• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’m going to analyze this assuming you’re more manly than not, since that’s where my experience is at.

    Emotions are separate, related issues that can be tackled just like a man can. A therapist with “Men’s Issues” experience knows how to frame the woo and abstractions of regular therapy with more actionable techniques. Someone with very intense or inappropriate emotions may need to face the emotions MORE than the problem at hand. There are techniques and viewpoints to be understood, and I had to use these myself.

    It’s stuff like simple facts about emotions. They exist. They influence your actions. They can be modified and analyzed. They need to be managed like an adult manages a child. Ignoring emotions can compact them into deep seated hurt that induce more emotions. Process your past to free yourself from that hurt. It won’t be fast, but it needs to be done.

    If certain situations that cause emotions can be avoided, do so when reasonable. If they cannot be ignored, recognize that external help through tools, techniques, and friends are not weakness, but the weapons you use to to fight your battles. Forgive yourself slipping while always focusing on the output. Learn to cry, and know how it makes you more powerful and strong.

    Notice that this is closer to “wise old karate master” or “Boy Scout Scoutmaster” talk. It’s what men crave but rarely find in popular media. IF the person does not have issues with their emotions and have a sufficiently sized ego, pulling them through the first steps of anxiety and hesitation is enough to make someone feel competent and secure. Positive visualization, goading their ego, pushing buttons (gently), it’s good for many men but not for all of them, and it just doesn’t translate to a lot of women. Expand your arsenal of emotional management for your target audience. You’re a good person for wanting to find a better way to help others.


  • Both because they are the ultimate tools in maneuvering a terrible, terrible development environment. For reference, Sigasi Studio costs 2,000$ PER YEAR, and it still doesn’t work for our dev environment!

    Let me paint a picture: Corporate job that won’t let you download anything except whatever you can smuggle through a git checkout. It took a month to convince IT to download vim 9.0 on the server. The programming language? VHDL and SystemVerilog and UVM. Horrible language support that relies on proprietary compilers/simulators, and always the ones you aren’t using. The one you are using is so obtuse that it has literally 50 configuration files for a single project. All of it is run with a janky python script with half of the flags not working. LSP support is out of the question since it dynamically pulls files from god knows where with at least 10 layers of …/ relative pathing.

    All I can do on vim is

    • ctrl+p for fuzzy file finding and a massive blacklist of intermediate files to ignore,

    • a custom :Make command with custom errorformat that you can navigate through,

    • Universal Ctags with per library indexes to reference those far off files,

    • and a fuckton of grepping for when Go To Definition (ctrl+]) grabs the wrong location.

    Vim’s autocomplete is almost always good enough. If my laundry list of plugins break, I can literally fix them on the spot and even submit the merge request on github. If you take into consideration all of this configuration and learning effort, I still save hours of navigating through the hundreds of files I have to essentially reverse engineer. My coworkers are all electrical engineers and it shows They’re using godforsaken nedit with no syntax highlighting…


  • If you want to know where I stand, my trans boyfriend came out a long time into our long distance relationship and he wanted surgery. I was a bit torn on the idea, but what really sold me was that he was gonna have a dick if he did surgery. THAT was cool with me, and likewise with the body shape thing. Boobs, ass, vagina, dick is all good with me, balls included.

    And the cool thing is? He’s having second thoughts on it now that he’s moved in with me and away from their parents. Given the freedom to choose gender identity regardless of their body, they are a lot happier and don’t need to pigeonhole themselves into a sexual/gender stereotype. I, for one, don’t care. His sexual orientation is demisexual due to need for emotional connection, whilst mine is pansexual(?) because I honestly don’t care. He does it for me and that’s great.

    It might be comforting to know that pansexual as a label exists and that your preferences are shared with others. You might find quite the assortment of… 2d images online. By the ratios it’s 8:5:1 for female bodies:male bodies:female bodies with dicks. Really, it’s not that uncommon. You might find even more freedom once you find the people that give you the liberty to truly own my desires. Feel free to interact with femboys, strapon girls, intersex people, whatever and wherever. Your sexual arousal needs no words to justify itself.



  • NovelAI is an amazing tool if you want to write stories. Cost: 10-25$ with a free trial, of course. In comparison to GPT-style LLMs, it has far less general knowledge, but it has immense training on online books and fanfiction. If you start writing a story, it will start emulating your style and producing great details with perfect grammar. And the best part? Born out of the dumpster fire of AI Dungeon, no censorship on anything. Full, unabridged NSFW, gore, suicide, war, torture. I’ve written a medieval war story turned isekai (with authentic battle damage) turned smut. Sadly, unless you wanna rip the leaked parameters floating around 4chan, you can’t selfhost. You can store it locally and in a file or in your cookies, and it does have free remote storage too.

    Ugh, I keep wanting to add more edits. It has great AI generation bundled in, with most people (notably Japanese) coming for that. All Danbooru trained. Yes, that means what you think it means.

    There are caveats, though. You need to actually put in some effort for your first prompts and tweaking the configs. Thankfully, the UI is GORGEOUS. A quick ask on the Discord can give you the up-to-date best options anyway, and they’re quite helpful. The AI needs some rather intensive editing, but that’s the thing: It’s as if NovelAI is the writer and you are the editor. And it’s damn good at writing. Railroad onto plot point and it will shine like diamonds in one or two runs through the AI. And? If you get really into the nitty gritty with their actual fantastic documentation, you can do stuff like inject AO3 tags into your story to induce a particular mood, theme, tone, genre, style, etc. I legitimately am going to tell my future kids that I did AI the cool way.


  • Do yourself a favor and trick yourself into liking the Zero or Diet versions of your chosen soda. Notably, the Zero formulations have less and less aftertaste. I have found Zero versions of Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Pepsi, Coke, etc. I even found Cherry Dr.Pepper Zero, which if you know what that means is just nonsensical. I go back to the regular sugar sometimes and it doesn’t taste any better. I enjoy my acidic spiced cherry lemon Dr.Pepper without the diabeetus.

    Calorie rant: Why? 1.5 cans of soda is 250 kcal. That is equivalent to 30 MINUTES OF EXERCISE. PER DRINK. 3500 kcals (or calories) is equal to 1-0.5 pounds of fat gained or lost. Stop drinking or substitute soda for 2 weeks and lose a pound/0.4kg. Stop for a year and lose 25 pounds/12 kg FOR NO EXERCISE. Do you know how disheartening to know that all of my exercise is wasted by just chugging a large soda? Do the inverse and save an hour of jogging with a large DIET/ZERO soda.


  • Intro thoughts, feel free to skip to next paragraph: What you’re basically suggesting (based off edit) is the massive and unrelenting attack on our more base urges. My boyfriend says this is “peripheral route persuasion”, and it includes sex appeal and also things like happy people drinking Coke. Indeed advertising almost exclusively uses these tactics to get you to buy something (or at least remember) within 30 seconds or less.

    But I think you’re getting at the main core of human interaction, where the natural order of people is to act based off of emotion and not really think about it. Alternately, you can put your mind into big-brain thinking mode and make a salient choice to not drink brown spiced lemon fizzy sugar water.

    The Elaboration Likelihood Model essentially assumes that “As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become relatively more important determinants of persuasion. Conversely, as argument scrutiny is increased, peripheral cues become relatively less important determinants of persuasion.” These peripheral cues can be hormone based, for example. Therefore, it suggests a central route of information processing (think hard about it), and a peripheral route of information processing (gut feeling).

    This is any information, not just persuasion. You see hot girl on street, you consider your car looks cool, you try to pick her up by using your*(edit) car as evidence to hop in.

    Btw, in the Wikipedia article they literally spell out the consequences of this theory in Politics, Advertising and Media (all of it).



  • I was in highschool suffering from multiple mental health disorders and social isolation. I was smart sure, but as I later learned you can’t outsmart your own brain. What it took was finding a girl, as studious and hard working as me, but even more stressed and destroyed by home life and a destructive boyfriend that preyed on their undiagnosed autism and major depression. It started when I simply told them that their emotions mattered, that they mattered as a person. Suddenly I was confronted with a person in their most stressful senior year, previously a danger to their own self, offloading their sorrows to me in need of anything resembling emotional support.

    I had to learn (the hard way sometimes) how to listen, and listen with intent. I felt this urge, this duty to help, no matter how little I could do with how I was faring. I felt like if I didn’t do this, I would regret it for the rest of my life. It eventually lead to friendship into a relationship on fundamental compatibility, but I didn’t have any of those feelings at the beginning. I just accepted their texts, their calls, the first ones I had ever made to someone outside of school. It was the first time I ever felt I had a purpose. It was the first time I felt like I could do what was right, rather than what was expected.

    Our relationship is rekindling as we both near college graduation. We’re far more stable now, but we crave our scant few hours shared on weekends. I can feel my life trajectory flying wildly out of prediction as the day they move in with me nears. However, I know that if it was anything like the last time, I can afford to be bold and to be true to myself. It’s one thing for your life trajectory to change, but it’s another to be committed to making it as good as possible.


  • America will always fight wars because their interests in resources, political alliances, and ideological stability. It’s for the money. It’s always the money at the end.

    America is the cultural and military hegemon due to the proliferation of free trade enforced through an unmatched navy. America becomes more powerful by maintaining this status quo. It’s why dangers to the oil supply have driven 3 out of the 4 examples you rightfully point out. Sadly the Middle East is the oilbasket of the world with the worst borders ever designed. If you want energy, you spread influence there.

    However, there is one instance where the interests of the USA align with the general interest of the average Westerner.

    People don’t like democracies getting invaded. And potential democratic trade partners getting invaded is bad for business. You can have both at the same time. I will not defend the Gulf War under this banner, but the faster that we can prove that land grabs are nonnegotiable in this Pax Americana, the better.

    And also, you don’t have to convince me that war is inefficient. I’ve read Catch-22. But you do have to convince me that the destabilization of the breadbasket of Europe (and the world) is less important than the opportunity cost of a couple million lost to a few hundred corrupt officials.