Initiateofthevoid
@Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 hours ago:
It’s because the burrito is getting cold.
- Comment on how do I stop being a sucker for alcoholic stuff on sale? 9 hours ago:
I am sorry to say that this part of your relationship with alcohol is a massive warning sign:
I then promise myself to drink it within several days, not all within 3 days, but something snaps in me each time I open the fridge and see all that beer. I sometimes drink 2 pints a day till I have no more beer.
This indicates that you do not have a healthy psychological relationship with a substance.
By promising yourself one thing and doing another, you have lied to yourself. Self-deception is extremely self-destructive. It is effectively the first and last lesson every alcoholic learns - substance abuse is never about willpower, it’s about honesty. No amount of willpower can save you when you lie to yourself and say “it will be okay.”
The influence of the substance in question reinforces that self-deception at every turn. Based on your description, when you are drinking, it feels okay to keep drinking. Even with a headache, or fatigue, you will have another drink. You will drink the next day. You will drink until you run out of drinks to drink.
When you are not drinking, it doesn’t feel okay. You know it’s stupid, you know it hurts you, you know you don’t really want it, and yet you think that there is no real internal force stopping you from drinking - there is only the externalized influence of the price.
By creating an external justification for your drinking, you have abandoned your own autonomy and authority. It is cheap, you drink. It is not cheap, you do not drink. It is in your fridge, you drink. It is not in your fridge, you do not drink. You do not choose, you just drink. With that behavioral pattern, it is only ever a matter of time until your next binge.
Generally speaking, the most reliable way out of this thought process is to seek help. Be honest with yourself and others (where it is safe and sensible to do so!), and seek support. You have done so here - you have opened up about your fears. That is strength, not weakness.
Groups like AA do not check your alcoholic level at the door. You do not need to drink a liter of vodka a day to be an alcoholic. If you are presently sober and say you are worried about your relationship with alcohol, they will welcome you. They will share their stories, and they will share what works for them and what doesn’t. Many groups are also welcome to families and friends, so you do not need to present yourself as an alcoholic if you do not wish to do so.
If you walk away from those meetings, drink more, and come back (again, while sober), they will welcome you again. They will welcome you as many times as is needed, and they will welcome you whether you are 24 hours sober or 24 years sober.
But it all starts and ends with honesty. You are worried about your behavior. Do not let yourself brush that aside. Do not believe yourself when you think “it’s not that bad.” Do not believe yourself when you think “these people are ‘real’ alcoholics, I don’t belong here, I don’t need help.”
Every last recovering alcoholic you ever meet would have rather they stopped earlier then they did. They would rather they stopped when it wasn’t a big deal. They would rather they hadn’t thrown so much of their time, money, and health into that bottomless pit.
There is no rock bottom, there is no moment where you can no longer dig the hole deeper. There is only the moment you start climbing out of it.
I cannot tell you that you are an alcoholic. I can only tell you that you feel anxious and worried about being an alcoholic, and that you should face those feelings with as much strength and honesty as you can muster. Best of luck. I am happy to listen, if you want to talk more.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 23 hours ago:
“This is the live cannibalism option”
“… the what?”
chomp
- Comment on a flower for mother's day 2 days ago:
Don’t sell yourself short! I don’t know you, you could be a racoon for all I know, but most people are at least a little trash, which means you’re probably just as good as most people. Better, even, based on your willingness to consider your own responsibility for your life.
- Comment on (・∀・) 2 days ago:
Much love for the antipasta! Thanks for the writeup.
This bellowing bit is awesome:
We suggest that male mating-season bellows function to reduce physical confrontations with other males allowing them to space themselves apart, while, at the same time, attracting females.
Emphasis mine.
Koala males really be out there screaming so loud so other males will stay away? I think that’s neat. Like biological magnets, pushing and pulling with the same scream.
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 4 days ago:
Ahh, the pinnacle of internet discourse - pretending that one wins an argument by minor differences in tone, rather than content. Only… suggesting over and over that someone is throwing an entitled tantrum certainly sets a tone, don’t it?
Strange, that I am the only emotional one here. Perhaps if you take a deep breath, and read my comments slower? Maybe ask a chatbot to read them in the voice of David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman?
Maybe you’re right, and I’ve just gone deaf from all this blind rage. At this rate I’ll never achieve my dreams of being acutie…
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 5 days ago:
Ohh, yes, my comments are just dripping with seething rage. I couldn’t hear you over my blood boiling in my ears, sorry.
Want to explain what I missed?
- Comment on Inspired by a friends current vacation 5 days ago:
Your dozen comments suggest this is pretty important to you. I take it you’ve suffered in the wilderness at some point? If so, my sympathies! A rough night outdoors can be genuinely awful.
But the “fragile” campers aren’t crying because they feel insulted - they’re just trying to share information about their hobby and hopefully help people like you not hate their lives if/when they venture into the wilderness.
It’s not like fucking sounding or taxidermy, but those were hilariously silly analogies, so thanks.
It’s more like someone making a meme about a video game that basically boils down to “this game sucks because I skipped the tutorial” and you’re out here saying “yeah but the game is torture.”
You don’t have to camp! It’s genuinely not for everybody, and that’s okay! But many people love it, so try not to be so down on others for the things they love and for trying to share their hobbies with others.
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 6 days ago:
Lol enjoy defending unethical business practices, I guess. I hope the corporations thank you for defending their right to walk all over consumers. Manipulating children into gambling and renting worthless digital products is “just video games” after all. I’ll try to keep that perspective in mind.
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 6 days ago:
You absolutely said everything that leads to this conclusion.
People sign agreements with Fortnite that give Epic the right to sell them microtransactions that don’t belong to the purchaser. They also give Epic the right to take down Fortnite and therefore remove access to any of the content that they paid for. This is the license that every player agrees to when they play the game.
You claim that protesting the usage of that license is “throwing a tantrum.”
Lol I forgot that teens aren’t children, apparently. That makes the microtransaction okay, because the players are (supposed to be) teenagers. As if teenagers aren’t vulnerable to manipulation, or as if the ESRB actually does a goddamn thing anyway.
Just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You just have to defend the corporation’s right to advertise to children, and blame everything on the parents. We already had this fight with cigarrettes, you know. People would say that it’s the parents’ fault if kids were attracted to cigarettes.
How did that turn out? That’s right. Nearly every developed country in the world agreed that advertising that shit to children was not okay. Full goddamn stop.
“Oh but it’s on the parents to make sure capitalism doesn’t poison their childrens’ bodies and minds through cartoon villain levels of social manipulation”, you say.
Corporations advertising harmful shit to children should not be tolerated under any circumstances, and functioning societies are entitled to make that a goddamn law, which they have done before, and can do again.
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 6 days ago:
Everything about the “rent/subscription” model is predatory, but we weren’t even talking about the truly fucked up stuff, like deeply unethical microtransaction marketing to children ala Fortnite.
Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!
(Lol inb4 “it’s the parents job to monitor their kids at all times in case a predatory corporation sneaks capitalism and FOMO advertising into their apparently harmless child-friendly free-to-play game or app”)
But sure, keep on defending predatory corporations! Enjoy the taste of boots!
I’ll be over here advocating for stronger consumer business protections! Sorry, I mean, I’ll be throwing an entitled tantrum lol.
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 6 days ago:
Lol swing and a miss again, my friend.
Nice use of the word “entitled” - really sums up your stance on the consumer/business relationship.
The consumer is “entitled” for protesting predatory or unethical business practices.
The consumer is “entitled” for opposing the ongoing enshittification of entire industries.
The consumer is “entitled” for wanting businesses to not be able to legally hide behind unsustainable licensing practices that provide no value to society and further entrench the ever-growing rent/subscription model that is squeezing people dry for no reason.
The entire point - the entire fucking point - is that these licenses are not okay. So, no, I don’t pay for these licenses, but I don’t think anyone should be able to pay for these licenses, because I don’t think anyone should be able to “sell” these licenses.
These licenses - like many unethical business practices - put the corporation that offers them at a financial advantage over the corporations that don’t.
Regulations - in every industry - levels the playing field. They allow ethical business practices to be viable and competitive, instead of being liabilities and risks.
We have every goddamn right to protest those business practices whether or not we do business with those companies - just as we have every right to protest unethical or discriminatory hiring practices by companies that we don’t work for.
But enjoy the taste of corporate boots!
- Comment on 70% of games that require internet get destroyed 6 days ago:
Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.
You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Standing up for all “oppressed groups” is contradictory. For example, in western countries, LGBT people are an oppressed group, and so are Muslims, yet when the latter are in power, they treat the former very badly, so which side do you stand up for
Easy. The answer is that you stand up for the oppressed group.
Why, exactly, do you think that’s a contradiction? When a group is in power, they are by definition not oppressed.
In all of your examples - all of them - there are oppressors in power, and there are oppressed that are not.
As generalized groups,
- LGBT people are not in power over Muslims.
- Transgender women are not in power over cisgender women.
- Palestinians are not in power over Israel.
In case it really needs to be said - obviously, not all Muslims, cisgender women, or Israelis are oppressors. But all Palestinians and most LGBT people are oppressed.
Palestinians are not “the Muslim world” and painting such a massive and diverse group as a monolith is disingenious at best. The same should be said for associating all Jewish people with the actions of Israel - it’s fundamentally wrong.
The answer remains the same, in any and every case. You stand up for the oppressed group.
Doing so is the only way you stand for:
a society in which anyone is allowed to live their life as long as they aren’t harming anyone else.
- Comment on Every toddler becomes a hackerman when they find a tablet 1 week ago:
it’s not convenient, but you’re doing it for them, not you.
All of parenting - especially the difference between good parents and bad parents - summed up in a single sentence.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 1 week ago:
Hah dang you should have told me to read the rest of the sample before I read the study! Now I’ll never know how far I’d get before I stopped imagining some nobleman drinking at a pub for no reason. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually… but 35 English students never figuring that out? Almost half?
Given a dictionary and the words solicitor, injunction, affidavit, talk of tripping each other up with arguments and a literal reference to a “pile of money”?! They couldn’t make the leap to “court of law”? Couldn’t functionally use the dictionary as a tool for comprehending a sentence?
…That’s really scary, huh…
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 1 week ago:
Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 1 week ago:
Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it’s probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?
The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?
The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it’s quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.
If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they’ve disappeared beneath the muck. I don’t know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.
It’s so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers… which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don’t know if that’s what a horse blinker is though.
The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something.
The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it’s muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There’s a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.
I don’t know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I’m on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what’s up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln’s Inn Hall look like?
- Comment on Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected for 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet 2 weeks ago:
Not to mention that even the companies are suffering from the system they themselves built. The gamified and enshittified hiring process doesn’t improve the quality of the workers they get, it just filters the candidates based on a bunch of unrelated skills.
The talent pool has always skewed towards people who know how to play the game, rather than actual talent… but now “the game” they’re playing isn’t even about useful skillls like human charisma or networking, it’s about handling or misleading poorly designed AI tools.
- Comment on The emotional support dunkies 2 weeks ago:
This might be one of the few good things about widespread AI adoption -the value of real-life images and videos must be depreciating when anyone can just generate whatever images they want and most of the audience won’t know or care for the difference.
Or worse (for the paparazzi) - audiences will assume or become convinced that the real photos are AI generated anyway.
With GenAI maybe we can stop taking so many meaningless pictures and videos of people just living their goddamn lives, or people doing dangerous or stupid shit for clout…
Right? Maybe? … I hope?
- Comment on The emotional support dunkies 2 weeks ago:
It really has to do a number on the brain to be so justifiably paranoid at all times.
That pic of Jonah Hill comes to mind, where he’s just absolutely not having it when he thinks someone is running up and recording him, and then relaxes when he realizes it’s Dicaprio.
And then you realize that the moment was captured on camera, so he actually was being surveilled at that exact moment.
A lot of celebrities are just terrible humans, but surely at least part of that is from the influence of being surrounded and surveilled by equally terrible people at all times. Not an excuse, just a sad observation.
- Comment on Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' 2 weeks ago:
But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
I stopped playing mid-loading screen. My awareness just snapped into place, and I realized that the last 30 minutes of “gameplay” was effectively:
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- walk through corridor
- loading screen
- space (menu)
- loading screen
- Space over different planet (menu)
- loading screen
- landing pad - walk through corridor
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- GoTo step 2
- Comment on Is it weird to juggle in the park? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve seen bagpipers doing their thing in random parks. Alone, with a bagpipe, standing in a field, practicing. Bagpipers who needed the practice, btw.
I thought it was cool. Nobody seemed to mind.
You do you!
- Comment on Anon is a fighter 3 weeks ago:
GNU Terry Pratchett!
- Comment on Anon is a fighter 3 weeks ago:
Orangutans have entered the chat. Their only natural weapons are the long guns they’re packing. Lean machine all folded up in a big skin sack. Plenty of humans could bench an adult orangutan, zero humans are winning that fight.
That being said they’re basically just a half step down the neurology ladder and 2 steps up the jungle ladder, so it makes sense that they would outclass us.
- Comment on When did I get so old 3 weeks ago:
I feel that the memery at TenForward have a lot of potential to add here. I don’t know enough about their inspiration material to understand why, but from what I can tell they’ve certainly got a lot of beans. More beans than these young’uns could ever hold in their tiny little kling-ons.
Janeway would lair them up dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, and they wouldn’t even know they were dangling the whole time.
For all I know these are fighting words to them. If so, I will try to die with my honor.
- Comment on When did I get so old 3 weeks ago:
I’m cool with it for streams, but it got really confusing because I’ve also heard slightly older young’uns refer to ChatGPT as “Chat”
So, like, “Idk I heard it from Chat” can either be a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust random twitch users, or a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust inchoate AI tech.
- Comment on Anon blames millennials 3 weeks ago:
AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 3 weeks ago:
I… uh… what? This still isn’t how words work.
I repeat:
what exactly are they coping with?
Who is coping here? With what? It’s… an athiest coping with a lack of faith? A jewish person coping with flaws in their religious law?
There is no one on the face of the earth that can reconcile passages from religious texts such as these.
Uh… way to just miss the point of the entire religion.
All of Judaism - down to their goddamn rite of manhood - is built upon literacy. Reading and interpreting the will of God. Scholarly analysis of their own texts - reconciling the word with the world - is literally the foundation of their entire religion.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think this word means what you think it means… what is “copium” about discussing possible origins of dogma?
OP is literally saying “this widespread institutionally-reinforced religious practice/dietary restriction could all be due to a mistranslation”, what exactly are they coping with?