If they were in the middle east they would be Muslim. These people did not choose Christianity from a multiple choice option. They were led down a path. If they lived in a different area they would have been led down a different path and the end result would remain the same, just with a different name.
The politically, religiously, economically, and socially dominate people love to act like they’re being persecuted. Fucking idiots every single conservative Christian. I’m going up go further since I’m half a beer in, all Christians in the West.
“with all that million dollar you still can’t be a doctor, did you know your nephew could play violins blindfolded while performing a surgery when he was still 3 years old. What a disappointment”
She didn’t just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn’t reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it’s a non-issue.
She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.
That… That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath…
Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven’t; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I’m being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I’m still living with my folks. Don’t get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I’m fucking around on the internet because I can’t seem to make anything of myself.
It really was. While there were bits and pieces of this that came up during the relationship, the bulk of this came out as we were breaking up. She had been abused as a kid, though I’m not sure the extent of that abuse. At the very least, she was abused by being effectively abandoned. She said she fended for herself, mostly eating canned food she got for herself through grade school, things like that.
I was upset for a while, she’s not someone I want anything to do with, but mostly I just feel bad for her. She was traumatized as a kid, she receded into a delusion to try and escape that, and her delusion came to define her to the point where she got incredibly defensive if you tried to challenge its reality. She had said that she tried therapy before but that it didn’t work because she knew better than the therapists how to deal with her problems, and I’m certain what that actually means is that they tried to talk her out of her delusion and she wasn’t having any of it.
I really hope she got the help she needs, but I sadly doubt it.
How old was she? Because, while I don’t doubt the mental health aspect of it all, it also sounds a lot like a young person who doesn’t really know themselves and is desperate to feel special.
I don’t remember exactly how old she was, but we were in our last years of university (I failed out, she graduated) so she was definitely in her early twenties, 22-24, somewhere in there.
And, yeah, no, my amateur and as such meaningless guess of a diagnosis was also that part of the delusion was a need to feel special. She talked about how most other people didn’t know the truth, they couldn’t know the truth, because she had magic power that let her know things about the world that normal humans couldn’t. You get that sort of language in conspiracy theorists and other types of people who want to feel special, they want to be in on some secret that everyone else can’t be. So I’d say that’s definitely part of it. But I also think, especially with her believing in a third parent when she was initially abandoned by her father and effectively abandoned by her mother until her father got custody of her again, I think most of it stems from her trauma as a child. Even that need to feel special, with no real parental figure for many of her formative years (I don’t remember how old she said she was when her father regained custody of her), probably stemmed from that lack of anyone encouraging her.
But, ultimately, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me half of this stuff until we were breaking up. And I’m not a psychologist, and she very much needed one.
I had a brief connection with a woman last year who was similarly deluded but in a different way, but also outstandingly kind, talented, intelligent, etc etc, and she was very open about how much abuse she’d undergone in her life, and it just makes me fucking cry. I’ve never cried about anything so much in my life. It feels like there’s no justice.
and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.
At the risk of shallow psychoanalysis I think we found the root cause. She was taught sex is a bad thing so she constructed an elaborate fantasy world to justify it
That was one part of a whole that a never got anywhere near finding out the entire story. With that and her stories of being damn near abandoned as a child, it really worried me as to what might have happened to her that she never felt free enough to tell me.
I tried to explain, “Like, no, that’s normal.” And she was just insistent that it was not. I didn’t know about the believing herself to be half-succubus until later, but when I found that out, it kind of clicked into place that something happened to her and she just cannot believe that a normal person should enjoy sex the way she does. And that is… Really troubling.
Gas ovens work by mixing natural gas and air to produce heat. When the thermostat is set, a fuse lights the gas as it seeps through a burner snaking inside the oven. The burner has multiple holes in it for the lighted gas to escape from, allowing the heat to spread throughout the oven’s interior. Modern gas ovens have electric pilot ignitions that create a small, continuous flame that increases in temperature and height by twisting a corresponding knob to the area in use4. The temperature of the oven stays consistent throughout the entire cooking period.
Yeah, which is why you shouldn't use strong household cleaners around kids, and should only use it with proper ventilation and a respiratory device if warranted. And smoking is bad, don't do it around your kids.
"Why should I stop doing one harmful thing when I knowingly do a lot of other dumb harmful things."
Gas ovens are not necessarily going to cause asthma. You can mitigate the amount of air pollution that they produce but having a gas oven doesn't necessarily mean a child will develop asthma or that they will even be the cause. Florida has a very small amount of gas stoves and yet have a median share of asthmatic children. There's too many other factors that can effect the data link to say for sure that gas ovens are a leading cause.
I’d say compulsively spritzing Febreze would have more to do with asthma than gas ovens, but I know a bunch of Karen’s that still go through a costco pack of the stinky fucking things a month, all over the furniture their kids eat, play and sleep on.
It would be a evolutionary benefit to fear / avoid any person that is behaving strangely in certain distinct ways. Could be a dangerous transmittable disease, i.e. rabies etc.
It would work for someone just starting and not knowing good tooling yet. However, the compiler should also tell you where to look and give you the area to look at as well. It’ll be less clear than an IDE, though.
I use it because that increasing invasiveness really messes with my ADHD. Ads make me spend extra energy and concentration to filter to what I want (and I won’t buy their crap anyway).
That being said, the only UK foods I’ve had were made by expats here in the states. None of it was bland, with the exception of breakfast beans, “because they’re meant to be mild to start your day” as I was told by a lovely liverpudlian.
She would do fish and chips, and the batter was well seasoned. Not heavily seasoned, but some pepper, a little paprika, and a bit of onion powder to give it some aromatic kick. Well balanced, and imo, as good as any of the southern fried fish recipes I’ve had.
The chips were obviously just salted and vinegar used per person.
But when we did pot luck at work, she would bring in what she called “good english food”, which included some curry a few times.
But her shepherd’s pie? Holy hell, that was some great stuff. She said it was really cottage pie because it was beef usually. But it had the usual pepper, onion, garlic, and herbs.
And the other expats I ate with were similar. Maybe different amounts of a given herb or spice, but it was in there.
I think the UK food thing is a meme in itself, and likely arose the way things usually do, with the majority of cooks just being bad cooks, rather than representative of a cuisine or the way things are done properly in that country.
The reputation comes from the US military being stationed in the UK during the height of WW2 rationing when there was an extremely limited list of ingredients to cook with. They were unable to associate a country under an attempted siege from U-boats with a reduced supply of food.
We do have a love of beige food at times, but it’s essentially our version of chicken tendies.
It hasn’t gone away because countless students from across the globe have moved there and found it to be true. While there is good food available in the UK it seems as if the average Brit is content to eat very badly and then supplement a terrible diet with copious amounts of alcohol.
We also had rationing for a good while longer than other countries after the wars (right into the mid-50s), so we have a whole generation who were pretty much raised with limited food options. That kind of national trauma sticks around and took a while to shake off.
Boomers made that bland war time food linger. They were children during and just after WW2 so it was part of their childhood nostalgia and they fed it to their own kids. Also we’ve had Indian/ Chinese restaurants in the UK for a while but they were mostly just in major cities at first so the average person still had little exposure to foreign or exotic food until the late 1970s/ early 1980s.
My ex mother in law and her mom both can’t eat any food that’s not a certain level of bland. Too much of any spice at all and they set it aside like an autistic kid with arfid. Which… come to think of it…
Yep, this sums up everyone I know over 60 that is descended from British -immigrants- sorry expats.
Actual British people coming over now that still sound British seem to have much more refined taste. BIR-style curries are indeed very popular vs bland British “stew” / casserole
man if you make stew right it’s the most flavourful thing out there. half a bottle of red wine, couple cans crushed tomatos, chop up half your intended vegetables( Carrot, potato, onion, green onion stems, parsnips and celery for me), brown the beef, dump it all in except the other half of your vegetables, bring the level up with strong beef broth till everything is covered, and simmer covered till it all except the beef dissolves into a brown gravy, then add the other half of your vegetables and serve when they are cooked. Bay leaves and rosemary and thyme and pepper of course too. Garlic. Usually enough salt from the beef broth.
Also as an American we don’t really have room to talk. Yes there’s the iconic southern foods but even then, grits are bland and meh. But for the most part a lot of traditional American food needed to have spices rediscovered. It seems like for a long time our attitude was to use sugar, pre ground pepper, and maybe salt as seasoning for something that had any good texture cooked out of it.
An aside here: but why is it that people from major cities aren’t considered average? In many cases major cities are major because they have a lot higher density of people leading to more development and resources.
It’s the same with English beer. On the continent, people keep saying that Brits drink their beer lukewarm. When I was there, they actually had temperature displays at the tap in most pubs that usually showed something around 4°C (~39°F). For reference, that was in the Huddersfield area (between Leeds and Manchester) around 15 years ago.
Well in this case the reputation for “warm beer” is true and I’m willing to die on this particular hill.
Proper cask ale should be served at between 8 and 12C, AKA cellar temperature, cool but not cold. Nothing beats a traditional pint of ‘best bitter’ in an old pub!
Plenty of people in the UK drink lager and other styles of beer that are more highly carbonated, stronger ABV, and served colder. Personally I’m not a fan but each to their own.
I live about an hour from London in a rural area with loads of great pubs but I find it difficult to find a nice beer in most parts of London. It’s much easier to keep a keg of carbonated beer under pressure than a cask ale that you have to finish within a few days of tapping, which is why when a certain proportion of a pub’s clientele start drinking other styles it just isn’t worth it for the pub to keep real ale. Hopefully it won’t become a niche thing.
I’ve home brewed a lot of English ales and I agree that those ales should be served warmer. If you don’t, the cold mutes and kills the subtle and rich flavors.
Lagers are good, but a good British Ale is something to savory with good friends.
A lot of people everywhere don’t know how to cook. They don’t even bother to try and learn, so they rely on corporate packaged foods and restaurants. That’s a separate thing from the cuisine of a given place, or the cooking of people that do know how to.
That may seem like sophistry, but it is an important point to remember when talking about cooking when not joking around for fun. You can’t really use people that aren’t actually doing a thing, or have never learned how to do it as an representative example of what a country’s core is. It’s like athletics, you can’t say that Ethiopians are bad ice skaters if the average person can’t access time and equipment to ice skate in the first place. (Not picking on Ethiopia, it was just the first country that came to mind as not being very present in the world ice skating stage).
It’s legit to say that the US has a major food education problem, as does the UK from what I’ve heard, but that is a different issue than the national cuisine.
True, it’s not American cuisine that’s bad, apparently McDonald’s hamburgers taste better in NZ than the USA too, probably because all the beef here is grass fed.
My favourite “traditional” English meal is a good Steak and Kidney pie, made with an ale sauce. Seasoned with lots of pepper, Worcestershire sauce (anchovy sauce), onion and stock. Absolutely delicious.
I think the issue is mostly in the visuals. When you look for traditional English food, it is usually a plate full of beige stuff, sometimes paired with really unappetizing boiled carrots and beans. The gravy being on the side instead of part of the dish doesn’t do it any favors either.
Also I’d argue England has pretty low standards for what counts as “food”. I’ve had to work in England for a month, and finding something fresh, healthy and tasty to eat was a real challenge. I’ve never been as fat as when I came home.
The epitome of the wasted potential of English cuisine is the fact that it’s an island full of the best fishes in the world, yet the only fish you can find is battered cod. Why is it so hard to get a salmon fillet? You have Scottish salmon ffs!
We do have a lot of very bland food over here, but a lot of us like that.
It’s a lot more about the texture sometimes, some of us (not me) can do some amazing roast vegetables and everyone seems to have their own ancient tradition for how to make them
For anyone else who was out of the loop, this is a joke from the IT Crowd when (in the show) England was changing their emergency services numbers:
From today, dialing 999 won’t get you the emergency services. And that’s not the only thing that’s changing. Nicer ambulances, faster response times and better-looking drivers mean they’re not just the emergency services — they’re your emergency services. So, remember the new number: 0118 999 881 999 119 725… 3.
Edit: Edited for clarification that this was a joke in the show and England did not change their emergency services number IRL.
We never changed emergency numbers. It might have referred to when we changed directory enquiries from a single one operated by your phone provider to multiple options with the prefix 118 xxx. Or perhaps when we extended emergency services to also have non emergency numbers for police and health issues.
Otherwise it's been 999 for decades (with 112 also routed to the same).
I’m not British, so I don’t know the history of this. The article I took my info specifically said:
Until 2003, you could call directory enquiries (to find out the phone number of someone if you knew their name and address) by dialing 192. That system was privatized, and you had to dial 118 NNN, where the NNN was the number assigned to a commercial service provider, the most famous of which became 118 118.
So the joke in the show was basically, “what if we did to emergency services what we did to directory enquiries”.
Are you sure about that. They specifically called out England and not the UK. That is a sure fire way to tell that they know what they’re talking about.
Lemmy’s biggest competitor at this point isn’t reddit, it’s Discord, or rather, the monster it has become. It seems to me that instead of creating a subreddit nowadays, every project now wants to use a Discord server for everything.
The problem with that is:
Asking messages in a big, open chatroom (over, say, 20 people) gets real messy, real quickly.
Conversations on Discord are difficult to follow when multiple of them are going at once.
The conversations containing solutions to problems in chat or threads are not search indexable, which is the reason why reddit became quietly dominant in search results, it is simply the biggest centralized repository of organized English language text conversations available.
So why do people insist on using Discord servers to build their community? Simple, it’s the network effect. If somebody wants tech support, it’s way easier to click a Discord invite on an account for group chat you already have than it is to sign up for yet another forum that you only use once. But Lemmy doesn’t suffer from that problem of traditional forums because of federation.
Which brings me to my point, if Lemmy is to grow, it’s better to sell Lemmy to disgruntled Discord admins and forum owners to move their community than it is to get people to move off reddit at this point, since people who wants to leave reddit has all done so at this point.
Discord sucks, but I’ve actually had a 100% successful help rate on it vs Reddit or Lemmy.
Typically Discord servers have specific tech support rooms, and you’ll get help pretty quickly. Only once I have had to ask my question a second time, because it was missed the first time.
Meanwhile Reddit threads just get downvoted, buried, and you’re never helped. Even when I try to search for threads that other people have posted, 90% of threads are just blank.
Lemmy is the worst. Doesn’t matter what you need, they’ll just call you stupid and tell you to use Linux and FOSS alternative, ignoring the fact you NEED to use what you’re asking help with.
A forum should work in tandem with a chatroom in an “ideal” online community, imo. Searchable Q&A with a communication for additional, nuanced interaction. They serve different purposes and can be more powerful when used together, than they could be on their own.
Lemmy does seem to have a bunch of old, crotchety internet nerds on here that like the “old ways” of the webs. But just tell 'em to “go fuck yourself”, if they’re being a dick; and than don’t reply to them again. It’s very freeing. They’re just butt sensitive about linux and foss, cause they were bullied on early internet forums and now act the same way, when expressing their loud-ass opinions. It’s like an unfortunate cycle of abuse that has existed on forums, but don’t let it discourage you from asking anyway… the question might help others
I’m a crotchety old internet nerd… tell me to “go fuck myself”, just for funsies! It’s empowering!
I feel like Discord fills a different need than forum type systems.
The one API I have on discord, likes Discord as a place for casual chat about the system. I think the devs prefer it because it is an active place for the community; to word it better, ‘hey look at this cool thing I did’ > response within a few minutes ‘that’s cool’ heart^5 fire^3 thumbs up^7. Whereas on a forum you’d be waiting for hours, or just not have that casual of a conversation.
It replaces the old usage of IRC servers.
The help channel is highly responsive, and great for things you want a quick chat about, need a response now, or if you get help now great, but if not, you’ll figure it out on your own before you would ever get help on a forum, so it’s not worth posting to a forum.
Threads really do help organize when a discussion is going to be large, and discord is very much searchable, just not from your browser search engine.
For changes to the API, ideas, issues, or bugs, they direct you to github “Discussions” or “Issues”. They do have an idea discord channel, but it’s a more casual thing, or far out there discussions.
Discord does get a lot of hate for it’s searchability, which is valid, but I don’t have a problem with it as long as places like Stack Overflow (or what replaces it) are still around.
Discord is really bad for preservation of information. I can still find forum posts from 10 years ago on a given topic all over, but discord links seem to expire and break all the damn time and it’s hard to search through. It sucks that discord has become the defacto choice for user community space.
Discord is the same problem for the internet as the Facebook grups were. Its hermetic, the info stays there, its hard to search thus the same problem is being asked over and over. StackOverflow and Reddit strength is that’s they are indexed and easy accessed
Lenny does part of this yes. Fediverse is the bigger ticket item. From a single account I can federate to different networks and post questions or have other interactions in different formats.
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