5434a
2yr ago
I've got a plan to dip my toe into salsa classes and other non-formal partner dances. What's holding me back is I'm making a concerted effort to clear out the backlog of loose ends accumulated from sub-diligent general living before I take up new projects and hobbies.
The primary reason I want to try partner dancing is that I've spent years going to clubs, parties, raves, festivals and other gigs and I'm fed up of the atomisation and informality. No matter the size of the crowd or the style of the music the audience were 99% locked in to focusing on the performer over the music or the other attendees, and any dancing that did happen was either self-conscious freestyling, lesser or greater degrees of going berserk, or thinly veiled dry humping.
Since you're here and it sounds like you've got some breadth of experience, how would you describe the differences in the type of people who are involved with the different styles? Any hobby drama or other funny/memorable stories?
5434a
2yr ago
some are arguing that taking hormones means that trans women are indeed biologically female
From the link: "to be a trans woman is to have been through, be going through, be intending to go through, or desire to go through a process that results in a change of a person's sex to female"
Tacitly admitting that only men can be trans women makes a poor argument that they're women. Wait a second, notice the sleight of hand in framing the premise in gender terms and the conclusion in sex terms? Very clever! But oh no, wait a second longer, that means a female can't be a trans woman.
Using the writer's own definition, either a) gender is primary and only a man can be a trans woman, or b) sex is primary and a female can never be a trans woman. Conclusion: Trans women aren't women and they aren't female. Alternatively, man and woman are empty signifiers and the pursuit to justify crossing from one category to the other renders the enterprise meaningless.
My position - the position a decade of high tempo trans rights advocacy itself has led me to - is that trans women aren't trans women either. It's a polite fiction. The uncomfortable reality is that they're transgender men with bad logic and a rhetoric built of sophistry. I've got no business telling them how to live their lives: change your name, buy some surgery, switch your wardrobe! I won't stop you. Demonstrate adequate commitment and I'll refer to you by the fitting pronouns and use practical labels out of simple pragmatism. But don't claim seriously that you are what you aren't and you aren't what you are.
[And vice versa re women/men and males/females.]
5434a
2yr ago
Does straight sex have a similar dynamic? I'm curious to know.
Power dynamics are weird. Or at least they are to me.
For the longest time I'd assumed that gay men engaged in a pragmatic and egalitarian division of the passive and active roles so that both people get a fair turn. Because in my mind a kind of intuitive equalising game-theoretical situation would develop where neither would be content to get the short end of the stick over and over and would simply leave. I was surprised to find out that the model is wrong, and that, as you confirm, the active and passive roles rarely swap over. I was more surprised to learn that apparently the passive role is predominant among gays. They're not struggling to find someone to fuck, if anything there's a surplus of those, they're struggling to find someone who'll fuck them. (Apparently a similar situation is common in BDSM communities). As a straight man this is an unfamiliar dynamic. The active and passive roles tend to play out naturally in straight sex. I'm often left wondering why a partner is out of breath afterwards when she's put in about 80% less exertion. If I was holding out for a woman who took a physically dynamic role in sex I'd be setting myself up for disappointment. Women's sexual passivity is such a commonly shared assumption that they frequently criticise men for not knowing where the clitoris is while also neglecting that they've got both hands free should they care to look for it themselves. Men however have to be reminded not to touch themselves in situations that aren't even sexual.
I'm not sure that I expected it to be greatly different on account of the inherently active-passive roles but it's still a disappointment when you grow up fantasising about something vaguely "lady in the streets, freak between the sheets" where the woman can match your sexual dynamism and you find out it's more like "passive in the streets and between the sheets". (And then you look around and notice women pathologically attributing their passivity to men, and that this itself is a manifestation of passivity....)
To formative childhood experiences, even when I was very young there was an intuitive specialness to attractive women. Men were background noise. Big powerful man? I suppose it would be good to be someone like that. Small wimpy man? I suppose it would be worse - unless he has an attractive wife. Image of a woman in a flattering outfit? Entrancing. A naked woman? That felt like discovering magic. If I'd seen a full on porno I would have thought the male lead was incredibly enviable rather than psychologically threatening, you know, if I'd thought of him at all. Reframing the social dynamic as one where you give up and compete with the woman to win the man is incomprehensibly gay. Horny straight men know that horny gay men exist. We know that Grindr exists. Some of us even know that the gay men who exist are keener to get dicked than do the dicking, and that there's a common gay fantasy for seducing straight men. We prefer getting rejected by women.
Getting back to competition informing orientation, the flip side of competition isn't limited to withdrawal. There's also cooperation. I lost 90% of interest in competition just as I hit puberty because that age was when sports stopped being a cooperative activity to generate the most fun and became a narrow contest solely to make number go higher than opponent, which as I saw it sucked all the fun out. And to be clear this wasn't a rationalisation to deal with being bad at sport, I was consistently among the first picks for any team sports and chose to drop out of playing for the school team. While I lost interest in conscious competition I still developed a typical pubescent boy's interest in women. I went and found the fun in drugs and music instead, and the sexual interest was (un?)satisfied with porn. I would have been better served if I'd had it explained to me that I could have competed against myself to achieve objective improvements and crucially that those improvements would in turn have afforded me better opportunities in the realm of sex and dating. Sadly/gladly I was in my late 20s when PUA evo-psych gave me a model that explained the world in a way that better mapped to reality than the blend of romantic stories and latent cultural feminism I'd been brought up with (women don't like arseholes, The One exists, be a modern man, it will happen if it's meant to be, etc).
5434a
2yr ago
speech or hearing disability
I realised after posting I probably should have said something like speech impediment instead of describing it as amusing. I've seen lots of people say that his voice makes it unwatchable but combined with the accent it's a little extra part of the appeal for me, and it's too prominent not to mention it. A hearing problem would make sense too.
5434a
2yr ago
Object restoration hobby videos. A lot of them are suspiciously clickbaity but some are more straight forward. Clickbaity ones tend towards digging up a cosmetically damaged high value object like a Rolex, the straight forward ones are more like restoring a rusty antique bench vice or a pair of bespoke leather shoes.
Big Clive. An affable Scottish electical engineer who dismantles and analyses the circuitry of discount shop gadgets.
Techmoan. A man who buys and reviews a mixture of high end vintage hifi components that were out of the ordinary buyer's reach when released, or low end Amazon novelty hifi components that are beyond the ordinary buyer's good taste.
SoftWhiteUnderbelly. A retired commercial advertising photographer conducts open-ended studio interviews with the inhabitants of Los Angele's Skid Row. This is the one I'd most recommend to Motte readers for the obvious sociological aspects. The common thread running through many of their narratives is a shitty childhood that the person assumes is basically normal. While they often have a sympathic story reading the comments is mind boggling to see people praising pimps, johns and heroin dealers with bottom shelf platitudes about what nice boys they are. It's like they watched The Wire and can't tell Bubbles from Snoop.
IsaacArthur. A man with an amusing accent (Virginia?) analyses sci-fi technology through the lens of real world engineering possibilities.
This guy who builds huts and other primitive technologies in the woods by himself
The ones I've watched always seemed dubious, it might just be the one channel I landed on. A guy makes a beautiful swimming pool in the jungle using only a knife and a bucket... hmm. At the least it seems like they always pick a spot with the softest, loosest, most diggable dirt in the whole world. There's never half of two brick walls buried four inches down.
People doing traditional crafts (especially Japanese art craft like urushi and kintsugi, wagashi making etc)
Link it up. I love watching craft and Japanese woodwork videos.
5434a
2yr ago
Merton and Hislop are the core of the show, Hislop fitting into the role of the straight man to Merton's funny man. I don't think the show could continue its success if one or the other were to leave as it's the both the quality of their input and the dynamic between those two which raises the show above the many other panel shows where average comedians with above average agents use the format of a current affairs quiz to ladle out their pre-cooked jokes. I was surprised when I learnt that Merton and Hislop have a pretty low regard for one another off set - not unheard of for established comedy duos but these two only play those roles by chance.
You forgot to mention that Hislop is the editor of Private Eye and one of the most sued people in Britain. He's less about laughing at poor people and more about holding politicians and other public figures' feet to the fire. That gives him a strong footing for skewering the guest politicians who continue to appear on the show despite the show's 30ish year history of using them for satirical cannon fodder. Johnson did better than most on that account.
Merton is a deadpan surrealist comic with an encyclopedic knowledge of Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock films.
I used to watch it every week but slowly lost interest over the Brexit/Trump/Johnson years as the real world became self satirising. Bit of a golden era for impressionists though, Dead Ringers on Radio 4 hasn't been the same since Biden took office.
5434a
2yr ago
What do you do with the collected dust? Are there any unusual uses for it like, say, mushroom cultivation, or boring uses like compost improver, or is it just bulky waste to dispose of?
5434a
2yr ago
I guess my first question is what do you actually do in a day? Are you remoting in from a comfy cafe laptop to restart a buggy service and then Googling how to write a script to automate the task for the next time it happens, or are you up to your neck in cat5 cables while your phone explodes because Shanghai is losing $20m for every minute that their server is offline. Or is it more like sitting in meetings looking at project dashboards and politicking to pass the responsibility for who will do another site inspection to check on the contractors you tasked to do the dirty work of scripting and plugging in the cables?
Does Cisco certification mean you're effectively dedicated to routing infrastructure or does network engineering bleed over into other aspects like storage provisioning and electrical specs, or interfacing with ActiveDirectory or AWS and those types of network dependent services?
How do you keep track of all the infrastructure? Running a home network with a few self-hosted services gets pretty complex when you start adding in everything from power demands to storage demands to network segregation to virtualisation, I can't imagine running a full commercial network with all the attending expectations. I guess you just aggressively silo responsibilities into limited roles.
I'm a curious amateur at best, but only being passively exposed to what's on the internet gives the impression of reading the output of one multi-faceted omnipresent techetype who runs everything and without working in the sector it's hard to untangle that into more accurate and discreet person sized models.
5434a
2yr ago
There's lots of programmers and software devs on the internet, you can hardly move without encountering them. Seems like there's a lot less sysadmins and network engineers. Clearly both are deeply engaged with the internet as a technology and equally essential to its functioning. Am I right to think it's because programmers have a lot more free time to shitpost leading to a skewed impression of the tech landscape? Maybe network engineers just call themselves programmers to save on splitting hairs when talking with laymen? Or can software engineers do all the network tasks if they need to but chose software because it's a better salary? It shows up in the "learn to code" memes too where people offer advice about leetcode practice but I rarely hear anyone suggest getting a Cisco cert. On the other hand I sometimes read posts by software developers who admit to having no idea how anything works outside of their IDE.
Asking mainly out of idle curiosity but if I ever get to the point where I need to look for a job in tech I feel like I'd be more inclined towards network tech than working in a game studio or brewing up a new algorithm for FAANG.
5434a
2yr ago
Not American and not Catholic, not a woman, I usually collapse the abortion threads.
I haven't changed my position but I've had a little more flesh added to the bones of the various arguments. Ultimately nobody thinks abortion is good as an end in itself, it's a lesser-of-two-evils debate where one side chooses the mother (and alleviating social ills downstream from unwanted children) and the other side chooses the child (and alleviating the moral ills downstream from permitting unwanted children to be killed before they reach the cradle. Note that it's permitting, abortions won't effectively stop if the permission is withdrawn). It's a poisoned chalice but I'll prioritise lowering the burden of social dysfunction over evading the gravity of moral judgements.
5434a
2yr ago
Re Stonehenge, a few miles down the road is Avebury with a lesser stone circle that is continually open to the public on account of being slap bang in the middle of the village, and with a nice pub at the side too. It's not worth making a special trip unless you're already in the Bath area but it's worth adding a mention of it to your entry on Stonehenge for anyone who might be interested.
5434a
2yr ago
Another man objectified for his hands here, but mine are much more surgeon's than labourer's.
I mentioned in another post a couple of weeks ago that I have a soft spot for assymetric facial expressions like smirking. That's probably a bit weird. A certain habit of gaze direction is weirdly charming and could fall under the same assymetry category. Other types of body language and unconsciously expressive gestures too, but it's hard to categorise those.
5434a
2yr ago
The drugs themselves are another issue. Joyce claims that [puberty blockers] have never been put under clinical trials and aren’t even made for that purpose according to the manufacturers. They’re meant for treating adults for hormone-related conditions or to chemically castrate sex offenders.
I thought their primary purpose was as a remedy for precocious puberty? A 9 year old girl begins menarche, goes on puberty blockers for a couple of years, then you take the brakes off and let nature resume its course. The purpose is not to go on puberty blockers until long past the typical age of puberty. Chemical castration aside the sensible use case would seem to be to attenuate excessive natural hormone levels and bring them back to the normal range, not suppress normally functioning hormone levels and reduce them below the normal range (how much of sex offending is accounted for by excessive hormones is not something I know, but it's not implausible).
I was looking at some old school photos the other day and there's a striking amount of development where at age 12 we all (95%) looked like kids, at 13 we looked gawky, and at 14 we were largely close to our final height if not our final weight - that is to say it's a typical S curve, and a pretty fast one for its effects that occurs within a narrow age band. What happens if you block puberty long term? You can't remain a physical child forever, right? How much do puberty blockers impart lasting effects on physical development after the typical age of puberty has passed? Conversely I doubt you could achieve full adult physical development if you gave puberty stimulators to a six year old. I imagine an outline of these questions could be trivially tested with plant experiments.
All of these questions get glossed over by TRAs in order to support the wishful thinking that sexual development is endlessly reshapeable with the right tools and endlessly redefinable in the absence of tools. On the other hand it could also support arguments for transitioning at ages younger than 16, which raises a different set of problems.
5434a
2yr ago
The simpler explanation would be that trans women attracted more scrutiny
Yes, but I think cross sex exogenous hormones play a significant role here. I remember reading a piece by a trans man about his partner complaining that since beginning receiving testosterone he'd become more terse and less expansive about his emotional experiences. Isn't it plausible that trans men in receipt of testosterone become more stereotypically masculine, either bottling up their emotions and/or more likely simply experiencing a significantly reduced valence of emotions, while trans women experience the opposite where their exposure to oestrogen manifests in the stereotypically feminine behaviour of feeling strong emotions and coping with those emotions by proactively sharing them for inspection and validation. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease technician's attention. Yes that's sexist but in this subject talking about sex-isms is unavoidable.
Since you mention rail, engineering achievement, and an itinerary of London-Paris you might want to have a look at the newly opened Elizabeth Line while you're in London, then take the Eurostar to France.
In the UK the expectation is that classical tickets are easy and cheap to get and popular music act tickets are hard and expensive, involving queuing online to be disappointed when a Viagogo bot clears them out in the first ten seconds of going on sale. Have a look at Printworks and Fabric for clubbing in London.
If you're travelling from York to London you could look into stopping in at Bradford or Leicester for a curry. Bradford is in Yorkshire, Leicester is about half way between York and London.
For London sights I'd include the Tower of London if only for the crown jewels, the British Museum for all the other historic relics we've looted/preserved, and the Tate and the Tate Modern for visual art although you will probably find broadly comparable or superior collections of those at any of the other stops on your tour. There's also Shakespeare at The Globe, or Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap at the West End if you want a more middle-brow piece of popular British theatre.
I'd strongly recommend seeing one of Gunter Van Hagen's BodyWorlds exhibitions. I saw the permanent exhibition in Amsterdam.
5434a
2yr ago
I'm only an armchair psychologist but I suppose what I mean is that maybe attachment theory isn't necessarily meant to change you, maybe it's merits are in providing a means to explain to a potential partner why you might tend to behave in contradictory ways. If it's useful the use is putting it into practice as an aid to allow the other person to better relate to your individual characteristics. Would you want your partner to contort their inner self into a palatable presentation for your benefit (unhealthy, disingenuous) or simply describe their inner self and let you make a closer inspection for what it actually is?
A theory that says your childhood attachment figures left you with formative emotional insecurities doesn't grant any ability to jump back in time and change it, only the ability to recognise and acknowledge it. Your challenge is how to address those insecurities: face on, or remaining evasive. I might be mistaken having never had therapy but my previous reading around therapists is that they work, often frustratingly, by holding back from prescriptively telling you what to do or how to change yourself and instead concentrate on exploring the issues and, pardon the cliche, raising your awareness. I'm not a therapist and you sound like you're already adequately aware of the problem. So my prescription is to face up to it and next time find a (sensitive, measured) way to let the person know who you really are regardless of what exactly might have made you that way. What other options are there?
If you need a low stakes run look for an opportunity to try talking around the topic with your platonic friends that you have similar issues with and see how that goes. Don't bottle it up and wait until you're already post-closeness self-distanced from a good woman and then ruining it by going zero to a hundred. Sharing adversity is often how we progress from shallow relationships to something more meaningful, but it won't work if it precipitates into an intense emotional purging.
TLDR The diagnosis is insecurity. The objective is security. The route is slow, progressive vulnerability. I don't think you can fix it with more reading and planning, if you're here you're probably a compulsive reader already. It's necessarily a two-party problem, so treat it as an opportunity to know people and be known a little better.
5434a
2yr ago
I read up a little about it a couple of years ago. It was only internet searches and wiki/blog reading so no specific sources to point to. Eventually I ended up searching for "attachment theory criticisms" which yielded much more interesting material. Maybe it's my dismissive avoidance speaking but I can't avoid being a little dismissive of the theory. As you noted below it often seems like another formalisation of Forer statements: they're not untrue but they're not particularly insightful or explanatory either, and the theory fails to account for other competing factors.
The only benefit I've gained from my reading was having an additional framework to interpret my brief relationship with a woman I met shortly after, and which disproved the academic theory that an avoidant person like me would be gratified by anxious attention. Nope. The lowlight was her accusing me of being deliberately hurtful for not reaching out to her for a whole week after we'd broken up.
Adults with [anxious] attachment style often project their anxieties onto otherwise benign social interactions
-wikipedia
Bingo.
As to changing oneself, I'm not sure it's aiming at the right target. My avoidance of greater intimacy with the woman I mentioned before was because she was not a suitable person for greater intimacy. Why twist myself out of shape to pretend otherwise or alienate her with that explanation? I think it's wiser to cut losses and keep looking for better prospects. If these women you're meeting are genuinely good prospects that you regret pushing away attachment theory might however provide a framework for addressing the issue and making your behaviour legible to them, but that's outside my experience. I have a feeling it would either backfire or go very well depending on your compatability, which is useful in itself. Broaching the topic would likely benefit from some tact and discretion though.
while I do have friends, my relationships with them are rather shallow. There's really no one in my life with whom I feel I have a really close, emotionally intimate personal relationship
I was watching Vice's video on the story of Afroman's Because I Got High last night and he said something that resonated: a lot of really cool things can happen when you're alone. Sure that's not everything but it's not to be dismissed - if you understand and accept yourself you probably won't have a pressing need for someone else to understand you, and at the same time it makes it easier to be understood when the time comes.
5434a
2yr ago
I was going to mention the same video as a welcome change from the Pollyanna-isms.
I'm only a casual Youtube user but it's clear that they set up an aggressive automod for comments a few years ago and I assume people have begun conforming to the unwritten rules in order to have their comments posted instead of being shadow-banned. I suppose it was necessary and probably a net improvement, it gets a bit uncanny though when I watch the videos from SoftWhiteUnderbelly interviewing the by turns desperate and criminal denizens of LA's Skid Row and then read the comments and see they're full of glib praise and hollow platitudes for pimps, addicts and proud gang bangers (in both senses of the term).
5434a
2yr ago
No disagreement, hence the caveats and the link to the wiki with its criticisms section. I read it once years and years ago. Glad it prompted some links to better resources as that one was the only book I could think of that wasn't the standard "come back after maxing out your tax efficient wrapped index traded funds".
5434a
2yr ago
Day trading isn't passive income, it's capital risk that you actively manage every day in the hope that you'll do better than an index fund. Real passive income would be something like buying the rights to a Christmas pop hit. You could then transform that to active income if you started promoting the record to induce more licensing and increased royalties, and hopefully the improved return would be worth more than if you spent the same time working more hours at your regular job.
Alternatively you could go for speculation (buy and hold assets), management (buy and rent out assets), gambling (stake capital on a binary outcome), banking (loan capital and charge interest, or trade capital for collateral), or bootstrap investing (create a business). There's very little that qualifies as truly passive.
It's corny but if you're a complete beginner try out Rich Dad Poor Dad for a basic introduction to financial literacy and avoid any memes about day trading, options, crypto and forex. It's probably a bit out of date now and not without its critics but it's a decent primer for further reading. MrMoneyMustache is (was?) the blogging era's inheritor of Rich Dad's paperback popularity but he always seemed to have at least as strong a focus on cutting costs against increasing income. Of course both of them could be said to have made a lot their money from writing, which is simply another bootstrap.
The point I'm getting at is that the stock market isn't the only option for passive income, and depending how you approach it it isn't even passive. But really what is?
5434a
2yr ago
My intuition is that autogynephilic men often want to transfer the kind of direct sexual desire that women receive to themselves, and they pursue that by attempting to transform into a woman in some kind of semiotic signifier-signalled double switch around. The resulting sexual desire comes from men/masculinity, which at one level of argument would render it homosexual. It's inherently complex and so it depends if and where you slice it into parts (homo/hetero) or if you sum the parts (man-loving-himself-as-a-woman, or -as-he-himself-loves-women, or etc).
5434a
2yr ago
I'm definitely not writing a driver, just trying to read (physically read, with my eyes) one value from an existing driver. I've got someone helping me now and fingers crossed I can use an existing library / script that I missed to get me what I need. Looks like I overshot the mark and ended up in the kernel zone.
Competing for female attention in latin dance totally fits my model. Here's my completely uninformed stereotypes of open classes (I assume the competitive level acts as a filter), please correct or confirm.
Rock'n'roll/Ceroc/Lindyhop: High metabolism neurodivergents with that weird blend of woke politics and retro aesthetics.
Salsa/swing: Casual singles. Divorcees dancing with unmarried tech workers and suave manlets.
Kizomba: As above but the divorcees are older, hornier and outnumber the men who are scared off by the more direct sensuality.
Tango: Trad types who like rules and following them. Etiquettists.
Ballroom: More stable relationshippers, enjoy the glamour, inclined to take the activity seriously and with all the conflicts that follow.
Street: DDR variety Asians, retired b-boys, female actual-dance-students polishing their moves.
Not sneering, I could probably fit in with nearly all of them to some degree.
Given that the activity involves dancing all night how pervasive are drugs? What's the drinking culture like? I guess the need to both be coordinated and coordinate with another person puts a natural ceiling on that aspect.
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