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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • When I was a kid I used to walk to the movie store to rent games. I would go back every time I had money and rent Chrono Trigger, but some one would always erase my save, so I would have to start over.

    On my birthday I got a check from my grandma that was for 50 dollars. I walked right up to the game store and slammed my check on the counter for one copy of Chrono Trigger. I didn’t know how money, checks, or sales tax worked.

    Luckily, my mom bailed me out. I played that game for years. I still have such fond memories of that game.


  • Communism is literally not dictated by the few. Communism is anarchist in that there are literal no leaders. What you are thinking of is leninism, where a group of few used the ideas of socialism and communism to hoard power and money, spread misinformation, and destroy education. Because educated people don’t like authoritarian leadership.

    Like how in the USA, education has been villianized by the right in their propaganda. They cut funding to public education. They remove what books can be found in libraries. They can keep people ignorant of ideas they find threatening to their power structures. Such as socialist and communism ideals. Any book that talks of breaking down the hierarchy is considered a threat.


  • I completely understand where you are coming from, but you got to realize that that concept of communism has been warped by western propaganda and selective education.

    People hungry for power will use what ever ideology appeals to the people to gain power. Look at Donald Trump. He was historically a Democrat from New York uninterested in politics. He ran as a Democrat the first time but made no headlines. He switched parties and started talking pro-christian rhetoric. He is very obvious no Christian.

    You see it with “Protect the children” anti-abortion groups. Who have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups that target trans people with the same stance have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups who are say they want to stamp out pedophilia use it to target privacy laws.

    And you have groups like Nazis and Lenist who used socialism and communism as a means to an end. Those groups used those movements to consolidate power and wealth to the 1%, and used violence against others as a way to ensure their continued control, they were neither communist or socialist in practice, only in their speech.



  • She never did it unguided. And the way the therapist did it was different than what I’ve seen online. She would lay down and the therapist had her hold two paddles. One in each hand. The paddles would vibrate or lightly shock her, alternating between left and right. She did this while she was reliving old traumatic moments from her childhood. It was supposed to help process the information differently or something along those lines.


  • For my wife it was mainly a good therapist she saw weekly. I think what helped her improve that most was a form of radical acceptance .

    • Intrusive thoughts don’t define me
    • Intrusive thoughts do not last forever
    • I’m not alone

    Or something like:

    • I am not my thoughts. They are not my authentic self.
    • I am just an observer of my thoughts. I simply watch as they pass through.

    Often the reaction to the thoughts is what gives intrusive thoughts power. Accepting the thoughts for what they are takes the power from them. This is hard since often intrusive thoughts are ingrained into your most moral values, so to take that power is difficult.

    One thing she had me do at the start of her therapy was to ask her a question when ever she had an intrusive thought: what if? What if you killed that person? What if you said that racial slur? For her it would be the end of the world, bringing it into reality would often ground the thoughts. For the driving example, “What if I hit a child?”

    Well, then there would be a loud thump. We would get out and check on the child. We would call for help while we did what we could. We would probably go to the hospital. The cops would try and determine if it was accidental or not. You might be in jail. You might not. That is out of our hands.

    Just follow the thoughts to the logical conclusion. That aspect of her work stopped shortly after we started, though.

    She also did some trauma therapy. OCD can be rooted in childhood trauma. My wife had a sister with bi-polar, and owho ften got violent. Her parents wouldn’t speak to the kids about it. So my wife’s childhood was filled with this constant unacknowledged stress and tension, because she knew something was wrong but everyone pretended it was all okay. Coupled with her autistic hyper empathy, this sent her into a anxiety driven downward spiral.

    Another thing she said that helped was EMDR. It’s sort of a pseudoscience but my wife swears it helped a ton. So, anicdotal but worth a shot.

    Anyways, thats all I can think of. I would recommend trying to find a therapist who specializes in neurodivergent people and go from there.


  • My wife has severe OCD. She has gotten to the point she has basically 0 symptoms now. Where before she couldn’t drive or leave the house. Here is what I’ve learned through our journey.

    • The repetitive actions are often caused by intrusive thoughts. My wife’s stemmed from actions that were tied to her morality, and her memory. Such as, she would drive around the block 5 times because she would have this thought, “What if you ran over a kid but you don’t remember it?” Which was the worse thing she could have done.
    • 90% percent of people with OCD are also neurodivergent, namely autistic. My wife wasn’t diagnosed with Autism until after her OCD diagnosis.

  • As Llamapacolypse said, it has it’s dark moments. What I wrote above is some of the darkest. It never goes into too much detail when it involves some of the more triggering things. Just a fade to black.

    That said it’s such an intensely human series. So much love and compassion litered throughout the whole thing.

    It’s also such a unique experience. Most fantasy books have huge massive reveals that shock and take you by surprise. Malazan has these things. But it also does it in reverse. You’ll read something and then a book or two later it changes context entirely, completely blowing your mind.


  • The Crippled God from Mazalan Book of the Fallen. I should probably spoiler this. And trigger warning.

    spoiler

    The High King Kallor once ruled an empire. And he did so with a cold hard iron fist. Some Elder Gods decided that he was to be dethroned, and set off to confront the High King. Kallor had gotten wind of this before the confrontation and so had all his mages begin a ritual. One that would summon an alien force from beyond the known universe. They were successful and pulled an entity of such power that it destroyed Kallor’s entire empire. As the Gods approached the High Kings throne they found him there, emporer of only ash.

    The power Kallor summoned was so alien and anthemic to the universe it needed to be destroyed. But they found it couldn’t be done. So instead they crippled and chained the power. This power came to be know as the Crippled God.

    It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the cruelty that the Crippled God did himself. See, the crippled god worked in the shadows from his tent on the beach. He lifted others up to enact his broken visions. Granted them slivers of his alien power, and whispered promises of power or revenge into their ears. One such figure was the Pannion Seer.

    The Seer was a holy figure who led an massive army, the Pannion Domin, on a crusade against the world. This was a holy war and such his followers where blindly devoted. His most devoted where called Tenescowri. The Tenescowri where purposely starved. Given no rations, no water, no food. They had to subsist on what they were able to find. And what is the most common thing found after a battle? Dead bodies. The Tenescowri was an army of forced cannibalism.

    It gets a bit darker. The most powerful of the Tenescowri where the Children of the Dead Seed. During battle the fervent women would take dying men, and force them to copulate. Filling their wombs with the seed of a dead man. These children would grow up to be unholy warriors.

    I think it was said the Tenescowri were 100,000 strong led by Anaster the Fist Born of the Dead Seed.





  • If that logic holds true than pure American pitbull terriers should actually be the safest dogs to own in regards to people. Pitbulls where bred for dog fighting, but even more specifically they were bred to not bite the handlers. As getting a dog to fight is just a matter of time and selection, but getting a dog to fight only dogs and not people is something much more difficult and valuable, at the time.

    But, that was many, many years ago. And the breed has been bred and bred and inbred and bred again. An American pitbull terrier average weight is about 35 to 60 lbs. Average. 35 is no bigger than an average corgi. With 60 at the high end being a small golden or average chow.

    These XL bully breeds aren’t pitbulls. Hell, even pitbulls now days aren’t pitbulls. They are a mix of staffy, mastiff, American bull dogs, English bulldogs, and random other terriers. And then sold as designer breeds like the American bully with no regard for behavior, temperament, or loyalty.


  • Things are bad at a federal level. That isn’t something you can avoid by moving to a Good place, as you call it. Yes, I said state by state but that was only half the concept. It’s state by state for now. With federal protections being stripped that means we are one election from going the complete opposite direction. That is not a Good place to be.


  • This is entirely dependent on who you are. My wife just had the highest court of the land tell her she has no medical privacy. Sure, right now it 's on state by state basis, but that can change. Every member of the supreme Court said under oath they wouldn’t overturn precident and yet here we are. I have no worries that anything bad will happen to me due to legislation, but I am a white cis male. My wife isn’t. My best friend is a POC. My inner circle is filled with nonbinary and poc. All these people are actually being affected by the “culture wars” in very real and tangible ways. Feeling like it’s all okay right now must be coming from a very privileged and secluded position. Having held multiple people that I love dearly while they cry because their rights were stripped changes your perspective on a lot of things.