(And here I go, talking about the stuff I don’t want to listen to other people harp on about! Haha.)
It’s mostly because I used to handle regulatory documentation for a food company, and as a part of that I read a LOT of mommy blogs/health blogs/etc. and discovered people are shockingly uneducated about the actual science of nutrition–but more than happy to talk about their ignorant misinformation at length, and gather followings online for it. People are also uneducated about the history of nutrition and food regulatory agencies and say a lot of stupid things there too.
You kinda see the same sort of problems arising that caused the anti-vaxx mindset. Anti-vaxxers come about because vaccines were so effective at preventing once-prevalent childhood diseases that people grow up without actually knowing people who got sick from those things, and they start tilting at windmills instead due to a lack of personal experience with the deadliness of certain diseases. (They attack the vaccine helping them, instead of having the experience to be scared of the disease.)
Likewise with food, food safety with pasteurization and such has been SO effective that you have things like raw-milk advocates crawling out of the woodwork because they’ve never actually heard about a toddler’s kidneys being damaged for life from salmonella. Apparently to them, their “freedom” to eke out…oh, some tiny unconfirmed extra “nutrition” from unpasteurized raw milk…somehow outweighs the very real risk of actual human beings becoming ill and dying. But historically back in the day tainted milk was a very real danger, killing kids and elderly and making others sick, it was a public health menace. The discovery of pasteurization was ground-breaking because it fixed that public health issue. But people who don’t know their history and haven’t seen with their own two eyes someone getting really sick from raw unpasteurized milk get fixated on some hypothetical damage being done to them or their freedoms if they can’t get or drink their raw, unpasteurized milk due to laws or regulations. They’re completely willing to let real people die on their minor molehill. Mostly because, as with anti-vaxxers, they haven’t seen what life is like when people are getting sick left and right from this stuff.
I also come from a background of trauma and abuse, and I’m extremely aware of how quickly control of food by someone antagonistic towards you can physically make you ill or sick very, very quickly. A lot of people have hot takes they think only affect them but which can fuck up other people if they were applied more broadly. There’s this disconnect that food is actually needed for people to live…probably because the people flapping their gums have never missed a meal.
It’s only been the last two years that I’ve truly got fed up with Google.
I remember, faintly, the days before Google. They started out as genuinely the best search engine/free email on the market. I was a fan for a very long time due to that.
The things recently that have made me fed up are A) them bitching about my adblocker on YouTube, B) their search, which is their sole reason for being, sucking. It’s sucked for a few years now.
If you hit up abuse survivors subs, you’ll come across the technique of “grey rocking”, and what it’s used for. If you honestly, truly want to understand why privacy is important, take a few months (yes, I do mean months–learning isn’t accomplished by a pithy two-sentence quip), and read the stories of abuse survivors. Pretty much all of them will have examples of how people in their lives used their knowledge of them to harm them in some way.
Basically, there are malevolent people out there, abusive people, who can and will take ANY info about you, and twist it around until it’s a weapon to be used. It doesn’t really matter what the info is–there’s ways to twist anything.
I was an A and B student in high school that never got into trouble, or did drugs, or got knocked up (I was pretty much the teacher’s pet because I didn’t need help and also didn’t get bored and act up, so I was an “easy” student) and somehow my uncle, who had unresolved trauma of his own and disliked I didn’t crown him “daddy” the first month I came to live with him, found reasons to permanently ground me for most of 3 years. (I mention school because I used it as a touchstone to figure out if there really was a reason to demonize me at home…I figured if the teachers weren’t constantly handing out detentions to me, and seemed to think I was a decent kid, then it must be home that was wrong.)
The most effective technique to deal with people weaponizing info about you on you is to cut off their source of information. This is something abuse survivors have generally found. When you live with unreasonable people, finding something that WORKS (outside of pie-in-the-sky ideals) is important.
Withholding info is pragmatic and helps blunt the effect of the attacks. When living in an abusive home, “grey rocking” means you give little to no information about your daily life to the abuser, and it’s called “grey rocking” because you act as interesting as a rock. (Even then, they’ll use that shutting off of the wellspring of info as evidence that you’re “abusing them with your silence” or something. But at least they won’t learn of your promotion at work and use that to beg you for money, or learn that you like some pop song and decide out of thin air it means you’re a slut that just got knocked up, or that you’re doing drugs, or that…blah blah blah.)
But the same people who are abusive in private homes also have jobs, are even in government. Those people don’t exist in just one sphere, they exist in others, with the same mindset that causes them to treat their “loved ones” poorly.
They’re not going to just give up their shitty ways. I mean, even if you haven’t had shitty partners or parents, you’ve probably run into those people in school or at work as bad managers. The people who, if they had surveillance info on you, would absolutely use it on you if they had the least bit of reason to.
And the way of dealing with them, pragmatically, remains the same, whether it’s abusive people in your family or abusive people who are managers or in government. You strangle their source of information. They can still lie about you (and often will), but it’s harder to make up plausible lies that other people will swallow if they don’t have enough information on you to get a good angle for it.
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
I know of two couples that dabble in it to some extent. One as far as I know is unicorn-hunting, because their rules for it suggest a 3rd member genuinely capturing someone’s heart would lead to relationship implosion of epic proportions, and I suspect that couple isn’t mature or stable enough to be doing what they’re doing without leaving people open for hurt. Not that I have any say in it, lol. But I feel sorry for any thirds that interact with them thinking there’s even a chance of them being an equal partner.
The other couple has much better communication skills, and claim they’re poly, but as far as I can tell from the outside “poly” has happened as an attempt to save the marriage. Maybe they’ll make it work, but I’ve watched them make some dumb mistakes, and the wife has jealous behaviors when women interact with the husband and a history of bending to his needs before her own so I think even if she says they’re poly she might have talked herself into it as a way to attend to him.
I think healthy poly is possible–but it requires extremely mature individuals with exceptional communication skills, and that’s rare even in monogamous couples.
The book Ender’s Game has a psychological component that it’s nigh-impossible to nail in a visual medium with child actors. The story works in book form because books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, but it’s harder to do in a visual medium simply because visual storytelling is different from written storytelling.
You could probably do the movie with really good adult actors–but most of the cast are children. And really good child actors are rare to come by–you’re lucky to have one, much less multiple. And when the cast is made entirely up of children who are all supposed to be geniuses, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get the casting and talent you need.
The Ender’s Game movie wasn’t terrible–it was surprisingly watchable compared to other adaptations of other books–but it didn’t come close to nailing the feel of the book.
I tried to watch Foundation, mostly because Asimov is one of those writers whose style I can’t stand in his actual books (his characterization is really flat–you could tell he was far more interested in his ideas and the characters were just pawns on a stage), and I’ve had a few cases where books I couldn’t finish were very watchable on screen. Also, I was following Jared Harris from the Expanse to Foundation in the hopes of seeing something awesome.
But what I saw, and what I remembered from the books, didn’t add up. Nor did it suck me in on its own merits, like some other adaptations have.
Yeah, I kind of oops’d my way into this. Have a plastic tub, and I use…not zip ties, but reusable variants of them…to keep various cables together.
It’s mostly SATA cables, HDMI or DVI cables, and computer power cables and a few small power/USB strips. There’s a weird satisfaction to needing a cable for something, opening the tub, and being able to just lift the right one out without dealing with a rat’s nest of whatever.
Personally, most of my life has been both difficult and unpleasant due to mental health issues (and capitalism), so I’m just proud of myself for still being here.
I don’t feel pride for past hard stuff I’ve made it through, not really. But I am grateful for the things I learned from the hard experiences.
I think the event that was most “useful” to me, and that I learned the most from, was running away from home when I was 16. It led to an immediate bettering of my situation.
I will caveat and say I was lucky in that my crappy family had a relatively upper-middle-class wealthy city gentrify around us, and I got to reap the reward of that well-funded support system because the foster system in my county was well-funded and capable. I hear that this is not necessarily the case in poorer communities, and people in other areas can end up in more of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation. I definitely made a jump out of the frying pan onto the relatively clean and stable counter.
But going from a situation where I was a minor and without money or access to things I needed to survive, to a situation where I had a job and could use MY money on whatever I wanted (including a living situation that was safe) was far superior than relying on abusive people to feed and shelter me.
It’s always funny to me when people hearken back to their teenage years when “everything was provided for them” and they could just do school and have fun without any worries. I never experienced that. A job and bills was a step UP from my previous situation where every bite of food I ate was flavored with fear and every blanket I fell asleep under had the potential to be ripped off of me while I slept if some adult decided they were mad at me for some petty, cruel reason.
People like to say things like, “It’s so inspiring you got through XYZ! I could never do that!” The news sites run a lot on that sentiment.
But if you look through history, people of all stripes actually are good at surviving through stuff, simply because there’s no choice. You just go forward. You see this in action in war-torn countries…everyone, of all different stripes and different personalities, surviving in one way or another. It’s not all that unusual to survive shitty things.
So I feel like the worth is in what you learned from those experiences, as some people survive them but don’t learn much from it, while others wring the crappy experience of every scrap of knowledge it can possibly offer.
But you can wring experience from good experiences just as well as bad ones, so wouldn’t it be nice if nobody had to have bad experiences?
Basically, I don’t think suffering brings any sort of grace, but if you are forced to suffer, it seems important to wring any scrap of knowledge from it you can. Tear the silver lining out with your fingernails if you have to, haha.
Well. If we’re being analytical here, and bringing support to our posts, you could take a glance at my post history. I have a temper sometimes so you could even cherry-pick me being a big meanie to someone else or something.
“Thinking only of myself” is not something people usually levy at me though. I do think a lot about other people and humanity in general, and my post history generally supports that.
But I did find your original post ridiculous, and many of your responses in this thread to me and other people are basically just you being a dick because you got mad.
My belief is yes and no. Like many biological things it’s both nurture and nature.
Many people think that the way they act is their “personality”, when it seems more accurate that they have feelings/urges/likes/dislikes that manifest in a certain way and don’t know any other way to act.
And because they might not have known a “them” where they were able to channel those urges in another direction (because they’re young, or never tried, or have never seen an example at home to follow because their family is shitty or out of control) they think that manifestation IS their personality and is completely out of their control. Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you think something can never change you won’t even try, and then it CERTAINLY won’t change.
Changing how your own urges manifest is within your power. It’s not always easy, but it is within your power. (Mental illnesses do make it harder, as mental illness often messes with things like emotional control or executive function, both of which are helpful to have when changing how you react to things. But I have known people with mental illnesses who made an effort to try, and those who did not, and even then there’s a difference when it comes to actually “trying”, and even with mental illness those who try and learn and grow get further than those who do not…although it does not magically “cure” the illness.)
Basically, it’s possible to skill up when it comes to self-awareness, emotional control, and even understanding what is and isn’t a threat, and all those things change how various aspects of your personality manifest in the real world.
But, beneath that, there are “the big five” personality traits that seem “real” to the extent that science pursuing investigation into them. Those are:
<span style="color:#323232;">* Openness to experience (includes aspects such as intellectual curiosity and creative imagination)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Conscientiousness (organization, productiveness, responsibility)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Extroversion (sociability, assertiveness; its opposite is Introversion)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Agreeableness (compassion, respectfulness, trust in others)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Neuroticism (tendencies toward anxiety and depression)
</span>
People who are interested in and have the drive towards self-improvement can gain and practice skills that help them redirect behavior and urges within themselves that they don’t like. For example, maybe someone who gets angry really easily starts to recognize when they’re feeling like that, and instead of shouting at others and ruining relationships, they go out running and get some exercise. Or, the reverse–someone who never stands up for themselves learns to.
I don’t think it’ll eradicate some tendency towards certain personality traits–but it can bring them under control so you stop holding yourself back due to it.
I have a friend, and he and I have made opposite journeys when it comes to anger. He’s had to learn how to channel it back, tone it down. I’ve had to learn that my anger is “okay” to express sometimes. We were opposite ends of the spectrum and have each made progress more towards the center. We still default back to what seems our “inborn personality”, but we also have a lot of times when we act different ways because we’ve chosen to and have better control over ourselves. And when you do that all the time? Well, it’s a pattern, and it’s “you” just as much as anything is.
I’m generally soft-spoken IRL, and quiet, and a loner. But I’m also a writer, and because I wanted to progress in that Craft, I learned to write and “speak” with authority, because a writer who quivers and wrings their hands every other sentence and seems to lack confidence isn’t going to be interesting or compelling to read.
This is not a natural talent of mine–but I worked on it. And I worked. And I worked. And I did eventually gain skill in “sounding” confident in myself–to the extent it sometimes causes trouble because people expect one thing when they’ve read my writing, but get someone who is much quieter and much less talkative in person. Obviously, I have not put the same work into my in-person speech, and have not worked on dispelling my wallflower status there, but having seen how things turned around for me in writing because I kept trying, I imagine I could turn it around in person if I wanted to.
…IF I wanted to.
“Wanting” to change is probably the biggest thing when it comes to self-improvement. If you don’t like who you are and want to change it, it’s really important to cultivate that desire, because that DESIRE to change is the thing that keeps you going through the hard, frustrating parts of changing and gaining skills in self-understanding and self-control.
I just kept critiquing myself after a negative interaction and trying to figure out why I got angry or frustrated.
This bit really is key.
Some of our emotions are legit. Sometimes someone really did try to screw you over or something. But a lot of times…our feelings are based on assumptions that aren’t true, and when you pick at the emotion a bit you start to realize you assumed the wrong thing, or didn’t consider something else.
So it’s important to critique yourself, and think about what happened, and try to dig down into the true root of the situation, separate truth from fact.
I grew up in an abusive home and generally am laid-back so it’s hard to get me angry. I had to learn that in my case, the anger I felt actually was valid and not just something I was blowing out of proportion–most people who talk a lot about anger are approaching from the other angle, and have to learn the opposite, that not everything is worth getting angry about.
But both of us, regardless of our “natural starting point”, have to learn how to think about stuff that happened, and ask questions, and try to figure out what happened and why.
You know, a “randomize me” choice that was fair (that is to say, not obviously offloading the worst stuff or stinting on portions or giving you the same “random” thing every time) is something I might actually use for meals if I could.
There’s this tea place online I buy tea from, what-cha.com , and they have a “mystery” tea section that’s really awesome for trying out new stuff. And the reason it works is because the “mystery teas” are still decent quality.
But I imagine fast food places don’t implement this because some jerk would harass the workers over it.
The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,500 BCE). This is the conclusion of...
Reminds me of how things like flood myths might have actually come from times of great natural disasters that got passed down in stories.
I’ve also always wondered if stories about elves, dwarves, etc. are ancient, tattered memories of prehistoric times when homo sapiens was not the only hominid walking the earth.
We overlapped with Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, etc. (And interbred. nationalgeographic.com/…/enigmatic-human-relative… ) So there was a time when anatomically modern humans walked the earth when other almost-human-but-not species still lived.
And it’s always seemed to me the variety of almost-humans in mythology from around the world might be in some cases an ancient memory of that.
Trans men enter Miss Italy contest to protest anti-trans ‘women from birth’ rule (sh.itjust.works)
More details: thepinknews.com/…/miss-italy-trans-men-trans-wome…
Excluding the obvious ones such as politics, what topics can't you stand listening to people talk about?
For me it’s detailed describtions about people’s dreams....
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What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
Which books have the worst video adaptation?
For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
Have you ever come across some sort of container or organizer for anything that ended up being strangely useful?
I’m not a natural organizer, but I’m starting to appreciate things that help me organize as I get older....
What difficult/unpleasant experience are you most proud of yourself for making it through?
Personally, most of my life has been both difficult and unpleasant due to mental health issues (and capitalism), so I’m just proud of myself for still being here.
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Absolute unit on the west coast (lemmy.ca)
Banana for scale. I was a little late to the party as it looks like something munched on it....
Is it actually possible to change your personality
This isn’t meant to be a negative post. I wanted to tweak how I handle some things and have gotten better but I it made me think....
"Heavy is the Burger" by Extra Fabulous Comics (lemmy.world)
www.extrafabulouscomics.com
Archaeologists Discover Remains of 5,000-Year-Old Wine in Ancient Egyptian Tomb (www.sciencealert.com)
Research finds dramatic increase in cranial traumas as the first cities were being built, suggesting a rise in violence (phys.org)
The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,500 BCE). This is the conclusion of...
Wild Pigs of Europe Are Highly Radioactive (www.popularmechanics.com)
Radroaches and radscorpions here we come!