ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10mo ago
Rawlings
John K. Rawlings, award-winning author of Harry Potter and the Veil of Ignorance.
I quit drinking cold turkey 4 days ago.
I feel mild anhedonia, experiences I normally enjoy are muted or feel like they're happening to someone else and I'm only watching, if that makes sense. I have too much energy during the day and it's hard to relax fully in the evening. My appetite has dropped a lot, but I still want to eat because I've increased my lifting recently. It's kind of the way you feel hungry when you have a cold. You feel your body's need for sustenance, but no foods are particularly appealing. My libido has dropped considerably, though that may also be due to the extra fatigue from increased lifting. In the evening, light is too bright and noises are too loud, kind of like when you have a bad hangover. My baseline stress level feels higher; on a scale of 1-10, I was previously around a 3 or 4 most days, and now I feel like I'm stuck at 6 all the time. Sometimes I suddenly feel exhausted during the day and want to rest, but I'm too wired to actually relax before bedtime, sort of like when you've had too much caffeine to sleep.
On the bright side, my feels like it's working at 200% speed. While I was doing well at work before, now I'm absolutely crushing it. I don't have heartburn or any other gastric trouble anymore, I don't have much appetite for junk food, and I find temptations to my various vices almost trivially easy to resist. Getting up in the morning is getting a lot easier. I have the focus and the patience to listen to chat with my kids in the evening after dinner. I can handle more chores. I can take care of my wife better. I can control my temper much more easily. I spend probably 1 hour less per day lying on the couch. I picked up a physical dead tree book and started reading it for the first time in many months. I'm not thirsty all the time, and my body doesn't hurt as much when I wake up in the morning. My heart rate gets back down to the low 50s when I sleep at night. My sleep quality is much better. And maybe best of all, I don't feel the sense of guilt and self-loathing I've learned to live with every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. That's probably what keeps me going each day more than anything, I don't feel like I suck anymore.
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism" when you google alcoholism and read stories from people downing a fifth or two of vodka and blacking out every night. But that amount was apparently enough to slowly change my mind and body over months in ways I hadn't even realized, and I'm dealing with the aftermath now. It's very... sobering.
I wrote this as a personal reflection and thought I'd share it in case any other folks are on the same path.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
22d ago
Bikes are less predictable. They can weave, turn, and change speeds much more suddenly than a car. When I'm walking and I hear a car coming behind me, I glance back once to see its trajectory and adjust my path accordingly. When I hear a bike coming quickly towards me, I usually glance back several times to track it since I can't fully tell where the cyclists plans to go.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1mo ago
"Ship of Theseus" existential, not "Destruction of Carthage" existential. Mass immigration and erosion of the civil religion threaten to transform the United States into something unrecognizable. That already happened once with Ellis Island immigration, and it is currently threatening to happen again as a consequence of the 60s cultural revolution.
You forgot massive self-inflicted economic damage (inflation, shuttered businesses, layoffs) caused by the lockdown ands insane money printing. All for basically nothing other tha our leaders indulging their "don't just stand there, do something!!!" impulse. I think about that every few days and I'm still angry about it. Really fucked up my plans, and I think I got off better than most.
Oh, and the insane powegrabs by literal-whos at all levels of federal, state, and city bureaucracy. Pencil necked losers in gubmint jobs suddenly issuing edicts about what free citizens of republic can and cannot do. And people obeyed. I will never be able to unsee that.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6mo ago
But where are your feats, your accomplishments? What have you done, besides praising Russia and calling Jews poison and publishing links to a bunch of crappy old Paladin Press books?
Hey, he rode a motorcycle around and camped outdoors that one time, that's gotta count for something
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10mo ago
It's because you know, and the Used Car Salesman knows that you know, that you're rounding everything he says down by 50% and probably just straight up ignoring some of it. It's a game you're both playing. If you called him out on his BS, he'd probably concede immediately "Well okay not quite zero to sixty in 2 seconds, maybe more like 5 seconds, but she's zippy! You're gonna love her!"
Whereas when the Lawyer lies to you, he thinks he's the only player in the game -- you're too dumb to play. He either sincerely believes you're too stupid notice the subtlety of his lie, or he knows that his lie-by-omission is well-crafted enough that refuting it would take an order of magnitude more time and energy and make you look like a fool for trying. If you call him out he will not concede, he will just persist in his bold-faced lie. Glib, simplistic political slogans are a closely related type of lie, which is why they are so effective at enraging political opponents.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2mo ago
I remember reading the Warcraft 2 game manual multiple times as a middle schooler. It was dark, gory, and realistic. There were heroes, but they weren't larger than life and sometimes they got died. It read like a chronicle of Aztecs invading England, it was badass. I especially enjoyed how each Orcish clan was essentially a separate tribe with it's own rituals and cultures, lovingly detailed. Shout-out to my homies from the Bonechewer and Laughing Skull. The human kingdoms also had interesting histories, I loved the stories of Lordaeron and Alterac. Even the heroes were cool. Aleria, Turalyon, and Uther were badass.
Warcraft 3 pushed all of this into the background to focus on goofy Arthas. The gameplay was good, but the SOVL was gone.
(Controversial take -- I feel very similarly about Final Fantasy VI and VII.)
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3mo ago
The even more irritating thing is that much of these same beliefs are also sincerely held by social conservatives (including many users in this space), who tend to typecast women as "potential victims" and men as "potential problems"
Do you have any recent examples of this? As one of the resident social conservatives, my belief is that this "perpetual childhood" should include a curtailing of rights and privileges in proportion to its reduction of responsibility/culpability, and the fact that it does not is an enormous problem. I thought this was a fairly common view among the social cons here. The double standard you're referring to strikes me as more of a boomercon thing, and I don't know if we have any of those here anymore.
Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think
My understanding is that it goes something like
MOTTE: There were a nonzero number of black people in England and so we should represent them. Look, here's a document from the 16th century that says "Lord Featherstonhaugh's goode and faithfull servant, Thomas, was a manne of darke complexion hailing fromm the distant continents" which clearly means that there was at least one person who was quite possibly a sub-Saharan African living on the island of Great Britain in the last 500 years.
BAILEY: There were probably lots of black people toiling away in England but the bigoted white English whitewashed them or refused to record them in history so we don't have any evidence, but we do know that's just the sort of thing the racist English would do, so we're justified in additing a lot of extra black characters to media. And even if that turns out not to be true, it's the right thing to do, because English history is the story of racist colonialists who abused the rest of nonwhite world, and so we should dilute, subvert, and erase history in revenge and to ensure that Never Again will whites threaten innocent POCs.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7mo ago
Does "the Gribble faction" just mean "people who don't trust all the official narratives and are therefore low status" or do you have something more specific in mind?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9mo ago
Raising the status of mothers is the correct answer. When we have lived in close knit communities where my my wife's peers were other mothers with 3+ kids, my wife was very happy. When we've lived in metropolises where restaurants, transportation, and general social life are all very unfriendly to mothers with children, she was miserable. Simple as.
How to do at scale? It has become apparent to me that egalitarian liberalism is a civilizational injury that an ER doctor of nations would diagnose as "incompatible with life," so I'm blackpilled on the prospects of liberal democracies mustering the fortitude to sit up on their sick beds long enough to even begin to do something about this. In my own life, I'm preparing to participate in a more heavily armed version of the Benedict Option and to pour my human capital into strengthening that community and its mothers without regard for, or even at the expense of, the surrounding economic zone "nation."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
13d ago
The one thing I have never grasped about Christian Zionism is implication that God is waiting for humanity to gather all 7 dragon balls before Jesus can be summoned. I'm pretty sure the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to, and that human efforts to bring it about are at best ridiculous and at worst extremely presumptuous. Jesus clearly says that nobody knows the hour or the day, so what's the point? I'm genuinely curious, do Christian Zionists have some theological justification or rationalization for this?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
13d ago
I'm just a random poster, so take this for what it's worth. But I appreciate that as an (apparent?) leftist or progressive, you still post here and help prevent The Motte from becoming a complete echo chamber. Before the last week or so, I remembering you posting interesting comments that go against the prevailing opinions here which stimulated discussion. But over the last couple of days it just seems like you're posting snarky one-liners, trying to bait people, and dunk on your enemies. I hope you don't flame out, but instead stick around and poke holes in right-wing thinking to help keep us right-wingers honest. Maybe it would be good to take some time away from this place? I know that even I have to sometimes despite agreeing with a greater proportion of the posters here.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
20d ago
But it's cruise control for cool.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
22d ago
Disclaimer: I don't hate cyclists and have not had many negative experiences with cyclists while driving.
I always find it difficult to find sympaths for cyclists in America. My thinking goes like this.
- America is built for cars. Homes and jobs are far apart. Friends and employers expect you to travel distance only reasonably covered with a car.
- Thus, cars are a necessary part of life for most Americans. You need a car to get a job to feed your kids. You must buy and drive a car even if you don't really want to.
- Biking to work or to the grocery is not feasible for most people for many reasons. Your employer won't think it's cute that you show up sweaty, or drenched in rain, or 30 minutes late due to snow. Your wife won't be amused when you have to bike 30 minutes to Walmart every day to fill your backpack with food for the kids. How do you get to the hospital when someone is sick or injured? How do you take your family anywhere, especially when the kids are small?
- Thus, cycling is best thought of as either an elective hobby for those with money and time to burn, or a last resort for truly destitute and/or criminal. The former can afford a car if they want, they just choose not to. The latter have bigger problems than just not having reliable transportation and prioritizing bikes over cars won't fix those.
- Thus, I really don't care about cyclists' complaints. I mentally put cyclists in the same bucket as skateboarders, rollerbladers, and Segway riders. If you can do your hobby on public roads safely and without endangering yourself or or car drivers, then fine. If there's any inconvenience or risk to drivers, the just ban everything except cars and call it a day.
tl;dr I need to get to work on time or pick up food for dinner, I'm not interested in being delayed or inconvenienced to accommodate some bum or some stranger's vanity hobby.
An argument I'm somewhat sympathetic to is that if we don't accommodate cyclists, we'll be stuck in our current automobile-centric hellscape forever. That is probably true. However, my preferences go like this:
- Cities designed for bikes & public transit, cars rarely needed
- Cities designed for cars
- Cities designed for cars where cycling is awkwardly retrofitted into existing car infra with significant gaps where there are no provisions for bikes at all
In the U.S., number 3 seems by far the most common, and it sucks for everyone. The car/bike war is one of those problems that IMO can only really be solved by a strong executive power not beholden NIMBYs and lobbyists. Until one materializes, I'm supporting option 2 all the way.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1mo ago
Hopefully he enjoyed the assault more than you were upset by it, thus increasing the net happiness in the world.
Caught me off guard and made me chuckle. Impressive, very nice.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4mo ago
I watched it for the first time last year and found the second half way too unbelievable. Some wag on 4chan summarized the movie's message as
>be based race realist
>go to jail
>get gang raped by a bunch of dudes
>turn into an effeminate libtard
What did they mean by this?
which, while clearly trolling and uncharitable, is a framing that I just can't unsee. I know that the director was trying to show that racist WNs are evil, violent, manipulative hypocrites and losers and that Norton's character learned his lesson after meeting "real" WNs in prison, but like with Starship Troopers, an alternate, unintended interpretation just seems to fit the movie better IMO.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
5mo ago
Every time I see this post, I think "most Hanania posts should be Tweets."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10mo ago
The right is so pessimistic and honestly nihilistic for what's supposed to be the party of God and goodness and strength and masculinity.
I think that demoralization and stigmatization have just been that effective. It's hard for me to imagine creating a political organization that champions God, virtue, and masculinity that wouldn't immediately be tarred as anachronistic, hokey, and LARP-y not only by the unfriendly omnipresent progressive media machine, but worse still by conservatives themselves who, having been raised by that media machine, instinctively and reflexively cringe at any overt, unironic celebrations of their own values. It's a problem that I've been wrestling with solving for a while. For now, the only solution I can think of is to first have one's target audience unplug from the machine long enough to recover from irony poisoning before trying to pitch such an organization. But that's a tall order -- you'd have to replace it with something else, but large-scale dissident media efforts are not tolerated by the machine, and so you'd have to do stuff in meatspace, which essentially mean's you'd have to first create a physical intentional community. "Just start your own bank nation, bro."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11mo ago
what is that like?
It's a mixed bag, overall I slightly prefer my home country (the US).
What prompted the move?
My wife is native to this country and we wanted to raise our kids bilingual/bicultural.
What have been the biggest challenges?
It's crazy expensive to pay for an overseas family move without moving assistance from the military, your company, etc. I worked a contract job on top of my full time job for about a year to save up enough (my wife is a SAHM).
It's also pretty lonely sometimes. Living abroad is fun when you're young and single and have lots of free time, but as a married family man, it's mostly the same as living back home except I have to deal with laws and social customs that are hard for me to understand. And because I'm no longer a baby faced bright eyed 22 year old but a 30-something year old head of a household it's no longer "cute" when I get confused or make a mistake, so I get cut less slack.
What have been the greatest rewards?
Seeing my kids participate in culture events, festivals, learn traditional songs, become fluent with their own way of speaking in the local language, and more. I think we've done a good job getting them educated and well integrated into this society. Personally I feel like it has scratched my wife and my "I want to live overseas" itch so I can return to the US and not be tormented by what could have been. I've also developed a hobby of making a local alcoholic drinks and pickled vegetables. And gardening, although I guess I could've done that anywhere.
Anything which was surprising to you, that you never would have thought to even consider before making the move?
Many small things, but one major one that stands out is how accepting people have been of me and my half-foreign family despite this country famously being "closed" socially (and having been "closed" historically in a much more literal sense). Local people don't treat me like a tourist because tourists almost never come out here, so I think they assume that I belong here even if they don't know me. It also helps that I have kids in the local school system.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
26d ago
I think OP is agreeing with you about the Republicans. Their reputation is "the fiscally conservative, small government party" despite them actively increasing the debt and expanding government for decades. See also "the party of Christian family values" despite doing little to nothing to oppose the normalization of progressive values.
America is over, and so, okay, then what?
you have the answer already:
be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan
Hard reforms may have been possible back when America was a nation. Here in Japan, people are just buckling down and weathering the long running currency devaluation because (they believe) the alternative is worse. There's a sense here that everyone is suffering together which makes it bearable. Unfortunately, America is not a nation anymore, it's a multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith empire that include groups who bitterly hate each other, which means it's nearly impossible to get all the different groups game-theory-cooperate to avoid disaster (barring an existential threat, and even then...). Instead, we will have factional war to the knife as the coffers run dry and systems gradually break down.
I don't expect a collapse that will make good TV, rather it will be a slow version of South Africa where everything gets gradually shittier, punctuated by sudden slips along regional/local political and social fault lines that result in brief but bloody spasms of violence.
So yeah, I think you would be wise to start grabbing what you can now while praying for a unifying moment that will help us avoid that future. I also recommend moving to a place where you're around ideological, religious, and or ethnic allies so that you're not the odd man out when broadcasts from Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines start to reach your neighborhood.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
28d ago
Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.
pierced septums
Truly repulsive. The small ones make me constantly want to wipe their nose. Like a small booger. Gross.
tongues
Probably severe daddy issues and or some sort of drug problem. Also I assume they suck dick.
gauges
Disgusting and... confusing? I have no idea why people do this. Piercings are a sort of jewelry, kind of like a ring or necklace, I guess. But gauges are ugly disks that stretch and distort a very visible part of your head? Why? Making yourself ugly for "fuck you" shock value? If so, pretty cringe.
nose studs/belly button piercings
Trying too hard. You can look edgy or interesting just by dressing better.
earrings
Tiny ones are cute, preferably something simple or whimsical. Bigger ones are meh unless it's part of your overall aesthetic.
tattoos
Nearly always horrible, and now so mainstream that even the "good" ones are pretty mundane. Might work if you're a career criminal.
I was raised middle class in the South where, besides earrings, none of that stuff was done.
IIRC doublethink was not what you describe, but the ability for Ingsoc subjects to believe two contradictory things at the same time and to reflexively shut down any realization of the contradiction ("crimestop"). Good modern examples are instances of what Michael Anton calls "The Celebration Parallax" ("That's not happening, and it's good that it is").
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