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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   844 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 11, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm looking for advice on how to fake being a football fan.

I call myself a fan of Arsenal because, when I played Fifa 2001, I'd end up picking them because I thought the cannon on their flag looked sick. I'm reliably told that they peaked right about then, and I've had decent mileage telling people I stan Arsenal because then they give me pitying looks and don't ask followup questions.

Courtesy of drinking at Scottish pubs, I feel at risk of more detailed grilling, and I want to get better adaptive camouflage. So far, I've come up with:

"What was the coach even thinking?" and "They keep trying to walk it in this year", but I'd appreciate more personalized advice to shake the trail.

Be less of a wanker, not more. Throw away the football shoes. Don't try to fake being something you're not. You'll be sniffed out easily.

If you couldn't tell, this was a joke.

For the unaware: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6yN2H3--1aw

Seemed only half jokey to me because I've seen those fakers IRL, even for something as lame as being a football fan.

Apologies. I'm sleep deprived.

Just casually stalk the subreddit. That'll expose you to some discussion points to start up, and people love nothing more than a chance to tell you why you're wrong - especially if you spin yourself as a foreigner who is willing to take the wisdom of the locals.

Bruh!!! Learn the foot. Or look around conspiratorially and go "secretly I like cricket more." Likely they will go "gasp, cricket, how awful" and ask no further questions.

Are you 100% sure that approach would work in the UK? They're almost as nerdy about cricket as Indians are!

I refuse to believe anyone would like cricket. REFUSE.

It boggles my mind too. It's one of the few sports where the spectators get more of a workout than the players.

Booked an expensive "non-refundable" airbnb apartment in a foreign country for next week. Listing promises calm area and quiet bedrooms. Host is a "superhost".

A few hours later, found out that there is extensive tram track renewal work ongoing or about to start in the same street. Tried calling the public transport company, who lists these construction sites, directly to ask about noise. The customer line gave me no option for English. The "modernization" line didn't pick up.

Airbnb host says when asked that the construction site is "not near".

What now?

Do you plan to stay in the apartment during working hours? Because I doubt they will be doing road works at night.

Call airbnb support, get told to fuck yourself, call credit card company, do a charge back, and go back to booking hotels ever after.

I actually heard back from an email I sent to the public transport company. They say there are no tracks near the building in question so there should be no noise.

Guess I'm going to trust that. Perhaps naively. We'll see.

Please drop everything and check out Meta's AI feed. It's making me cry, imagine getting to have a quick look at what people are talking about on ChatGPT, except that it's the bottom barrel of literacy, and that they're not aware that the "share" button isn't a save button. It makes everything public for the world to see.

Best I've seen is 2 minutes is a woman grappling with vaginal stankiness, and someone trying to write a character letter for their buddy about to be sent to jail. Good times.

Here's the tweet that introduced me to the hobby.

Here's the actual site, if you don't want to accidentally download the Meta AI app and then find out it's meant for smart glasses:

https://www.meta.ai/#feed

"Meta AI isn't available in your country."

If only there was a way to get that effect on every ”provider” that insists on shoving AI slop to my face in their ”tools”…

It's only fair the stupidest AI out there has the same caliber of user. Or perhaps those with the best taste, idk.

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So does NoFap/Semen Retention actually do anything? Or is it all a bunch of bullshit?

It'll make you horny af. That's about it dawg.

Regarding sperm:

A 1999 study.

Short-term abstinence may be associated with limited improvements in semen quality in healthy men but could be more beneficial for infertile men, especially within the first 4 days of abstinence.

Regarding testosterone:

A 2001 study

These data demonstrate that acute abstinence does not change the neuroendocrine response to orgasm but does produce elevated levels of testosterone in males.

Also several bullshit studies. No credible peer-reviewed studies on cognitive or emotional benefits, beyond anecdotal.

YMMV, but oddly jacking off in the 21st century hasn't had much research.

Yes it does something. Namely, makes you a lot more interested in women from a dopamine/seeking perspective. Whether that's a benefit is up to you. It can be intoxicating though.

I wonder if, as abigguy4u implies, it has more to do with removing a poor coping mechanism in order to establish more constructive sources of joy and relief. Some people smoke cigarettes constantly to take the edge off. Does it work? Only if you keep at it, only temporarily, while doing nothing to the underlying pain and anxiety of their life.

One downside to a man simply not ejaculating is worse prostate health. A daily jizz may lower the risk of cancer there, last I heard.

It’s like quitting drinking. If you’re a terminal alcoholic, quitting will have some major positive effects on your life. If you drink a few beers twice a month, you’re probably not even going to notice. For “The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z” who are cranking it out to hentai 7 times a day, nofap is a revelation, and they will see substantial improvements to their mood and energy levels. For anyone with normal habits it probably isn’t going to be a game changer.

Increased horniness and its attendant behaviours. Past a certain point it will just end in a nocturnal emission.

In the words of Andrew Dice Clay: "What are you saving it for?! It'll grow back".

Others will have better things to say than me, but I think women like it when you're actually interested in them and eager to bed them. NoFap helps on that front. Any other benefits they claim, I would be pretty suspicious of.

@sun_the_second you've been tricked, mwahaha

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Context, for those of us not in on it?

"Xianxai" is a genre of fiction centering on "Cultivators", martial-arts practitioners who develop various reality-bending superpowers by "cultivating" their chi, or mystical life-force. These stories tend to be produced in serial format, and are often very, very long, many hundreds of chapters for text versions being relatively common. Think Dragonball Z.

Cultivators generally congregate in "sects", communes dedicated to further developing and perfecting their particular method of cultivation and raising the power of the sect's members generally; these communes are usually depicted as rigidly hierarchical, and often mercilessly competitive and even grossly exploitative for those on the bottom of the hierarchy. Within a sect, someone lower on the hierarchy is one's "Junior", someone higher is one's "Senior". Seniors are often depicted intentionally stunting or interfering with their junior's training for various bad or even occasionally good reasons.

Cultivation takes a very long time, generally is depicted as passing through a long sequence of distinct levels and sub-levels demarcating significant increases in power. There's usually a pretty distinct tradeoff between slow, steady, diligent growth and rapid "get rich quick" growth that shoots up quick but plateaus early. The slow-and-steady growth is often referred to as "building one's foundation"; if you do this poorly you may grow quicker but plateau earlier, and the reverse might mean slower initial growth but much more capacity for growth.

The meme is portraying Xianxai fandom as recapitulating the medium; the "senior" (fan who has read tons of Xianxai) is misleading his "junior" (fan who has read less), claiming that he's read an extremely long work and that they should definitely read it as well. The story is "building it's foundation" and the quality pays off spectacularly 1400+ chapters in. In fact, the senior hasn't read a single page, but by the time the "junior" is in a position to assess the truth of this claim, it could be argued that they will certainly learn something from the experience, and perhaps will be Enlightened.

The specific context is that @self_made_human is claiming to have pulled this gambit in his previous recommendation of "Reverand Insanity", an extremely long and apparently quite polarizing Xianxai serial that's been discussed here in several previous reading recommendation discussions.

Right. Xianxia novels vary widely in terms of quality. It's not uncommon for them to be thousands of chapters long.

There are, in fact, instances where a novel can start off slow for dozens or even hundreds of chapters, and get better. That's often the case when the protagonist has to start from scratch and scrabble to establish the powers and connections required to do much of anything.

How do you know if a novel is good? The rating systems on the popular sites are fucked, and it's certainly a pain to read a ton of one before realizing it doesn't get better.

Hence communities like /r/MartialMemes, where readers ask each other for recs or reviews. They also love to RP as actual Cultivators, which is why they're addressing someone as a "junior".

The joke here is that some naive newbie has asked a more experienced reader about a novel. The latter promises that it gets better, and even if the first few hundred (!) chapters are dross, stick at it and the payoff will be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, he hasn't even read the story in question and has been making shit up.

Fortunately for @sun_the_second, I have in fact read Reverend Insanity (and am currently re-reading it again), a popular novel that has occasionally faced (unfair, IMO) accusations of having a slow start. He began reading it on my recommendation, and hopefully he's enjoying it so far. If he isn't, I promise it gets super peak at chapter 42069, can't give up on it before then.

Since I have an opportunity to ask: what is with RI's author's numeracy? Do the Chinese have no precise numbers?

I can understand why the narration says "thirty to forty of jade dragons flew forward" because an average person wouldn't count them precisely at a glance. But when there are such unnecessary hedges as "four to five", hell, they might even go as low as "two to three" although I obviously can't quote the specific page numbers... well, my eyebrows rise.

well, my eyebrows rise.

How many of them?

One to two.

Hmm? Can't say I noticed that myself. I would assume any such instances are written from the perspective of an observer who can't precisely count the values.

If you can tell me a chapter number, I can look it up.

Chapter 642: "...four to five light barriers covered his body"

Chapter 310: "In the blink of an eye, three to four days passed."

Chapter 242: "They had already bought [this and that] from three to four <...> clansmen."

I tried to only count instances where something discrete is being counted in a specific occasion. It's fine to say that a Gu refinement or something usually takes "three to four days", but there's no way "three to four" days passed between one specific event and another specific event. It might not be terribly important how many, but pick one number, damn it! You can't buy supplies from 3.5 traders, and there can't be 2.76 spectators at a specific arena fight!

Well you brought receipts. It still never jumped out to me haha. It might be translation issues, otherwise no clue.

Is this a translation issue? Like how "forty days and forty nights" just means "till it's done."

I think I'm getting decent at spotting translated Chinese idioms, and I'm pretty sure most of what I'm talking about are not that.

It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.

There's a handful of well-known examples in western languages, too, and probably a bunch more that are too informal to really be written down.

In that case maybe the reason the author got purged was because of innumeracy?

This is why I haven’t read a word of text since 2007. I use text to speech for everything.

Impressive if true, you'd have to have been running this con a few months before I actually asked you about RI.

He's actually not a doctor either, this whole persona is part of a matchstick men style long con.

Next thing you know, you're going to start claiming my theoretical degree in physics isn't valid :(

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