I admonished a relative’s dog for not stopping at a curb while we’re walking. My relative asked me “Why do you say that to the dog? Do you think he can understand what you mean?”

I said “No that lecture was more for his owner’s sake, that he needs consistent training to not run into the street.”

Before it was coopted by the right to mean “child predator” or “deadly threat to everything holy” it was just a style of burlesque show, a whole niche cultural thing that never bothered anyone, open to anyone who wanted to take part.

They had problems with the fact that most performers are males or assigned male at birth, and the whole thing is basically parody of gender norms and style, but embraced rather than hated, and it was just a generally fun time. (Never mind that it’s kinda what stage performance has been like across the globe for hundreds or even thousands of years when it comes to gender-bending performances.)

Speaking as a CIS straight male, I have been to a couple shows and don’t really get it, it’s not my thing, but everyone is having fun and they’re being welcoming and happy and sharing a thing together, and it’s far more harmless than a million other silly things people do for fun as social groups.

Being “smart” and “thinking” are two very different things. You can be very smart but have no conscious thought. You can be a great thinker without ANY formal education or experience. (Calm down internet geniuses, you’re not that special.)

We might start figuring out how to get either one if we start understanding that there’s a difference.

Your brain doesn’t work the way you think it does. Your mind isn’t entirely your own. Your language influences your internal dialogue, and if you have no internal dialogue, you need to exercise that by reading a lot more and thinking about your thinking.

Nothing I said is to even suggest that you shouldn’t talk about your passions, just that you can temper it and gain the emotional intelligence in how to make it engaging for others, but I do hope you continue to take care of yourself and seek the happiness you deserve.

edit: i so love how people are literally addicted to the idea that they can’t change or be helped. We have truly given up as a species.

I don’t know what kind of care and support you’re getting, but if you have an ADHD diagnosis, I hope you’re aware that you still have agency and can still make major improvements to your life, it’s just harder than it is for others. Depending on the severity of the symptoms. You don’t just “grow out of it” normally, you DO have to make deliberate effort to improve the quality of your life if you want that, and that’s one of the major differences between having ADHD and people who don’t, the need to understand in greater detail how the brain works so you know how to manage it.

Intimately familiar, that’s where this kind of knowledge of how brains works comes from, this is process that most people who don’t have ADHD go through naturally in the course of life, ADHD and ASD can make it so you end up stunted slightly and never develop the tools naturally for change and growth.

Step 1. Be a young male with a terrible home life and only male friends, learn to communicate only through irony and sarcasm, preserve a culture of condemning or making fun of any genuine expressions of emotion or empathy from others because it’s “cringe.”

Step 2. Have ONE date in your teens in high-school with another teen who has no idea what she’s doing either, have it end badly as most teen relationships do.

Step 3. Use that experience to color your entire world-view for the rest of your life and start consuming manosphere content to relieve yourself of the discomfort of remembering how terrible that one romantic experience went. “It’s not you, it’s her!” should be echoing in your head every day.

Step 4. Really internalize other people’s ideas, thoughts and experiences as long as it validates what you’re feeling. Distance yourself from women even further, convince yourself they have nothing to offer you and are less-than-human so you have nothing you can learn from a “female.”

Step 5. Don’t forget to hate yourself most of all, wallow in your virginity like it’s your entire sense of self, think about sex constantly and hate yourself for it, develop a crushing porn habit that dulls your ability to feel pleasure from daily life. Self-medicate with games, escapism and drugs and alcohol. Ruminate on your depressive thoughts until you’ve picked your emotions raw like a scab that won’t heal.

Step 6. Make your disgust for women part of your entire identity, develop political views that also validate these feelings, avoid people in your life different from yourself lest they remind you that there are alternative perspectives in the world, only your own experiences and your own misery matters. Scowl in disgust when you see an attractive woman with a man, have dark, violent fantasies about having power, control, and bad things happening to people who aren’t you. Over-correct your sense of masculinity to an absurd degree, avoid the color pink, don’t touch your own ass in the shower, sneer in disgust at any attempt by others to reach you and talk about life or offer advice, they’re just NPC’s and are brainwashed by liberal media! None of this is real! We’re in The Matrix people!!

Step 7. A beautiful, submissive woman who fits all your ideals will now approach you and beg you to marry her. You will live happily ever after.

It works 100% of the time.

Problem is, the same girl who finds it attractive will find it annoying in a week or two, and all of a sudden that thing she liked makes me a jerk.

If you can only talk about one thing with any level of passion, yeah people are gonna get bored.

I think a lot of younger folk online really misconstrue what it means to “get hobbies” or “just put yourself out there” and other tired cliches.

It doesn’t mean having X hobby and just standing there around people is going to change how women look at you. It means you have to train your OWN brain to be more comfortable expressing yourself and finding new ways to feel about your situation or interests.

Basically, everyone whines endlessly how they wish they were someone else, but you can literally change who you are on a fundamental level by changing your environment enough and forcing yourself to feel new things. Brains just do that. But people resist the moment they feel something starting to change inside them and recoil as your ego tries to preserve itself. Then they make up reasons why they didn’t commit to change and why they can’t let go of their old-self.

That’s a lotta Henry Cavill in your life, are you sure you’re not Henry Cavill?

Cathartic for those struggling or feeling insecure.

But somewhere along the way we broadly all stopped understanding the very nature of “catharsis” and just decided that anything that makes us feel a certain way MUST be some kind of fundamental truth and now will be our life direction.

Apparently we’re also going to mix it with deeply toxic envy of celebrities for seasoning.

Imagine how happy the world would be if people suddenly stopped wishing they were someone else and just realized that they only get one fucking chance to live life and every moment you spend wishing you were someone else is just a massive fucking disservice to yourself and people in your life.

It’s part of why I cut my social media entirely, there’s nobody I care enough about and can’t just talk to or call that would make me want to endure the endless stream of people I barely know or long-lost coworkers and friends hitting me up to buy a ticket to a “conference” or try to get me to sell energy bars or essential oils.

I agree. But don’t really care if people use it, I just cannot stand when people wave it around like a new teddy bear that gives them a smug sense of superiority for… checks notes …using a product that someone is selling to let stupid people do easy things.

None of the kids you’re talking to on this site have friends, much less play actual D&D, they probably just read the manuals and imagine running campaigns based on how they interact with other loners online.

As a game, it’s a purely social experience that even the rules are far less important than the narratives and shared storytelling experience, most adults know this and it’s why they play these kinds of games, not to “win” or be some champion of self-expression.

I am ranting about it because there is a wild disconnect between the kinds of people who use sites like this and reality. I don’t think a lot of people who comment about things online have healthy, balanced lives. I mean, I know I don’t, but I also know that many others have totally different kinds of issues that pulls them into the comment sections of sites like Lemmy or Reddit.

Sorry my comment didn’t have Subway Surfers playing in the corner with a popular streamer reacting to it so you could actually read it and understand it.

I’m not impressed by today’s AI and I also fully understand that the tech is going to completely upend society and will eventually be a part of our picture of utopia, or our picture of actual hell on Earth.

The people who are screaming it’s wild wonders and benefits are at least as closed-minded as the people who think we’re going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The actual direction this tech moves is going to be far more like the discovery of radio, in that at the time of it’s discovery and early implementation, the people then had no idea the implications down the road and we’re at the same point. Except the big difference and why this is contentious is that radio was far less dangerous to society broadly.

Radio was a fundamental force that always existed around us, we learned to use it the way our ancestors used rivers and waters to move goods and people. AI is completely human-made and doesn’t exist without human engineering, so it’s not neutral, it’s a tool shaped by man to do whatever a man wants with it.

A side rack with drainage into the sink is ideal for handwashing dishes, anything more or less complicated than that is going to be endless headaches. This thing looks unstable as fuck.

Imagine pumping soap from the dispenser while the top rack has several plates and pots and pans (and fruit??) on it.

even the RX9070 is running around $900 USD, I cannot fathom affording even state-of-the-art gaming from years ago at this point. I am still using a GTX1660 and playing games from years ago I never got around to and having a grand time. Most adults I know are in the same boat and either not even considering upgrading their PC or they’re playing their kid’s console games.

Every year we say “Gonna look into upgrading” but every year prices go up and wages stay the same (or disappear entirely as private-equity ravages the business world, digesting every company that isn’t also a private equity predator) and the prices of just living and eating are insane, so at this rate, a lot of us might start reading again.

I’ll deliver this reply in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:

If you want to make a reference to Donald Trump being at his birthday parade and thus exposed, vulnerable and in the open and presently not looking up, turn to page 89.

If you rather make a reference to how we should leave the Devil be because the Devil himself is more respectable and honorable than any of these monstrous despots who murder out of spite and wrap themselves in scripture, turn to page 322.

I haven’t looked into the methodology but I would wager off the top of my head that it has to do with the large migrant population in California. (you’ve probably seen a little bit of news about it) California being a highly populated, coastal state with a booming economy means it has more of everything. It has the most problems and conversely it has the most solutions, the most high-tech, progressive ideas and industries across the street from homeless tent-towns.