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Every time I hear that story I always feel sad for them.M_Sinistrari posted:we know it's usually triggered by a tragic incident such as loss of a loved one. This I did not know, but holy poo poo does this explain something to me that was kind of incomprehensible in my personal life.
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May 20, 2019 09:57
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Yeah, imagine being stuck in a bed while you knew your brother's corpse was nearby and you couldn't do poo poo about it and just starved to death. 
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May 20, 2019 10:45
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nankeen posted:i lose thirty seven pounds every time i take a dump That One Weird Weight Loss Trick Diet Companies Don't Want You To Know.
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May 20, 2019 12:28
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Cat Army
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Proteus Jones posted:Every time I hear that story I always feel sad for them. I forgot which of the Hoarders type shows it was, but they started to focus more on the psychological reasons and rehab therapy aspect and it'd turn out to be things like the hoarder had a son who died too young and what started as a 'don't throw out his things' mushroomed from there, or the wife died and the grieving husband started to pick up things that reminded him of her and it mushroomed from there. I remember one where it turned out the person's family had been through a fire where they lost everything and had been so poor they lived off of what could be foraged and even though the hoarder did eventually make it to a better living situation, they started hoarding food and that grew to hoarding anything that could be reasoned as useful. With that one they were pulling out unopened food packages so old they didn't even have bar codes. Even watching the early steps of therapy was rough since patience is critical as they have to go slow and keep reassuring the hoarder they're in control, that nothing's going to be thrown out without their approval. Naturally you're going to see some family member at the cleanup who's already been fed up with things since before the show and is all 'screw this waiting for them to be okay with what to get rid of, let's just toss poo poo'. It's a subject I'm fascinated with since my own family has hoarder tendencies. For us it stemmed from making mad bank with bootlegging during Prohibition only to lose it all with the Stock Market Crash/Great Depression. It left my Grandma's generation of the family terrified of throwing anything out that could be useful as well as distrustful of banks. For the rest of us, it became a matter of when they'd pass on, we couldn't just be cavalier with throwing things out because you'd flip through some old book and there'd be money stuffed in the pages, what looked like a ball of paper in a shoebox wrapped in old newspaper was hiding jewelry, or there'd be a roll of bills hidden in some enema kit from the '40s.
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May 20, 2019 14:27
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M_Sinistrari posted:I remember one where it turned out the person's family had been through a fire where they lost everything and had been so poor they lived off of what could be foraged and even though the hoarder did eventually make it to a better living situation, they started hoarding food and that grew to hoarding anything that could be reasoned as useful. With that one they were pulling out unopened food packages so old they didn't even have bar codes. Long before the Collyer Bros, people observed that shipwreck survivors who had been through long periods of starvation would obsessively hoard and hide food. It actually makes perfect sense as an adaptive behavior - your body learns it can't rely on a regular supply of food, so it compels you to make your own backup supply. I wouldn't be surprised if that same mechanism was at the root of all hoarding behavior, not just food hoarding.
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May 20, 2019 14:38
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My neighbor's dad died last year and he had a basement absolutely chock full of tools from the Kennedy administration forward. Dozens of heavy, metal-case power tools, thousands of every drat scraper or file or driver or pry bar. Sprit levels stacked like cordwood. The weird part was that it was highly organized. One section for plumbing, one HVAC, one painting, one fishing, one wood, one electrical, one automotive. You could start to see the patterns and consideration behind the madness. Just walking in, though, it looked like a clusterfucky dump, because it was.
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May 20, 2019 14:47
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I think that dad was just a dad
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May 20, 2019 15:59
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:*Casio intro* This is some high-quality merchandise right here.
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May 20, 2019 19:27
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Phlegmish posted:I think that dad was just a dad Am I doomed to a similar fate?
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May 20, 2019 19:42
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I have a family member that's a hoarder. He used to be rich then lost a fortune in a lovely real estate deal. Now he goes to Goodwill, claims he's buying junk to fix and sell, then never sells it. His beautiful little old house is in great condition besides the piles of tools everywhere. He actually still has more money than I've ever made in my life and the house and cars are paid off, so it's not like he even needs to find things at Goodwill to resell. I'd have more pity for him if he wasn't a religious super-Republican rear end in a top hat that thinks complaining about the gays and yelling at the minimum-wage insurance company gal (for his own mistake) for hours a day is alright. In the past few months he's fallen asleep driving and hit another car, and also refuses to use his turn signals which has caused a second accident. I can only hope when that abusive rear end in a top hat wrecks he only kills himself. Suddenly not being freakishly rich is a hell of a stupid thing to lose your mind over but I guess he didn't have anything really terrible to be traumatized over.
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May 20, 2019 21:13
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M_Sinistrari posted:I forgot which of the Hoarders type shows it was, but they started to focus more on the psychological reasons and rehab therapy aspect and it'd turn out to be things like the hoarder had a son who died too young and what started as a 'don't throw out his things' mushroomed from there, or the wife died and the grieving husband started to pick up things that reminded him of her and it mushroomed from there. I remember one where it turned out the person's family had been through a fire where they lost everything and had been so poor they lived off of what could be foraged and even though the hoarder did eventually make it to a better living situation, they started hoarding food and that grew to hoarding anything that could be reasoned as useful. With that one they were pulling out unopened food packages so old they didn't even have bar codes. In my case I was referring to myself. My fiancé died in front of me about 3 1/2 years ago and EVERYTHING went to poo poo. I was still able to function outside the home, but once I got home I was done with doing anything. That’s why I was saying it makes so much sense to me. It was like a switch was flipped. For me it was less accumulating things (although I was constantly buying poo poo to fill the hole in my soul), but rather just not giving a poo poo about trash and clutter and filth. I’m out of it now. I hired a cleaning and haul away company that specializes in hoarding. Got rid of most of my furniture and got the flooring ripped up. I’m currently going a room at a time, sealing the floors with Kilz and putting down flooring. As each room is finished, I furnish it with new stuff. I’ve also hired a cleaning service to come in once a week to do light housekeeping. A strong argument can be made that for me it was more PTSD/depression but from the outside it was pretty indisinguishable from hoarding.
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May 20, 2019 21:44
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Generally when we think of a Christianity based cult, it's something along the lines of Fundamental Protestantism. In the case of the Children of God, that is not the case. Founded in 1968 by David Berg, it was originally called Teens for Christ and its purpose was to bring the counterculture to Christianity. From the outside it appeared standard to any of the various religious movements of the day with living in communes and handing out pamphlets. However, Berg preached something else than the usuals. He stated that God loves sex because sex is love, and that Satan hates sex because sex is beautiful. He advocated sex between family members and with children along with the concept of "flirty fishing" which was recruiting new followers through sex. He regularly wrote what would be called the Mo Letters which detailed pedophilia within families, "Loving Jesus" which was envisioning Jesus joining in for sex or masturbation, and flirty fishing techniques. Young girls were encouraged to film themselves performing stripteases that would be sent to Berg. While some would admit publicly that sex with minors was only with 12 years old at the youngest, River Phoenix who had been raised in the cult admitted his first sexual experience was at the age of 4. Eventually the darker aspects of the cult would surface, and they would change their name to The Family of Love, The Family and is currently known as The Family International. They were featured in episode 3 of A&E Cults and Extreme Belief. The Family claims to have made changes but considering they still maintain intense secrecy, it's unknown as to how legit these changes are. I strongly advice caution if anyone googles the Mo Letters since they are very  or  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_International https://allthatsinteresting.com/children-of-god-david-berg https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/children_of_god/main.htm?noredirect=on I think we might need a new thread title since it keeps the notion of cults in my head.
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May 20, 2019 22:12
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Brawnfire posted:Am I doomed to a similar fate? Every dad has fifteen different tools for doing things that you didn't even know existed or were necessary. So yes
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May 20, 2019 22:32
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Weirdest one that I saw along that line was at an auction. It was an estate auction for a guy who used to work at a now shut down glass manufacturer. If I'm remembering right he supposedly had almost 1,000 industrial tongs for holding pieces of glass. Apparently he just stole a pair every week or so for the entire time that he worked there, and just left the hoard sitting in his basement until he died.
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May 20, 2019 23:01
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:Weirdest one that I saw along that line was at an auction. It was an estate auction for a guy who used to work at a now shut down glass manufacturer. If I'm remembering right he supposedly had almost 1,000 industrial tongs for holding pieces of glass. Apparently he just stole a pair every week or so for the entire time that he worked there, and just left the hoard sitting in his basement until he died. I used to do this with silverware from work. I used the silverware tho
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May 20, 2019 23:09
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one of my friends is a hoarder and he owns a secondhand shop crammed floor to ceiling with poo poo, at first it looks like a dump but then you realise there's not a speck of dust anywhere in the place and every surface is gleaming clean. anybody who actually tries to buy anything from him is in for an adventure because he refuses to let anything go, so people have to persuade him that items are even for sale before they're allowed to even mention the price. sometimes he'll just arbitrarily decide he doesn't want to part with something after all and i've seen customers getting more and more frustrated offering him actually quite extraordinary amounts of money for secondhand appliances that they really need right at that moment and he's like "no, no, you can't have it... get out of my shop"
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May 21, 2019 01:05
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nankeen posted:one of my friends is a hoarder and he owns a secondhand shop crammed floor to ceiling with poo poo, at first it looks like a dump but then you realise there's not a speck of dust anywhere in the place and every surface is gleaming clean. anybody who actually tries to buy anything from him is in for an adventure because he refuses to let anything go, so people have to persuade him that items are even for sale before they're allowed to even mention the price. sometimes he'll just arbitrarily decide he doesn't want to part with something after all and i've seen customers getting more and more frustrated offering him actually quite extraordinary amounts of money for secondhand appliances that they really need right at that moment and he's like "no, no, you can't have it... get out of my shop" It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.
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May 21, 2019 02:31
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Sounds like a South Park episode.
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May 21, 2019 02:41
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Aunt was a clean hoarder. Clean hoarders are organized madness.
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May 21, 2019 04:02
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M_Sinistrari posted:I forgot which of the Hoarders type shows it was, but they started to focus more on the psychological reasons and rehab therapy aspect and it'd turn out to be things like the hoarder had a son who died too young and what started as a 'don't throw out his things' mushroomed from there, or the wife died and the grieving husband started to pick up things that reminded him of her and it mushroomed from there. I remember one where it turned out the person's family had been through a fire where they lost everything and had been so poor they lived off of what could be foraged and even though the hoarder did eventually make it to a better living situation, they started hoarding food and that grew to hoarding anything that could be reasoned as useful. With that one they were pulling out unopened food packages so old they didn't even have bar codes. I had three Great Aunts who never married and lived together through the Great Depression. When one of them died and they were cleaning out her stuff, they found around $10,000 USD (a lot of money in the early 70s) stuffed in old purses, shoeboxes, and under her mattress.
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May 21, 2019 11:09
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My very unscientific  analysis of the people featured on Hoarders was that, in general, the women were mostly hoarding because they had sentimental attachments to items and couldn't bear to feel like they were throwing away memories, while the men were hoarding items that were functional, and couldn't bear to feel like they were wasting usable items.Also I would guess that a pretty significant proportion of them (also my aunt, who was a hoarder and died recently) had undiagnosed autism or ADHD or other severe executive functioning impairments, where they simply couldn't figure out how to get the things done that they wanted to get done.
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May 21, 2019 19:21
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Proteus Jones posted:In my case I was referring to myself.
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May 21, 2019 19:46
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After the latest Chernobyl I finally looked up the pictures of Ouchi and I wish I hadn't. Jesus.
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May 22, 2019 01:23
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packetmantis posted:After the latest Chernobyl I finally looked up the pictures of Ouchi and I wish I hadn't. Jesus. Yeah, that's a tough one. I haven't start Chernobyl yet. I'm waiting until it's done so I can just blast through the misery in one long day. Plus it ends the day I move into my new condo, so adding to the nightmares I'll have in a new place shouldn't be too much of a problem.
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May 22, 2019 01:37
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packetmantis posted:After the latest Chernobyl I finally looked up the pictures of Ouchi and I wish I hadn't. Jesus. yeah, the last episode was kind of gruesome
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May 22, 2019 02:11
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nankeen posted:one of my friends is a hoarder and he owns a secondhand shop crammed floor to ceiling with poo poo, at first it looks like a dump but then you realise there's not a speck of dust anywhere in the place and every surface is gleaming clean. anybody who actually tries to buy anything from him is in for an adventure because he refuses to let anything go, so people have to persuade him that items are even for sale before they're allowed to even mention the price. sometimes he'll just arbitrarily decide he doesn't want to part with something after all and i've seen customers getting more and more frustrated offering him actually quite extraordinary amounts of money for secondhand appliances that they really need right at that moment and he's like "no, no, you can't have it... get out of my shop" Reminds me of an old story: "My Rose and My Glove".
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May 22, 2019 02:16
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I found this NYT review of Last Train from Hiroshima, about the atomic bombings that I think everyone should read to try and grasp the horror of the atomic bombs. Also the book is suuuuuuuper depressing but I highly recommend it as well. All of this nuclear talk is extremely personal to me. My great aunt was essentially conscripted to be a "nurse" (read: grab a high schooler and give her the most rudimentary medical education and send her out) at the tail end of WWII, and was at Hiroshima, though I forget if she had gotten there right before or right after the bomb. for obvious reasons she rarely talked about this period of her life outside of why she hated the bomb. Regardless, she was there treating the first victims of an atomic weapon, and she had a photo album because she wanted to make sure no one ever forgot. Very few things make me uncomfortable but that photo album still makes me physically ill. There is a term in Japanese that translates roughly to "ant walking alligator". These are people who were too far from the blast to die instantaneously, but instead (SPOILERS BECAUSE THIS IS GOING TO GET REALLY GROSS ) their facial features all got obliterated by the atomic blast, their eyes boiled in their own heads, every inch of skin that wasn't covered by white clothing was horrendously burned and theur vocal cords singed to a crisp so they couldn't even scream. They got their name because their blackened skin looked more like alligator hide or ant carapaces than anything human, and many of them either succumbed to their wounds shortly afterwards if they were lucky. Otherwise they would just shuffle forward and hopefully medical personnel could help them before they blindly stumbled into a pit My great aunt's stories were so vivid that I had nightmares about them for years. I can't imagine what it was like for her to have been there.
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May 22, 2019 02:28
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packetmantis posted:After the latest Chernobyl I finally looked up the pictures of Ouchi and I wish I hadn't. Jesus. The effects work's very impressive. I also highly recommend the supplemental podcast since it goes into some of the things that did happen but they didn't put into the miniseries because people wouldn't believe it.
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May 22, 2019 02:32
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Don Gato posted:... One thing that really scares me about the future is that we're not far from losing living memory of what the atomic bomb really does. There's something particularly scary about the way that we know they're around, strapped onto missiles, in bunkers, waiting to be loaded onto very real planes and that they could be used both by us and on us so quickly we wouldn't know it was happening until we saw the flash, but how we don't really fear them as a culture anymore. Like Chekhov's proverbial gun, sitting on stage.
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May 22, 2019 03:16
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Azathoth posted:One thing that really scares me about the future is that we're not far from losing living memory of what the atomic bomb really does. Even as the bombs were dropped we forgot how awful a firebombing is.
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May 22, 2019 04:16
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Reminds me of an old story: "My Rose and My Glove".
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May 22, 2019 06:48
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ArcMage posted:Even as the bombs were dropped we forgot how awful a firebombing is. We’re preternaturally afraid of a-bombs because of the radiation factor (it’s invisible and therefore scary) but firebombing all the cities was, if anything, worse than using the nuke. Did you know that during the firebombings of cities like Tokyo, a lot of people died by drowning? They were trying to take shelter from the fires by jumping into rivers and canals but the smoke from the fires just settled into the lower areas and asphyxiated them
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May 22, 2019 06:59
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pookel posted:My very unscientific My own unscientific analysis is that it's usually the moms who are the most ruthless when it comes to discarding things that are associated with cherished childhood memories Mom why did you do it 
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May 22, 2019 07:01
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Pirate Radar posted:We’re preternaturally afraid of a-bombs because of the radiation factor (it’s invisible and therefore scary) but firebombing all the cities was, if anything, worse than using the nuke. Did you know that during the firebombings of cities like Tokyo, a lot of people died by drowning? They were trying to take shelter from the fires by jumping into rivers and canals but the smoke from the fires just settled into the lower areas and asphyxiated them There is always more, and it's always worse. 
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May 22, 2019 07:17
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ArcMage posted:There is always more, and it's always worse. They say war is hell, but that quote was made at the very dawn of industrialized warfare and it's only gotten worse since then. It's a drat good thing no first world powers have gone to war with each other since the end of WWII, because even without nukes the wars would be bloodier than anything that's come before it when you factor in the amount of firepower a modern military unit has. Edit: OK, fine, now you're more likely to die because the enemy is trying to kill you instead of making GBS threads out your insides before the battle even starts. You're also likely to be killed by an artillery strike that was aimed via drone and you won't have time to react before the shells start falling. Don Gato has a new favorite as of 07:29 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 07:21
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Don Gato posted:They say war is hell, but that quote was made at the very dawn of industrialized warfare and it's only gotten worse since then. That's not quite true. War used to involve massive amounts of dying from dysentery. It's worse in many other ways, but in a few small ways it's now better.
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May 22, 2019 07:24
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War these days involves things like cluster bombs that scatter a thousand submunitions over a wide area and have dud rates of 5% or greater ensuring that each use leaves dozens of small unexploded bomblets lying in the dirt
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May 22, 2019 07:30
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Pirate Radar posted:War these days involves things like cluster bombs that scatter a thousand submunitions over a wide area and have dud rates of 5% or greater ensuring that each use leaves dozens of small unexploded bomblets lying in the dirt in the middle of civilian areas.
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May 22, 2019 07:35
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Not civilian for long, given all the undetonated ordinance.
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May 22, 2019 08:04
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Pirate Radar posted:We’re preternaturally afraid of a-bombs because of the radiation factor (it’s invisible and therefore scary) but firebombing all the cities was, if anything, worse than using the nuke. Did you know that during the firebombings of cities like Tokyo, a lot of people died by drowning? They were trying to take shelter from the fires by jumping into rivers and canals but the smoke from the fires just settled into the lower areas and asphyxiated them There's accounts from Operation Gomorrah, the bombing of Hamburg, of people trying to flee but getting stuck in asphalt that was liquefied by the heat, or that the winds caused by the fire were so strong people were sucked into the inferno like leaves, and that the people who didn't flee either suffocated in their basements or baked to death. I remember reading one account by a German firefighter about how the glass lenses in his helmet began to melt and he had to lie face-down on the ground and suck air from the "cavity" created by his body. Oil from damaged fuel tanks and ships set the canals and harbor on fire. IIRC estimates are that the hottest areas of the firestorm reached the same temperature of a steel blast furnace. Allegedly the tail-end bombers (RAF night bombing used a continual "stream" of aircraft rather than the daylight formations the USAAF used) could smell burning flesh as they passed over the cities, my dad's grandparents in Copenhagen apparently said they could see the glow of the burning Hansa cities reflected on the clouds but I think the distance might be a little far for that to be plausible. Tashilicious posted:in the middle of civilian areas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnd3IYH7x1o
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May 22, 2019 08:40
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