Yeah, I can still smell the lubricant we used in our high school machine shop. It was water based and we called it blue juice

If it's something you have to be intimately close to smell it's nice, if you sit down at the table next to me and I can smell it that's rough

Why is it so alluring to fantasize about the world after your suicide or death?

Is it just fascinating to speculate upon the impact you'll have had?

Do you just feel so meaningless and frozen that it's the only impact you can see yourself causing?

Are you just so numb that imagining the grief of friends and family, or the horror of the cruel indifference of the world, is the only way to breach the shell?

Maybe you just can't let yourself fantasize about the act itself, and imagining the aftermath is the next best thing?

Perhaps it's cathartic to see the world without you in it.

One way or another, you'll never find out how accurate you were.

UwU

I mean, if someone stops responding to you, something is clearly wrong. Either they're not into it or there's more going on than meets the eye and in the first case you shouldn't proceed, and in the 2nd you should try to help them, not fuck them. Either way, I wouldn't even ask them if they wanted to continue, I would stop and ask them what was wrong.

Probably because it's probably cropped yiff

I'm not an mtg person, would protection mean only enemy spells? The original is your own too. Would be cool to have a board wipe that couldn't affect you

Thankfully, that night was the worst of it, and they were much more stable in the morning. They angrily knocked over some stools and stuff, so could have been a lot worse. They did break a light bulb, but like, deliberately? Apparently something they do as a coping method, and they collect the internals. (They were really apologetic about it, but like, if you need to break a lighbulb to cope with that shit, you go right ahead, you know?) I was concerned for them but not for myself, pretty much. Like I said, they were much more stable in the morning and we made a plan to move them in with their grandmother, a somewhat estranged father, and their brother. Took them over yesterday, they should be much better off with family they moatly know and love, and a much more familiar environment. All in all things qent about as well as they possibly could have. I think they expected me to be upset and angry with them and basically kick them out, they seemed surprised when life went on like normal the next morning. (I've pretty much been there, my depressive episodes usually involved collapsing into a puddle on the couch, but I did get more manic ones and I coped by running myself ragged. Good to reduce your energy and somehow feels self-destructive while not really being so). So, all in all, I think everything resolved as well as it could have, and we're still friends. Dealing with that on top of being nastily sick was really rough but I think I weathered it well.

I don't know, I think cultures can definitely be rated by and advance in the category of how well the people living in it are treated. It's interesting though, because the phrase "an advanced culture" doesn't really feel natural to me, and I would interpret it as "a culture that's progressed through time" rather than "a culture that's objectively better". I don't know, I think it's ok to think of, for example, Afghanistan's culture as barbaric compared to more developed countries, based on their treatment of women. Though I think this is also starting to cross into a culture vs government discussion, it's not like I have reliable information on how the average Afghanistan male feels about the role of women in their culture. Anyways, I think you're absolutely correct that technological advancement is not equivalent to cultural improvement, I just think that some aspects of culture, most importantly to me how people are treated in it, can be relatively objectively rated, and personally I judge/rate cultures by that aspect.

On another note, to me, primitive is not the same as barbaric. I think some technological advancement is needed for a more "developed" culture, but being more developed certainly doesn't mean better. For an extreme example, if you have a culture that hasn't invented writing yet, I would say it's less developed than one that has--while oral storytelling is still existant, I think some way of more permanently recording information is crucial to developing widespread, long standing culture.

I don't know, I'm rambling at this point and I haven't reread your comment in like a paragraph and a half so I have no idea how on topic I am. I hope this is something thought provoking and welcome your thoughts on how I see things.

Addon edit, written just after I hit submit--As this relates to the prime directive, I think even without the concept of cultural advancement, I think it's still advantageous to let cultures and their technology change and adapt without external influence, from an interstellar perspective. For a planet to develop the technology to join the interstellar community and presenta planetary presence, to me, it implies that their culture has grown unified, and the fact that they haven't driven life on their planet extinct in the process is basically a qualifying factor in their cultural... maturity? If you were to accelerate their technological development to speed their ascent to the interstellar community, it might make it more likely to still have... barbaric? tendencies that could be disastrous for them or other planets. However, trying to weigh that against the potential suffering you could mitigate by advancing them technologically... I don't know, it's certainly not black and white to me. In an extremely primitive analogy, giving a caveman a laser rifle might well result in the eventual extinction of their community. Not the greatest analogy, super oversimplifying, but that's the gist of how I see it.

There is nothing better on this earth than a cat that enjoys tummy rubbins. My roomates cat loved them, and I would take like an hour long break from working on my senior project to destress and rub her tummy and scritch her chin. Her purrs weren't usually audible, but you'd feel her romble and she'd be kneading away. She's still alive and well, just me and her person graduated and went our seperate ways. I miss her a lot tbh. I'll never forget hearing a funny noise, turning around, and seeing her lapping ranch dressing out of a container my roomate left out. She loves anything salty or greasy, but wouldn't try to eat your food, just maybe lick it if you left it unattended. She did love to sniff my dinner though.

I fucking wish I had been medicated as a kid. Fuck

The world is a much better place if you don't whip yourself into a frenzy at every opportunity.