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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Have to disagree, at least back then it was the first exposure most kids got to using a computer for work at all. Even if some of the content isn’t useful for most kids, it still challenges kids to learn some basic stuff they might not otherwise. I do think it’s a shame that it’s required even if you already know how to do everything the course teaches, but that could be said about most classes. Everyone needs to know basic computing shit, forcing people to learn Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and some other random apps is a fine way to do that, and those apps aren’t going anywhere in our lifetime, nor have they changed in a way that invalidates anything taught 20 years ago. I work with people who use a computer full time for their job and it’s obvious they didn’t take a basic course when they were in school 20-30 years ago, or any time since. I have nephews that are 11-15, haven’t taken anything like that yet and they are totally inept with even basic shit, because it wasn’t taught yet and most people don’t just learn without instruction.

    Your last point about usefulness to a very limited set of jobs is silly considering how much actual useless to 99% of jobs shit they teach in the core curriculum. If we didn’t throw all this mostly useless shit at the whole of young society, some future great scientist, artist, mathematician, etc. would rot in ignorance, at least that’s the theory. Hard to say if the American education system is working at all though.


  • Counterpoint, most of the stuff I learned in my highschool A+ class (aimed at teaching you enough to pass a certification test that proves you can repair computers) was outdated already that year, and it’s like 95% outdated now. Typing and business productivity app skills are still directly valuable for most modern people.

    Most valuable skills are things like learning how to learn, critical thinking, judgement, understanding the value of time, humility, etc. I’ll say that the A+ course was much better than most classes at growing those skills for me, but I could say the same thing about the construction course I took. American school system, at least when I was in it, is totally happy to output kids that only know math, science, english, and arts. It’s hard to teach those life skills, harder to test for them, do we just don’t.


  • Psychology is doing their best, it’s just that their best isn’t great compared to most other modern medicine. At this point, autism is still held by many in the same way it was in the 90s, only the negative traits, as some developmental disorder, etc. Some of the best tests compare the average answers to questions like that from previously diagnosed autistic people and non-autistic people. The way we think is so different, I’d wager studies would find this sort of difference with anything they asked, assuming they asked the question in a certain way and the autistic person gave the first answer that came to mind instead of the answer they’d give when masking. That doesn’t make the test invalid, it just proves how profoundly different the neurotypes are.

    Autism wouldn’t be a disorder if everyone had the neurotype. The label is still strongly attached to the diagnosis given to people with this neurotype who also have severe mental disabilities. People still resist giving the diagnosis to high functioning adults, which muddies the field’s ability to study the neurotype and throws off all the statistics.


  • I am a rhythm game enjoyer, I’ve genuinely played Cytus. At this point I’d consider the best mobile rhythm game, but I don’t play it often as I’m not stuck playing only on a phone that often. Like, only play it on airplanes sometimes. I did fiend it for a bit when I first discovered it (10 years ago already?). Much easier to master than any other rhythm game I’ve played, might be part of why I don’t play it more.


  • Unless you’re power starved, just place your first pump near the output, don’t waste time trying to save a few meters. After that, the next pump will snap to place where the last pumps headlift runs out. I read somewhere that the indicator won’t show if it’s more than 100m away horizontally, didn’t have to test that situation myself though.


  • Great to hear you challenged conventional wisdom and found improvement. I’m someone with zero experience doing any serious running, but get paid to challenge conventions. The idea that there’s some universal pace sounds absurd. Bodies are so different, if there is some magic number it would at least be ratio based. Sports medicine is full of charlatans, and conventional wisdom in sports is constantly being upset by someone that tries something new and succeeds by shocking margins.

    Just remember that there are still people alive today that believed in their 20’s that it was unsafe for women to run in marathons because it would damage their reproductive organs (early 1970s before women were allowed to compete at all). That people holding an opinion as incorrect as that had a hand in writing the phys ed textbooks that were used over the next 50 years.

    Remember the history of world records for the fastest mile, that it was thought impossible to go faster than 4 minutes for more than 50 years until suddenly someone did, and then two more people did the same within a year. We are so prone to believing bullshit, don’t let anything set your limits.


  • That scene in episode two certainly felt unnecessary, maybe a service to the horny viewers. They manage to keep it somewhat believable, where most other shows typically fail to do so. I think the overly interested in the younger characters’ romance teachers is weirder than that scene, though I’ve met people like that and they aren’t even exaggerations.

    Maybe I just relate to the MC. There’s a reluctance to romance that takes me back. Most other anime I’ve seen way over exaggerate it, or don’t play on it at all.

    I appreciate your explanation.


  • I really enjoyed I Parry Everything, weird to see it so low or not even ranked in categories it makes sense for. I also watched No Longer Allowed in Another World and it’s way weirder to see it at the top of so many lists. Maybe some of the charm is lost in translation or I just don’t appreciate the play on tropes as much.

    Makeine is great so far, half way through about to binge the other half. Lovely art, generally avoiding the gross tropes that turn me off with these types of anime. When those tropes are visited it still manages to frame things in a believable way. I need to get my wife to watch it for her take, but it feels like the girls are represented respectfully as their own relatable characters and not strictly some object for the male viewers to desire. Probably still not totally there, but feels nice to see some growth in that direction.

    Curious if anyone can compare Makeine to Days with my Stepsister, and Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian. Both of those shows have some face value ick that’s keeping me from starting them.


  • Toxic positivity is just like woke, it can be anything you want it to be!

    For real though, not allowing down votes is not toxic positivity. You don’t go to an orgy and start yucking everyone’s yums. You’re not being told you can’t dislike things, you just aren’t allowed to vocalize it at no cost. And if you do decide to vocalize it in a comment, you may* be kicked out of the orgy because it’s a fucking orgy and that’s the rules. There’s literally no point to it except to shit on others, which you wouldn’t do at an IRL orgy**.

    *There might be a room for sexual degradation **There might be a room for scat

    Toxic positivity is telling someone their negative feelings (not opinions) are invalid. The existence of this term still doesn’t make people at an orgy assholes if they tell someone who’s bringing down the mood to go away. It’s literally a fucking party, don’t go there trying to make everyone worse. I could play devil’s advocate and say that the act of throwing a feel good only party is toxic positivity as it’s just as likely to enable escapism (from bad feelings) as it is to be totally neutral, but fuck that. Sometimes the cure to a bad mood is acknowledging it, and then escaping it.


  • What finally pushed you to get it addressed?

    Narcoleptic here as well. I’ve recently started considering it an unhealthy coping mechanism for boredom. I’ve never fallen asleep while doing something truly stimulating. Boring to me tv show or movie while comfy, sleep at 10pm, TV show that has me gripped, binge until 2am. I have a memory from my teens of watching a good movie in the theaters, no issue, but a friend dragged me to see it a second time and I passed out. I finally realized I had an issue because I was falling asleep while driving my daily commute, the same boring stretch of road. I finally did something about it when I fell asleep with my future wife in the car, in the afternoon after a full night’s sleep, very nearly getting us into an accident on that same stretch of road.

    It was crazy to see the EEG showing me hitting REM with 15 minutes. Sometimes I feel like I’m conscious and experience REM.

    Modafinil is a wonder drug. I feel like it does absolutely nothing to me other than fixing undesirable sleep.

    Apparently autism and sleep disorders are comorbidities. I didn’t realize I was autistic until 10 years after my narcolepsy diagnosis. More to do with the field not considering low support needs autistic people as worthy of the distinction. Not saying that’s you, just saying the questionnaires only take a few minutes, and the world makes way more sense to me post realization.


  • Eventually the science will show ADHD and a slew of other ND psychoclassifications are entirely genetic. It’s very likely one of your parents are driving the same brain around as you, with all its faults and strengths. In their childhood psych didn’t have the labels and treatments, you didn’t really want to mess with those abusers. Society also found it ok to beat children that didn’t behave. The parent with the ND brain was probably beat by their parent until they figured out how to wear the right mask. And not just beaten by their parents, but every single authority figure, teachers, pastors, etc. The cycle of physical abuse was only recently broken. We still haven’t broken the cycle of emotional abuse this society forces on ND people. The majority of psych pseudoscience still ongoing considers ND to be subhuman, excluding us from studies, using derogatory language that only serves to dehumanize and not empathize, recognize, and accommodate. They fail to recognize the positive aspects that are unique and common amongst ND, so we end up not even realizing in ourselves. In your parent’s generation they’d treat perfectly capable ND people with a lobotomy. There are probably more psych professionals practicing today that were taught by books written by the same folks who practiced lobotomies, than those that learned the still incorrect (but at least more correct than a fucking lobotomy fixes everything) science from 10 years ago.

    Sorry for the rant.





  • Ah, thank you for the clarity. My view of things, intelligence comes down to luck as it’s a measure of brain capability (not IQ), which I believe is fixed. Darkness was strictly meant as ignorance. Highly intelligent people will be more likely to learn, synthesize new ideas from previous experiences. When faced with the struggles of this existence, high intellect might invent a functioning coping mechanism where low intellect will fail and leave you to meltdown. Considering I believe we also become frustrated over a lack of understanding, not strictly from undesirable sensations, I think intellect plays a huge role in why people say autism is a spectrum. The compounding failure for an average intelligence autistic kid to learn to cope results in daily meltdowns and placement in special needs classes where they are seen as incapable. If society better understood their problems, helped them process and learn coping mechanisms, healthy stims, and what to avoid, they might be able to live a more normal life. That’s not what happens today, and it’s fucking tragic.

    I don’t really like any of the words that exist to talk about the issues unique to autism. Sorry if that caused any confusion.


  • Based on your response I’m not clear what we didn’t agree on. I’m a former smart kid that only realized he is autistic at 33. I’m hopeful that my kids will have more support in school than I did, and that the world outside of school will continue to become more accommodating for us. The world wasn’t built for people in wheelchairs, but it’s slowly being rebuilt with accommodations. Our curb cuts will take a lot of different shapes.


  • Start expanding your fundamental understanding of what is happening. Words give power over problems, prior to understanding triggers were even a thing you weren’t looking for them. Read experiences of others, what triggers them. Consider that you can alter your relationship to the triggers, not just avoid them. I hated almost all music as a kid, that changed once I started playing music rhythm games like DDR and guitar hero. I’ll argue that music was information I didn’t understand how to process, which dysregulated me. The unwanted information of songs being stuck in my head really upset me. Improved understanding of the sensory input opened ways to stim in response to it.

    Expand what you consider to be inputs, expand what you consider to be a stim. Inputs are anything happening to you, including your own thoughts and actions. Stims are your outputs, including thoughts. Inputs you don’t understand cause frustration. Your brain expends energy to find the correct response and gets nothing for it. Pressure builds up and if we don’t do something in response we blow up. There are so many things that get better once you can understand them.

    Consider cilantro, wiki says between 3 and 21 percent of people have a gene mutation that makes it taste unpleasant, I’m in that lucky pool of soapy disgust. Before gaining this understanding I simply could not process how my family enjoyed food with cilantro. In fact, I didn’t even know it was cilantro at fault, I just hated some of the food and my family loved it. Lack of knowledge let me believe it was a subjective taste preference, and I would suffer for that, going hungry or being forced to eat soap. Learning in my late teens of this genre mutation empowered me to avoid my own disgust while explaining how others aren’t disgusted by it.

    So much in life is improved by expanded understanding. I think that’s the core of why kids dysregulate more often, they have less tools to explain the world. I think that’s why super smart kids with this brain don’t dysregulate as often, they pull themselves out of the darkness.

    I’ll leave you with this link about how words literally grant your brain power to process inputs. https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102