IonAddis

IonAddis , 8 months ago

All the money spent coordinating that visit could be better spent fighting the war in Ukraine.

…you do realize that the ONLY reason the money coming in to Ukraine at the pace it is is because he said exactly the right things on the world stage at the right time in such a charismatic way that people believed in him enough that fundraising basically started flowing in?

His diplomatic/networking/fundraising acumen is WHY the money is flowing in, ya doofus.

Why the hell wouldn’t he be furiously trying to arrange in-person meetings where he can use his personal social skills to forge diplomatic ties?

IonAddis , 8 months ago

Yeah, I treated Twitter as a RSS platform where I could follow subject matter experts like scientists and writers and artists I liked.

I also used it to follow people and groups that weren’t like me so i could learn. Like, “disability twitter” opened my eyes to some things I took for granted, because you had regular people dealing with those things just talking back and forth about it. If I shut my mouth and just listened, it opened up a whole new world.

For small-time creators making either art or science, Twitter was a good platform to get little chunks of info out to your followers. I don’t know that Mastodon fills those shoes yet, but I hope it will.

IonAddis OP , 8 months ago

Yeah, seems a great channel. Solid info presented in clear words by a guy who is a research scientist on this exact topic.

Mars Guy is Arizona State University associate research professor Dr. Steve Ruff, a Mars geologist with decades of experience exploring the red planet. This channel follows the exploration of Jezero crater by the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, presenting science, engineering, and the search for life on Mars using a novel in-person experience.

This project was initiated in part with collaboration from the NASA Infiniscope project.

search.asu.edu/profile/224420

Steve Ruff is a planetary geologist with a focus on the mineralogy of Mars determined via infrared spectroscopy, part of an effort to understand its geologic history and potential for past habitability. Through field work in Mars analog settings and laboratory work using field samples, he seeks to better interpret observations from Mars.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

Yeah, cultivating a growth mindset is really, really important. And it really is cultivating…you’ll have a hundred reasons why you “can’t” knocking on your door, and you’ll have to be persistent to slay each one.

But once a “growth mindset” is habit, it gets easier.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

Funnily enough, if as an intellectual you let go of the idea that others are dummies and start examining what they do and why and start brainstorming about what might motivate them, you might get a better idea of all the dynamics that go on when it comes to an individual’s choice or motivation. Including, yes, why people are “anti-intellectual”. And perhaps how to “solve” it.

I’m a bit snarky here, because I get irritated by other supposedly “smart” people looking at things through a tiny, biased and prejudged pinhole.

You’re smart? Ok. Get out there, observe things, learn them, then come back and form a hypothesis that aligns with what you’ve observed.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

brominated vegetable oil - it’s found in citrus sodas because the (natural) citrus flavoring is an oil, an orange or citrus oil of some type, and is prone to separating if there’s not a way to keep is suspended in water. And I’ve seen separated sodas in a QA testing lab and they look pretty nasty. I imagine orange sodas that haven’t already reformulated will have to, so they might end up tasting different. I know orange Gatorade reformulated to get rid of BVO about 10 years ago or more. www.fda.gov/food/…/brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo

As a note, California also forced (by being one of the largest markets) reformulation of dark sodas containing caramel color across the nation. Caramel color is what happens when you brown toast or caramelize sugar. I kinda just scratched my head because it seems you’ll get more exposure to the carcinogen they’re talking about if you burn your toast. www.fda.gov/food/…/questions-answers-about-4-mei . And if burned baked goods were a genuine problem, it seems we would’ve known it long before now.

I think most industries definitely need more regulation, but California sometimes seems to do banning so often on the slightest sliver of data, and it kinda creates a regulatory “crying wolf” situation, where people become so used to the “known to cause cancer in California” warnings that they start to ignore ALL of them and can’t differentiate the ones that are dead fucking serious and the ones that honestly require unusual situations for it to happen like someone eating/consuming a physically unlikely amount of the product constantly.

I personally think it’s a problem when people don’t have a way to differentiate the warnings about things that’ll genuinely fuck you up under current levels of exposure, and things you basically have to go dip yourself in a vat of daily for months before it harms you.

And I think it’s a problem because people naturally have short attention spans, and when EVERYTHING has a warning, you know people aren’t going to actually do research to figure out which one is dead serious and which is fluffed up and starting at shadows. So you start to get inconsistent heeding of the warnings. Eventually you’ll ignore the boy crying wolf because you’re so tired of going to to check if the wolf is there, and the wolf’ll come eat you then.

I have no solutions for solving it though, given how polarized things are (one side massively under-regulating, and the other sometimes starting at shadows) and how few people are willing to listen to nuance.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

I was going to contradict you, that bookstores always carry bibles…but then I realized the memory I was thinking of was from the 90s.

I’d say this is just a good excuse for me to go to the bookstore and check…but they’ve all become so small and sad that I kind of don’t want to. I just get depressed.

I know ebooks and audiobooks have massively taken off so people are reading/listening still…I just miss my childhood refuge being stuffed chock-full of treasures.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

I had a dictionary of etymology that I truly loved. Can’t say I’d read it from start to finish like a novel, it’s not meant to be used that way, but I did spend time jumping from word to word learning about their histories.

But I’m a writer so I’m one of the few that would genuinely be into that.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

I sometimes run into interior design pics where books are organized by spine color, and I gasp and clutch my pearls at the heresy.

…but yes, some people do use books as decorative props instead of as things to be read and enjoyed for their content.

IonAddis OP , 8 months ago

I thought this was super-cool–full build video to make a little water turbine to generate electricity.

IonAddis OP , 8 months ago

I can’t speak for the one in the video–although that inventor is a Scottish guy who seems to work in impoverished areas in Africa, Panema, Tibet, etc. so I presume his design works as he keeps using it–but Kris Harbour (www.youtube.com/) is a homesteading guy in the UK who is running his homestead on a combo of solar, water generation, and wind power.

Kris Harbour’s latest video is him installing a waterwheel for a client, although he himself uses a little water turbine on his own property. He has videos of both up.

IonAddis OP , 8 months ago

I would say of all of that, solar is probably the easiest to do for a suburban household. For hydro you’d need land with access to a stream or something, and for wind you might run into local ordinances about noise or the height of the structure or the like, in a suburban area at least.

Speaking of ordinances, given that solar has taken off so much, depending on where you live I have heard you might have to obey local laws about installation of that too?

I am in NO WAY an expert, but as I understand it (assuming I wasn’t misled by my reading), when households are feeding into the electrical grid (instead of just the utility company), an electrical utility worker who is working on something and has turned off power from the power plant coming down their particular line can be surprised/hurt by electricity coming from the residential side of things if it’s feeding into the grid and isn’t supposed to be.

So that’s why areas where solar power on residential homes are regulating solar installs if the electricity from the solar power feeds into the larger grid, so folks working on the lines have a clear idea of what’s being fed into them.

IonAddis OP , 8 months ago

The guy’s channel revolves around solutions that are super-cheap so that someone handy in a poor country can easily source the materials to build the thing. So I imagine some of his design decisions are based on his knowledge of what materials are locally available to relatively poor people in various places in Africa, or Panema, or Tibet, or wherever.

I was watching another one of his videos, and he was trying to get a bike chain to act as a belt for his wind turbine, and his rationale was that bike chains are easily accessible in poor countries, but he had to fall back on a car drive belt that was cut down and modified because he couldn’t get his first option to work.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

really you have to make everyone disembark during rush hour so you can cram your obesity scooter on there so you can go to Tim Hortons so nobody else can sit down?

Has it…occurred to you that some disabled people have mobility issues or pain disorders that limit mobility to begin with, and that weight gain is a byproduct of not being able to walk or move or stand for very long without trouble?

I had a boss who had dwarfism and used a wheelchair 80% of the time. 20% of the time he slowly, painfully did hobble about–but it was clear as day WHY he was higher weight than he should’ve been. My own blood pressure would spike hearing the tiny sounds of pain he made when got out of his wheelchair and moved.

I have a friend with POTS–and if you’re unfamiliar with that, basically she stands up and her blood pressure and heart rate is malfunctioning so her heart acts like she’s running a marathon, the beats per minute go insane…but blood is pooling in her feet and they’re turning purple where you can’t see it because things are out of whack and despite her heart going haywaire, there’s not enough pressure to get the blood out of her feet and elsewhere. This condition happened prior to any weight gain.

I can hear her breath start to go wobbly just doing simple things because her body doesn’t regulate her blood pressure and heart rate normally. She’s gained weight because she’s at risk of passing the fuck out if she is on her feet for very long–she has to literally plan out doing simple things like going to the grocery store because if she pushes herself she might end up downed on the sidewalk relying on the helpfulness of strangers to get back up. It’s taken her many years to accept she really shouldn’t be pushing herself into a collapse because she’s worried that people will judge her for being “lazy and fat”. Comments like yours about “obesity scooters” only act to tear down all the people who ARE trying their hardest and still having their body fail them.

I have a different friend who has thyroid problems, she inherited them from her mom (and her bro has them too), and weight is a bitch for her to manage because her thyroid is fried.

I just broke my foot in July, and watched my weight inch up because it’s really fucking hard to get up stairs when you can’t put weight on one foot. I was semi bedbound for like 2 months. I’m LUCKY in that my foot will heal, but I don’t even snack and I gained 15lbs because of that one little temporary mobility issue. I’m LUCKY in that once it heals, I will be able to move normally and lose what I gained.

You could’ve made your point about transit without taking pot-shots at disabled people, who often are stuck in a terrible situation of their body failing them medically, and society often forcing them into poverty to be able to access the care they need.

Seriously, why isn’t it possible to champion mass public transit for all without shitting on the people who use it by necessity currently?

IonAddis , 8 months ago

but some of it is because 50% of the way through their brain is tired of reading text. AND THAT, is problematic.

Yep.

This reminds me of how often people mistake skill for “natural talent”.

“Natural talent” exists, but someone without any particular natural talent who still has spent thousands of hours doing a thing is going to run circles around someone with “natural talent” who never put time and effort into practicing.

And I think when that skill is “reading”, people don’t power through the moments when their brain rebels, gets frustrated, or gets tired. So they hit that block, and don’t push through to overcome it. They go do something else…but they go do something else every single time. So a block that would be frustrating but minor in the big scheme of things gets codified in one’s mental image of themselves.

And once you have this idea that you are or are not something–that conception can turn into a huge mountain to overcome.

(As an aside, our parents have huge influence on if we think we “are” or “are not” something. It’s very worth it when you think you “can’t” do something to go back and look at your life and check if that voice in your head is yours, or if it’s the internalized voice of a parent who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about!)

(Both people who were belittled as “stupid” and those who were constantly called “smart” can end up kinda “malfunctioning” later on, thinking they can’t do something. The ones called stupid think they can’t do something because “they’re dumb”, while the one called smart has been conditioned to fear not being 100% perfect, so they don’t even start because minor, genuinely trivial failures loom as large as the destruction of the entire earth in their minds!)

IonAddis , 8 months ago

So, I’m a writer, not a researcher, but I’ve found the more tools I have stuffed into my brain, the more likely it is that two different things clank against each other and create something interesting.

I don’t think this is something unique to writing fiction–from my understanding of history, there’s quite a few moments in science where two somewhat unrelated things bash against each other and spark a new idea.

Sure, computers can do things we already know how to do, but actual inventors/scientists/people making stuff still need to think up things first before you can computerize it.

It’s possible that this WON’T do anything new in the realm of math, but it might create a string a researcher in a different domain–history, linguistics, whatever–can pull on to unravel something else. A diverse tool set leads to multiple ways to solve a given problem, and sometimes edge cases come up where one solution actually is better in some niche application because of something unique to the way it is shaped.

IonAddis , 8 months ago

I liked Black Book more than Inscryption. it’s about a young evil witch in a fantasy version of eastern europe, and you cast spells by stringing a combination of cards together that are curses or blessings. There are some encounters that use puzzle decks, but mostly you build your own deck as you progress and get new cards.

it’s heavily steeped specifically in slavic mythology, which is different from most worldbuilding using viking or celtic or the like. So you meet things like leshys instead of trolls.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I’m 40 and min wage where I was was $5.25/hr if I recall. (Non-tipped job, tipped jobs were lower.) A 1 bedroom in my area at the time was about $700. I remembering being SO damn confused as to why someone working 40 hours on min wage wouldn’t even pay for a 1 bedroom after taxes, much less utilities, car, food, etc. I redid the math over and over again, thinking I must be doing something wrong because school talked all about budgets and stuff…

…but no, school had just failed to tell me that min wage wouldn’t actually cover a real-world apartment in my area.

It was all particularly stressful to me because I was in foster care in a group home as a teen, and I did work and school at the same time and they were prepping for us to go live on our own…and no matter how I did the math, I couldn’t afford a real apartment on my own EVEN IF someone had been willing to rent to me w/out a co-signer.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Another thing re: wall thickness to think about is there wasn’t steel-reinforced anything, and in an area without lots of trees, there wasn’t much solid timber for beams either. So you get “structural brick” which has to be much thicker on the lower floors than the brick facades you see today, on buildings with steel support beams. Structural brick makes for FAT walls esp if it’s supporting a 2nd story.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

In the tech sector you can run into caste-ism (is that the correct word?), where Indians who are “lower” caste can be looked over when applying to jobs if the one going through resumes or making hiring decisions is Indian themselves and a “higher” or at least “different” caste, and can identify at a glance what caste the applicant is by their surname.

It’s apparently popping up enough that it’s on the radar as a discrimination problem in California, which has a big tech sector and I suppose a large enough population in some areas of Indian immigrants for this to start being a problem.

It surprised me at first that anyone was concerned about it–but then I realized…yeah, you kinda want to nip that one in the bud. Given all the existing classism/racism in the US, we hardly need a new one to throw into the mix. And it’s really dumb/disappointing to me that someone might come here from India hoping to start a new life and obviously have to deal with racism already because that never won’t NOT be a thing–only to ALSO run face first into caste-ism from fellow immigrants who drag that crap over with them. What a crappy catch-22, you know? So it seems to me that it’s good that some folk have awareness that it’s a thing to watch out for.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

So what I’m hearing is that computer code will eventually drift closer to DNA where “noncoding” sequences actually perform regulatory functions but in a way that’s super-arcane, and all you know is if you get rid of the noncoding bits the proteins change expression for some bizarre reason…

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Maybe if you take LSD while watching it, the multi-fingered, multi-limbed speech will start to make some sort of divine sense…

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Yeah, there’s a reason horror films and fantasy universes often base their stuff on Catholic trappings.

Like, when was the last time some horror flick brought in, I dunno, Baptists or Mormons or Lutherans to deal with the exorcism of a demon?

No, you bring in the Roman Catholic Priest, or MAYBE the Eastern Orthodox Priest, he’s MUCH cooler and has rituals and robes and everything.

The theater and singing in the Catholic tradition is generally top-notch, and it’s one thing I miss about being Catholic. They know how to tap into artistic showmanship in a way other religions seem to have purposefully shed.

…I sometimes wonder how much of the metal community is ex-Catholic. It has the same theatrical flare.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Stuff like that has never been unique to self-checkout. I remember in my teens in the 90s you’d run into things like the credit card system being down or the check-checking system being down when you went through the line with a physical cashier, or some barcode not scanning because it’s some niche product that didn’t make it into the system. Or you only had a $50 on you and the cashier was struggling to make change because it was too early/too late in the day, so you had to hold on while they flagged down someone who could help them open another register to break it. Or there was a coupon being weird, or, or or…there was always something now and again. If not for you, for someone ahead of you in line.

Basically, minor inconveniences always happen now and again regardless of your method of checkout or payment. Feeding your own anxiety by stressing out whether you look stupid because a touchscreen has stumped you for this or that reason is unproductive.

Like–yeah, I get it. I’ve felt frustration too. I have felt the same things you talk about.

But I consider my own feelings a “me” thing? I’ve always felt that was a thing I had to overcome in myself, my own impatience, my own frustration over an everyday minor blunder. My own fears that I look “stupid”.

Blaming the world around me (such as the self-checkouts) for being imperfect is…unrealistic, to me? There will always be minor things, minor delays–it’s just a facet of life that will never change.

So it’s always seemed to me that it’s more productive to be zen about it. Especially when looking at my own memories I remember just as many minor checkout “upsets” when going through a line with a physical cashier as I have encountered in the self-checkout. Small errors happen regardless of system, so why not learn to flow with it?

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I can’t speak for other mediums, I mostly know genre fiction best.

(I also agree that the system we have in place is not the most ideal–it’s just the framework current authors work under, and thus the framework that pirating of their works interacts with, if that makes sense.)

If you exclude textbooks (which work under a very different model) and non-fiction (which likewise works in ways I am unfamiliar with), libraries collectively have a ton of purchasing power and can make or break a mid-list author of genre fiction.

Library buy-in can mean an author gets contracted for another book or not. It can mean that author is given another year of breathing room to grow their career or not.

A novelist–and I’m talking specifically about traditionally published fiction novels, not short stories or screenplays or anything else–is part of one of the few cottage industries left. They are not employees of a publisher. Genre authors do not get salaries and health insurance and benefits from the publisher. They are contractors/small businesses.

They hand-craft a unique product, partner with a publisher for a measly $10,000 (or often less) advance for their year of work and some hypothetical small % of royalties from books sold beyond the first advance. That % of royalties may or may not materialize depending on if their work takes off or not, and so many of these authors generally do not make even minimum wage. Also, they are taxed like a small business, about 1/3rd of that measly $10k advance goes towards taxes.

So yeah. A small-time author sells one book for a $10k advance. That advance already has 1/3rd eaten by taxes, and it also gets doled out in shitty little $2k chunks according to whatever points their contract specifies. 10k would be tiny income to trickle in over ONE year, much less across multiple. And most authors don’t have the stamina to write more than one book a year–“unicorns” like Seanan McGuire or Mercedes Lackey who can do like 4+ books a year are rare.

Most average genre authors do NOT make Stephen King-like money, most basically work/act like a small one-person business who have a contractor-like relationship with a publisher. They have families or spouses that support them, or a day job, or they live in abject poverty because the publisher does not give them much.

Things like AAA games or movies are different in that there’s a lot of funding there and the whole financial aspect of those works very differently.

But your average genre fiction author is basically the same as a one-man indie game team who does nearly everything from art design to storytelling to game mechanics.

And the publishing house is like–hell, let’s say Unity because that’s all over Lemmy today. You can say the power of a game engine is roughly equal to the power of a book publisher/distributor, if you are examining power dynamics between the actual creator of something, and the tools they partner with to get their thing made and “out there”.

Like, if that foundation poofs, whether Unity fucking over devs with weird contract shit, or the publishing house abruptly pulling support from the next books in the author’s series, the author/indie developer is super-fucked.

So when you pirate genre authors who probably got less than $10k for their book (spread out over 3 or 4 payments over 1-3 years), the publisher doesn’t see enough financial income that would give them incentive to contract that author for another book. So they say “bye” to the author.

And traditionally-published authors are fucked if their name/pen name gets tarnished like that. If they get a rep in the sales databases for being a low performer. You either try to go indie even if you don’t have the skills for the business side of things, or you start from scratch with a new pen name that’s not tarnished and try to build a new reader base. (Starting to build a base from 0 is hard.)

Whereas if you use the library, the library DID buy that book, and that purchase appears on the publisher’s accounts, and gives a tick towards the author being profitable enough to contract another book from. So that author gets another chance to grow their career.

Most authors don’t break out with one huge book in genre fiction. Even Terry Pratchett–who died as “Sir” Terry Pratchett by the end of his career–had some real shitty books early in his career, and if his publishers had dumped him early on because there wasn’t enough of a profit to justify letting him grow his career and get better we might not have ever gotten the good books he wrote.

Many authors build their careers one brick/book at a time. They slowly get better with time and experience. They slowly accrue fans over time as they develop a backlist of books that a new reader of the latest book can find and devour.

And it’s pretty easy to disrupt that process for small-time authors if you choose pirating over library. Because they’re one-person dev teams, basically, and the ecosystem is fragile.

(Big name authors–like, ones you actually KNOW have made shit-tons of money–are less affected. King, Rowling, Sanderson, Nora Roberts–are probably financially fine. But in the middle there are authors whose names you KNOW who actually aren’t making all that much. It’s weird–you might have read a midlist author’s books and know their name but they’re not raking in all that much even though instinctively you think that because you know their NAME they MUST be rich, right?)

Now, big-budget movies and games…those act differently and are funded differently, they’re not one-man shows. There’s a lot of greedy corporate assholes at the top of those chains (thus the recent writer/actor guild strikes.) The impact of piracy on those creative mediums is probably different. I’m not informed enough to really know.

But fiction? Yeah, most genre authors are tiny little indie creatives, and pirating actually does potentially fuck them over to some extent, if the author is still alive and still writing as their career.

The big whale authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson or Nora Roberts or J. K. Rowling are the exceptions, not the rule. Most authors are not bringing in that much with their works. The truly giant authors probably won’t notice if you pirate–but the smaller authors, that you might mistakenly think is “rich” because you recognize their name, might not actually be all that rich and might actually encounter problems if there’s more pirating going on than library checkouts.

Libraries, as a demographic, can add up to be a nice chunk collectively (think how many libraries there are), so an author who is popular in libraries can see continued support from publishers. But if people choose pirating over libraries…well, that support goes away and it’s easier for the publisher to say “bye” to the author.

Maybe sometimes it’s warranted, some authors just aren’t good. There’s an element of sink or swim going on with making/selling a book by the nature of it.

But I know as a reader there’s several authors I like, and who later won awards…who kinda had crappy early books. Publishers nurturing them through their early wobbly careers is what allowed them to grow into the greats they became. (These days, Publishers are much more cutthroat in getting rid of midlist authors, as I understand it, compared to the 70s/80s/90s.)

And although I mostly talked about traditional publishers above, indie authors can have it rough too (or even rougher) because they directly foot the cost of things like editors and cover artists and the like without being able to spread the risk of marketing and selling their book across a bigger pool of authors like a publisher can.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

If my childhood memories are correct, didn’t those always make sad noises, even when new?

IonAddis , 9 months ago

When you make an emotional plea like that, not based in reality, I think of when I was living with my aunt and uncle, and my aunt was so upset I was angering my uncle by not giving in to him.

He was going to abuse us regardless of what we did, I’d been in the situation for a few years by then and saw the patterns, and when you’re in that situation and understand the history of how that individual acts, you don’t fling yourself at the abuser’s feet once again…you fight.

I fought and got free. Got bruises and my hair ripped out of my head for it…but I got out. My aunt put up with a few more years of abuse because she wasn’t willing to put up with that bit, the dangerous bit when he popped off when someone defied him.

The situation in Ukraine is (writ large of course) similar to the dynamics of what goes on in an abusive home. The stakes are higher–more lives lost–but the dynamics underneath are still human dynamics. Which needs to be understood when it comes to negotiation and “civility” and such. It all comes back to the nature of the human animal.

You have a lying abuser at top (Russia) who tries to divert attention by tugging on heartstrings with pretty words while they are placing the blame for the war on the victims who “just won’t stop fighting–don’t they want to stop getting hurt?” as if fighting someone who is already hurting you is abusive, as if fighting back against them is irrational.

You don’t play around with idealism with these people, because they’ve already shown they are not willing to hold up their side of that social contract. (Although they are cunning and know using it on YOU might get you to do things against your own interest.) It’s NOT a given that stopping fighting will stop the loss of lives, that the abusers will keep their word once they’ve given it–with the Wagner dude as an example, who stopped what he was doing presumably because he was given promises if he did stop, then was blown up in an airplane shortly after.

Being civil only works if the other person is also being civil. When they’re not, other methods of dealing with a threat have to be taken. In an individual home, like my situation, I was lucky enough that simply leaving was enough. It was wildly “uncivil”–everyone gets super upset when you say you ran away from home or don’t talk to family…but it was effective to change the situation I was in. I didn’t need to be violent myself, just physically remove myself.

Nations, unfortunately, can’t pick up their borders and walk away to a place where their neighbors can’t reach them, they are by their nature very land-bound. So you get war instead, when civility–diplomacy–doesn’t get the result needed. (Just like talking to my uncle wouldn’t stop him from doing things, it’d only cause more trouble because he’d get even angrier that you’re “back talking” and not giving in.)

BTW, I’m not really responding to this guy, I doubt they’ll read or understand what I’m saying as the wringing fingers appeasement is an emotional ploy meant to get people to stop thinking and start crying inside.

Even if he’s real I’d be surprised if he understood. My aunt never did understand my point when I tried to explain what was wrong in our situation. There’s a reason it takes X amount of years and X amount of tries for abused spouses to get free.

I hope this is interesting enough for lurkers, though.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

So, I’m uncertain if the parent’s behavior (screaming and throwing things w/ the mom) has been like this all the time and OP is finally getting fed up with it, or if it’s really a sudden change.

I’d definitely first consider the advice from others in this thread to check environmental toxins or health stuff with the parents, esp. if the behavior of mom is a sudden change–but if that checks out ok, or if the mom screaming and throwing things has been present OP’s life, it’s not a bad thing to consider this advice above.

How you handle parents who were good (or decent enough) parents when they decline is different from how you handle abusive parents. And this advice here is solid for if OP’s parents are abusive.

I imagine the people downvoting it are people who grew up with stable parents who maybe did descend into (normal) decline and thus are thinking of their own experiences and can’t imagine what it’s like to have genuinely bad parents one’s entire life, or the harsh boundaries one has to set to win yourself free of them.

But OP does need to take context into account (including stuff they might not have put in their story) and evaluate if the screaming/throwing things is actually new, or if it’s always been that way and they’re finally getting fed up enough to want to break free.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

The problem is that leadership doesn’t interpret it that way and just sees “minimizing inventory increases profit!”

Yep. Managers prioritize short-term gains (often personal gains, too) over the overall health of a business.

There’s also industries where the “lean” strategy is inappropriate because the given industry is one that booms in times of crisis when logistics to get “just in time” supplies go kaput due to the same catastrophe that’s causing the industry to boom. Hospitals and clinics can end up in trouble like this.

But there’s other industries too–I haven’t looked for it, but I’m sure there’s a plethora of analysis already on what Covid did to companies and their supply chains.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I imagine it’s a case where if you’re knowledgeable, yeah it’s free. But if you have to hire people knowledgeable to implement the free solution, you still have to pay the people. And companies love to balk at that!

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I also grew up in an abusive home–but I had a freeze/flee response to conflict.

So, there are several “defense” tactics when it comes to conflict. Fight, which you grew up with. Freeze (do nothing and hope they don’t notice you), Flee (leave the situation), and Fawn (people-pleasing).

When people say not to be a people-pleaser, they are generally talking to people who have an oversized urge to please as their defensive tactic. If you are a person where “fight” is your go-to, toning it down so you can properly interact with people isn’t a bad thing. It’s what YOU needed to do for YOU to gain necessary social skills.

But other people out there have “Fawn” as their defense mechanism. That is to say, whenever there’s conflict, they try to placate other people as their technique to de-escalate. And this becomes a situation FOR THEM where they erode their own boundaries trying to please other people whenever in conflict. It becomes a problem when other people take advantage of them because they tend to fawn and give other people things too much, and it causes harm in their life where work/spouses/friends abuse their placating nature. At that point, people who “fawn” need to try to do what you did with your fight response, and set more boundaries and say “no” more often without placating.

A good portion of “general advice” on the internet does not point out that “context matters”. But it really does, the patterns and personality and past of the person taking advice matters, and when it comes to someone who grew up in an abusive home learning how to master their defense mechanisms, different people will need different advice.

If you were truly as belligerent as you say before, I’d be honestly surprised if you over-corrected to the point of people-pleasing becoming a detriment, as it’s extremely hard to shake these things. They almost seem to be inborn personality traits that are ramped up into extremes if one is in an abusive situation. I have a friend who had a journey similar to yours, with a “fight” defense mechanism mode, and he’s done a TON of work breaking the “fight” response, but you can still catch him in moments where he goes into “asshole mode”.

And I’m the same, I’ve grown and improved, but I still default to “freeze” or “flee” in conflict situations that are especially stressful. (My growth has been embracing a “fight” response when necessary, and also a “fawn” response when necessary.) Him and I made opposite journeys…I learned to be more aggressive because it was necessary, and he toned his aggression down (because it was necessary to avoid driving away people he loved).

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I stepped away and thought of more things–so a response to my own reply, heh.

As for learning where to draw the line…you need to take a pragmatic approach to your own past responses to things. Stop and look at them with clear eyes, pretend you are a scientist analyzing data both good and bad, and don’t cherry-pick your data, look at both sides of what happened…how many of your recent responses go overboard with “fight” in a way that doesn’t give a clear benefit or align with your ethics? (And how many likewise do “fawn”?)

Like, fighting just to fight drives people away so that’s not a benefit as you lose community and support, and fighting with (say) a customer service person you’ll never see again for $2.00 turns you into a Karen and wastes time so that’s not a benefit.

But haggling on the purchase of a house or a car might actually be a financial benefit (so long as you don’t turn it on the underlings and place it where it belongs and don’t go overboard with being mean just to be mean).

So look at your recent responses. How many fight for “bad” reasons that are small or petty or waste your own time, how many fight for “good” reasons?

Likewise, how many of your reactions people-please in ways that help you keep friends you actually want to keep, and how many start to be detrimental to you because people are starting to abuse your new habit of people-pleasing?

To learn where the line in your life is for either response, you need to look at what YOU’VE recently done, and figure out if that’s the person you want to be, if the benefits/detriments make sense.

For example (example pulled out of my ass), if you go out with friends and pay for stuff for everyone SOMETIMES, that is one thing. If you NEVER do it because you’re angry they’re taking advantage of you…well, if you never do it, how could you be paying for everything “all the time”? How could that even be possible? Sure, the anger is there, but is it based in reality? Might be you’re just angry to be angry–and it’s good to look at that. Fact-check emotions against reality to re-calibrate and see what’s going on.

But by the same measure, if you over-correct because you feel bad about being an asshole in the past and you desperately don’t want to be that person…you might be paying for everything all the time…which actually IS unfair to you, and if you examine a situation and find you’ve over-corrected and this is happening, an appropriate balance might be to scale it back. But you want to CHECK and look at your pattern across time to see if that’s going on.

(Patterns across time tell you more than isolating one event out of context.)

You’ll probably find instances where you FEEL one way and want to fight/fawn/(freeze/flee), but to continue to grow you probably need to stop and look at your recent patterns and fact-check your emotions against what really happened.

For me, since learning to “fight” was a part of my journey away from “flee/freeze”, I tend to reserve “fighting” for situations where either A) I’ll get genuinely financially fucked if I don’t (not just a dollar here or there, but something that’ll affect food/rent/real-life survival stuff), or B) I’m interacting with a community and there’s toxic folks coming in. Sometimes a community with toxic people simply need someone to stand up and call it out to counter the bystander effect, then people will rally behind you.

Also, a note: When you draw a boundary, even if it’s a very rational and reasonable one, it is not uncommon for SOMEONE to get upset by it. This is not the same as everyone getting mad at you because you’re constantly an asshole. Again, the proof is in the pattern…if no matter what you do people seem constantly angry at you, that’s probably you. But if that reaction to you has stopped, but a few people get upset if you actively set a boundary on something–that’s human nature. There are OTHER people out there who definitely want to take advantage of everyone around them, and that’s sometimes you, so if you set any sort of boundary at all no matter how rational that’ll still be “too much” for them.

That’s not necessarily a sign that you’ve “back slid”, it’s just that 20-30% of people are shitty people no matter what.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Wow. I read the article and the guy doing it also did to other women, including the stalker’s own underage relative. Luckily, the sisters were able to get him sent to prison.

But one of the things that really pisses me off is that the ex-boyfriend of one of the sisters sent MORE images to the stalker.

Like, the stalker already had some, and this fuckwad sent him MORE.

And he got off the hook because he said he was sorry and was only doing it to “gain the stalker’s trust”.

Basically, he supposedly didn’t do it out of malice (just overwhelming monumental stupidity…which I don’t believe, I think he just got lucky by saying sorry and by the laws in the books worded in such a way that BAD intent was necessary for it to be a crime). They settled with him in court later on, but the idea that someone could send a stalker nudes of their GF/ex-gf and get out of it by acting like it wasn’t a malicious act but “only trying to help” is infuriating. That loophole definitely needs to be closed.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

For those looking at this comment, this guy seems another one that only crawls out to talk about Ukraine and India.

Interesting comment pattern, to be sure.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I don’t even like Asimov’s work (his characters are awful) and what I watched of the first season of Foundation was pretty bad. I can’t imagine what fans of his books must’ve thought.

I was hoping an adaption that shored up his weaknesses in characterization while finally showing me what all the fuss was about, and I didn’t get that at all.

IonAddis , 9 months ago

I’m curious what country/culture you’re from that this is a significant problem in your life?

It kinda sounds like you’re a medieval serf who got an arrow shot in your ass while poaching off the king’s preserve.

…or like, you’re reading an awful lot of fantasy…and thinking 500-year-ago-problems are today’s problems…

IonAddis , 9 months ago

Also, the “it’s species they know” thing is often exactly the problem: there are species on one continent that look exactly like a species on another continent, but one of them is edible and the other is deadly.

Yeah, I’ve heard this is a thing with some immigrants with East Asian background. There’s a species of mushroom in Asia that is totally edible, but its look-alike in North America is deadly.

So every year there’s a handful of people who accidentally poison themselves, because they didn’t do research on local mushrooms (or the info that’s available is in English and they’re not all that fluent in the language.)