practical_romantic
Pretending to be a cs undergrad.
User ID: 975
practical_romantic
1yr ago
What gta game should I play first. I have the itch of playing a fun action game, nothing serious like an RPG but something that is not very demanding. I have a slightly older windows laptop so I cant run games like witcher 3 on it.
I do kinda wanna play the older ones like Vice City and San Andreas in particular with a shit ton of good mods but dunno where to start. gta 4 and 5 are great games too but I have never played them.
practical_romantic
1yr ago
How does one get into linguistics as a hobby? I would appreciate some creators or accounts on ig or twitter, people making YouTube videos and podcasts about linguistics.
practical_romantic
1yr ago
My brother and I have a tense relationship, unlike my mother and her five elder brothers. She grew up as the only daughter in the lord’s house of her ancestral village. Her youngest brother, a politician and landowner, surprised her with a visit yesterday for Raksha Bandhan, a festival where sisters tie rakhis to their brothers and receive gifts in return. He drove all night with his driver and left this morning. My mother talks to her family daily, but I failed to be a good older sibling for my only brother. He turned 19 today and we will go out for dinner to his favourite restaurant. I also had a female friend tie me a rakhi yesterday, as I have no sister or cousins here, it is a very Hindu thing so I do not think most will get what this means lol. I don’t know what to buy my brother so suggestions are welcome. We all will go out for dinner to celebrate his 19th today.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
The one about step parents being 40 times more likely to abuse kids than biological parents. The west gets family wrong, I will likely never divorce my wife since marriage in Hinduism is a bond for many lives, not just one and the main unit is the family. My mother stayed in a marriage I never would have despite it not even being my fathers fault. My family had some genuinely terrible circumstances and my mother could have left, had I been her, I would have but she stayed for us. I do not wish anything bad on kids who have step parents but anyone who stays together despite issues deserves respect.
I really liked the one about /u/tracingwoodgrains wedding. Other than that maybe the ones where standard_order told me to get addicted to natural dopamine or where everyone trashed me because my oneitis began dating some other dude. I did not get what the people meant back then but it makes more sense the more I read it. The standard_order post was in october 2020 and this one in march 2021. January 2021 stands out too but yeah.
One that will forever stand out would be the book review of from third world to first.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
Will read ramayana and likely watch the latest fast and furious movie titled fast x. It is low brow and I did not like the last two at all so hope this one is not another vin diesel fest.
Short rant - Vin Diesel looks old, the dude is not what you would want in an action hero, not because of the bad acting but he also does not look the part at all. The movies themselves have gone from being about stealing dvds and him being a normal man to some sort of brainless avengers ripoff where literally everything revolves around vin. Keanu is another old guy who is not a good actor but at least the John Wick movies are nice, they have good set pieces and are not dumbed down to appeal to 3rd graders.
I also tried out chilli oil ramen, it is an alright thing, just needs a decent packet of ramen without much sugar or coloring or you may risk burning it or making it taste rancid. My sabbatical begins next week so I will spend my last weekend free just reading the glorious ramayana and contemplating on life. Life is good, also cookies and cream is a great ice cream flavor I just found out about.
tl;dr - Went to Pai, did drugs, met a girl, didn't have sex, and I think I really like her.
I've been in Chiang Mai for over a month to work on a startup. My co-founder and I decided to pursue separate aspects of the business, with me focusing on code generation and broader AI stuff. I won't divulge more until I have something concrete to show. This left me with some free time, so I started visiting nightclubs to improve my PUA skills. While I didn't pull any girls, I made some progress.
I met this guy from my hometown in India who, in hindsight, was a total creep and loser. He suggested I go to Pai for more parties. I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs, so I was hesitant, but my co-founder convinced me. I planned to stay for a day but ended up staying for six.
In Pai, I made some great friends. There was Alessio, a 35-year-old Italian songwriter traveling for seven months, and Dario, a Spanish guy a year younger than me who loves partying. I approached many girls, tried shrooms, and even had girls come back to my place. In the midst of this, I met a girl who changed everything.
She's my age, owns a house, and works as a programmer specializing in RPA. She's around 5'9 and in great shape. People who know me might remember my 2021 March incident, where a girl I was obsessed with ended up with other guys. Up until last week, I was still hung up on her, but this British girl changed that.
My Italian friend said hi to one of her friends at a pizza shop, and I started chatting with her other friends in the kitchen, where I first met her. We bumped into each other many times on Walking Street and later at a bar. She told me she wanted to shag me at first but changed her mind after I opened my mouth, saying I was too much of an asshole and trying too hard. I left, and she started making out with another guy. I went to another place, and she ended up there too, dancing with me.
At one point, she sat on my face while I was sitting on the bleachers. I made some jokes about mutual oral sex, and she stopped, saying it wasn't happening. I left and later told her to fuck herself when I saw her again.
I saw her the next day but didn't say a word. The day after, we exchanged glances, and I went on my first-ever date. We kissed goodbye as she had a flight the next morning, while I stayed for two more days.
I fucked up. I should have eaten her out when she asked, and we would have had sex. I've never been teased this much by a girl. I want to meet her again. She's in the south of Thailand until the 24th, and if she still wants to fuck me, I'll take the first flight to meet her. I won't make the same mistake as last time. It might seem beta, but I like her. She comes from a humble background and has made a good life for herself. She seemed genuinely happy, and I hope to meet her soon and spend the night with her.
My friends convinced me that if she's into me, it's worth a shot. Maybe she could even be a co-founder since she's good at coding.
Back to Pai
I did drugs in Pai - acid, shrooms, cannabis edibles, nitrous oxide, and even liquor. This was the most fun week of my life. We'd wake up late, explore the beautiful mountains, visit nearby scenic spots, and then get fucked up. One night, I did shrooms with some girls and blacked out, convinced they were going to molest me when we left my room. I had earlier spoken with a German guy about how he would have to leave me back to where I live if I got fucked up. He was making out with this girl, saw me sitting in a balled-up position, and helped me get back home with the girl helping me out too.
I had a guy help me get water at 5 am only for him to later tell me that he passed out next to the river. Or the time we rode scooters to the waterfall where I was high sitting behind my friends, or the time I helped Alessio walk back to his place while we both could barely walk from the edibles in the rain. It felt like something out of a video game.
I have so many stories to tell. I feel happy, after many years, I finally felt happy for more than a few hours. It's more than what I deserved frankly. I left and bumped into these Norwegian girls who did a bar crawl. Overall, I am happy, I hope you guys are too.
I want to visit Pai again, maybe in the future once my startup stuff pans out, perhaps I can convince some of the friends I made there to travel once again. I feel a warm glow even describing the things I did there. This was the first time in my life where I traveled alone and did drugs. Pai is magical. Cheap, clean, small, safe, only tourists all around you, mountains all around you.
See ya folks later.
practical_romantic
11mo ago
My co-founder and I are moving to Chiang Mai from our hometowns and want to move next weekend. I would appreciate any tips. We both realised that staying in our hometowns is not productive and Chiang Mai is the cheapest good place to move to. We calculate that we can be comfortable at a monthly burn of about 1-1.2k USD for two people if we share an apartment and eat at local vendors for every meal. The rent is about 500 USD or so since we want to live around nimman road.
I have never travelled outside of my nation so my first time heading out. Please do not hesitate to write what you feel, I am fairly new to this stuff. Also, I turned 24 on the 18th of July, which feels weird lol.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
I developed a terrible habit of looking at the IGs of girls I used to talk till early 2021 before I left IG forever. Any opinions or tips or pointers on how I can curb this bad habit. I have removed my study's wifi router and download everything I will need to study so as to reduce my usage. Best internet usage is just saying Hi to a bunch of smart people in places like this one and getting advice you apply in your life. I hate the internet now as low status, low value me can feel good about myself or get some status as a fringe e celeb whereas the only way to lead life is to do important things IRL on a consistent basis.
How do i stop myself from checking the IGs of other girls. I use third party apps often and it is kinda pointless at this point. Life on IG is only a small snippet for what happens to you irl if you are not a total loser or internet addict or both. Checking the IG of my former oneitis does hurt but otoh not being able to get with her caused me enough pain to not use the app again (I deactivated) and start a parallel group of like minded people (something like themotte but on whatsapp or telegram) where I have people who are actually successful in life while also trying to help to the best of their abilities as they genuinely would be happy to see me outdo them
Long and important post about my interaction with the head priest, likely the most important religious figure alive and some other important thoughts about life. Maybe one of the most important posts I have written. tl;dr I found god and finally am happy :).
I got to visit the Shankaracharya ji of Puri. Shankaracharya is the title given to the head priest. There are 4 Mathas(Monasteries of sorts) for Hindus, each assigned one of the 4 vedas, with Puri being assigned the Rig Veda.
He arrived on Monday and leaves today. I have been listening to their YouTube channel (Govardhan Math) where his public interactions are put up for the world to see and was hence excited to finally see him in flesh.
I arrived early at 11 and he was busy at the time so I could not meet him but I did get to interact with one of his young students. His student was tall, fairly lanky and good looking. His head was shaved with just a shikha (some hair at the middle of the head tied up). He was dressed in white robes instead of the usual saffron with white tikas on his body. He was also an engineer who was in a uni as good as mine for his undergrad (i am at a low tier 1 uni in India) who later went to the best Indian uni for his grad school (IIT Kanpur). His first question on knowing that I was an engineer in my final year was about my job situation lol.
I talked with him for a good bit and he was extremely nice to me. He saw the good in me, the kind I did not think I possessed and told me to focus on sorting my life instead of becoming a monk given I am not a brahmin and my role in this world is to hence lead the life of a family, in fact that most brahmins themselves should not become monks. My role is to become good at my craft and help others like him with the preservation of our customs. He was very youthful yet felt extremely grounded and wise beyond his years.
I got back home given that Shankaracharya ji would begin his public interaction at 5 pm, studied some nlp and later went back again to see him. I finally got there and was able to meet other great priests of high knowledge who were extraordinarily humble. One introduced me to Aditya Vahani, a group of sorts that organises these events nationiwde for the matha and do so despite not even having an office. The young people there were very competent and took me as thier own, we later went to the hall and the program began.
Shankracharya ji was greeted with the chanting of ancient mantras, likely the vedas of some sorts and sat on the stage with everyone else sitting below as a sign of respect.
People asked him questions about many different things, from personal issues to politics to theology and he was quick witted, erudite beyond belief and always courteous in his responses. I asked him about whether the Kali yuga is inevtiable and he replied back stating that a good monarch can stop it.
He answered questions for 2 hours after which the event ended and everyone went for dinner that was served as prasada (food that is considered holy, that is the rough translation).
I stayed back and chatted with his student who was recording everything he said on the tripod to edit it later and upload it. He remembered me from my interaction earlier and chatted for a bit. I helped them wind up and he handed over a case to me, instructung me to carry it on my head. When i arrived outside the empty hall, everyone started looking at me as it turns out the case contained Shree Narayana paduka. The sandals of Vishnu would be the english translation. most never get to see them despite years of deovtion I got to carry them so that was something. After that I talked to him for a bit and he told me to do well in life, act like a good devotee and meet him in prayagraj in January for my Janeu (sacred thread ceremony).
I felt amazing, it was the first time in over 18 months that I felt genuinely happy. The colleague of my father who arranged this meeting met me yesterday and told me that god has a plan for everyone, that I should just work and not give up on life given that something good will happen. This got me thinking about my first post I made in January of 2019 and how 4 months later I ended up being in the newspapers for my academic efforts, from a failure to a success of sorts.
The girl I had a oneitis for got a boyfriend and it hurt to hear that but in reality I am glad she is happy. Not getting with her forced me to discover the ways of PUA and that led to me finally not being bitter about women and life. I read this book called the Tyler Digest and two posts I recommend that everyone read from it are "Points of change" and "How you perceive the world".
Girls did not like me, this was not due to my looks (I look alright I think) or because of my status but because I was bitter and they could sense it. I have always had a superiority complex and in 2019 wanted a transfer outta the country because I thought that I was too cool for my uni, actively looked down on literally everyone i met and had a sense of entitlement to compensate for my own inferiority. It failed and now 3 years later, all the kids who I made fun of have job offers and here I am still a month or two away from hitting 200 questions on leetcode. I say this because I am glad that all these bad things happened to me. Bhagwan (hindi word for god) does everything for a purpose and I needed to taste the humble pie to see my shortcomings. I was kicked out of high school and went to do better than all my classmates, I lost the only girl I ever felt anything romantic for and now have the tools to never have issues with dating ever again, I may be down now but but I trust god that things will get better soon.
The two posts are about two important topics. The latter is what I will describe. My younger brother just began uni here and is extremely bitter about life so was mocking the priests but I could see that he did not hate them but rather like me, hated himself which made me re read these posts.How we see the world and other is a reflection of our own selves. This forum and everyone here has always, always said good things to me, at times when i was clearly wrong, genuinely depressed and likely saved my life. People saw the good in me that I was sure I did not have and that is because you people are good. The priests I met have all the reasons to act high and mighty yet they don't.
It is easy to judge others, call people losers and feel that I am higher value than them, my knee jerk reaction to sharing about anyone was trying to demean them so that they would seem less cool than me as my own sense of value is low.
A person who is high value does not act that way, there is some good in everyone we meet and no amount of tactics can make a girl like you as much as genuine happiness that leads to a fun and playful time with her.
The head priest, my father's colleague, my family, my psychiatrist, that girl I liked, all saw the good in me despite there being none and and today I am alive, getting to appreciate little moments of life.
Only Bhagwan can judge people, not me. There is good in everyone, bitterness is never good and there are ways to change this. I do not have any concrete progress this week but I am finally happy in life.
The hole in my heart has been filled, I accept my lowly place in society and am looking towards working my way up. I read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche etc was always sad, accepting that I will never be happy in my baseline but here I am actually happy just to be alive.
All those bad things I did were not so bad after all, I found god and I am glad he chose me. Puri has kept traditions that began thousands of years ago alive and these priests are the only Indians I know who are proud to be indian instead of copying euros. Indians copy them out of a complex that is why girls mock my religiosity. People speak English as a signaling mechanism of where they are socio economically and pick up whatever americans do to look cool, afterall, this is also why I refuse to watch sports or TV shows because it goes against my ideals. I was like this too but have changed quite a bit now given my recent insights. I am proud of my way of life, my forefathers, the culture they left and the ideals they want me to live by.
I have not cussed at, mocked or thought low of people since yesterday and life has been much better. I smile and feel happy just to be alive, just to be able to do all the things I can and to be where I am in life. Sure, I am still fucked in the short term but I finally feel at ease with life.
You are entitled to your labor, not the fruits it bears said Lord Krishna to Arjuna. Took me 2 decades to understand that.
So yeah, even though bad things happened, I got to see the head priest and my life changed completely. I still like that girl but that is more because of neediness, that is fine tho, I do have a feeling I will meet her someday, BF destroying is quite easy given I have done it before lol and I will be a tier 1 lothario after I manhandle the academic and discipline issues in my life starting now. Life has meaning. I look forward to studying and acting how Lord Krishna would want me to act. Instead of my oneitis, every song and thing reminds me of Lord Krishna. I am not lying when I say that. I feel happy.
I finally grew up.
May you find Bhagwan too, may all of us get the best that we deserve.
Narayana Narayana.
side note, I was in the dorms for the first time in my life past Friday for my department day, was out for cigarettes with my friend, we reminisced over our oneitits, hung out with others in the dorms and talked a lot. I do not smoke regularly but it was great. I had fun, slept in his room on the floor, it is the little things in life man, walking aimlessly at night and seeing others go about their life. I finally love uni.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
Any tips on how to ensure I do not feel beat up after working out. I do 4 workouts a week in the morning (upper and lower split) using HIT and do 6 days of MMA for 6 days a week. I began last week and have terrible sleep and bad food habits so feel sore all the time. I have seen a reduction in my levels of soreness so just wanted to get some decent advice. I am a farily skinny rail untrained person and have in fact made progress whilst working out infinitely slower by fucking up my sleep previously so please lemme know what things I can and should expect and possible remedies. Thanks!
Long post - tl;dr - have never done anything hard in my life. Isolated, still living in my super dysfunctional family and voluntarily in a sabbatical to fix my CS fundamentals now for the next months, feel really low about myself with immense self doubt. Never met someone as lazy and ambitious as me so the disconnect between what I expected to have happened by age 22 and what actually is happening hurts to talk about. Now forced in a corner, I cannot muster any positive emotions and am drifting towards nihilism. Isolation is another factor which I really would appreciate tips on. I remember being told 2 years ago here that life will go on without me if I do not change, seeing that warning turning into reality has definitely shaken up things. How can one even cope with self worth in a world of billionaires where you have so many people better, more successful than you?
Some thoughts -
I feel dead on the inside, do not think I actually am smart enough to do anything and may be too late to the party. I cannot find any joy in food, porn, music, movies etc. Everything feels tasteless, this is despite being on prozac. A recurring pattern in my life is me hating isolation, not having any peers and being forced to do something hard with those two things happening simultaneously. Getting off of cram schools without ever studying a day always made me feel that I will have to pay for it by working like that some later time in my life so the Sabbatical is a voluntary step in that direction. Everyday I recoil with anger, horror, fear and envy when I see someone my age or slightly older or younger doing good things (like getting into Stanford for a second degree or publishing papers in journals that matter or partying in higher end places with a rad social circle, meeting models regularly or working a super interesting, respected job that is meaningful). A part of me wishes I could do those things but the remaining half sorta knows I will likely never make it given what has happened till now.
I have applied for a semester waiver for this semester( get my 4 year degree this summer without having to attend any classes, exams, labs starting next week) so that I can study full time without college o disturb me and save time, actually do something good. Real programming has scared me, I doubt myself each time I work but end up learning something new. Learning and working hard is by definition really really painful and never having done it before, living a life of just surfing all day has fried my brain to the point to only ever like things that are easy. I look at really really good guys and feel a sense of awe and sadness for I marvel at their ability but simultaneously subconsciously feel that I will never be good enough no matter what I do. No one can ever be like John Carmack but you can only know if you keep trying and competence is its own reward so always right to do these things, hope that you get so good that you enjoy them.
Regardless, I just hope I succeed with this. I will also take up a combat sport in some time as the only thing I will do for the entirety of my day is study, work out and sleep, no classes or exams and whatnot. Programming itself is not bad, no matter how tired, bad I may feel starting work has a wierd effect where once I begin, I can feel everything else disappear and bang out some code only to actually feel tired for real when I do a few hours of it (2 or so for now but can push to 5 or 6 maybe?) which is something I feel only when I work. There is happiness, satisfaction at the end of a hard day of work where I like having learnt new things and feel good about myself for not doing what I do by default which is to never do fuck all. Developing actual skills is like developing a chiseled physique in the sense you must do the thing hard enough, long enough without breaks only to see results in a few months. The first few weeks is just pain but the payoff is otherworldly. I have felt some of it recently and it felt great. Like waking up from an opium dream to a reality that feels cleaner, more vivid but also better.
Some Developments in life -
On the 9th of March, a day after Holi I will get my sacred thread (Janeu). It is a highly respected thing which only a small minority of the country can wear. I feel immense pride in being born into a lineage that traces its origin to divinity. The thread means that you are a twice born, born once from the womb of your mother and the second happens when you take your Janeu. It is something that very clans can take up and despite the gloomy nature of the post below, knowing that I will be the first in my family to revive the tradition is heartwarming. My recent ancestors did not get theirs so my family's lineage will now have my name in it as those who will take up the sacred thread will do so under my name (or so I was told) which is very touching. I was told not to post here and that was honestly great advice given I would simply lie about my progress and would post just to get some semblance of validation from the internet as real life is too dull.
Recently, more specifically, today I have been feeling really low. I also got paralettes (bars for push ups) for push ups and have started doing Timed Static Contractions (a form of isometrics) now. The real bottleneck for everything fucking me up is sleeping on time and electronic distractions as I have had some really good days where I felt great and had no screen time besides work, slept on time. Getting off of sleep meds so will just take prozac and staretta, I hallucinate on ambien sometimes and think about my oneitis who is dating someone seriously now. Deep down I feel that I will never get anyone better but then again, why not date someone who is rich or has a settled life instead of me. My city has played a huge part in this as she lives in the capital whereas my town barely has anything and feels like a retirement home. I do not meet interesting, attractive people ever at all and this is not just me being someone with a superiority complex, someone young is better off in a metropolis with other young people instead of the sandy land of Rajasthan. My GPA is super low at a 6.77 out of 10 but I am just glad uni will get over soon. I hate, fucking hate it with all my passion and have met better people here than in uni.
Sabbatical -
My uni taught me fuck all. The exams, labs, classes were all a LARP and a bad one at that, something others here can attest about Indian higher education, all I got was 4 years worth of wasted time and a college life I will forever hate. I have decided to take a sabbatical of at least six months after university ends to fix the holes in my CS knowledge and decompress from all the trauma I got at uni. I have good people I found as mentors via the internet helping me out in learning key fundamentals from ground up properly (Computer Architecture, Discrete Math, Data Structures in C etc etc) and will end it with a capstone project so that I not only have the fundamentals required but also a fixed direction.
My mental health is in the gutter in all honesty. All I have ever wanted is to leave my home for a better life but somehow I find myself in prolonged isolation yet again. My town is way way too small, the only decent uni here is mine and I cannot befriend more people or see any girls for now as I take my sabbatical seriously.
I finally did nearly finish my first proper notebook since 10th grade which is an achievement for me, finally.
I aim to get a remote gig from some firm based in the west by the end of this year that pays me well and have actual fucking skills to make things that matter instead of just cramming questions off of leetcode because that is the extent of what I have seen in my uni for all 4 years.
Even during such times of extreme nihilism, I would much rather die than work a 9 to 5 job here where I commute long distances for a job where i deal with office politics from people who pretend to be intellectuals on Indian tech twitter.
Remote jobs or migration are the only two things I wish for.
My mind was dead when I began writing the post but I feel better after having written this out. My friends and mentors grill the fuck out of me daily and weekly with progress reports so at least I have that going for me. I miss my oneitis, the big reason for wanting to move out is to meet better women than her, by the hundreds. Sure that is not the main reason, that is obviously bettering my career but most Megacities have both. She was nice to me so I still wish her well but I really still want to at least spend one night with her irl. I have always have had needy one sided crushes since forever so I need to work on myself too.
Also the online world, the screen, the internet, TV, my brain, none of that is real. The more I work and the less time I spend with all of these things, the better I feel. Sure my mentors and friends who help me out are all online but I will get a dumb phone. I study in my Unis library which is a 20-30 commute away from my house and turn on gather.town so that my friends can check my work and my screen. Adds another layer of safety. Also will try out the book focusing by gendlin which is about self therapy of sorts. Just need to stick to a routine long enough and all should be fine.
Will post updates next. Take care!
practical_romantic
1yr ago
Fights this week.
Porier vs Islam Makhachev
Porier is an everyday man's fighter but sightly better. Better than average everywhere, really good in some places but elite in zero spots besides one, beating up pressuring brawlers.
Makhachev is an interesting fighter. Whilst Khabib was the physical freak, makhachev wwas always the technical guy. Khabib relied on chain wrestling whilst makhachev has a better shot, much better striking, lefty and also chain wrestling. Though Khabib had a much more damaging top game, Luke Rockhold esque. Islam wants to ground and pound you too but his grappling is more positional.
Unless Islam fucks up, he should win easy. Porier is the feel good story but life is cold and calculated. Michael Bispings a one and done thing. Fighting is brutal, your chin only gets worse with time, roids can't fix it, you get paid like shit.
Recently saw some movies
- Glengarry Glen Ross
Simply brilliant, very relatable and great dialogue's. Must watch.
- Thief
Proto Drive. Incredible. Must Watch, amazing soundtrack. Mann is incredible
- The Insider
Meh
- Fargo
Boring, terrible. Don't watch, how can the same people make the big lebowski. It feels like they were mocking the Midwestern amerikaner with this one.
- La Noire.
Meh
Nearly finished Gta Vice City. I can't enjoy video games anymore. I feel like I have to work lol. Have a fun week folks.
I am not doing well at all, I pulled my first 14-hour day a few days ago, it was not clean at all but I went from doing nothing to actually being somewhat better than what I thought I could be, from 0 hours per week to 40 plus. I have to implement this paper on Spectrograms and train some models (Deep learning stuff) and so far the pre-processing part has been kicking my ass and the deadline of the weekend has made me go nuts. I cannot sleep, all I think about is failing this assignment and never making it to the lab I want to work in. I do not want to work the lower paying jobs in the Indian market and wanted to pursue this Deep Learning thing full time, My undergrad got over a few weeks ago and I took the plunge. The research position pays peanuts and I would happily work for free or pay out of my own shallow pockets to work on the kind of stuff that I wish to work on but alas.
I am still working out, I am close to 157 lbs (I began at 145 and at maybe the same level of body fat percentage at 6 foot, totally untrained, still look the same though) and even did MMA for a while. Life just keeps getting worse, I see all my classmates from high school and uni lapping me and getting into great grad schools, partying, enjoying life whilst I am anxious, doing as much work as I can and still failing. My bad decisions have caught up to me but I had to take a day off totally as I was too stressed and too tired to work.
My life sounds like a broken record but the harder I try to fix these things, the more pain I feel. What if I do not get this gig and have to hear my parents and everyone I know scream at me and mock me for trying to get to grad school or trying something like research? It haunts me, I have never worked, studied or even been productive in my life and when I try my hardest I get hit with worse outcomes. My doctor diagnosed me with ulcers due to high amounts of stress and each day I hate myself more, the only reason why I do not hate myself as much as I should is that I try my hardest. Deep Learning stuff is quite fun too, I find the jupyter environment and training models way more fun than anything I ever learned in uni. Udemy and Fastai are great tools.
With no phone, no girls, no social life, no surfing as I blocked everything on my browser or any other distractions, I have been trying this for 2 weeks and can feel tired and helpless. Even really scared of posting about it here or to my friends as I am a frequent liar of sorts so it is reasonable to be skeptical Plus I am not exactly a blood relative that anyone would care beyond a point. Everyone thinks I am a fuck up who would pick garbage and see me as the village idiot. No one else will implement the paper for me and my problems are my own but I always thought that if I worked hard enough some day, I would feel proud of myself but that was fleeting as the next day I realised how much harder this thing was.
Please do not judge me, I am scared and each day I feel worse about my own life. I am sorry. I wish I were more competent but I am finally trying and I just hope that I get my break in a good lab and more importantly that I do get good at the deep learning stuff. The lab is not the main thing here, my not being good enough is and I hope I get there soon.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
My favorite fast food has to be McDonalds. Something about the filet o fish and the rest of the burgers. Taco Bell is kinda meh.
Is there any Indian fast food joint in the western world btw?
practical_romantic
9mo ago
I will leave Chiang Mai this or next week and I am a little bittersweet about it. I have been sorta working in startups for close to a year without any progress and will go back home and work on a prototype for a tool for developers. This will be the first time in my life that I will be working without direct supervision and get an apartment in a different, smaller town, away from my parents if I can. My role in my previous startups was non-technical and that was not as helpful. My responsibilities were not fixed plus I did not develop any skills as a programmer at all. My depressive episodes and malaise stem from a lack of skills, routine and clear path towards something meaningful. There is not much point staying in Chiang Mai on my roommate's dime since I do not have a job, I came to assist him on his startup but we both fell out. I will help out my friends with their e-commerce venture (they have this alongside startup stuff) part-time to get a regular income and then work on my own on my startup.
In hindsight, I should have just started working on my own thing a year ago. Being a janitor in a startup where the speed of shipping is not very fast is not ideal and I am a little scared about posting this stuff online but I just want to let this stuff out for once. But that is what I was, a janitor.
Chiang Mai was good. My first time ever out of the nation. I met some really cool people. This jacked middle-aged Russian dude named D who worked as a programmer and read a whole bunch of classic literature. He clicked very well with me and in broken English would tell me a whole lot about life. His analysis of me being someone who needs a strict routine and some meaning in my life to work on more, and how I try to "sell" myself to others in attempts to get them to like me instead of being who I am more freely. I met guys like this dutch ex party head who now runs e-commerce in Africa, a Russian girl who works for a gambling organisation, and a rich Thai guy who abused every drug known to mankind and now has black feet from it.
Pieter Levels, the most popular digital nomad often recalls his early days nomading, stating that he'd meet super interesting people, like this one Aussie guy who would travel to Thailand with just his laptop and charger, buy clothes when he would touch down and donate them all before he left. D of all people left a big impact on me, making me start working out again and how daily callisthenics is enough, and more importantly, how daily physical exercise is more important for the mind more than anything else. I saw this movie named The Island, a Russian movie about regret and of all I would miss him the most.
I have not had irl friends since 2016 in a sense. I would have close friends on the internet and meet them occasionally but never irl friends who I meet daily without scheduling meetups, organically and learn a lot from. I dont want to leave chiang mai but I am at this point a burden on my roommate, and even if I were not, I would have had to return anyway to get a hang of the e-commerce stuff and learn some cs topics to help with my startup. Leaving is bittersweet. I actually had fun. I actually liked hanging out with people after a while. Learning about literature, music, movies and just life in Eastern Bloc and so much more. Back home, people would find my tendency to say hi to everyone and try to talk to them a weird low status thing whereas the expats here are happy to talk. They all have a story to tell. Sure they are not world beaters but neither is anyone I know of, more importantly, there is more to life than just what you do. People around me have this faux superiority complex where everyone is looked down upon unless they are like fucking silicon valley billionaires or conquerors like Alexander but if you are someone who is that good, you probably would be fine talking to most people since everyone is below you in the hierarchy anyway.
Truth is, I liked meeting good people irl. People who like me for being who I am. I was a hermit for a decade, yeah I would visit uni and stuff but I never could connect with anyone since people in uni hated me for a lot of petty reasons. Most nomads are not perfect and I don't want to be one long term but I wish I met more of them. I finally felt feelings for a girl, tried a bunch of narcotics, finally partied like a normal person and got to experience life beyond what a guy my age experiences in a small town. I hated Chiang Mai when I landed and my roommate would get angry whenever I would say hi to random people but since I stopped working with him on his startup, I have been able to take time off, make friends who I connect with and finally take an adult vacation for the first time in my life, ever. Up until this point, I had never explicitly taken any days off. They would mostly be me having some anxiety in the back of my mind whilst not getting any work done but for the first time in years, I finally took a week off completely and loved every single second of it. I kept posting about wanting to meet girls and got to cold approach nearly a hundred girls, all attractive tourists from various nations. My oneitis which I could not get over for years became an afterthought a few days into a normal vacation spot. Most of what I knew about girls came from the internet or from stuff others told me but I had never experienced what talking to them was like beyond my small town and it was amazing. Rajasthan or any city in India does not display what life holds, it is all little leagues and scarcity. Despite being somewhat better looking than the average guy from where I am from, I had loads of girls tell me that they found me attractive and wished to spend more time with me. I had guys come up to me and tell me that they liked hanging out with me a lot in a non homo way lol.
I look forward to the next few months. Finally on my own and doing something really hard, I will resume weekly updates so that I can have accountability. My skills as a programmer are at best noob tier and the idea I am working on is itself based on a strong hunch a good wise friend of mine had who himself wished to work on it before, 2 years ago but could not due to tech not being good enough which it is now. I am sorry for writing these long winding posts but I have no one else to talk to about this stuff. My friends will judge me for writing about them online and I cannot be weak in front of my parents who already have gone through a lot.
Things I experienced are not unique or special. By my own faults and laziness, I fucked my life up where I got to be this manchild by age 24
practical_romantic
1yr ago
My startup is going to launch it's mvp in less than 4 weeks and I have to handle the sales/customer acquisition/marketing and some hiring stuff in the meantime.
Please point me to resources on these topics that will ensure that I do my parts well. I don't wanna blow my opportunity and get users the smart way to our product when it launches.
practical_romantic
2yr ago
Does anyone here have any experience with psychiatric drugs like ambien, prozac and axepta with viviloref. My skin doctor makes me consume finasteride, fish oil and biokap for my hair (I have decent hair but was thinning, the thinning has stopped now so I am glad I took action on this soon as now I will not lose hair). Obviously minoxidil plus fin solution twice a day too.
The main aim this week is to keep both my workout and study journal handy and update them honestly daily. Ambien does cause some issues but imo is it more of my fault as I take it at different times and hence also have little consistency with my axepta and prozac (take both in the morning).
Anyway, will refrain from long rants. Measured my 1rpm today and shall begin 531 from tomorrow. I still have urges to not study, be lazy, surf the internet all day or to check the ig of my oneitis but at least I do something daily. Tracking it would give me more accountability so should be a good exercise. That way I can pinpoint what causes inconsistency and modify that behavior.
Obviously there is some pent up frustration within me. I have a lot of advantages over a lot of my peers simply because I have competent people irl guiding me, I still feel bad at times about my oneitis. I hate grinding, being alone and having to work but on the other hand, this is what makes you aryan. Life will always have these issues and running away never helps with that. I just needed to vent that. I do not tell my friends about that girl, it is kinda silly but I do not want to lie, at least not on the only place where I can be honest.
The greeks worked out not just because it made you look better and higher class but also it makes you better on the inside, the main reward hence is the betterment of who you are. Physical culture makes you better inside with the muscles just being a side effect of a better mind. This may also be why even today, Greek or roman sculptures are more pleasing to the human eye than anything else, Not only can you look like them (the later stages did see the statues getting exaggerated to a point of absurdity) but they also showcase bodies that are capable and I genuinely find that appealing. All my mockery or low thoughts about others get washed away after I take an objective look at my own performance after a hard day in either of these two.
You have to get used to pain and learn to develop an instinct for finishing tasks, I would justify stuff by telling myself that since I am trying my best, I do not need to track things as the day to day inconsistency would make me feel bad. Progress however is consistently positive and tracking helps you visualize that. If you track things, you know if you are failing or not, there is no vagueness to it, an objective review of three months of daily review will take one further than working till you cannot anymore without tracking.
Definitely learnt this and the part about having a killer instinct the hard way. A good person or rather those who do well get disproportionally more for just being slightly ahead of those behind them, similarly, doing slightly more work each day so that you actually hit targets does more than just leaving something at 90 percent. You get 100 percent rewards at 100 percent and 0 at 90. Sure it is good practice to do 90 over 0 but at this point, I should be able to know what realistic goals are, what my daily and weekly work capacity is and how much I can expect to improve.
I am glad that I know this now lol. Just writing it down since I will read this post later in the future to look back on the time when I started tracking things. It takes one action to have massive impact on you, visiting a decent club did more for me than many months of reading or texting so I expect much from tracking stuff transparently and consistently.
Have a great week!
practical_romantic
1yr ago
Things I did for fun this past week - GTA Vice City (with the Extended mod), Franchise Cricket, Fights, below is my description of these three.
I played a ton of GTA Vice City extended. It's called extended due to the game-altering mod that updates the graphics, adds a ton of gameplay tweaks etc and I do not like it. I play the game and feel that it is mundane and I should be working instead. Regardless I still liked it more than surfing Instagram. I played Vice City for the first time as a 5 year old and 19 years later, I can finally grasp the story and how overly sexual it is lol. The game back then was a breath of fresh air on fat monitors where you could live out all your vile fantasies of violence and vehicle-based activities in Miami straight out of Miami Vice.
The game's protagonist is Tommy Vercetti who spent 15 years in Jail for his mafia family. Upon getting out, he is sent from the North to Florida for a drug deal that goes wrong and in order to repay back his family, he starts making money with local druglords, to the point where he takes over. It has a star cast featuring Tim Burton, Trejo, even people from Miami Vice. The game is no doubt primitive 22 years after its release though still quite fun.
Miami and the amazing radio that you listen to in the game are two really really important things. They make it come alive, the tune still hold up and Miami is one place I want to visit once my startup fetches me some money. The neon lights, girls in bikinis, tropical weather and distinct architecture with a ton of water in a North American metropolis sounds fucking amazing. That place must be super fucking fun if you have a little money lol.
The other source of my daily entertainment has also started feeling a little drab. You have franchise cricket in the summer, so clubs based out of cities similar to how sports are done in North America. My grandad watches it every day so I watch parts of it daily with him. My hometown's team did qualify for the playoffs despite losing like 4-5 in a row recently, though I am quite neutral about cricket, still a good way to kill time.
This weekend, Tommy Fury fights Usyk, IMO usyk wins a decision given Fury is probably washed now. I won't watch MMA this weekend since I just don't feel like it. The other day I realised that I had been watching MMA for over 8 years and have only learnt it for a few months so feel a sense of dread watching it as I could have actually acquired the skills I see on TV somewhat had I trained all that time instead of just watching fights and checking news or betting lines and analysis of various fights. That kinda attention should only go to ones day job or some serious hobby.
Spending time with these activities also made me want to go back to reading books again. Things I read for fun somehow ended up influencing me in a good way. I like the person I am when I read instead of when I am up till 3 am flying an RC helicopter for a game mission or looking at different betting odds for MMA. I have been wanting to read Faust and Ramayana, started both but left them for god knows what reason.
practical_romantic
1yr ago
Lmao, the peson who poasted it has the account name exposed pajeets, pajeet is an ethnic slur for people of indian subcontinent. I am from India but the movie by the looks of it focuses on the rural poor class which makes up most of the nation. These are the people who are found in disturbing imagery because of their poor conditions. Being poor, not very smart and living in India is not a good combination at all.
I find myself in a bit of a twist now, a lot of the stuff in the documentary is true, which is why those who are slightly upper middle class or above look down upon everything that is associated wth poor Indians. I cannot fully criticise all Indinas publicly since I by definition am one but at the same time, this stuff is vile.
Regardless, do lemme know what you guys think about it.
practical_romantic
1yr ago
Dune Part 2 was the last movie I saw in theatres and cannot recommend it enough. It is similar to LOTR in the sense that it is able to showcase a lot of loyalty to one's aristocracy or ruling clans in a way that all people can relate to. The movie is majestic, grand, an epic in the real sense. I loved Javier Bardem the most and recommend everyone to go watch it.
I will be listening to a lot of house and trance music from the 2010s, not super mainstream stuff but rather somewhat mainstream so Anjunabeats and all. As a teenager, I did not like my classmates at all so I spent a lot of time listening to dance music and back then my attention was not as fucked. I remember listening to Aviciis BBC Radio 1 essential mix, seeing Swedish house mafia disband (in hindsight their music was not even good) and overall got to hear a ton of really good tracks. Listening to music in your room is a relaxing affair, I intend to do it this weekend.
I was also at a wedding a few weeks ago where me and a guy I met there downed more than a bottle of tequila in under 6 hours with zero side effects so it is a great liquor lol. I was at quite a few weddings every weekend with two being those of my cousins, danced a lot at the second one and honestly, I really like dancing now, I get why people visit nightclubs, besides the part about meeting other attractive people. not much besides, my startup journey is far more complex than I thought it would be, making my uni issues seem inconsequential but I am positive. I am still depressed like today I saw my former oneitis (now a functioning cokehead) in my dreams taunting me about the amount of drugs and dudes shes been with since I stopped talking to her but I will be fine, I'm reading Eguenge Gendlins focusing and hopefully, that should aid me.
Have a great weekend folks, I wish I could post more and I plan to soon. themotte honestly played a much larger part in shaping my worldview than my uni mates since I got here in 2019 as a high school drop out and I find it wild that it has been half a decade. I hope this place does not die off.
practical_romantic
1yr ago
Edit - edited the FR, it is linked for those who want to read the field report.
I went to a nightclub for the first time last saturday and had a blast. I made out with/danced/ felt four different girls and three of them complied with less than 2 minutes of me asking them to do it.
I was just gonna see my date for coffee at this hipster coffee place, she got late so I talked to two other girls and got her number as well.
Later went to that nightclub place and had fun. I got blocked by 2 of the 4 girls who did touch me but that is fine.
Main takeway is that I am now in a state of abundance, as in I have tasted it myself and will never be desperate for girls. Earlier I would just cry over getting blocked but now I do not care as I know I will find better and many many many more of them later so focusing on careermaxxing for remote ML or Quant jobs is the right path as I will miss out on the club here but will be able to do this in posh areas in the capital later.
Once you taste it, you are different, I have changed as a person completely and hope you all experience this.
P.S. The field report is linked and is on my profile. The field report contains the details of the interactions so please if you get the time, do read them and let me know what you feel. https://old.reddit.com/user/practical_romantic/comments/xwf3y7/fr_first_night_at_a_club_and_some_daygame/
Religiosity, Abundance and internal motivation have made my life much better. Do read and provide feedback. Action beats everything, just being there in field helped me grow up and have more fun than all of the reading ever did. Overall quite fun, something changed inside me, a switch was flipped, I know that I can get all girls and hence do not need to worry about them now at all since I have better things to do.
- Is there a point in your 20s when you are forced to move out because of constant bickering by your parents?
My mother has constantly been angry and aggressive since her menopause last year. I do not like shit tests coming from my mother, not the kind where the only solution is not talking to her. My dad has an incredibly short temper and would berate me for flunking high school (I still cleared the nationwide entrance tests and high school exams with literally perfect grades, being featured in the newspapers because of it). Every day he would scream at me for having flunked exams and this went on for at least 2 years until I started uni. I have to bear it from both my parents now who expect me to have a stable income while building something of my own. To them, the perfect life is of a bugman code coolie. I may have fucked up but I still went to uni without having to stay back a class. Some here would remember my posts in 2019 about trying to transfer over to the US and how my family actively sabotaged it, now whenever news of a kid getting a scholarship to some big-name uni comes up, my mom talks about it loudly as to call me a loser, even though I had zero money to even write exams, forget about hiring consultants like other kids who go out do here. Then after I argued about it, she told me that I would have failed and I got what I deserved.
I love my family, they have sacrificed everything they could have to raise me and my sibling but they are overprotective and abusive to the point where I do not wish to share a roof with them ever again. Calling me a has-been failure at age 23 (will be 24 this July) is not fun. My family suffered a lot due to bullshit court cases resulting in the loss of most of our ancestral land to legal limbo which my family sunk a lot of money into. I get why they feel the way they do yet they cannot change at this point, I should leave soon. I have not told them when I am leaving, the ticket is for June 3rd, and I want to leave without telling them about it. Have never travelled in my life since they have always been overprotective.
The shit tests are fairly constant. I started working out more seriously and saw my clothes shrink a little. I did gain some inches on my waist by forced overeating from MMA but my ma just keeps calling me fat, telling me that I am going to be fat whilst herself being really obese. Everyone in my family is overweight except me and she somehow always calls me fat whenever the topic of my clothes comes up.
- Part-time nanny
My grandad is 91 and his room is in the section of the house where my study is so I am constantly being asked to run errands, pointless ones, it fucks my work up since I have to constantly start over and over again. Even worse is that my parents don't let me sleep because my work hours are late and they wake me up at 9 am so I average 5 hours of sleep a night. Any disagreement results in them screaming at me again and telling me that I will fail at my startup too. At this point, they are more convinced of me being a failure than anyone else I know of. Not saying that they want me to but this behaviour has always been a constant in my life. The only metric that mattered ever was fucking stupid exams, that produce their tier code coolies for the West which is what universities in my nation are in all honesty.
- Start-up woes and relocation
I will be leaving for the large metropolis this Monday to meet with my cofounders and start serious work on my startup. One is based there and makes a good living doing a bunch of programming stuff and the other is a child prodigy of sorts who has many job offers whilst studying as an undergrad in the US. The one living there has a large apartment so we will be working out of it until we get our service apartments 5 minutes from his place, still using his home office as our primary workplace. I am the non-tech guy here for now since we need a lot of front-end and back-end infra up and running so I will have to take care of marketing, sales, hiring, communication etc and I am worried that I might get kicked out or the startup may fail. I have never had anything good happen to me over a long time and I feel quite scared.
I will keep writing more ML code, meditating and figuring out how focusing works properly since my work hours will be gruelling. I am just tired, I have no one to share any of this with, I could not share my feelings with my family earlier which is why I started posting here and now I can never share how I feel about anything with them or anyone. For now, I feel alone, with no safety nets.
No lol, I have slept with women and I can sleep with them. I just do not hit on ones who are like my mom, very traditional, I do not do it because I like being friend-zoned lol, on the contrary, I am somewhat decent at pickup, I just share a bond with this girl because she is religious and I do not want to be someone who sleeps with her.
I friend-zoned her and a few other traditional conservative girls the first time we interacted because I know how much sleeping with a guy impacts them, that is just how some feel in my religion. Sleeping with girls who are really chaste is something I see as a sin, maybe I am weird. I do not have issues with those who sleep around, I just only sleep with them and not ones who are chaste.
My oneitis is a different girl altogether and even she had not friend-zoned me but I did fuck up big time with her.
I had my final exam yesterday and am now done with my undergrad exams. Today all of my classmates will be getting t shirts to commemorate 4 years at my uni and will scribble a bunch of things on them. It is a pretty common thing here in high schools and unis so since I could not attend mine at high school, I will finally attend it in my uni.
One more thing I have recently begun enjoying is walking around aimlessly at the end of a workday. So walking through my uni campus or my high school randomly was a very fun and relaxing experience. I got to meet a bunch of people from my past life and uni friends, walking around aimlessly is hard to do in most parts of the country but I was lucky enough to go to decent schools and it honestly is a fun experience, especially once you are done for the day.
Also I finally did give up watching cricket and other sports, sure I may watch a little bit here and there but the time these things can consume is a lot. 4-5 hours spent in front of the TV is not ideal, I find much more enjoyment in meeting people. Also I get why alcohol is so fun for most people. I do not drink but hanging out with more people my age does make me understand why. My entire batch will be going to a resort near our town next weekend to get shitfaced and honestly I cannot wait to try it at least once in my lifetime.
Do suggest tips on how to do it properly, what to do and what not do when getting shitfaced.
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