually enjoy for myself.
I didn’t see this as him saying that people know better than doctors.
I saw this as him saying that self diagnosis, especially with multiple tests from reasonably reliable sources, is a valuable tool in a wide variety of circumstances, and with autism in particular, has very few ill effects and is a net positive.
Including as a first step in the official diagnosis process.
There may be a number of reasons not to get an official diagnosis. When I self diagnosed for autism about… maybe 15 years ago, there was a three year wait list for the only psychiatric diagnosis thing I could afford. (I can’t remember the details, it’s been a while, but it was some government funded program.)
I have since gotten an official diagnosis, but getting the unofficial one first was extremely helpful for me in narrowing down where I should focus my efforts.
The guy, towards the end, was even encouraging people to get the official diagnosis - if they’re able to, financially, etc. But starting with self diagnosis makes a great deal of sense.
The whole thing was about cutting down the myths and attacks around self diagnosis and saying people should be allowed to start there without getting attacked for it. That’s all it is.
I, incidentally, am not anti vax or anti science. I’m a science teacher, as it happens, and science is totally my jam. I love how he included study information on accuracy rates of self diagnosis, and misdiagnosis rates for mental health issues with the medical field. I love how he encouraged people to get official diagnoses, and how his suggestions for the medical field were to increase access and affordability for people. This video did not strike me as anti science or anti psychiatry at all.
I absolutely love this idea (lemmy.world)
What is your opinion? (lemmy.world)
Have you replaced any British words with their American versions?
For example, switching out the word ‘boot’ for ‘trunk’, or ditching the word ‘rubbish’ for ‘garbage’....
How did you learn you were "different"?
This community is for people who have a special neuronal configuration and I’d like to hear how you discovered it. Were you told? By who? How did you take it? How is life today?...
Awful Book (lemmy.world)
If given a new life would you choose to be born the same sex that you were?
I mean like I accept who I was born as but if given the choice I’d choose to be born a woman, yk? Idk but I kinda envy them a bit but i’m fine being an unsexy man...
Pick One: Which is your favorite way to read books? (lemmy.zip)
degree in bamf (mander.xyz)
XXX (sh.itjust.works)
Why Florida might sue Maine over abortion, transgender health care shield law. What to know (www.floridatoday.com)
Florida’s attorney general is one among many from red states across the country threatening Maine with legal action as the New England state considers a shield law that would protect those seeking abortions and health care from criminal repercussions in Florida....
Stuck (slrpnk.net)
Learn the rules, then break them! (lemmy.world)
Lego Sashimi (stop motion) (i.imgur.com)
Direct link in case the former doesn’t work: imgur.com/gallery/Br88Lv3...
The lethal doses of 55 substances (infosec.pub)
Everytime (lemmy.ml)
There's a reason I run vibe checks before DMing for people (lemmy.world)
Video: The constant gaslighting that autistic people experience (infosec.exchange)
Can anyone relate?