OpenStars

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Hehe, nothing to see here, these are not the stories you are looking for, move along :-P

On the bright side, Kbin is showing a picture of absolutely gorgeous cherry blossoms 🌸 in the snow for this post. :-P

Learning about the philosophy of the Stoics (which frankly was not enough for me), plus this quote (which also was not, but the two together… that did help!:-D), something to the effect of: “Strong societies beget weak children, who then grow up to create weak societies, which then beget strong children, who then grow up to create strong societies” - and the cycle continues. i.e., Boomers mainly did not fight in the wars, just grew up hearing how Great America was, without having to experience first-hand the blood, sweat, and tears that made it that way (to the extent that it ever was that way ofc). Well, now things are changing in the direction that they were ALWAYS going to have to changed in - b/c evil people gonna evil it up, no doubts about that - and eventually, sheeple will get sick & tired of being sick & tired and rise up, to change things. Until then, we suffer, but not needlessly.

In other words, we’ve gone through the stages of denial (climate change / economic downturn / wage slavery / cultural insensitivity / whatever is NOT happening), anger (okay so it’s happening but what are you going to do about it), bargaining (he tells it like it is and big daddy will fix everything & make it all great again! ironically this holds true for both Obama and Trump, loathe as I am to have ever uttered such a sentence), and now we are into the depression era.

Next comes acceptance, and that’s when the healing - and the beginning of lasting change - can truly start.

Just at a guess, people who say that surely must be factoring in medical healthcare costs, to deal with the consequences of obesity and such.

Nobody “never gets mad”, they just deal. But your issue speaks to something bubbling underneath the surface, it sounds like (obligatory caveat: I am nowhere near a professional). Figure that shit out bc it’s not going away.:-(

Maybe you are worried about your job or partner or something, and this little stupid stuff is just how it comes out, bc you won’t allow yourself to be mad about the REAL reason you are currently unhappy. It definitely sounds like it is yourself that you are mad about… but even that could be a smokescreen or like projection or some such, if it were not okay to be mad at someone/something else.

Therapy could help if you could afford it - even just the time bc there are like volunteer orgs that lower the cost - but you can also do a lot on your own, like try to create a safe space where it is okay to be mad about whatever, even if it seems “wrong”. Stupid dog tracking stupid dirt on the stupid carpet… why can’t I ever do anything right? (Like: I could not even marry someone who I don’t highly suspect is cheating on me… WTF!? Or maybe not that, maybe it’s a midlife crisis with career, or children, or who knows what else). Eventually your brain will allow you to know what is REALLY bothering you, when telling you that fact will cause a lesser amount of pain than doing so right now would.

IMHO, start with: you are not okay, this is not normal, and things can get much better (REALLY!), but it will take effort and possibly time (depending on how deeply ingrained whatever it is turns out to be).

But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.

There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc… profit).

• Elon Musk, probably

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Regexps are awesome! And also not at the same time:-P. 🎉 Congrats👏!:-)

Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.

The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.

At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their “hold” over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).

Doesn’t that sound nice, in theory? Sigh… I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!

Then this might help: remember that even as you try to set boundaries between yourself and others, you can set boundaries within yourself as well. e.g., you could watch a movie depicting a fictional narrative of a not-good-faith event, and decide to at least attempt to not be triggered, or at least quite as much. You cannot control the world, but you control your response to it, and you deserve to be happy:-). Though you need to find the route to get to it - even in spite of others attempting to ruin it for everyone around them, to become as unhappy as they are.:-(

I guess you already said this, sorta, in that when people act that way, you respond to increase your happiness by getting away from that source of toxicity. But I mean something deeper, which you may also already be doing, in terms of setting the boundaries within yourself, to not feel unhappiness about their actions.

To me, the key is always good-faith.

Abso-frigging-lutely. Even the dumbest person, or maybe someone with a bad memory, but who is trying can eventually be trained, or else constrained, whereas a malicious actor can do everything “right”, until they get what they wanted all along and then cause the highest magnitude of harm.

I like how you are approaching it intentionally, which demonstrates awareness and intent to make things better for yourself, and also others as you plan ahead for what is most important.

We ALL are that way. :-D

You can do whatever you want.

So too can they.

The balance point lies somewhere in the middle.

I won’t tell if you don’t…

Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.

30 seconds costs a minute

I… but… it… wha… my brain just broke a little :-P

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P