Actually as a kid I realized that what I was taught in the bible and church were metaphors and not things to be taken literally. I mean, a lot of it went against what we learned in school, and school actually made sense.
Only much later in my teens did I realize that many Christians do take the Bible literally. It was then that I decided to completely abandon my religion.
Same, as a little kid I had no idea the adults actually BELIEVED what they were telling us, it just seemed like stories. I was so confused when I found out they believed it was all real. Then again when as a pre-teen I found out they thought homosexuality was against the rules - love? They thought love was wrong? I had gone to church for so long and that idea had never crossed my mind.
I remember having my first same-sex crush when I was around 11 years old. Unfortunately around 10-11 was also when I started to learn that "gay" was a slur and a shameful thing, and a bit later that it was a sin too. I would fall into deep self hate and internalised homophobia for the following 10 years...
I'm straight as a board, and it was the earlyish 1980s so a more backwards time but I still found it utterly shocking. I remember it so clearly. It was a youth group evening and they were talking about sex, when they started talking about homosexuality I absolutely anticipated they were going to talk about the issue of hate towards gay people, so when they went in the other direction I was floored.
I have never understood the metaphor argument. When I was a believer I believed it all literally. If this stuff is a metaphor then what it is a metaphor for? Also if it is a metaphor how come (especially in the prophets) the Bible spends so much time listing metaphors and then explaining them? How come when the Bible self-references it treats itself literally?
Adam and Eve were the literal truth to Paul and he used it to create his theology of original sin.
This
That nobody is a “grown up” and that everyone is faking it.
We’re all just kids having kids.
Yes, and now, anytime I'm trying to get to know someone better, I'm strategizing as to what childish/dirty joke or well placed cuss word will break through the "fake wall" and allow me to really know this person.
You should try an initiation ceremony. It could help you feel like an adult.
When I was about 10 I realized that people of other religions probably felt just as strongly that their religion is “true” as I felt about mine and that I had no grounds to look down on them.
Fast forward 10 years and I became an atheist.
Not to mention all of those who believed in a religion that's fallen into myth, or even been completely forgotten by history. Thor was someone's Jesus
I used to spend a lot of energy being concerned what other people thought of me. How I dressed, how I acted, what I owned, etc. One day I realized 2 things:
Most people are too busy thinking about themselves to spare any meaningful thoughts for me.
I'm never going to see most of these people ever again so it doesn't matter what they think.
After that I started directing that energy into making sure that I approved of my choices rather than hoping strangers would.
It has a name its called spotlight effect
Some people have decided to call it the spotlight effect
I just wanted to let op know its a thing and there are others with it and there are resources
Why are you wearing those pants?
Why aren't you more like your father?
Why haven't you liked and subscribed?
Friends can matter to you more than family, and that's ok, but family does a lot more for you than you realize.
I didn't have a great family, but it was only when I was upset about a birthday party when I was like 12 where my mom made all the cards and buttons and stuff and I was so mad that it wasn't the cool cards and prizes that you buy that I kind of realized it.
It dawned on me like two weeks later that my parents couldn't afford any of that, but they took time out of their day, for like two weeks, even though they both worked too much, to hand-make approximations as best they could. Without me knowing, so I would be surprised.
Ever work a double shift and then spend the few minutes you have not working, sleeping, or cooking to hand-make party favors? Yeah, me either.
It still makes me cry thinking about how ungrateful I was and the look of sadness and yearning on my mom's face when I got mad at her for not buying the "good" stuff.
When I was 20, I sat her down and told her about it and how bad I felt, and how I never knew how to apologize for it. We had a good cry, and she thanked me for seeing it eventually, and how happy it retroactively made her knowing I realized it so soon after.
After my nerve damage: there are some mistakes you can only make once.
Also: Life has no rewind button and shit can go south pretty fast.
Similar experience. Got in a bad accident when I was 15, entirely my own doing. That's when I learned that some mistakes and their injuries are permanent.
Say what you mean; mean what you say.
No idea where I heard or read it, but preteen me internalized it and it's become part of my creed to this day
I can learn everything I need to know about how to be a decent person from cartoons.
Cartoons have always shown me that being a friendly person, who is honest, do right by their friends and tries to do the right thing will guide me well through life. I needed to weed through the friends a little bit but that has held true thus far
Bluey teaches me how to be a good dad
Rag doll!
Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path.
I grew up watching Looney toons, and they taught me to be an asshole.
I did once try to drop my largest book on my dad's head from as high up as I could get, my logic being that since it wasn't an anvil, which was clearly artistic license, he'd probably be fine.
No one is gonna stick up for you and what's right, you gotta do that yourself
...and if someone does, it's because there's something in it for them. They don't do it for you.
You gotta be that squeaky wheel
Be the grease
In school, I happened to notice exactly when some random topic went from "uh, I guess I kinda understand this" to having it actually "click". That clued me off to the difference between e.g. knowing a bunch of shitty formulae, and actually understanding the topic to the point where you can actually use it for problem solving. Also, that all the teaching and books I received revolved 100% around the former.
I had that moment when learning to code. I had like 98% or what I needed to know. Then one day I came across some random SO post, learned something that I really should have learned a while ago (the difference between static classes and instantiated classes, yes really) and then everything just fell into place and I realised I could actually write proper code now. It was a fun moment :)
For me it was variables. I know it's as basic as you can get here. But when I figured out that I could store data in a little box to get later I was like "oh, I can do anything with this"
Also, that all the teaching and books I received revolved 100% around the former.
This is true, because understanding comes from practice. The teacher and the books can never create that click of understanding. Only the student's side of the effort can do that.
Negative numbers. I just asked if there were numbers below zero when I was like 4, and my mom about pissed herself. Not that it stopped her from homeschooling me into ignorance instead.
The spawn is too dangerous. We must insulate it from too many sources of knowledge
If it gets too curious it may burrrrrn!
It's alright, I asked why Santa would get me presents for Christmas and not my parents; was about 4.... My dad still doesn't like me today. Might be different reasons, but he has never said hahaha
I was about 11 or so and acting out, my teacher said my name. I just froze for a moment and it dawned on me that was the first time he had said my name all day. Completely invisible unless I was doing something wrong. Just a square shape in a square hole unless I choose otherwise and if I do it by making my life worse.
I guess it doesn't sound profound. Every guy knows this on some level but it really knocked the wind out of me at the time.
Want to join my team of supervillains?
There's a book series called The Hammer and the Cross about an English bastard child of a noblewoman that resulted from her being taken by a Viking raid and later escaping back to her home. Then the Vikings invade to avenge the death of Ragnar (his 4 sons are each powerful Viking Jarls).
The way it handled the two religions clashing, where each was powerful based on how many followers they had, along with it being the first time I'd seen where Christianity isn't presented as the Underlying Truth but was just another thing. I realized that it was a metaphor for how religion actually worked. If enough people believe in something, it gains power. Christianity won through politics and warfare, not through truth. There wasn't anything special separating Christianity from other former religions we largely now refer to as myth other than the one Empire that united most of Europe declared it to be the truth and people were slaughtered until they went along with it.
That's when I stopped being a Catholic that just hated going to church and was an atheist at first, then later settled into agnosticism since who knows what's going on beyond what we can directly detect with our senses and tools.
If enough people believe in something, it gains power. Christianity won through politics and warfare, not through truth.
These two sentences conflict with one another.
To make them match you'd either have to change the first sentence to:
If a thing gains enough power, people believe in it.
Or you'd have to change the second sentence to:
Christianity won politics and warfare, through being believable.
It's circular with my version and yours of the first sentence both applying. It gains power from people believing which then leads to more people believing. Though it also depends on the aggressiveness of the religion's followers.
"Family" isn't what you are born in, it's what you decide and stand for. Fuck that kind of "family" I was born with, these useless, manipulative, egoistic, stupid waste of oxygen.
As a kid I got a lot of “Do as I say not as I do.”
The lesson I learned is that a lot of grown ups are hypocrites. I saw this so much it made me decide I would always be honest with myself and others about why I was doing the things I was doing. It is not always easy, especially now that I have kids of my own, but it is much healthier in the long run. I teach my kids by example rather than preaching fake piety.
You cannot change how someone feels about anything. You can try, but that's only going to be some formula of what you did + plus their life experiences against how they feel about you andh ow they are feeling in the moment.
And any time it appears you succeeded in changing how they feel about it, all you really did was convince them to hide their feelings.
People hate what they fear and fear what they don't understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding
I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It's a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they're dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous
Yeah, you should never mistread animals unless you can profit from it through a TV show. He was truly inspirational.
We were studying XYZ, coordinates during one math class in the middle school.
I asked where's the Z if X and Y were on the paper. My friend pointed with his finger that Z would come out of the paper like this.
Mind blown 😂
I still reminiscent on it once in a while.
Whatever the decision is, make it so you don’t have regrets about it.
Stay true to yourself and do what’s right for you and nobody else.
And trust your gut!
Wanking!
You don't mess with a wild badger
, Honey
I'm bad at decisions so I will name a few that stuck with me:
In 5th grade I realize that lines are hypothetical and all that really exists are line segments. (My teacher basically said yes, but you're confusing the class shut up.)
There are lies in all truths and truths in all lies. (A mantra I had).
The best way to get your way is to let someone else be the leader, act as the compromiser between the most disparate view points by saying you're adding ideas of both sides, but actually give your positions and lipservice to the others, then finally make it all seem like this was literally everyone else's idea and not yours. Ex. Working in a group project of 4 people to create a alternate energy model. A wants to make a wind turbine and it needs to be yellow. D wants solar panels made from copper. B just wants to do what's easiest. So you suggest a crank powered flash light that uses copper wiring, because it captures A's desire to have a kinetic energy conversion and using the copper wire shows D's desire to prove the usefulness of copper in alternative energy designs. A and D didn't say that's why they wanted the designs, but by making the argument in a good light and attributing it to them it makes them much more likely to go along.
I believe my 4th grade teacher saw what I was doing as she had us do a lot of group work because after a while she had me do my own thing.
Walking
Looking forward to hitting the trails when it warms up :)
Don't apologize unless you actually mean it. Saying sorry when you didn't really mean it, or you did the same thing again only devalues any future apology until it means nothing to the people you care about.
No one can tell me who I am, but me.
I am an infinitesimal cluster of neurons inhabiting a large body, and none of us have any idea what the fuck we're doing.
The universe is far larger than I can comprehend.
As far as revelations when I was 10 goes, that's about it. I didn't know about girls or sex yet.
How are your boundaries?
that I could read people's minds by reading the room, reading the situation, reading their mannerisms and facial expressions. I remember having this epiphany about age four.
I think it's an ability many or most people have.
unfortunately some childhood trauma traumatized me and I lost this ability.
People who thrive in life and own companies and run businesses etc have that ability to "read people." I wish I still had that ability.
fuck trauma.
Interesting, I attribute my own abilities to trauma.
Yup. Hypervigilance is like a super power that you can never ever turn off.
Therapy and mindfulness help tons but it can get super tiring.
I wouldn't trade it for anything, but yes, "super tiring" is basically my existence, and mindfulness is always the answer. That sound that makes me instantly acute stress response? The neighbours probably aren't as angry as they seem getting out of their car. Breathe.
The problem with mindfulness training is that it's very easy to make it feed into the hypervigilance thing.
I'm saying this as someone who has struggled with hypervigilance and who lived in a buddhist temple for 3 years as part of my 9 years of heavy zen training. I take mindfulness training very seriously.
Doing meditation the right way, actually wrestling with attachment and practicing letting go, hypervigilance isn't fed. But that's advanced meditation. In the earlier stages, it can very easily be done incorrectly, and in a way that feeds the hypervigilance.
For someone with hypervigilance, I recommend chanting, walking meditation, koan training, as additions to basic focused-awareness meditation, that help break the pattern of defensive-readiness that creates hypervigilance.
And neurofeedback training is AMAZING for this. Decreasing beta wave amplitude via neurofeedback is an excellent way to see the difference between hypervigilance and non-attached awareness.
Yes you are correct. It takes a while getting used to that "empty" mindset. I don't know what else to call it.
Whoa! That is something I would love to do some day. How was your experience in such a place?
When I started my journey what helped me the most, was yoga. The movement along with breathing properly made me feel so whole and complete that I haven't stopped since.
It was good. I had a job and integration into regular society during my time there, but we had a strict training regimen as well.
A friend was a monk, and that seems to have helped him quite a bit. For him it was total immersion. He started taking psychology classes and is now a psychotherapist.
I myself started zen training as part of aikido training. My aikido teacher got himself ordained as a rinzai priest then started encouraging us to show up for his “zen club” meetings. He sold it as a way to make our martial arts better.
He was an irish guy, with a shaved head and thick eyebrows. Think Lex Luthor or Professor X. He was a big time romantic. Used to have us stand in ice water while we practice sword kata, to train our ability to keep moving while in pain.
Pretty much the perfect zen teacher for a kid in his early 20s. Kept it all very low-level. “Notice how colors are more vivid once you’ve been meditating a while”. Didn’t talk about the high level stuff like suffering or transcending the ego. Just kept it simple: “If you meditate science has shown you’ll be able to tell different tones of sound from each other more easily”. That kind of thing.
Then later, the temple was part of a korean sect. Much more colorful than rinzai zen. As in, literally gold plated buddha statues covered in ornate flowers. At one point we had some monks show up with green paint. Their mission was going around to all the temples to paint mustaches on the buddha statues.
I literally just now realized those guys might have been full of shit.
Anyway this temple was in a modern city, and I had a normal life. But living in a community where everyone is dedicated to the same kind of work is powerful. And I had great teachers. Only passed like 4 of the 1500 koans available in our system, but even those expanded my mind in extremely useful ways.
I was extremely lucky, because at the same time I had zen training going on, I also had a series of ayahuasca ceremonies going on.
My “second sangha” was a group of people who had clustered around this shaman, who was offering ceremonies to people. Went to maybe a dozen over the course of a few years.
Without the ayahuasca, I would not have made much progress in my zen training. And without the zen training, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much out of the ayahuasca.
Those two are as different, and as complimentary, as peanut butter and jelly.
What an interesting experience! Thanks for sharing.
What a beatiful thing is to appreciate simple things.
My now husband went through something I think similar to what you've described while practicing judo. He was a competitive judoka for many years and while the physical part was important, the spiritual part about living in a dojo and all that it entails, made a deep impression on how he lives his life and permeated a bit into mine in a way.
If you ever get a chance to do a week-long meditation retreat, or an all-night native american ceremony involving mind altering substances, I highly recommend them both.
Same. I can tell when someone on the other side of the room has become slightly uncomfortable, and it's because I had to be ready for my mom to go ballistic at any moment.
You're telling me if you watch any tv show on mute and no subtitles you couldn't suss out the overall context or how people are feeling/interacting?
I call friendly bullshit ;) When you are a fly on the wall, do you feel the same way still? It takes a lot of bandwith to both socialize or scrutinize the physical cues and stuff, they are as talented and smart as fortune tellers aha
You're telling me if you watch any tv show on mute and no subtitles you couldn't suss out the overall context or how people are feeling/interacting?
Yup, My mind pretty much goes blank and I get depressed and I don't understand the thrill or the point of human interaction. Same for social situations.
I mean since you brought up TV shows, I literally don't watch TV and the first thing I thought of at your example was like some people watch reality shows like Jersey shore and real housewives, I'm a woman and I just don't get any of that, not interested at all. just a bunch of pointless drivel, women with plastic surgery and all their drama and crying all the time, I have no idea what's going on.
It takes a lot of bandwith to both socialize or scrutinize the physical cues and stuff
Exactly. I no longer have that bandwidth.
I had to develop this ability as an adult. I recommend psychedelic drugs in a ceremonial setting, as way to reconnect with humanity.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
I so adore the popularization of FA&FO. Its just such a universal thing that needs to be better taught
Sexy fun voice: "Divine!"
The correct pronunciation of "trilogy"
Lol this hits home, I was saying "triOlogy" for years before I actually slowed down to read the word letter-for-letter
Yep, exactly that :)
Tryology was the original name for thermodynamics
How computers work. Fascinating machines.
Something always happens.
often try and conceptualise things, like if I thought of a thing I would question what caused that thought and run through my previous thoughts to understand it.
And I'd also think about time and how it passes how nothing is truly present as its always an idea of the present.
Like one day I found myself walking towards a wire fense, with each step the fense got closer but at no point did the idea feel present, it was always a recollection.
Now I am an adult and can use more constructive words to describe these ideas but even so I still find it all profound
If you put in the work upfront it will make the back half easier. If you slack on the front end you’ll need to sprint to the finish.
Mainly came to this conclusion in school with academics, but started applying it to everything. It’s not perfect—you can absolutely work hard and still not get the results because of forces of nature (or oppressive systems). But in general I’ve found it’s a good rule to live by.
When I was a kid I heard people talking about how kids learn better than adults.
So I realized that the "way a kid's brain works" is probably correlated with "the way it feels to be conscious as a kid" so I used my autistic super-memory to save a snapshot of the feeling of consciousness itself.
Then I instructed my brain to keep track of that, and never lose it.
Now I'm in my 40s, and I can still learn like a little kid.
Brain plasticity is absolutely a thing, and there are exercises you can do to maintain and even regain some of your brain plasticity.
That feats of cryptography can be done using any material. Or rather I'd expect it to be a common conclusion. When you look at quipu, braille, or morse code, does nobody ever think "I wonder what random randomly assorted things might also be an embodied utterance"? Nobody looks to the colors of flowers or the patterns in sounds, they always wait until the mind seizes upon letters and numbers before they go into expect-a-message mode.
What a precocious child you must have been
Not particularly, I was slower than the average child but who happened to have a unique epiphany like every answerer here. I never understood though how people limit their expectations when it comes to communication. If the word "cryptography" here is what throws anyone off, it's not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind. A child will learn any form of communication you provide, from sign language, to flagging, to anything that exists that can be called "patterned" (involving any usage of any of the human senses), just not "top percentage" cryptographers in our writing-centric culture for some reason.
If the word “cryptography” here is what throws anyone off, it’s not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind.
Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.
All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).
All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.
I never said anything about "hiding" meaning (versus "carrying" it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn't saying cryptography as a field wasn't advanced, just that this isn't the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. "encoding" typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a "symptom" of something (maybe that's why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you'd be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that "hiding meaning" or "carrying meaning"?
If the word “cryptography” here is what throws anyone off, it’s not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind.
No it doesn't. Cryptography is specifically encoding messages in a way that is hard for someone without the specific secret key to decode, even if they know the methodology.
So much for a non-native English speaker wanting to have some verbal legroom on Lemmy.
You provided a definition that doesn't even loosely resemble the correct one.
There's no need to use words you don't understand, especially when they're wildly unrelated to whatever you're saying. They just add confusion.
You say that like it's that big a leap. In any case, sorry I wasn't 100% linguistically perfect, even post-elaboration. Half of people say I should be concise, the other half says I should elaborate more, so I figured someone would sound unpleased.
Because it's a giant one.
There is no valid interpretation of cryptography that resembles the way you defined it in any way.
Is that based on what you see when you look it up?
cryp·tog·ra·phy
noun
the art of writing or solving codes.
That's a terrible definition, but "codes" is doing the heavy lifting.
It is not a code, in that definition, if it does not require knowledge of a key to decode.
It is literally impossible for anything that doesn't have a secret key to qualify as cryptography. That is the entire defining trait.
no. replacement cyphers are cryptography, too.
The "key" is the mapping of cipher alphabet to message alphabet.
There has to be a secret to be cryptography. The meaning has to be hidden without the secret information (though primitive/weak attempts can have a small enough search space to be brute forced). But the content being hidden without that information is the entirety of what the word means.
That’s a terrible definition
How so?
And what do you think I've been talking about this whole time if not forms of substitution?
So UI and design
No, nothing directly to do with technology. Just regular physical representation of otherwise unwritten ideas.
Those concepts aren't exclusive to computers. Why do you think red triangles are used in road signs, or handles are only on one side of doors that open in one direction?
I'm confused then. People do think of technology sometimes when they think of cryptography, but where does that and things like road signs and door labels fall together aside from being a part of communication? Unless I misunderstand you, the characters on an ordinary sign are typically fully ordinary English.
My experiences are a biased view of the world by the fact that things closer to me appears more important and things far away from me appears less important.
Knowing this, I can try to readjust my views but this bias will in part remain and this is unavoidable.
(this taught is from before my teenage years)
How to spell freind and feild correctly
No nottes
Everyone will let you down eventually
That's an unfortunate lesson to learn in childhood.
There are good people out there, but even the best aren't perfect. The good people will recognise when they slip up however, and try to make good on it somehow.
There is no god and adults are assholes.
Actually as a kid I realized that what I was taught in the bible and church were metaphors and not things to be taken literally. I mean, a lot of it went against what we learned in school, and school actually made sense.
Only much later in my teens did I realize that many Christians do take the Bible literally. It was then that I decided to completely abandon my religion.
Same, as a little kid I had no idea the adults actually BELIEVED what they were telling us, it just seemed like stories. I was so confused when I found out they believed it was all real. Then again when as a pre-teen I found out they thought homosexuality was against the rules - love? They thought love was wrong? I had gone to church for so long and that idea had never crossed my mind.
I remember having my first same-sex crush when I was around 11 years old. Unfortunately around 10-11 was also when I started to learn that "gay" was a slur and a shameful thing, and a bit later that it was a sin too. I would fall into deep self hate and internalised homophobia for the following 10 years...
I'm straight as a board, and it was the earlyish 1980s so a more backwards time but I still found it utterly shocking. I remember it so clearly. It was a youth group evening and they were talking about sex, when they started talking about homosexuality I absolutely anticipated they were going to talk about the issue of hate towards gay people, so when they went in the other direction I was floored.
I have never understood the metaphor argument. When I was a believer I believed it all literally. If this stuff is a metaphor then what it is a metaphor for? Also if it is a metaphor how come (especially in the prophets) the Bible spends so much time listing metaphors and then explaining them? How come when the Bible self-references it treats itself literally?
Adam and Eve were the literal truth to Paul and he used it to create his theology of original sin.
This
That nobody is a “grown up” and that everyone is faking it.
We’re all just kids having kids.
Yes, and now, anytime I'm trying to get to know someone better, I'm strategizing as to what childish/dirty joke or well placed cuss word will break through the "fake wall" and allow me to really know this person.
You should try an initiation ceremony. It could help you feel like an adult.
When I was about 10 I realized that people of other religions probably felt just as strongly that their religion is “true” as I felt about mine and that I had no grounds to look down on them.
Fast forward 10 years and I became an atheist.
Not to mention all of those who believed in a religion that's fallen into myth, or even been completely forgotten by history. Thor was someone's Jesus
I used to spend a lot of energy being concerned what other people thought of me. How I dressed, how I acted, what I owned, etc. One day I realized 2 things:
Most people are too busy thinking about themselves to spare any meaningful thoughts for me.
I'm never going to see most of these people ever again so it doesn't matter what they think.
After that I started directing that energy into making sure that I approved of my choices rather than hoping strangers would.
It has a name its called spotlight effect
Some people have decided to call it the spotlight effect
I just wanted to let op know its a thing and there are others with it and there are resources
Why are you wearing those pants?
Why aren't you more like your father?
Why haven't you liked and subscribed?
Friends can matter to you more than family, and that's ok, but family does a lot more for you than you realize.
I didn't have a great family, but it was only when I was upset about a birthday party when I was like 12 where my mom made all the cards and buttons and stuff and I was so mad that it wasn't the cool cards and prizes that you buy that I kind of realized it.
It dawned on me like two weeks later that my parents couldn't afford any of that, but they took time out of their day, for like two weeks, even though they both worked too much, to hand-make approximations as best they could. Without me knowing, so I would be surprised.
Ever work a double shift and then spend the few minutes you have not working, sleeping, or cooking to hand-make party favors? Yeah, me either.
It still makes me cry thinking about how ungrateful I was and the look of sadness and yearning on my mom's face when I got mad at her for not buying the "good" stuff.
When I was 20, I sat her down and told her about it and how bad I felt, and how I never knew how to apologize for it. We had a good cry, and she thanked me for seeing it eventually, and how happy it retroactively made her knowing I realized it so soon after.
After my nerve damage: there are some mistakes you can only make once.
Also: Life has no rewind button and shit can go south pretty fast.
Similar experience. Got in a bad accident when I was 15, entirely my own doing. That's when I learned that some mistakes and their injuries are permanent.
No idea where I heard or read it, but preteen me internalized it and it's become part of my creed to this day
I can learn everything I need to know about how to be a decent person from cartoons.
Cartoons have always shown me that being a friendly person, who is honest, do right by their friends and tries to do the right thing will guide me well through life. I needed to weed through the friends a little bit but that has held true thus far
Bluey teaches me how to be a good dad
Rag doll!
Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path.
I grew up watching Looney toons, and they taught me to be an asshole.
I did once try to drop my largest book on my dad's head from as high up as I could get, my logic being that since it wasn't an anvil, which was clearly artistic license, he'd probably be fine.
No one is gonna stick up for you and what's right, you gotta do that yourself
...and if someone does, it's because there's something in it for them. They don't do it for you.
You gotta be that squeaky wheel
Be the grease
In school, I happened to notice exactly when some random topic went from "uh, I guess I kinda understand this" to having it actually "click". That clued me off to the difference between e.g. knowing a bunch of shitty formulae, and actually understanding the topic to the point where you can actually use it for problem solving. Also, that all the teaching and books I received revolved 100% around the former.
I had that moment when learning to code. I had like 98% or what I needed to know. Then one day I came across some random SO post, learned something that I really should have learned a while ago (the difference between static classes and instantiated classes, yes really) and then everything just fell into place and I realised I could actually write proper code now. It was a fun moment :)
For me it was variables. I know it's as basic as you can get here. But when I figured out that I could store data in a little box to get later I was like "oh, I can do anything with this"
This is true, because understanding comes from practice. The teacher and the books can never create that click of understanding. Only the student's side of the effort can do that.
Negative numbers. I just asked if there were numbers below zero when I was like 4, and my mom about pissed herself. Not that it stopped her from homeschooling me into ignorance instead.
The spawn is too dangerous. We must insulate it from too many sources of knowledge
If it gets too curious it may burrrrrn!
It's alright, I asked why Santa would get me presents for Christmas and not my parents; was about 4.... My dad still doesn't like me today. Might be different reasons, but he has never said hahaha
I was about 11 or so and acting out, my teacher said my name. I just froze for a moment and it dawned on me that was the first time he had said my name all day. Completely invisible unless I was doing something wrong. Just a square shape in a square hole unless I choose otherwise and if I do it by making my life worse.
I guess it doesn't sound profound. Every guy knows this on some level but it really knocked the wind out of me at the time.
Want to join my team of supervillains?
There's a book series called The Hammer and the Cross about an English bastard child of a noblewoman that resulted from her being taken by a Viking raid and later escaping back to her home. Then the Vikings invade to avenge the death of Ragnar (his 4 sons are each powerful Viking Jarls).
The way it handled the two religions clashing, where each was powerful based on how many followers they had, along with it being the first time I'd seen where Christianity isn't presented as the Underlying Truth but was just another thing. I realized that it was a metaphor for how religion actually worked. If enough people believe in something, it gains power. Christianity won through politics and warfare, not through truth. There wasn't anything special separating Christianity from other former religions we largely now refer to as myth other than the one Empire that united most of Europe declared it to be the truth and people were slaughtered until they went along with it.
That's when I stopped being a Catholic that just hated going to church and was an atheist at first, then later settled into agnosticism since who knows what's going on beyond what we can directly detect with our senses and tools.
These two sentences conflict with one another.
To make them match you'd either have to change the first sentence to:
Or you'd have to change the second sentence to:
It's circular with my version and yours of the first sentence both applying. It gains power from people believing which then leads to more people believing. Though it also depends on the aggressiveness of the religion's followers.
"Family" isn't what you are born in, it's what you decide and stand for. Fuck that kind of "family" I was born with, these useless, manipulative, egoistic, stupid waste of oxygen.
As a kid I got a lot of “Do as I say not as I do.”
The lesson I learned is that a lot of grown ups are hypocrites. I saw this so much it made me decide I would always be honest with myself and others about why I was doing the things I was doing. It is not always easy, especially now that I have kids of my own, but it is much healthier in the long run. I teach my kids by example rather than preaching fake piety.
You cannot change how someone feels about anything. You can try, but that's only going to be some formula of what you did + plus their life experiences against how they feel about you andh ow they are feeling in the moment.
And any time it appears you succeeded in changing how they feel about it, all you really did was convince them to hide their feelings.
People hate what they fear and fear what they don't understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding
I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It's a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they're dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous
Yeah, you should never mistread animals unless you can profit from it through a TV show. He was truly inspirational.
We were studying XYZ, coordinates during one math class in the middle school.
I asked where's the Z if X and Y were on the paper. My friend pointed with his finger that Z would come out of the paper like this.
Mind blown 😂
I still reminiscent on it once in a while.
Whatever the decision is, make it so you don’t have regrets about it.
Stay true to yourself and do what’s right for you and nobody else.
And trust your gut!
Wanking!
You don't mess with a wild badger
, Honey
I'm bad at decisions so I will name a few that stuck with me:
Walking
Looking forward to hitting the trails when it warms up :)
Don't apologize unless you actually mean it. Saying sorry when you didn't really mean it, or you did the same thing again only devalues any future apology until it means nothing to the people you care about.
No one can tell me who I am, but me.
I am an infinitesimal cluster of neurons inhabiting a large body, and none of us have any idea what the fuck we're doing.
The universe is far larger than I can comprehend.
As far as revelations when I was 10 goes, that's about it. I didn't know about girls or sex yet.
How are your boundaries?
that I could read people's minds by reading the room, reading the situation, reading their mannerisms and facial expressions. I remember having this epiphany about age four.
I think it's an ability many or most people have.
unfortunately some childhood trauma traumatized me and I lost this ability.
People who thrive in life and own companies and run businesses etc have that ability to "read people." I wish I still had that ability.
fuck trauma.
Interesting, I attribute my own abilities to trauma.
Yup. Hypervigilance is like a super power that you can never ever turn off. Therapy and mindfulness help tons but it can get super tiring.
I wouldn't trade it for anything, but yes, "super tiring" is basically my existence, and mindfulness is always the answer. That sound that makes me instantly acute stress response? The neighbours probably aren't as angry as they seem getting out of their car. Breathe.
The problem with mindfulness training is that it's very easy to make it feed into the hypervigilance thing.
I'm saying this as someone who has struggled with hypervigilance and who lived in a buddhist temple for 3 years as part of my 9 years of heavy zen training. I take mindfulness training very seriously.
Doing meditation the right way, actually wrestling with attachment and practicing letting go, hypervigilance isn't fed. But that's advanced meditation. In the earlier stages, it can very easily be done incorrectly, and in a way that feeds the hypervigilance.
For someone with hypervigilance, I recommend chanting, walking meditation, koan training, as additions to basic focused-awareness meditation, that help break the pattern of defensive-readiness that creates hypervigilance.
And neurofeedback training is AMAZING for this. Decreasing beta wave amplitude via neurofeedback is an excellent way to see the difference between hypervigilance and non-attached awareness.
Yes you are correct. It takes a while getting used to that "empty" mindset. I don't know what else to call it.
Whoa! That is something I would love to do some day. How was your experience in such a place?
When I started my journey what helped me the most, was yoga. The movement along with breathing properly made me feel so whole and complete that I haven't stopped since.
It was good. I had a job and integration into regular society during my time there, but we had a strict training regimen as well.
A friend was a monk, and that seems to have helped him quite a bit. For him it was total immersion. He started taking psychology classes and is now a psychotherapist.
I myself started zen training as part of aikido training. My aikido teacher got himself ordained as a rinzai priest then started encouraging us to show up for his “zen club” meetings. He sold it as a way to make our martial arts better.
He was an irish guy, with a shaved head and thick eyebrows. Think Lex Luthor or Professor X. He was a big time romantic. Used to have us stand in ice water while we practice sword kata, to train our ability to keep moving while in pain.
Pretty much the perfect zen teacher for a kid in his early 20s. Kept it all very low-level. “Notice how colors are more vivid once you’ve been meditating a while”. Didn’t talk about the high level stuff like suffering or transcending the ego. Just kept it simple: “If you meditate science has shown you’ll be able to tell different tones of sound from each other more easily”. That kind of thing.
Then later, the temple was part of a korean sect. Much more colorful than rinzai zen. As in, literally gold plated buddha statues covered in ornate flowers. At one point we had some monks show up with green paint. Their mission was going around to all the temples to paint mustaches on the buddha statues.
I literally just now realized those guys might have been full of shit.
Anyway this temple was in a modern city, and I had a normal life. But living in a community where everyone is dedicated to the same kind of work is powerful. And I had great teachers. Only passed like 4 of the 1500 koans available in our system, but even those expanded my mind in extremely useful ways.
I was extremely lucky, because at the same time I had zen training going on, I also had a series of ayahuasca ceremonies going on.
My “second sangha” was a group of people who had clustered around this shaman, who was offering ceremonies to people. Went to maybe a dozen over the course of a few years.
Without the ayahuasca, I would not have made much progress in my zen training. And without the zen training, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much out of the ayahuasca.
Those two are as different, and as complimentary, as peanut butter and jelly.
What an interesting experience! Thanks for sharing. What a beatiful thing is to appreciate simple things. My now husband went through something I think similar to what you've described while practicing judo. He was a competitive judoka for many years and while the physical part was important, the spiritual part about living in a dojo and all that it entails, made a deep impression on how he lives his life and permeated a bit into mine in a way.
If you ever get a chance to do a week-long meditation retreat, or an all-night native american ceremony involving mind altering substances, I highly recommend them both.
Same. I can tell when someone on the other side of the room has become slightly uncomfortable, and it's because I had to be ready for my mom to go ballistic at any moment.
You're telling me if you watch any tv show on mute and no subtitles you couldn't suss out the overall context or how people are feeling/interacting?
I call friendly bullshit ;) When you are a fly on the wall, do you feel the same way still? It takes a lot of bandwith to both socialize or scrutinize the physical cues and stuff, they are as talented and smart as fortune tellers aha
Yup, My mind pretty much goes blank and I get depressed and I don't understand the thrill or the point of human interaction. Same for social situations.
I mean since you brought up TV shows, I literally don't watch TV and the first thing I thought of at your example was like some people watch reality shows like Jersey shore and real housewives, I'm a woman and I just don't get any of that, not interested at all. just a bunch of pointless drivel, women with plastic surgery and all their drama and crying all the time, I have no idea what's going on.
Exactly. I no longer have that bandwidth.
I had to develop this ability as an adult. I recommend psychedelic drugs in a ceremonial setting, as way to reconnect with humanity.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
I so adore the popularization of FA&FO. Its just such a universal thing that needs to be better taught
Sexy fun voice: "Divine!"
The correct pronunciation of "trilogy"
Lol this hits home, I was saying "triOlogy" for years before I actually slowed down to read the word letter-for-letter
Yep, exactly that :)
Tryology was the original name for thermodynamics
How computers work. Fascinating machines.
Something always happens.
often try and conceptualise things, like if I thought of a thing I would question what caused that thought and run through my previous thoughts to understand it.
And I'd also think about time and how it passes how nothing is truly present as its always an idea of the present. Like one day I found myself walking towards a wire fense, with each step the fense got closer but at no point did the idea feel present, it was always a recollection.
Now I am an adult and can use more constructive words to describe these ideas but even so I still find it all profound
If you put in the work upfront it will make the back half easier. If you slack on the front end you’ll need to sprint to the finish.
Mainly came to this conclusion in school with academics, but started applying it to everything. It’s not perfect—you can absolutely work hard and still not get the results because of forces of nature (or oppressive systems). But in general I’ve found it’s a good rule to live by.
When I was a kid I heard people talking about how kids learn better than adults.
So I realized that the "way a kid's brain works" is probably correlated with "the way it feels to be conscious as a kid" so I used my autistic super-memory to save a snapshot of the feeling of consciousness itself.
Then I instructed my brain to keep track of that, and never lose it.
Now I'm in my 40s, and I can still learn like a little kid.
Brain plasticity is absolutely a thing, and there are exercises you can do to maintain and even regain some of your brain plasticity.
That feats of cryptography can be done using any material. Or rather I'd expect it to be a common conclusion. When you look at quipu, braille, or morse code, does nobody ever think "I wonder what random randomly assorted things might also be an embodied utterance"? Nobody looks to the colors of flowers or the patterns in sounds, they always wait until the mind seizes upon letters and numbers before they go into expect-a-message mode.
What a precocious child you must have been
Not particularly, I was slower than the average child but who happened to have a unique epiphany like every answerer here. I never understood though how people limit their expectations when it comes to communication. If the word "cryptography" here is what throws anyone off, it's not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind. A child will learn any form of communication you provide, from sign language, to flagging, to anything that exists that can be called "patterned" (involving any usage of any of the human senses), just not "top percentage" cryptographers in our writing-centric culture for some reason.
Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.
All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).
All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.
I never said anything about "hiding" meaning (versus "carrying" it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn't saying cryptography as a field wasn't advanced, just that this isn't the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. "encoding" typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a "symptom" of something (maybe that's why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you'd be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that "hiding meaning" or "carrying meaning"?
No it doesn't. Cryptography is specifically encoding messages in a way that is hard for someone without the specific secret key to decode, even if they know the methodology.
So much for a non-native English speaker wanting to have some verbal legroom on Lemmy.
You provided a definition that doesn't even loosely resemble the correct one.
There's no need to use words you don't understand, especially when they're wildly unrelated to whatever you're saying. They just add confusion.
You say that like it's that big a leap. In any case, sorry I wasn't 100% linguistically perfect, even post-elaboration. Half of people say I should be concise, the other half says I should elaborate more, so I figured someone would sound unpleased.
Because it's a giant one.
There is no valid interpretation of cryptography that resembles the way you defined it in any way.
Is that based on what you see when you look it up?
cryp·tog·ra·phy
noun
the art of writing or solving codes.
That's a terrible definition, but "codes" is doing the heavy lifting.
It is not a code, in that definition, if it does not require knowledge of a key to decode.
It is literally impossible for anything that doesn't have a secret key to qualify as cryptography. That is the entire defining trait.
no. replacement cyphers are cryptography, too.
The "key" is the mapping of cipher alphabet to message alphabet.
There has to be a secret to be cryptography. The meaning has to be hidden without the secret information (though primitive/weak attempts can have a small enough search space to be brute forced). But the content being hidden without that information is the entirety of what the word means.
How so?
And what do you think I've been talking about this whole time if not forms of substitution?
So UI and design
No, nothing directly to do with technology. Just regular physical representation of otherwise unwritten ideas.
Those concepts aren't exclusive to computers. Why do you think red triangles are used in road signs, or handles are only on one side of doors that open in one direction?
I'm confused then. People do think of technology sometimes when they think of cryptography, but where does that and things like road signs and door labels fall together aside from being a part of communication? Unless I misunderstand you, the characters on an ordinary sign are typically fully ordinary English.
My experiences are a biased view of the world by the fact that things closer to me appears more important and things far away from me appears less important.
Knowing this, I can try to readjust my views but this bias will in part remain and this is unavoidable.
(this taught is from before my teenage years)
How to spell freind and feild correctly
No nottes
Everyone will let you down eventually
That's an unfortunate lesson to learn in childhood.
There are good people out there, but even the best aren't perfect. The good people will recognise when they slip up however, and try to make good on it somehow.