Step one: Pull up pants really high.
Step two: Say "I'm the big boss man."

I'm not a bottom. I'm an antitop.

This is me every single time somebody has been into me. To be fair though, the one time I didn't over analyze and just went "Oh, I guess she likes me" it turned out she didn't, she just really liked romance songs.
So yeah, people are just gonna have to deal with having to be very forward about their intentions with me.

This is the only time so far I've seen "fallacy fallacy" used correctly and not being used, ironically fallaciously, as if it automatically cancels out every fallacy in a person's argument automatically making it valid.

As somebody on disability for psychological disability reasons, you're usually allowed to have somebody else fill those out for you. That's what I had to do.

Luckily the ones they send you afterwards every few years to check if you're still disabled are much shorter, and if you've got a detailed medical record of your disability sometimes they can't shut it off no matter how you answer the questions, such as in my case. Even if I wrote "I'm cured. You can turn off my disability now," they can't do that because they have guidelines that make you auto-qualify, and if your medical records still show that you meet those guidelines they can't legally shut it off.

I've always been paranoid when somebody lets me info dump that they're secretly attracted to me and that it's gonna make things super awkward.
Starting to get real suspicious of my wife...

Kerbal landing technique? Like smashing into the surface max speed because you somehow managed to decouple your only engine due to poor preplanning? At least that's how I play it.

Mabinogi.

Not many people have played it I'm sure, but imagine this:
You've just downloaded a new free MMO. You figure it's gonna be super pay to win, but it's free so why not give it a shot anyway.
For the first few minutes, after you stop being confused by the UI, you start to take everything in. There are no classes, you can do whatever you want. Want to be a mage AND a warrior? Totally doable. Want to be a bard playing in the town square for tips? Thanks to the robust music system, you can. In fact, you're having trouble finding anything you can't do.
A few months later, things are progressing nicely. You've mastered every skill, played thousands of songs by now, got some pretty good gear, and you haven't encountered even a hint of the p2w you expected. Life is great. However, you're going to need a bit of a gear upgrade before tackling this next dungeon. You check how much it'll cost you. 300 million.
You've never even seen more than 50 million in one place before. Nevertheless, you figure with hard work, you can achieve it. After a month, you've gathered about 100 mil by exploiting market bubbles to sell anything valuable as fast as possible and in as large of quantities as possible. It's still not enough though. The cash shop begins to beckon you. You could pay a little real money to buy a cash shop item, and sell it for gold.
But you realize that in order to get the 200 mil you need, you'd need to spend over 100 dollars. You rationalize to yourself that hey, the p2w isn't that bad if it's easier to make the gold in game than it is to make the real money to buy it. You continue on your quest, but you run into an issue. There just aren't any more bubbles to exploit. You've crashed the market in your quest to obtain all the gold you need without spending a penny. You cave, and buy just a couple cash shop items to sell and make up the difference. You get your shiny new equipment. You feel powerful. It's such a huge upgrade it's almost ridiculous. You feel like 20$ was worth it to have this much fun. Out of curiosity, you check to see how much your next upgrade will cost.

2 billion. It's too late. You're addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in. You've already invested in your character, and that next upgrade is gonna cost you 2000$.
You can't quit. You've tried. There's just no game like this anywhere else. You will spend that money eventually, no matter how hard you try to avoid it.

This is my story. I'm aiming to get that gold without spending a penny. It's been months. I'm half a percent if the way there. It's not gonna happen. Every day I have to pull myself away from that cash shop. It would be so easy, but so irresponsible.
But one day I will spend that money. The game is insidious like that. The only way to avoid it is to either not play the game in the first place or not give a shit about progressing. I am in neither camp.

Genuinely, I love the game, but every day I pray it gets shut down before I have the chance to pay in that much money. It's so hard to stop myself.

I'd love to, but unfortunately I annihilate on contact.

I miss r/lies. That was my favorite gimmick sub.

Probably a lot. Jpegs have lossy compression.

Trigger warning on this. Can't get the spoiler thing to work at all.

Definitely not imagining it.
Since I first joined I went from having nice conversations with strangers about the weirdest things, never having a single negative interaction, to nowadays saying I think women deserve a baseline level of respect and being told I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
To be fair, the dude who said that did get banned from the instance I'm on for that, but it happening in the first place would have been unthinkable to me a few months ago.

We don't even know what consciousness is, let alone if it's technically "real" (as in physical in any way.) It's perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I've heard people argue a machine couldn't feel emotions because it doesn't have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don't actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole "this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function" with a simple statement that said "this happened, change behavior and function," maybe there isn't really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.

My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they're special things that can't be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It's basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.

The meme is satirical. It's making fun of TERFs who think they can always tell a trans woman from a cis woman from appearance alone because they think they all look a certain way. Hence the "We can always tell" at the end, which is a line commonly spoken by transphobes.
The joke being that this is a ridiculously over the top example of somebody "identifying" a TERF by appearance alone, even though that's not actually possible, just like it's not possible for trans people either. A TERF cannot refute this meme without pointing out the flaw in their own logic, and that's funny.

I hope this doesn't sound aggressive, but unless you're a man, you never had to venture very far on Lemmy to experience misogyny. If you ever mentioned you were a woman in any of the major instances and communities in any context except "I'm a woman and here's what I don't like about other women," you were gonna get misogynistic replies and a shocking amount of downvotes. It's just what happens when any internet community is dominated by a single gender I guess.
Lemmy's always been great about almost every other social issue, except sometimes trans issues and neurodivergence if you stepped out of the communities for it, but women's issues have always been an absolute train wreck around here.

When I was a kid another kid called me a dingleberry and I was devastated for days and wouldn't go outside.

Some parents are weird. I once got grounded because I left my room, forgot something, and went back in to get it. Wasn't even going anywhere or doing anything important. Just randomly got yelled at and grounded.

I skip the fourth step from the bottom on every staircase. It started because multiple staircases I regularly traversed coincidentally all had spiders make their homes on the fourth step, so I'd step over them. And then I just never shook the habit.

Bad.

My wife and I broke up several days ago. We were never legally married, and I suppose that makes it a lot easier, but still not easy.
We both had severe emotional control issues, for different reasons. I tried countless meds to help, and keep myself, and us, together. Tried therapy. But in the end, more often than not, there was no voice of reason in our relationship. We could reach points where we'd go a month or so without fighting, but it'd always happen again some day.
Finally, at a time where we were both calm and unemotional, we came to the decision that we needed to work on ourselves separately. When the consequences of our mental illness were not just hurting ourselves, but each other, it was just too hard to cope with.
We're still friends. We're still supporting each other, but I feel like I've lost the best thing I've ever had in my life and it's my fault. I'm happy that she no longer has to feel chained down by my angry outbursts, my constant panic attacks, and wondering every day if I'm still going to be with her tomorrow, but I wish none of those things existed in the first place, so we could be happy together.

On top of all this, the catalyst for making this decision in the first place was that there was a new guy, who was very interested in me. When he found out I was already taken, he tried to back off, but.. I guess now my ex-wife encouraged him to keep going. We'd been open to the idea of polyamory from the beginning of our relationship, so that's how we were hoping it would go. Unfortunately, it turned out he couldn't be comfortable with polyamory, and wanted an exclusive relationship.
And that's when we suddenly realized that there was a choice. I could try to stay with her, hoping one day things would get better, or find a new relationship and hope it doesn't end the same way. We realized quickly that the second was the only healthy option, even if we really, really didn't want that.

And now, several days later, this new guy is already telling me he's in love with me. He said it was love at first sight for him. I told him I'm going to need a long time before I can even consider anybody else romantically, and he's told me he's willing to wait however long it takes, but the concept scares me.
My last relationship ended largely because of emotional and psychological problems that feel insurmountable. I'm terrified if this goes anywhere that I'm going to screw it up the exact same way.

I just don't know what to do anymore. I've checked up on my ex a few times, and it feels like she's handling this better than I am. At the very least, she'll survive, and that makes me happy. I was friends with her for a long time before we even started dating, and I'm just really hoping I can learn to see her that way again. But this is the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with emotionally and I don't feel like I'll survive, even if I know consciously that I will get through it.

Does it count if I stopped reading after the 3rd paragraph because it gave me bad anxiety due to bad memories? Because I want to know if I should try my best to give it a full read through anyway.

I keep luring them out by accident just by bringing up any kind of women's issue at all. Thankfully though, a quick report and they get banned from my instance real fast.

Have you tried developing severe bipolar disorder?

Gen Z here.
People liked being part of in jokes nobody else understood. Eventually it evolved into creating jokes even you yourself weren't in on just to confuse the fuck out of people. Brings the satisfaction of seeing people not understanding the "in" joke and the additional satisfaction that they never will be in on it either.
The "that explains nothing" feeling when you see the origin is part of the joke.

The only problem I have with places like that is that they make me feel incredibly insecure about my own body. I'm not campaigning for a boycott or anything, but I really wish there was more diversity in the kinds of women they hired instead of reinforcing the current beauty standard by only hiring women who fit within it.

I've never been to a hooters though, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

On the contrary, it's not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I'm saying we can't be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don't know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It's perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it'd be conscious by default.

This seems to be the attitude of most I encounter nowadays. I think every friend I have who I've asked about their sexuality tend to reply "I dunno, I just like what I like."
It seems the labels are slowly starting to lose their use, which to me is a good thing. It means we're getting to the point where we don't need it to feel normal anymore because it's just normal by default. We're not quite there yet, but it shows we're moving in the right direction.
Not that people can't use labels if it makes them more comfortable, I'm just glad more people are starting not to need them because they're already accepted.

It is when I do it.

I don't mind AI art at all as long as it's not posted in any art of photo based communities (besides ones intended for AI art.)

When it comes to memes, I don't even care if those are labeled as containing AI art. Memes are naturally derivative, so labeling it as AI art would be like linking the exact stock photo you used. Wouldn't be mad if we did label them though. Just don't want there to be a double standard.

Encountering AI art in photo communities is super annoying though. It's increasingly common for people to submit obviously AI photos and that's super annoying.

I had this problem with one I modded myself because the new screen was just slightly thicker than the old, pressing on the outer shell and causing the dpad to need more pressure. The solution that worked for me is cutting a small ring of cardstock and putting it between the dpad and the membrane. It increases sensitivity by a lot, but does come with the side effect that you'll be able to press every direction down at once if you press on the center.

My dad was like that. I remember a moment where my dad couldn't understand the solution to the Monty Hall problem, so I tried to explain it to him and instantly got yelled at and sent to my room for contradicting him.

JESYS FUCK IT'S BEEN 3 FUCKING DAYS AND IT FEELS LIKE IT'S BEEN 3 YEARS.

You might remember me posting a while ago about breaking up with my wife. That week does not even COMPARE to this week. I can't mention a lot of it without a lot of people getting very angry, but maybe being angry would be an improvement over how things are now.

Got drunk tonight because everyone thought the drama was over, and we wanted to wind down. Turns out no, it was not over, and we got smacked with all of it at once AND MORE while drunk and of course, dealt with it like drunk idiots and made it worse.

So now it's 6am. I haven't slept. I won't be sleeping. I feel like I'm gonna vomit. I gotta try not to make people angry tomorrow, people gotta try not to make me angry tomorrow. Nobody will succeed.

What sucks is there's a bunch of amazing stuff that happened tonight, too, but it was more than ruined by drunk idiots like me handling drama. Jesus I want it to be over so I can just appreciate all the good stuff that came out of this, but that's gonna take a lot longer than just this week.

EDIT: good news guys. I'm 36 minutes more sober and things already don't feel that bad anymore. They were that bad, but now they don't feel like it.

Edit: It's the next day. It was surprisingly easy to smooth things over. Apparently the drunk stupidity ended up being a good thing somehow because it let everyone get everything out, zero filter, and now that everyone's sober we were able to properly address things and things are actually dramatically improving now.
The short version is there were still some complicated feelings left after my breakup, and somebody close to me came out as trans right in the middle of it, so balancing trying to support them and trying to manage those leftover feelings fucked me and everyone else up bad. Now, it seems though that those feelings are finally getting left in the past, and I can fully focus on supporting them. There's was also a short drunken probably undiagnosed bpd induced, definitely alcohol induced episode where I accused said trans person of lying about being trans with zero evidence, but luckily they're an incredibly strong person and weren't even phased by it, knowing I was drunk and also mentally ill, and instead choosing to gush over how pretty I said they were and how I'd told them I was super happy to know they trusted me, when I was less drunk. I've spent a part of this morning apologizing profusely for my behavior when I got clearly far too many drinks in.

I don't know why, but the support I get from people who can't understand but still want to help means the most to me.

Luckily, I've had a load of messages from a million people on just about every platform I knew anybody on filled with support and encouragement. Everybody's making really sure I don't feel unloved.

For me, the changes happened really gradually, and some changes didn't happen at all (which is normal, because it's not the same for everyone, not even cis women.) It took around 2 years before I started noticing any changes, and around 4 before I stopped noticing any more changes. It can vary a lot though.

It's also worth noting even once you've experienced all the changes, it won't feel the same every time. For instance, for me, it's only a full body experience if it's a good one. Otherwise it doesn't feel much different in nature from a guy's orgasm. It does definitely last longer usually though. Usually around 15 seconds, but it can go up to... well, actually, I've never felt the need to break out a stop watch.

There's some things that for me never changed though. For instance, it doesn't take any longer to build up, and I almost never can have multiple in a row. Although I'm still responsive to stimulation, it just doesn't go anywhere. On very rare occasions I've had consecutive ones, but it's been that way since even before I transitioned.

Also, I've seen a lot of claims that female orgasms are more intense than male orgasms. For me at least, that is absolutely not the case. They feel different, but intensity wise it's exactly the same. I do react more physically, but not because it feels better, rather just because estrogen did that to me for some reason.

I think honestly the line between "male" and "female" orgasm are a lot blurrier than people think and it's not really a useful way to think about it. Not everyone will even experience changes to their orgasms and that's not because there's something wrong, it's just because there's so much natural variance that many women just naturally experience what is often called a "male" orgasm.

I've seen a lot of trans women get really disappointed thinking something must be wrong because they haven't achieved the fabled "female orgasm." Just know that that's a very idealized version of a female orgasm that not even most cis women, in my experience, meet. It's completely normal for some things to change but not others, or even on occasion for almost nothing to change at all.

Don't really need photoshop. It's not all that hard to get a setup like this working with cheap converters from Amazon. It's whether somebody's grandma who refuses to upgrade from a TV that old would know how to do it that's the questionable part, but it's not impossible somebody set it up for her.

Breaking Benjamin - Torn in Two with a Boner

The long story short:
Fell in love with somebody, she rejected me, but we ended up becoming very close friends anyway. Now she's going through a medical crisis and has been leaning on me a lot to get through it emotionally. Besides emotional support, I've been reminding her that even as friends I still love her, in fact a lot more than before. Hearing that she says has cheered her up a lot and really helped.
I don't take it her answer will change given her reasons for rejecting me, but I've come to realize I don't need it to as much as I thought I did. It's enough for me that my love for her makes her happy. That's all I need.

So I'd say in spite of everything seeming like it should be going wrong, I'm having a great week, and I'm going to try to keep having good weeks so she can rely on me to help her through whatever she needs.

I misread "talking shit to a soldier" as "taking a shit in the shower" and was like "Yeah, I'd be mad too."

Are you coming onto me?

Ah, just kidding. In seriousness though, I've chosen not to have kids on account of being so mentally fucked up by my childhood that I don't want to put a kid through having me as a parent.

Although luckily my dad did mellow out with age. He'd kinda also been equally fucked up by his own childhood and refused to seek help until I'd left, my mom left, and later my old sibling left, and I refused to speak with him anymore. Last year I got a massive, 4 page, single spaced apology from him for everything he'd done, so luckily things are looking up at least.

Your suggestion in the second paragraph sounds good. Most of our fights were more or less caused by extrapolating information incorrectly due to our high strung emotions. Things like she'd mention a famous person in passing, and I would happen to know said famous person had a horrific controversy, and I'd suddenly go on high alert thinking she supported said terrible things, which would snowball into "If she supports that terrible thing, she must support all these other terrible things as well," at which point I'd explode, she having no idea why because she didn't know about said controversy and didn't even like said famous person very much in the first place.
When she'd blow up at me, it was usually because I ignored a load of warning signs that she was in a really bad mood, because I felt bad not helping when she felt bad, but the only help she actually needed was for me to leave her alone until she could settle down.

As for the new guy, the situation is a little complicated by the fact that he did actually try to do the polyamory thing at first, and a bit into that is when he first confessed that he was in love with me. However, we realized that what he was really hoping for was that I'd fall for him so hard I'd decide I wanted to be exclusively with him. Once he realized that, that's when we realized polyamory wasn't going to work and I had to make a decision.

It still disturbs me a bit that that happened so fast, but I don't feel like I should be judging since I was exactly like that with my ex before we started dating. Just fell so deeply in love that I couldn't bear not telling her.
At the same time though, maybe that should make me more worried, because I was absolutely off my rocker back then and the first year of our relationship was almost entirely her reigning me in and teaching me how to approach relationships in a more healthy way.

Trans, wasn't ready to use my new name IRL, or come out to anybody, so I took the word "Somber" and shoved a Y in it because it makes it really similar to my chosen name, so I could feel like I was being called my preferred name every time somebody said it.

Now that I'm this far into my transition it's nothing but a relic, but I like the username anyway.