NeatHeteroDude posted:

thank you! and I gotcha, I appreciate the compliment too.

that's what I thought at age 22, before the hair started thinning out

Good soup! posted:

I'm still having trouble figuring out the meaning of your av

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

it's because the former owner of the site is bad and the people he picked for admin are predictably bad, the current owner of the site is also bad so he kept around all the bad admins from the former owner before getting started on picking new, also predictably bad, admins for himself, and the people they all pick for moderator are, obviously, bad. from lowtax on down the stewardship of these forums has always held the people who post here in contempt. to the extent these forums have ever been good it has always been in spite of the people with buttons not because of them, and cspam is no different.

and every moderator and admin will happily agree with the last sentence in that paragraph, by the way, right before they go and perma someone totally harmless because by god if they didn't everything would go to poo poo and don't these ignorant plebs understand that they, personally, are the only thing standing between us and a deluge of bad posts

hope this helps

Dreylad posted:

i imagine this of everyone by default

lobster shirt posted:

ya im in my mid 30s though. full head of hair! its very gray though tragically rip.

some plague rats posted:

Just an excellent plot twist. still lol thinking about how you could hear everyone's mental brakes screeching when we found out

NeatHeteroDude posted:

right? I'm not even that old (though I am very bald)!

NeatHeteroDude posted:

that's probably true. on top of the exercising stuff, i used to kickbox and compete in MMA. that was until like 4-6 years ago when I got hit by two cars in two separate moments 6 months apart, which required many ortho surgeries to repair my elbows and shoulders. i haven't done any combat sports back then but I was posting about it in the fitness and glenn threads because I'm finally close to my pre-accidents level of strength (even though i'm not as explosive and my cardio isn't anywhere near as good)

but thinking in terms of beating people up and doing that kind of math always bugged me because it's very mean to beat someone up, and I haven't been in a fight with anyone for like...6 years. fighting is in general much more painful and dangerous than people think. all it takes is one punch to knock you off balance and BOOM you've cracked your skull on concrete. on top of that, you run the risk of badly hurting someone else in a fight :[, which would haunt me forever.

some of my old MMA buddies loved going to bars to drink and fight and i was the weenie who said "no thank you guys, I'll stay in"

i'm discovering every day that you're incorrect, but far worse is drinking alcohol because i have no hangover tolerance anymore. it sucks!

Bilirubin posted:

Reporting PFC for probation evasion

NeatHeteroDude posted:

rude, but I deserve it for thinking they seriously needed me to explain more about the beat me up thing. but if forums lore posters are interested: I once got headbutted (from offscreen, basically) in a bar so bad that it concussed me and created an open wound that required like 15 stitches to close. I had been shoulder to shoulder on the first day after classes started, and this guy I never saw was like, "if you don't move, I'll move you." and I said, "I don't have any room, and I'd like to see you try." and then he headbutted me.

ben shapino posted:

wow, crazy

NeatHeteroDude posted:

but thinking in terms of beating people up and doing that kind of math always bugged me because it's very mean to beat someone up, and I haven't been in a fight with anyone for like...6 years. fighting is in general much more painful and dangerous than people think. all it takes is one punch to knock you off balance and BOOM you've cracked your skull on concrete. on top of that, you run the risk of badly hurting someone else in a fight :[, which would haunt me forever.

quote:

on top of that, you run the risk of badly hurting someone else in a fight :[, which would haunt me forever.

NeatHeteroDude posted:

rude, but I deserve it for thinking they seriously needed me to explain more about the beat me up thing. but if forums lore posters are interested: I once got headbutted (from offscreen, basically) in a bar so bad that it concussed me and created an open wound that required like 15 stitches to close. I had been shoulder to shoulder on the first day after classes started, and this guy I never saw was like, "if you don't move, I'll move you." and I said, "I don't have any room, and I'd like to see you try." and then he headbutted me.

lollontee posted:

in an actual fight, it turns out most people have a hard time hitting or hurting another person with full force, unless they have an actual emotional motivation for hurting another person. that's why psycho(socio)paths tend to do so well in streetfights and random, surprising violence. they have no voice going on "should we really hurt this guy", and with those couple first seconds of the fight being decisive, I often see physically smaller street psychos beating up bigger guys who hesitate. being able to take a hit on the chin and having the rexlexes to strike back even through the white, high pitched mist, is also critical since normal people usually pause after hitting someone, as they're trying to come to grips with an unfamiliar situation.

having that voice telling you "that's enough, he's done" is however critical, especially because

is something one needs to be aware even if you are defending yourself. just because somebody violently invades your home to steal your laptop doesn't you should push that knife through once you got it under his throat, even if you have the legal right

NeatHeteroDude posted:

100%! I absolutely agree about the psychological drive to not hurt people. At a certain point, it's really hard to harm someone in a big way even if they're trying to harm you. You also see it a lot hypothetically in the way conservatives talk about home invasion (which you highlighted). Shooting someone to death because they tried to steal your TV is stuff that's romanticized in a way that really bugs me.

My mom used to tell me I should keep a handgun to keep my family safe but my response has always been: "I have insurance. If someone wants to steal my poo poo to sell for any reason, my stuff isn't worth snuffing a human life."

lollontee posted:

what happened to the guy who headbutted you cold out btw?

lollontee posted:

i think guns really do change violence on a fundamental, spiritual level. they alienate the user from the act of choosing to kill completely, since all you do is move your finger a little bit and a person explodes in gore. this allows the kind of cognitive distance where you stop asking yourself if you really should hurt and kill another human being, because the act of pulling the trigger is so simple a child could do it, which is why they do. much harder keeping up the state of rage required to beat somebody to death with a golf club trophy

NeatHeteroDude posted:

It was honestly a very good lesson about how people who want to hurt you don't have to follow mma rules and definitely don't have to give you a chance to set up and get into a fighting stance. I'm glad I learned it, because it also led to me switching from chemical engineering to education after I briefly dropped out of college.

NeatHeteroDude posted:

I also agree with this! There's a good book called On Killing which is U.S. military focused and about how we've spent decades since ww2 trying to do what you're talking about- alienating soldier from the act of killing humans as much as possible

lollontee posted:

i.... find your linking of your educational choices to getting blindsided and concussed a bit of a weird connection, but i suppose brain damage does occasionally lead to new ideas growing in damaged tissue. one thing i've learned is that one should never look away from a challenge before the other one backs down, that's how you get blindsided, among many other ways.

seems that we've been reading the same books. i worry

NeatHeteroDude posted:

Being concussed caused me to stop trying to be a chemical engineer and drop out of college until my brain healed. The time off convinced me that I was in the wrong career path, and, truly college for education is way different than college for chemical engineering. I don't know if I could have gone back to engineering school even after a year of recovery. It was initially really heartbreaking, but it helped me find something I genuinely love to do.

Also lol, I hate Grossman for all his ridiculous poo poo but he's 100% right about killing and combat (except for the stuff he said about cops killing people and having good sex immediately after their shift)

lollontee posted:

good on you for taking time to rethink your life, but where did you get your penchant for psychoanalysis? symposium XI at École Nationale Supérieure?

NeatHeteroDude posted:

Also I appreciate you and everyone wanting to talk to me. I've really got to get to bed, though. Goodnight!

Cranappleberry posted:

Cranappleberry posted:

Cranappleberry posted:

NeatHeteroDude posted:

I also agree with this! There's a good book called On Killing which is U.S. military focused and about how we've spent decades since ww2 trying to do what you're talking about- alienating soldier from the act of killing humans as much as possible

Lib and let die posted:

azathoth irl

Lib and let die posted:

azathoth irl

Lib and let die posted:

azathoth irl