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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It refers to a preference for “natural” things. The kind of people who make their own peanut butter and grow their own veggies etc.

    Like most things it’s a personality trait that’s cute and sweet when they’re putting in the extra effort as a gift to another human–“I recently aged my own cheese and it came out really good; here’s a sample to try!”

    vs the nuisance of people those who use it as a measure of puritanical superiority–“you can’t even keep a sourdough starter alive? It’s not even hard! It’s like you don’t even care about the chemicals in store bread!”

    Honestly I’m even over “people don’t realize that having the time to keep a sourdough starter is a privilege because–” you don’t even need to think that much about it. Literally anything can be harder or easier or a privilege due to the infinite complexity of the universe. Just stop assigning moral value to random behaviors by default. Eats the soul on both ends when you could be plotting the downfall of wealthy pedophiles.




  • Also like I’ve been with hubs for years even before making it legally binding and at a certain point 90% of your communication / negotiation is nonverbal with a 10% verbal clarification for when it’s insufficient. Like we’ll mutually get pushy / use the other if we’re horny enough just because we’ve been together long enough that we recognize that sometimes the other person just really needs it at that time to feel loved or they need physical release or they’re just too damn horny even if you’re not feeling it right that second. (Mutually enjoyable experiences are very possible but usually take a few days of planning, especially to sync up our refractory periods to increase the chance of both orgasming in the sweet spot between slowly and quickly enough, more if we’re planning on incorporating an by specific kinks).

    There’s still space to say no if you’re really just sick / hurt / tired / overstimulated but at this point the default setting for both of us is “yeah go ahead just use lube” / understanding that it’s on the initiator to put in the effort to receive an adequate physiological response. And you accidentally overstep sometimes but it’s pretty minor and non traumatic when it’s rare and you’re both able to look at it from the perspective of an honest mistake. Sometimes your partner steps on your toes or runs into you around a corner too and it’s not a Problem unless you’re in a shitty relationship with an ongoing unidirectional lack of effort towards preventing hurtful events.

    I think this is what a lot of older couples are describing who are in what would otherwise be considered a healthy and loving relationship by modern standards but where (usually the woman) states that she considers satisfying her husband’s appetites to be an obligation of their marriage. I take issue with it being unidirectional (historical perspectives on women’s sex drive is a whole other convo) and think they’re lacking the emotional intelligence / language to describe the level of nonverbal communication they’re actually doing, but I think what they’re actually describing is just that they’ve been together so damn long that that communication has become largely nonverbal and following loose but long-standing emotional / relationship contracts. That lack of context makes for shitty advice because you can’t just start a relationship there, that’s a negotiation that doesn’t really get settled until years or sometimes even decades in (also the thing about bidirectionality and gender equality).

    TLDR; after enough years and in a communicative enough relationship you don’t need verbal / explicit y/n as frequently.



  • You probably do relate to all five love languages to some extent. Most people do. But for most people 1–2 tend to matter more than the others over time.

    Figuring out which ones those are can actually be pretty useful.

    • It helps you understand yourself better (why certain things make you feel especially cared for).
    • It helps you communicate more clearly instead of expecting people to just pick up on it.

    You can get a sense of this by:

    • Thinking about past relationships and noticing what made you feel most valued.
    • Or using quiz-style tools as a starting point to spot patterns.

    Once you’re aware of the ones that tend to matter most to you, it’s usually easier to express your needs and understand how other people show care too.





  • Meet people: hobby or spiritual community are the two big ones most people meet a partner at. Look up cheap hobbies in particular something like a walking club.

    Cheap places to take a girl:

    • fish around in conversations for her favorite food. Pick the prettiest spot within walking distance. Pick somewhere out of the way but visible to passerby like the edge of a park. Check the calendar for favorable weather. Bring a blanket, that favorite food, and anything needed to make the environment comfy like an umbrella.

    • if it’s just not the time of year for favorable weather book a library or community center presentation room and in addition to food fish around in convos for a favorite movie. Still bring a large blanket and push the tables and wheely chairs out of the way.

    Any partner who finds effort over cash undesirable is just not a good fit for your life right now.




  • A lot of the times our hospital security show up to my deescalation classes after leaving a job in corrections. One of the things we often commiserate on is that they got into corrections and I into the state hospital to try and help other people grow and heal but what happened is that we got caught in a loop of “what am I going to see next that I’m going to have to report?” I’m now working for a psych unit in a regular hospital which still has it’s flaws but none comparable to the state.

    First you see a patient spit in the face of a staff member who has to be physically held back from hitting them (they actually told us we’re allowed to restrain our coworkers if that happens), then you see a staff member get called racial slurs and they get up in the patients face and yell at them and you have to get between them and tell your coworker to take a walk but it’s hard to get them to do that because it’s 2am and there’s no other techs on the unit and they know the nurse isn’t gonna come out to help you before it’s too late. And those reactions make sense and you wonder why they’re packing you in with so many patients that your coworker can’t just walk away. And then you see somebody posture and yell at a patient who’s just all around rude but again it’s 2am and you can’t make it to 7 with just one tech.

    And you also know that you’re going to need to choose the moment that it’s too much and that’ll be the end. Because if you stay after that you become the “them” in the “us vs them” and one day you’re going to face a violent patient at 2am and the tech who’s with you will leave you alone with that patient because “I don’t want you to report me too.”

    And if you’re smart, you get out before it gets that far. One day a nurse asked me what I’d seen happen and I told them (truthfully) that I’d been at lunch and had no idea what they were talking about and they cut the conversation off. And I had no idea what patient or staff member it would’ve been about (as far as I could tell all of the patients were the same as before I’d gone to lunch) so I couldn’t have reported anything anyway. But I had to ask myself if I had seen something what would I have been asked to cover up?

    I said that to that hospital security worker coming from corrections and there was this instant look of recognition. Anybody who’s worked corrections or for the state will tell me something similar happened to them, or worse. And I just… You either get out or something awful happens. I’m so grateful I was able to get out before I personally got pulled into something. You think you’ll be able to be different but that system is just so much bigger than you. And it’s not because I’m a better person it was luck. Part of it was luck that I had enough formal and informal education to know what was coming but some of it was pure grace of the universe luck.

    And people who are outside of it living their happy lives will tell you they want a better system, but they will never truly be willing to put in the work needed to change it or even give you the resources to do it yourself. Like I’d been a patient at that state hospital previously and went back as a staff member to try and help and being a staff member was just so much worse somehow. I’m grateful that it gave me the experience to do what I do now and be an authority / teacher in the management of violent patients but it was hell while it was happening (I was also in therapy for other stuff at the time and was sooo fortunate to be given that opportunity to properly contextualize the experience as it was happening). No one who’s never been through that will ever really understand.





  • I had an old coworker who had given MAGA organizations her life’s savings. She was working well past her planned retirement and wound up getting a head injury when a patient bopped her on the head three times. She shouldn’t have been put in the position to work high acuity psychiatry in her 70s. She was going to retire destitute but after that nobody could deny she just wasn’t safe to work anymore. And to the day she retired she kept saying trump was going to reward her any day now. I know somebody here is gonna talk shit but aside from being too damn naïve she was such a kind soul. And I’ve only ever worked psych as a nurse but she’d done all kinds of things like oncology and wound care so if I had a patient with a medical problem or who needed an IV placed she had my back. She’d rant to the high heavens about the lizard people but damn if she didn’t know her lab values and meds back to front. I hope those grifters rot in hell.


  • Most offenders I’ve interacted with have no specific attraction to children at all. They want to rape someone and children just happen to make ideal victims by being smaller and weaker and depending on age and upbringing may not even realize a crime had occurred or be able to advocate for themselves. Most of the offenders would have / often had also raped the elderly or disabled if given the chance. They would even attempt to prey on the smaller or weaker staff members or other patients if given the opportunity.

    There were a few edge cases of profoundly psychotic / ID patients who genuinely just didn’t know any better but again it was rarely a specific attraction and more of an overall disinhibition, they would generally also have trespassing, petty theft, and property damage charges and were showing their genitals to just about anyone. Violent and sexual intrusive thoughts can be a part of some OCD presentations but the thoughts usually go away when the underlying anxiety is treated with medication and behavioral therapy. Pts with violent and sexual intrusive thoughts also pretty much never offend, to the extent that I never really interacted with that population until after leaving forensics. They’re a super high suicide risk though due to not understanding the actual psychological mechanism of the thoughts (self-reinforcing through anxiety, not attraction).

    I’m not saying attraction to children doesn’t exist, but when we’re taking about the actual issue of child sexual assault it’s just an unproductive line of discussion that relates very little to the actual core issues. The “can’t help being attracted” is mostly pop-psychology TV shows use to tell a more emotionally charged story.

    Now that said, we do have a huge issue as a society with allowing the high of righteous fury to interfere with victims actually receiving justice. Those accused have just as much of a right to due process as anyone accused of any other crime. Interfering with that right either creates massive overreach by the legal system or in individual cases damages evidence that would be used to fairly prosecute an offender. It also creates a social environment where people protect their offending loved ones out of fear for them, when they should feel secure in the knowledge that while they will probably always love the offender, they can and will be safely separated from the rest of society (or at least be forced to live under monitoring and away from possible victims) for the rest of their natural life.