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Right, I'll keep an ear to my gut. Here goes nothing

Next, do your research. Do not trust medical resources that aren't on queer-friendly websites. There are literal centuries of misinformation and demonization about queer life (and I'm not just talking about sex) that you need to sift through, and trust me when I say that you can't do it. You're too new to this, you have no way of doing it. EDIT: saying this so you know why you have to pick where your research comes from VERY carefully.

Are there any sites you trust, or know are shitty?

I preesh the offer, but I'm good

Find your local queers, first of all. Like, that's literally the very first step. I didn't do that and I had no support network, just years of free fall. Only knowing them through the internet is fine, but the important thing is finding the queers who are local to you. Do not be like me and assume internet queers are enough, you need the locals so you can hear who the bigots are and how to go shopping in the wrong part of town and not get clocked (trust me, now that you're queer and aware of it, that's an actual concern you have to have, even if you think nothing has changed).

Next, do your research. Do not trust medical resources that aren't on queer-friendly websites. There are literal centuries of misinformation and demonization about queer life (and I'm not just talking about sex) that you need to sift through, and trust me when I say that you can't do it. You're too new to this, you have no way of doing it. EDIT: saying this so you know why you have to pick where your research comes from VERY carefully.

After that, your local queers got this. They've babysat other newbies, they'll keep you on track.



If you're talking about very real life-or-death survival, this is super simple. Just lean into the "tough guy" aesthetic hard. Get a bunch of milsurp, grow one of those dumb survivalist beards, buy a gun or at least talk a lot about buying a gun. This is what I do, you know how many people gaybash me? None. Because no one fucking knows I'm not a chud, when I walk around with my desert sand Hazard4 backpack and MOLLE-laden thigh pouches. I have to warn fellow queers about me when they meet me for the first time, but that's a small price to pay for being functionally immune to RL bigotry.

Also, you'll spend less on clothes. The milsurp is cheap and lasts forever. Goes double on the lasts forever part if you buy "tactical" stuff: 5.11 Tactical is overpriced but indestructible, Rothco will have your back for everything except for boots, and UTG/Leapers bags are literally impossible to destroy. I have one that has survived being dragged two miles down a freeway, run over by a truck, multiple drenchings in heavy rain, etc. — and if I got a can of computer duster it would look like new.

If you lay on your sarcastic asshole impression thick when approached by chuds, you also manage to get them to avoid you like the plague without becoming a target of theirs.

Holy shit Altered, thank you. This just the kind of thing I was hoping for. I'm not great at networking, but now would be the time to improve. I absolutely know how much of a threat other people can be, though I need to learn who around me are definitely bigots, like you said.

Hi there!  Welcome to the party.

Not sure how much you want to disclose here, but may I ask if you thought you were a gay person who realizes they like the opposite side of things, or if you thought you were straight and then figured out the grass is just as green on your own side?

Also, have you figured out your default ratio?  I don't usually meet people who are perfectly 50/50, and of course it changes in real world context.

Feel free not to answer if it's too personal.

Thanks for having me, and for giving me space to get out of your questions. I assumed I was straight up until I seriously thought about it. I haven't been paying attention to my ratio, but off the top of my head I'd say I'm like 70-80% biased towards guys.

So, over the last couple months I've realized that I'm bisexual. That took me by surprise, to make a serious understatement, and I'm trying to understand the position I'm in as quickly as possible. I've been reaching out to people I think already do more than me as part of that. So, this's a general call for any information any of you want to give me: Resources, advice, specific dangers, whatever. Don't worry about scaring or talking down to me, if you have something you think I should know I want to hear it. I have some stuff to handle right now, so I'm sorry if I don't check back here until next weekend

3.0
This's something that doesn't come up on its own that often, but some of my other ideas are based on it. This's my first time writing it out, and it was tough. I'm sure there's vocabulary out there that could talk about this stuff clearly, but I don't know it. Still, being able to just point back to this could make describing some things easier in the future, so I wanted to try getting it off my chest.

What I'm talking about is how I think people build up their knowledge of the world, and the way different types of knowledge usually take different amounts of effort to be useably solid. So there's the world, massive and complicated, there's me, and then there's the image I have of it. As far as I can tell, that image is made up of a catalogue of facts about the things -any kinds of thing— I know about: the way they effect people, the ways they'd react in certain situations, what I can expect from them in the future, those kinds of info. I've been building it up across my life based on direct experience (touching a hot ban burned me, so the next time I see a pan it reminds me of that and I check the burner), hearing secondhand (someone I trust told me that hot pans can burn), or thinking over what I already know (I know hot metal can burn, so when I see a metal pan I figure I shouldn't touch it). I don't have a deep understanding of everything I'm aware of, I feel like there's a small collection of things I'm actually familiar with and then a drop in comprehension down to most of what I know about.

Also, it seems like there are three stages or tiers of information that a person's knowledge of something can belong to. First of all, you can just be aware that something's real, because of its effects. Someone doesn't need to know what a hot pan is, or what it's used for, or anything else about it to know that touching it hurts. I think this's something people do passively, and is out of their control. I can't decide to learn about something that I don't know exists. Once that first step is passed, and that thing has a place in their mind, someone can look for opportunities to learn more about it and figure out what it is. This's something people have to actively do. I've talked about hot pans enough to want another example, so I'll imagine you showed a car to a bunch of people who'd never seen one before, then asked them to figure out whatever they could about it. In the system I'm trying to describe, them seeing it for the first time would be them becoming aware of it. The second step would be when they start to try and see how the car behaves. This could take experimenting on their own: pulling on its handles makes its doors pop open, or relying on things they already know:  some people could look at a car and figure that it had to be artificial. Sooner or later —probably after a lot of mistakes— they could work out enough to drive it around, though in a dangerous way outside of example-land. At that point, I'd say that they'd built their picture of it to the second level. But then, no matter how hard it was to work out how it behaves, their jobs would jump up in difficulty if you told them to pop open the hood and figure out how it works.

Without all the examples: I think that figuring out how something behaves takes more effort than just seeing it in action, and working out why it does what it does is even harder. One problem I have this idea is that it applies to objects and events evenly, and I'm not sure that the ways things work and the reasons behind events are really equivalent.

So I just explained part of how I think the world works, but on its own that doesn't show how I act because of it. So now that I've said what I think, I want to try and explain that thought's consequences.
To start with, because I just made a decision based on this, I think that the effects anything has on people are what's important. So, even if an idea I have isn't terrible, the way I apply it might be.
I feel like taking something you know is true about one thing and then trying to apply to another that's similar, but that you aren't familiar with, is the way a lot of mistakes are made. So, I think I should be careful about assuming I know how anything works because it reminds me of something else I do understand, if I don't know they're comparable.
I'll talk more about this in a minute, but I'm worried about being too confident in what I know about other people. I also can't expect others to just magically understand or trust me.
And the last thing is that if I've only just built an idea of how something behaves that I feel confident about, I shouldn't expect to have a decent understanding of why it does what it does.

4.0

After that, I want to talk about something based on it that does come up pretty often: everything I just said applies to my understanding of others. If I try to map this system onto people a person's effects are their actions, what they are is their personality and identity, and the reasons behind them are the experiences that ended with any part of that identity forming.

So, when I learn about someone new, from meeting them in person or otherwise, I start building an idea of what kind of person they are. The problem is, I think it takes a lot more time and effort than most people think to get a decent read on how someone ticks. Also, I think it should be impossible to know what made specific person have any character trait just based on my observation of them.

It seems like when some people see others they don't know very well they assume that their whole personality fits together in an obvious, intuitive way and don't consider how they've developed through their life. To have a chance to know someone well I think I'd need to see how they act in a whole range of situations, because if I only talked to (or saw, or just learned about) someone in one context, I couldn't know how much the way the acted around me shows how they'd act in any other.

As far as I can tell our personalities grow organically from the moment we're born onwards, and that makes it so that I can't intuitively understand someone after only learning a few things about them. Let's say a friend introduces me to a stranger and tells me they work in construction, were really into sports in highschool, and which city they're from. Great, with that information I should know next to nothing for sure about them. But I feel like some people let the first things they know about someone colour the way they process everything they learn after, so that their image of them ends up like a caricature of their first impressions. As someone on the ground I can't look at another person's trait and intuit what caused it. There're too many possible reasons behind any one character trait for me to just snap my fingers and know which is right. But the biggest problem I have is that I think the same trait can have different causes for different people. So if me and a friend both love walks down the beach, and I know why I do, I can't be sure they do for the same reasons.

Everything I've seen makes me think that if the clouds ever clear and I feel like I've grokked people enough to extrapolate their whole identities from only a couple facts, that'll just mean that I've bought into some shitty group of stereotypes. So I think I should keep my weight on my back foot and avoid trying to fill in the gaps as much as possible when learning about other people, unless I absolutely need to make a leap of faith based on what I feel confident about.

So, I think it's tough to get to know someone, and probably impossible to completely understand them, but maybe still possible to get by. I don't need to be totally familiar with someone to decide how to act towards them, and even if I can't be 100% sure they think a certain way, I can still have seen enough to think they probably do. I couldn't tell anyone else how much exactly how much observation that should take, because I don't know, but from what I remember I've been more confident that I know other people in the past than I'd want to now.

This's kind of a swerve, but in the past I've seen people try to argue against retribution using language like what I've been using, focusing on how we can't be certain of who other people are. I don't agree with that, so I want to say outright that some people do deserve shit. Nazis and terfs are the first that come to mind. Wish I could give this the intensity it deserves, but Fuck Them like they fuck others.

I've used "effort" a couple times here, but I haven't actually said what it's supposed to mean. So when I used it in this I was talking about noticing the way other people act or react to things, remembering how they do, and then making a picture of their personality based on that.

5.0
This'll be shorter. So, I'm a big believer in Murphy's Law, and I think it applies to people too. If I can imagine a belief I can assume that some people, somewhere and sometime, hold it, and that if an experience is physically possible there are people who've gone or will go through it. What looks unlikely when I imagine it happening to me or any one person I know will probably be a lot more believable if I think of it never happening to literally anyone who'll ever exist. I figure something needs to have conditions stacked on super-specific conditions to have a chance to never happen.

This isn't pessimism, it's realism.

If the universe behaved properly, anyone could do what we do.  We prepare contingencies, mug angels, whatever it takes, because we are murderous primates and we get the job done.

You're not wrong there

How did writing things out work for you? I've fallen out of that habit, but this thread reminded me how useful that tool can be. When I think about the times I felt trapped by looping thoughts, the inability to adequately express them was a root cause.

Quote from: Exoteric on December 07, 2020, 11:08:30 pm
I feel like there are always more ways for something to go wrong than to go right.

I agree with that if you take individual short-term situations and score them. I also feel there are more positive long term outcomes possible in the branching and merging of reality trees, which contain those negative knots, and couldn't exist without them.

I think it's helped. I've gotten out of a couple spirals by sitting down and getting it on paper. It took a bit to get started, I ended up telling myself that I'd get rid of whatever I was writing. That made it easier to push past any blocks that came up, and I ended up keeping some things.

Thanks for the replies, I see what you mean.
I know what I'll be obsessing over next.

It also occurs to me that it "suffering" is your baseline you could be in trouble. "There is no ethical consumption" and all that.

Thanks for the warning. What do you mean? Or, where should I go if you don't feel like writing out something I could just read somewhere else.

I think that right now I'm young and I'm stupid. One of those things is definitely going to change, but whether or not the other does is up to me. I have a lot of ideas, but I have a hard time thinking through them. My head's felt constipated for a bit; I think if I can get my thoughts someplace outside myself they'll start to feel more like concrete things I can work with, improve, and apply. And if it turns out I'm a dumbass now, hopefully that'll be caught on here before I can go off and seriously fuck up. So I'll keep rambling posts like this on this thread as I'm able to get them out.

1.0

I think it's possible for people to feel like every community or culture they're familiar with somehow dominates reality, and that they can only live along the lines they set out. I remember having that problem, and I've seen other people talk and act in ways that make me think they could too. And groups absolutely can have massive influence over peoples' lives. Even without formal power, cliques and circles can make people change in ways they wouldn't have without them. But there are more communities out there than I can imagine. I think there are more groups than there are individual people, because I feel like most people are probably part of more than one.

The thing is, no individual community out of the billions out there can claim to control the entire world. So, none of them should be automatically relevant to you. I think that ideally you would consider the positive or negative impact you think one could have to you, or other people you care about, along with any obligations you think you have to it, and then base how much headspace you give it on that. The problem is, not all groups a person knows exist has reasons to be important to them, but people can obsess over any they learn about. It's like we're born only knowing the groups we belong to, and as we grow up we don't realize alternatives exist. We also believe in some way that the groups we're part of are the only ones that really exist, and all others don't have the same depth, influence, or substance. Because of that, any circle of people that gets under our skin —that we don't cut ourselves off of as soon as we meet— is given the same importance in our head as the ones we've grown up with. We think that everyone, or at least all real people, belong to them and follow their rules, and that we have no choice but to too. I'm more uncomfortable trying to figure out the why of something than the what (I'll talk more about that later), so while right now I do think this issue is real, I think the explanation I just gave only could be its cause. I can't look into everyone's heads and confirm it, and I haven't collected enough of other people's experiences to even make it a decent theory. But it might make what I'm trying to say more clear.

2.0

I can't, under any circumstances, tell someone else what to be. I can only possibly have the right to tell someone else how to interact with other people, and even then I need a damn good reason to. The more I think about this, the more reasons for it I come up with, but this's the one I think works best.

If I see someone else doing something that I know won't cause suffering, then I can't possibly have a reason to try and stop them. Even if it's something I wouldn't do, even if it sets off alarm bells in my head, I have an obligation to shut myself up. Because —again, as long as it isn't a form of abuse— the only kind of suffering their actions are causing is my sense of offence. Obviously they can't control that, and whatever they're doing, something must be causing them to. Because of that, it would definitely take less strain for me to change my attitude than for them to change their actions, and the responsibility's on me to make the effort. Realistically, I just don't think people should change for no other reason than to fit into others' view of reality, but I have that justification to pull out if I ever need to.

This's one of the beliefs I especially want to improve because, as strongly as I think I hold it, it's still something that only clearly came to me relatively recently. I want it to be fucking solid in my head, so I'll keep hammering it in, thinking through its repercussions, and trying to solve any contradictions I find.

Everyone gets a year older. New issues show up, some old ones go away, and a lot mutate. I can't predict the future more than that, but I can say that hopefully the US starts to un-fuck itself and your years turn out better than this one was.

I don't think I know anyone who never gets urges like that, but I may just be cynical about human nature

Yeah, I mostly agree. I don't think it's physically impossible for people like that to exist, so I guess at least some of them have to, but they're definitely a small group so I shouldn't take the chance. Thanks for all the information, I'm sure it'll be useful.

Personally, i never ever "think" if i dont have to, without a Word document or a pen and paper where i dump my thoughts, because otherwise youre not making progress, akin to a dog chasing its own tail.

I'll try this out. When I think about something serious in an idle way, like when I'm walking or doing something else, it feels like when I try to remember a song and end up repeating the same parts in my head. I just go over the same points without making any new connections between them. Writing them down should force me to fill in the gaps between them.

As a warning, this post talks about getting stuck in your head and having a pessimistic worldview. If you know that that could cause any problems for you today, you don't have to read it.

So, I tend to worry about everything. Based on what I've seen and heard, I feel like there are always more ways for something to go wrong than to go right. And because of that, things do mess up most often than they don't. That idea is still kind of half-baked in my head, though, and I think I'd still have this problem if I hadn't thought of it. The thing is, I get anxious about things I have no way to impact. And I can't decide what to think about that. I definitely want to be aware of the world's problems, and all its shitty possibilities, but sometimes I can't stop thinking about them and my train of thought ends up going in circles, from one topic I've been over hundreds of times before to another without forming any kind of conclusion.

I still would rather live with that than try to ignore the world's flaws. So if I want to free up my mind for more productive thinking I'll need to learn to acknowledge them and factor them into my thought processes without my brain melting down. I've already gotten some advice on that and started trying to apply it, but I want as much help as I can get. So if any of you know any ways to combat what I'm talking about, please share them. I understand a technique that worked for somebody else isn't guaranteed to work for me, but there's a chance.

It doesn't actually matter if you're the least experienced fish in the bicycle race, if you know what I mean.

What we have proven over 18 years of SCIENCE is that nobody is good at this, and if someone SEEMS to be good at it, they're selling you something (tangible or otherwise).  Usually they are selling you the idea that they are some form of Guru or otherwise Really Important Person that You Should Listen To, but on one memorable occasion we had a guy named Gavriel try to sell us our own art work.

This of course worked out well for everyone involved.

Fair enough. I wouldn't mind hearing the story about Gavriel if you're okay with sharing.

Hello everyone. I need to get better at expressing myself, so this introduction will probably be awkward to read. Sorry about that. I first found this forum about a year ago when I was learning about Discordianism. I drifted away from the religion itself a little while later, but I've kept coming back from time to time since then. A lot of what you talk about on here has really resonated with me, and this also looks like the best place I've found to get serious criticism about what I think.

I don't know how often I'll actually post on here vs reading your threads, but I do know I'll probably stick around for a long while. When I do post, other than to react to other people, it'll most likely be either to ask questions or to get your input on my ideas. I'm worried that I'm too inexperienced to participate on here, but I need to grow up someday. Hopefully I'll end up contributing in a positive way, whether that's soon or when I'm older.

I don't know any really unique or obscure recipes, so the best I can offer is a tip for making grilled cheese sandwiches. If you butter the outsides of your bread, and then coat them with parmesan it'll give them an extra layer of crunch when they're grilled. Maybe you'd like that.