[lhcbianh] twice fun

having fun is inherently enjoyable.  then, having fun, especially in circumstances with adversity, also signals good mental health, high self-qi.

maybe having fun isn't ever inherently enjoyable: maybe it's this signaling that's only ever being enjoyed.  would it be as much fun if you were alone and couldn't tell anyone?

what things require adversity to be fun?  it wouldn't be as fun if the adversity were removed.

possible examples: scary amusement park rides, horror movies.

hazing.

previously similar: validation is fun.

future post: sex is fun.

[mokptfkn] i've seen things, terrible things

what is the origin of the quote, "i've seen things, terrible things"?  typical context is PTSD.

here is a Youtube clip from an unknown movie: "I've seen things, Francis, terrible things."  is this the original, or is it referencing an older work?

[bxzutaqn] social class who consider consent impossible to obtain

i strongly suspect there exists a large group of people who hold the following belief: the idea of anyone willingly consenting to have sex with me is preposterous.  their belief is supported by their personal experiences of asking and being rejected, so is accurate.

for this group of people, the only realistic ways to achieve having sex are through force, psychological manipulation, deception, inducing or taking advantage of errors in judgment, or payment.

evaluate educational materials and policies advocating consent culture from the perspective of these people.

it might be horrifying to consider their point of view.  on one hand, these people must exist.  (look in yourself: there are people you don't want to have sex with.  given the homogeneous nature of society, your preferences are likely correlated with those of other people in society.  therefore, just among the people you don't want to have sex with, there is likely a good chunk of them that no one wants to have sex with.)  on the other hand, these people may be so unpleasant to think about -- some may consider these people not worthy of human rights, people who should be destroyed -- that one may prefer to pretend they do not exist.  i suspect a great many people, including policymakers, do the latter.

to these people, "consent culture" at best falls on deaf ears because consent is impossible.  perhaps "deaf ears" plays out as follows: they ignore descriptions of what consent should be and instead calibrate "consent" to their own experiences, experiences populated with the non-consensual and not-very-consensual methods of achieving sex mentioned above.  those experiences get calibrated as consent, objectively incorrect of course.

at worst, consent culture to these people may foster resentment against people who advocate consent culture: resentment against people who are ignorant (perhaps deliberately so, as described above) of this group of people, resentment against people who are using (or perceived to be using) consent culture as a weapon to make this group of people feel unwelcome, Othered.

inspired by considering a previously proposed method of advocating consent culture, one that focuses on encouraging people to avoid false accusations of rape.  for these people, avoiding accusations of rape, whether false or true, would eliminate all possibility of having sex, so this avenue of advocacy would not be effective on them.

this group of people does not have a name.  there is some overlap with incel (but there's a battle raging about whom that term encompasses, whether to characterize a group by its extremists, those who advocate violence), but this group also includes people who do achieve having sex, perhaps often, but through the non-consensual or not-very-consensual means listed above.  "loser" might be pretty apt term though rarely precisely defined, though it too doesn't seem to encompass those who are good at force, deception, or manipulation.

both incel and loser are typically applied to men, but this group contains all genders.

possible difficulties with this model:

everyone has people who they want to have sex with, but the desire isn't mutual.

there are some people, on a good day, who will willingly consent to have sex with anybody, and this is well-known, so conversely nobody believes their chances are actually zero: you might get lucky.  though perhaps the people who are the subject of this post (correctly) believe their chances of encountering or accessing (future post) such a person are zero.

[ktkszvbh] public freedom causing private oppression

if the government gives people a freedom, hypothesize that organized private entities will come to exist to exploit that freedom.

inspired by women's rights.  were women granted equal rights to employment (and to institutions supporting employment like education) intentionally to give corporations a new source of labor to exploit?  then, if both parents work (are forced to work), the stresses of work may result in a decrease in mental health of both parents simultaneously, whose effects are felt by the children.  this is an externality.

organized crime is another more obvious example.  it flourishes when and where government is weak, which could be interpreted as a form of freedom.

many make the comparison between big corporations and organized crime.

freedom of religion, then organized religion exploiting people through indoctrination.

freedom of speech?  not sure about this one.  we are looking for a situation in which person A exploits person B's right to free speech, to the benefit of A and detriment of B.  maybe seeding viral misinformation for political purposes.

when politically choosing more or less freedom, one is actually trying to choose the lesser of evils, who will oppress you less, the government or private entities.  if the law favors private entities ("more freedom"), competition and market forces might steer things toward less oppressive private entities.  or it might not: monopolies, lock-in, network effects.  also externalities as mentioned above cause people to make suboptimal choices.

"freedom" and "liberty" favor the organized.  as such, they are means for the organized to oppress and exploit the less organized.  it's likely a feedback system: the organized use oppression to prevent the oppressed people from themselves organizing.  perhaps freedom and liberty paradoxically result in oppression more often than not.  the privately organized will politically favor more freedom and liberty.

[wdeayxdr] first and last great sex

hypothetical survey: when was the first time you had great sex?  when was the last time you had great sex?

hypothetical disturbing results:

the age at which many people first had great sex is considerably below the legal age of consent.  inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness?

the last time many people had great sex was a long time ago, maybe decades.  people spend the last many years of their lives not having enjoyable sex.  perhaps caused by decrease in sex drive caused by decrease in health including mental health with age.  or perhaps inability to find the right partner.

many people report that they've never had great sex their entire lives.  perhaps the activity does not cause very much pleasure, perhaps because they never learned to connect it with pleasure.  or similarly, perhaps pleasure has been decreased or eliminated by traumatic events associated with having sex.  or perhaps inability to find the right partner.

after age N, you will never have great sex again.  what is the median value for N?  do we have any clue?  what affects its value?  other milestones to measure from: marriage, death.

what was an instance of great sex changes retroactively to not as subsequent events color memory.  (assume survey done multiple times over entire life.)

wildly speculate that the possibility of disturbing results like these has dissuaded surveys like this from being taken.

[aokyfrwo] 3 terrible people

1. a man sexually harasses a woman.
2. the woman responds with kindness.
3. a third person calls the woman a slut for doing so.

who has committed the most evil?

note: the argument why #2 might be considered evil, and why #3 might be justified so not evil, is that, in responding with kindness, the woman encourages and excuses the man for behaving that way, and the man thus enabled will go on to similarly harm others.

what is the best way to prevent badness?

understanding the mechanisms that cause #1 would be helpful, but it seems to be taboo.

disincentivizing kindness with punishment is sad, but (cynically) that seems to be where society is generally headed: normalizing cruelty.

inspired by an anecdote from a woman feeling safe at a venue because of the lack of the third type of person, not the lack of the first type, who were present.

[grcatcep] lynching Sephiroth

the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy 7 caused a lot of grief (various stages of grief) in players.  why?  inspired by https://xkcd.com/299/, exemplifying denial.

one hypothesis is that the game developers (writers) did a very good job at creating a character to whom players felt emotionally connected.  given how much Aerith's death stands out among all video games, if this hypothesis is true, then the writers must have done a monumentally good job, a feat of writing that has rarely been approached before or since.

(digression: one alternate hypothesis for why Aerith's death hit so hard (in some) is its historical context.   FF7 was the first (Western) video game which had a deep and expansive story.  gamers were not expecting it, not psychologically prepared for it.  subsequent games may have done story just as well or better, but the surprise was gone.)

some possibly important points of Aerith characterization:

1. meeting at the church: be my bodyguard to go on a date with me.
2. lack of fear in entering a situation with a high probability of being sexually violated (Wall Market in general, Don Corneo's mansion specifically).
3. Golden Saucer date: conversation at the end of the gondola ride looking forward to a future date.
4. quickly forgiving after Cloud hands over the Black Materia to Sephiroth at the Temple of the Ancients.
5. quickly forgiving after Cloud beats her at the Temple of the Ancients.  we assume the dream sequence in the forest was actual telepathic communication (not wishful thinking) because it also provided correct information about where Aerith went.
6. nice theme song (used effectively in the boss battle immediately after her death)

1 and 3 set up good hopes for the future.

1, 2 and 5 (and others) suggest that her character has high mental fortitude, high self-qi, a rare and valuable quality in a person, so therefore someone heartbreaking to lose.  she wants to spend time with, is seemingly attracted to, a flawed (seemingly schizophrenic) character / player surrogate.  perhaps gamers saw themselves in the flawed Cloud, feeling undeserving of affection from such a rare person?

many of these characterization points could be explained away by the need to advance plot.  others are very standard literary tropes, e.g., girl in love with protagonist, setting up hopes for the future only to dash them, that have been done and continue to be done over and over again.  although gamers might not have encountered the tropes in games, they certainly must have encountered them in other fiction.  there doesn't seem to be anything monumentally special in Aerith's characterization.

(this post was also inspired by Final Fantasy 7 Remake which put a lot of effort into more characterization of many of its characters; we'll see whether it "sticks", whether players feel emotionally connected to the characters.)

some players were less emotionally affected by Aerith's death than others.  why?  one traditional explanation is Cloud/Tifa shippers versus Cloud/Aerith shippers, though i doubt that is the whole story.

another hypothesis is that (some) players became emotionally invested in Aerith because they had expended effort in leveling her up ("grinding").  but grinding happens in many games, as does character death.  why did Aerith's death cause so much grief compared to other games with similar mechanics?

this question of what caused the grief is important, because grief over someone In Real Life dying (or even getting hurt), grief comparable to (or greater than) what some felt over Aerith, can motivate significant Real Life actions.  for example, consider this Youtube comment about Aerith's death: "Ah yes, the exact moment when the game became a grind-fest for max level and max stats, just so I could brutally murder a self-styled god for this heresy. Good times."

if a large number of people were to take such an angry attitude of grief over a real life person, the group's desire for violent retribution might result in a lynching.  many historical lynchings center around a young woman being hurt.

is understanding the psychology of grief and subsequent actions over a fictional character in a game useful for understanding grief and actions in real life?  can such understanding help predict actions?  can it predict lynchings or other grief-driven violence?

expounding further on the "grinding" theory: hypothesize significant grief occurs if someone feels they have expended a lot of their own personal effort in producing the person who has been hurt or killed.  "producing" means effort in having made the victim a "high quality" person.  this might be dark: manipulation, ownership of (part of) a person, "grooming" (in the context of pedophilia).  previously, hypothesizing a tribe claiming ownership over a young woman's romantic relationships.  is "it takes a village" sinister?

[vvxzpztp] gatekeeping balance

an organization which restricts membership too much will die from lack of members.

an organization which is too lax in restricting membership will die from internal strife among members.  perhaps members leave because they don't want to be part of an organization that would have as a member someone they don't like.

it is already a tricky balancing act.  but it is actually even more difficult:

the distribution of characteristics of applicants changes over time, so membership criteria must in turn adapt to avoid the two bad outcomes above.

the distribution of characteristics of applicants may change due to truly exogenous reasons, or due to competition with other organizations competing for the same applicants.  this is game theory, because your organization's membership decisions may influence the existence and behavior of competitors.

as an alternative to changing membership criteria, an organization can also internally change to avoid the bad two outcomes above: adapt to function effectively with fewer members, or deploy mechanisms to prevent internal conflict.

many gatekeeping mechanisms such as those in courtship or employment probably attempt to measure self-qi.  however, the distribution of self-qi among applicants might change over time, so rituals and procedures for measuring and filtering by applicants' self-qi must change to match.  along with that, applicants are all the time trying to game the system, trying to fool measurements of self-qi.

[odhiopog] Count with your eyes closed

Relax, close your eyes, and count numbers.  How far can you get before your mind wanders?  How much mental concentration does it take?

Or, sing Happy Birthday in your head.  How many times can you repeat before you find yourself thinking of something else?  Inspired by washing hands for COVID-19.

Hypothesize that these tests can be used to measure mental state, how frazzled your mind is.

[kdppnzsr] Connoisseur addicts

When do addicts become connoisseurs of the substance or service they are addicted to?  And when not?

Inspired by coffee addicts, though many other examples exist: alcohol, video games.

Simplest answer might be when they have disposable income.  But it seems there might be something more going on.

Obviously, it helps if the addicted-to item is legal, allowing producers to differentiate.

Is all connoisseur behavior a symptom of an underlying addiction?  What otherwise would incentivize caring enough to learn to distinguish among items?

[dvpmehdj] Hurdles and education salary

If the main purpose of education is to teach things, then that requires considerable skill on the part of the educator.

If the main purpose of education is to place hurdles in front of students so that those who clear them can signal (in an imperfect-information game) that they possess the ability to jump over hurdles (perhaps through high self-qi), then that is less difficult for the educator: a large variety of hurdles are equally effective at this kind of signaling.

Hypothesize that the wages earned by educators reflects the skill required or not required, and therefore their purpose in the education system.  That is, we can "read off" an educator's purpose (teaching or setting hurdles) simply by looking at their salary.

Counterarguments:

Teaching useful basic skills is easy because of the simpleness of the skill and people's innate (perhaps self-motivated) ability to learn, and because of this, educators of basic skills have low salaries.  Primary school teachers earning very little would be an instance of this counterexample.  Meanwhile, setting hurdles is difficult because there needs to be considerable infrastructure to prevent students from cheating.

Business school professors typically have high salaries (I think) among educators, but the observation that all they do is enable signaling in an imperfect information game uncontroversially won a Nobel Prize (2001).

[xropqqon] Logically assuming based on dress

What can you conclude from how someone is dressed?  Logically, you can conclude that they are not part of the group who would never dress like that, the contrapositive.

The types of clothing you would never wear is often something deeply psychological: you could imagine (or more likely you would rather not even try to imagine) the huge discomfort you would feel or huge resistance you would put up if someone forced you to dress that way.

Famous examples: men in women's clothing, women in sexy clothing, nudity.

That huge discomfort is probably a phobia.  It might also be identity.

What mechanism shapes a person's psychological profile of the clothing they would never wear?  Does the mechanism also cause other things, in which case one can probabilistically conclude (through correlation) those other things based on dress?

It seems like people with high self-qi would not have any strong clothing objections.

[lkiccdly] Feel like exercising

People tend to exercise when they feel like exercising.  When do they feel like exercising?  Probably self-qi.  Fitness, the result of exercising, becomes a reflection of self-qi.

[ejhsazxj] Four moods in the bedroom

1. Tired and happy
2. Tired and irritable
3. Happy and full of energy
4. Irritated and full of energy

#1 is good for cuddling; #3 is good for sex.  Partners need to accurately communicate about which of the 4 states each person is in.

#2 and #4 might be associated with sexual assault, maybe #2 the survivor and #4 the perpetrator.

[jrkeayxw] Four moods, one terrorist

1. Tired and happy
2. Tired and irritable
3. Happy and full of energy
4. Irritated and full of energy

#4 is dangerous, a powder-keg for socially destructive actions.  What does society do to prevent them?

Seems to be "keep people tired" so only #1 and #2 are possible.

Idle hands are the devil's playthings.

[umaeypvw] May December

What goes wrong more frequently or more harmfully during or at the end of a romantic relationship of disparate ages, versus one of similar ages?  We assume an older man and younger woman for ease of presentation and to explore the common stereotype.

Here are some possibilities, albeit not relying on real-world research on whether or how much these scenarios occur, but instead mostly enumerating common cultural assumptions.

1. The obvious thing that could go wrong even in the best case scenario is, they stay together, have kids, but the older man dies or gets infirm because of old age, so becomes unable to support the family in child care.
2. Similar is, even without considering child care, after death you are left with a middle-aged woman who will have to support herself by herself for a long time because middle-aged widows stereotypically rarely find new husbands.
3. In light of #1 and #2, time spent by a young women in a relationship with an older man is very precious time wasted, because that time and effort should have been spent on finding a partner of similar age with whom the problems of #1 and #2 are less likely to occur.
4. The problem of #3 is exacerbated because a relationship of disparate ages will go on longer than it "should", because the older man will likely have more skill (acquired through previous practice) than a younger man in maintaining a relationship, and more resources (acquired through life) to spend on maintaining the relationship.
5. The skills mentioned in #4 could be skills that are genuinely good, most notably relationship communication skills which take a lot of time, effort, and practice (often from past failures) to develop, or they could be skills of deception and manipulation, skills also honed through practice.  The latter encapsulates the common stereotype of older men preying on younger women through deception and manipulation, then keeping them trapped in a relationship with those skills.  "Grooming" is one such manipulation.
6. There is a power difference that results in abuse by the Power Corrupts mechanism.  Sometimes the power difference is explicit: the couple met while within some external power structure (e.g., employment, education) and still occupy unequal levels within it.
7. Another source of power difference is the unequal resources mentioned in #4; this turns into power because the man has more resources that he can threaten to withhold from the relationship.
8. Over life, the older man may have accumulated power in the form of social standing and connections which stymies reporting or preventing his abusive behavior.  We will elaborate on this in a future post.
9. The peers and support structures around the woman may disapprove of the relationship, so abandon her.  This exacerbates the problems of #5 (becoming trapped in a relationship) and magnifies the harm she suffers when the relationship ends.
10. A variation of #9 is that the support structure is already gone for unrelated reasons before the relationship begins.  With no support structure, any relationship, disparate ages or not, may go or end poorly, so initially seems irrelevant to this list, which seeks only to enumerate things special to disparate-age relationships.  However, lacking a support structure, a woman may purposely seek an older man with more resources to replace the missing support.  This results in older men being disproportionately represented when this kind of situation (a relationship absent a support structure) goes or ends poorly.
11. A relationship with an older man may proceed more quickly and frequently to physical sexual activity because of the older man's greater previous sexual experience.  Even if entirely consensual, this causes harm if woman belongs to the stereotypical society which values (as "purity") sexual inexperience (especially virginity) in women, or similarly, if the woman defines her own self-worth in terms of purity and sexual inexperience.

#9 and #10 are interesting because a third party is involved in the harm.  They doesn't get mentioned much, perhaps because the third party (the former support structure) doesn't want to accept blame for being a party to the harm.  However, support structures are critically important in any discussion of psychological harm because people often survive extremely painful and difficult experiences without traumatic consequences when they have the right support structure around them.  We hypothesize it is the determining factor for whether a negative experience results in long-term psychological trauma.

We have not elaborated on what the support structure is nor how and when it decreases harm.  Leave it undefined for now, though on the surface, it seems kind of obvious.

In #11, a third party, namely the rest of society, is also involved in causing the harm.

In #9, exactly what is the mechanism that starts with a person disapproving this kind of relationship and ends with them abandoning being part of the young woman's support structure?  Equivalently, why do people at other times remain loyal, remaining part of someone's support structure?

We hypothesize one mechanism involving tribal behavior.  Tribe boundaries are invisible in modern society, but people definitely discriminate between One Of Us versus Not One Of Us.  People had joined and remained in the young woman's support structure for a somewhat selfish reason: for power, in particular, for the power of influencing the woman's romantic relationships toward the direction that most benefits the tribe.  Against a young man as suitor, the support structure can successfully use standard anti-personnel tactics to drive him away if they should disapprove of him, because the young man lacks the resources to defend against the attack.  However, an older man with resources can defend, but in so doing demonstrates that the support structure no longer has power over the young woman's romantic relationships.  This being demonstrated, they no longer have incentive to remain in her support structure, so abandon her.

Another mechanism by which a support structure may abandon the woman is the man manipulates (#5) the woman to behave in such a way that the support structure abandons her, e.g., poisoning her to her friends, or convincing her to abandon them, to isolate her and thereby gain more power over her.  This kind of behavior can happen in any relationship, disparate ages or not, but older men may be more skilled at it because of experience.  Also the promise of greater resources he could expend on the relationship might be effective in convincing her to abandon her support structure.

Yet another hypothesis of why a support structure might abandon a woman is #11.  The support structure only cares if the woman retains high social value (protect the valuable); her promiscuity lowers her value in their eyes, so they abandon her.

The mechanisms above can cause a feedback effect with #10.  #9 causes some of the support structure to leave, leading to behavior #10, which causes more of the support structure to leave, leading to more behavior #10.

#3 and #4 require cost-benefit analysis, especially if the woman is consciously not planning for this to be a long-term relationship.  The cost is time and maybe trauma at the end of the relationship; the benefits may include practice at romantic relationships and using the resources of the older man to further herself during the relationship ("sugar daddy").  Are young women systematically doing this analysis wrong?  Perhaps yes, due to deception and manipulation (#5).

The young woman could practice romantic relationships with men of any age, but she may deliberately select an older man as a better practice partner, because the older partner may be more prepared and resilient, from experience, for the mistakes the less experienced younger partner will make in the practice relationship.  This is part of the cost-benefit calculation.

Previous musing on power differences of #6 and #7, speculating that the power difference might not be as great as it seems at first glance.  The young woman can withhold sex, which has a very powerful effect on the man especially in this kind of relationship, because that was the only reason he was interested in her.  Of course, he could rape her (a stereotypical form of abuse in disparate-age relationships), but that is a very different experience, usually much less pleasant for the rapist (and of course less pleasant for the survivor), than having sex with someone who actually wants to have sex with you.

Every one of the items listed above has potential for harm, but harm doesn't occur every time.  Why is it only sometimes?  Which cases go which way?

* * *

Self-qi generically affects relationships in many ways:

1. Those with low self-qi are more likely to engage in deceptive and manipulative behavior.
2. A member of a support structure with high self-qi is more likely to be or remain supportive, not abandoning.
3. The presence of a support structure around you increases your self-qi.

However, none of these issues seem correlated with age nor are more relevant in disparate-age relationships.

[eskwontp] Mass shootings within sports

It's surprising that there aren't more mass shootings among sports players targeting each other.  Within sports are a disproportionately high number of people who are very competitive, "jacked up", "win at any cost".  Some of those people might have reasons (even valid reasons) to come to believe that "the system" of the sport is institutionally stacked against against them: compare this to similar motivations articulated by other mass shooters, e.g., upset that the courtship system is stacked against them.

The combination of factors leading to mass murder won't all occur all that frequently, but if they do occur, it seems they should occur more frequently among sports players than in society at large, because ultracompetitive.  But this seems not occuring.  Why not?

We hypothesize a mechanism:

Participation in sports is voluntary.  Therefore, mass shooters are preferentially volunteering not to play or volunteering to stop playing a sport long before their mass shooting tendencies kick in.  What is the mechanism of exclusion?  Who else is it excluding?  Do we see the mechanism elsewhere?

Sports are physically and mentally taxing.  They are especially psychologically taxing at the beginning because you also spend a lot of time losing.  To survive these challenges and not choose to "voluntarily" leave, one needs mental fortitude, i.e., high self-qi.  We put "voluntarily" in scare quotes because, under this model, your fate was predetermined by your self-qi level at the start; there was only an illusion of free will in your voluntary decision to leave.

These barriers, this process, eliminates early the mass shooters, who are characterized by low self-qi.  Only with low self-qi does frustration boil over into destructive action, though we haven't elaborated very much on this mechanism.

One more aspect of sports:  If you show up, you have to participate, so become subjected to its mental and physical demands.  You can't be a sports player without playing.  This idea is also seen and articulated in one of the Principles of Burning Man, and in Fight Club.

What other activities have this pattern?  Easy to voluntarily leave, or choose to not show up.  Participation required.  Mentally or psychologically taxing, especially toward the beginning, but it doesn't ever completely let up.  This culls away the mass shooters before they start shooting.

We notice the pattern in social partner dancing.  We may elaborate more on this in a future post.

[tizrsxko] Censorship by friends, or social networking through censorship

It seems straightforward to create a social network system like Facebook based on censorship carried out by friends.

A person makes a post, visible to friends.  One of the friends dislikes it so pushes the "Censor this" button which deletes the post.  Any friend can do this.  Then, the original poster is notified of who censored the post, and given an opportunity to un-friend, or create a friend group to make future posts not seen by that censor.  Typical friend groups in this context will be defined as exclusion, "all friends except some list", though inclusion groups are possible, too.

Censorship is transparent: you see who opposes your speech.  People will form communities of speech that they agree with, or at least tolerate.  (Tricky problem: what you can tolerate changes day-to-day; should people interact with you based on how you acted on your worst day?  We probably need something client-side -- something that understands your stress level that day -- that also limits what you see that day in your best interest.)

Should the metadata of who is and who is not able to see a post be visible with the post to those who can see it?  Maybe a rabbit hole of visibility of the metadata.

Public posts are trickier.  Several ideas: It's not possible to follow someone's feed of public posts without being their friend: public posts are indexed by cryptographic hash, so you definitely have to make an effort to go find a post (get a friend to snitch) to find the public URL of a public post.  Each public URL is unique to the friend who sees it, so knowing the leaked URL is enough for the original poster to identify who snitched and then un-friend or make limited.  (Public posts can still be limited about who is notified of its existence.)  Posts have watermarking that can similarly identify from screenshots.  Provide a utility with which anyone can easily forge a post from anybody with any content, for plausible deniability.

Comments on posts are also tricky.  A nice feature would be, if a post with comments is censored but the poster reposts to a more limited friend group, the old comments get migrated.

Previously on the theme of Anyone Can Censor.

[cjlmoizr] The thrill is gone

Did you actually enjoy something, or did you just fool yourself into thinking you enjoyed it?  Maybe the latter because you've enjoyed it in the past, or you feel you are supposed to (by social pressure) enjoy it.

Perhaps an easy way to tell: are you still happy the next day?

What causes the sensation of "still happy the next day"?  What causes it not to happen?  Is it a good way to measure whether you actually enjoyed something?  Can you tell in the moment whether you will be happy the next day?

[oeubwwad] BDE

Big Dick Energy is synonymous with self-qi.

Thank you Anthony Bourdain for dying, inducing the term and concept to become well known?