That’s interesting and I hadn’t realized. It’s not surprising, I guess, we people tend to latch onto the salacious bits (see the joke about “if you build 100 bridges do they call you Johnny the bridge builder?..”). And frankly “people like to dress up as animals and LARP as them” (and apologies if that’s overly reductive to someone) just isn’t all that interesting lol, like any other hobby I don’t happen to be into.

Bit about the dentists makes perfect sense, haha. Bet the lawyers are about the same.

LOL just a devoted nerddom out here making even the Olympic Village look like a buncha prudes by comparison, and no one knows because the participants are too busy fucking to communicate with the outside world.

Wait, this is news to me. My understanding was that it began as effectively a kink with its associated community. Like, I think I recall it being pretty much strictly sexual in every way I heard of it for a long time. And then lately I see that it’s more broad than that - the most clear example I have is when my kiddo’s friend recently named it as one of the cliched “kid archetypes” at their high school, e.g. jock/goth/furry/etc. Maybe it was just never specifically sexual or maybe it’s been through some evolutions.

I’m not ready to recommend others become gun owners, that’s too personal a decision, but I do think it’s unwise for only one side of a major political rift (manufactured / artificially maintained as it may be) to be well armed. Especially when law enforcement is also overwhelmingly on that same political side that’s already well armed. Especially when that same political side is the source of the folks who said “we better storm the capital to make sure elections turn out how we think they should”.

I’m okay with brief compulsory service, in favor of “sensible gun laws”, and firmly against any approach to full disarmament at present - that solution could only be remotely feasible after maybe a full generation where firearm ownership was not a hot button issue. Any approach to disarmament in the US without a long quiet period would be received as hostile action by ~half of the country and rejected categorically, along with any good will on other issues. We need to drop that and find people to elect who will cooperate on issues of broad popularity.

Ah, those are reasonable points of view to me. I think responsible gun ownership is fairly straightforward and the statistics look that way because of the extremely irresponsible folks who don’t take it seriously, and because suicide is usually included. Proper gun safety really only requires diligently following a few simple rules, make those consistently followed - habitual - and the additional risk drops to pretty close to zero.

But I concede that owning a gun does - at again just a definitional level - create a path of escalation which is almost always inappropriate to pursue, which is not available without that gun, and that’s inherently risky too. It’s not a decision to be taken lightheartedly, but we all face risk at varying degrees and have to make our own decisions about what are good and bad tradeoffs there.

There are a lot of folks (of all political persuasion, which is not to say it’s evenly distributed at all) who are definitely LARPing, and I think their idiot rhetoric is foolish and potentially harmful. I just think the quiet gun-owning left shouldn’t be automatically associated with that group, and if I remember the original comment right, I don’t think the poster indicated any hidden desire for violence.

I agree that we should be discussing and insisting on action for way more substantive and impactful stuff, guns are a ridiculous wedge issue that will never be “resolved”, and our limited time is definitely better spent trying to force improvements that would benefit and be popular with a majority of people.

You seem to be taking an “either / or” approach here. In my opinion the left should do everything possible to avoid violence, and also own guns in case these efforts are unsuccessful. It doesn’t need to be one or the other.

It’s really kind of a matter of definitions to me. In my view, there exist situations where a firearm is about the only way to prevent super bad outcomes for myself. Those situations are uncommon, there are many good ways to avoid them usually, and I hope to never find myself in one. But by definition, if I find myself in a situation like that, having a firearm available is the difference between having agency and having none.

Some people feel that the likelihood of such a scenario is so small that it’s a bad idea to prepare for it. Maybe this is how you feel? I do understand that point of view, I simply disagree. I don’t really understand points of view that seem to argue there is no scenario where firearms are useful, or that we’re magically “past that” as a society (and to be clear, I’m not sure you’re taking that stance). To take one example, just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example of how flimsy our law and order really is. Once a situation is bad enough to overwhelm the existing structures we have in place, all bets are off and rules for behavior evaporate. We’ve seen this happen, in our country, in our lifetimes, more than once. I don’t understand the derision - why eye roll?

Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍

Right, believe I heard that tribes/peoples on other nearby islands were essentially ruined by their contact with modernity, making this a pretty reasonable response.

Thanks for this, really enjoyed it :)

KenM? You made your way to the lemmyverse?

That’s fair, it’s not my interpretation though. It’s been a while and I don’t remember the specifics well by now, but I definitely came away feeling like he was an egocentric asshole just in it for the attention. To be fair, a far more interesting and useful egocentric asshole than most! But I ended up not liking him…as in, I don’t just have some complaints about unpolished moments, I would actually choose not to hang out with him if given the chance. And I came to that opinion after starting off absolutely smitten with the guy.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it’s the way I viewed him with hope and admiration, then later discovered he’s just yet one more self-obsessed asshole media personality. It’s rare anymore that I switch off the cynicism the world has beaten into me and allow myself to just assume the best about some media figure. And doing so leaves one vulnerable - finding out later that this was naive and foolish really hardens that cynicism. This stings in a way that just assuming he was a piece of shit from the start doesn’t.

Thanks so much, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I also know exactly what you mean - weirdly, maybe the most potentially harmful thing about cannabis is the way it makes doing nothing tolerable and even enjoyable. I think overuse does lead to a lot of very stunted life trajectories and ultimately unfulfilling time spent on earth for many people. Certainly did for me in my youth. Of course there are the rare folks like my buddy who smokes daily for decades on end and does more stuff than I do.

In myself I’ve noticed that it makes me much more shy and less willing to engage with others when under the influence. Oddly enough I can sometimes be more productive with it, though, because the right dose tends to quiet my otherwise kind of scattered attention and I’ll work on just one thing rather than 4 at once (badly). I write software for a living and a small dose actually helps me just grind out some boring code that needs to get written. But like you said it limits depth so it’s not good for thinking about project structure and decision making. And at higher doses it does leave me very content with doing very little - at least in the moment.

Anyway. I’ll keep my eye on it, thanks for relating your experience!

Would you be willing to elaborate on the negative effects you observed that led to your decision to drop it? I gave up alcohol this year - I’ve slowly been adding in cannabis lately and want to watch for issues with overuse and such.

Without remembering the track name I knew without a doubt that this is the minute you meant.

The first time I heard this as a kid my jaw was on the floor and mind was blown, it really changed me. It’s just so unbelievably, effortlessly dope.

You may have ideas in mind about what kind of person they’ll be, in terms of interests, personality, etc. This can be really strong because it may come from deep subconscious wants, and you may not even realize it, but it’ll come out in your behavior. Nudging toward this activity, away from this one - that kind of thing. Be really careful with this - your kid will tell you who they are, and it can be super damaging if you don’t listen.

You can shape values, and you can show them your enthusiasm for what you think is cool, but stop short of trying to shape what they like and who they are. Accept and get excited about the things they’re into and they’ll always want to share with you and keep you involved as they get older. Enthusiasm and passion are so much more important and useful in life than liking this thing over that thing, but it can be hard to let go of your implicit ideas about their future personality.

We very much expected kind of a tomboy-ish, or at least mixed interest girl. Rough and tumble, daredevil, etc. Not at all - she is the most classically feminine, pink-loving, only-interested-in-dolls little kid you can imagine.

Hey, thanks, that’s a useful (and probably fairly accurate) distinction and I’m happy to find that a positive shift in my viewpoint, if minor. The corruption might be a really big problem or it might be one guy who’s an aberration for being wildly outside the court’s norms, really unclear on that part. But I needed a solid reminder that it’s not quite yet another ruined and hypocritical institution we once held dear.

Seriously. I’m not at all of the opinion that both sides are equivalently bad for our society, but this is just silly.

Any suggestions for someone with a parent who openly acknowledges that he’s having cognitive changes / difficulties? I get the sense he’s experiencing precisely this kind of pre-dementia decline. He’s on Medicare, FWIW. I just assumed nothing was realistically available (thanks, US healthcare system for the deep sense of futility), but would love to be wrong.

Thing is, when you’re drinking as much as you are, you can’t really trust how you’re feeling as being really how you feel. Alcohol has such an influence on mood / outlook / general emotional state that I’d argue you don’t really know how you feel right now. The insidious part is that all the emotions feel just as genuine as sober feelings, even though they’re being shaped so heavily by outside chemicals.

I’m not arguing that if you take some time off you’ll magically discover you’re just super happy or something, I’m not naive. But you can’t really trust your emotional state when it’s this heavily manipulated. For me, problems feel much bigger and more hopeless when I drink regularly. There’s also an anxiety that comes with heavy use that’s near universal, and I don’t have that feeling at all sober, just flat out isn’t there. Take 30 days and find out how you really feel, and pay attention to how those feelings change as you get some distance - you at least owe yourself that. You don’t have to make some huge “never again” commitment. Just take the time to really dry out and see what your emotions are like from there. You’ve got nothing to lose by doing so, it’s just a few weeks.

Oh, ETA - like you my hangover symptoms were always super mild and that definitely contributed to overdoing it. I really only get severe fatigue and low motivation, but even that was absent for years. Plus I was internally doing some stupid macho “I can handle this when others can’t” type shit, not sure if you’ve let that seep into your identity as well.