Ah, dammit.

If people had any idea how often being even the least little bit kind to someone in that situation can give them the hope they need, they’d be a lot kinder.

I bounced at a few gay bars. You lose track of how many kids are finding the first moment of acceptance they’ve ever had. Or the ones that linger as long as they can because they don’t have anywhere to go home to. Or the ones that are at the end of their rope, out at a bar because they need something resembling human kindness to make it one more day.

It’s better than it used to be, but there’s still plenty of people out there afraid, ashamed, or alone with no idea of how to keep going. Not just the kids, but adults, even old farts like me. There’s people my age that still haven’t come out at all, and more that don’t feel safe or ready to come out more publicly. There’s people older than me that have stayed in the closet longer than I’ve been alive.

Your get into this kind of situation, you do what you can. That’s all you can do.

Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

Fwiw, and I don’t know if it was intentional or not, it’s embarrassed and wielder, not imbarrest or wilder.

Yeah, boob owners seem to not fully appreciate the sheer joy of having regular access to boobs for a boob lover. It’s like, “I can see and/or touch those forever? Hell yeah!” But I guess if you aren’t a boob lover, having them might make them become old hat after the first few years.

The good news? My wife is leaving me her boobs in her will.

Well, I can say this much: never discuss your philosophy on life and death with your doctor, because you’ll need to find another doctor after they flip their shit and assume you’re going to off yourself.

;)

Good idea!

Nah, she’s got this one old, worn out bastard pf a sasquatch, but she’s a free agent otherwise

Jfc, my wife does this. And it works every fucking time

Yeah, I feel that. If we accept things as they come, and accept when they leave, even the bad things are less bad because we know they’ll leave, and we can work on letting them go easier.

The Manitou

It’s the only horror movie that ever gave me a nightmare, even as a younger kid than I was when I saw it.

My parents were willing to let me watch horror movies pretty young, depending on the exact movie. Like, old school fifties and sixties era horror I was laughing about at 5. So they had gradually loosened the limits up because it never bothered me, nor did I get obsessed.

So we watched this one one night after I picked it out at the video rental place (vhs). It wasn’t scary per se, I did way more laughing than anything else because the effects were not impressive.

But the core idea of it, that stuck in my brain apparently, because that night, and a couple after, I had the nightmare of the Manitou growing in me.

I’ve seen it as an adult a few times, and it isn’t exactly a great movie, despite being a fairly classic example of body horror. Decent, not not great, and you have to overlook the era’s film making style.

The Wikipedia link

The trailer

I’m not aware of where it might be available, but YouTube has a few clips.

I’ve never had anyone, online or irl, know that it existed, much less having also watched it.

I mean, it is the central precept.

The precept is that stress stems from attachment to things. Thus, if you let go of attachment to a state, then you have less stress when it isn’t there.

Suffering, which is what the idea gets translated to despite it being more along the lines of distress or stress or upset, is an internal thing in that concept. We can’t control the world around us entirely, so there’s no easy to go through life without some degree of “suffering”.

When we cling to things that are transient, such as happiness or even sadness, we are certain to have additional stresses above and beyond the bad things life throws at us.

Since it is nearly impossible to actually hold a single state of being such as happiness, the way you avoid distress at its absence is by accepting that transience is the only truly permanent thing, and finding a way to let go of the “desire” to have that state. This extends to things other than emotions, since material or worldly things are most definitely something we cling to, that we have attachment to.

However, and this is very very important, there is no claim in any of that, that doing so is going to cure depression or anxiety. It can help in dealing with such things, but it would only be one tool to use. And nobody has ever said that using that tool doesn’t take practice or that it’s instantaneous.

You don’t just think “hah, I will not cling to this” and magically enter remission of depression. It takes the same level of time and work as talk therapy. You have to practice with the tools that help gain the ability to let go of attachments.

That’s why this comic isn’t a literal thing, it’s only a demonstration of the principle. And, it is important to notice that the person on the bench needs help to let go of the attachment to happiness. Just like we all need help to escape depression or other psychological distress. It isn’t suggesting that it’s simple, or easy, just that it can be done.

And, yes, I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Have for my entire life so far, and still do. But the tools in the concept presented here do help. They help a lot. When you combine the acceptance of that concept with good meditation practices, good therapy, and a willingness to explore other tools as they come around, it makes a huge difference over time.

You don’t even have to be Buddhist, or practice Buddhism to make use of the tools. It isn’t really important to follow the other precepts of Buddhism, the eightfold path stuff. You just need to recognize that nothing is permanent, and that letting go of attachment to things will help.

More like a pride of lions bringing down an elephant, or maybe wolves on a bison.

1v1 dragon slaying would still be more like a badger taking on a tiger.

Player characters (as opposed to non d&d dragon slaying stories) aren’t usually as ill prepared as a cat is vs a human, and rarely “hunt” alone. PCs have better weapons than claws and teeth, and the ability to coordinate attacks reduces the advantage of size and power the dragon has more than the comparison between a cat and a standard, unarmed human.

I do, however, love the idea presented :)

Hmmm, if you’re asking if the external flow of what we perceive as time would shift according to an observer’s state of mind, that’s doubtful.

But our perception of time isn’t the same thing as the flow of time. Our temporal sense is definitely subjective, and there’s been some research into that (though damned if I can recall the details without looking it up, and I’m getting a bit brain fried tired, so not up to doing so).

Anticipation, be it fearful or happy, definitely shifts how we perceive time.

Man, if you’ve never tagged out with Cactus Jack while banging someone, you ain’t lived

No idea about anyone else, but I tend to only chime in if the question spurs some kind of thought, or I have a story that matches, or some other kind of quasi useful input.

So it can be weeks before I jump in, or multiples in the same day.

What duck?

Back in the day, I was running a game with friends. They both decided to play precocious kids, with a lot of power (magical and family) but in need of extra guidance.

So, they had a DMPC that was from Maine, and had the stereotypical accent like Fred Gwynne had in Pet Sematary. So he’s talking about systems of magic, gods and spirits in that Mainer drawl.

We ended up playing pretty much every night for a month or two, and with me doing the accent so much, I had trouble shaking the accent irl.

It was a great fucking campaign tbh. We had a shit ton of fun just rampaging around and wrecking shit with their pair of grossly wealthy and grossly over powered siblings and their “uncle”. The two kids were British, so those cheesy accents were in play, and they were from a posh witch family, which makes this post extra funny for me.

It’s easy when you use the same password for encoding everything.

I rarely worked the window, and it was only when someone was on break, or we were under staffed and the other people on shift weren’t exactly capable of running a register.

But we had a few regulars.

My personal favorite was “farmer man”. Homie would ride through with his animals. Usually it was one of those pot belly pigs, named Harvey. But he had a goat named Bill, a rooster named Charlie, and sometimes a nanny goat called Maria.

Why those names? No idea, it was drive through, so no time for long chats. But he’d order for them by using their names, as in, “I’ll have a whopper, and Harvey here’ll have a cheeseburger.”

The awesome visits from him were when the cab of his truck was essentially full of critters. One day, the rooster was with him, along with a bunch of hens just chilling on the passenger side.

Really good customer, he would roll through a few times a week, always polite and had his shit ready. He was literally a farmer, there’s plenty of them out here in the sticks. One of the normal window staff asked him if she could bring her kids to see a farm, and he was happy as hell to say yes. His critters were essentially pets, though the chickens were an egg source. Dude was a one man petting zoo lol.

Then there was “coffee”. He’d roll up, and order “coffee”. That’s it, nothing else. And I mean that’s all me would say. You’d ask what size, and he’d just repeat “coffee”. At first, people just got mad, assuming he was fucking with them. But he kept coming back. Eventually the manager just said “fuck it, tell him he’s getting a large”. He got told that, and to drive forward. He’d take the large coffee, hand over his money, and that was it. But he never said anything. If you told him to have a nice day, he’d nod and smile a little.

There was also “naked lady”. As the name might indicate, she would come through naked. There would be a visible pile of clothes in the passenger seat of her car, sometimes just a robe, but usually what looked like jeans and a t-shirt. Her order varied. But she’d been coming there for years by the time I ran into her at the window.

It was usually only night time, fairly late, but every now and then she’d come through during breakfast rush. Story was that she had called in one day to ask if it was okay to come through the drive through naked, and the manager at the time thirty it was a joke and said she didn’t care as long as the money didn’t get pulled out of her twat, before hanging up. No idea if it was true or not. If you worked the window at her usual times and were new, you’d get warned amd asked if you were okay serving her. We were also warned not to be creeps about it.

She was probably in her early forties, attractive, and friendly. Knew the window workers by name and would chat while waiting, when it was night. Didn’t really flash anyone, didn’t try and get any extra attention, but didn’t make effort to hide anything either.

One guy asked for a better look one night, and she said that he could look all he wanted, but she wasn’t putting on a show. Manager gave him hell over it, though the lady didn’t complain about it.

There was one lady that was usually on nights that wouldn’t deal with her, and that’s how I first encountered naked lady. Got called up from the kitchen and asked if I was okay taking care of a naked customer. I was in training to be a nurse’s assistant at the time, so I didn’t have an issue with nudity. It had already become just kinda unimportant to me. So I just shrugged and said sure. The manager warned me to be chill and that was that.

Nice lady.

What was weird was seeing her elsewhere in clothes. She was just as friendly if you ran into her at the grocery store or whatever. But it was always a little jarring, like she should be naked everywhere lol.

Beyond that, it was just the usual drunks, potheads, and occasional crack or meth head that were weird enough to stand out.