I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.

I’d rather see multiple comments giving the same safety advice if it means people are more likely to be able to see it.

Telling kids “you’re only allowed to dig a hole that’s at least as wide as it is deep” is likely to go over a lot better than “you’re not allowed to dig a deep hole because it’s unsafe”

The internet is full of loads of weird people doing their own thing. You don’t need to like that they like, but trying to shame people into acting differently is cringe. Get with the times.

“Most of us have been in your shoes, with the same amount of fear, confusion and helpless feelings. So…uh…welcome to our little club. We get together sometimes and hang out (mostly virtually, admittedly).”

This exactly. I felt such an overwhelming sense of solidarity when reading this post because I have been in this position so many times before. Hell, I still occasionally get like this — although I am way more confident in solving most of my technical problems nowadays, that additional knowledge just makes it all the more frustrating when I run into something that makes me feel confused and overwhelmed.

I’m not going to give you any technical advice because there’s already a lot of suggestions already. I just wanted to leave a comment in solidarity.

I am the techiest person in my fairly techy group of friends, and even I often end up making silly mistakes that mess up my system sometimes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, especially when there seems to be solutions to my problems that I’m not able to understand.

Trust me when I say that you’re not stupid for not getting this. This shit is difficult. I have been in your position so so many times before — right down to the despair making me feel suicidal. It’s hard when you desperately need to fix a thing, but the more you throw yourself at the problem, the harder it gets. Take as much of a break as you need to, and come back to some of the answers that sound promising, but you’re struggling to understand, and ask questions. You’re not dumb for not understanding — you’re new at this, and that’s okay.

I can’t speak for other people in this thread, but I know that when I’m giving technical advice to people, it often feels like I’m getting practice at communicating things in an accessible way. I want more people to be able to participate in this hobby that I enjoy, but I’ve been steeping in this environment for so long that sometimes, the advice that I give is overly dense, or it assumes knowledge that the person needing help doesn’t have. That’s an unfortunate mistake to make, because it makes the person reading my reply feel stupid, and that’s the last thing I want. I’ve found that giving technical advice online is often a mutual learning process — the person I’m helping is learning the tech stuff, and I’m learning how to communicate better. If you revisit some of the comments in this thread, bear that in mind — it’s not all on you.

On the topic of wishing you were stronger, I can relate to that — like I said, I’m pretty prone to getting myself into a spiral of shame when I don’t understand a thing and everything I do keeps getting worse. For what it’s worth, I think that asking for help as you have done here is something that requires a lot of strength; it’s hard to be vulnerable when you feel like you’re messing things up. It also takes strength to recognise that you’re getting overwhelmed enough that you need to take a step away. It’s valid to want to be stronger than you are now, but I hope you’re able to recognise your small achievements.

Finally, a small bit of practical advice that I’d give is that if you’re entering terminal commands or changing settings to try fix this, it’s super useful to make a note of what you’re doing. Sometimes when I have a complex problem and I try one potential solution that doesn’t end up working, the changes made in that solution can conflict with steps involved in attempting a second solution. It can make it easier to keep track of what you’ve tried so far, especially if you have to undo stuff later. It’s okay if you haven’t done this so far, but it can help going forward. I find that when I’m panicking and desperate for a solution, that makes me more likely to just attempt basically everything, and those are the times when keeping track of what I’ve done is especially important.

Don’t feel guilty for asking for help, or for needing clarifications. We’re all here of our own free will. Many of us have been in your position before, and only got to the point where we are now because of the patient help of kind online nerds. That’s a big part of why I try to chip in when I find someone with a problem I can help with — it feels like giving back to the community that helped me to learn back when I was new to this.

I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re doing well. Keep trying, and I promise things will get easier. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take breaks, or for feeling overwhelmed. How you’re feeling right now is within the range of what’s normal for new people running into a difficult technical problem like this. You’re not stupid, this stuff is just hard.

Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them

(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.

Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”

I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)

That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”

Pole dancing actually requires an incredible level of athleticism, and as such, is a pretty fun way to get in shape. Some people who install a stripper pole in their home will no doubt be the kind of people you describe, but that’s not the only kind of person who might install a pole at home.

I know a couple of people who do pole dancing as a sport and have a pole installed in their home. They’re both people who seem like archetypical examples of people who have their shit together. For these people, installing a pole in their home is analogous to a weightlifter purchasing a squat rack so they can lift at home — basically just a way to practice without having to travel.

I’m not trying to suggest that your caution is unwarranted — if I were the person in the OP, I would feel pretty anxious about knocking on their door about the problem, because it’d feel like a bit of a coin-flip: are they going to be the kind of person who has a full fledged liquor bar in their kitchen, or someone who engages pole-sport as a productive way to stay fit? Because one of those people would likely be much less easy to work through issues with.

I guess my goal in writing this is to convince you that there are at least some people who install a pole in their home who are nothing like the archetype you’re envisioning. I’m not suggesting that they are the majority — I have no idea what the relative prevalence of these different archetypes are. However, they do exist.

Did anything improve after that?

I have a friend who uses snuff tobacco, and occasionally she’ll add some cocaine to it — she calls it “spicy snuff”

Taking nudes is really difficult. I’ve never taken nudes per se, but recently I was trying to take some photos that included my body, whilst wearing some sexy clothing. That shit takes some skill.

One tip that I discovered is that using your phone’s regular camera rather than your front facing camera makes a big difference. To get this right, you ideally need to use a mirror so that you can see what’s on your screen as you’re getting the angles right. I found that positioning my phone higher and pointing it slightly downwards was best. Finding a way to securely position my phone to make this work was a bitch.

If you’re using your backward facing camera, then you’ll probably need to set your phone to take the image on a timer. Alternatively some smart watches can be used to trigger the photograph without you having to get up from your sexy pose to press the button on your phone (which risks knocking your phone out of position). Alternatively, once you’ve found the right angle and pose, you can try taking a video of you posing and then extracting frames from that video later.

The experience left me with a greater level of respect for people who take good nudes.

Impressive dedication. Do you have an important task to do that you’re currently procrastinating? Whenever I show similar levels of commitment to answering trivial questions, that’s what is usually driving me.

TBF, as someone who frequently wears high socks and stockings as part of my regular attire, I don’t think they’re particularly normal. In order to even be able to see that a person is wearing thigh highs as opposed to tights, it’s necessary to wear a fairly short skirt or shorts, which may not be appropriate in many contexts — and if they’re worn with an outfit where you can’t see that you’re wearing thigh highs, then wearing tights appears to be the more practical options.

Plus I have known a lot of people who wanted to be the kind of person who wore thigh-highs, but became impatient with them frequently rolling down. Wearing a suspender belt is a good solution for this, but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones with clips that are robust enough to be useful and not excessively fiddly — most people I have known who have experience with suspender belts know them only as an inconvenient but sexy piece of lingerie, rather than a pragmatic undergarment (which can also be sexy, but they actually exist to serve a function rather than their entire purpose being the sexiness)

So yeah, I would say that people who wear high socks aren’t normal. But I certainly don’t see that as a bad thing — in fact, seeing someone wearing thigh high socks immediately makes them more attractive to me (as a friend or otherwise)

I own a lot of stockings as part of my regular daily attire (they’re so awesome! They’re like tights, except you don’t have to do the weird tights-dance every time you go for a pee, and if one of them gets a hole, you can just throw away the one stocking instead of the entire pair of tights!). However, if I’m doing programming, I’m probably at home, and in lounge wear.

I always found the “programming socks” quite funny, so one day, I decided I wanted to be even more in on the joke, so I deliberately wore some of my fancy thigh highs when sitting down to write some code. I ended up having a tremendously productive session, and it made the socks feel like magic. It was likely just that I was just having a serendipitous day where my brain decided it wanted to get shit done, but still, the prospect that they had actually helped was pretty humorous to entertain.

Because of this, I wore them again the next time I wanted to have an extended, focussed session of coding. And then the time after that. And again and again until eventually, I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of programming socks increasing my productivity — I came to associate them with the headspace of productive focus, and so now whenever I wear them while sitting at my desk, my brain goes “oh damn, we programming now — best lock in”.

I am extremely happy to have stumbled into this outcome, because it is both useful and hilarious

It’s a reference to the phenomenon of “programming socks”, which is the meme phenomenon of knee high socks being associated with programmers. I think the association stems from the disproportionately high number of trans women and gender non-conforming men (such as femboys) in programming.

I quite like Yorkshire puddings.

But I agree, British cuisine is pretty beige in vibe

Damn, that’s grim.

Times when I or someone close to me have needed to hire artists, we’ve been able to find the right person for the job through professional networks. It’s sad to think that due to real artists struggling to find work, that many of these professional networks are liable to collapse, making it harder to find the remaining artists who are still working

This goes way before the Spotify thing. This is just a court ruling that took a long time to come through.

At a certain point, if your entire raison d’être is to do illegal things, you might as well fully commit

There’s actually a lot of trans women in the professional modelling world. One friend told me that due to preferences for taller women with particular bone structure, that the field actively selects for trans women. Like, there’s still way more cis women in modelling than trans women, simply because there’s way more cis women in the world, but trans women are disproportionately represented in modelling

It’s because there’s a significant proportion of people whose preferences are something behind “skinny, white, conventionally feminine woman”, and so when people outside of that demographic are featured in media, it freaks them out because their preferences are limited to people who fit within that narrow description, so wider diversity of people depicted in media is, to them, synonymous with a push for unattractive people in media.

That in and of itself isn’t a problem — they have every right to their own preferences, and I have no interests in trying to convince them of anything. The problem is because they have attached themselves to the idea that their personal preferences are the objective standard. So when they see more diversity in media, and others thirsting for people they would consider to be objectively unattractive, this destabilises the idea that their preferences are The Truth. This means that, rather than just accepting that people like what they like, they contort themselves into believing that this is all a big conspiracy to try to push objectively unattractive people into media. Framing things like that means they end up seeing this as something that is entirely a political push to erode all foundations of society as part of some Woke ploy. They feel threatened and genuinely scared that there will be a future where there is literally no-one who they find attractive represented in media. Which is to say that someone who is accustomed to being the boot distrusts people who want there to be no boot, because surely they must be lying so that they can seize power and be the boot and crush everyone else.

At the heart of this is a zero-sum way of thinking of the world. They have deeply internalised that if one group in society gains rights, or power of any sort, then it must come at the cost of someone else. Some of them occasionally show awareness of the moral awfulness of them using their privilege to oppress others in society, and they briefly have moments where they understand that if the oppressed wished to take our retribution against them, we would be justified. However, they are incapable (or unwilling) to actually reckon with all the cognitive dissonance they’ve built up, and so their fear causes them to become ever more rigid in their worldview.

I find it fascinating, really. I am a fat, queer punk, and my existence is viscerally horrifying to them, because I am the epitome of so much of what they hate, and it breaks their brains to imagine that someone could find me attractive (tbh, it still sort of breaks my brain a bit too, but I’m getting there with improving my confidence). They genuinely believe that THE WOKE LEFT want everyone in media to look like me, even though that would be the opposite of the diversity we actually want.

They don’t believe us when we say this though. Their zero sum thinking combined with their willful inability to acknowledge that their own preferences are as subjective as anyone’s means they don’t believe us when we say this though, and that this is all part of our dastardly plot to seize absolute power for ourselves and make them be the oppressed ones.

It’s quite sad for them in the end. I’ve found that a huge part of what has allowed me to become more confident in myself has been acknowledging and embracing all the non conventional things I find attractive in other people. For instance, I firmly believe that the most beautiful point on basically any human body is the point where the curvature of the calf turns from being convex to concave. And because I don’t feel the need to convince other people of this, I can just let myself like what I like and be free to bite my partners’ calves. Even if their tastes do genuinely align with what is considered to be this narrow notion of “conventionally attractive”, I can’t imagine they feel very free to actually enjoy their own desires and their own bodily potential