I once got to do a tour of a historic fort, and when we visited the magazine the guide told us that garrisoned soldiers were issued wooden button fly trousers. They couldn’t use a zipper because a spark might set off the gunpowder, and also they hadn’t been invented yet.

What doesn’t kill you might succeed on a second attempt.

Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

angry upvote

But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI

I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community

You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”

Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid

They’ll pay you peanuts to protect their gold. The only gold trickling down is a shower

People in traffic often seem to be in a big hurry and drive recklessly so that they can end up waiting at the same red light as you

Correctamundo!

Not yet

That’s an odd way to ask for clarity when you’re looking for help

Squeaker, Fire-belly, Poison Dart, Ghost, Parsley

I think the answer depends on how you define art.

Like, the artist in me wants to have a discussion about the appeal of abstraction versus impressionism, and whether you should compromise your artistic vision for the sake of commercial success.

The pessimist in me says that the most popular physical art is probably Pokemon trading cards and other merch.

“Physical Art” is a pretty broad category because there’s still a million mediums you can choose from. Would making prints of digital art count as physical art? That might be a question for the philosophers.

Anyway, if you’re looking to break into the scene then you should probably visit some craft fairs / galleries / tourist traps and see what they’re selling. Talk to the artists in the medium you want to explore.

Mom’s lasagna is the best. It’s the benchmark against which I compare any other lasagna.

She used to make a really great pizza too, but geez, it’s probably been decades since she made one

We’re not Italian, I guess I’m just nostalgic for the food of my youth

I had a kid at a summer camp where I was teaching have an unusual one maybe 5-6 years ago.

I’m going through the roll call, and there’s a kid who’s first name was listed as ABCDE. I think that’s pretty weird, so I assume it’s an error like somebody made a mistake on the intake form or the database garbled something.

So I skip over that one, and at the end I ask if I miss anyone. A girl puts up her hand so I ask for her name and she pronounces it like “Ab-siddy”

I realize they’re the same kid, and that her parents fucked her. I think she knew what was up and was kind of ashamed. Poor kid, I didn’t ask her to spell it

If you’re a roller coaster enthusiast, you might get a kick out of the Euthanasia Coaster, or as I like to call it The Sui-Slide

I’m not sure if this question is positing that women aren’t stimulated by porn visually, or if it’s using porn as an example of something to be stimulated visually by.

My wife likes cartoons and has a diploma in animation. Her class was like 80% female. Animation is pretty much by definition visual stimulation.

But if we’re talking exclusively about eroticism, there’s female directors making porn for the female eye too. IMO it relies less on the gonzo fake shit and tropes of mainstream porn too, so it might actually be healthier to consume (note: not a sexologist)

Either way, I’m not sure that this divide between men and women exists where you think it does

In English we have an idiom, “same shit, different day,” which means dealing with the same sort of unpleasant task until it’s routine. Do you have something similar?

This Hamburg court thing sounds like something I’d call “same shit, different pay,” which would be like when you have an issue with your boss so you appeal to their boss, and find out that they’re just as bad except they’re higher in the organization.

No joke, I opened this thread to comment on it last night and forgot until I saw it in my feed again today.

I started keeping a diary, and I found that helps. Something about writing things down helps encode memories, but then if you do forget you have a reminder.

In particular my gratitude journal is helpful. I often find myself in a state where I can’t think of a single good thing going on in my life. But then going through it I read about how a stray cat came to sit in my lap in the garden, and while I didn’t remember that before I read it the memories come flooding back.

A lot of people are in here saying propaganda and manipulation are inherently bad. And while I agree that in the current media landscape it’s used in an overwhelmingly negative way, it doesn’t have to be.

Consider that everyone is a victim of propaganda. Literally. Everyone. You probably don’t realize all of your own biases because that’s how the system works.

Imagine you see two posters / articles / memes or whatever side by side about vaccines. One says “vaccines cause autism, protect your loved ones,” and the other says, “get vaccinated, protect your loved ones.” They’re both propaganda. However, the latter is much more grounded in truth than the other.

If a doctor offers a child a lollipop if they’re brave during their vaccination, that’s manipulation. But it’s still a good thing because the kid gets vaccinated.

Anyhow, manipulation and propaganda (particularly in the modern sense of the word) are typically used as the tools of bad people. And if people become very entrenched in their views, they no longer listen to reason. Sometimes propaganda and manipulation might be the only way to get someone to change their harmful views.

I’d obviously prefer to live in a world where people do the right thing because it’s the right thing, and not because they’ve been tricked into it. But sadly that isn’t the world we live in.

I do think there’s nuance to be had. “Vaccines protect against disease,” is a truthful statement and will stand up to scrutiny. “Vaccines add two inches to your dick,” might be a more effective way to get people to try a vaccine. But when an antivaxxer tries it and discovers that their unit did not, in fact, double in length, then they’ll turn back around to antivaxxing with a new fervour.

Anyway, I prefer that my biases are grounded in truth. Show me the data, teach me the science, reach out and help me. Unfortunately, for many people they prefer their biases to be grounded in social inclusion. Peer pressure is a hell of a drug.

The exact protections will vary depending on your jurisdiction, but generally speaking employees aren’t liable for theft, damages, losses, spoilage, shrink, etc. Those are all the cost of doing business and that’s carried by the employer. Otherwise, arguably they’d have no claim on the profits from their business since the employees are the ones carrying the risk.

Imagine you work in a kitchen and drop an egg on the floor. Well that sucks, but accidents happen. The kitchen eats the cost and you get a fresh egg. If our legal framework allowed the employer to bill the employee for the cost of the egg, before you know it people will be scooping yolks off the floor to save money.

Know your rights. Even if you are protected by your labour board, that won’t stop an unscrupulous employer from intimidating you into waiving your rights.

If your employer is trying to intimidate you into preventing theft and that’s not your job, fuck them. Interfering with crime when you have no training to do so is a great way to incur personal injury.