At this point, everyone knows I'm hugely into books.
It's just so depressing how even book people are about nothing more than intentionally creating this self-perpetuating "community" of anxiety.
You can't go to any freaking book-related online space without people asking for permission to not finish a book. "Is it okay to DNF?????"
Same with doing shit to your own books. Do not write into them, do not open them too much or the spine will crack. Get a panic attack because two fucking photons touched the book and how it will be DAMAGED.
"I am having a panic attack because maybe I didn't get all the references in this book."
The same with every hobby. Cooking? You are not environmentally friendly enough, you are not authentic enough, this is wrong, that is wrong.
Hell, I am kiiinda thinking about a Switch, I looked at Animal Crossing and people are freaking the fuck out at others for not playing the game "right". Others are having depression because their islands are not aesthetic enough.
How did the internet turn everyone so fucking neurotic over the things we were supposed to do as FUN? And I am not even just talking about SJW things, but every community is about "doing it the right way" even though it doesn't matter and there doesn't exist a right way?
It's to the point now where if I see a millennial having one of their trademark panic attacks, that I try to egg them on into a breakdown. At this point I consider "anxiety" to be every bit as fake as ADD.
I want it to be real. We're overdue for a culling of the weak.
As fucked as millennials are, they're not so bad that you can't get away with thinking that, at least for now. They're functional enough that you can still write off their dysfunctions as just millennials being shit.
You have until the lockdown kids start hitting their late teens, at least. Every dysfunction the millennials have, they're gonna have 10x worse, and there won't be anything left to point to but generations of rotting culture, and how it's ruined child-rearing. It's gonna be very real.
Gen Z is worse than Millennials in mental illnesses and neuroses and Gen Alpha (the iPad generation) is going to be even more messed up than them. Poor parenting skills by Gen Xers and Millennials combined with the overexposure to technology has ruined these kids. Ultimately, this proves Dr. Kaczynski was right yet again.
Try to get them to define anxiety, in their own words, sometimes. You'll find they have no idea what it is, and generally just describe the basic troubles of being alive.
ADD is real, probably caused by vaccines and many other modern things the health industry pushes on people. Probably also a side effect of ritalin being pushed on young kids.
I think we will learn that a lot of this insanity was no different than mad hatters being exposed to mercury. Except, the society back then at least knew they were mad and there were not as many of them. Now the mad "nuerodivergent" are in such numbers and with access to each other that they have formed a culture out of their madness.
I also do not doubt that this was engineered. Whether for a more controllable population or just for big pharma to be able to sell meth to kids and adults just so they could function like a normal human.
I have a similar view about 'trauma'.
Yea. In theory Reddit is a great idea but I never thought it would devolve like it has. I was a part of the literature group along with other groups but they were ridiculous with left wing talking points before Floyd riots. Then they were off the charts. And the mods were mad when I asked what a “statement on racism” has to do with hockey cards.
If you know of any legit book clubs let me know. I love reading too
The Floyd thing blew up so fast, so far and wide, that it became very clear the left was merely waiting on a starter pistol event to go full “revolution”. That’s just how their ideology is structured; wait for a flashpoint, any flashpoint, and then rush your agenda through as many doors as you can. Same thing happened with gamergate. All of these converged communities and institutions are just waiting for the opportunity to toss all the wrongthinkers to the curb/in the gulag.
Think about this relationship. We’re locked into a democracy with people who are actively striving to flip the table and will use any provocation, no matter how questionable, as an excuse to destroy and remake society. That’s not a union. That’s a hostage situation.
They think they're in an existential war for survival.
You think you're in a debate club.
FIGHT.
That observation deserves a meme!
It's not my line--I can't remember who originally said it.
But I loved it so much that I kept it around.
Completely agree
It’s mostly just faggots looking for attention and asspats, we’ve deified weakness so much in our society to the point that people will act like pussies as a substitute for having a real personality.
“Asspats”
What a perfect description, I’m keeping that.
I think people have always been this way, it's just that you never heard from the freaks who sit at home and literally shake because their character has 5 less points in str than is optimal. They were sitting at home shaking.
Now they're doing that, but they're also compulsively joining every internet community they can, trying to infect everyone else with their mind virus.
I definitely remember people who would play EverQuest for 16 hours a day, terrified that their guild or whatever would blow past them, leaving them alone in the dust with nobody to play with. I remember people who were livid when I placed a PlayStation disc on the counter rather than its special cotton bag. It's not like I just chucked discs around. I gently placed them on a counter. But the way people acted, I might as well have taken a knife to them. Like buddy, it's fucking Tomba, who the hell cares. Look, it still plays just fine. No scratches.
People have been hair trigger lunatics forever, it's just that in the past, nobody would be friends with those people and they'd be forgotten about by everyone. Now you basically have no choice but to interact with them.
Oh, and don't worry so much about the Switch. I own one, it's a great console, and I use it as a bonding experience with my family as much as anything. Just because soys love it doesn't make it bad. They like good things too, they just like them for the wrong reasons.
It's a bit too easy to say people have always been this way and the internet has just exposed them. It's still a possibility that people truly are different now. Hell, even during the internet's short history there has been a distinct evolution in people's behaviour on it.
Evolution, as in the development of novel and clearly distinct traits by random mutation, generally takes many hundreds of generations. Natural selection, as in the balance of already existing genetic traits in future generations by outside influences, can eliminate a trait in a single generation if the imposed force is strong enough.
After two world wars and several smaller ones, it's possible the bravest men have been significantly culled. And after 50 years of prevailing corporate drudgery and cronyism disenfranchising those outside the system, it's possible that independence and self possession have been economically disfavored in the middle class who don't forgo kids to break free of the servitude.
Maybe all the societal rot we see currently is purely just the result of cultural/environmental factors in their lifetime, but it's not impossible that the average person now is actually also just fundamentally quite different from the average person just 100-200 years ago.
I think the bigger problem is that everything is social now. Everything you listed as a hobby is a solo activity, but you've made it a social club instead.
People aren't supposed to be social 100% of the time. There needs to be a balance. Yet most people can't handle being in solitude for more than a few minutes.
Everyone needs a solo activity they enjoy. Something where you barely even know what the "greater community" is talking about. Books you'd think would be that, but apparently everything needs to be a book club instead.
Those people who can’t handle solitude either lack an internal monologue or are terrified of their own thoughts. I’ve thought about this a lot and this is the conclusion I’ve come to. Also they probably have a shit attention span and need constant stimulation to not go insane.
I think its even more than that. They lack the ability to make choices for themselves.
Nobody can just see a movie or read a book anymore. They need to confer with the masses to find out if its good or not first. Then, they need someone to acknowledge that they did in fact do that, so they post about it somewhere or engage in some discussion about it. And they can't game without some discussion on the meta level, whether its about min/maxxing or just "what's best build" to copy paste.
There can be no fun had unless someone else has participated in it. Nothing is ever done just for your own personal enrichment and pleasure. Fun itself is a group activity.
That’s very true. It’s why the mass media has such a hold on people, they can’t form their own opinions, they need to be told what opinion to have. I can’t even get mad at them, I used to be the same way. I used to rely on NPR to tell me what to think. I believed at the time I was just getting informed on whatever news was happening but looking back I can see that I was not forming my own opinions without checking on NPR first.
I also used to do exactly as you describe with vidya - I couldn’t just play a character and experiment and figure out the best build on my own. I always scoured the message boards for a given game to see what the current meta was for the class and pretty much just copy what someone else already figured out. There is certainly a fear that so many seem to have for just blazing a trail. In gaming, for me, it was aversion to being seen as some noob retard who didn’t know how to play a given class.
I need to remember this thread the next time I feel compelled to just copy what someone else has done. It’s really just lazy-brained to do that.
The thing is, there is a balance to be had. We are social creatures by instinct and we are at our best when we share notes and learn from one another. Its the requirement to always be doing that wherein it becomes a problem.
As such, its beneficial to sometimes look up what people have found about the game to give yourself a new perspective on how to better optimize. Sometimes you just won't see synergies and options that others do, and you can adapt that in to vastly enhance your enjoyment. However, it becomes an issue where you just can't play a game without a walkthrough open, or knowing the absolute best build before you start. Your fun is predicated on living up to some nonexistent standard of being judged for subpar performance.
Fun is ableist you fucking Nazi, some of us are neurospicy and can't have fun! Reported to the internet police.
Anyway, yeah, reddit is a shithole filled with incredibly sad people who don't have any IRL friends and are desperate for validation, even if it comes from other losers like themselves. Normal people have their own insecurities and irrational fears, but we can get over it because we haven't been surviving on Soylent for the last half decade. Considering Reddit's opinions on pretty much any topic should be avoided at all costs, I only go there anymore to laugh at the faggotry through subs like r/shitredditsays and r/coronaviruscirclejerk.
I thought of something while I was writing the first paragraph, though: I'm really convinced that these people who freak out about this kind of stupid shit are autistic - at least those who started it, there's also bound to be a sizeable chunk of literal NPCs who saw these autistic outbursts and now they're just aping them because they think that's what's appropriate. But then you have subs centered around topics that genuinely attract actual autists, subs like r/Factorio and r/KerbalSpaceProgram, and those are some of the best on the site. And the big difference? There are no women on these subs. Hmmm.
I don’t have any IRL friends because everyone is so sensitive and neurofaggy. It bums me out, idk how to meet other autists in my area with spicy political takes who aren’t offended by facts.
I guess I need to start a Midwest group for “nazis” that cause others to literally shake. But then the feds will just Ruby Ridge us all :(
Just as women have sought to destroy men's spaces and activities, so to does globohomo seek to isolate those with dangerous ideas.
Fellow Midwesterner here, and I wholeheartedly concur that we need more social spaces where like-minded men can gather, shoot the bull, discuss relevant topics, and maybe have a burger and a beer while we're at it. Somewhat like the Moose Lodges, Eagles Aeries, Masonic Lodges, etc, but without all of the prior associations that go along with any of those groups. Trouble is, with the current political climate I doubt that any place that gets set up would be allowed to get to the point where the Feds could Ruby Ridge it, because the state and local opposition would get wind of it and do everything in their power to shut it down.
People pulled the same shit with elden ring.
"You're not supposed to use summons!"
Then why are they in the fucking game, asshole?
At least with Elden Ring, summons are seen more as ‘easy mode’ and for journalists, and without them that’s the real Dark Souls experience. And for the occasionally broken boss fight, like most of the ones where they’re giant and you’re in a small closet together and you can’t see what the hell’s going on. They’re telling people that this is supposed to be a really hard game that requires a lot of you and are encouraging people to play it that way. It’s akin to a game like Bayonetta that I think had a ‘the game’s going to play itself for you’ mode, which with some summons that’s basically what you’re doing, like the mimic. Still think they’re a good idea to have the feature because if I want to Souls it I can and if that’s too much for someone they can too without making bosses one hit kills or bullet sponges on either end.
With Animal Crossing, I think they got mad that you can put an afro hair style on a character that doesn’t have dark skin. I actually know a black guy that has lighter skin than me and I’m white. The fuck do we do about him in Animal Crossing? Is he not allowed to be seen? I’m not even sure what playing Animal Crossing right would mean since most of the game play is you walking around each day hitting the rocks til they’re dry and picking up flowers and coconuts and catching bugs and fish.
Eehh, I must admit, sometimes that thinking is cancer.
I don't look back on my Chromehounds over-the-horizon guided missile spammer with pride, for instance, for all that it was devastatingly effective.
I mean, yes, it was in the game, but no, it's not what you'd call "fair play".
In my defence, that was the first or second thing I took into multiplayer. I settled on considerably less cancerous builds after that.
Gatekeep your shit, be toxic.
I think FOMO is a much bigger deal than most people realize. It’s really a powerful manifestation of cluster B personality disorders, which are more or less clinical leftism in the first place.
That's a really astute observation I'd never considered before.
Cluster B personality disorders
Antisocial PD - essentially the criminal mentality
Borderline PD - every crazy suicidal/homicidal girlfriend ever with fear of abandonment and malignant jealousy
Histrionic PD - attention whore and pathological liar, essentially Amber Heard
Narcissistic PD - self explanatory
Wait until you realize they sum up 99.999% of the the mtf trannies.
Not just mtf, and really, not just trannies. Literally every single "out" homo I've ever had the displeasure to know was histrionic and narcissistic. The histrionism is outright a part of their culture. It's why I don't have any gay friends, I have enough self-respect to never associate with cluster B personalities.
I just quit trying for online communities of about anything. Video games probably being the last straw when it came nothing but griping and bitching or dick measuring contests. "OMG this game was so fun then it dropped a single frame once what the hell is wrong with games anymore it's such a shit game." Or, "The only reason anyone doesn't like Dark Souls is they are bad, it's not even a hard game it's so easy I finished it in 5 hours naked with a guitar hero controller and it was still too damn easy."
Oh, and I don't like cracking the spine of my books, but I've always been that way. I don't write in almost anything because I'm not a note-taker type. Still though, I don't give a shit if someone else wants to highlight the entire damn book and tear every page out one-by-one and read it. None of such things is going to give me a panic attack though. Panic attack over an inanimate object, really?
Dark souls at least is understandable. Its a game defined by its difficulty. Yet a bunch of people keep bitching and whining for the devs to make it easy or to add an easy mode. It needs its core community to gatekeep those people out.
I always pick on it because I don't like it. I hate the dodge-dodge-stab tedious game play loop, and it's fans will come out in droves to trash negative opinions.
Probably a more universal example is trying to go to any mainstream gaming forum and criticize a 1st party PS4 exclusive, because those are considered the absolute pinnacle of gaming and are infallible.
In Elden Ring, summons were the difficulty slider. If you want the Souls experience don’t use them. If you want to make it easier, use them. It works.
The problem with a real difficulty slider on a Souls game is that it wasn’t designed for that because the gameplay is too tight. Other games have you button mashing with animation cancels to have everything happen instantly. Souls games are the exact opposite. Every single button press is a commitment. If you made it easier you’d basically be upping your HP and lowering the enemies and it would feel janky and it’d still be pretty rough because when you’re attacked you often can’t move. If you can’t beat a boss as is you wouldn’t do much better if it died quicker.
I stopped browsing niche communities and I now just do whatever it is for personal enjoyment. It's so depressing how everything that is non political in nature has a million soy retards bringing up some liberal BS.
Dude FOR REAL. My main hobbies are gardening, home reno, and books. I don’t even BOTHER existing in online spaces for any of that shit for the exact reasons you mention. I see so many morons flipping out about shit, shaming and “calling out” each other… I’m convinced this is the terminal velocity of boomer idiots after they get exposed to the millenial-generation obsession with canceling people and things and making their “anxiety” their entire identity.
Gardening people, I would argue, are even worse than the book scene. There are truly a million ways to garden and nearly all of them are valid imo. Yet no matter what technique you like there will be some dildo screaming about how what you’re doing is somehow dangerous (lol) and you’ll get sick from eating the veggies you grow. It’s like these people build their entire self worth around their ideas of how to do something a certain way and if you don’t fall in line and validate their “concerns” you’re some kind of Judas.
I feel you 100%
That's just heavily moderated online communities tbh. Jannies enforce draconian community standards, then stan for the people that suck up to them, creating the most toxic and nepotistic hugboxes.
Take your hobby offline, if you can, and you will be much better for it.
You could try a creative hobby. Most woodworking should be okay, and anything involving a lathe is more or less bombproof from pussies.
That Rob "Law and Lumber" guy seems like an exception.
He's a YouTube lawyer who grew a following by hanging out with the rest of LawTube during the Johnny Depp trial where he would sit on the panels discussing the trial while woodworking on camera.
Then he started white knighting for Alyte/Legal Bytes, a blonde Californian-Lithuanian lawyer who got rich livestreaming the trial after she became a Karen and banned another lawyer and citizen court reporter from her channel because she disapproved of a "face" they made in the courtroom during the trial during some hot take testimony.
This is what happens to narcissistic secular materialists who have abandoned any and all sense of the divine and supernatural. This is their only shot at existence. So, everything must be perfect and they must reach the highest rung of the ladder possible, or else they're wasting their very limited time. Everything is an achievement, a building block that must be perfectly placed in the meticulous construction of their perfect lives. Like Fulton Sheen once said, they have no idea of the value of wasting time.
We ebook reads aren't real, because we can't SMELL the books.
(Funny enough, I have a barely existing sense of smell because of a childhood illness, so I can't really smell them much anyway. Never will be a real reader.)
That is if you buy them from like Amazon. You don't have to have your ebook reader connected to the internet, you know. In offline, nobody can do anything, especially if you load the books from your computer.
By that logic, the physical books are one spilled glass of water/leaking pipe/random bug or other pest infestation/fire etc. away from being destroyed.
This is the way. I have a Kobo specifically because I can drop an Epub or text file on its internal drive and it will just read it. Calibre can manage books offline for a number of e readers, but I like that I can just open random txt files
Download the epub or mobi, run it on calibre that connects to your server and read them
Old version of Kindle for PC + Older version of Calibre + DRM-removal plugin. Download 'em as you buy them, strip the DRM, upload them to your own cloud storage as a backup. Plus, as an added bonus, with Calibre you can set the covers for the books in your library so you don't have to use the godawful "NOW COMING TO NETFLIX", "SOON TO BE AN AMAZON MOVIE", and "COMING SOON TO THEATERS" covers that publishers slap on the books well after you've bought them but Amazon seems intent on updating years down the road.
Tbh ebooks suck if you ever need to go back to look up something from earlier, it's much easier to do it in a physical book.
Yeah, if you're using a program on your computer or smartphone it's probably fine, I specifically meant dedicated e-readers. I have a pocketbook, it has search too, but it's just so painfully slow. As far as I'm aware, even Kindles are the same, even with EPUBs. And don't get me started with PDFs on e-readers, fuck that shit.
The problem is too much worrying about what others think. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being snobby about how pristine your books are, especially if they're collectible editions or something. The problem emerges when we spend so much time being concerned about how others view our hobbies.
Time to get into guns: we don't care.
I disagree. There's plenty of that kind of shit in the gun community, it's just a little more tongue in cheek. But it's still there.
Hell, the first thing I do these days when I get my mitts on a new hardback book is fold both the front and back cover open so they'll get broken in. Books were meant to be read, dammit, not just sit on a shelf and look pretty like they do in so many wokies' libraries.
I leave books by the wayside all the time and drop them on the DNF/donate stack because they didn't hold my interest long enough or I've already bounced off of them three times and I really don't think a fourth attempt will be worth it. Granted, that physical stack is a lot smaller these days due to me switching most of my reading over bootlegged ebooks, but considering that the vendors want to charge you the same price for a stack of bits and bytes (that has effectively zero overhead for them to produce and deliver) as they do for a physical tome of 150-300 bound pages, they can all get bent.
In my experience, it's more worth it to just not pay attention to the bullshit that goes on online when it comes to a hobby I enjoy. For example: I just recently started getting into vinyl records and have been building a small collection of stuff I enjoy. While I maintain a Discogs account to track my collection and wishlist, I stay as far away as I can from ANY forums or discussion areas in regards to the hobby, on ANY site, because inevitably they devolve into batches of snobs with their own pack of neuroses and gatekeeper-ish bullshit. My life and enjoyment of the hobby is greatly enhanced by staying the hell away from them and only shooting the bull with the owner down at the local record store.
They just followed everyone else online because people went away because of the kvetchers.
I left almost all of the "communities" about the things I love. Games, shows, music... all infested.
Your issue is going to mainstream sites. I don't know if there ARE even any non main stream stuff left but if there are that is where you probably find the real people. Reddit is such a shithole, you can't go there to get any read on something. It's only good for the occasional art piece being uploaded I can take as a reference. Otherwise reddit is utterly useless for meaningful discussions. I miss old forums.
I just ignore internet dwellers
snorkelling is not, because the snorkelling community just snorkels, wet suit, mask and snorkel, weight belt, boom you are done, if it works for you great, thin suit for warm water, think for cold, thats about it really
best hobby, plus it can reward you with food, had some real nice mussels yesterday, likely surfing too although im not really familiar with that community, its just the general beach vibe
Get off your computer and go do things with real people in the real world. Join a hiking club. Volunteer at your church or at a Habitat for Humanity build. Make some friends at your local gun range.
The internet can be a wonderful tool. It can't be your life. Touch grass and shake hands.
Yeah, so I just point and laugh at those people. Oh you don’t like that i changed the clock on a video game because I have a real life and job where I can’t waste 24 hours to do something at a specific time? I like this seasoning and to cook things this way.
Don’t go online. Problem solved.
In person is always better
this is a retarded post. stop posting.