WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.
Because I can!
Snatches can be difficult on hands. But I've refined my technique to the point where they aren't for me. Or at least drastically less so. Basically at the top when you punch through there is a moment of weightlessness. This is the easy part for most people. I've seen a lot of people do different things on the way down. Some drop it straight down, some kind of unwind around the side like they are coming down from a press but then let it keep falling. I pull my wrist out of the handle as quickly as possible, back tracking the punch through movement. It recreates the moment of weightlessness from the punch through, and saves my palms a lot of wear and tear.
You just need to work on your pull out game.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
Progress continues on my 200 snatch goal. I carved out some headroom above 130 reps. But man, it sucks getting old. First something in my mid right back tweaked the fuck out. Sprained or knotted something so fierce I could barely get out of bed the next day. Eventually stretched/massaged that out. Then something in my right shoulder hurt so fucking bad I couldn't reach behind myself to wipe my own ass with my right hand. And more or less only that movement in specific caused problems. I could actually still do tons and tons of snatches no problem. Lots of stretching and massage for that too. Both those problems have gone away and don't seem to be coming back. But now my fucking fifth metacarpal on my right hand, which I broke in my 20's, has decided to ache for days every time I do my 100+ snatch reps.
Fucking why?!
On a sadder note. We lost my cousin last month. The funeral was last week, and I found out he committed suicide. We weren't especially close growing up, but we had reconnected a few years ago, and unfortunately lost touch when I moved away. He was a good guy, struggling with what remained of a life of poor choices and core traits he couldn't reform, despite solid success breaking some of their more destructive manifestations. There was always such a tone of regret when we'd catch up, and he'd ask how the wife and kid were doing. He clearly wanted those things, he'd had chances, but he couldn't stop himself from fumbling them, badly.
I miss you cous'. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're at peace now.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
Long distance relationships aren't real, without a concrete plan to become a short distance relationship. Preferably you've at least traveled to meet this person already?
I made the terrible mistake of getting into a LDR as an early 20's super nerd who'd barely interacted with women, at least not successfully. The novelty of "Somebody likes me!" was nice, but actually meeting torpedo'd it so fucking hard. Granted, this was the mid 00's and things were a little bit different socio-culturally. But it turns out, the sort of woman who is desperate enough to latch onto a long distance relationship is even worse than the sort of man who does. Consider all your flaws, and reasons you can't find a real relationship near you, and understand that along axis you don't even realize exist, she's probably worse.
That said, the strategy I pursued after that might not even be available anymore, so who knows.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
What then?
The existential dread that you've truly wasted the one life you were given on this Earth, and there is no going back. Then you die. Or at least many do.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
That being said, and I mean this genuinely, but your posting style seems very uhhh cynical for someone who believes in Christ? If you genuinely believe in the Christian tradition, shouldn't you be more joyous? Christ won!
Yes. I am a lifeline cynic/edgy internet atheist trying to change my ways. It's not moving in a straight line.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week. Was the Minnesota shooter a D or an R? Will I ever really know? We still don't know shit about the Butler PA Trump Assassin. Or the motives of the Vegas shooter. I've utterly given up concern over whether the truth of the Christian tradition is 100% literally exactly what happened. Probably 75% of what I hold to be true about history, or the active state of my own country, is a lie. Lies I will never have the ability or opportunity to correct. Shit, people get wrong the truth of things they saw with their own damned eyes. Eye witness testimony is famously among the worst forms of evidence. I get all the nitpicking about the game of telephone/oral tradition that eventually got put down in the bible, and then translation after translation etc. I just no longer see how that same argument isn't a fully generalized destructor for any concept of truth.
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history." It goes back to the constant arguments about how much of what we know about, say, Alexander the Great was real, how much was propaganda, and how much was apocryphal nonsense? But at the same time, you can't go full retard and claim Alexander the Great never existed. Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
How important is it really if I choose to believe that 2000 years ago God manifested as a human on Earth? More over, as I go down the rabbit hole, and try to intellectualize that belief, I can still make it work, literally. If I really want to.
I guess if I had to try to put a point on this, it's that everything may be lies and nonsense. The fog of war isn't some vague concept in distant operations. It exists inside our brains far closer to the source than we'd like to believe. Not unlike LLMs have done more to degrade my estimation of people than raise my estimation of AI, arguments against the Christian Tradition have ultimately eroded my ability to believe anything more than they "disproved" Christianity in specific. So fuck it, why not return to the belief system my ancestors had for over 1000 years? They had a pretty good run during that time.
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-difficulty-in-dating-good-men
Another stream of consciousness essay from a town bike describing (probably without meaning to) how all men just blur together and cease being distinct human beings you could bond with anymore after being run through enough? You don't say?!
It's fascinating reading something like that, where the front half is just a pastiche of the ways men are objects to her, scarcely individualized. Then the back half comes up with about a dozen potential reasons she can't seem to bond with anyone... except the correct one. Alas.
Edit: You know what, let me elaborate. I knew a guy who knew a guy who used to be hooked on heroin. The guy I knew was too, but he was telling me about another junkie he met in NA. One addict to another he told him, being slightly older and along his path of recovery, that nothing he did in life ever felt as good as being on heroin. Not meeting the love of his life, not getting married, not even the birth of his first child. They all felt good, sure. But man... nothing topped heroin. Luckily for him, support groups like NA exist to keep him from succumbing to that eternal lure. I know their failure rates are high, but I like to think, like the guy I know and still see regularly, he's chugging along on the relatively straight and narrow.
Aella has spent the better part of her life smashing her moral compass with a blunt rock in a petty act of rebellion. The single piece of human machinery that gives us feedback when we are moving along a proper path of human fulfillment. And now she's complaining that nothing feels right when she attempts to return to the path, so she gives up. Maybe there is money to be made in a "Narcissistic Internet Whores Anonymous".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
Confused further by the fact that the pointing out essentially IS the consequence here.
Strong disagree. Like, I get that people believe everything is a social construct and thus all consequences are socially imposed. Or that what matters is not having done the thing, but people finding out you did the thing. But I'm not a blank slatist, I think certain behaviors actually do damage the human animal mentally, emotionally and physically beyond "social constructs", and I think someone looking for a mother of their children should have a right to know that a woman is a proud e-prostitute.
It almost gives me hope yet that no poor schmuck has ruined his life with her in the gravest fashion possible.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
There are plenty of total simps in tech with a solid paycheck who'd be thrilled to go for her, and she knows that.
But simps are gross. Very few women who think anything of themselves (and Aella thinks a lot of herself) is willing to stoop and settle for a simp.
This is all a marketing gimmick. Come save the poor whore with a heart of gold and a mind of platinum!
I can't discount it. This could all be part of her hustle. Like I said, I try to ignore her.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
You know, I was saving this for Friday Fun but it almost fits better here...
If you came of age and discovered internet porn in the early 00's, ideepthroat dot com was legendary. It was this couple, one part a bottle blonde woman with a handsome face and giant fake tits, and the other a dopey sounding guy packing some above average heat. The hook was that this lady had no gag reflex what so ever, and he could literally fuck her face without her gagging or crying or anything. To this day, if blowjobs are your thing, best in class.
Eventually the site shut down, but the clips lived on. They were early 00's quality, but if Citizen Kane can be a masterpiece despite the technology of the time, so are those blowjobs. I heard rumors from time to time, she became a realtor after she quit cam girling. Or that her and her husband had kids and hung it up. Or that they split. No clue if any of it was true.
Well, a couple years ago she decided to return on pornhub. It's gross. Really gross. She's in her late 40's or early 50's now? The giant rock hard fake tits are pretty much the only part not succumbing to the ravages of time. She was shoving comically oversized dildos up her prolapsed asshole. I used to think there was nothing sadder than a washed up rock star who's arthritic spasms on stage make you wish they'd joined the 27 club. But it turns out an old camgirl, first of her breed, trying to recapture some of that young and sexy magic is even sadder. Makes me wonder if in another 20 years or 40 years we'll see these old camgirls auctioning off the chance to be their partner in a snuff film, to die as they lived.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
I do wonder how the average iron age scholar would react to "Pointing out that actions have consequences is evil".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
I don't follow Aella. In fact I usually mute anything I see about her. E-girls thrive on attention, and the only correct course of action is to block/ignore.
But what I have seen is that a large part of what set this off was her complaining that she wants to get married and have kids, and no partner she wants to do that with returns the sentiment. She may have also broken up with her long time partner cuck because he didn't want kids with her? So she was mourning the situation that she would never have these milestones in life she wanted.
And then what I saw was people, IMHO rightly, pointing out that if she wanted those things, a life of being a filthy whore in public was mutually exclusive to them. This was a self inflicted wound. And especially zeroing in on her entitlement to a "high quality male" (not her words, but reading between the lines), despite being a literal prostitute that doesn't shower. Like what did she think her value was? The post I saw were blunt about this. Perhaps excessive. But examples must be made lest others fall into the same trap. Consider the sort of man you want, and act accordingly. It's at least known among some men this is what must be done to attract the correct sort of woman. Women just seem to have entitlement.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
If you want to talk to an AI
This rhetorical question actually caused me to have a think. Why do people want to talk to an AI? I mean productivity I can understand, all the usual "as a tool" excuses. But I've felt no compulsion, not even curiosity, to talk to an LLM just to talk. And yet I see people casually mentioning doing that all over the place. It's like something straight out of Her, a film which thoroughly squicked me out. Is there anyone here who just casually socializes with an LLM who can explain why they do it?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
fight the dandelion infestation on your front lawn again (fuuuuuuuuuuuck)
I'm waiting for it to stop raining long enough to put down something for the crabgrass currently threatening to destroy the overseeding I did last fall. I feel your pain.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud.
I may elaborate on this in another post, but even assuming zero participation in social media, the algorithm is always listening. Often directly through apps on your cell phone, and indirectly from every link you click, video you watch, search you make, how long your eyes linger on something while you scroll. The degree to which a crude homunculus of yourself is being constructed in the cloud, whispering to you through your screen on the margins of every page you visit is horrifying. It was not a rhetorical flourish to describe it as a second subconscious. I absolutely believe that.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3mo ago
We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
Hah, not yet. I actually didn't know that myself.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
I think America is already dead. There are almost certainly other theories, but look at the utter collapse of our state capacity.
Sometimes I see people point to Vietnam as the point where America "lost the ability to win wars", the first Iraq War not withstanding. We can fight wars. We can fight wars for decades. But we haven't achieved our geopolitical goals after a war in decades.
But there is more to running a nation than adventurism over seas! Sadly since Obama basically the state has failed at every initiative it ever undertook, and fails harder, faster and more obviously as time goes on. And yet people connected to government keep getting fantastically wealthy!
The corruption and graft is so out of control, we've become like Africa where nothing gets built, but the people accepting the contracts all live in mansions. And it's hard to ignore that the multi-ethnic low trust society we've all been forced into seems to have paved the way for this.
I'm no longer confident the US will be around in my old age. I just wonder which ethnic group or coalition will be lead by some modern day Atilla or Clovis will seize control of large portions of the US under a forced "reorganization" of state and federal power because the feds no longer have the state capacity to stop them. After all, we've seen such a decline in state capacity everywhere else, why should we expect them to hold the country together, push comes to shove? You think the 20 million illegals that flooded the country, or the 60-100 million descendants they'll have in 50 years in their ethnic ghettos care about the continuity of the American project? They came here for a better life, and that doesn't necessarily include us.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
If you don't watch the ADV Films dub of Evangelion, complete with nepotistic casting of Asuka voiced by the wife of the ADV president, you are doing it wrong. Yes it's terrible. Yes it's obnoxious. Yes it's horribly unprofessional and undermines the quality of the entire show.
But damnit, it was the 90's and that's just how old anime was done.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
Only thing that would have made it better is if the execution came at the end of several intractable arguments where the victim was repeatedly accused of being too hard headed.
Also I kind of want to see the whopper of a cromag skull this guy was sporting.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
I'm still slowly making my way through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. I know there was an update 50 year version, but I'm not sure I care.
It's a lot. I've read my share of Harlan before. But getting through 200 pages of Harlan is significantly different from 1000 pages. Harlan is such a committed misanthrope, it really starts to wear on you after enough of it back to back. And of course, in this collection especially, there is an emphasis on how much these stories relate to Harlan the author. Little tidbits about Harlan are included by the editor in short prefaces to each section that lay bare how autobiographical many of the stories are. Many of his characters have had 4 divorces just like Harlan. Many of them are short, or did a brief stint in the army, or ran away from home, or had their father die young, or have spent time in jail, or are also authors.
Funnily enough, few of his self inserts copy his famously cantankerous nature. They are just obviously correct about most situations. I guess every author has his blind spot.
He really doesn't disguise his self inserts that much, but they also never meet good ends. They serve more for self flagellation than wish fulfillment.
All in all, past the first 300 pages I find it to be a challenging read, an exercise in spiritual endurance. But I'm past the 600 page mark and the end is in sight so I'm trying to commit to reading it more. I have other books I'd like to get through that I anticipate being brisker reads.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
I don't know if Adam Friedland will seize the day to become the ironic Bill Maher for under-40s
Is becoming Bill Maher supposed to be some sort of accomplishment? His schtick mostly seems to be begging the Democrats not to be crazy (and failing) for 1.5 years, and then spending the other 0.5 years during peak election season (midterm and presidential) sheep herding all the audience he grown being "contrarian" into voting Blue No Matter Who anyways because "The Republicans are still worse."
It's working less and less well as time goes on. And every time he goes "I was wrong, here are some of the good points Republicans make" for a few months. But then another election comes up and the mask of reason falls and the pure partisan comes back out.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
In theory this could have been me, once upon a time. I was more inclined to go the "Save as much as possible, invest, move to a low cost of living country" route. I had spreadsheets once upon a time with some rough calculations of how much I'd need to save to live in Romania without any dependents for the rest of my life. I'd more or less given up on women, my girlfriend having left me for another man the day before my father died.
Tangent, that was almost 20 years ago now. Sometimes I actually forget that I was seeing a girl around that time, and she had in fact dumped me the day before my father died. All I remember anymore is the day he died. When I do remember that lady, it's almost like a curiosity. Some weird anecdote that happened to someone else. Not me, happily married with a kid.
Back on point, when I was in my 20's I was an asshole. I mean, I still am an asshole, but in my 20's I was a major asshole. But when I think back, everyone in my 20's was a major asshole. We were high off youth, and whatever minor achievements we'd made. Maybe our brand new degree. Maybe some job that seems like hot shit to us at the time, but was really just another job. A lot of women loved showing off engagement rings for marriages that have long since collapsed. May have had something to do with them also bragging about how short a leash they kept their husbands on, or how "well trained" they'd gotten them. Sometimes I cite 25 as peak cockiness. Something about that feels about right to me as the apex of youthful exuberance. It doesn't fall off immediately after that. But if bad things haven't humbled you yet, they probably start to.
I don't know how you get two assholes to pair off and endure each other until they stop being assholes. I don't know how you get 25 year olds to not be assholes. I don't know how you make the whole experience of having your ego sandblasted off by other assholes so demoralizing you don't tune out of society all together. I have no idea how any of this used to work, or what other generations experienced. I was raised on self esteem and main characters like Zack Morris, Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4mo ago
Going bald isn't the end of the world but it's pretty traumatic. People get hair transplants that look terrible or wear a hair systems to cope with it.
And some people accept their fate and choose to get jacked. Because fat and bald sucks. Fit and bald is a definite look though. All in all I'm pretty happy with my choice.
We'll have to compare notes on who's approach is better/worse. I'm just stubbornly sticking to my program, working through the injuries with extra stretching and warmup, instead of trying to change programs. Because I've more or less accepted, though I hate it, that something is gonna hurt. Avoidance of pain and injury is a myth.
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