FriendOfDeSoto

I’m sorry about your mom’s illness.

What I’m reading here in this thread is that you haven’t found the right therapist yet. And us jokers on the internet cannot fill that void for you.

We all have to live with bad memories. Regardless of quality if we were to enter a pissing contest to see whose suffering is greatest. You’re not living with yours, they keep you as a pet. I would go so far as saying being an obsessive goodie has not worked for you either. So look for a different therapist. At the very least another channel for you pent up regret. You can of course still be nice to the people around you. But you gotta give yourself a break from trying to outshine your average saint.

Without wading into the therapeutic too much, is there a way to move your PC, maybe to the bedroom. Or to set your partner up with wireless headphones.

I would say it isn’t so important to put a label on either of you as it is to find a workable solution. So frame your approach in these terms, make a schedule for headphone time, don’t engage in the at home therapy. Other than that, look for somebody who knows both of you better than me or anybody else here. The advice is probably going to be better.

How long have you been together? How long since you moved in together?

Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I’m thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.

Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It’s not perfect. It’s not always fair either. But I’d rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.

In terms of communism, as dreamt up by Marx and Engels, you can only turn a completely capitalist economy into a communist one. This has never been achieved, shortcuts have been taken. All communist states in existence have either turned authoritarian or to dust. So in my view, there aren’t many communist movements left in the world. They may use the word but either M&E wouldn’t like them or they don’t really have a lot of support behind them. No support, no money. Capitalists have a lot of money. People with a lot of money tend to have the ear of their leaders. If an investor is interested it’ll be real hard to go for an employee-owned model (excluding models with free publicly traded shares). If investors are not interested, the business may be failing and employee ownership is the last hurrah before the end. Capitalism tends to come up on top.

The movements of people since time immemorial does not adhere to the arbitrary political lines we’ve drawn between nations today. Both France and England have seen large scale immigration by the Romans, various old Germanic people, then the Vikings. All these people have killed and fucked each other. Attributing DNA to an area is partially a statistical likelihood, so there’s a margin for error. Except in geographically and/or historically isolated areas, we’re all more blended than anything else. That makes the race theory of the late 19th century seem so utterly ludicrous today but we can’t quite completely get it out of our heads either.

Because they are a rebellious bunch. But it doesn’t matter because in one belief the whole country seems united. And that is to ignore all the pleas of train operators to stand on both sides of the escalators to prevent long lines and crowding on the platforms. We’re having none of that sensible crap.

There is a tendency to walk on the left in Japan as well. I wouldn’t call it a rule but a vibe. For a society that is rigidly built on rules and conventions, they are remarkably flexible when it comes to tolerating people who swim against the stream. Not wanting to cause a fuss overrides a New Yorker outburst of the “Hey, I’m walking here!” variety. IMO they also insist less on the right of way or other car traffic rules when behind the wheel.

I’m no expert. Stop reading here if that’s not good enough.

My understanding is that in cathode ray screens, the old-style non-flat types, heat would make a difference. In LCD and LED screens, so little heat is produced by showing images, it is probably negligible. One of them, I forgot which type, does black by just turning the light off in that spot. So the type of screen used probably matters here.

You can see massive ad screens even in hot places. Now, there may be insulation in use and/or A/C. My guess would be if they can operate a huge ass screen in 100F 40C weather to get me to buy shit, the combined energy costs cannot be exorbitant. And my guess is further that’s mostly to prevent the hardware from melting in the sun, whether the screen is on or off.

Taxes are unpopular necessary tools in the governmental toolbox. They are often marketed to the people as temporary necessities. And then the weeds of time grow over these intentions, people forget, and they’re here to stay.

Germans still pay a sparkling wine tax. It was introduced to be able to increase military funding before WW1. They have since gone from a monarchy to a republic to a murderous dictatorship to an occupied territory to two republics side by side (at least in name, the east got rid of the tax) to a unified republic. Guess what survived for more than a century?

That’s some cool stable genius shit!

This sounds like a weird person at best or the prelude to a scam, stalking, or social engineering at worst. You stick with your standards and don’t doxx yourself to passive aggressive douchebags, however insistent they may be.

YMMV. There is no universal answer to this question. None of us separate the artist entirely from the work and thus our enjoyment of it. I think of it in video game terms. Every artist has a power bar. They can get hit a couple of times and can still be tolerated when they’re in the yellow. But once we’re in the red zone and the character starts getting translucent or is flashing I’m out. This is all very subjective though.

Marylin Manson went red for me and I scrubbed the songs I liked from my playlists. Michael Jackson also. But I continue to listen to The Smiths/Morrissey in spite of Morrissey’s politics. I still enjoy Pink Floyd although Walters and Gilmore are profoundly unlikable characters and Walter’s politics rub me the wrong way a lot of the time.

In the age of streaming, there isn’t a lot of money going to the artist. You’re not really supporting them financially if you enjoy their music in spite of any a-holery, moral or criminal, they may have committed. If you get something out of it, continue to do so. If it feels yucky then I’m gonna guess one more hit is putting the character in the red. And if you paid for the music/album, the “damage” is already done.

I’m glad I was never a big fan of Kanye’s œuvre so I don’t have to wrestle with this question about him. I think he would have done enough to drain his power bar thrice over and thus it’s game over for me. I wish he had more well meaning people around him who could help him to protect himself from himself.

Bluesky is merely a stepping stone between Xwitter and Mastodon. Facebook can just die with them boomers.

Any other answer than professional therapy runs the risk of making it worse. But I know that it can be a luxury.

Out of sight hopefully leads to out of mind eventually. Actively avoiding these a-holes is one thing, having a good emergency plan when it can’t be avoided is another. I don’t know your life so you have to figure this one out yourself. In my experience, people that have a certain power over you in your mind immediately lose a lot of it if you imagine them naked, tickling the tip of their nose with a feather.

Are you reacting rationally when you’re confronted with them? If you can control yourself enough to imagine the nose tickling, start there and see how it goes. If you can’t get there and therapy is out of the question look for a fresh start somewhere else. Different part of the city, different city, different time zone. We are conditioned to think we mustn’t run from our problems, which isn’t bad advice but isn’t universally true IMO. There are cases where you’re allowed to just move away in the night, secretly flipping the old life off in the process. If after careful consideration going through all the pros and cons you arrive at this conclusion, don’t deny yourself this option for dogmatic reasons.

A therapist, after disagreeing with me, would probably add that you should make sure you don’t repeat past mistakes by creating new dependent relationships that could lead to new abuse. So keep that thought in the back of your head.

How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.

Glad to hear it! I thought I heard a sigh of relief so massive it circled the world twice.

What you need is help, not AI. If paying a designer is out of the question, look for the most design savvy person in your family, friends, or in your neighborhood. Maybe you can comp them a meal in exchange for making this look good.

You can use AI image generators to make background images. Just check the licenses if you’re okay to use their stuff in a commercial setting. AI is still largely dog shit at handling real text in images. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend going this route for you here. You have a lot of text.

What do you want to do with your poster? Will this be used as a meme or will it actually go to a printer or be displayed on a high-res screen? If it’s just a meme thing, any image creator AI will do. Most of them have free options.

If this will actually go to a printer, you’ll need high resolution images and would do well to design it in a vector format, SVG for open source software: Inkscape is free to install on computers, vector-ink is a thing for mobile and the web as well. Adobe Illustrator for the corporate expensive route. Big file sizes work better on a good computer so YMMV.

I get why the feelings sucks. You’re in your head and somehow only the worst possible outcomes ruminate. You’ve called the cops, good on you.

You’re not in charge of the world, there ought to be others who are charged with taking care of that girl. Their failure in preventing her from showing up on your porch is not your fault either and she’s their responsibility, not yours. Keep repeating that in your head.

I know. What you have hit upon here is my obviously unsuccessful attempt at making these people look more ridiculous than the OG death cult.