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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

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  • It’s not a thing to change, though? I guess there’s one aspect that might be addressable.

    I don’t enjoy sports, but I appreciate the skill and training that goes into it. No one could say anything that would make me enjoy watching any sports, but they could help me to appreciate it by better understanding the skills and stuff.

    So if you don’t like Doctor Who - same deal. It’s a matter of taste, that’s fine. If you don’t understand what there is to like about it, that’s all anyone could help you with.

    Me, I only really like the first few sessions of the reboot, with the 9th and 10th Doctor, because I appreciate a little more depth in my stories.

    Doctor Who appeals to so many people and a major reason for it is that it appeals on a number of different levels.

    There’s the escapism, of course. How many Whovians secretly (or not so secretly) wish they could hear the whine of the TARDIS’s engines, see the Doctor, and be whisked away? To adventure, to incredible sights and experiences, to feeling like they matter. That brings me to the next point, but just here for a moment - that escapism is uniquely profound in Doctor Who. A huge number of fans would accept being the Doctor’s companions, even knowing how badly it ends for so many of them. If I didn’t have a kid to take care of, I’d be on that list myself - I’d take a short, full, meaningful life over this bullshit any day. Even if I’m dead in 6 months, for those six months I’d live more than a hundred years the way I am now.

    There’s also the simple, pure joy of following the adventure of someone who’s just straight up a good guy. You can feel safe rooting for him, in your heart - he’s going to try to do what’s right, there’s no mixed feelings about that. It’s like a child’s story that way. And yet, he’s not just fighting cartoonish, childish enemies. Sometimes, yeah, but there’s often nuance, moral complexity, hard choices.

    Like the Pompeii episode where he had to decide whether to actively kill everyone in the town in order to save the world. And they didn’t blow it off, it was a painful choice, he wasn’t saved by a Deus ex machina at the end, he had to do it. He hurt for it - him and his companion Donna, they both strove to do what’s right and made this terrible choice.

    And yet, for all that heaviness that underlies so much of the show (and I swear, the writers love traumatizing the doctor), it still manages to be light-hearted and fun most of the time. Suitable to watch with your family.

    It’s real, and alive, and cheerful, and rich in a way so many shows aren’t. It’s fun and thought provoking.

    Yes, it’s incredibly stupid at times, no joke, and I’m not at all happy with some directions it took after the 10th. I finished Matt Smith’s run and then stopped watching.

    But there’s something beautiful and deeply compelling about it for a great many people. Ah, to be whisked away to adventure and purpose! Wouldn’t that just be brilliant?

    Edit: I can’t seem to figure out how to do spoilers on here…


  • You think that the statement “what LGBTQ+ says about x” is a comment that is possible to make sense?

    “LGBTQ+” is not an organization. It’s not a religion or a creed. It doesn’t “say” anything - and, in fact, isn’t even an “it” in the context you’re using!

    It’s a term for a group of people that have nothing to do with each other, other than some shared traits. In your comment, replace “LGBTQ+” with another word for a group of unrelated humans. “Blondes,” maybe, or “women,” “men,” “dark skinned folk,” “humans,” etc. You can’t put something like “Americans” or “Christians” in that sentence, because those are too specific.

    Can you see the problem now?

    Is it fair to post a video of some random dude saying something stupid, and then say, “I have proof that men believe X”?

    No, because “men” don’t share a creed.

    LGBTQ folk also don’t share a creed. We’re just people.

    And I absolutely believe you’d hear some folks joking around about “coming for their children.” A friend of mine jokes about the gay agenda all the time. Her gay agenda is “going to the grocery store to get milk.” But someone could get a clip of her saying that she’s got a gay agenda, easily.

    And thing is, even if that video happened to be about some folks who weren’t joking - it doesn’t mean anything! Just because someone found some random assholes at pride doesn’t mean that everyone who’s LGBTQ+ has an agenda.

    I’m probably wasting my time, I know, but I figured I’d put it out there just in case you are honestly misunderstanding the situation. Here’s hoping.



  • Even if Jellico was right about it being a superior system, he was still being a shit leader.

    You don’t come into a management position and instantly change everything up. You start by learning how things have been going with your staff and setting up a series of changes, with adequate forewarning, for them to adjust to reasonably.

    You sure as hell don’t come into a situation that’s tense with time pressures, emotional pressures, legitimate causes to fear for their lives, etc, and then force a wide array of changes onto your staff.

    Even if the 4-shift thing is unquestionably superior (and let’s assume it is, ignoring the Bajor comments people are making) - it’s still a stupid as fuck thing to do, under the circumstances.

    Especially considering all the other changes and pressures he was adding on, all at the last minute, before a major battle.

    Engine overhaul, protocol changes, shift changes, multi-day extreme overtime, on a staff that’s emotionally distressed right before their lives will be put at severe risk?

    He’s an absolutely terrible captain and a disgrace to Starfleet. His bullshit would have endangered everyone’s lives for no good reason, had he not been damned lucky that the battle never came.


  • We once did something really amazing along these lines. Only once, it was a crap ton of work.

    We were fighting this giant demon wall thing. We made it out of Graham crackers and chocolate decorations, which we attached with melted chocolate as glue, basically. It was super creepy - I made demon eyes, oozing blood stuff, it’s was great.

    As we damaged the wall, we would rip parts of and eat it. It was like a solid 2-3 freaking pounds of chocolate and other assorted things. It was glorious to devour the enemy like that!


  • It’s annoying when monogamous people act like we’re all lying about experiencing compersion.

    Man, do I feel this. Why is it so hard to believe that people can feel differently about things?

    No, I’m not jealous and afraid my wife is going to leave me if she has sex with someone else. She isn’t when I do that, either.

    We’ll eagerly discuss all the juicy details. She loves hearing about my adventures. She’s more shy, so I hear more about who she’d like to be with rather than actual adventures. We both giggle and discuss people we’d totally bang and there really actually isn’t an undercurrent of anxiety about it.

    If I found someone that I started to fall in love with, isn’t that an awesome thing? Love is wonderful! And the sort of person that I could love would be someone that my wife would, at the very least, like. How does this not sound like a wonderful situation to people?

    Monogamy doesn’t make sense to me, though I respect people’s right to feel the way they do. If they feel jealousy, that’s allowed. If they think it’s better to have jealousy, then I’m confused, but whatever.

    It’s just weird that feeling differently gets such negative reactions and accusations of lying.


  • The way I think of it, there is no subtraction, and there is no division. Or square roots.

    There is the singular layer of operations (the adding/subtracting layer which I think of as counting, multiplying/dividing layer which I think of as grouping, etc).

    Everything within that layer is fundamentally the same thing. But we just have multiple ways of saying it.

    Partly because teaching kids negative numbers is harder than subtraction, and thinking of fractions is hard enough without thinking of it as a representative process of relationships via multiplication.

    Again, just how my brain does things. I’m not a mathematician or anything, but I’m pretty decent at regular math.



  • Thank you! That’s really sweet, I appreciate it.

    It’s been a number of years, and I’ve found my way. Found someone truly amazing to get married to and she’s done a lot to help me out. I still suck at making friends, but my wife helps bridge that gap.

    Interestingly enough, tabletop roleplaying games, like dungeons and dragons, helped me more than anything else. I could practice different ways of interacting with people and get actual feedback on how I came across - people will criticize characters I’m pretending to be in a way that they won’t for my real self. And it has lower stakes - if I screw up in that context, it doesn’t matter. If I freeze and don’t know what to do, I can just roll a die and make the problem go away.

    I appreciate what you and your wife are doing. If it weren’t for my wife, I’d probably really be in need of that sort of support. Thank you.


  • “Different?” That’s just always been true.

    I’ve been going to a psychologist on and off for “social dysfunction” since I was like 3. My family wasn’t well off, so it was more my mom trying to do what she could with evaluations or whatever every few years.

    I was diagnosed with ADD back when everyone was diagnosed with it, despite not meeting pretty much any of the criteria. My mom tried to argue about it, but random not-quite-poor person vs psychologist, she was blown off.

    I used to fantasize that there was an alien civilisation that was trying to understand earth and so created a human-alien mental hybrid to try to make sense of humanity. It’d mean there was nowhere I truly belonged, of course, but it’d also mean there was a reason, a purpose, to me being surrounded by confusing aliens.

    Mom ended up going to medical school and learned about autism (and Asperger’s, at the time) while there. She was furious. I was a textbook case of a woman with Asperger’s syndrome, but in my youth, psychologists frequently didn’t consider it possible for female patients to have Asperger’s.

    She wasn’t sure if she should mention it, since by that time I was an adult and on my own. I discovered it through a video game, actually - To The Moon, an amazing story in which one of the main characters has Asperger’s.

    I mentioned it to her as a “holy crap, I looked into this and I feel like I’ve been seen!” And she mentioned what she’d learned in school. It kinda annoyed me that she hadn’t passed that along, but between her support and what I’d seen, I pursued options and got diagnosed.

    Now it’s just autism and not Asperger’s, but whatever. Still, it was blatantly obvious my entire life. I had a rough childhood. I didn’t manage to actually make a friend of my own till I was 17. I had a few friends before then, sort of, but they were a thing where I was kinda adopted because I was easy to manipulate, and not any real connection.

    I could be defiant as hell, but I was so lonely, I’d do anything for those who called me friend, so… yeah, not the best friendships, in hindsight.

    Really wish those psychologists would have identified my issues back when. My life would have been vastly different.