jaycifer

u/jaycifer@lemmy.world
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Here are some thoughts based on past reflections I’ve had (so they might not be phrased the best) in no particular order:

First, you mentioned sometimes not understanding what is being said. I minored in philosophy during college, and the first and most important thing I was taught during Intro was the principle of charity during discussion, composed of two parts. The first, assume the other person has something worth saying, isn’t super relevant here. But the second part is that questions of meaning come before questions of truth. If you can repeat back what the other person tells you in your own words and have them agree, then you can start forming a rebuttal.

Speaking of forming things, I believe that the thoughts you express are not your thoughts, but a linguistic representation of your thoughts. When I envision a thought forming, it’s more like a glowing ball of thought and words can be put together to form a kind of shell around the thought. The better the wording, the closer the shell gets to matching the shape of the thought itself. Improving your English toolset will allow you to better shape your words to match your thoughts more quickly and easily. The primary way to do this is to expand your vocabulary/lexicon/internal thesaurus and ability to connect words together, and the primary method to accomplish that is to expose yourself to new words in new orders, and you do that by reading new stuff.

All that is just the prep work. In an actual conversation you don’t have the luxury of reading a bunch right now. My advice there is that, if the other people are cool, be upfront that you are still formulating your thoughts into words and ask for help in finding the right ones if your struggling. Doing so will leave less space in the minds of others to assume anything else, likely leading to not just more patience from them but possibly help for you as well.

I think the process of forming thoughts into words is one of the most fascinating things there is. The times when I have observed myself pulling an original thought out of the ether of my mind or better yet being able to help someone else in pulling their thoughts out of their head and into the world are some of the most beautiful moments I have experienced. I wish you well in working on your ability to find those moments!

on Vanilla FTW! · c/memes · 6 pts · 2h

Vanilla is my favorite smell. Back in college when my buddy went to Mexico and brought back cup souvenirs for friends, he didn’t get one for me. Instead he gave me a big bottle of fancy vanilla. I kept that thing at my computer desk and every so often for the next couple years I’d pop it open and take a big rip of the smell just to feel a little more alive. It was so great.

In our friend group slack we do a purge every couple years or so to cut down the member size, so they could have been doing something similar. But we also send at least an @everyone notification to give folks a chance to say they want to stay, and it sounds like they didn’t do that here.

Between the post apocalypse reclaimed by nature, the avatar returning after presumably generations, and the floating red shapes at the end, this reminds me a lot of Breath of the Wild.

Navigation, easily. I can learn a few basic phrases of a language, and odds are someone will speak English in the places I’m going. I can ask English-speaking people what the essential customs and etiquette are.

But if I don’t know where I’m going, I can’t be confident in what I’m doing. If I’m in a new place and have to follow a narrow set of directions to get to specific places, I’m confined to those narrow spaces. Knowing where I am and what’s around me opens up the world with me driving the experience instead of relying on the knowledge of others.

In both of the cities I’ve lived in, I hear a place mentioned and I instantly can point in its direction, estimate the distance, and calculate a good route to get close to there. At the music festival I’ve attended several times with a large venue I am the guy that people stop and ask for directions because I exude confidence in where I am. To be able to carry that knowledge with me anywhere in the world would be incredible.

And if “understanding the streets” includes knowing good restaurants or places to visit and whether a tourist would be welcome there, then all the better.

I realize there’s a good chance you already do something similar, but I’ve been cutting back on my own sodium intake and I like pasta. Instead of pasta sauce jars I’ve been throwing a couple cans of diced tomatoes (usually reduced salt petite diced) and a 6oz can of tomato paste into my ground meat then adding spices for flavor while it heats up. It’s really good!

I’m rarely certain enough to claim that I’m right. Oftentimes I’ll acknowledge that uncertainty by stating where/when I heard something so the other person can judge the validity of that source themself.

That said, if I am confident in something and I’m told that I’m wrong, I’ll usually look it up there or just say something like “that’s not my understanding but I can’t dive into it now.” Then when I do have time I’ll do a bit of research, or if the topic comes up again I’ll assert what I was confident in with the caveat that so-and-so told me this other thing.

If I do the research and find that I was wrong, I’ll try to remember that the next time I see the other person and let them know I confirmed they were right.

What about them? If a sex repulsed asexual person loves an allosexual with a strong sex drive that relationship probably isn’t working out. An aromantic probably isn’t getting into a romantic relationship deeper than friendly companionship, which I would call “weaker” (for lack of a better word) than the “soul loving” they put forth. An aroace person would have both issues.

on Reset (2008-04-02) · c/pbf · 8 pts · 20d

A spacefaring civilization encounters something that "resets" them back to a primordial form from which creatures evolve into a new spacefaring civilization that then encounters something that "resets" them...

This post and the comment from Lupus helped me a lot when my dad passed away: https://lemmy.world/post/22499928?sort=Top

My own advice is to do what feels right if you can. As my emotions cascaded over me when the doctor told us he was gone, one image went through my head. I saw myself throwing a rock into the lake my grandparents had a cabin on when I was growing up, from the boat landing my dad would walk to with my brother and me to skip rocks. So a day or two later my brother and I drove back to the lake, trespassed around the old cabin to soak in the memories, then skipped rocks for a while. I still suck at skipping rocks, and it didn’t fix things, but it was a little cathartic.

My dad was an organ donor when his brain died. The next day after the 24 hour period to confirm brain death, I was sitting with my brother and stepmother waiting to have the plug pulled when a lady walked into the room and introduced herself "as part of my father's care team." I don't remember much of what she said because I was focused on waiting for the end and she wasn't wearing scrubs so I didn't really care what she had to say, but she left and after another couple hours I learned that she was from the Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) for our State, my dad was a donor, and they weren't pulling the plug until they took him to a different hospital for organ harvesting.

The rest of that day was a blur but my stepmom was pissed, the next morning my dad's body was in the same room, that lady was apparently fired, there was a new guy and gal as well as their boss to talk with us, they told us they weren't going away. Eventually they agreed to perform the harvesting surgery there so we could walk to the OR with him. We were asked if we wanted a "hero walk" where the nurses and doctors take time away from actually helping people to clap for a corpse being walked down the hall, which was the dumbest fucking thing I'd ever heard of.

I wasn't there when my dad's brain died in the middle of the night. I thought I'd be there as his body functions shut down over the course of a half hour, but instead the last I saw of him before he was cremated was his still breathing corpse being pushed down a hallway. I got a text that his heart had stopped a couple hours later.

Across North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin there are only something like 350 organ donations a year because the body needs to be either very fresh and preserved or brain dead to keep the organs intact for harvesting. If you are a donor, it is very unlikely that your organs will actually be donated, but if they are, it can add a whole extra layer of shitty to an already awful situation for the family. Obviously this is just my experience and it's probably unusual for people to be fired so it was probably an especially bad one, but you asked and this is my answer to your question. I'm still not sure if I'm going to be a donor next time I renew my license. I don't think I will until I add a stipulation to my will to allow my family to override it if they feel a need to.

In my own made up worlds I often imagine FTL works by moving between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions. 3D is “flattened” in such a way that point A (where you start) and point B (where you want to be) are at the same point of the now 2D universe. During the transition back to 3D, points A and B go back to their original positions, but you are now at point B.

In Christopher Paolini’s book To Sleep in a Sea of Stars there are people whose brains have been removed and installed as ship minds to augment ship functions. There’s some discussion about what it cost and whether it was worth it.