self_made_human's profile

self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago

You offered marriage with the strings attached so that she'd refuse it

Strings attached? I live in Scotland. That's where I'm going to be for the foreseeable future. I'm not marrying someone who isn't willing to relocate to be with me, and I think my unwillingness to do the same isn't unprincipled when I'm doing a residency. That's kinda sorta important for my career. Some spoiled daddy's girl who's too good to wash her own knickers? Do I want to sign up with a funeral home early?

I had hoped it would be clear that the whole point of that gambit would be to show her that what she was asking for was untenable. All the polite excuses I'd used till date didn't do the trick.

What would you prefer I said? "Sorry beautiful, I was already against marrying you because I think you're too dumb for me. We might have really fucked up kids. Wait, that was before I found out that you have the morals of an alley-cat."

That finally put it through to her that I'm not an option. I mean, I say finally with less than 100% confidence. I think there's a real chance that she's back to begging me to fly back and rescue her before this message goes cold. Even after becoming tired of her shit and pushing her buttons, I'm still a far superior option to any at hand. If you're inclined to disagree, look at her behavior.

What you insinuate, and which is absolutely, categorically false, is that I did it to lead her on or assuage my ego. I know I can have her, a snap of my fingers and she'd be on her knees with a ring, or for other reasons. "Babe, I'm willing to stay back for you. But you ought to know, I have a try before I buy policy, a sad consequence of being burned one too many times. Let's get you a drink and out of those stuffy clothes." Boom. Done. The only thing stopping me is a conscience, and I'm loathe to loose it.

You wanted her trotting around after you like a little dog, but you disliked her enough not to want anything serious

I... uh... What do I even say to this? You might want to do less off-the-cuff pattern matching and look at the whole thing in context. God knows I worked very hard to provide said context. Was it all for naught?

I'm the one who wants her trotting around me? Hardly. I'd pulled away well before I was due to leave, I didn't bother her one bit while I was away, and I wouldn't have called her if she hadn't texted me first. Do you see any mention of me texting or calling first? No? After I've been brutally honest, and even penned an unflattering description of myself?

In contrast, I am distressingly close to being guilty of orbiting her.

This is the polar opposite of me jerking her around, making her dance to my tune. All I'm really guilty of is being guilted into playing along, and deriving some voyeuristic pleasure from seeing things play out.

I do think she's better off without you, and you may be better off without her.

Quite possibly. Unfortunately, she keeps coming back. I'll avail myself of a baseball bat should it happen again. I'm talking about me being better off without her.

Would she be better off without me? That's the debatable hypothesis. You do realize that I'm the least bad man in her life, by a country mile? I've been the voice of reason. I've gone hoarse. It would have been better, quite definitively so, if she never knew me. Then perhaps she would have already shed many a tear alone and settled. I suspect she will eventually. Her lifestyle is unsustainable. She is a grown-ass woman almost my age, not a child who can't be expected to know better.

A woman you dislike, feel contempt for, and can't ever respect but damn it she's a human female, you're a straight human male, your biology goes "bong!"

I would like to note that the overwhelming bulk of my attitude towards her, until very recently, was genuine pity rather than contempt. The things she told me struck me as beyond the pale, out of character even. I'm an imperfect judge, even if I think I do alright. Do you feel her actions aren't worthy of some contempt? If not, extend that Christian charity to me too. Besides:

If all men were wise, psychiatrists and clergymen alike would be out of a job. I've let my dick lead me to places I wouldn't go without a gun. There really is no solution, barring bumping into someone I actually want to marry and then doing so successfully. I'm hunting for the happily ever after. I'm working on it. I'm a lovesick fool, who mostly disguises his disappointed romanticism with performative cynicism. That isn't mutually exclusive with liking sex with pretty women.

You really won't get that. Not for any fault of your own, but a deeply religious, middle aged women who I believe professes chastity (I could be misrembering the last bit, genuinely do correct me if I'm wrong) is not in a position to grokk it. The men here? They're sighing or chuckling.

that's not a situation that's good for anyone involved

Incorrect. I'll be fine. I've found someone else I like, a lot. I have a date with her tomorrow. I have that pleasant giddiness at that prospect. I have flowers ready. I intend to buy a soft toy, but because I care, not because I needed to kill time. Unfortunately, the realist in me knows even that isn't unlikely to work out, but I'm ignoring him. He's a real drag. I could do with a fling during an Indian Summer, and who knows, things might work out. I might not ache forever.

The damage to me is bounded. I've done my best to minimize the damage to others. But you can see how well that worked I'm sure.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 7hr ago

Thought so. That didn't strike me as modern picture of the situation in either Britain or the US, which are the Default™ expectations, or at least what I assumed without this context.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 8hr ago

But you do want to use her, and here is where I get off the bus and hop aboard the Dumb Bitch wagon.

Look, ma'am, if you are going to litigate against male sexuality, you had best pack a lunch; court is going to be in session for the next ten million years. If you win the case, you'll be the first person worthy of canonization this side of the millennium. He who has no desire to sleep with a hot, nubile model may cast the first stone. I’ll wait.

That said, please substantiate "fucking her around."

I started in good faith. I told her I was moving. I rebuffed her efforts to convince me to marry her. I put marriage on the table if she came with me, because I was correct in hoping it would help her connect the dots. She declined. Instead, she wants me to stay here, uproot my life, and marry her, while she continues to sleep with other men. Do I look like a chump? Do I look like a chimp? Do I look like, as @Sloot would eloquently/crudely put it, a simp?

She treats my time with the entitlement usually reserved for minor royalty. She told me she'd let her ex get her drunk in his nightclub and then let him take her back home to fuck her senseless, a few weeks before I was due to leave. She hassled me with a pregnancy scare - I am not a gynecologist. She once called me away from a family dinner, weeping, begging to see me: only to reveal she actually just wanted a ride to her toxic ex's house because she missed him. She is lucky I didn't throw a drink in her face.

Do you know what the male equivalent of that behavior is? Removing panties under false pretenses. I have never done that. I have left beautiful women behind because I had the simple honesty not to lie to them. That is a low bar, I admit, but look at the other clowns in this circus. One is a cheater, the other is a coward, one more paranoid (justified with knowledge he doesn't have), and the lady in the center is an arsonist complaining about the heat.

So what if I stick around for the attention, the drama, and the chance to get laid again? Her home is already a burning heap of garbage; I didn't light the match. She is cheating on two men and trying to solicit fraud from a third. At this point, my aversion to homewrecking is overpowered by the realization that there is no home left to wreck. A good soul would have saved numbers and organized a group call with Rich and Poor alike.

Fucking her around just so you can feel superior and post about it on here is not cool, man.

I chose unkindness because politeness failed. I chose to narrate it because it is absurd.

I have offered nothing but the truth, for once delivered with the bedside manner of a crash cart. I refused the fraud. I refused the gaslighting. I told her to settle for the least bad option. Truth is an absolute defense for libel, and it should be for being a "cad," too.

You're louche, you're rakish... you want to look cool while you're doing it.

Guilty. Of looking cool. The sunglasses are there because the glare from her bad decisions is blinding.

Much of the tone is a bit. If you missed that I was performing the role as a shield against the sheer depressing reality of it, that's on you. If I didn't write it this way, I'd just be another sad guy wondering why the world is broken. Better to play Hunter S. Thompson than Werther.

But you read this story, where a woman offers sex in exchange for malpractice to cover up her infidelity and wishes to euthanize the dogs of a man she's cheating for her convenience, and think I'm the villain? Really? Not a word for the arsonist, just the guy taking notes? I'm not afraid to tell her anything you wish to convey. I don't care. She reached out to me again, today, so evidently she thinks I'm less of a cad than you do, not that I would trust her judgment further than I can throw her. She's using me, and I decide to use her in the sense that people used to pay money to gawk at the inmates of an asylum.

My soul floats as light as a feather. I trade off interesting vs. regret, and right now, the ROI is looking just fine.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 9hr ago

I kickstarted my year by re-reading Reverend Insanity. I won't bore anyone with a recap, all I'll say is that it took me 4 months to finish not because I was slow, but because the novel is both great and very, very long. About 5x the entire HP series.

But I digress. Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. Go read it.

Outside of that singular, four-month nostalgia trip, this was a bad year for books. It felt like walking through a library where all the ink had run, leaving behind only the faint smell of pretension and pulp.

The Golden Oecumene Trilogy (John C. Wright) I am sitting on a full review of this, much like a hen sits on an egg that refuses to hatch. The barrier is purely technological. I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.

The story concerns Phaethon, a man in a post-human utopia who decides he would rather own a spaceship than be happy. It is solid hard sci-fi. Wright builds a world of remote-controlled bodies and dream-logic Internet architectures that feels surprisingly robust. It is the sort of future the effective accelerationists dream about, assuming they stop tweeting long enough to actually build anything.

The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson) I have already written about this. The premise is a banger: The Black Death kills 99% of Europe instead of 30%, leaving the world to be carved up by China and the Islamic Dar al-Islam. We follow a group of souls reincarnating through the centuries, trying to build a history that doesn't end in trench warfare.

It is a good book that fails to be great because Robinson treats Buddhism less like a religion and more like a narrative device he bought at a discount store. The theology is contrived. The characters feel less like reincarnated souls and more like KSR wearing different hats, lecturing the reader on the inevitability of scientific progress. It is Whig history with a side of curry.

Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) I tried. I really did. I read half of this brick before throwing it across the room, or I would have, had it not been on my phone, and had I not been worried about scratching the screen.

Miéville is a talented writer who has fallen in love with his own adjectives and the way his tongue tickles his taint. The setting is New Crobuzon, a city that is essentially London if London were made entirely of grime, cactus-people, and Marxian alienation. So basically just London, albeit with denizens who are more literal in their prickliness. The plot allegedly involves Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin trying to restore flight to a bird-man, which eventually unleashes psychic moths that eat minds. Oh, and he also fucks a cockroach woman. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the cockroach bit is above the neck.

But getting to the moths is an ordeal. You have to wade through three hundred pages of atmospheric sludge. It is navel-gazey. It is the literary equivalent of a goth teenager showing you their collection of preserved insects for six hours. The pacing is nonexistent. Miéville seems to believe that if he describes the dirt on a windowpane with enough polysyllabic words, it constitutes a plot point. It does not. 6/10.

The Simoqin Prophecy (Samit Basu) This was a re-read of a teenage favorite, and unlike most things from my teenage years, it holds up.

It is Indian fantasy, a genre that is tragically underrepresented. Basu takes the standard "Farmboy Saves the World" trope and beats it to death with a cricket bat. The hero, Prince Asvin, is sent on a quest, the only sincere man in town, surrounded by people who know they are in a book or at least have a refreshing tendency to say fuck you to the plot and do sensible things. It is meta without being annoying, which is a rare feat. Tracking down the epub for the third novel required me to scour corners of the internet that haven't been visited since 2008, but it was worth it. Western readers might miss the puns, but good satire transcends cultural boundaries.

The Outside (Ada Hoffmann) There is a specific genre of modern sci-fi that I call "HR-punk." The Outside is the apotheosis of this genre.

The protagonist is an autistic scientist who accidentally invents a heresy that attracts eldritch gods. She is autistic. She is also a lesbian. The author is autistic. The author is possibly a lesbian. Did you get that? The book will remind you. It confronts the cosmic horror of AI gods who eat human souls, but the real horror is the prose.

It feels less like a story and more like a diversity statement written by a committee of Lovecraftian entities trying to avoid a lawsuit. It is absolute dross. The identity politics are not the subtext; they are the text, the cover, and the barcode. It is a book that demands you clap for it, not because it is good, but because it is brave. It is not brave. It is boring.

Theft of Fire (Devon Eriksen) This is more like it. A decent sci-fi page-turner. It’s about a roughneck space trucker and a genetically modified heiress trying to steal a superweapon. It’s The Expanse meets Firefly, but written by someone who really, really likes engineering schematics.

I am a Richard Morgan fan. I like Hard Men Busting Heads (In Space!). Eriksen delivers this. The physics are hard, and so am I : radiators, delta-v, the silence of the void. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the "ChatGPT Problem." It makes predictions about AI that became obsolete roughly three weeks before publication. I look forward to a sequel.

The "Mid" Pile: Footfall, Live Free or Die, Through Struggle, The Stars I group these together because they all suffer from the same pathology: The inability to write a human being who sounds like they have ever spoken to another human being.

Footfall (Larry Niven): Aliens who look like baby elephants invade Earth. They are called the Fithp. The military sci-fi is competent, but the characters are cardboard cutouts that Niven seemingly forgot to paint. I liked Ringworld in my youth. I wanted to love this. I did not.
Through Struggle, The Stars: Standard mil-SF. The author hands the characters the Idiot Ball whenever the plot requires tension. It is frustrating. It is like watching a horror movie where the teenagers decide to split up to search the haunted asylum, except here they are commanding starships.
Live Free or Die (John Ringo): This is part of the "Troy Rising" series. It is extremely "Humanity Fuck Yeah." Aliens build a gate in the solar system, and humanity fights back. How? Maple syrup. I am not joking. The protagonist leverages the galactic demand for maple syrup to fund an orbital defense platform. It is a libertarian fever dream where the free market literally saves the species. It is soft sci-fi for people who think Ayn Rand was a documentary filmmaker.

Space Pirates of Andromeda (John C. Wright) Wright again. This is an odd duck. It feels like Wright watched Star Wars, got annoyed at the physics, and decided to rewrite A New Hope with accurate orbital mechanics.

We have a princess, a gallant Space Cop, and an evil empire. But instead of the Force, we have very rigorous adherence to the laws of thermodynamics. The dialogue is baroque. The characters are larger than life in a way that feels operatic. It is a 7/10 novel that I finished on a long flight, sandwiched between a crying baby and a man who smelled like old cheese. It passed the time. I will not read the sequels. I have mountains to climb, and by mountains, I mean another four million words of Chinese cultivation novels.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 10hr ago

Was he working in the North Sea? Half of Scotland seems to be involved in Oil and Gas, but my impression is that the overwhelming majority are locals/white.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 10hr ago

It strongly depends on what actually caused me to end up in such dire straits. Was it insufficient care taken when anonymizing patient details land me in front of a patient tribunal and strip me off my license? Did the UK succumb to the rage virus? Did the NHS finally crumble?

Usually, my backstop is coming back to India. Working with my dad and taking the reins. Looking for a job elsewhere. If I'm done with training by then, I could probably make a decent life for myself as a shrink, if not, well I suppose it's hitting the books and preparing for some other exam. I'm pretty good at that, even if it's hardly my preferred way of passing the time.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 17hr ago · Edited 12hr ago

If I ever have delusions about wanting to get into a relationship, I'll just talk to self_made_human to kill that urge in a jiffy.

This is "Pagliacci becoming a doctor for clowns" territory. I can't cure my own urge to get into a relationship! I'm doing that right now, by which I mean getting into one and not the curing. (it's not with the model).

By all means, do enter into relationships. We live in a fallen world, in an age of declining TFRs. Everyone needs to do their part. Find love, expose your heart to being flying kicked and then curbstomped. It's a learning experience. Most women are actually nice, I just have very little to say about them that isn't better articulated by some romance blogger with a bazillion followers on Substack.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 17hr ago · Edited 12hr ago

It says... something that I read that last line 3 times and for every single instance, my brain autocorrected "least" to "most" lol. My priors on the Motte's personality are just that strong.

Thanks. It's hard being an ADHchuD in an autist world.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

A contrast to this would be Deleuze and Guattari: I think they're amazing

There you were making a rather convincing argument, and now I think you've got a case of rhizomes on the brain /jk.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

They're rude, smelly, mostly idiotic beasts who think only with their stomach and are incapable of love.

Dogs aren't known for table manners or calculus skills. My dogs certainly think with their stomachs, they delegate to their small intestines if that's not enough intellectual horsepower. Incapable of love, however? Are you sure you've met a real dog and not a coyote?

My dogs spend weeks waiting for me at the border of the property after I'm gone. They drown me in slobber and leave muddy pawprints on my white shirt when I make the mistake of greeting them right after a flight. If that's not love, I don't know what is.

Some claim humans don't deserve dogs. I disagree, we do. We took the slinking, hungry, ravenous beasts that circled our campfires in the night and made the perfect companion out of them.

/r/dogfeee is one of my favourite subreddits

I am surprised to hear of a sub that is almost certainly more insufferable than /r/childfree. I must hate-browse it at some point. If dogs aren't for you, so be it. But actively hating on them confuses me, even after an essay on moral mutants.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

She can't live without maids. Maybe I need MAID after this interaction.

Can this woman really be happily married to anyone? I would feel pretty bad for the rich guy if it really did happen. With all that money, he cannot help but buy a narcissistic cheating woman who cruelly makes him give up his pets.

I don't know if she was always this way. She was in serious relationships before, and as far as I know she was content and didn't cheat. Not that I know her that well.

It's possible that it's a trauma response. She's been burned by assholes so many times that her defense mechanisms include a terminal inability to commit, there's always a monkey with a juicier fruit on the next branch, and why let go of the one you're swinging on till you absolutely have to?

Maybe she'll settle down willingly. Maybe she'll find a controlling husband who makes her settle down. She's raised in a rather paternalistic society, if you didn't see my last post and her mom's reaction to her revelation that her ex was sleeping with hookers on vacation. Not did she seem to mind that Rich Guy demanded her whereabouts around the clock.

And you know what? I don't blame the guy one bit. It's not paranoia if they're out to get you. Insecurity is justified if your girl is cheating on you, denying you sex while sleeping with another man, and trying to fuck me into fraud.

It is surprising to me that this kind of archetype exists in India, too. And if it exists in India, it probably exists in the whole world. Except maybe in Muslim countries?

I'm somewhat tickled by the innocence in that question. Human archetypes are nigh universal. Muslim countries? If Saudi Arabia didn't have ditzy women ready to turn tricks for a bag, they did after the Sheikhs discovered Instagram.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Cut-rate? I can't help it, I'm sure he makes a lot more than I do. I charge as much as the market can bear, which is very little.

Funnily enough, the pastiche was intentional-ish. I was re-reading his blog. I was also rather mad, which probably culminates in something unusually cynical. I've already been compared to him a grand total of two times, in different contexts. That's not a lot, but it's funny that it happened twice. I guess there aren't that many psychiatric bloggers in the Ratsphere.

I do recall that you offered to pray for this lady. I'm not sure if you did, but I get the impression she needs it all the more now. I started off as sympathetic to her plight, but I think she's gone from being the victim of forces outside her control to actively making things worse for everyone else. Right now I just want to see how this ends, and maybe wrangle a wedding invite so I can eat at a buffet again.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago · Edited 12hr ago

If it makes you feel better, this story is perhaps 50% more cynical than I actually am. I was going through TLP's Greatest Hits of Misanthropy and some of it rubbed off. It won't stick.

I hope you find love someday friend.

That's the rub, it isn't that I didn't find love, it's that it didn't stick. There is someone new in the picture, but as infatuated as I am, I know it can't really work out.

And I hope this model lady wises up before its too late.

Don't we all?

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 1d ago

Alright, I must say that this information has raised the level of esteem I hold Heidegger in. If you screw barely legal teens so good they're willing to go to court to testify on your behalf twice-as-many-years later, you're doing something right.

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