I honestly think mobile ads in free games and other apps are some of the lowest quality piles of garbage I've ever had the misfortune to see, and they are constant. How did we get to this point? Where they are so horribly unbearable and yet so commonplace?

Edit: People are really making me out to be an evil psychopath with no empathy. I get that you can only tell so much from one post, but it's incredibly far from the truth. I have people that love and adore in my life and would do anything for. It just takes me a long ass time to get to that point...and as an introvert, my social battery with new people wears down quickly. Online dating is just difficult. I am not rude to others. Conversations just quickly peter out and neither I or my match end up continuing for much longer. The "ghosting" I speak of is often mutual. These aren't people I've interacted with for months that I suddenly stop talking to. It's chatting for a day or several and then we peter out.

If you think from this small post that I am such a psychopath as to discard a literal child, I don't know what to tell you. It's just leaping to such wild conclusions that I don't even know how to respond. I don't even necessarily want kids...I just want to be able to have the option to.

I'm sorry if this is too odd or specific of a question, but I have a bit of a dilemma.

I live alone. I have some work friends work friends, but they basically stay just friends at work. So I get lonely sometimes. And sometimes I just want to have someone around to do stuff with me. And sometimes I wonder what it might be like to raise a family.

So I occasionally try dating apps. But when I finally get someone to respond to me, my reaction is first a little bit of excitement, but then I get annoyed at having to chat with someone I just met all the time. So I unfortunately act like a dickhole by then ghosting them soon after. Even if I manage enough stamina to chat back and forth for a week or so, it always just ends up tiring and a bother to me.

The thing is, I don't really have much capacity to feel attracted to people. I'm probably somewhere on both the asexual and aromantic spectrums. So you'd think, why date? Just make a friendship then. But there are some things you can't do with a friend...like raise a family and such.

Plus, I don't even think I could manage a friendship with how difficult it is for me to like someone. I don't like anyone I just met. It takes a long time for me to enjoy and appreciate people, and many never actually make it to the point of someone I really like. There have been a couple of times where I have tried hanging out with people as friends and it's just...kind of dissatisfying to me?? Yet I really like hanging out with certain members of my family. I don't get it.

Plus like...what are you even supposed to do on a date or on an outing with friends? What are you supposed to say when you're chatting with a partner? How long and often are you supposed to chat with each other? I feel like I need some sort of a step by step guidebook because I don't even know what the hell people are supposed to do with each other.

Sorry if this is too specific. I'm just wondering if anyone else out there is as confused with human interaction as I am.

I've turned search engine suggestions off because they often get me side-tracked, or even get me to completely forget what I actually wanted. If it is something I have visited once already, simply getting that from my history skips the search engine, making the process slightly faster. I realize that my attention problem might not actually be solved by this,

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24986940

("the McDonald's girl" = girl 3. That phrase was the motorycle boy's idea. This story is not related to McDonald's or motorcycles.)

On January 8, 2024, I began to feel the physical attraction whenever I was in the one class we were both in.

On February 29, when I was sitting down and she was walking in front of me and I probably looked at her for a moment, she appeared to pause and make eye contact with me, and I was very shocked. Later in the same class period, when she was sitting in front of me, she appeared to turn back and look at me. I felt like I knew that she had some sort of interest in me, maybe a crush idk. I gradually started to think about how good she was (this was likely affected by a lot of bias) and have a crush on her. The beginning of the crush was between March 2[^1] and March 5[^2].

This is around the time when finding my future wife before graduation if she could be found was slowly becoming almost like a goal, instead of just a hypothetical possibility in the distant future. (Both of these mindsets are worse than the exploration goal.)

On March 2, me and most other seniors went on a field trip to Disneyland. Experiencing scary rides for fun might have influenced my mindset.

In a group chat (not with the McDonald's girl), I sent:

• "Last Thursday in religion class, [the McDonald's girl] looked at me in an interesting way"
• "It seems to reveal interesting feelings"
• "Probably attraction, but could also be a feeling of impending doom" (joke)

I did not ask "Does [the McDonald's girl] have a boyfriend?" I did not reach that level of fearless communication yet. Eventually you will see that asking this would have made a difference.

I considered going to the table with the McDonald's girl during lunch and asking to sit there. On March 6, while feeling uncertain that I would be able to do it and that we we would have the same lunch period, I saw her but gave up and did not sit there. On March 12 (the next day that we had the same lunch period), I cared more about having undelayed success in doing it, and while being completely calm, I did it, and I was welcomed to sit there. Praying for strength in a bathroom stall at the beginning of lunch might have had an effect. I did this 3 times in total. Also, the motorcycle boy (one of the people I previously sat with) told me in a text "they both asked me what I did to make you sit over there. They thought I pushed you away! 🤬"

On March 17, at night, I believed that I would probably ask about her looking at me and confess to her at lunch the next day. The next day, the feeling of certainty faded away, and I did not do it. But in the evening, I sent her the creative writing club project that I was working on, with "I'm trying to impress you" as the message. It took several minutes to have the courage to click the send button.

On March 19, when all students were walking from the church to the school, the motorcyle boy appeared and told me something like "Dullbananaaaaaaaaaas. So the McDonald's girl was telling me... in case you forgot... she wanted me to remind you... in case you forgot... that the McDonald's girl has a boyfriend. I know it hurts!" This meant I was finished with the McDonald's girl. I felt calm at first. Then I started having negative thoughts in less than an hour. The decision of whether or not to sit at her table the next day seemed more scary than it should have. There was a little bit of perceived risk in both choices. Also, I vaguely remember fearing that I would be humiliated a little bit. I thought "maybe I was too ambitious" (this thought is a big no no), but then I had these positive thoughts:

• My mental model, with lasting regret and lack of freedom being a worse danger, is still correct.
• There is light at the end of the tunnel. This suffering is part of the path to an extremely beautiful situation that I'm looking for.
• This is better than the previous situations with other girls. This time I went so far and finished the situation in less than a month. I hit a new PR. (Very important)

I was slowly becoming nauseated. I constantly thought about the situation. That night, I felt so much shame, and multiple times in the same night I had sleep paralysis while seeing static everywhere. In the beginning, the positive thoughts didn't stop the discomfort, but they did prevent me from being owned by the discomfort or doubting myself.

That evening, in the shower, I realized that what I was experiencing was the growth of only one person, and that I could try to have a ripple effect. Later, this led to sharing of wisdom and encouragement, and eventually Project Pansystellar. This stuff might be described in another post.

The next day, at lunch, I did not have the strength to sit at the table with the McDonald's girl or at the table where I sat previously, so I sat far away by myself near a tree and facing a field of grass. In retrospect, this was the right choice. It was therapeutic. I had a huge need for rest.

I developed a mindset of fully allowing and embracing this level of discomfort, just like falling when learning how to walk, or like recovering after intense workout. On the next day (March 21), I changed my senior quote submission from "I accept control over Lemmy's code to sabotage Reddit, not Lemmy" to "Try, mess up, have nauseating embarrasment. Better than no ambition."

Before March 24, I had these thoughts:

• All I did wrong (not morally wrong) was I didn't ask if the girl had a boyfriend (as mentioned earlier), and I didn't recognize the lack of sufficient connection after 2 or 3 times of sitting at her table at lunch. The idea that I messed up more severely was an illusion.
• Reducing one's level of ambition is a poor substitute for tweaking the goal that is thought of. In other words, only change how the ambition is applied. (This turned out to be a important concept, and it's very fundamental to my design approach for the Pansystellar Architecture.) (In this situation, I decided to make my goal include finding a girl that I develop a deep enough connection with easily enough in the beginning. This did not fix everything, as you will see in a future post.)
• Physical attraction, either to or from me, should be mostly ignored. (This one is not very useful, and it's probably false. The underlying problems can be solved differently, partly using things from my other posts.)

Around a month later, I realized that my discomfort and doubt after finding out that the McDonald's girl had a boyfriend was probably mostly an attack from Satan, and that a person like me having the persistence needed for the path to marriage and parenthood is probably scary to Satan because it's a path to things that strongly oppose Satan's vision for society, including these things which all cause increased similarity to Jesus:

• Obsession with the good of someone other than myself
• Positively influencing the world through how I raise my children

Eventually I knew that the motorcycle boy was surprised that I didn't know that the McDonald's girl had a boyfriend.

I quickly began to see this as just a high school memory.

Key ideas:

• Don't treat uncertain information as very likely to be true (in this case, the girl having interest in me that I should act on).
• Someone being interested in you is not necessarily a special and important situation. (Seeing your ability to do something that makes someone feel good is different)
• Other people can overestimate your knowledge about someone.
• An uncomfortable situation is not a forbidden situation.
• Taking a break can be a good choice.
• Think of the past and the future so you can recognize self-improvement and not falsely see your current situation as being disconnected from goodness. To be clear, you shouldn't try too hard to make your specific actions connect with a future goal.
• Emotions don't accerately reveal something about you. Judge your actions and decisions using reason. Be skeptical of negative emotions.
• Modify the mental system that ambition is applied to, instead of reducing the level of ambition. Resting is an exception to this.
• Allow the present to be like a childhood memory.

[^1]: On this day, I said a joke hoping it would impress girl 2 (in the same restaurant near Disneyland in which I wrote this comment).

[^2]: On this day, in the shower, I thought about telling the McDonald's girl that I have a crush on her.

Edit: to clarify, my discomfort was about the situation I perceived myself to be facing, not about the fact that the girl had a boyfriend

Not for nothing, but Lemmy is a MUCH more enjoyable place when there's actually something to talk about.

I get a lot of spam. In the subject it might say something about Home Warranty. The sender will say Home Warranty (the actual sender will be [email protected]).

But whenever I use my email's search engine, to delete all emails that say "Home Warranty", it can't find them.

Do people usually just ignore these types of emails?

TL;DR: In four weeks, I’ve cut my average screen time from 8 hours and 55 minutes to 1 hour and 28 minutes on average.

I know no one cares about this, but I still wanted to share it here just in case someone is facing the same problem and looking for motivation.

I recently finished my semester and got a summer break. My girlfriend and I planned our first big trip abroad, something we’d been looking forward to for more than a year. But after getting free from studies and exams, I got addicted to my phone, spending hours scrolling social media. My addiction started to ruin our plans and our excitement for the trip.

More than a month ago, my girlfriend spent a weekend finding resources to help me. She found an article with practical methods for different levels of phone addiction. Inspired by her effort, I decided to give it a shot.

Week 1 saw my screen time drop to 7 hours and 35 minutes on average, which made me very happy because I never thought anything would help me with my phone addiction. Even though I started with no hope, seeing this result gave me hope.

Week 2 brought it down further to 5 hours and 12 minutes on average. The key was a fun challenge my girlfriend and I did together to stay off our phones. Having her as my support system made everything so much easier.

In Week 3, I tried a $23 timed locker my girlfriend got from Amazon. It worked wonders, cutting my late-night screen time and improving my sleep. I ended the week with an average of 4 hours and 3 minutes on average. Despite a slight setback over the weekend due to feeling down, I’m happy with my progress, even though it was very little.

In the last week of this challenge, I kept up the same habits but added a new twist suggested by my girlfriend. We signed up for swimming classes and started going daily because we always wanted to learn swimming. It’s been fun, and I’m loving every second of it. I also started locking my phone for an hour in the morning using the timed locker. This helped me bring down my screen time to 1 hour and 28 minutes. While my initial goal was 1 hour or less, I’m proud of myself with my progress.

Honestly, I couldn't have achieved this without my girlfriend’s support. I’m incredibly grateful to have her in my life. Dating her was the best decision I've ever made. I want to write a big thank-you paragraph here, but I don't want to bore anyone.

Here is my screen time screenshot before I started: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JQVQaI1q7xgLUpojzx6osRci8zwwGWoJ/view?usp=sharing

Here is my screen time screenshot from the previous week: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjBWCJyLDX29fdgdaq-UJ21X3osVcBhx/view?usp=sharing

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24360964

I started having a crush on her in the 2021-2022 school year. In August 2023, she sat next to me in math class. I began to be interested in the whole person, not just her body. Then my belief that I don't want relationships, marriage, and parenthood slowly went away, for reasons that might be out of scope for this project.

I kept on wanting to say "Hi, [girl 1]" next time she approaches the desk at the beginning of class, but I never did that. Each time she came, I gave up. I vaguely remember having a fear of how people would think of the motive or something like that. I prioritized comfort and others' perception of me too much. This will likely be represented as a heavy filter that I got rid of and is intentionally excluded in the Pansystellar Architecture.

Edit: There's stuff I forgot to mention.

• I felt a lot of regret and frustration after each time I chose to be silent. I felt so distant from happiness. This should be treated the same as any other danger. And it should be the one that's fled from. I have another experience that I would pick over this one despite the other experience being more nauseating and unfamiliar. I will describe that experience later.
• Weeks later, we unexpectedly had to change seats, and the girl was now at a different table. I felt so much regret, and I saw the problem of being slow. The way I see opportunities began to change.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24342829

This is in a very early stage of development and is not designed for people who are in a relationship. I probably need to add more items. This might become a diagram.

• Prohibition of absolutely any commitment (the word "commitment" is not specific enough; maybe "exclusive attention" covers most or all cases)
• Tolerance for anything having a big influence on who I date or marry
• Fear of fear itself (applied broadly)
• Prohibition of text communication with someone who's not responding, even if I don't know the reason or whether or not there's a technical problem (this prohibition is made possible by the prohibition of commitment, the tolerance for anything having influence, and the fear of fear itself)
• Clinging instead of giving up when about to do a planned courageous task (such as saying hi to crush)
• Focus on finding natural complimentarity
• A lightweight filter that greatly reduces risk of creepiness without any measurable sacrifice (it should exclude things like "I think about you every night" and "you're cute"; but not things like "I like your hair")
• No separation between platonic and romantic (todo: make this more specific)
• Interact with girls I feel like interacting with, even if I can't put my finger on anything other than appearance that attracts me or I don't predict that the interaction will give me something other than short term enjoyment

Food bank only had raisins. My food stamps were cut by two thirds. Inflation is way up. Specific shortages. I asked some people around me and they're also struggling. No emergency announcements. Feels like a cover up. I heard US shale oil is peaking. All this and I live in the central valley of California, ag central. I should have food easily, instead it's a struggle.

FWIW, the community was [email protected].

I assume I was banned because I said I understood Biden opposing surgery on minors, specifically trans surgery. Although I disagreed with it.

Just caught some Olympic qualifying finals for breakdancing?! Kazakhstan versus Netherlands. They both crushed it and Netherlands won. I thought the Kazaki won the whole thing with his opening move in the final bout.

I haven't read these links yet but apparently this is the first games that will feature break dancing.

https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/breaking-olympics-2024-paris-dancing

https://olympics.com/en/news/how-to-qualify-paris-2024-breaking-qualification-system-explained

I can't seem to find a video of the bout. Very cool to see breaking at the world level.

I've enjoying seeing how the games have evolved over my short life. I remember when Johnny Mosely pulled that perfect helicopter (360°) at mens moguls in Nagano in 1998 and it completely changed the sport of skiing. It launched entire categories of competitive skiing: freestyle, big air, and half pipe, eventually became Olympic events. I'm not really a big Olympics fan or anything, just wanted to share the news about breakdancing for Paris 2024. Can you believe it?

.

I am looking for a community to find moderators for my community and I have used several community search engines to search for communities to ask users if X community exists, but I have not been able to find any. Maybe someone in this community can help me to find out if such a community exists.

considering the current state of the world and things like the resurgence of fascism and other authoritarian ideologies, do you think there is still a chance to avoid a new world war or now is unavoidable?

With that convoluted title I'm making myself think about what we'd call the additional days on other planets or other different temporal circumstances.

Instead of ending them with -day you could end them with the planetary body name or circumstance name. Today might be Lajove on Jupiter!

These days i have had several problems with twitter, mostly at midnight, with dms not being sent and the page going down all together, is just me? No one over there seems to have noticed

Remember: be gay, do crimes

The OwOs are in the jets

The thigh highs control the nets

Always been around, always will be 😎

I encounter situations like this rather often where I am responding to a comment that contains many individual points/statements. I typically will respond with a single comment that contains a quote of each point that is being responded to with my response under neath the respective quote — and, sometimes, for added clarity, a horizontal line separating each response. For example:

Statement 1

My response to Statement 1

Statement 2

My response to Statement 2

etc.

I wonder if it would be better practice to have atomic responses to comments — create a single comment for each individual statement, i.e. spawn a new thread for each new atomic topic. This would allow scores to be representative of each specific response rather than an average of the total, and it may also help with clarity when reading through the comment section, as well as easing the creation of responses (not needing to rely on formatting so much). For example

Comment 1 in reply to comment with multiple points:

Statement 1.

My response to Statement 1.

Comment 2 in reply to the comment with multiple points:

Statement 2.

My response to Statement 2.

etc.