Well, I recently lost, like, 50% of my credibility as an intellectual as I stopped smoking. So I guess I am now somewhere in between both ends.

Oh, like German “Fach” then, I assume? That does actually make sense

Which I would classify as pretty weird, but not really unethical. Besides, I think the comparison doesn’t fully work - it’s more like, growing a lump on your body somewhere, having it removed, and saying “hey, can I eat that?”. Which I would also classify as weird, but not unethical.

Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

Mayo + Ketchup combined, the classic “Rot-Weis”-combo in Germany.

That or, preferrably, mayo + a good chilli sauce

Yeah, I am too attached to my account because it’s several years old and was made when there were next to no instances running. But I can only shake my head at the amount of Marxist-Leninist nonsense that is at times pushed there, that unironically elevates what was a development of “Marxism” out of the material conditions of the Eastern Bloc as an imperialist sphere bent on market expansion and accumulation of national capital, into a religion-like orthodoxy.

No, ideology that is nominally Marxist, and having an educated caste of decision-makers highly trained in your interpretation of it at the top won’t prevent capitalist dynamics and bring about communism, only the material base and changing it will, and your ideology will follow what your material base demands. And that had been expansion of national capital for the Eastern sphere since the revolution failed to link up with any industrialised nations in the 1920s. The elevation of Marxism into a basically teleological ideology, claiming that with subservience to the interests of national capital, there will be communism at the end (a promise broken over and over again), is completely understandable by looking at the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence from a Marxist perspective.

And even the structures put into place by Lenin were explicitly designed as for his own time and the conditions within the Russian Empire, not as an infallible orthodoxy, and things like Democratic Centralism explicitly contained open and free discussion before unity of action, which was just completely pushed away. Urgh, it’s sad to me, because I think a new, invigorated and organised communist movement is needed more than ever, but by redirecting it to the national interest of states like China (and even Russia, which isn’t even nominally communist, and just opposes western imperialism to impose its own imperialism - like choosing Germany over France in WWI, the exact shit Lenin fought against) instead of the international proletariat, just weakens it overall.

Hm, lets see if I can still get it together, it has been years since I read Lacan. All of this should be viewed as just from the top off my head the way I remember/interpreted it.

The phallus for Lacan is the imagined omnipotence and agency of our parents (or other caregivers) as we are a very young child and completely dependent on them, turned into a fundamental aspect of the unconscious. Further, it is some desirable aspect, that we imagined makes our caregiver desire other things more than our own needs. (Think: A mother may not immediately feed a child because she is occupied with something else, like the father.) It is the idea of having something, that can fulfil your needs - but is also intimidating and unpredictable, powerful yet volatile. In sexuation, Lacan argues, the “male” sexuation (note that Lacan already did not completely tie this to sex nor even gender as such, more to sexual roles that develop more broadly but have tendencies) projects this onto the proper phallus, i.e. penis, and desires to control it and use it, i.e. overcome the unconscious concept of castration (the realisation of your own powerlessness and dependency). Whereas the “female” sexuation starts to project onto the phallus the primal desire of getting back the symbolic phallus - fetishising it as something powerful that takes control of you and ultimately will enable you to reach the object of desire. Note that this object of desire to Lacan is a complex concept in the unconscious, and I can’t get it all together (and assume I already misremembered some stuff along the way), but at its core, it is an unreachable, unimaginable part of the unconscious, around which the rest of the unconscious circles, never quite reaching it.

The original image was just an image of a possessive gf holding up a guy by his dick.

*Dryena

Just another case of a small, unknown competitor trying to gain market share with the supreme life simulator sandbox CK3, smh frfr

So, I recently learned about my own autism, also in my 30s, and I have begun the process of consciously unmasking quite recently - not a lot of experience yet.

What I’ve been doing is using my overactive self-reflection that was honed from going undiagnosed and being high-masking, to analyse where I might have been masking, what behaviour I might have done just to fit a specific role. For example, today I accepted some cake that a friend advertised in a group chat, that no one else seemed to want. In hindsight, while it was delicious, I was neither hungry for it, nor did I want to deal with the stress of him coming over to deliver it. But when I reflected on it, I realised I actually did this because I had internalised it as behaviour that is conducive to social connection, and “what is expected of me” when someon offers cake, even when I now very much feel the stress of having been interrupted by the offer, by accepring it, by getting myself ready to leave my apartment, actually going outside to meet up, the smalltalk involved, walking with a cake through the street afterwards. All stuff that actually stressed me out quite a lot.

While waiting for him outside, I allowed myself to close my eyes, listen to music and rythmitically drum on my thighs consciously - something that I know I repressed completely before, without even knowing. Unlike in the decades before, I also did not focus on thoughts of self-loathing like “why is something so simple so hard for you? What the hell is wrong with you?”, consciously pushing thoughts and feelings like that away as best I could.

At the moment, I am very much still sorting what even is behaviour that comes to me intuitively from “myself” and what is a mask - mostly by reflecting on the amounts of stress and overstimulation I feel after the fact, and then trying to consciously avoid the things that I realise, after the fact, were most likely long internalised masking behaviour.

That all being said, I also try to appreciate my masks as something I can go back to as a talent, when the tradeoff of their use is worth the additional stress. Being able to speak publicly, being able to look people in the eyes/face if needed, and other things, are good to have in some situations.

Germany, don’t watch TV, have adblock on all devices - I guess I do still see advertisements on billboards when I go outside, but those are a bit different.

This is a lot worse, IMO, at least wiping your ass is a good idea - douching is just an all-around bad idea outside of very special circumstances.

Aw, a lot more tame than I expected. But I guess I understand why I’ve never heard of it, I’ve never seen that brand before in my life.

As someone outside the US, and someone who hasn’t seen advertisements in a long, long time - outside of memes that make fun of the shittiest ones - what is this about? I am always curious about how ad culture evolves, and having a bear literally talking about his shit-encrusted ass, on television no less, would be a rather fascinating escalation of the more publicly shown ad-culture to take into account.

Also, learn how to fly drones if you can, if (when?) things go shit-fan-hitting globally, that seems like a really useful skill to have in your group, considering how the face of warfare looks at the moment.

With a quick reminder: If you in any way can, don’t do this solo, connect with others, don’t get arrogant about it, either. The fascist preppers have a huge weakness in their narcissistic individualist “I am better than the sheep” prepping style. Being able to actually support and organise a community in the potentially coming chaos is important.

I feel that, I am currently on a waiting list for an official diagnosis I managed to organise with the help of my current psychiatrist. For me, here in Germany, I searched for “adult autism diagnostic” on maps, and it gave me a clinic with a department a few kilometres away in a big city, with their waiting list being roughly a year long.

Resources for autistic adults are super scarce, considering how many undiagnosed people have gone undiscovered from lack of awareness in the past decades.

Yeah, I never understood it either. Either have an open relationship with consent, or communicate whatever needs you have that you want to fulfill by cheating properly, and accept that it may not work out if there is truly no way to meet them. I guess I can at least abstractly understand when it happens spur-of-the moment and under the influence of drugs/alcohol, but I still can’t properly put myself in those shoes.

Don’t fuck with mankind - one of your siblings sinks one measly ocean liner, and they will boil the planet and themselves just to eradicate every last one of you.

Oof, I haven’t touched shaders in Godot myself yet, besides a very simple section during one tutorial, so maybe I should not give any advice, but I think this can be solved by applying the shader to the pond and adding a check for transparency before applying the changes to the pixels.

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.