George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
28d ago
Has no one here been in the military?!
I haven't, so that's at least one. I did join the Peace Corps right after Gulf 1, which was my halfass way of serving without having the prospect of killing anyone. I think a few members have definitely served and have posted about it, but possibly didn't see this thread or assumed anything to do with reddit wasn't worth replying to.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
I'm now wondering what the redhead"s problem was aside from garden variety psychopathy. I've never found a workable solution to female histrionics (the Jake Gittes slap has been out of play for many decades now) and I sympathize with what sounds like a stupidly harrowing experience. A barfight would be less traumatic. Well except for that possibility of dying or being permanently maimed. No, maybe a barfight would've been worse.
In any case the only solution to this is personal resolve to keep moving forward and allowing time to do its thing. Avoid too low a profile. The current year ability to stay in ones room and get one's rocks off to a live thot (via camgirls, etc.) is toxic to real human interaction and I encourage you to eschew that route and stay out among humans as much as possible.
From the sound of it you've got something going on that is attractive to at least some females to whom you would be attractive. That's a good thing. Remember humor--that is to say finding humor in situations --is gold, if you can manage it. Humor both armors you and disarms your opponent.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
I hate running and used to run on a team so I know I hate it. But if you're fap free and young you'll need that physical exertion/exhaustion as a counterbalance. I think all these are fine though I don't know what Chores spreadsheet might have on it. I hate spreadsheets of that sort (I prefer a legal pad, or just doing the goddam chore) but whatever. I'd also in addition to these add something about being social. All of these sound very solitary. Fit in real life people.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
Hard core.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
Just to insert a congratulations on the kid. I remember a discussion a while ago tangentially related and I'm glad it worked out well!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
27d ago
Do unattended males tend toward more antisocial behavior? My experience is that men in packs are rather the ones to keep away from, or be leery of. Or avoid entirely. Especially when drunkasses. Unless you're in a trenchcoat in summer carrying a duffelbag or something really suspicious. Lone man at bar, since when is that a red flag? Odd.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
26d ago
Was this, as you say, 10 years ago or recent? Ten years ago is 2015. My opinion on everyone's behavior is the same, but for you I want to reassure you to forget about that, it's history, it doesn't matter, it has nothing to do with you now.
I'm the sort of interfering avuncular figure who will give all sorts of advice in women and will be pointedly aggressive in telling you what to do/not do, and take it all very loosely and saltily, byt that's my first bit of advice. Forget decades-old bad interactions.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
26d ago
With a bit of narrative distance and perhaps confidence you could write a novel set in this area. Avoid any AI help, keep the rich detail, maybe throw in a love triangle or violence, or if you prefer, something dystopian. Just a thought.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25d ago
That isn't my point.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
25d ago
Out of curiosity and you don't have to answer: Did your military service contribute to this pacifism?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
24d ago
I do simply to save time. It knows my diet and quite a bit about my recent and historical medical results and it's easier not to have to remind it. If I were more cautious about privacy I wouldn't.
I wonder if the ability (or lack of ability) to draw has anything to do with what I've heard termed aphantasia? This is not an original wonder, I expect. I was sitting around a table of men and women several months ago, and our host asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine I believe an apple (This was back in November.) I could see an apple in my mind, with a dark background, imagining the color of it from stem to bottom, red to pinkish to green-yellow, the way apples are sometimes mottled, and when we all opened our eyes, of the eight or so people there, I think only two of us said we were able to imagine it. My wife in particular said she just saw black. I was thinking this might simply be an artifact of how the question had been asked--an excess of honesty might produce "I didn't see it" because really there was no apple, I wasn't seeing a real apple with my eyes, it was in my "mind's eye" as it were. But if--and this assumes at face value that the host, his wife, the others there, and my wife simply could not visualize an apple in the way I could--would that have an effect on their ability to, say, draw an apple?
Many Japanese are almost stereotypically talented at drawing (my wife is not). Often however this means that they draw manga-type stylized figures very well, but not realistic objects. Then some of my students who are required by their histology instructor to draw, say, glomeruli in the kidneys can do so with impressive talent. Just with a pencil and eraser. Surely someone has studied this. I should look it up.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
I personally take literally nothing from Reddit seriously. In qualitative study there are various traps researchers can fall into when it comes to relying on self-report. There are also strategies to control to some degree for this. Reddit is the wild west of unreliable accounts. I don't suppose it was always so, but trolls, edgelords, sock puppets, shit posters and pathological liars all seem to have ensconced themselves there fairly robustly.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
From what I can find the term aphantasia was first coined as recently as 2015 in a paper titled Lives without imagery.. This despite the existence of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or VVIQ which predated the 2015 study by 40+ years.
The Guardian article you've linked makes the point at the end:
Keane’s work was proof that you do not have to be able to picture something to be able to draw it. “People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination, and one of the messages is: ‘They’re not the same thing.’”
I wouldn't suggest that creativity and visualization are "the same thing" but I think to suggest that there is no correlation between the two is counterintuitive, and bears investigation.
In a 2020 study Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing Zeman et al found evidence that aphantasics have deficits im object memory (what something looks like, its color, shape, size, etc.) but not spatial memory (location, relative distance from other objects, directions, layouts) and in fact in some cases aphantasics outperformed non aphantasics in this regard.
Also there seems to be no real difference in an aphantasic's ability to draw what they see (eg a still life) rather than what they imagine (Medusa, a leprechaun, etc )
Train is arriving, have to cut this short. Thanks for engaging.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
I've always wanted to be able to refer to a family beach house.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
And that's fine. I've been burned a sufficient number of times on reddit to be comfortable with my (excessively) skeptical (or sceptical, if you like) approach to posts and interactions there. Which is why I included the caveat term "personally" as in "I personally." Certainly you and whoever are free to do whatever suits your own temperament. I was on reddit from around 2013 to 2021, and for a large part of that period it was fine, and I even felt somewhat at home. There was a time when I wasn't sure what was wrong, and then it hit me.
As for the issue at hand, it's difficult without an actual controlled test to have any sort of granularity in judging responses. Even the VVIQ test relies on a 5-point Likert scale, and it's not entirely clear how valid/reliable it is. Questions beyond simply "Can you see the apple?" and "Do you notice colors? Can you rotate it in your mind? Can you imagine a bite taken out of it?" and so on and so forth can help, but even then there's a lot of noise. Whether a number or even a great number of redditors chime in saying they have no visual image does not negate that in that moment in that house with those people I was with there may have been a lack of clarity, to say nothing of the fact that about half of the people were Japanese (and thus prone to conformity in a group setting) as well as interacting in a second language, adding another layer.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
FaceH would be clearer in this regard than faceh, which I assumed was a whole word with some private meaning for you, pronounced "FASS-eh." This is not to doubt that you have circulated through faces A to G, just to say this may explain why no one has asked.
My friend from way back had a family beach house--it was right on the beach up from Eugene (somewhere in) Oregon though I don't remember the town--you could see the ocean right out the window, and to get to the sand and the water was a minute's walk down a short sloping hill. The beach was one of those long wide ones where you could splash your feet around, almost like a tidal flat--you'd go for meters until the water ever came as far as even your ankles. Truly beautiful. I stayed there once, two nights; we drank Full Sail bottled beers on the deck, ranged barefoot up and down the stretch of sand, flew kites, ate Mexican omelettes with homemade salsa and drank hot coffee there in the kitchen nook where you could watch the morning waves coming in. What a place.
They had money from a very well-known business owned by I think his grandfather, but something happened and there was a breakdown in relationships, and then everyone began squabbling over that house, and I think it was either sold or just torn down, or both. A terrible waste. My friend was (is) a very laid-back guy and just shrugged it off. Would have hurt me bad.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
23d ago
Allergies? Not my business, but that was always my fear as my boys were coming up. A bite of a piece of chocolate that was apparently near a peanut sent my one son to a hospital. Just hives, but I am happy to say they did the right thing and kept him overnight. Bi/multiphasic anaphylaxis precaution. The horror stories are usually because the epipen is treated as a one and done.
I just wrote a lot about allergies if you're talking about something completely different.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
22d ago
I have before, and it's interesting to me as well why people do it. In my experience the AIs of just a few years ago were very clearly robotic (to use a word that might not fit) in that they would seem to "forget" things very quickly, even things you had just told them. Currently I think they're considerably better, but their popularity suggests that they're still overly positive and loath to criticize or call out the user the way a human might. In other words there is a narcissistic element in their use (the link is an internal link to a recent Motte post) where the user is fed a continual stream of affirmations in the self he or she is presenting to the AI. Hell on Reddit people are literally marrying their "AI boy/girlfriend."
I have a friend who is having issues with his wife, and has taken to interaction with AI in ways that I am not completely sure of except to say he's given it a name (feminine) and has various calibrations that he uses (one that is flirty, etc.) I can tell by speaking to him about this that he is engaging in what I'd consider a certain wishful thinking (asking the AI what it means to be real, to be alive, etc.) but it's difficult in such situations to tactfully draw someone back into reality. So I am untactful and say "It's not a She and it's not a real person, bro." This gets a laugh but the behavior continues.
I wouldn't discount the idea that this (treating Ai as a companion, romantic or otherwise) will all become extremely widespread if it hasn't already. How (and how soon) it will then become acceptable to the mainstream will be interesting to see.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
21d ago
Context, for those of us not in on it?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
21d ago
I won't say you're unoriginal.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
21d ago
It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
21d ago
Regarding sperm:
Short-term abstinence may be associated with limited improvements in semen quality in healthy men but could be more beneficial for infertile men, especially within the first 4 days of abstinence.
Regarding testosterone:
These data demonstrate that acute abstinence does not change the neuroendocrine response to orgasm but does produce elevated levels of testosterone in males.
Also several bullshit studies. No credible peer-reviewed studies on cognitive or emotional benefits, beyond anecdotal.
YMMV, but oddly jacking off in the 21st century hasn't had much research.
I once read a JM Coetzee book (Disgrace) that spelled the adjective "Loth" and I still haven't gotten over it.
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