I can take a guess at what it tells us.

We’re lonely. We get no physical contact. No touch. No warmth. And it’s not really socially acceptable for us to seek those things, because men are scolded for emotions and vulnerability. We are scolded for anything that would enable intimacy.

And it’s to such an extent that most men are so repressed they don’t even realize they crave intimacy. They don’t even have the vocabulary to describe their need for intimacy.

Now introduce, to such a man, a “sister.”

Heavy emphasis on the quotes.

The “story” of the porn, using their family ties as a shortcut, quickly establishes that she lives with him. She bonds with him. It’s socially acceptable for him to hug her, to wrestle with her, maybe even to cuddle her. And she will always be there, because her connection to him runs deeper than most “romantic” relationships can (we’re still assuming this man can’t articulate his own need for intimacy), so he doesn’t need to worry about her abandoning him.

Naturally, this emotionally repressed man is going to look at this fictional family member, this figment of his suspension of disbelief, and say, “well I want to 🦆 her!” (I always find my keyboard’s lack of profanity amusing. I refuse to teach such an innocent piece of software how to cuss.)

What he really means is that he appreciates that intimacy. And cannot really get turned on in its absence. But he can’t say that. He can’t admit that or even know that. Because this man is not only starved of all of the above: he can’t even articulate this starvation.

Daughters? Sisters? Mothers? They all serve the same purpose as a shortcut – “here’s a person who is intimate and trusting with you by default.” The familial bond is a fast, easy way to establish prebuilt trust and affection without spending 20-30 minutes on storytelling or 20-30 hours of therapy trying to convince a repressed audience that it’s okay to have a deep, intimate, trusting connection with this consenting woman.

In other words, what it tells us about society isn’t good.

It sounds like you were distressed and left because you didn’t know what to do or how to help.

That’s empathy. Feeling uncomfortable when you see people in pain is empathy. And it’s normal. It’s normal for you to feel distressed around her as you hear her account. It’s normal to want to leave. It’s normal to feel guilty about leaving. It’s normal to wonder if you could have done more to help catch the bastard.

This is awful. What you just saw is awful. What you just experienced is legitimately uncomfortable.

And it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around, because how could your pain be valid when it’s a response to seeing someone in “real” pain? How could your pain be important when it’s nothing more than the faint echo of the pain you’re witnessing someone else go through?

But it hurts. As selfish as it feels to hurt at a time like this, it still hurts.

Wow. That’s Linus Torvalds levels of screaming, “ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!”

People got really worked up back in 2008.

Oh no, if I think someone’s name is Joe and it turns out being Jeff, I feel atrocious.

Have you tried punching “batch recipes kale” into a search engine? (but instead of kale, put whichever vegetable you want to eat more of)

“Batch recipes” are basically like meal prep. And they often taste amazing.

My reasoning is: if you have leftovers in your fridge that are veggie-laden, tasty, and convenient, odds are you’ll be getting your veggies without even trying.

But now I live in Nevada. I will be voting for Biden because

• the CHIPS Act is going to put chip manufacturing at the mercy of union labor
  • and with the solidarity whipped up by places like Antiwork? It’s going to be a bloodbath.
• his bans on slave labor solar panel imports will do the same thing. Union laborers won’t need to compete with slave owners.
• he halted ICE worksite immigration raids, which were basically used to terrorize migrant workers and keep them complacent (hence lowering their wages, and by extension, lowering the market price of labor)
• he “played the long game” and helped win rail workers those sick days they were fighting for.
• he kept student loan payments paused for the first 33 months of his term and tried to get a decent chunk forgiven
• he appointed trust-busting advocate Lina Kahn to the FTC, where she is now a chairwoman
• he appointed pro-labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo to the NLRB, where she recently set an anti-union-busting precedent that, according to Harold Meyerson at Prospect.org, “makes union organizing possible again”

He’s silently, steadily, baby-stepping us in the right direction. And that’s worth a vote of support, not just a vote for a lesser evil.

I didn’t. I was in California, so my vote was irrelevant anyways. I’ve been living with my mom, so I decided to use it to make a point.

I was like, “look Mom! I don’t approve of Biden’s hair sniffing, so I’m voting for Jorgenson! You can do the same! That’s an option!”

It didn’t work. She voted for Trump. (Don’t worry. She was also in California so her vote was also irrelevant). You’d think with her personal history, she’d have been AGAINST serial sexual predators… but I guess his cult of personality was just too strong. She still genuinely believes he “stood up to the globalists.”

Yeah, Literature Cafe seems to be down.

Ah…

Well yes, your response did extend things quite nicely. I, for one, found it fascinating.

I think it’s an interesting framing,

Thanks!

I’ve frankly learned a lot about game engines, 3D modeling, and coding via these groups. The illumination of all the systems behind the scenes is what has been most valuable and interesting. I’m having trouble pinpointing one thing. 😅 There is a lot of “trivia” or arbitrary facts to learn when dealing with game engines.

Yeah, game design does sound like a pretty vast and complex topic. I can see it being tricky to just grab one thing without needing to explain a dozen other things.

It is done. But I have no idea how to link it.

Do I choose this?

https://literature.cafe/post/1367371

Do I choose this?

https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/1947047

Do I go over to Lemmy World and grab this link?

https://lemmy.world/post/4506074

Or should my link start with something other than https:// ?

I am contemplating stealing this and turning it into a prompt for !writingprompts@literature.cafe

Something like,

“you have recently noticed that your friends will do everything you tell them. Is it a prank? A superpower? Doesn’t matter. You won’t let this opportunity go to waste.”

Or what if they are 100 people who are all lying in hospital beds with incurable illnesses that cause excruciating pain, wishing they could die, and now doomed to years more of their unbearable existence?

When I went to community college, I’d arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with “Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation.”

Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.

Yeeeeaaaaah… I can see that. All of it.

• The “sharing shiny rocks instead of themselves,”
• The shiny rocks getting exhausting
• The sharing of them getting repetitive
• The pushing away other people.

That does sound tiring, man. Sorry you’ve found yourself in such a situation.

But also… what’s one random, interesting thing you learned from the group? (sorry)

I mean, the real answer is for us to get around people who are tolerant of neurodivergents. Then our shiny rocks would be allowed. But it’s hard for anyone to choose their social circles.

I know, right? It’s so uncomfortable!

On the chance that you’re a fellow neurodivergent, I’m going to share something I discovered after moving back in with my mom. We neurodivergents think of information like one might think of rock collecting. We collect information, compare its shininess and smoothness to other pieces of information, roll it over in our hands. We’re eager to show information to people, and eager when someone shows us a new piece of information. Anyone enlightening us has our full attention and enthusiasm. And when we get corrected? That is the smoothest, shiniest stone. We collect that voraciously.

But 1) not everyone shares our information-collecting obsession. And 2) everyone has a weakness to their own special kind of rock – their own, private kryptonite. And we neurodivergents tend to ignore the pain when we pick up our own kryptonite because we figure “information is always good (even if it hurts).”

But it’s not good to expose a person to the information that is their kryptonite. Even our fellow neurodivergents, who will be begging us, “please, bring it closer! Knowledge is power! I must grow!”

As a neurodivergent, you must learn which rocks are kryptonite to which people. You must learn to withhold extremely relevant information in the exact conversations when it’s most pertinent – and do so precisely because its pertinence is why it’s kryptonite to the person. And you must learn to do so even with fellow neurodivergents.

Acceptable:

• ✅ - the social behavior of bonobos
• ✅ - the Flynn Effect
• ✅ - the origin of the name of various open source software projects
• ✅ - the economic argument against slavery (that’s Roman history)
• ✅ - the fact that the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit was actually justified, and the whole story was twisted by corporate propaganda

Unacceptable:

• 🚫 - “Tucker Carlson has been caught lying” >> [this logic here] >> “Tucker Carlson is probably not trustworthy, going forward.” (people hate hearing about that logical bridge!)
• 🚫 - the damage that you see a person’s religion of choice doing to their psyche (people really hate that)
• 🚫 - most of the situations in which someone’s beliefs are incorrect

If you want to discuss the “unacceptable” topics with people, you must look up street epistemology. But keep in mind as you learn it: discussing these topics productively will actually be painful for you if you’re a neurodivergent. As you perform street epistemology, you will be asking questions, and the person answering you will be espousing an unbearable symphony of incorrect beliefs.

And you will have to hold back your urge to say, “well, actually” dozens of times a minute, maintaining an outwardly calm appearance and somehow focusing on your next question in the middle of their blizzard of wrongness.

Damn it, it’s now GNL and we have to rewrite all the textbooks!

Duly noted. I’ve subscribed to the writing prompts community.

I don’t think they were hue bulbs. I think they were just regular LED light fixture bulbs.