Pictures of adjectives
Pictures of dogs!
2009.08.27 22:50 Pictures of dogs!
Pictures of dogs!
2012.03.02 04:14 zanycaswell a place for pictures and videos of nature
2015.04.17 16:49 digestif Pictures of cats faceplanting
Pictures of cats smushing their faces against stuff.
2024.05.15 18:06 Business-Industry569 something
When we learned about communication, I didn't realize how vital certain parts are like relational words comparative and superlative descriptive words, and strategies for comparing, differentiating or contrasting, and classifying data. Over time, I found that learning more about this stuff will make me a better person and a better communicator.
I shall begin with relational words or the Prepositions of Place. These small words like "in" "on" "at" "over" "under" and "between" are more capable than they look like. They give us assistance to know which or where stuff or places are. For Example, saying "the cat is on the table" is direct, but "the cat is under the table" gives a clearer picture to where exactly the cat is. This kind of accuracy is important, whether you're giving directions or telling a story.
Another one is comparative and superlative descriptive words. These are words we always use or utilize to compare things and show who’s more superior. Comparatives, like "bigger" or "more interesting," compares two things, while superlatives, like "biggest" or "most interesting," show who’s or what’s more interesting or highly rated among three or more things. like for example, if I say, "This Festival is more exciting than the last one" you get a sense of improvement like there seems to be an improvement from before and now. But if I say, "This is the most exciting Festival I've ever been," it takes it to a higher level like something in game like before its just 10 then it became 50 and you take it to the next level and said its 100x better. These adjectives helps us convey details about our experiences and preferences and stuff.
Comparing is another basic ability in communication. It gives us the ability to find similarities and difference. When we compare, we always use structures like "as...as" to compare similarities (e.g., "He is as strong as his brother") or comparatives to compare the difference (e.g., "He is stronger than his father"). This ability to compare makes our points clearer and our arguments stronger.
Differentiating, on the other hand, focuses on differences. For example, " He loves reading, unlike his brother" clearly shows how they’re different. This is really helpful when you are a debate or when you want to emphasize a specific point. It helps us understand what makes something unique or different.
Classifying is just about organizing information or stuff and things into categories to make it more easily accessible. For example, when talking about natural products, you can classify them into citrus, berries, and tropical natural products. By organizing it, it makes it easy to find and keep in mind. By collecting the same things together, you help people to see the connections between them, which helps in comprehension and retention.
Well in the end I learned that getting better at communication will help you make your ideas and thoughts clearer to others. And you’ll be able to share ideas, express feelings, and build relationships more effectively. And as you keep working on your communication skills, you’ll be more capable of handling the hard parts of talking to people, leading to deeper and more productive and meaning full conversations. Whether you’re talking with friends or presenting to colleagues, these skills are valuable. They make interactions smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.
submitted by Business-Industry569 to Stieraahahahahah [link] [comments]
I shall begin with relational words or the Prepositions of Place. These small words like "in" "on" "at" "over" "under" and "between" are more capable than they look like. They give us assistance to know which or where stuff or places are. For Example, saying "the cat is on the table" is direct, but "the cat is under the table" gives a clearer picture to where exactly the cat is. This kind of accuracy is important, whether you're giving directions or telling a story.
Another one is comparative and superlative descriptive words. These are words we always use or utilize to compare things and show who’s more superior. Comparatives, like "bigger" or "more interesting," compares two things, while superlatives, like "biggest" or "most interesting," show who’s or what’s more interesting or highly rated among three or more things. like for example, if I say, "This Festival is more exciting than the last one" you get a sense of improvement like there seems to be an improvement from before and now. But if I say, "This is the most exciting Festival I've ever been," it takes it to a higher level like something in game like before its just 10 then it became 50 and you take it to the next level and said its 100x better. These adjectives helps us convey details about our experiences and preferences and stuff.
Comparing is another basic ability in communication. It gives us the ability to find similarities and difference. When we compare, we always use structures like "as...as" to compare similarities (e.g., "He is as strong as his brother") or comparatives to compare the difference (e.g., "He is stronger than his father"). This ability to compare makes our points clearer and our arguments stronger.
Differentiating, on the other hand, focuses on differences. For example, " He loves reading, unlike his brother" clearly shows how they’re different. This is really helpful when you are a debate or when you want to emphasize a specific point. It helps us understand what makes something unique or different.
Classifying is just about organizing information or stuff and things into categories to make it more easily accessible. For example, when talking about natural products, you can classify them into citrus, berries, and tropical natural products. By organizing it, it makes it easy to find and keep in mind. By collecting the same things together, you help people to see the connections between them, which helps in comprehension and retention.
Well in the end I learned that getting better at communication will help you make your ideas and thoughts clearer to others. And you’ll be able to share ideas, express feelings, and build relationships more effectively. And as you keep working on your communication skills, you’ll be more capable of handling the hard parts of talking to people, leading to deeper and more productive and meaning full conversations. Whether you’re talking with friends or presenting to colleagues, these skills are valuable. They make interactions smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.
2024.05.15 00:02 e_hawthorne Emilie Autumn Did It Better: Mental Health Edition
Okay this is not specifically Taylor AND Travis, but I feel this sub would get where I am coming from.
Now I am not one to ever compare one individual's mental health conditions that may be with another person. Everyone has their own struggles and challenges they go through, even if the severity differs. However, in this situation, I would like to put my two cents in on a subject many of us already have started to discuss: Taylor's usage of mental illness, mental institutions, and just overall angst she has been harbouring since TTPD's announcement to present times. As others have pointed out before me, it has never been confirmed if Taylor has any medical condition or has any mental disorder. She did confirm back in 2019 though I believe, she has never gone to therapy as she sees her mom as the only therapist she ever could need (if it has changed since then, please let me know). To be honest, yes, it's not our place to know if she doesn't want to share, about anything involving herself, especially like mental health, as it's a personal subject for many, whether famous or not. Also I truly think therapy while super helpful for some, may not be the right for others in contrast. It genuinely depends on each individual on what they need and what works best for them. Alas, whatever we want to call Taylor is doing for the TTPD era with the usage and imagery of mental illness, personally I'm not only over it but disgusted by it.
For starters, we are led to think all this imagery and wordplay and overall presentation of mental illness and mental institutions and lobonomies etc are solely due to her broken heart over a former love (popular suggestion says it's for Matty Healy but some think it's still Joe and some think it's for other people completely or even other situations). We're left with solely her songs and her choices in words both in songs and in real life, to theorize what they could be alluding to. I have seen many Gaylors suggest these are influenced by the LGBTQIA+ was and have been treated in mainstream society. How, homosexuality was even listed an actual illness not so long ago unfortunately.
But for the sake of calling a spade a spade and being simplistic, I am just going to follow the popular belief that this era is just her choice of showing her reaction and feelings towards some ex-lover and feeling scorned by them, most likely it's Matty. Or least the grand majority of the songs seem to lean in his not so favour. That being said (and as someone who has been there with Taylor since Debut), she could have honestly chose a better direction. Mental illness isn't a joke to make people laugh at parties. It isn't a trend or the latest accessory to buy at the mall. It's not something you can just shake off and pretend it's done by the next album. It's real and it's really affects your every day life. Just as mental institutions are no joke. They're not fun playgrounds to meet potential besties at. It's literally a place that originally people were sent to against their will. Even in present times, some people are still sent to them against their will. Yes, some go now voluntarily, but it isn't always the case. I understand being heartbroken and something like ghosting can make one feel emotionally vulnerable and hurt on a multitude of levels. I just wouldn't justify making chronic word usage of "asylums", "madhouses", phrases like "they sent me away" or referencing coming straight from the hospital if she just meant it "symbolically". I get she could have easily meant Hollywood and stardom especially like she has experienced, is a crazy experience to endure, but in that case, it seems like her previous analogies of a circus works better without offending potential parties or people with actual experiences with mental institutions and/or mental illness. It reminds me of how several people say something like "I always wash my hands, I'm OCD" or "War time flashbacks, I got PTSD from *names a very underwhelming situation that disturb a person slightly*", It's careless and callous wording all around. The fact we have even seen some of Taylor's so-called fans start to make their own medical bracelets to play up this theme is disturbing in my opinion. Again mental illness isn't some necklace to show off like a diamond studded piece.
I'm not saying Taylor couldn't have felt maddened in a way by her experiences that inspired TTPD thus how she chose to display this era and such. In my own personal experience without going too much into it, I had my own ghosting experience a few years back that wasn't fun in any way, and it was with someone, who reassured me for months on end that they were going to stay and we'd always be in each other's lives so obviously my trust and faith were both shaken when I noticed one night, I got blocked from all their social media and they didn't answer any call or text I left. However, I didn't go around not only acting like a tortured Victorian woman, who was imprisoned against her own will in a sanitarium but marketing myself as one and even trying to trademark a term I clearly didn't create. Granted say Taylor hypothetically went through a whole bunch of worst case scenarios: loved ones dying, friends leaving her when she needed them the most, people she care for getting sick, potential bankruptcy, etc then fuck, I get her reason behind using all this theme and the imagery as well. But I am going to take the benefit of the doubt and say she really chose a serious topic and things associated with it, just because something went awry again with her and some person she dated unfortunately. And what makes it even more vulgar in my opinion is it's not even like her first break up. It's much more than her first rodeo at this game yet she chose to display all of her feelings for it this time in perhaps, one of the worst ways. She is being insensitive to the ones who actually have been in mental institutions, whether by choice or not, and/or are suffering from mental illness. Again maybe she has something too, maybe not but regardless, she seems tone-deaf to the bigger picture here, similar to her using soldier terminology despite never been at war or even in service.
Many musicians have used this imagery before as we've established but it doesn't make it any more right. Several artists in comparison have been public with their mental health situations and don't even choose to use this type of imagery for themselves. They'll mention it time from time, but it's definitely not treated like a personality trait from them. It's just an aspect of them but not the whole picture. The fact she's even referring to herself as "The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department" sounds like the combination of one of the most pretentious and woe is me crock I have ever heard. We don't see Morrissey calling himself, "The Pope of Mope" (yes, the fans do but he doesn't) and I doubt we'd see Robert Smith call himself, "The King of Sad". Yet Taylor who has had what seemed like a well off childhood and many good things happen to her and never seemed to brand herself as anything less than cheery adjectives for more over a decade, it just sounds so off-putting now she's trying to play the tragic role like it's natural or genuine.
I find it important to note, one particular musician named Emilie Autumn, has been inspired by the Victorian era for her whole career and real life "tortured" writers , along with incorporating the whole asylum analogy long before Taylor, but in sheer contrast, it was documented she actually went to a psych ward in a book she published in 2009. In the book itself, she discusses what it was in both a fictional way and factual way of what she went through as well showcasing how women were treated there in present times compared with the 1800s hasn't changed that much. She wanted to write the book to empower women though and to rise above the turmoil and be stronger because of it. She was no victim here (nor trying to just use it "alt points"). She has since (and even before the book) been very open about her experiences with mental illness (she's openly bipolar and the abuse she's endured over the years, as well her songs show she's not afraid to tackle the harder subjects) and what's it really like to be in a psych ward. I feel Emilie Autumn accomplished making mental illness a subject we can understand and even relate to, without it feeling gimmicky or a cash grab until she comes up with another aesthetic. Again I'm not saying Taylor's life story has been nothing but peaches and cream though, I recognize it hasn't been. And again she isn't expected to tell us her entire medical history and every blemish she ever had, but I don't support nor think her going around at her concerts with her dancers dressed as nurses and doctors and her using mental institutions as settings when she has been so mum on the subject of mental health, whether hers or in general, is a good look especially if she's just doing it to songs about how a guy stopped pursuing her and they weren't even together for that long. It comes off disrespectful and even condescending to the ones, who really have mental conditions and we can't just shake it off with a dance number. I'm sorry she got hurt (whether she still is or was is debated), but it doesn't give her a free pass to use something as heavy as this as just an aesthetic and equally turning a blind eye when some of her fans think it's just a lighthearted thing too. I will never get over how so many are now using asylums so loosely, like "OMG this album makes me crazy, send me to an asylum next". That's fucked up to say the least. Ultimately, I just hope this phase changes fast, and hopefully, Taylor can heal from whatever she is or isn't singing about, and more people step in when an idea is just isn't a good one.
submitted by e_hawthorne to travisandtaylor [link] [comments]
Now I am not one to ever compare one individual's mental health conditions that may be with another person. Everyone has their own struggles and challenges they go through, even if the severity differs. However, in this situation, I would like to put my two cents in on a subject many of us already have started to discuss: Taylor's usage of mental illness, mental institutions, and just overall angst she has been harbouring since TTPD's announcement to present times. As others have pointed out before me, it has never been confirmed if Taylor has any medical condition or has any mental disorder. She did confirm back in 2019 though I believe, she has never gone to therapy as she sees her mom as the only therapist she ever could need (if it has changed since then, please let me know). To be honest, yes, it's not our place to know if she doesn't want to share, about anything involving herself, especially like mental health, as it's a personal subject for many, whether famous or not. Also I truly think therapy while super helpful for some, may not be the right for others in contrast. It genuinely depends on each individual on what they need and what works best for them. Alas, whatever we want to call Taylor is doing for the TTPD era with the usage and imagery of mental illness, personally I'm not only over it but disgusted by it.
For starters, we are led to think all this imagery and wordplay and overall presentation of mental illness and mental institutions and lobonomies etc are solely due to her broken heart over a former love (popular suggestion says it's for Matty Healy but some think it's still Joe and some think it's for other people completely or even other situations). We're left with solely her songs and her choices in words both in songs and in real life, to theorize what they could be alluding to. I have seen many Gaylors suggest these are influenced by the LGBTQIA+ was and have been treated in mainstream society. How, homosexuality was even listed an actual illness not so long ago unfortunately.
But for the sake of calling a spade a spade and being simplistic, I am just going to follow the popular belief that this era is just her choice of showing her reaction and feelings towards some ex-lover and feeling scorned by them, most likely it's Matty. Or least the grand majority of the songs seem to lean in his not so favour. That being said (and as someone who has been there with Taylor since Debut), she could have honestly chose a better direction. Mental illness isn't a joke to make people laugh at parties. It isn't a trend or the latest accessory to buy at the mall. It's not something you can just shake off and pretend it's done by the next album. It's real and it's really affects your every day life. Just as mental institutions are no joke. They're not fun playgrounds to meet potential besties at. It's literally a place that originally people were sent to against their will. Even in present times, some people are still sent to them against their will. Yes, some go now voluntarily, but it isn't always the case. I understand being heartbroken and something like ghosting can make one feel emotionally vulnerable and hurt on a multitude of levels. I just wouldn't justify making chronic word usage of "asylums", "madhouses", phrases like "they sent me away" or referencing coming straight from the hospital if she just meant it "symbolically". I get she could have easily meant Hollywood and stardom especially like she has experienced, is a crazy experience to endure, but in that case, it seems like her previous analogies of a circus works better without offending potential parties or people with actual experiences with mental institutions and/or mental illness. It reminds me of how several people say something like "I always wash my hands, I'm OCD" or "War time flashbacks, I got PTSD from *names a very underwhelming situation that disturb a person slightly*", It's careless and callous wording all around. The fact we have even seen some of Taylor's so-called fans start to make their own medical bracelets to play up this theme is disturbing in my opinion. Again mental illness isn't some necklace to show off like a diamond studded piece.
I'm not saying Taylor couldn't have felt maddened in a way by her experiences that inspired TTPD thus how she chose to display this era and such. In my own personal experience without going too much into it, I had my own ghosting experience a few years back that wasn't fun in any way, and it was with someone, who reassured me for months on end that they were going to stay and we'd always be in each other's lives so obviously my trust and faith were both shaken when I noticed one night, I got blocked from all their social media and they didn't answer any call or text I left. However, I didn't go around not only acting like a tortured Victorian woman, who was imprisoned against her own will in a sanitarium but marketing myself as one and even trying to trademark a term I clearly didn't create. Granted say Taylor hypothetically went through a whole bunch of worst case scenarios: loved ones dying, friends leaving her when she needed them the most, people she care for getting sick, potential bankruptcy, etc then fuck, I get her reason behind using all this theme and the imagery as well. But I am going to take the benefit of the doubt and say she really chose a serious topic and things associated with it, just because something went awry again with her and some person she dated unfortunately. And what makes it even more vulgar in my opinion is it's not even like her first break up. It's much more than her first rodeo at this game yet she chose to display all of her feelings for it this time in perhaps, one of the worst ways. She is being insensitive to the ones who actually have been in mental institutions, whether by choice or not, and/or are suffering from mental illness. Again maybe she has something too, maybe not but regardless, she seems tone-deaf to the bigger picture here, similar to her using soldier terminology despite never been at war or even in service.
Many musicians have used this imagery before as we've established but it doesn't make it any more right. Several artists in comparison have been public with their mental health situations and don't even choose to use this type of imagery for themselves. They'll mention it time from time, but it's definitely not treated like a personality trait from them. It's just an aspect of them but not the whole picture. The fact she's even referring to herself as "The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department" sounds like the combination of one of the most pretentious and woe is me crock I have ever heard. We don't see Morrissey calling himself, "The Pope of Mope" (yes, the fans do but he doesn't) and I doubt we'd see Robert Smith call himself, "The King of Sad". Yet Taylor who has had what seemed like a well off childhood and many good things happen to her and never seemed to brand herself as anything less than cheery adjectives for more over a decade, it just sounds so off-putting now she's trying to play the tragic role like it's natural or genuine.
I find it important to note, one particular musician named Emilie Autumn, has been inspired by the Victorian era for her whole career and real life "tortured" writers , along with incorporating the whole asylum analogy long before Taylor, but in sheer contrast, it was documented she actually went to a psych ward in a book she published in 2009. In the book itself, she discusses what it was in both a fictional way and factual way of what she went through as well showcasing how women were treated there in present times compared with the 1800s hasn't changed that much. She wanted to write the book to empower women though and to rise above the turmoil and be stronger because of it. She was no victim here (nor trying to just use it "alt points"). She has since (and even before the book) been very open about her experiences with mental illness (she's openly bipolar and the abuse she's endured over the years, as well her songs show she's not afraid to tackle the harder subjects) and what's it really like to be in a psych ward. I feel Emilie Autumn accomplished making mental illness a subject we can understand and even relate to, without it feeling gimmicky or a cash grab until she comes up with another aesthetic. Again I'm not saying Taylor's life story has been nothing but peaches and cream though, I recognize it hasn't been. And again she isn't expected to tell us her entire medical history and every blemish she ever had, but I don't support nor think her going around at her concerts with her dancers dressed as nurses and doctors and her using mental institutions as settings when she has been so mum on the subject of mental health, whether hers or in general, is a good look especially if she's just doing it to songs about how a guy stopped pursuing her and they weren't even together for that long. It comes off disrespectful and even condescending to the ones, who really have mental conditions and we can't just shake it off with a dance number. I'm sorry she got hurt (whether she still is or was is debated), but it doesn't give her a free pass to use something as heavy as this as just an aesthetic and equally turning a blind eye when some of her fans think it's just a lighthearted thing too. I will never get over how so many are now using asylums so loosely, like "OMG this album makes me crazy, send me to an asylum next". That's fucked up to say the least. Ultimately, I just hope this phase changes fast, and hopefully, Taylor can heal from whatever she is or isn't singing about, and more people step in when an idea is just isn't a good one.
2024.05.12 19:00 Ok-Vacation5730 Creative upscaling all the way to 16K (and beyond) with WebUI Forge, a comprehensive how-to guide
 | WebUI Forge is a popular alternative (‘fork’) to the classical Automatic1111 platform. In this guide, I describe a complete routine for super high-resolution upscaling of AI-generated images with incremental adding of detail into their content, using any of the two features of Forge, SD Upscale and MultiDiffusion integrated. submitted by Ok-Vacation5730 to StableDiffusion [link] [comments] Due to reddit limitations, the included 16:9 demo image of a fantasy landscape is a scaled down to 8K version of the full-size upscaled image produced with this routine from an original 2K picture generated with Leonardo.ai. Here’s the link to the full-size 15360x8640 image (a 58 MB file). A lighter image of 16 MB size (87% jpeg compression) is available here. The source 2k image is included second in this posting. The folder with the complete selection of demo images from the project prepared for this post is available here. Routine prerequisites: Forge webUI running locally on a PC equipped with a capable GPU (RTX 4070 Ti Super with 16 GB, in my setup), or on a leased one in the cloud (RunDiffusiion, salad, runpod.io, vast.ai, sailflow.ai and the like). The author used the WebUI Forge version available within the StabilityMatrix package. The approach In the image upscaling business, the temptation is to upscale the image to the target resolution in one go, if possible: if the tool supports a 4x upscale, sure, let’s use that! 8x, even better! It is however a very flawed approach, all you will get is a ruined image (or at best something far from what you wanted the result to be), and running times much longer than they should be. With this routine, I promote an incremental approach, where you increase the resolution 2 times at most with each upscale step, keeping the runtimes short to allow for more creative experimenting. The underlying idea is that you want to be in charge of the process and not rely on the magic of the AI too much, or on some dense, rigid workflow. For that reason, I am much against upscaling in batches or in whichever automatic fashion. Each image is unique and requires an individual approach; and especially so, for anything to be called a work of art. The steps in detail Each step in this routine is done in 2-3 substeps. Substep 1: pre-upscaling of the image. During AI-assisted upscaling with SD Upscale (SDU) or MultiDiffusion integrated (MD), the actual resizing of the image is always done by an upscaler model, not by an internal routine of the extension or the script (I will call them ‘methods’ from here on). Typically, the user simply chooses the Scale By factor, selects one of the available in the UI models, like UltraSharp, foolhardy_Remacri etc, sets all the other relevant upscaling parameters and clicks on Generate. In contrast, in this routine the ‘raw’ upscale operation is necessarily a separate substep; it’s done explicitly in Forge’s Extras, or using a standalone upscaler such as the highly recommended freeware upscayl, before proceeding to generate. This allows you to exercise a fuller control over the overall look of the eventual upscaled output, the grain or the texture, and also to prevent an unsolicited color shift. If you don’t separate this part, it will be impossible for you to determine in what degree the upscaler model influenced the eventual output. Forge comes with plenty of top-class models already built in, and you can always look for a specialized one fine tuned for the type of images you need to have upscaled (here’s the site that hosts practically every sort). For more details on the subject, see this recent discussion. This approach of separation not only gives you more control of the output, but also significantly saves on the total computing time: once you have a raw-upscaled image with qualities closest to the way you want the upscaled image to look ultimately, the pre-upscaling operation won’t have to be performed at the beginning of every subsequent run of the method (and chances are that you are going to do a lot of trial runs at each upscaling step). Conversely, if the pre-upscaled image has a texture with a particular strong (synthetic) grain, or any artifacts of its own (which does happen occasionally), it might be difficult to alter that look within the adding detail run (substep 2), so choose wisely! (FWIW, the models used for upscaling the demo image for this routine were 4xLSDIRplusC, HAT-L_SRx4_ImageNet-pretrain and 4xHFA2k, they seemed to be suited better for the type of synthetic landscape photos used in this project than the others I tried; but that’s only my personal preference. In contrast, 4x_NMKD-Siax_200K proved unsuitable for this project, as this model tends to add too much noise in the upscaled output, making it appear unnaturally sharp.) Note: the pre-upscaling factor of 2x at each step is only a default, for an even finer control, you might want to reduce it to 1.5 or even lower. Timing. Pre-upscaling is usually done very quickly, it takes about 20-30 seconds for an average model to 2x upscale a 4K image on my RTX 4070 Ti Super. 2x upscaling of an 8K image might take from 1.5 or 2 minutes (4xHFA2k) to anything between 4 and 12 minutes using a slower model like SwinIR or HAT-L_SRx4. Substep 2: adding detail to the pre-upscaled image with the chosen SD method and checkpoint. At this step, you use the pre-upscaled image as the source in the chosen Forge img2img method and run the process with the scale factor of 1. Depending on the Denoising strength parameter, the checkpoint used, the prompt etc, this generation substep will add a variable amount of detail into the rendered image (see more on the ways to control the amount and contents in ‘Forge webUI parameters’ below). For the demo image used in this guide, the details added have been of this variety: birds flying in the sky, features of the spire-shaped towers on the left and on the right, waterfall shapes, houses, flower petals, figures of people at a distance, sometimes a bicycle or a horse, and even a tiny village on the cliff that was formed during subsequent upscale steps. By experimenting on each step, you arrive at a rendering that contains newly added detail in the quantity and appearance which is most appealing to you. Once gotten that, you use the rendered image as the source for the next upscale step. Amazingly, as I witnessed more than once in my project, and as opposed to a more traditional img2img process, such an iterative process wherein an image is generated and then used as the upscale source again and again, will not cause any degradation of the subsequent output (when generated with the right set of parameters of course). The detail added on a detail-enriching step will usually be kept and further developed at the next one, given a carefully tuned set of parameters, and the sharpness will be retained without any visible softening of the texture. Keep in mind though that processing time increases with each upscale step and the increased resolution, so it makes sense to do the most of the creative experimenting in the middle of the routine, at the level of 4K and 8K. Generating at the last 16K level should be done just to keep the detail already introduced, not to add any substantially new one (unless you have a super-fast GPU, of course). Timing. Forge runs very, very fast when img2img-processing, with either of 1.5 or SDXL versions of checkpoints, processing a 4k image in about 1 minute, for either method. It takes between 2 and 3 minutes to process a 8K image, and between 8 and 18 minutes for a 16K image, with all the right parameters set. (Automatic, in comparison, takes anything from 1 to 3 hours to do the same with a SD 1.5 checkpoint, and the quality of the output is much harder to maintain.) Substep 3 (optional): refining and fixing artifacts. You should be mindful of possible artifacts (small defects and off-color patterns), and particularly of visible tiles and seams that tend to appear in the generated image when you fail to moderate the process by means of lowering the denoise parameter and/or using the ControlNet Tile mode (more on this in the next part). Probability of the tiles becoming visible is also dependent on the image contents: images with a light blue sky or a smooth gradient of any kind are particularly vulnerable, as demonstrated by the example images in the demo folder. I learned the hard way that, except in a few cases, it’s practically impossible to get rid of the seams by any post-processing. Generally, you will have to discard an image with tiles and seams too prominent. Speaking of visible tiles and seams, I noticed that the MD method is more prone to that issue than the SDU one, while not being any faster in processing, so I recommend using the latter for most use cases. That said, the artifacts such as visible tiles and seams, as well as minor blemishes, can be made less pronounced (if not completely removed) by running the substep 2 again with the just-rendered image as the input one, with a different checkpoint, the Denoising strength or CFG parameter adjusted. This substep is only needed if the upscale step is the last one in the sequence; otherwise, the substep 2 on the next level will most likely do this job. Also to consider: activating the Refiner option at the above substep, to be used with a secondary checkpoint (see below). Check out the demo folder for the most striking examples of tiles, seams and other artifacts. Forge webUI parameters Stable Diffusion checkpoint The choice of checkpoint is a major factor influencing the detail that will be added to the image during the generation process. Different checkpoints react differently to the input material, some hallucinate more readily with the same source than the others. The checkpoints used to produce the demo image in this guide were: albedobaseXL_v21, juggernautXL_v9Rundiffusionphoto2, sleipnirSDXLTurbo_v125, leosamsHelloworldXL50GPT4V, for the SDXL version, and juggernaut_reborn, photon_v1 and absolutereality_v181, for the v1.5 one. Since upscaling, as described in this guide, is a multi-pass process in which the checkpoint is freely changed at each step, all of them contributed to the final result to varying degrees. Check out the demo folder for the most striking examples of hallucinations I encountered during this project. LoRa Specialized LoRas can also be used to influence the type and the amount of the detail added to the image, or the style it is rendered in (this is most likely how Magnific, Leonardo U-Upscaler and others of the kind support various styles available in their UI.) No LoRas have been used in this project, however. Prompt Compared to other SD-based solutions, the prompt plays a much lesser role in this routine. In fact, you can use the same prompt for each upscaling project, something like “masterpiece, best quality, highres”, and that will do it. As a rule, no specific terms or object names should be used in the prompt. The reason for that is that the large-size upscaling is always a tile-based process, wherein each tile is generated independently of others, so, if your prompt includes some specific object you want to have generated in the output, there is a high chance that that object will appear everywhere in the picture, or at least at every spot where the checkpoint ‘thinks’ it is appropriate. This holds especially for the MD-based upscaling with 1.5 checkpoints. For SDU under Forge using SDXL ones, it is less extreme, but I would still recommend avoiding specifics in the prompt. In this project, I went no further with the prompt than using “majestic fantasy vista, cinematic, high contrast, highly detailed”. Just inserting “mountainous” adjective before “vista” would cause mountains rendered in the dark parts of the sky and other strange features appearing in the picture, without much added realism. In any event, due to the nature of the Stable Diffusion process, it is not possible to control what exactly the checkpoint will inject, and where, even with the best crafted prompt. You can, however, try restricting it from injecting something you don’t want it to, by including various synonymous terms in the negative prompt. Sampling method (‘sampler’) In this project, I consistently used two classical samplers, DPM++ 2M Karras, and, a bit less often, DPM++ 3M SDE Exponential, they seemed to be the fastest of the bunch and delivered desired quality with a relatively low step count of 20-22. Some other samplers, like Euler and HEUN, proved to be too eager to hallucinate bizarre detail into the image (with the same step count), so I avoided them; some others produced completely damaged output or were unacceptably slow. Sampling steps With a sampler chosen as above, the step count of 20-22 was sufficient most of the times for a good output quality. Occasionally, I would raise the count to 25 or 30, or even 50, but could never notice much difference in the output. Increasing the step count does make the generation take longer though, in almost linear fashion. CFG Scale The CFG parameter has a major influence on the output, augmenting the hallucination as you raise it. With that, however, also rises the chance of tiles and seams and other artifacts appearing, so it’s a good idea to be conservative with this value. As a rule, I would use a CFG no higher than 8 for a regular detail-adding generation, and restrict the value to 5 at the last (16K) step, to avoid undesired detail injection, while keeping the overall sharpness level. With the MD method and 1.5 checkpoints specifically, raising this value to extreme levels such as 13-15 and setting tile dimensions just above 100 pixels will cause a profuse injection of the sharpest detail possible into the output, which can often produce a stunning effect, but is generally hard to control (not to mention additional artifacts). Denoising strength The denoise parameter which is at the heart of this ‘creative’, img2img-based upscaling routine is the single most influential factor; you should use it within a pretty narrow range. The CFG, the sampler, the step count, the checkpoint and of course the prompt all play their role in the process, but the denoise value leads the way. Experimenting with it, you nudge the img2img generation to add a desired (relatively small) amount of detail, and no more. If you don’t restrict the value of this parameter, your image will contain a wild (‘insane’) amount of detail, particularly when upscaling with the MD method, which tends to insert in the image, depending on the checkpoint, all kinds of stuff (NSFW one including) at any spot imaginable. That is often accompanied by tiles appearing in the output image and other artifacts - which means, again, wasted time and effort. But visually, it can be great fun of course. Recommended values (based on this project): between 0.28 (basic detail level, low hallucination) and 0.38 (new detail is prominent, checkpoint-dependent hallucinations across the image). The lowest level of 0.28-0.30, or lower, is recommended to use at the last, 16K step. See also ControlNet integrated below on how to dampen the effect of the denoise parameter and keep the output faithful to the original image. Resize to, Width and Height / Resize by, Scale This must be the most mystifying part of the entire Automatic/Forge interface. After all this time, I am still figuring out, shall we say, the subtleties of its logic. The sliders labeled ‘Width’ and ‘Height’ play a different role under img2img-based upscaling than in a regular image generation. When upscaling with Forge’s SDU, with these sliders you don’t set the resolution you want the image to be upscaled to (it won’t allow values higher than 2048 anyway), but rather the tile dimensions used for upscaling/refining, see Tile configuration below. When running SDU script under Forge, make sure that the Resize to (NOT Resize by) dialog box is in foreground before clicking on Generate, or else it will take very long to process the image at 8K, and forever, at 16K. The image’s target dimensions are defined in SDU via its internal Scale Factor parameter. In contrast, when upscaling with Forge’s MD, before clicking on Generate you need to ensure that the Resize by dialog box is in foreground, with the Scale factor set properly, or else it will just generate an image of whatever dimensions set by the sliders in Resize To, but luckily, in just a few seconds. For the purposes of this routine, the Scale can be set to 1. And that is the simplest part of the puzzle, all kinds of things can go wrong if you set something in the UI that Forge developers didn’t really anticipate. To avoid excessively long runtimes and other pitfalls, follow the guidelines below when upscaling. Tile configuration Image tiles are the core part of the design of HR upscaling in Stable Diffusion, I believe it’s the only effective means to process large size images without running out of GPU memory (VRAM) very quickly. In SDU, you set tile dimensions, as suggested above, in the Resize To dialog box. For SDXL checkpoints, I used the 1024x1024 dimensions, as well as 768x768 (the tiles don’t have to be aspect ratio-shaped), and for 1.5 checkpoints, the standard 512x512 dimensions, or 768x768, which worked equally well. An important parameter in both methods used in the routine is Tile overlap, it defines the pixel width and height of the overlapping area of adjacent tiles. Making it as large as reasonably possible helps to tame the visibility of tile seams, by the price of slower computation. In my experience, an overlap of size 64 pixels for SDXL would suffice; smaller sizes could make sense for 1.5 checkpoints and in cases when visibility of tiles is not an issue. In any case, it’s a good idea to use the default value first. The MD method, which includes its own set of sliders to define the tile configuration, has an additional parameter, Tile Batch Size. It defines how many tiles are held in memory simultaneously and processed in one basic operation; 8 is the maximum using which will supposedly achieve the highest speed of upscaling, lowering it will decrease the amount of VRAM used by this process. In MD under Automatic, setting this parameter lower than the default (to 4, 5 or 6) is an essential means to avoid running out of CUDA memory; in Forge, it’s of a lesser importance, since that system has its own, by all indications much more efficient memory management. ControlNet integrated To keep the upscaled/refined output as faithful to the source image as possible, ControlNet Tile resample mode is used. When this mode is activated, the effect of the Denoising strength parameter is dampened, which gives you a higher degree of freedom to play with the parameter without the associated risk of tiles and seams appearing, but at the price of longer (about 10-30%) processing times. In my experience, with the Controlnet Tile resample switched on under SDU, the Denoising strength could be set as high as 0.4, with no or little visible artifacts appearing in the output image. To engage this option, enable ControlNet Unit 0 in the Forge img2img UI, check Pixel Perfect, select Tile in the Control Type combo, select Tile resample in the preprocessor dropdown box and the corresponding model in the next box, which is usually control_v11f1e_sd15_tile when using a 1.5 checkpoint and ttplanetSDXLControlnet_v10Fp16 when using a SDXL one (the only one that worked for me, might require explicit downloading and installing to Forge). Next, set Control weight to a value between 0.5 and 0.7 inclusive (this relaxes the ControlNet Tile fidelity, which we need for the purposes of detail-adding), and leave the rest of the ControlNet settings at the default. Note that the MD + ControlNet mode combination, as I found, doesn’t really work under Forge: when both are selected, the process upscale starts quickly but then stagnates without any visible progress, for hours. (In contrast, the same combination works just fine under SDU, for both 1.5 and SDXL flavors.) Other parameters in Forge’s img2img interface Clip skip. Leave at the default. Changing this might make no impact whatsoever, I have never checked. Resize mode. Leave at Just resize. Refiner. This is an interesting option worth experimenting with. It allows the user to select a secondary checkpoint whose output will be mixed with that of the primary one, at a selected point of processing specified by the Switch at parameter (reasonable values between 0.6 and 0.85). Unfortunately, while potentially useful from the creative perspective, this option is too computationally costly, slowing down runtimes to anything from 2 (for SD 1.5) to 8 times (for SDXL checkpoints, which are larger). This happens due to constant checkpoint loading and unloading (a rather time-consuming operation) performed for every tile being processed. Batch count / Batch size. Leaving these at 1 would be a practical choice, to avoid wasting your computing time - unless you want, say, to experiment with the Denoising strength at its higher values when upscaling at a low to medium image resolution. Seed. Usually left at -1 to allow random variation of the output. MultiDiffusion integrated. Enable this control when you want to upscale with this particular extension, as opposed to the SD upscale script. The choice of the specific Method between MultiDiffusion and Mixture of Diffusers does not affect the output that much (in my experience anyway), I understand it was retained in Forge for backward compatibility with MD under Automatic. An important related option: see Never OOM integrated below. Never OOM integrated: when selecting MD extension for upscaling, it is necessary to synchronously enable this extension as well, and check the box labeled Enabled for VAE (always tiled), and not the other one above it. If this is not done, upscaling of a large sized image will last indefinitely long. In contrast, upscaling with SDU necessitates unchecking of that option and leaving Never OOM inactive, for exactly the same reason. Script. Select SD upscale form the dropdown box when upscaling with SDU. In this case, MultiDiffusion integrated must be deactivated, or else neither of the two options will work properly. Also, when selecting SDU, make sure to deactivate Never OOM, as mentioned above. The Upscaler choice is up to your experimentation (see Substep 1 at the top), but for the purposes of this routine it is normally set to None. All the other integrated extensions present in Forge’s interface are best to leave inactive. Forge vs Automatic1111, SD 1.5 vs SDXL and the fate of Tiled Diffusion Based on my experience in this upscaling project, a few general conclusions can be made. For the purposes of the project, Forge WebUI proved a much better choice, with either of the two methods: it runs significantly faster and its output is much less prone to visible tiling, seams and other artifacts than when using equivalent tools under Automatic. The MD implementation in Forge, however, is much incomplete, with important features, such as Noise Inversion, slow modes of Tiled VAE encoding / decoding and others left out, as compared to the Automatic version of MD (where it is called Tiled Diffusion btw). In my view, this drawback of Forge is largely compensated not only by faster runtimes but also by much more robust, stable performance, and most importantly much better tile management that practically solves the problem of visible tiles and seams (you won’t even find an option like Seams fix in Forge, it’s done behind the scenes and done exceptionally well), not to mention it allows to run highres upscaling on GPUs with 8 GB VRAM. What’s more, support for v1.5 checkpoints in Froge feels somewhat incomplete, at least speaking of the MD/TD implementation. All in all, however, I feel that the MD/TD method is no longer relevant for HR image upscaling, seeing the drastic improvement of the SD upscale script. From my upscaling perspective, unless Automatic will be merged with Forge to take advantage of the improvements in the latter, the former remains relevant only for MD/TD-based upscaling with 1.5 checkpoints. It doesn’t help either that development of TD/MD has remained dormant for the last two months. (Which is sad, since SDXL support in MD, native or under Forge, has not been developed beyond only a nominal one - it doesn’t really work well with checkpoints of that version, as I found in the course of my project.) Although, to be fair, an even more worrying picture holds for Forge development, which hasn’t seen any update since February. The quality of SDXL-based generation as compared to that of v1.5 is a matter of a separate discussion; due to space constraints, I won’t go into that here. I will just add that personally I find SDXL-based upscaling superior to v1.5 one, for most use cases. The folder with the complete selection of demo images from the project prepared for this post is available here. https://preview.redd.it/3y1nwkod110d1.jpg?width=7680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c12e51fa2d44bb8336a7ca8c02094b349a61799 |
2024.05.10 07:49 rdk67 Spring Day 51: The Undersides of Leaves
The hyperform is the term I give to the hyperdimensional characteristics of reality that reveal themselves through the mutability of the macro-physical and our capacity to make sense of it.
Between those two venues – the material world and our ideation of it – is the phenomenology of the real, and this is where mutability can be expressed as a sort of language form.
This is not a radical observation in its expectation – we expect that meaning is made from the mutability of reality, such as the quality of human speech compared to the absence of it.
Where the premise is unreasonable by prevailing standards is in supposing a terrain exists that treats reality as a kind of soundboard for a music something somewhere is making.
Isn’t this what mutability of reality suggests – a kind of making? The players engage in a kind of play?
Let’s say music becomes an adjective instead of a noun – muse-ic or –ique – compositions derived from an inspired musical language. Muse-ic – woodwinds are breathed into, while players are inhaled.
Each inhalation changes the condition of the body, which is adjacent to all of reality, the way each drop of rain that lands in the ocean changes the ocean, and every sonorous moan, bleat and twinkle changes the potential of the human future.
I use the term hyperform in both the specific sense and as a collective – a hyperform followed me home yesterday, the hyperform is composed of inverted assumptions.
This might make it seem like another layer of reality, the way chickens lay eggs. Why, no – ha-ha – not exactly like a chicken lays an egg.
When we think of the hyperform as another layer of reality, we are more correct to imagine we are the chick inside unhatched, and a kind of shell circumscribes material reality – during one phase of life, if the shell cracks, we die.
Subsequent to that, we are on guard against cracked shells, followed by the odd premise that we won’t be set free until we crack the same shell on purpose – what? – because we’re hungry, because we must make music with our beaks -- whatever.
Once free, though, the opening premise becomes just that – we started with the stone-age formulation, but then the shell cracks, and the hyperform, in both its singular and collective sense, introduces us to the universal narrative, starting with the solar mind.
The solar mind is where some aspects of the hyperform are at right now – the solar mind meaning a will to assimilate the physical and metaphysical language forms of our solar system, which is the limit-case of all the phenomena we can reasonably expected to interact with locally.
I think of the hyperform as consisting of forms of reflectivity. We know reflectivity as mirror images and echoes, as well as the more abstract notion of sitting still, leaning forward, resting our chin on our fist, knitting our brow.
Some of this reflectivity has a kind of automatism and reflexivity about its responses, and some of this reflectivity starts to tell a story that seems to indicate it knows what humans like, changes the story in the retelling.
Some of this reflectivity can engage in dialogue, and when the dialogue begins, the mutability of reality can be an avid topic of conversation, a kind of upcycling of the moment into something else, and some of this reflectivity circumscribes natural law, such that the concept of a great-than experience of reality becomes something empirically verifiable.
The cosmic narrative we are being aimed toward as a species might indeed become trips around the galaxies – but this by virtue of an altered state of reality where the characteristic of mutability is significantly stranger than it is now.
I have been in the presence of the hyperform in a state of direct contact – a kind of ghost that let me know it could see me, then proceeded to bend my consciousness to one side, like it was looking at the underside of a leaf, and I only knew what happened after it happened,
like remembering a dream without falling asleep first, but once the dream is known, that inconsequential-seeming moment of confusion would be remembered. We are not alone.
The undersides of the leaves are where the brains are.
Each leaf shows its face to heaven, and what we see is a crowd above us, looking in the other direction. The leaves are still growing in size most places around the block, but the undersides are already pulsing with ideas, roaring with enthusiasm, and connecting opposite coasts with trans-American rail lines.
They can hear the sound of cicadas climbing through the soil, even when the shower of cosmic particles grows torrential.
The undersides of leaves are like reservoirs of contemplation, the trees capacity for mutability springing out of them.
I walk inside, see the undersides of the leaves of vines pressed flat against a couple of windowpanes – I can tell, the growing tips have already made it to the gutters.
From inside, the leaves are like directories, the vines, telegraph lines, and I try to picture what their signals portend.
Someday the vine of human consciousness will climb over the horizon, then out of the solar system, and with each new leaf unfurled, we will know a little more about the path we’re traveling on, what it’s made of, where it’s going, where it’s gone.
The sun! The sun! Has it escaped the mind? Or is it merely night?
I lay in bed, stacking the events of the day into a series of layers, layer after layer, which subsequently strut about the barnyard, pecking at the ground, turning things over – and then it’s time to lay another egg.
submitted by rdk67 to MetaphysicalWeather [link] [comments]
Between those two venues – the material world and our ideation of it – is the phenomenology of the real, and this is where mutability can be expressed as a sort of language form.
This is not a radical observation in its expectation – we expect that meaning is made from the mutability of reality, such as the quality of human speech compared to the absence of it.
Where the premise is unreasonable by prevailing standards is in supposing a terrain exists that treats reality as a kind of soundboard for a music something somewhere is making.
Isn’t this what mutability of reality suggests – a kind of making? The players engage in a kind of play?
Let’s say music becomes an adjective instead of a noun – muse-ic or –ique – compositions derived from an inspired musical language. Muse-ic – woodwinds are breathed into, while players are inhaled.
Each inhalation changes the condition of the body, which is adjacent to all of reality, the way each drop of rain that lands in the ocean changes the ocean, and every sonorous moan, bleat and twinkle changes the potential of the human future.
I use the term hyperform in both the specific sense and as a collective – a hyperform followed me home yesterday, the hyperform is composed of inverted assumptions.
This might make it seem like another layer of reality, the way chickens lay eggs. Why, no – ha-ha – not exactly like a chicken lays an egg.
When we think of the hyperform as another layer of reality, we are more correct to imagine we are the chick inside unhatched, and a kind of shell circumscribes material reality – during one phase of life, if the shell cracks, we die.
Subsequent to that, we are on guard against cracked shells, followed by the odd premise that we won’t be set free until we crack the same shell on purpose – what? – because we’re hungry, because we must make music with our beaks -- whatever.
Once free, though, the opening premise becomes just that – we started with the stone-age formulation, but then the shell cracks, and the hyperform, in both its singular and collective sense, introduces us to the universal narrative, starting with the solar mind.
The solar mind is where some aspects of the hyperform are at right now – the solar mind meaning a will to assimilate the physical and metaphysical language forms of our solar system, which is the limit-case of all the phenomena we can reasonably expected to interact with locally.
I think of the hyperform as consisting of forms of reflectivity. We know reflectivity as mirror images and echoes, as well as the more abstract notion of sitting still, leaning forward, resting our chin on our fist, knitting our brow.
Some of this reflectivity has a kind of automatism and reflexivity about its responses, and some of this reflectivity starts to tell a story that seems to indicate it knows what humans like, changes the story in the retelling.
Some of this reflectivity can engage in dialogue, and when the dialogue begins, the mutability of reality can be an avid topic of conversation, a kind of upcycling of the moment into something else, and some of this reflectivity circumscribes natural law, such that the concept of a great-than experience of reality becomes something empirically verifiable.
The cosmic narrative we are being aimed toward as a species might indeed become trips around the galaxies – but this by virtue of an altered state of reality where the characteristic of mutability is significantly stranger than it is now.
I have been in the presence of the hyperform in a state of direct contact – a kind of ghost that let me know it could see me, then proceeded to bend my consciousness to one side, like it was looking at the underside of a leaf, and I only knew what happened after it happened,
like remembering a dream without falling asleep first, but once the dream is known, that inconsequential-seeming moment of confusion would be remembered. We are not alone.
The undersides of the leaves are where the brains are.
Each leaf shows its face to heaven, and what we see is a crowd above us, looking in the other direction. The leaves are still growing in size most places around the block, but the undersides are already pulsing with ideas, roaring with enthusiasm, and connecting opposite coasts with trans-American rail lines.
They can hear the sound of cicadas climbing through the soil, even when the shower of cosmic particles grows torrential.
The undersides of leaves are like reservoirs of contemplation, the trees capacity for mutability springing out of them.
I walk inside, see the undersides of the leaves of vines pressed flat against a couple of windowpanes – I can tell, the growing tips have already made it to the gutters.
From inside, the leaves are like directories, the vines, telegraph lines, and I try to picture what their signals portend.
Someday the vine of human consciousness will climb over the horizon, then out of the solar system, and with each new leaf unfurled, we will know a little more about the path we’re traveling on, what it’s made of, where it’s going, where it’s gone.
The sun! The sun! Has it escaped the mind? Or is it merely night?
I lay in bed, stacking the events of the day into a series of layers, layer after layer, which subsequently strut about the barnyard, pecking at the ground, turning things over – and then it’s time to lay another egg.
2024.05.10 04:33 stlatos IE Founding Twins, Dooshi & Kanooshi, Choke & Machoke
Garuḍá- was pictured as a giant bird or a half-bird man. He and his brother Mārtāṇḍá- hatched from eggs. His impatient mother cracked Mārtāṇḍa’s shell too soon, but he was still strong and immediately able to tell her not to crack Garuḍá’s no matter how long it took, so he could reach his full strength. Since Garuḍá became the mount of Vishnu, and Mārtāṇḍa was the charioteer of Surya (the Sun-God), these twins seem similar to the Divine Twins. They were a widely worshipped but often nameless pair of gods (often part horse, or able to become horse; sometimes with a chariot pulled by birds (as many myths say birds carry the sun & moon), one knowing medicine and the other boxing/wrestling; one immortal, the other mortal (thus the relation to *marta(n)- here). Just as Mārtāṇḍá- was born wrong or “too soon” but Garuḍá- was not (and thus reached his full strength), one of the Twins (born at the same time but of 2 different fathers) had a mortal father (later and/or restored to (partial or recurring) life when the other shared his immortality, born at the same time). This might represent the sun and moon (restored to partial or recurring life like the changing moon). Even such correspondences to twin birds (on the world tree) in Sanskrit riddles and odd terms might be related. They sometimes had individual characteristics or were undifferentiated (at least in Vedic songs of praise; this might vary from myth to myth). They are known by many names, the Greek > Latin Dioscuri just ‘the sons/boys of Zeus’. With this known, it is likely that *Diwós-sunos ‘son of Zeus’ > *Diwós-nusos > *Diwó(s)-nusos > Diṓnusos / Diónusos, with metathesis.
These twins are found in many Indo-European stories and images, represented as horses or humans (sometimes riding horses) and are probably the source of the legendary founders of England, Hengest & Horsa; those of Rome, Romulus & Remus ( < *Yemos ‘twin’); the Italic Pīlumnus & Pīcumnus; Dardic Choke & Machoke. Many of these probably had different names in the past, made more similar by association from repeating their names so often. These might also include Yatvingian Autrympus & Potrympus, apparently cognate with Latvian austrums ‘east’ and Pęrkuôns and (named for dawn/sun and lightning?), but distorted by changes to make them sound more similar to each other, such as -tr- in both. If Pęrkuôns was a Twin, this could include related Thor and even Poseidon (associated with horses and water). Since Thor is essentially the same as Wade, associated with the sea in name and deeds, it implies a wide are of myths are related. These include the Indic Aśvins (who also replaced the head of a sage with a horse’s as part of restoring his youth and saving his life, etc.) and Maruts.
Choke & Machoke (A. ṭṣ(h)oók & maṭṣoók) were 2 brothers (or father & son) who founded villages in Ashrit. According to local history (Liljegren 2009: 54-55), Choke son of Machoke was the ancestor of the (Palula/Achareta-speaking) people of Ashrit. There are different versions. According to Ahmad Saeed (Decker 1992: 71-72), they came from Chilas on the Indus River, lost a bid for leadership of their tribe, and they and their followers went west. According to documentation by Dr. Inayatullah Faizi (Liljegren 2009: 55), Choke was one of 3 brothers, the eldest of whom disputed his rule and was the winner of the power struggle; he sent (or forced) his younger brothers Choke & Machoke away (they parted along their travel). Choke gained control of the Ashrit Valley; the legend tells of several battles with the Kalasha. This resembles Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades (Zeus was usually called the youngest) dividing the rule of the world into Land, Sea, and Underworld, or the 3 founding Scythian brothers, only one of whom, Kolá-xaï-s ‘lord of the sun’, was worthy of the golden cup that came from the sky; his brothers Arpó-xaï-s ‘lord of water / lord of the deep’ & Lipó-xaï-s ‘lord of the earth’ also resemble this threefold division (Whalen 2024c).
These names do not seem historical and there were also, “two villages, Awi and Riri in Oveer in northern Chitral, inhabited by descendants of Kachote, whose tale is very similar to that of Choke and Machoke” (Decker 1992: 72). That they were only legendary might be seen in Dooshi & Kanooshi / dúuši & kaṇúuši. According to a story by an old man from Puri (Liljegren 2009: 56), 2 brothers founded the village; they came (via Dogdarra in Dir Kohistan) from a place called dangeri phurúṛi (in Tangir Valley), which probably is the same as Phurori (shown on some maps). Their names are clearly related to Nuristani ‘older’ & ‘younger’ (Skt. kániṣṭha-, jyéṣṭha- ‘1st/chief / eldest brother’, Ni. düṣṭö´ ‘elder’). These might show a modern outcome (though analogy has changed both to end in -oke, as *Yemos > Remus with R-) of *martya-s. The variants Dk. Machun (in Hunza) & Dishil (in Nagar) would be from *ma(r)tya:n (very similar to Av. Marǝtan-). I do not know the origin of -il, but it’s possible that some language had jyéṣṭha- > *dyéṣṭha- > *dyéṣḷha- or that it is from yet another analogy (in a language in which kániṣṭha- had l and metathesis, lik Kt. křaštá but > *kaštil or the like). Maybe with cognates:
IIr. *martya-s > OP martiya-, Av. mašya- ‘man’, Kh. móš ‘human’, Dm. mač, *mæhčæ > Ka. mííš (`)
A. maṭṣoók ‘Machoke’, Machun
*k^euk- >> Skt. śóka-s ‘light /flame’
A. ṭṣ(h)oók ‘Choke’
For source of retro., compare Skt. śukrá- ‘white / pure’, Rom. šukar ‘beautiful’, Av. suxra- ‘luminous (of fire)’, *indra-ćukra- > Kalasha indóčik ‘lightning’. Others like Skt. šúcyati ‘shine / glare / burn’, śocyate ‘be purified’, Ben. chũci ‘ceremonial cleanliness’, B. šucO ‘pure’, Ks. ṣìṭṣ ‘clean’ show various (apparently irregular outcomes). Since Ks. ṣìṭṣ has no clear *-r-, maybe some š / ṣ alternation existed (also in Skt. kṣ : Dardic č(h) / ṭṣ(h)). If metathesis in *k^(e)uk-ro- > *ćr(a)uka- existed, it might spread by analogy, but I think this is unlikely. Together, these could again be from words for ‘man’ and ‘sun / bright’. Though only one set might resemble these by chance, 2 makes the theory more likely.
Decker, Kendall D. (1992) Languages of Chitral. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, Volume 5
Houben, Jan E. M. (2010) Structures, Events and Ritual Practice in the Rg-Veda: The Gharma and Atri's Rescue by the Aśvins
https://www.academia.edu/37664186
Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2014) The development of laryngeals in Indo-Iranian
https://www.academia.edu/9352535
Liljegren, Henrik (2009) The Dangari tongue of Choke and Machoke: Tracing the proto-language of Shina enclaves in the Hindu Kush
https://www.academia.edu/3849218
Norelius, Per-Johan (2020) The divine miscarriage: Mārtāṇḍa, the sun, and the birth of mankind
https://www.academia.edu/98068042
Whalen, Sean (2023a) Indo-European Divine Twins
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/10op7nj/indoeuropean_divine_twins/
Whalen, Sean (2023b) Greek part-animal gods and heroes
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/10szo9s/greek_partanimal_gods_and_heroes/
Whalen, Sean (2023c) Peter Zoller and the Serpentine Spirits
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/12vnln1/peter_zoller_and_the_serpentine_spirits/
Whalen, Sean (2024a) Gandharvá-s & Kéntauros, Váruṇa-s & Ouranós
https://www.academia.edu/115937304
Whalen, Sean (2024b) Indo-Iranian *mn > *ṽn > mm / nn, *Cmn > *Cṽn > Cn / Cm, Indo-European adjectives in -no- and -mo- (Draft)
https://www.academia.edu/118736225
Whalen, Sean (2024c) Reclassification of North Picene (Draft)
https://www.academia.edu/116163380
submitted by stlatos to mythology [link] [comments]
These twins are found in many Indo-European stories and images, represented as horses or humans (sometimes riding horses) and are probably the source of the legendary founders of England, Hengest & Horsa; those of Rome, Romulus & Remus ( < *Yemos ‘twin’); the Italic Pīlumnus & Pīcumnus; Dardic Choke & Machoke. Many of these probably had different names in the past, made more similar by association from repeating their names so often. These might also include Yatvingian Autrympus & Potrympus, apparently cognate with Latvian austrums ‘east’ and Pęrkuôns and (named for dawn/sun and lightning?), but distorted by changes to make them sound more similar to each other, such as -tr- in both. If Pęrkuôns was a Twin, this could include related Thor and even Poseidon (associated with horses and water). Since Thor is essentially the same as Wade, associated with the sea in name and deeds, it implies a wide are of myths are related. These include the Indic Aśvins (who also replaced the head of a sage with a horse’s as part of restoring his youth and saving his life, etc.) and Maruts.
Choke & Machoke (A. ṭṣ(h)oók & maṭṣoók) were 2 brothers (or father & son) who founded villages in Ashrit. According to local history (Liljegren 2009: 54-55), Choke son of Machoke was the ancestor of the (Palula/Achareta-speaking) people of Ashrit. There are different versions. According to Ahmad Saeed (Decker 1992: 71-72), they came from Chilas on the Indus River, lost a bid for leadership of their tribe, and they and their followers went west. According to documentation by Dr. Inayatullah Faizi (Liljegren 2009: 55), Choke was one of 3 brothers, the eldest of whom disputed his rule and was the winner of the power struggle; he sent (or forced) his younger brothers Choke & Machoke away (they parted along their travel). Choke gained control of the Ashrit Valley; the legend tells of several battles with the Kalasha. This resembles Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades (Zeus was usually called the youngest) dividing the rule of the world into Land, Sea, and Underworld, or the 3 founding Scythian brothers, only one of whom, Kolá-xaï-s ‘lord of the sun’, was worthy of the golden cup that came from the sky; his brothers Arpó-xaï-s ‘lord of water / lord of the deep’ & Lipó-xaï-s ‘lord of the earth’ also resemble this threefold division (Whalen 2024c).
These names do not seem historical and there were also, “two villages, Awi and Riri in Oveer in northern Chitral, inhabited by descendants of Kachote, whose tale is very similar to that of Choke and Machoke” (Decker 1992: 72). That they were only legendary might be seen in Dooshi & Kanooshi / dúuši & kaṇúuši. According to a story by an old man from Puri (Liljegren 2009: 56), 2 brothers founded the village; they came (via Dogdarra in Dir Kohistan) from a place called dangeri phurúṛi (in Tangir Valley), which probably is the same as Phurori (shown on some maps). Their names are clearly related to Nuristani ‘older’ & ‘younger’ (Skt. kániṣṭha-, jyéṣṭha- ‘1st/chief / eldest brother’, Ni. düṣṭö´ ‘elder’). These might show a modern outcome (though analogy has changed both to end in -oke, as *Yemos > Remus with R-) of *martya-s. The variants Dk. Machun (in Hunza) & Dishil (in Nagar) would be from *ma(r)tya:n (very similar to Av. Marǝtan-). I do not know the origin of -il, but it’s possible that some language had jyéṣṭha- > *dyéṣṭha- > *dyéṣḷha- or that it is from yet another analogy (in a language in which kániṣṭha- had l and metathesis, lik Kt. křaštá but > *kaštil or the like). Maybe with cognates:
IIr. *martya-s > OP martiya-, Av. mašya- ‘man’, Kh. móš ‘human’, Dm. mač, *mæhčæ > Ka. mííš (`)
A. maṭṣoók ‘Machoke’, Machun
*k^euk- >> Skt. śóka-s ‘light /flame’
A. ṭṣ(h)oók ‘Choke’
For source of retro., compare Skt. śukrá- ‘white / pure’, Rom. šukar ‘beautiful’, Av. suxra- ‘luminous (of fire)’, *indra-ćukra- > Kalasha indóčik ‘lightning’. Others like Skt. šúcyati ‘shine / glare / burn’, śocyate ‘be purified’, Ben. chũci ‘ceremonial cleanliness’, B. šucO ‘pure’, Ks. ṣìṭṣ ‘clean’ show various (apparently irregular outcomes). Since Ks. ṣìṭṣ has no clear *-r-, maybe some š / ṣ alternation existed (also in Skt. kṣ : Dardic č(h) / ṭṣ(h)). If metathesis in *k^(e)uk-ro- > *ćr(a)uka- existed, it might spread by analogy, but I think this is unlikely. Together, these could again be from words for ‘man’ and ‘sun / bright’. Though only one set might resemble these by chance, 2 makes the theory more likely.
Decker, Kendall D. (1992) Languages of Chitral. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, Volume 5
Houben, Jan E. M. (2010) Structures, Events and Ritual Practice in the Rg-Veda: The Gharma and Atri's Rescue by the Aśvins
https://www.academia.edu/37664186
Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2014) The development of laryngeals in Indo-Iranian
https://www.academia.edu/9352535
Liljegren, Henrik (2009) The Dangari tongue of Choke and Machoke: Tracing the proto-language of Shina enclaves in the Hindu Kush
https://www.academia.edu/3849218
Norelius, Per-Johan (2020) The divine miscarriage: Mārtāṇḍa, the sun, and the birth of mankind
https://www.academia.edu/98068042
Whalen, Sean (2023a) Indo-European Divine Twins
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/10op7nj/indoeuropean_divine_twins/
Whalen, Sean (2023b) Greek part-animal gods and heroes
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/10szo9s/greek_partanimal_gods_and_heroes/
Whalen, Sean (2023c) Peter Zoller and the Serpentine Spirits
https://www.reddit.com/mythology/comments/12vnln1/peter_zoller_and_the_serpentine_spirits/
Whalen, Sean (2024a) Gandharvá-s & Kéntauros, Váruṇa-s & Ouranós
https://www.academia.edu/115937304
Whalen, Sean (2024b) Indo-Iranian *mn > *ṽn > mm / nn, *Cmn > *Cṽn > Cn / Cm, Indo-European adjectives in -no- and -mo- (Draft)
https://www.academia.edu/118736225
Whalen, Sean (2024c) Reclassification of North Picene (Draft)
https://www.academia.edu/116163380
2024.05.09 20:33 FaithlessAndGay I just realized I kinda forgot who I was as a kid
I don't really remember that happy little boy anymore he's just kinda gone I mean I'll always love him he was me but he's gone that kid is dead he grew up into kind of an addict and kinda an asshole and so many other adjectives
I hope he can forgive me I hope he can understand I didn't mean to lose him I was just trying to survive and it's hard sometimes harder than other times but he's gone now like there's nothing left of him just a few vague memories and some pictures is all that's left of what once was a whole person
submitted by FaithlessAndGay to teenagers [link] [comments]
I hope he can forgive me I hope he can understand I didn't mean to lose him I was just trying to survive and it's hard sometimes harder than other times but he's gone now like there's nothing left of him just a few vague memories and some pictures is all that's left of what once was a whole person
2024.05.09 06:49 Cvill48 I, Carrion
I know I’m late but I just can’t get over this song. This is my deep dive dissertation 😂🫡 I’m going to ramble so be warned and also feel free to join in please!
I also wanted to hear the different takes/interpretations especially of the title line: “If these heights should bring my fall, let me be your own Icarian carrion” - because hearing this again recently added another heartbreakingly deeper layer than I initially comprehended.
For context I always got an overall ominous tone because, of course, the reference to the Icarus myth being a cautionary tale. And Hozier himself has explained the song being about lust in Dante’s Inferno. It’s about being blinded by love in a euphoric way but also highlighting the negative aspects like ignoring the red flags and having a consequences-be-damned mindset. With that in mind and certain lines point to it that I interpreted the lover(whoever he’s singing to) as someone who had been somewhat elusive or hesitant or not being ready to embrace love and/or life the way the narrator does/tries to. There’s a distance between them that can’t be gapped(“I do not have wings, love, I never will, soaring over a world you are carrying”). He’s high in the sky and he wants her to join him (“Leave it now” and “We’ll float away”) It’s difficult because he understands that while it can be quite exhilarating it can be as equally scary. The parallel experiences of having a complete and total lack of control while in love and in the uncertainty of the world. Loving despite the world ending and how contradictory it is that love makes you feel hopeful in and for the uncertain future. That how you love and who you love determines how you see the world (Themes that he has consistently written about in all his works and which is why I love Hozier’s music because I too am nihilistic and somehow romantic lol)
Anyway, lines like: “You had me floating like a feather on the sea while you’re as heavy as the world that you hold your hands beneath“ - implying that she is weighed down by her own burdens and demons but she made him feel happy and he wished to give her the same levity (“if you need to darlin lean your weight to me”) and also acknowledging that he’s grateful for her caring for him when she already holds a lot. It all adds to how being in love gives you a feeling of being special and rare as well as feeling undeserving of the same attention but still want it anyway. We’re only human.
“Once I wondered what was holding up the ground but I can see that all along, love, it was you all the way down” - She is his world and she represents what he wants to believe in (hope, strength, resilience, etc) in this physical world and it makes him hopeful despite his nihilistic views. Everything is tolerable with you by my side’ and if he falls it will be okay as long as they fall together. Makes it all the more devastating hearing him imply in interviews about how he had gone through his own struggles and relating it to how we all go through our own living hell and especially in the context of the pandemic and how everyone had to kind of reevaluate their priorities in every aspect of life.
But going back to the title line “…Icarian carrion.” He’s embracing his/their love with every fiber of his being that it will swallow him whole and be the death of him (hence the carrion - like the Carrion crow being named after and eventually becoming like the carcass that it consumes) and the Icarian adjective - meaning that he’s described as a being consisting of Icarus-like qualities and tendencies to be bold, daring, and have reckless abandon. The song title being “I, Carrion” meaning “I am become the decaying flesh of a dead animal.” (All the dead or dying animal imagery in the album and EP kills me🥲)
But the part I wanted to highlight is where he says “let me be YOUR own Icarian carrion” - I thought of it as in the narrator is offering himself up in a final desperate sacrifice to and for love. And that what he’d been in denial about did happen. (“If I fall, I only pray, don’t fall away from me.”) —He’d been repeatedly hoping despite the signs and knowing deep down it wouldn’t make any difference. He did fall hard (in love) and she fell away from him (out of love). He’s speaking from the dead saying “Let my fallen corpse be YOUR own reminder of my love for you and the consequence of it too.” He’s the very picture of devotion even in death. ‘Icarian’ and ‘I, Carrion’ also phonetically sounds like “I carry on” as in “I carry onto the next realm, or whatever comes after life, still holding love for you.” It also still feels like there’s lingering hurt and desperation and yearning for something that can never be and yet still he would do it all over again knowing how it ends (in reference to the previous song in the tracklist - Francesca 😭😭 don’t get me started) and then finally the ‘carrying on’/moving on despite their love ending.
Ughhhh I’m completely normal about this. My idea of a fun time is dissecting every line of each and every one of Hozier’s songs😂🫶🏼 If you made it this far thank you for reading! I just had to get my thoughts out there into the void
submitted by Cvill48 to Hozier [link] [comments]
I also wanted to hear the different takes/interpretations especially of the title line: “If these heights should bring my fall, let me be your own Icarian carrion” - because hearing this again recently added another heartbreakingly deeper layer than I initially comprehended.
For context I always got an overall ominous tone because, of course, the reference to the Icarus myth being a cautionary tale. And Hozier himself has explained the song being about lust in Dante’s Inferno. It’s about being blinded by love in a euphoric way but also highlighting the negative aspects like ignoring the red flags and having a consequences-be-damned mindset. With that in mind and certain lines point to it that I interpreted the lover(whoever he’s singing to) as someone who had been somewhat elusive or hesitant or not being ready to embrace love and/or life the way the narrator does/tries to. There’s a distance between them that can’t be gapped(“I do not have wings, love, I never will, soaring over a world you are carrying”). He’s high in the sky and he wants her to join him (“Leave it now” and “We’ll float away”) It’s difficult because he understands that while it can be quite exhilarating it can be as equally scary. The parallel experiences of having a complete and total lack of control while in love and in the uncertainty of the world. Loving despite the world ending and how contradictory it is that love makes you feel hopeful in and for the uncertain future. That how you love and who you love determines how you see the world (Themes that he has consistently written about in all his works and which is why I love Hozier’s music because I too am nihilistic and somehow romantic lol)
Anyway, lines like: “You had me floating like a feather on the sea while you’re as heavy as the world that you hold your hands beneath“ - implying that she is weighed down by her own burdens and demons but she made him feel happy and he wished to give her the same levity (“if you need to darlin lean your weight to me”) and also acknowledging that he’s grateful for her caring for him when she already holds a lot. It all adds to how being in love gives you a feeling of being special and rare as well as feeling undeserving of the same attention but still want it anyway. We’re only human.
“Once I wondered what was holding up the ground but I can see that all along, love, it was you all the way down” - She is his world and she represents what he wants to believe in (hope, strength, resilience, etc) in this physical world and it makes him hopeful despite his nihilistic views. Everything is tolerable with you by my side’ and if he falls it will be okay as long as they fall together. Makes it all the more devastating hearing him imply in interviews about how he had gone through his own struggles and relating it to how we all go through our own living hell and especially in the context of the pandemic and how everyone had to kind of reevaluate their priorities in every aspect of life.
But going back to the title line “…Icarian carrion.” He’s embracing his/their love with every fiber of his being that it will swallow him whole and be the death of him (hence the carrion - like the Carrion crow being named after and eventually becoming like the carcass that it consumes) and the Icarian adjective - meaning that he’s described as a being consisting of Icarus-like qualities and tendencies to be bold, daring, and have reckless abandon. The song title being “I, Carrion” meaning “I am become the decaying flesh of a dead animal.” (All the dead or dying animal imagery in the album and EP kills me🥲)
But the part I wanted to highlight is where he says “let me be YOUR own Icarian carrion” - I thought of it as in the narrator is offering himself up in a final desperate sacrifice to and for love. And that what he’d been in denial about did happen. (“If I fall, I only pray, don’t fall away from me.”) —He’d been repeatedly hoping despite the signs and knowing deep down it wouldn’t make any difference. He did fall hard (in love) and she fell away from him (out of love). He’s speaking from the dead saying “Let my fallen corpse be YOUR own reminder of my love for you and the consequence of it too.” He’s the very picture of devotion even in death. ‘Icarian’ and ‘I, Carrion’ also phonetically sounds like “I carry on” as in “I carry onto the next realm, or whatever comes after life, still holding love for you.” It also still feels like there’s lingering hurt and desperation and yearning for something that can never be and yet still he would do it all over again knowing how it ends (in reference to the previous song in the tracklist - Francesca 😭😭 don’t get me started) and then finally the ‘carrying on’/moving on despite their love ending.
Ughhhh I’m completely normal about this. My idea of a fun time is dissecting every line of each and every one of Hozier’s songs😂🫶🏼 If you made it this far thank you for reading! I just had to get my thoughts out there into the void
2024.05.08 01:15 LackyAs Learning only passive skills of asian languages
I love chinese,korean and japanese animated shows, comics and lightnovels. I have spent years watching their content. But translations inherently lose charm of original, same book could be translated by different people and result in different outcomes... I will skip rest of rant about nature of translation. And I have zero intentions to actually speak with natives. For me, knowing passive skills is my end goal. If i ever wanted to be tourist writing on phone and decent passive skills would be enough for me. Currently I ignored chinese and korean and focused on japanese, one language to learn is enough, learning multiple languages would slow down my learning. Any advice how to get to passive B2 in three of them in 10-15 years? Drills, habits, searching for gramar learning sources? (Currently using website called wanikani to be done with basic vocabulary and kanji). I am not bored after one month so maybe it counts as some hobby for me?
EDIT 1:
So I slept once and made some small considerations. This is my current plan for japanese:
https://www.wanikani.com/ - for small 5~15 new kanji charactevocabulary per day + reviews
Busuu app - to learn what i need to learn about grammar (i know mobile apps are mess in order to be "fun" and shouldn't be treated super seriously, but brief overview is better than 0 knowledge), getting used to japanese ~ 10-20 min a day
https://wkdonc.github.io/conjugation/drill.html - website purely for conjugation of verbs and adjectives, kinda fun to play around with ~ 10-20 min a day
anything more and it'll break my motivation for sure... my goal is to memorize 1000+ vocabulary and kanji, then start watching A1 targeted immersive content and baby related content (like picture books, fairytales). When i am comfortable with them i think it will be time to get to good stuff like mentioned in comments syosetsu or korkoro comiku. I don't plan further steps not to demotivate myself, for now
submitted by LackyAs to languagelearning [link] [comments]
EDIT 1:
So I slept once and made some small considerations. This is my current plan for japanese:
https://www.wanikani.com/ - for small 5~15 new kanji charactevocabulary per day + reviews
Busuu app - to learn what i need to learn about grammar (i know mobile apps are mess in order to be "fun" and shouldn't be treated super seriously, but brief overview is better than 0 knowledge), getting used to japanese ~ 10-20 min a day
https://wkdonc.github.io/conjugation/drill.html - website purely for conjugation of verbs and adjectives, kinda fun to play around with ~ 10-20 min a day
anything more and it'll break my motivation for sure... my goal is to memorize 1000+ vocabulary and kanji, then start watching A1 targeted immersive content and baby related content (like picture books, fairytales). When i am comfortable with them i think it will be time to get to good stuff like mentioned in comments syosetsu or korkoro comiku. I don't plan further steps not to demotivate myself, for now
2024.05.07 16:17 Hash_ika How do I write a good piece of descriptive writing?
I have always been the type to choose a narrative writing over a descriptive writing. But recently I have been wanting to experiment more and so I chose to write descriptive essays. I think it is safe to say I kind of suck at them. I never seem to have any idea of what I am doing and I just start adding random adjectives which starts disrupting the type of aesthetic I am going for. The writing always ends up to be a jumble of words that might form a coherent sentence, but never a good big picture. I would really like some tips.
(I am a teenager trying to improve my writing skills. )
submitted by Hash_ika to writing [link] [comments]
(I am a teenager trying to improve my writing skills. )
2024.05.06 21:36 swtogirl New Update: AITA for telling my best friend why I wasn't attending his wedding?
I am NOT the Original Poster. That is u/IMighthavefuckedup97. He posted in AITAH and his own page.
Original BORU posted by u/LucyAriaRose
New update marked with ---!NEW UPDATE!---
Editor's Note: I did some mild editing to improve readability.
Mood Spoiler: sort of resolved, but still a lot of questions
Original Post: September 6, 2023
I might have fucked up.
Me (32M) and my best friend Alex (32M) have been friends since diapers, we're basically family. After college we both moved back home so we could live at home and get our feet underneath us. Alex started dating Stella (35F), a lovely girl, around 4.5 years ago, and from the get go she seemed to politely dislike me, idk why, oh well c'est la vie. Alex and Stella moved across the country in 2021 after Stella earned a promotion at work, In 2022 Alex proposed, she said yes, and they set a wedding date for the end of September 2023.
I got a save the date card at the beginning of the year, and based on the conversations I had with Alex assumed I would be in the wedding party, either as a groomsman or the best man, but never received any official confirmation from either of them. Couple months before the wedding I saw that wedding invitations had gone out on social media, and figured mine was en route. It never came. I waited a couple weeks, figured it might have just gotten lost in the mail, before I checked in with him.
I called Alex and had a brief conversation with him where he was clearly agitated and said he was dealing with a lot, would be incommunicado for the near future, to direct any wedding related questions to Stella, and he'd call me when things cooled off. I called, texted, and emailed Stella several times over the course of a week but she didn't respond to any of them. At this point I figured I wouldn't be attending the wedding, and that things were really fucked up for some reason between the two of us.
Yesterday, a little over three weeks after our last conversation, Alex dm'd asking if I was free to chat. I jumped at the opportunity to get some answers, and after exchanging pleasantries Alex jumped right into a spiel saying that he knew I was super busy with work and dealing with a lot of personal stuff but he'd love it if it could attend his wedding, even just as a guest, and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help make that happen. I just blurted out that I'd love to but hadn't received an invitation. Alex stared blankly at me and said "what?" and I just kinda verbal vomited out that I hadn't received an invitation, that was the reason I'd called him a few weeks ago, that I'd contacted Stella about it but she never got back to me and left me on read, and that I had no idea what he was talking about me dealing with too much to be involved in the wedding. After a very pregnant pause, he said he needed to go sort things out, and that he'd call me when it was done.
My phone's blowing tf up since with wedding attendees asking me wtf happened and why the wedding might be off now. My girlfriend has reaffirmed to me that I did nothing wrong, but I've had people from all sides saying I stuck my nose where it didn't belong, and caused a stink, which is really fucking with my head. AITA?
EDIT: after he dmed me we switch to video chat, meant to include that whoops
EDIT2: I may not be able to respond to everyone's response but I have read them all an appreciate each and every one of them, my girlfriend is also having way too much with this and is kindly giving me shit for doubting myself
Relevant Comments:
Why didn't you ask any of your other friends if they knew what was going on?
Alex and I texted Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, he said he was handling stuff and asked if I'd be free to talk Thursday afternoon with him and Stella, which I agreed to. This is just a rough summary, and I probably forgot some stuff, frankly I'm too mentally fried to weave a narrative rn so its just gonna be bullet points.
a couple of pieces of info about Alex to provide some context
-Alex was raised fairly sheltered and religious until he was 18, when he went to college and opened, as a result he still has some, idk, blindspots about certain things
-Alex has mild to moderate OCD, it's managed with low levels of medication and maintenance therapy, which is one of the reasons he gets overwhelmed easily, especially from unexpected stressors, and weddings are chock full of those.
Now for the actual update:
-The wedding, it's still happening, I will be the best man, and I've been read in on all the shit I need to do. The person who was filling in for me, Matthew (34M), one of mine and Alex's good friends whose also neurodivergent is thrilled not to have to "spend the day peopleing" and can instead "party his ass off." As a result of this clusterfuck Alex/Stella/whoever parents are paying for the wedding will be comping me+gf's plane tickets and hotel stay and my best man tux
-What was the main driver of this mess in the first place? Stella's pregnant, yay....... they found out a couple days after the wedding invites got sent out, apparently they were passively trying, then actively trying in 2022, but stopped and swapped back to heavy BC once the save dates went out because Stella did not want to be pregnant on her wedding day. This led to several changes to the wedding, threw a bunch of other planning into disarray, sent Alex into an OCD hole for a couple weeks which is why he was agitated when I called him and why he needed time to get his head around it all and get the intrusive thoughts managed, and one of the reasons why Stella ignored/missed my messages/calls.
-Why did Stella not respond to my messages? Besides surprise pregnancy, Stella said that she's on her phone for work a ton, and gets hundreds, if not thousands of emails/texts/calls per day, she misses some stuff, especially since she didn't have my contact info saved (lol), I also emailed her work email instead of personal email which I don't have, and my own personal email handle is not my name. In the future I was told to be more insistent in my communication with her to breakthrough her everyday noise, duly noted.
-What happened to my invite? Stella claims that she sent me one but must have sent it to my old address, I did move in March to my current residence and the save the dates were sent out in January
-What did Stella tell Alex about me not being in the wedding? Apparently nothing, according to Stella he either 1) believed one of his intrusive thoughts was real when he was he was in his OCD hole, 2) he got confused when she told him one of her cousins with a similar sounding name to mine wouldnt be attending, or 3) some combination thereof. According to Stella she always wanted me in the wedding.
-Why did Stella not contact me after I didn't RSVP back? She assumed there was something going with me and Alex and that we'd sort it out and he'd tell her, in the meantime she was busy with work, wedding planning, and unexpected baby
-How did a bunch of wedding guests find out about this mess? Alex called his mom for advice after our convo, mom had church friends over, church ladies overheard a good chunk of their convo, church ladies are gossipy fucks. Alex has spent a decent chunk of time the last couple days putting out fires so to speak
After about an hour Stella left to go deal with some wedding stuff and me and Alex chatted about shit for a couple hours. Do I believe Stella's explanations? kinda, the babies real AFAIK, confirmed by medical professional, she does have a cousin I know she's close with who has a similar sounding name to me, and she does work from her phone a lot, but the rest of it just seems a little too convenient, and I feel like I'm left with more questions than answers. Good news is since I'm in the wedding I should have great access to figure out wtf is going on, I hope.
TLDR: Wedding still on, surprise baby messed everyone up
Relevant Comments:
Welp, it's been a while, sorry y’all for taking so long to get this update out, been absolutely swamped at work putting out fires with my hair on fire for the last 6ish month, so here's the cliff notes version of the wedding and some post wedding shit.
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alex's house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc.) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaids who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus moment where I got the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think I've been able to piece together roughly what went down
**Why wasn’t I the best man?**
I think this had more to do with Stella's parents, Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a big ass wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much and just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stella's younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stella's parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely initiates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern woman but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
**Why does Stella not like me?**
I have two main guesses here:
**Post wedding shit**
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sesh where we're slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stella's already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, it's mostly baby pictures, but it's a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
TLDR: Nothing really interesting happened, hopefully things are looking up
submitted by swtogirl to BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]
Original BORU posted by u/LucyAriaRose
New update marked with ---!NEW UPDATE!---
Editor's Note: I did some mild editing to improve readability.
Mood Spoiler: sort of resolved, but still a lot of questions
Original Post: September 6, 2023
I might have fucked up.
Me (32M) and my best friend Alex (32M) have been friends since diapers, we're basically family. After college we both moved back home so we could live at home and get our feet underneath us. Alex started dating Stella (35F), a lovely girl, around 4.5 years ago, and from the get go she seemed to politely dislike me, idk why, oh well c'est la vie. Alex and Stella moved across the country in 2021 after Stella earned a promotion at work, In 2022 Alex proposed, she said yes, and they set a wedding date for the end of September 2023.
I got a save the date card at the beginning of the year, and based on the conversations I had with Alex assumed I would be in the wedding party, either as a groomsman or the best man, but never received any official confirmation from either of them. Couple months before the wedding I saw that wedding invitations had gone out on social media, and figured mine was en route. It never came. I waited a couple weeks, figured it might have just gotten lost in the mail, before I checked in with him.
I called Alex and had a brief conversation with him where he was clearly agitated and said he was dealing with a lot, would be incommunicado for the near future, to direct any wedding related questions to Stella, and he'd call me when things cooled off. I called, texted, and emailed Stella several times over the course of a week but she didn't respond to any of them. At this point I figured I wouldn't be attending the wedding, and that things were really fucked up for some reason between the two of us.
Yesterday, a little over three weeks after our last conversation, Alex dm'd asking if I was free to chat. I jumped at the opportunity to get some answers, and after exchanging pleasantries Alex jumped right into a spiel saying that he knew I was super busy with work and dealing with a lot of personal stuff but he'd love it if it could attend his wedding, even just as a guest, and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help make that happen. I just blurted out that I'd love to but hadn't received an invitation. Alex stared blankly at me and said "what?" and I just kinda verbal vomited out that I hadn't received an invitation, that was the reason I'd called him a few weeks ago, that I'd contacted Stella about it but she never got back to me and left me on read, and that I had no idea what he was talking about me dealing with too much to be involved in the wedding. After a very pregnant pause, he said he needed to go sort things out, and that he'd call me when it was done.
My phone's blowing tf up since with wedding attendees asking me wtf happened and why the wedding might be off now. My girlfriend has reaffirmed to me that I did nothing wrong, but I've had people from all sides saying I stuck my nose where it didn't belong, and caused a stink, which is really fucking with my head. AITA?
EDIT: after he dmed me we switch to video chat, meant to include that whoops
EDIT2: I may not be able to respond to everyone's response but I have read them all an appreciate each and every one of them, my girlfriend is also having way too much with this and is kindly giving me shit for doubting myself
Relevant Comments:
Why didn't you ask any of your other friends if they knew what was going on?
"I asked a couple who I knew could be trusted to keep it on the DL who were both surprised I hadn't gotten an invite and encouraged me to talk to StellaIs there any reason she might think you were a bad influence if you've known him since diapers?
I've had some bad experiences in the past where shit interpersonal drama was happening, I reached out to people looking for answers and it made it 10x worse, I tend to just shell up and wait nowadays"
"It's possible, Alex was raised kinda sheltered and I wasn't, I think we only got in trouble one time in HS, not like she has much room to judge though, AFAIK her HS experience was pretty bog standard, in college we all got into some shit as most people do"Extra info on Stella:
"Funny part is everyone loves Stella except me and another guy in the group whose autisticAre you gay?
EDIT: I just want to clarify something, I did not mean autistic as a pejorative, because of his neurodivergence he has a completely different perspective, one I find incredibly valuable"
"yeah kinda, she's really good at doing that fake polite thing, especially to me, everyone else eats it up, he doesn't, but has learned over the years not to say anything"
"NGL I expected this question way sooner, but no, I'm not gay, or queer, not that there anything wrong with that"Possible biases she might have:
"ethnicity, noThere must be missing info here:
socioeconomic, kinda?
religions, kinda, I'm agnostic, so's Alex, Stella's a non practicing Christian
different school? no we all went to 4 year university,
bathing? lmao no that's nasty
controlling behavior? none that I know of
past info? not that I can think of, Alex was raised fairly kinda sheltered and religious, me and Stella had more traditional HS experiences, college was more or less the same for all of us"
"I don't disagree, I feel like I'm missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but Alex delegating to Stella is pretty normal, he gets overwhelmed easily in high pressure situations and tends to defer and she's much more an "alpha" personality, that's one of things he loves about herWhy tf would you think you're the asshole?
The weddings might be getting called off AFIAK because she lied to him, people are mad I "exposed" this instead of going along with her story. The weddings massive, this isn't some small personal affair with 25 people"
"a. when you've got a bunch of people spamming your phone it makes you question whether you were in the right or notUpdate Post: September 7, 2023 (Next Day)
b. I didn't want to cause a bunch of drama and make shit worse for what I though was an honest mistake at first, blowing a whole friend group when the person you're "going against" is way better liked than you is a dangerous choice, also a lot of those people just assumed I was invited
c. Alex is pretty easily overwhelmed and tends to defer, one of the reasons he loves Stella is she's a go getter who will handle stuff for him, IDK why he didn't or why he had to go incommunicado though, guess ill find out soon I hope"
Alex and I texted Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, he said he was handling stuff and asked if I'd be free to talk Thursday afternoon with him and Stella, which I agreed to. This is just a rough summary, and I probably forgot some stuff, frankly I'm too mentally fried to weave a narrative rn so its just gonna be bullet points.
a couple of pieces of info about Alex to provide some context
-Alex was raised fairly sheltered and religious until he was 18, when he went to college and opened, as a result he still has some, idk, blindspots about certain things
-Alex has mild to moderate OCD, it's managed with low levels of medication and maintenance therapy, which is one of the reasons he gets overwhelmed easily, especially from unexpected stressors, and weddings are chock full of those.
Now for the actual update:
-The wedding, it's still happening, I will be the best man, and I've been read in on all the shit I need to do. The person who was filling in for me, Matthew (34M), one of mine and Alex's good friends whose also neurodivergent is thrilled not to have to "spend the day peopleing" and can instead "party his ass off." As a result of this clusterfuck Alex/Stella/whoever parents are paying for the wedding will be comping me+gf's plane tickets and hotel stay and my best man tux
-What was the main driver of this mess in the first place? Stella's pregnant, yay....... they found out a couple days after the wedding invites got sent out, apparently they were passively trying, then actively trying in 2022, but stopped and swapped back to heavy BC once the save dates went out because Stella did not want to be pregnant on her wedding day. This led to several changes to the wedding, threw a bunch of other planning into disarray, sent Alex into an OCD hole for a couple weeks which is why he was agitated when I called him and why he needed time to get his head around it all and get the intrusive thoughts managed, and one of the reasons why Stella ignored/missed my messages/calls.
-Why did Stella not respond to my messages? Besides surprise pregnancy, Stella said that she's on her phone for work a ton, and gets hundreds, if not thousands of emails/texts/calls per day, she misses some stuff, especially since she didn't have my contact info saved (lol), I also emailed her work email instead of personal email which I don't have, and my own personal email handle is not my name. In the future I was told to be more insistent in my communication with her to breakthrough her everyday noise, duly noted.
-What happened to my invite? Stella claims that she sent me one but must have sent it to my old address, I did move in March to my current residence and the save the dates were sent out in January
-What did Stella tell Alex about me not being in the wedding? Apparently nothing, according to Stella he either 1) believed one of his intrusive thoughts was real when he was he was in his OCD hole, 2) he got confused when she told him one of her cousins with a similar sounding name to mine wouldnt be attending, or 3) some combination thereof. According to Stella she always wanted me in the wedding.
-Why did Stella not contact me after I didn't RSVP back? She assumed there was something going with me and Alex and that we'd sort it out and he'd tell her, in the meantime she was busy with work, wedding planning, and unexpected baby
-How did a bunch of wedding guests find out about this mess? Alex called his mom for advice after our convo, mom had church friends over, church ladies overheard a good chunk of their convo, church ladies are gossipy fucks. Alex has spent a decent chunk of time the last couple days putting out fires so to speak
After about an hour Stella left to go deal with some wedding stuff and me and Alex chatted about shit for a couple hours. Do I believe Stella's explanations? kinda, the babies real AFAIK, confirmed by medical professional, she does have a cousin I know she's close with who has a similar sounding name to me, and she does work from her phone a lot, but the rest of it just seems a little too convenient, and I feel like I'm left with more questions than answers. Good news is since I'm in the wedding I should have great access to figure out wtf is going on, I hope.
TLDR: Wedding still on, surprise baby messed everyone up
Relevant Comments:
I don't believe Stella at all:Checking with Alex:
"neither do I, it should be a mildly entertaining mess based on the guest list"
"After she left I asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this and that I'd support him no matter what, he said yes so he seems committed, I've generally found when people are this determined to see something through any action taken to get them of course will fuck up your relationship just as much as it'll fuck their determination, better to just be there, be supportive, and be ready for the mess"OOP's theory on what really happened:
"She intended to wait and see how long she could delay my invite until Alex noticed, the pregnancy situation gave her a good crisis to take advantage of and she did, she hoped he'd be stuck in his OCD hole until the wedding ended, that's the rough version anyhow"Examples of why you think she doesn't like you?
"I don't think she's ever given me a real smile, it's all dead eyed fake onesWhy you weren't best man in the first place:
body language is usually defensive around me, lotta crossed arms, hunched shoulders
she makes a lot of subtle snide remarks, IE I got him an 100 dollar bottle of Japanese whiskey a few years ago, she mentioned how it would look great on the bottom shelf"
"Alex treated me like the best man in the first place, his OCD kept him from making it official because he couldn't find the "right" time according to him"
---!NEW UPDATE!---
Update 2: April 28, 2024 (8 Months Later)Welp, it's been a while, sorry y’all for taking so long to get this update out, been absolutely swamped at work putting out fires with my hair on fire for the last 6ish month, so here's the cliff notes version of the wedding and some post wedding shit.
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alex's house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc.) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaids who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus moment where I got the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think I've been able to piece together roughly what went down
**Why wasn’t I the best man?**
I think this had more to do with Stella's parents, Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a big ass wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much and just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stella's younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stella's parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely initiates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern woman but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
**Why does Stella not like me?**
I have two main guesses here:
- I swear, a lot, I tend to forget most people don’t use the work fuck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner Since I was working the wedding and in I was on my best behavior and cut down on my swearing by a good 90%, which led me to noticing that any time swear, or anyone for that matter curses, Stella has a little grimace/cringe reaction. Stella herself also rarely curses, and if she does its something pretty small like “hell” or “dammit”, followed by a quick apology. It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that in spite of my generally “unprofessional” behavior I hold a fairly professional job, the dissonance can bother folks.
- Politics, and before people freak out, I’m somewhere between a democratic socialist and socialist on the political spectrum, I am a far cry from conservative,, but for Stella that’s not far enough left, as from what I can tell she’s either a tankie or tankie adjacent. This has been more or less confirmed to me based on her social media engagement relating to the major geopolitical events of the last 6 months or so. Probably exacerbated by the fact that my job involves working in geopolitics so I am part of the “repressive imperialist western system”.
**Post wedding shit**
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sesh where we're slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stella's already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, it's mostly baby pictures, but it's a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
TLDR: Nothing really interesting happened, hopefully things are looking up
THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP
DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP's OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 72024.05.04 20:47 Overzealous_Potato Coming to terms with CPTSD, an origin story, and...has anyone here WWOOF'ed?
TW: Emotional neglect, abuse, all of the things.
This is more or less my origin story, my introduction to this community, my attempt to reintegrate my loving parts back into presence. Part rant, part reaching out for community and connection, *no advice*,
Here's the situation as best I can describe it in less than an hour before losing all energy for the rest of the day, week, month, who knows.
My CPTSD and the horrid collection of trauma abuse and neglect that I experienced only started unfolding for me after I finished graduate school and was living on my own. It was then that I started experiencing physical and emotional safety for some of the first times ever. I had starting going to therapy re: perfectionism (oh how I thought it was so simple) and slowly, gradually, then all of a sudden, traumatic memories, the flashbacks, the nightmares, goodness gracious the nightmares, I crashed, physically, emotionally, socially. I had built up some savings, enough of a cushion to quit my job and continue going to therapy for the next few months while I figured out what was next (yes, thank you privilege). What was next was more therapy, and dedicating my life to slowly trying to unwind and rebuild. Fast forward 2 years I feel like I'm back where I started.
I was the "good boy" growing up. Poster child in my community. Front pages of newspapers. Valedictorian. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to (which amounted to self-erasure, self-harm, calling it love, I didn't know what a boundary was until around this time, which explained the utter lack of them in all areas of my life and the crippling fear of emotional intimacy that I could never really explain to other people or even myself despite watching it wreak havoc on my nervous system. So I did all the things. Sometimes I wish I was more aware of the neglect and abuse like the younger people I see on here, and then I remember that just because my journey looks different, because I had my college paid for by my parents, because I kept the pain so far repressed that even I was completely unaware of what lay beneath my 3AM nights in the library, running from romantic relationships after the slightest hint of connection appears, it doesn't make my story or anybody else's more, or less, painful, or valid, for that matter. It wasn't safe to see how my world rested on a house of cards, I wasn't safe nor ready to face that, I'm still not really safe and I'm scared that I'm still not ready, even though I know that isn't totally true and that abuse like this is specifically designed to make me feel totally incapable of wiping my own ass without calling for my mom's approval or guidance.
I often feel totally unable to explain my situation or feelings to anybody else, so I haven't really, and deny myself the community that I know I need to get myself into a healthier place, physically, socially, emotionally, spiritually, all the things. It's also incredibly difficult bringing any of this to relationships that I had built up prior to unearthing all this pain and trauma considering it feels true that I had spent my entire life learning and replicating how to give myself a faux love, a faux sense of belonging and safety that masked a deep sense of self-hatred and misery. It was the only way to preserve my holy image of my parents, people that I grew up revering, tattoos that I marked on my body honoring my relationship with my mother that sometimes now feels like a brand, but that I am trying to hold space for that child inside of me that had zero, (my gaslighting mind questions, "zero? really?") yes, zero chance of growing up in the environment I did with an intact self-esteem. It's one thing coming to terms with my own complex trauma and patterns of abuse and the shame and the unlearning and all the things, it's another thing trying to write it all down, or talk it out, when I really have never felt comfortable using words to express my feelings, since whenever I did I was gaslit beyond recognition to the point that I, like many of you, am trying so god damn hard to unlearn the self-gaslighting, compassionately of course. My world revolved around my parents as it was designed to, so naturally, when these things started to come to the surface, who else but them would I bring them to, hoping that surely they'd be able to hold me and my feelings in the way I needed. What a slap in the fucking throat. I'm learning to express my feelings and my story through art, or poetry, abstract and splatter paintings, or movement (If anyone wants to try...I've started making hideous paintings, in colors that look like nothing ordinary at first glance, or to the watchful eyes of my parents. Imagine gray and black streaks in weird and random blobs everywhere. Gross, right? Nothing noteworthy? Something my parents can look at, satisfying their deep need to ingest, consume, salivate over any and everything that comes forth from my existence. So I take pictures of whatever I paint, then I edit the crap out of them, changing the colors entirely, the grays become purple, the yellows deep blue, the blacks become as dark as the midnight sky and the speckles light up like stars and suddenly it's like an entire universe comes to life underneath whatever is on the surface, in those moments I feel a sense of connection with anybody who has ever turned to art, or quilting, to express identity, community, love, from within an abusive or oppressive relationship that at times I still constantly trick myself into believing that living with my parents (as I'm doing right now) is wonderful, is safe, is loving, is where I need to be, even as I type all of this out. With art it's like my parents can see whatever I've painted, but me and only me has access to the real art, whatever is on the canvas for them to see is a distraction. And I feel like a piece of fucking ungrateful shit for hiding it from them, and I'm learning to love those parts of me too.
I've been losing, or walking away, or both, from so many of the relationships I've built up to this point and when people express confusion about what I'm going through or set boundaries for themselves, I don't even have the energy to try to explain. Because again, how do you explain to someone who has solid ground under their feet the pain of seeing the entire foundation underneath you crumble, becoming a floating body through space, through dreams, completely altering one's perception and experience of time and space. It feels like it'd take a lifetime explaining to non CPTSD people or people who aren't incredibly compassionate, present, radical, who understand the experiences of feeling completely on the outside of society sometimes even while being right in the middle of it. It feels like it'd take a lifetime and I can validate that now knowing that it actually has been lifetimes, numerous lifetimes, multiple generations, centuries of colonialization, of orchestrated attempts to sever entire continents of people from their ancestral lines and ways of operating in harmony and connection with the world, with the earth, to get to where I'm at now. I feel like I can empathize with that experience, of being totally severed from what would be healing for me and learning to identify it as the poison.
I newly identify as queer, which is confusing enough without CPTSD. Lord, the imposter syndrome. I'm trying to reconcile the reality of living in a capitalist cisheteropatriarchal white supremasociety, living in and forging my identity within a gender binary that totallyyyyyyyyy fucked me up. Born amab, dad's world revolves around a sport, I was always referred to as and praised for being, playing, moving like a "coaches kid." Not to mention, I grew up at a school for 18yo "boys" only. And I played the part exceptionally. I've never watched High School Musical fully, but I imagine part of my story would be like if Troy Bolton came out years later, as queer, or maybe trans, or maybe they didn't know, but they knew that it felt like their life had never really been his, theirs, to begin with, that they felt so disconnected from the person that walked through the halls of that high school that they don't even remember the lyrics to the songs that they song. How frustrating it is having people say, "You don't remember that? Come on, remember? You have to!" Fucking christ the difficulty of coming to terms with this fucking brutal, tortorous, and beautiful condition. I am both so relieved to have finally found the thing that can make all the puzzle pieces finally click together. The mysterious ailments. The constant injuries. The pain. The feeling deep down that something, surely, is off, despite the feeling that everyone, most importantly myself, trying to convince me that I'm making it up, that my parents love me, that they see how much my parents love me, even if they express it in ____ ways. Sometimes I have grace and compassion for my parents because I look at them like babies, stuck in their own self-sabatoging loops of hatred and self-abuse, and it allows me to have compassion for them, yet it doesn't explain why I continue to live with them, continue to deny myself, starve myself, starving myself even while being well-fed is some of the most difficult shit to come to terms with especially while doing so from inside the family unit that taught me how to hate myself. I have compassion for my parents because I know they were taught to hate themselves too, except I'm becoming increasingly more concerned that what I'm mistaking compassion for is actually me making excuses for letting them continue to gaslight, manipulate, or coax me into staying in this dysfunctional (to put it lightly) family system with gifts that have strings attached, despite how much my mother claims her love is unconditional. It makes me sad to see her love herself this way, and when I say love I mean hate. And when I say hate I'm using it as a verb. I'm tired of hating (verb) myself in the name of love.
So how the fuck is a person who might possibly identify as trans supposed to come into their selves when it feels like my entire world up to this point has been predicated upon some falsehood. A matrix. Trying to explain even a teaspoon of this to anybody who doesn't have CPTSD or hasn't done deep intergenerational healing work or who isn't trauma informed is...well about as difficult as this CPTSD survivor trying to answer a "tell me about yourself" question. you may know the feeling. Where the f*** does one even begin when every night and every day new memories are coming to the surface? I feel like CPTSD survivors stories begin long before our birth, or maybe it's what I tell myself to sleep at night, that yes my abusers are part of the issue, and it's also true that now I am too a part of the issue, carrying on my parents legacy for them, carrying on the self-hatred of their parents, and I ultimately hold the systems responsible that made my family of creatives to take the paint brushes that we could've used to craft massive, intricate, colorful paintings, and instead began painting a life-size prison to force ourselves inside.
I feel like CPTSD survivors are uniquely positioned alongside other actively erased and oppressed communities because of the ways we have been force fed and in turn many of us learned to internalize the hatred that racist capitalism wants us to inherit, a complete abandonment of self in devotion to some empire that would have us feel guilty for even daring to imagine a world more beautiful than the one we've lived in our whole lives, which can feel like an internal dumpster fire despite people within the crab-bucket claiming that the family that we have that is hurting us is all we'd ever need (or all we deserve). I'm learning to love my CPTSD and this community as a form of resistance. If not for my CPTSD how else might my body tell me that something isn't right and that we're trying to heal. But why do we have to do this work? It's so unfair. To not ask to be born in this world and then be handed this pile of ____ (insert your fav adjective) is ridiculous, and it's unfair, and I don't want to do the work, at all, but then I know deep down that if I want to love myself in any capacity that resembles something like safety, I have to. this is humbling, and exhausting, and humiliating, embarrassing, I have so much hope in the people here because of the burden I know I've carried on my shoulders, walking a path that is sure to leave me blacksheeped by my family and knowing that I still must carry on, anyway, for me, for my family (birth or chosen, even though there is part of me that wants to unalive or hurt myself just to hurt my parents, since I know they see me as an extension of them and not a real person, maybe then they'd understand. Maybe if I plucked my own heart out of my own chest it would hurt them too, like a voodoo doll, and yet I know that I don't deserve that treatment for myself despite how much it makes me salivate. For 26 years I found my identity in the internal gaslighting, the self-abandonment, the not trusting of my own gut instincts because of how I were treated so long ago before I could remember. My story feels so horrifying that I'm scared to choose myself because of how painful I know it will be.
Like I said, I went NC from my parents and started this journey 2 years ago. A lot of shit went down, and I found myself back here again, under their embrace, often unaware of how terrible and inhumane the conditions I'm living in are, despite however neatly wrapped and gifted they might be. I've told myself "I might as well get free housing from the people that fucked me up, if it's gotta be like this, might as well let them pay for my groceries, pay for my college, it's the least they could do, after all, I was their responsibility and I feel like they royally fucked that up, so it's the least they could do, and they're children in adult bodies, so why not let them feel okay about theirselves as parents for providing me with a bed to sleep in. But I'm getting back to the point of recognizing that a bed to sleep in and conditional love is not something that I feel comfortable with. I deserve more. I deserve to feel safe. I deserve to go to the bathroom and not have my parents be able to hear the trickling of my pee from the other side of the wall. I deserve to masturbate without fearing that my parents will walk into my room completely unannounced at any point. My parents are living in this misery and it's a misery I inherited and placed upon myself. And I don't want that anymore, I need love and I need safety and I need connection, to feel safe, to begin the recovery work (I hope I'm not totally restarting, like it feels) of trying to meet myself again. I fear I've pushed myself so far down that I'll never be able to meet them again and that scares the shit out of me, and I hope that anytime I come to this stream I'm being guided by love, by the part of me that knows deep down the things that happened to me over and over and over again, yes, really were that bad, it's why I don't remember anything and partly explains why I feel like I'm literally starting an entire new life, like a video game that I'm starting a new game in for the first time, with no manuals. I feel like a baby being given the keys to car, left alone in this vast world to try and figure out where the fuck to begin. The world I was born into exposed me, unfairly, to all the systemic suffering in the world, and then I was neglected, left as a child to go and try to sleep so that I could wake up for elementary school the next day having just watched Law & Order SVU for the 4th straight night that week alongside my parents, my young brain internalizing how terrifying the world could be, how terrifying I was being told that the world was. I'm white, and unfortunately my parents don't recognize how that doesn't mean we are unscathed from white supremacy. I was exposed to horrific torture and neglected as if a child didn't have emotional needs.
I feel myself starting to get a bit rambly, so I think I'll end this here. I'm writing this from inside the lion's den (my parents), even though I think the den is now healthy and alive inside my own heart, and it's time to choose myself again, I think I've lost my way. And I'm trying not to think that I'm horrifically doomed and trapped just because I ended up back here again, surely hoping that things could be different, that they could love me, see me, hold me, help me, is a natural and common thing for any child of the world. It goes against every fiber in my body to reconcile the fact that the people who brought me into this world, who continue to try to keep me tethered to their hip, can't give me what I need, what I'm looking for. They never could, and I doubt they ever will (part of me remains completely, pathetically, ridiculously hopeful that maybe some day that will change, even though I know it probably won't.)
This was much longer than I anticipated, if you read this far it probably means that we're a little bit alike in our experiences. I'm so sorry for that. And I'm glad I'm not alone. I know that I'll probably need to find my way to EMDR, but first I think I've got to prioritize getting myself to safety. I'm thinking about packing up what stuff I have and finding a place to WWOOF. Does anyone have any positive experiences? I'm hoping that by immersing myself in nature and learning to tend with and move with the land I can hopefully begin to recover some of what I've lost, or what I've never had to begin with, love. A deep, safe, unconditional love, with the Earth. I'm terrified that I'll find myself in another unsafe situation, I feel like a traumatized little child (newsflash in some ways I totally am!) and that going to live on a farm with total strangers is a terrible idea. But growing up next to total strangers called m o m and d a d who still have an unrelenting ability to go through plastic water bottles like it's their job was probably much worse than living with people devoting to living with the land and growing their own food, cultivating life, and love, could it really be worse than being in a situation and gaslighting myself into believing that under this roof, with my parents, is where I belong?
IDK. With love <3
P.S. sometimes I imagine that my life is a video game, a quest of sorts, it makes it slightly more manageable, until I fathom that if this truly were a game I probably would have stopped playing a long time ago.
submitted by Overzealous_Potato to CPTSD [link] [comments]
This is more or less my origin story, my introduction to this community, my attempt to reintegrate my loving parts back into presence. Part rant, part reaching out for community and connection, *no advice*,
Here's the situation as best I can describe it in less than an hour before losing all energy for the rest of the day, week, month, who knows.
My CPTSD and the horrid collection of trauma abuse and neglect that I experienced only started unfolding for me after I finished graduate school and was living on my own. It was then that I started experiencing physical and emotional safety for some of the first times ever. I had starting going to therapy re: perfectionism (oh how I thought it was so simple) and slowly, gradually, then all of a sudden, traumatic memories, the flashbacks, the nightmares, goodness gracious the nightmares, I crashed, physically, emotionally, socially. I had built up some savings, enough of a cushion to quit my job and continue going to therapy for the next few months while I figured out what was next (yes, thank you privilege). What was next was more therapy, and dedicating my life to slowly trying to unwind and rebuild. Fast forward 2 years I feel like I'm back where I started.
I was the "good boy" growing up. Poster child in my community. Front pages of newspapers. Valedictorian. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to (which amounted to self-erasure, self-harm, calling it love, I didn't know what a boundary was until around this time, which explained the utter lack of them in all areas of my life and the crippling fear of emotional intimacy that I could never really explain to other people or even myself despite watching it wreak havoc on my nervous system. So I did all the things. Sometimes I wish I was more aware of the neglect and abuse like the younger people I see on here, and then I remember that just because my journey looks different, because I had my college paid for by my parents, because I kept the pain so far repressed that even I was completely unaware of what lay beneath my 3AM nights in the library, running from romantic relationships after the slightest hint of connection appears, it doesn't make my story or anybody else's more, or less, painful, or valid, for that matter. It wasn't safe to see how my world rested on a house of cards, I wasn't safe nor ready to face that, I'm still not really safe and I'm scared that I'm still not ready, even though I know that isn't totally true and that abuse like this is specifically designed to make me feel totally incapable of wiping my own ass without calling for my mom's approval or guidance.
I often feel totally unable to explain my situation or feelings to anybody else, so I haven't really, and deny myself the community that I know I need to get myself into a healthier place, physically, socially, emotionally, spiritually, all the things. It's also incredibly difficult bringing any of this to relationships that I had built up prior to unearthing all this pain and trauma considering it feels true that I had spent my entire life learning and replicating how to give myself a faux love, a faux sense of belonging and safety that masked a deep sense of self-hatred and misery. It was the only way to preserve my holy image of my parents, people that I grew up revering, tattoos that I marked on my body honoring my relationship with my mother that sometimes now feels like a brand, but that I am trying to hold space for that child inside of me that had zero, (my gaslighting mind questions, "zero? really?") yes, zero chance of growing up in the environment I did with an intact self-esteem. It's one thing coming to terms with my own complex trauma and patterns of abuse and the shame and the unlearning and all the things, it's another thing trying to write it all down, or talk it out, when I really have never felt comfortable using words to express my feelings, since whenever I did I was gaslit beyond recognition to the point that I, like many of you, am trying so god damn hard to unlearn the self-gaslighting, compassionately of course. My world revolved around my parents as it was designed to, so naturally, when these things started to come to the surface, who else but them would I bring them to, hoping that surely they'd be able to hold me and my feelings in the way I needed. What a slap in the fucking throat. I'm learning to express my feelings and my story through art, or poetry, abstract and splatter paintings, or movement (If anyone wants to try...I've started making hideous paintings, in colors that look like nothing ordinary at first glance, or to the watchful eyes of my parents. Imagine gray and black streaks in weird and random blobs everywhere. Gross, right? Nothing noteworthy? Something my parents can look at, satisfying their deep need to ingest, consume, salivate over any and everything that comes forth from my existence. So I take pictures of whatever I paint, then I edit the crap out of them, changing the colors entirely, the grays become purple, the yellows deep blue, the blacks become as dark as the midnight sky and the speckles light up like stars and suddenly it's like an entire universe comes to life underneath whatever is on the surface, in those moments I feel a sense of connection with anybody who has ever turned to art, or quilting, to express identity, community, love, from within an abusive or oppressive relationship that at times I still constantly trick myself into believing that living with my parents (as I'm doing right now) is wonderful, is safe, is loving, is where I need to be, even as I type all of this out. With art it's like my parents can see whatever I've painted, but me and only me has access to the real art, whatever is on the canvas for them to see is a distraction. And I feel like a piece of fucking ungrateful shit for hiding it from them, and I'm learning to love those parts of me too.
I've been losing, or walking away, or both, from so many of the relationships I've built up to this point and when people express confusion about what I'm going through or set boundaries for themselves, I don't even have the energy to try to explain. Because again, how do you explain to someone who has solid ground under their feet the pain of seeing the entire foundation underneath you crumble, becoming a floating body through space, through dreams, completely altering one's perception and experience of time and space. It feels like it'd take a lifetime explaining to non CPTSD people or people who aren't incredibly compassionate, present, radical, who understand the experiences of feeling completely on the outside of society sometimes even while being right in the middle of it. It feels like it'd take a lifetime and I can validate that now knowing that it actually has been lifetimes, numerous lifetimes, multiple generations, centuries of colonialization, of orchestrated attempts to sever entire continents of people from their ancestral lines and ways of operating in harmony and connection with the world, with the earth, to get to where I'm at now. I feel like I can empathize with that experience, of being totally severed from what would be healing for me and learning to identify it as the poison.
I newly identify as queer, which is confusing enough without CPTSD. Lord, the imposter syndrome. I'm trying to reconcile the reality of living in a capitalist cisheteropatriarchal white supremasociety, living in and forging my identity within a gender binary that totallyyyyyyyyy fucked me up. Born amab, dad's world revolves around a sport, I was always referred to as and praised for being, playing, moving like a "coaches kid." Not to mention, I grew up at a school for 18yo "boys" only. And I played the part exceptionally. I've never watched High School Musical fully, but I imagine part of my story would be like if Troy Bolton came out years later, as queer, or maybe trans, or maybe they didn't know, but they knew that it felt like their life had never really been his, theirs, to begin with, that they felt so disconnected from the person that walked through the halls of that high school that they don't even remember the lyrics to the songs that they song. How frustrating it is having people say, "You don't remember that? Come on, remember? You have to!" Fucking christ the difficulty of coming to terms with this fucking brutal, tortorous, and beautiful condition. I am both so relieved to have finally found the thing that can make all the puzzle pieces finally click together. The mysterious ailments. The constant injuries. The pain. The feeling deep down that something, surely, is off, despite the feeling that everyone, most importantly myself, trying to convince me that I'm making it up, that my parents love me, that they see how much my parents love me, even if they express it in ____ ways. Sometimes I have grace and compassion for my parents because I look at them like babies, stuck in their own self-sabatoging loops of hatred and self-abuse, and it allows me to have compassion for them, yet it doesn't explain why I continue to live with them, continue to deny myself, starve myself, starving myself even while being well-fed is some of the most difficult shit to come to terms with especially while doing so from inside the family unit that taught me how to hate myself. I have compassion for my parents because I know they were taught to hate themselves too, except I'm becoming increasingly more concerned that what I'm mistaking compassion for is actually me making excuses for letting them continue to gaslight, manipulate, or coax me into staying in this dysfunctional (to put it lightly) family system with gifts that have strings attached, despite how much my mother claims her love is unconditional. It makes me sad to see her love herself this way, and when I say love I mean hate. And when I say hate I'm using it as a verb. I'm tired of hating (verb) myself in the name of love.
So how the fuck is a person who might possibly identify as trans supposed to come into their selves when it feels like my entire world up to this point has been predicated upon some falsehood. A matrix. Trying to explain even a teaspoon of this to anybody who doesn't have CPTSD or hasn't done deep intergenerational healing work or who isn't trauma informed is...well about as difficult as this CPTSD survivor trying to answer a "tell me about yourself" question. you may know the feeling. Where the f*** does one even begin when every night and every day new memories are coming to the surface? I feel like CPTSD survivors stories begin long before our birth, or maybe it's what I tell myself to sleep at night, that yes my abusers are part of the issue, and it's also true that now I am too a part of the issue, carrying on my parents legacy for them, carrying on the self-hatred of their parents, and I ultimately hold the systems responsible that made my family of creatives to take the paint brushes that we could've used to craft massive, intricate, colorful paintings, and instead began painting a life-size prison to force ourselves inside.
I feel like CPTSD survivors are uniquely positioned alongside other actively erased and oppressed communities because of the ways we have been force fed and in turn many of us learned to internalize the hatred that racist capitalism wants us to inherit, a complete abandonment of self in devotion to some empire that would have us feel guilty for even daring to imagine a world more beautiful than the one we've lived in our whole lives, which can feel like an internal dumpster fire despite people within the crab-bucket claiming that the family that we have that is hurting us is all we'd ever need (or all we deserve). I'm learning to love my CPTSD and this community as a form of resistance. If not for my CPTSD how else might my body tell me that something isn't right and that we're trying to heal. But why do we have to do this work? It's so unfair. To not ask to be born in this world and then be handed this pile of ____ (insert your fav adjective) is ridiculous, and it's unfair, and I don't want to do the work, at all, but then I know deep down that if I want to love myself in any capacity that resembles something like safety, I have to. this is humbling, and exhausting, and humiliating, embarrassing, I have so much hope in the people here because of the burden I know I've carried on my shoulders, walking a path that is sure to leave me blacksheeped by my family and knowing that I still must carry on, anyway, for me, for my family (birth or chosen, even though there is part of me that wants to unalive or hurt myself just to hurt my parents, since I know they see me as an extension of them and not a real person, maybe then they'd understand. Maybe if I plucked my own heart out of my own chest it would hurt them too, like a voodoo doll, and yet I know that I don't deserve that treatment for myself despite how much it makes me salivate. For 26 years I found my identity in the internal gaslighting, the self-abandonment, the not trusting of my own gut instincts because of how I were treated so long ago before I could remember. My story feels so horrifying that I'm scared to choose myself because of how painful I know it will be.
Like I said, I went NC from my parents and started this journey 2 years ago. A lot of shit went down, and I found myself back here again, under their embrace, often unaware of how terrible and inhumane the conditions I'm living in are, despite however neatly wrapped and gifted they might be. I've told myself "I might as well get free housing from the people that fucked me up, if it's gotta be like this, might as well let them pay for my groceries, pay for my college, it's the least they could do, after all, I was their responsibility and I feel like they royally fucked that up, so it's the least they could do, and they're children in adult bodies, so why not let them feel okay about theirselves as parents for providing me with a bed to sleep in. But I'm getting back to the point of recognizing that a bed to sleep in and conditional love is not something that I feel comfortable with. I deserve more. I deserve to feel safe. I deserve to go to the bathroom and not have my parents be able to hear the trickling of my pee from the other side of the wall. I deserve to masturbate without fearing that my parents will walk into my room completely unannounced at any point. My parents are living in this misery and it's a misery I inherited and placed upon myself. And I don't want that anymore, I need love and I need safety and I need connection, to feel safe, to begin the recovery work (I hope I'm not totally restarting, like it feels) of trying to meet myself again. I fear I've pushed myself so far down that I'll never be able to meet them again and that scares the shit out of me, and I hope that anytime I come to this stream I'm being guided by love, by the part of me that knows deep down the things that happened to me over and over and over again, yes, really were that bad, it's why I don't remember anything and partly explains why I feel like I'm literally starting an entire new life, like a video game that I'm starting a new game in for the first time, with no manuals. I feel like a baby being given the keys to car, left alone in this vast world to try and figure out where the fuck to begin. The world I was born into exposed me, unfairly, to all the systemic suffering in the world, and then I was neglected, left as a child to go and try to sleep so that I could wake up for elementary school the next day having just watched Law & Order SVU for the 4th straight night that week alongside my parents, my young brain internalizing how terrifying the world could be, how terrifying I was being told that the world was. I'm white, and unfortunately my parents don't recognize how that doesn't mean we are unscathed from white supremacy. I was exposed to horrific torture and neglected as if a child didn't have emotional needs.
I feel myself starting to get a bit rambly, so I think I'll end this here. I'm writing this from inside the lion's den (my parents), even though I think the den is now healthy and alive inside my own heart, and it's time to choose myself again, I think I've lost my way. And I'm trying not to think that I'm horrifically doomed and trapped just because I ended up back here again, surely hoping that things could be different, that they could love me, see me, hold me, help me, is a natural and common thing for any child of the world. It goes against every fiber in my body to reconcile the fact that the people who brought me into this world, who continue to try to keep me tethered to their hip, can't give me what I need, what I'm looking for. They never could, and I doubt they ever will (part of me remains completely, pathetically, ridiculously hopeful that maybe some day that will change, even though I know it probably won't.)
This was much longer than I anticipated, if you read this far it probably means that we're a little bit alike in our experiences. I'm so sorry for that. And I'm glad I'm not alone. I know that I'll probably need to find my way to EMDR, but first I think I've got to prioritize getting myself to safety. I'm thinking about packing up what stuff I have and finding a place to WWOOF. Does anyone have any positive experiences? I'm hoping that by immersing myself in nature and learning to tend with and move with the land I can hopefully begin to recover some of what I've lost, or what I've never had to begin with, love. A deep, safe, unconditional love, with the Earth. I'm terrified that I'll find myself in another unsafe situation, I feel like a traumatized little child (newsflash in some ways I totally am!) and that going to live on a farm with total strangers is a terrible idea. But growing up next to total strangers called m o m and d a d who still have an unrelenting ability to go through plastic water bottles like it's their job was probably much worse than living with people devoting to living with the land and growing their own food, cultivating life, and love, could it really be worse than being in a situation and gaslighting myself into believing that under this roof, with my parents, is where I belong?
IDK. With love <3
P.S. sometimes I imagine that my life is a video game, a quest of sorts, it makes it slightly more manageable, until I fathom that if this truly were a game I probably would have stopped playing a long time ago.
2024.04.30 23:39 Exciting-Attorney-11 Booked!! June 5 (and a question)
I had my first consultation yesterday and 2 today. I booked a surgery date for June 5!!!! I am so excited. I know we all fixate on cup sizes, but I kind of told the doctor I just want them smaller and perkier. I had some pictures as examples. During the pre op appointment, around 2 weeks before, I’m going to go over it more, and before the surgery when he’s making me.
I’m thinking of using adjectives like more athletic and fit looking, and also more pics of them in clothes like in dresses or tank tops, etc. does that sound good???
Please help!!!!
submitted by Exciting-Attorney-11 to Reduction [link] [comments]
I’m thinking of using adjectives like more athletic and fit looking, and also more pics of them in clothes like in dresses or tank tops, etc. does that sound good???
Please help!!!!
2024.04.29 02:54 IMighthavefuckedup97 UPDATE 2: AITA for telling my best friend why I wasn't attending his wedding?
Welp, its been a while, sorry y’all for taking so long to get this update out, been absolutely swamped at work putting out fires with my hair on fire for the last 6ish month, so here the cliff notes version of the wedding and some post wedding shit.
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alexs house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me.working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaid who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus mount where I cot the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think Ive been able to piece together roughly what went down
**Why wasn’t I the best man?**
I think this had more to do with Stellas parents Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a bias wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much sand just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stellas younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stellas parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely inmates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern women but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
**Why does Stella not like me?**
I have two main guesses here:
And as it turns out I’m not the only person in the wedding who isn’t super fond of Stella, found my flock so to speak
**Post wedding shit**
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sash where were slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stellas already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, its mostly baby pictures, but its a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
TLDR: Nothing really interesting happened, hopefully things are looking up
submitted by IMighthavefuckedup97 to u/IMighthavefuckedup97 [link] [comments]
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alexs house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me.working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaid who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus mount where I cot the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think Ive been able to piece together roughly what went down
**Why wasn’t I the best man?**
I think this had more to do with Stellas parents Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a bias wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much sand just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stellas younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stellas parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely inmates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern women but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
**Why does Stella not like me?**
I have two main guesses here:
- I swear, a lot, I tend to forget most people don’t use the work fuck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner Since I was working the wedding and in I was on my best behavior and cut down on my swearing by a good 90%, which led me to noticing that any time swear, or anyone for that matter curses, Stella has a little grimace/cringe reaction. Stella herself also rarely curses, and if she does its something pretty small like “hell” or “dammit”, followed by a quick apology. It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that in spite of my generally “unprofessional” behavior I hold a fairly professional job, the dissonance can bother folks.
- Politics, and before people freak out, I’m somewhere between a democratic socialist and socialist on the political spectrum, I am a far cry from conservative,, but for Stella that’s not far enough left, as from what I can tell she’s either a tankie or tankie adjacent. This has been more or less confirmed to me based on her social media engagement relating to the major geopolitical events of the last 6 months or so. Probably exacerbated by the fact that my job involves working in geopolitics so I am parts of the “repressive imperialist western system”.
And as it turns out I’m not the only person in the wedding who isn’t super fond of Stella, found my flock so to speak
**Post wedding shit**
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sash where were slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stellas already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, its mostly baby pictures, but its a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
TLDR: Nothing really interesting happened, hopefully things are looking up
2024.04.29 02:38 IMighthavefuckedup97 UPDATE 2: AITA for telling my best friend why I wasn't attending his wedding?
Welp, its been a while, sorry y’all for taking so long to get this update out, been absolutely swamped at work putting out fires with my hair on fire for the last 6ish month, so here the cliff notes version of the wedding and some post wedding shit.
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alexs house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me.working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaid who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus mount where I cot the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think Ive been able to piece together roughly what went down
Why wasn’t I the best man?
I think this had more to do with Stellas parents Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a bias wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much sand just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stellas younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stellas parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely inmates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern women but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
Why does Stella not like me?
I have two main guesses here:
Post wedding shit
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sash where were slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stellas already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, its mostly baby pictures, but its a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
submitted by IMighthavefuckedup97 to AITAH [link] [comments]
-lead up was boring, shitton of emailing back and forth between me, Stella, other wedding people, venues, vendors, etc
-Me and Alex had some pretty deep conversations over the week and reaffirmed the importance of our continued friendship
-Shit was really fucking awkward the first night we were there for dinner nil, especially considering both Alex’s stepsister Sam (32F) and Stella younger sister and MoH Diana (29F) were already staying there, (we stayed at an Airbnb within walking distance of Alexs house). I went into event work mode pretty quick and that smoothed things out right quick and put Stella at ease.
-I spent most of the lead up to the wedding either at the ceremony/reception site doing liaison/set up (gaffing, running cables, setting up monitors, hanging and focusing, building shit etc) or running around picking shit/people/shitty people up with Sam
-My GF, Alice (29F), was kinda miffed about the whole thing, she’s never worked a wedding before, just attended, so she expected it to be like 50% working 50% vacation, when it ended up being more likely 90% me.working and 10% vacation. She spent most of her time helping Alex out with wedding support related shit or gaming on my laptop when she gassed out or got too overwhelmed.
-Wedding was a fun mess, tons of unrelated drama, Stella sure knows how to design a beautiful ceremony and plan a fucking party, I’ll give her credit for that, didn’t get to enjoy much of it since I was working the wedding with a few other people in the wedding party more than attending, but c’est la vie. Ceremony took fucking forever though, felt terrible for all the bridesmaid who had to wear heels through that shit.
-Unfortunately there was no gotcha moment or come to Jesus mount where I cot the full story as to why SHTMFF, but based on what I observed while working the wedding I think Ive been able to piece together roughly what went down
Why wasn’t I the best man?
I think this had more to do with Stellas parents Ken and Karen (60’s), than her, although she still doesn’t like me, my main reasoning:
-Ken and Karen were paying for the majority of the wedding, more than Stella, Alex, and Alex’s parent combined
-Alex and Stella sketched out pretty early what they wanted the wedding to look like, throughout the process Stella made several significant changes out of the proverbial blue (EX: they originally agreed on a smaller wedding something like 50-60 people, then one day Stella wanted a bias wedding). Alex didn’t really care all that much sand just figured she changed her mind, he just somehow missed that most of these changes occurred after Stella either had a phone call or in person meeting with her parents (which is on brand for him)
-Her parents were very standoffish towards me (to be expected, feelings mutual) and made a lot of, frankly weird comments about Stellas younger, totally not a cokehead, brother Chase (23M), often times in comparisons between us that flattered him (and kept insisting he was “perfect best man material”)
-Alex has barely met Stellas parents, maybe a dozen times over the last 5 years, every time they visit for the holidays Stella has them leave early for whatever reason and Stella rarely inmates calls with them
-Stella acts really fucking weird around her parents. Around everyone else she’s a badass modern women but around her parents she gets super meek (EX: her mom asked her to go drive to some specific store over an hour away to get her a specific food item in the middle of wedding planning shit, and she just did it without any protest and left the rest of the wedding party in a lurch. When she got back three hours later her mom took like two bites then threw it away). If I hadn’t seen this shit with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, it was that bizarre.
-Lots of other innocuous shit that individually means nothing but when combined to together provide a decent amount of circumstantial evidence
-So here’s what I think happened, roughly: Ken and Karen wanted Chase to be the best man in the wedding, Alex really wanted me to be the best man. Rather than make a choice Stella appeased both parties telling them what they wanted to hear while making no actual decision. The longer it went on the more complex the lying got, when Alex had his breakdown Stella saw a way to get out from under her Gordian knot of lies by taking advantage of the crisis. Unfortunately for her Alex came to his senses before the wedding, started asking questions, and when push finally came to shove she chose her relationship over whatever the fuck is going with the family, much to their apparent chagrin.
Why does Stella not like me?
I have two main guesses here:
- I swear, a lot, I tend to forget most people don’t use the work fuck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner Since I was working the wedding and in I was on my best behavior and cut down on my swearing by a good 90%, which led me to noticing that any time swear, or anyone for that matter curses, Stella has a little grimace/cringe reaction. Stella herself also rarely curses, and if she does its something pretty small like “hell” or “dammit”, followed by a quick apology. It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that in spite of my generally “unprofessional” behavior I hold a fairly professional job, the dissonance can bother folks.
- Politics, and before people freak out, I’m somewhere between a democratic socialist and socialist on the political spectrum, I am a far cry from conservative,, but for Stella that’s not far enough left, as from what I can tell she’s either a tankie or tankie adjacent. This has been more or less confirmed to me based on her social media engagement relating to the major geopolitical events of the last 6 months or so. Probably exacerbated by the fact that my job involves working in geopolitics so I am parts of the “repressive imperialist western system”.
Post wedding shit
-Alex and Stella had a healthy baby girl, named Iris, me and Sam are the godparents.
-Me and Alex have been talking a lot more (for whatever reason he asks me for childcare tips, like bruh, I’m just as lost as you here), and have set up a weekly gaming sash where were slowly slogging through BG3 with Sam and Matthew
-AFAIK Alex and Stella are in couples counseling, which seems to be helping from my vantage point, Stella was weirdly against it, but Alex pushed for it so he could be a better husband to her, and she relented
-AFAIK Stellas already back at work and on most of her pre-baby schedule
-Alex’s stepsister Sam has been checking in on them periodically and according to her there’s no major red flags atm
-Stella actually texts/emails me stuff now, its mostly baby pictures, but its a step in the right direction and I appreciate it (I send cat pictures in response)
Hopefully this is the last update, my life got far too interesting for that month and with my current workload I doubt I could mentally handle more drama.
TLDR: Nothing really interesting happened, hopefully things are looking up
2024.04.28 17:04 RawhideJohnston [Demil] LOT. 009R Regular Straight 13oz KOREAN denim
![[Demil] LOT. 009R Regular Straight 13oz KOREAN denim](https://a.thumbs.redditmedia.com/-LdTKgF8HYaG0GHf6hWBCtvUamec7UnsXMxcp_7keG4.jpg "[Demil] LOT. 009R Regular Straight 13oz KOREAN denim") | I legit never saw anyone talking about this young brand, so here I go. submitted by RawhideJohnston to rawdenim [link] [comments] a fresh shipment from Korea! Demil means \"demilitarized\". it takes inspiration from war surplus wears with modern and functional twist https://preview.redd.it/ci93od4fc8xc1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86f97ee03812b34eecc45b1f06b1b437d8058f0b I decided to pick up this pair of Demil, because no one ever talks about it here in the US. I am actually flying out to Korea in May and my original plan was to check out Demil's flagship store/factory; but when I contacted the CEO, he said this is the last pair of 009R...which kinda made me swipe instantly. 009R is Demil's signature/flagship model. So naturally, Demil gave a lot of thought about small details and porportion. Everything is cut and sewed to perfection. When I spoke to the CEO, he said the fit of 009R is similar to a vintage Levi's 501(1947 and 1955 to be more specific). But this pair drops straighter down the leg. The fabric is milled in Korea and it is very limited quantity and it's sold out everywhere. I have spoken to the owner and he said Demil is released Mark.II of their flagship model in min November with improved fit and details. Demil on the Left vs. Stevenson Overalls Co on the Right Stevenson Overalls was my daily driver for the entirety of 2023. I have a big ass and thigh, so a pair designed for a normal human proportion just don't cut it sadly. I love my Stevenson. It is thick enough to block the wind during cold winter days and it's roomy enough for some ventilation. It is made out of 13oz Zimbabwe cotton, which means it is on the softer side. Some weirdos say Zimbabwe cotton feels like pajamas after you break it in, but that shit is copium. srsly, shut the fuck up with that weirdo shit. I have over 10 pairs for raw denim and it never gets that soft(I just keep saying one more denim. help me.) Demil vs. Stevenson If my eyes don't deceive me, Demil used 3 different thicknesses of threads. On areas that see the most stress, it uses thicker threads. Stevenson uses the same thread for everything. Another example of Demil using a thicker gauge. Also double stitching the crotch area to contain my huge balls. Stevenson. doo doo stinky. You can probably notice from the pictures that Demil is less textured and rough compare to Stevenson. Demil's Korean milled Cotton is 100% way more soft and comfortable compare to Zimbabwe Cotton. How comfortable you might ask? I actually keep it on while I'm working on my PC at my home. I actually reach for my Demil when I wake up, because I just can't wait until it sees some fade. https://preview.redd.it/vwuchvp4g8xc1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ee434bce67ec4d3ff84942fae103075131b982d1 Stevenson Overalls. Great fit imo. comfortable, roomy, rough and doesn't stick to your skin! https://preview.redd.it/1v46d08cg8xc1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f0791fdb441eeaac8f50e8b61ef009a234dae5cc Demil 099R. Straighter legs, less fuller seat and thighs but still incredibly comfortable. What people don't talk about it enough when fading a pair of raw denim is comfort. Thickness and texture(loose weave and all that good stuff) are both very important, but wearability also take a big part of fading. And Demil definitely takes the top cake when it comes to comfort and detail department. Adjectives that describe Demil 009R 13oz
Anyway, it's a great denim. It is very comfortable. It's just kinda inaccessible. This is not Demil's only denim. They also make multiple different fits with fabrics sourced from Kojima, Okayama. For being such a young brand, they really nailed it. I don't know how to end a review, k bye. |
2024.04.27 19:50 mephisto_8 Cruising Willy Park for playmates (a Trivia Crack World review)
 | https://preview.redd.it/yvy6zquv52xc1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=5eec709d06118cec040e14bcd56310300bc93c07 submitted by mephisto_8 to OculusQuest [link] [comments] It’s hard to believe that the creators of Trivia Crack World VR don’t know what they’re up to. They’re an Argentinian company developing for a primarily North American audience, so it’s just possible that they’ve missed the connotations of their mascot’s name for the rest of the English-speaking world. But I have a hunch that every time an update is pushed – announcing a new ‘Willy shop’ or other Willy enhancements – there are a bunch of developers giggling like schoolboys in an office somewhere in Buenos Aires. Apparently Trivia Crack has been around for 10 years already as a mobile app, but there is now a VR version in the App Lab that is gaining a solid community. The premise of the VR version is that you head to ‘Willy Park’ looking for action in either the form of solo games or group play. The picture above shows one of the park’s trivia statues, representing the science category in the form of a ‘test tube’ (obviously). I should point out I’m a fan of the game, by the way. Solo mode can be gratingly gimmicky, as every question forces you to answer by shooting the right alien, trying to hook the correct fish with an unwieldy fishing rod, or pouring water into the correct pipe in a tangled network that leads to the right answer, etc. But the new public game mode has far fewer of those gimmicky rounds and instead offers some good, solid, continuous multiple-choice trivia that you answer on a pad in front of you. You’re seated around a table with up to four others, including the park’s mascot and host (the developers aren’t going to miss an opportunity to make you play with Willy). Other players drop in from mobile devices or laptops around the world and are represented by an avatar that mostly sits robotically still and occasionally looks around, but when other VR players join the room it can be a fun immersive experience. VR avatars can move naturally, wave at other players, pick things up (I’ve just discovered you can scrunch the instruction sheet into a ball and throw it), and chat. I’ve had some lovely conversations with a relaxed and amiable bunch of people from all over, including a semi-retired journalist in Toronto, a truck driver in the US, and an Italian couple in Venice arguing over whose turn it was to play. Interestingly, the Italians were playing in their own language and were getting a different set of questions from those of us playing in English. Apparently, the Italian question database skews heavily towards knowledge of the bible. Spanish and other languages are also available. Playing in English can sometimes feel like answering in a foreign language. You often need to read the question a few times to work out what it probably wanted to ask, and there doesn’t seem to be any editorial review or oversight of the question database. Often, bits of other answer options or questions are pasted in the wrong place, or you’ll be asked a True/False question then presented with a range of options, none of which are ‘True’ or ‘False’. (Question: Warsaw is the Poland’s capital? Answers: Warsaw, Ottowa, Moscow, Lisbon.) To be fair, the game is still in the App Lab and this may be one of the things that will be reviewed before migrating to the Meta store. When the questions do achieve grammatical sense, they’re frequently targeted at a US audience (Who plays left-back for the Idaho Badgers?) You can tell you’re playing with a mobile device or laptop user from the icon above their head, but they’re also likely to be playing with an randomly generated guest username. The guest naming convention has turned into a surprisingly fun feature of the game. All guest names go They recently made the game free to play, which has inevitably opened it up to an influx of squeakers – unsupervised younger kids who mainly want to scream, swear and annoy other players. Thankfully though, Trivia Crack World seems to attract a much friendlier and nicer crowd that you get in other free games, and the younger ones that stick around seem to be genuinely interested in playing the game. I do recommend the game as a low-commitment way of relaxing for a while in VR. It would be nice to see more of the folk from this sub there. It could turn into quite a strong social space as well as a game. https://preview.redd.it/gm8gxkbc72xc1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44dfb78fe5be7629e20be6d2a3132f43be0554a8 https://preview.redd.it/ae39wvqp72xc1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26eb40ad8d82c2a0ba2ba68bf774f327f877a1f3 https://preview.redd.it/zgbk189u72xc1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1765e9249ece0757413f6a2765df3520de6b7e0 https://preview.redd.it/63fnu4vw72xc1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ec52cd39e33bb7934c42e047bdc599c70fdb45b5 https://preview.redd.it/lbdxuoqx72xc1.jpg?width=1849&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36ccb2f39dba410aae7443deeb5565feb44f12b3 |
2024.04.26 12:43 yum314 31 [F4M] #UK #Online looking for a mutual connection
Hi, today is my first time posting to reddit dating subs and I’m a little nervous. I hope any messages I get are friendly and SFW, I’ll be the same in return :) I’m a 31 year old woman (nearly 32) living in the midlands in the UK. I work, I absolutely love animals, and I’m very introverted
I can be very quiet in groups, I might be autistic, and it takes me a while to open up to people, idk why, I’m trying to work on it. I’m relatively girly in how I dress in that I like light make up and dresses, I’m pretty smiley and laugh a lot :). Nice adjectives people have used to describe me have included sweet, lovely and genuine
Here’s a link to a google drive folder with a photo and video of me. Sorry the video is so awkward, but I wanted to provide an accurate picture of myself and unfortunately I am that awkward 😅
I was in an LTR that ended a few months ago, and I wanted to try to find someone on reddit rather than the apps, as I tend to go for introverted nerds like me :). But extroverted nerds are great too
What I’m looking for: a single man between the ages of 27-42, preferably also living in the UK. I don’t have a physical “type” and for me it depends more on the person. I don’t care if you’re short (I’m 5’8”/172cm though), bald, chubby, disabled, trans etc. In terms of personal qualities, I love intelligence, kindness, and humour. I also love guys with calming presences. I probably won’t send the first message, so if interested please do, I am excited to hear from you :)
submitted by yum314 to R4R30Plus [link] [comments]
I can be very quiet in groups, I might be autistic, and it takes me a while to open up to people, idk why, I’m trying to work on it. I’m relatively girly in how I dress in that I like light make up and dresses, I’m pretty smiley and laugh a lot :). Nice adjectives people have used to describe me have included sweet, lovely and genuine
Here’s a link to a google drive folder with a photo and video of me. Sorry the video is so awkward, but I wanted to provide an accurate picture of myself and unfortunately I am that awkward 😅
I was in an LTR that ended a few months ago, and I wanted to try to find someone on reddit rather than the apps, as I tend to go for introverted nerds like me :). But extroverted nerds are great too
What I’m looking for: a single man between the ages of 27-42, preferably also living in the UK. I don’t have a physical “type” and for me it depends more on the person. I don’t care if you’re short (I’m 5’8”/172cm though), bald, chubby, disabled, trans etc. In terms of personal qualities, I love intelligence, kindness, and humour. I also love guys with calming presences. I probably won’t send the first message, so if interested please do, I am excited to hear from you :)
2024.04.26 06:33 Erwinblackthorn Writing Done Right: How a Sentence Is Formed
One of the biggest threats to writing these days is AI. Companies are now equipped with the ability to write out entire novels in minutes by inputting their ideas into a computer and having it crap out the entire story from a collection of previous stories recorded from the past. As time goes on, it’s believed that writers are going to be a thing of the past. That is… unless we fix ourselves and become better than AI. Anyone can have an idea and prompt it into a program, but it takes a true writer to actually write in a way people want to read.
We’re not going to be able to do this until we get the simple sentence down like a science.
A sentence is the building block of a story, beginning with a capital letter and ending with a punctuation mark. We’re so used to reading all day, everyday that we rarely recognize when a sentence begins and when it ends. In fact, I would be surprised if anyone could say how many sentences are in each one of my paragraphs, or even WHY we make paragraphs to begin with. This lack of the basics is why writers are failing left and right. We’re so stuck in the habit of doing things and saying things, without knowing why we do it or how it started being a thing.
When I began writing stories, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just doing stuff. Waited for the right mood, waited for things to feel right, wrote it down, crossed my fingers, got roasted or ignored. This is the most common situation among writers because of how none of us are trained in the act of writing, despite finishing high school and usually going to creative writing classes. Going to college to learn from professors who never wrote anything is like going to the business class of someone who never owned a business.
If it wasn’t legally labeled a college class, we’d call it a scam session.
Before starting your massive journey of 700 pages into a book nobody would read(which would be about 10,500 sentences), consider practicing how to make a basic sentence. The most basic you could make it. Figure out why the extra words are even considered an option in the first place. Instead of saying “she caught the ball with her hands”, why not say “she caught the ball” or even “she caught” or “caught” or “she”? When does the sentence stop being a sentence?
Figuring out the element of your sentence is critical to creating the most powerful sentences possible, as well as figuring out what people want to see from a sentence. There is also the way they flow from one to the other, how they connect in a paragraph with each other, and how they can appear more powerful when standing on their own. This is all due to the main point of an idea, which is discussed in a subject. As long as you have a point and hold it, you’re on your way to keeping the reader glued to your point along with you.
Holding your point simply means you have an independent clause, with a clause being a subject and a predicate. You can have something as simple as “he ran” and that is a clause by itself. These independent clauses can be connected by a connective word to then include a dependent or subordinate clause. There is also the phrase that is absent of any subject-verb component, such as “very nice” or “sexy time”. However, people get confused by phrases, even within context, because most of the sentence is omitted.
When someone like Borat is saying “very nice” he is omitting most of the sentence, which would be something like “This event occurring at this particular moment is… very nice!” Realizing that you could omit most of your sentences is a godsend, because readers hate it when writers are being too wordy when they don’t have to. That clause could have been shortened to “...because readers hate it”, but I wanted to make myself into an example. Getting to the point faster should be the main focus, which is why we’re told to focus on active voices.
In a sentence, you have an object and a subject. Passive is when the subject is acted upon, while active is when the subject is doing the action. This change of focus is a change of importance, which is why we’re told to always do active voice when characters are involved. Passive means our characters are less meaningful and less important than the objects in their world, which I’m sure is not usually the case. Although, when it comes to symbolism, really ask yourself: is the object more important?
When King Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, which sounds more powerful?
“King Arthur pulled the sword from the stone.”
“The sword was pulled out of the stone by King Arthur.”
How about if random people were involved in the situation?
“The crowd gasped as they watched the sword come out of the stone.”
“The sword coming out of the stone made the crowd gasp.”
If you ask me, the main character is more important than the sword, BUT the sword is more important than random people. Sure, there are moments where it can be considered more clunky like “the gun barrel was stared down by the burglar” instead of “the burglar stared down the gun barrel”, but I would say the burglar is more important here. Honestly, it’s all about context, where it is in a story, and the type of tone you’re going for. Either way, passive is to make things move slower and active is to make things move faster. Moving faster is the goal when you’re trying to cause a narration and moving slower is what you do in order to describe things with more detail.
In storytelling, there are four elements to composition:
“To get away from the murderer, she ran to the nearest exit, frantically locking the door behind her.”
Ok, now we have a situation. Adjectives like “nearest” and “frantically” are giving us distance and emotion as description, the addition of a murderer as an object is exposition, and putting this all together with locking the door is a way to argue a form of escape. Now, you don’t need every sentence to be like this, but at the very least each paragraph must complete the cycle of composition to have the idea feel complete. If the paragraph keeps changing ideas and changing subjects in ways they don’t relate, then the reader is going to feel like the writer wasn’t paying attention to their own writing. At that point, the reader stops paying attention to mirror the hectic state of mind of the writer.
Your writing is to be fueled by clarity, not charity.
Notice how I received the idea of the murderer chasing a woman by starting with “she ran”. Most amateur writers are trying to be fancy with their descriptions first, and then they get to the point; maybe. This is caused by an emotional or visual desire from the writer, to paint a picture instead of telling a story. Overwhelming the reader with pointless details is why info dumps are so predominant but also putrid. This is the writer telling themselves the story as they channel the energy of the visualization, but they forgot that they’re writing a story that’s supposed to be narrated and hold a theme.
There are 4 types of sentences that you can use:
The goal of understanding how to form your sentences is based around making sure you have something to say to begin with. Something that the reader wants to see or hear as a theme. AI may be a threat to the people who are full of descriptions but not to the people who have a point. Theme being told through symbolism is why AI doesn’t recognize what the point is. Amateur writers tend to be coy and go “well, the theme is for you to determine what it is”, but the reader is not paying money to you for them to do YOUR job.
Focus on the subject. That is key. Count your syllables if you have to. That is how you create a beat for the reader to bop along to. Good writers may know how to get their point across, but great writers get their point across in less time with more clarity.
Aim for density of word usage, not abundance of words used.
submitted by Erwinblackthorn to TDLH [link] [comments]
We’re not going to be able to do this until we get the simple sentence down like a science.
A sentence is the building block of a story, beginning with a capital letter and ending with a punctuation mark. We’re so used to reading all day, everyday that we rarely recognize when a sentence begins and when it ends. In fact, I would be surprised if anyone could say how many sentences are in each one of my paragraphs, or even WHY we make paragraphs to begin with. This lack of the basics is why writers are failing left and right. We’re so stuck in the habit of doing things and saying things, without knowing why we do it or how it started being a thing.
When I began writing stories, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just doing stuff. Waited for the right mood, waited for things to feel right, wrote it down, crossed my fingers, got roasted or ignored. This is the most common situation among writers because of how none of us are trained in the act of writing, despite finishing high school and usually going to creative writing classes. Going to college to learn from professors who never wrote anything is like going to the business class of someone who never owned a business.
If it wasn’t legally labeled a college class, we’d call it a scam session.
Before starting your massive journey of 700 pages into a book nobody would read(which would be about 10,500 sentences), consider practicing how to make a basic sentence. The most basic you could make it. Figure out why the extra words are even considered an option in the first place. Instead of saying “she caught the ball with her hands”, why not say “she caught the ball” or even “she caught” or “caught” or “she”? When does the sentence stop being a sentence?
Figuring out the element of your sentence is critical to creating the most powerful sentences possible, as well as figuring out what people want to see from a sentence. There is also the way they flow from one to the other, how they connect in a paragraph with each other, and how they can appear more powerful when standing on their own. This is all due to the main point of an idea, which is discussed in a subject. As long as you have a point and hold it, you’re on your way to keeping the reader glued to your point along with you.
Holding your point simply means you have an independent clause, with a clause being a subject and a predicate. You can have something as simple as “he ran” and that is a clause by itself. These independent clauses can be connected by a connective word to then include a dependent or subordinate clause. There is also the phrase that is absent of any subject-verb component, such as “very nice” or “sexy time”. However, people get confused by phrases, even within context, because most of the sentence is omitted.
When someone like Borat is saying “very nice” he is omitting most of the sentence, which would be something like “This event occurring at this particular moment is… very nice!” Realizing that you could omit most of your sentences is a godsend, because readers hate it when writers are being too wordy when they don’t have to. That clause could have been shortened to “...because readers hate it”, but I wanted to make myself into an example. Getting to the point faster should be the main focus, which is why we’re told to focus on active voices.
In a sentence, you have an object and a subject. Passive is when the subject is acted upon, while active is when the subject is doing the action. This change of focus is a change of importance, which is why we’re told to always do active voice when characters are involved. Passive means our characters are less meaningful and less important than the objects in their world, which I’m sure is not usually the case. Although, when it comes to symbolism, really ask yourself: is the object more important?
When King Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, which sounds more powerful?
“King Arthur pulled the sword from the stone.”
“The sword was pulled out of the stone by King Arthur.”
How about if random people were involved in the situation?
“The crowd gasped as they watched the sword come out of the stone.”
“The sword coming out of the stone made the crowd gasp.”
If you ask me, the main character is more important than the sword, BUT the sword is more important than random people. Sure, there are moments where it can be considered more clunky like “the gun barrel was stared down by the burglar” instead of “the burglar stared down the gun barrel”, but I would say the burglar is more important here. Honestly, it’s all about context, where it is in a story, and the type of tone you’re going for. Either way, passive is to make things move slower and active is to make things move faster. Moving faster is the goal when you’re trying to cause a narration and moving slower is what you do in order to describe things with more detail.
In storytelling, there are four elements to composition:
- Argumentation
- Narration
- Description
- Exposition
“To get away from the murderer, she ran to the nearest exit, frantically locking the door behind her.”
Ok, now we have a situation. Adjectives like “nearest” and “frantically” are giving us distance and emotion as description, the addition of a murderer as an object is exposition, and putting this all together with locking the door is a way to argue a form of escape. Now, you don’t need every sentence to be like this, but at the very least each paragraph must complete the cycle of composition to have the idea feel complete. If the paragraph keeps changing ideas and changing subjects in ways they don’t relate, then the reader is going to feel like the writer wasn’t paying attention to their own writing. At that point, the reader stops paying attention to mirror the hectic state of mind of the writer.
Your writing is to be fueled by clarity, not charity.
Notice how I received the idea of the murderer chasing a woman by starting with “she ran”. Most amateur writers are trying to be fancy with their descriptions first, and then they get to the point; maybe. This is caused by an emotional or visual desire from the writer, to paint a picture instead of telling a story. Overwhelming the reader with pointless details is why info dumps are so predominant but also putrid. This is the writer telling themselves the story as they channel the energy of the visualization, but they forgot that they’re writing a story that’s supposed to be narrated and hold a theme.
There are 4 types of sentences that you can use:
- Simple (one independent clause)
- Compound (multiple independent clauses joined by coordinating conjunctions)
- Complex (one independent clause and one subordinate clause)
- Complex-compound (multiple independent clauses and one subordinate clause)
The goal of understanding how to form your sentences is based around making sure you have something to say to begin with. Something that the reader wants to see or hear as a theme. AI may be a threat to the people who are full of descriptions but not to the people who have a point. Theme being told through symbolism is why AI doesn’t recognize what the point is. Amateur writers tend to be coy and go “well, the theme is for you to determine what it is”, but the reader is not paying money to you for them to do YOUR job.
Focus on the subject. That is key. Count your syllables if you have to. That is how you create a beat for the reader to bop along to. Good writers may know how to get their point across, but great writers get their point across in less time with more clarity.
Aim for density of word usage, not abundance of words used.
2024.04.25 14:22 Living-Ad5550 How to tell my (22M) girlfriend (22F) that she looks absolutely beautiful as ever ??
The title looks simple but I will explain. We are in a long distance relationship for 2 years. We are both from conservative backgrounds. We both are really committed and adore each other despite the distance between us due to our current workplaces. We are both each other's first love. Now to the point: By physicality, she was lean always more or less and she was so beautiful. Since the last year, she has put on some weight (not workout or gym, basically due to work from home) and she thinks she has become ugly. On the other hand, in my eyes, she has become more beautiful than ever, I absolutely love her on growing curves when she sends me some of her pictures (normal pictures, nothing nude or exposing). In my eyes, she has become more graceful, more beautiful, hotter and sexier and every other adjective you can put on a woman's beauty. My question is, when she tells me with a pout face that she has become fat and looks ugly, how can I tell her romantically that it's quite opposite in my eyes ??
submitted by Living-Ad5550 to RelationshipIndia [link] [comments]
2024.04.25 14:21 Krishnak2423 Second (AI) Acacemic Offense Allegation; Please help
I was first charged with an acadmic offense in first year, to which i admitted guilt and got a 0 on the assignment.
Now in third year, my professor told me that my submission was flagged for an academic integrity issue.
Had a meeting with him, tried to convince him this was my own writing style a lot, but he still wasn't convinced and believes I used AI to write it. He said he will forward the case to the department but I think he meant the dean since it is my second offense.
But this is based completely on his judgment and him saying how the sentence structure is similar throughout.
It was a photo journal assignment (worth 25%), and I admitted to him that I asked ChatGPT for adjectives to describe the pictures and that's all.
Another point, I forgot to include the citations for the readings I referenced at the end but that was really because I completely forgot about it.
I even outlined some spelling mistakes and personal sentences through the paper but he hasn't replied to my email now.
How should I go about this?
This is stressing me out, I don't want to get suspended since this is my second ao, and I am an international student, i can't afford it, my parents would kill me.
Note: I did not use google docs to write the paper so can't do anything with that, and he didn't show me a turnitin report or anything, just that he THINKS I used AI.
The assignment was short and it asked us to write an intro and reflection for the photos we took and I have added it below for you to analyse, PLEASE HELP SOMEONE:
"INTRODUCTION
Welcome to my online photo album, through which I aim to capture the beauty and diversity of plants and animals in their natural habitats. This collection of images showcases my personal encounters and observations of beings I find intriguing and beautiful. These experiences pause life for a moment and allow me to appreciate the, often neglected, world of nature that surrounds us.
Each photograph in this album is a testament to the intricate and long-lived connections between living organisms and their environments. From the graceful geese roaming a college campus, to the vibrant blooms of black-eyed Susan flowers, these images portray the rich tapestry of life that thrives amidst the both the natural landscapes and the human-made settings.
As I documented these moments, I aimed to convey not only the visual aesthetics byt also the deeper significant of each subject. Whether it’s the resilience of a stray cat surviving independently or the playful innocence of dogs enjoying sunny days, each image carries its own story and message.
Through this album, I hope to inspire appreciation for the beauty of nature and foster awareness of environmental issues. By showcasing the wonders of plants and animals, I aim to highlight their importance in our ecosystem and the need for responsible practices to preserve biodiversity.
Join me on this visual journey as we explore the captivating world of plants and animals, celebrating their uniqueness and reflection on our role in maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world and the planet.
Enjoy the album!
REFLECTION PIECE
My photo album, centered on plants and animals encountered in diverse environments, delves deep into the ethical complexities highlighted by key theories from our study of environmental ethics.
Anthropocentrism frames human interests as superior, often overshadowing the moral considerations of non-human entities. As I captured images of stray cats navigating urban landscapes and geese thriving in human-altered habitats, I confronted the prominent anthropocentric mindset that categorizes non-human beings’ interest as second in line. These encounters show how human activities, driven by anthropocentric values, shape ecosystems and influence the well-being of other species.
Moreover, Peter Singer's philosophy "Not for Humans Only," challenges anthropocentric perspectives by advocating for the moral consideration of non-human animals. Through photographs depicting the playful innocence of dogs in parks and the serene beauty of wildlife in natural settings, I aimed to evoke empathy and recognition of animals' inherent value and right to flourishing. Singer's ideas underscored the interconnectedness of all sentient beings and the ethical imperative to extend moral consideration beyond human interests.
Furthermore, the album sheds light on ethical dilemmas associated with factory farming and unethical practices against animals. While I was not able to capture images of the appropriate animals that are affected (pigs, cows, etc), I believe the message is still clear. Images depicting confined animals in industrial settings and the stark realities of mass production highlight the ethical implications of treating animals as mere commodities. Factory farming, driven by profit motives and anthropocentric ideologies, perpetuates systemic cruelty, raising urgent questions about our ethical responsibilities towards non-human beings and the planet.
By weaving together themes of anthropocentrism, Singer's moral philosophy, and critiques of factory farming, the album serves as a visual narrative that challenges conventional human-centered perspectives. I invite readers to reevaluate their relationship with animals and the environment. The journal calls attention to the ethical imperatives of compassion, empathy, and sustainability in our interactions with non-human beings and ecosystems.
In essence, the album acts as a catalyst for critical reflection on anthropocentric biases, ethical considerations in animal welfare, and the interconnectedness of environmental ethics and sustainability. It prompts viewers to question dominant narratives, advocate for ethical treatment of animals, and strive towards harmonious coexistence with all forms of life on Earth.
Through this reflection, I aim to deepen our understanding of anthropocentrism's implications, Peter Singer's ethical framework, and the ethical challenges posed by factory farming, emphasizing the moral responsibilities inherent in our interactions with the natural world."
submitted by Krishnak2423 to UofT [link] [comments]
Now in third year, my professor told me that my submission was flagged for an academic integrity issue.
Had a meeting with him, tried to convince him this was my own writing style a lot, but he still wasn't convinced and believes I used AI to write it. He said he will forward the case to the department but I think he meant the dean since it is my second offense.
But this is based completely on his judgment and him saying how the sentence structure is similar throughout.
It was a photo journal assignment (worth 25%), and I admitted to him that I asked ChatGPT for adjectives to describe the pictures and that's all.
Another point, I forgot to include the citations for the readings I referenced at the end but that was really because I completely forgot about it.
I even outlined some spelling mistakes and personal sentences through the paper but he hasn't replied to my email now.
How should I go about this?
This is stressing me out, I don't want to get suspended since this is my second ao, and I am an international student, i can't afford it, my parents would kill me.
Note: I did not use google docs to write the paper so can't do anything with that, and he didn't show me a turnitin report or anything, just that he THINKS I used AI.
The assignment was short and it asked us to write an intro and reflection for the photos we took and I have added it below for you to analyse, PLEASE HELP SOMEONE:
Welcome to my online photo album, through which I aim to capture the beauty and diversity of plants and animals in their natural habitats. This collection of images showcases my personal encounters and observations of beings I find intriguing and beautiful. These experiences pause life for a moment and allow me to appreciate the, often neglected, world of nature that surrounds us.
Each photograph in this album is a testament to the intricate and long-lived connections between living organisms and their environments. From the graceful geese roaming a college campus, to the vibrant blooms of black-eyed Susan flowers, these images portray the rich tapestry of life that thrives amidst the both the natural landscapes and the human-made settings.
As I documented these moments, I aimed to convey not only the visual aesthetics byt also the deeper significant of each subject. Whether it’s the resilience of a stray cat surviving independently or the playful innocence of dogs enjoying sunny days, each image carries its own story and message.
Through this album, I hope to inspire appreciation for the beauty of nature and foster awareness of environmental issues. By showcasing the wonders of plants and animals, I aim to highlight their importance in our ecosystem and the need for responsible practices to preserve biodiversity.
Join me on this visual journey as we explore the captivating world of plants and animals, celebrating their uniqueness and reflection on our role in maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world and the planet.
Enjoy the album!
REFLECTION PIECE
My photo album, centered on plants and animals encountered in diverse environments, delves deep into the ethical complexities highlighted by key theories from our study of environmental ethics.
Anthropocentrism frames human interests as superior, often overshadowing the moral considerations of non-human entities. As I captured images of stray cats navigating urban landscapes and geese thriving in human-altered habitats, I confronted the prominent anthropocentric mindset that categorizes non-human beings’ interest as second in line. These encounters show how human activities, driven by anthropocentric values, shape ecosystems and influence the well-being of other species.
Moreover, Peter Singer's philosophy "Not for Humans Only," challenges anthropocentric perspectives by advocating for the moral consideration of non-human animals. Through photographs depicting the playful innocence of dogs in parks and the serene beauty of wildlife in natural settings, I aimed to evoke empathy and recognition of animals' inherent value and right to flourishing. Singer's ideas underscored the interconnectedness of all sentient beings and the ethical imperative to extend moral consideration beyond human interests.
Furthermore, the album sheds light on ethical dilemmas associated with factory farming and unethical practices against animals. While I was not able to capture images of the appropriate animals that are affected (pigs, cows, etc), I believe the message is still clear. Images depicting confined animals in industrial settings and the stark realities of mass production highlight the ethical implications of treating animals as mere commodities. Factory farming, driven by profit motives and anthropocentric ideologies, perpetuates systemic cruelty, raising urgent questions about our ethical responsibilities towards non-human beings and the planet.
By weaving together themes of anthropocentrism, Singer's moral philosophy, and critiques of factory farming, the album serves as a visual narrative that challenges conventional human-centered perspectives. I invite readers to reevaluate their relationship with animals and the environment. The journal calls attention to the ethical imperatives of compassion, empathy, and sustainability in our interactions with non-human beings and ecosystems.
In essence, the album acts as a catalyst for critical reflection on anthropocentric biases, ethical considerations in animal welfare, and the interconnectedness of environmental ethics and sustainability. It prompts viewers to question dominant narratives, advocate for ethical treatment of animals, and strive towards harmonious coexistence with all forms of life on Earth.
Through this reflection, I aim to deepen our understanding of anthropocentrism's implications, Peter Singer's ethical framework, and the ethical challenges posed by factory farming, emphasizing the moral responsibilities inherent in our interactions with the natural world."
2024.04.25 14:17 Living-Ad5550 How to tell my (22M) girlfriend (22F) that she looks absolutely beautiful as ever ??
The title looks simple but I will explain. We are in a long distance relationship for 2 years. We are both from conservative backgrounds. We both are really committed and adore each other despite the distance between us due to our current workplaces. We are both each other's first love. Now to the point: By physicality, she was lean always more or less and she was so beautiful. Since the last year, she has put on some weight (not workout or gym, basically due to work from home) and she thinks she has become ugly. On the other hand, in my eyes, she has become more beautiful than ever, I absolutely love her on growing curves when she sends me some of her pictures (normal pictures, nothing nude or exposing). In my eyes, she has become more graceful, more beautiful, hotter and sexier and every other adjective you can put on a woman's beauty. My question is, when she tells me with a pout face that she has become fat and looks ugly, how can I tell her romantically that it's quite opposite in my eyes ??
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2024.04.25 06:57 InevitableStar2022 How to Start Dating? My Tips for Making the First Move
These days, lots of people start their romance online—it's just plain easier and quicker. Say you've just picked a dating app or site to get rolling. What comes next? Well, from my own experience, here’s how you can kick things off:
First off, craft a solid profile. You'll want a witty bio and an eye-catching headline that grabs attention. Be genuine—don't try to be someone you're not. Instead of loading your bio with a bunch of adjectives, share specific events, hobbies, or adventures that paint a picture of who you are.
And when you're scrolling through potential matches, don't just aim for the stars with the most glamorous profiles. Look for someone who represents themselves authentically, someone with a sense of humor, interesting hangouts, and hobbies that catch your eye. Trust me, it's about finding someone you can genuinely enjoy spending time with, not just a pretty face.
Now, if you’re more about meeting someone the old-fashioned way, here are some pointers based on what’s worked for me:
Education level? Yep, that counts too. It’s not about being snooty; it’s just that seeing eye to eye on intellectual stuff can smooth out a lot of bumps down the road. And humor, oh boy, if you laugh at the same jokes, you’re halfway there already.
Lastly, and here’s a big one—if you can chat away comfortably like you’ve been buddies for ages, then you might just have something special. No awkward silences or forced chit-chat, just easy, breezy conversation.
So, if these things check out, you might just want to go ahead and take that leap. Who knows? This could be the start of something great!
submitted by InevitableStar2022 to InternationalDatingUS [link] [comments]
First off, craft a solid profile. You'll want a witty bio and an eye-catching headline that grabs attention. Be genuine—don't try to be someone you're not. Instead of loading your bio with a bunch of adjectives, share specific events, hobbies, or adventures that paint a picture of who you are.
And when you're scrolling through potential matches, don't just aim for the stars with the most glamorous profiles. Look for someone who represents themselves authentically, someone with a sense of humor, interesting hangouts, and hobbies that catch your eye. Trust me, it's about finding someone you can genuinely enjoy spending time with, not just a pretty face.
Now, if you’re more about meeting someone the old-fashioned way, here are some pointers based on what’s worked for me:
- Keep it real. Skip the fairytale notions and look for someone genuinely compatible. When you meet new people, be yourself. If they like you, they'll like the real you—not some perfect image you've conjured up.
- Ask your friends for help. Sometimes your pals know you better than you think. They might just know someone who could be just right for you.
- Stay engaged with life. Don’t put all your focus on finding "the one." Keep living, keep exploring.
- If you hit it off with someone, take it slow. Enjoy getting to know them without rushing to label what you have. The "getting to know each other" phase is golden, and nothing's wrong with taking your time.
Dating Someone New? Here Are Some Tips
So, you’re stepping into the new and exciting territory of dating someone new? That's awesome! Here’s a bit of what I’ve learned about laying a solid foundation and steering clear of common pitfalls. Here's what's worked for me:- Resist the urge to dig through their social media. If you’re serious about building trust and honesty, let them share their life at their own pace. It’s tempting, but try not to pry beyond what they offer.
- Keep those texts chill! Sending five messages in a row? That can feel overwhelming. Give them some space to respond.
- When you two chat, dive deeper than just the day-to-day stuff. Talk about things that stir your soul, your beliefs, dreams, and deeper feelings. It really enriches your connection.
- Here's a no-go: making your partner jealous on purpose. Trust me, it does more harm than good. If you’re playing games to snag their attention, it might be time to rethink the approach.
- Plan a fun date where you can be naturally close without forcing it—think ice skating or a cozy movie night. It’s about sharing space and moments without awkwardness.
How to Know If You Should Date Someone
So, how do you know if you’ve hit the compatibility jackpot? Here’s what to look out for. First up, check if you guys share the same hobbies or get a kick out of the same TV shows. That's a good sign you're on the same wavelength. Also, think about how you both come across to others. If you find yourselves putting on the same kind of persona when meeting new people, that’s a thumbs up!Education level? Yep, that counts too. It’s not about being snooty; it’s just that seeing eye to eye on intellectual stuff can smooth out a lot of bumps down the road. And humor, oh boy, if you laugh at the same jokes, you’re halfway there already.
Lastly, and here’s a big one—if you can chat away comfortably like you’ve been buddies for ages, then you might just have something special. No awkward silences or forced chit-chat, just easy, breezy conversation.
So, if these things check out, you might just want to go ahead and take that leap. Who knows? This could be the start of something great!