DeltaAro

@Apathetic Echidna So I now wonder if I understood your argument with the outer solar system probes correctly… did you mean that they should have reached the “fixed stars sphere” if a geocentric model was correct? Anyway, this discussion made me think about if I should get into amateur astronomy, lol. buy a telescope measure the stellar parallax of Proxima Centauri confirm to you that the earth indeed revolves around the sun… but I guess that would be too cliché… too sheldonesque.

So, what's so surprising about this? As you know, they already faked the moon landing. Stanley Kubrick was part of the conspiracy. 2001: A Space Odyssey was basically a NASA-supported trial run. Because, as we all know, Muhammad split the moon in half, so how can it be that it was still a whole when Neil Armstrong landed there? You can inform yourself about the “moon landing theory” here, closing with: Here, for entertainment purposes (because everybody has seen this scene too often), with the original and later discarded soundtrack by Alex North. No CGI, no photoshop. And with low resolution (2001: A Space Odyssey was filmed on 70 mm! => very high resolution) it would look far more realistic. Alex North was dropped by Kubrick because he was too nosy about Kubrick's involvement with the NASA. On a more serious note, why should the flight path of the probes disprove the system of Longomontanus (or William Gilbert)? Of course, even the most advanced variants of the Tychonic system are incompatible with the Newtonian law of gravity, so we can't really explain the flight path. But who says that the law of gravity is true? It might as well be part of the conspiracy.

Only a system in which the earth is spinning around its own axis daily can really explain both night/day and seasons, which are “offset” in the southern hemisphere by 6 months. So that's the question: How can she explain this? But this only refutes that the daily observed movement of the sun (from sunrise in the east to sunset in the west) is caused by the sun going around the earth. The problem is that a variation of the Tychonic system (IIRC already developed by Tycho Brahe's student, Longomontanus), that is the Tychonic system with a center earth but not an immobile earth (doing a full rotation around itself every 24 hours, but not rotating around the sun) and the correct order of planets, is already very advanced and difficult to refute with layman's arguments. If you have a strong bias for geocentrism and you are really convinced of a gigantic conspiracy of scientist on this issue, AFAIK there's sadly no way to convince yourself of heliocentrism without becoming a well-equipped amateur astronomer. (The Tychonic system)

More “mature” than my silly classmates High standards Seriously dating challenged Emotionally dried cod (can one say this in English?) Incompatible with anyone Sociopath Maybe something very broadly related to asexuality? (wrong, but it was the right track!)

Yeah, there is no firm line. That's it. It obviously depends so much on context and the situation. And there are variations between aros. It even can even change for a person over time. What I posted some months ago in this thread, seems quite extreme to me now. But I think that there is still behavior that falls squarely under “romantic” and behavior that falls squarely under “sexual”. In this thread, at least, it's very much admitted.

I rather organize a sham-marriage for @Apathetic Echidna than get married.

I also subscribe to “drowning, suffocating, crushing”. Romantic intimacy is the uncanny valley between what happens in a very close touchy-feely friendship (= ) and … sexual activity! But still nothing to run away from. If there was any good reason to engage in it, sure.

You experience that you're male? Like subjectively, internally…? So how does that feel like? For me it's rather like: In my ID card (English section) one can read “sex: male” I guess the only feature of my outwards appearance that is usually not associated with “male” is my long, thick hair, which I find very beautiful! ??? ??? so like my gender is male? well, okay then… Never thought about the whole issue very much…

I bet! Theoretically, one could also experience kissing on the mouth in a platonic context. But the socialist fraternal kiss is kinda out of fashion! If I did that, it would at best be considered a romantic move way behind schedule (friends, or rather some of them), at worst Creepazoid-9000 (like family, lol). Similar for me. Before I knew about aromanticism, couples in their thirties or older, who had been together for many years, were my role models! They seemed so much more normal. As we put it, it was of course very mean. Still, you know that there's some truth to it. Doesn't mean that they are bad people! It's just that the dishonesty is more tolerated here. For example, look at this quote from a dating guide (in the “for women section”): If you want to deceive, don't fear committing perjury: Venus makes the gods deaf to such love games. Oh, that's from Ovid's Ars Amatoria… Some things never change… It's similar as presenting yourself to an employer – considerable dishonesty is seen as ethically neutral as long as you don't commit clear-cut fraud (forging documents etc.). The stakes are high and everybody does it!

Hand-holding doesn't seem sexual to me, though. More like mostly romantic and sometimes platonic. It helps to consciously imagine scenes where kissing isn't meant romantically, over and over. Better yet, to experience it in completely non-romantic contexts. (jeez, this sounds like NLP I actually don't know if it helps anybody else but it did for me) Kissing would still be uncomfortable/awkward for me if it is meant romantically… I can't intuitively mentalize1 romantic behavior. That's an eerie experience, if you can intuitively mentalize any other common behavior. Being a total failure in the romance-department is regarded as pathetic. Romance = ticket to happiness. So it remembers you what a sad freak you are. For all the supposed LOVE, at least in the early phase, romance seems like missionary activity by Scientology2: lots of careful maneuvering and emotional manipulation with the goal of “absorbing” you. Like, when a friend asked me “Should I tell my girlfriend <dark secret X>?” … I'm just thinking: “Well, you already told me! If you love her sooooo much why is this still a question?!? ” If romance was directed at me by someone I don't care about, there's not much to worry how to reject them. But if it comes from someone I already like and care for in my way… => Romance repulsion! Points 1 and 2 are not affecting me anymore, which considerably reduced my romance repulsion. But I guess there is no way I can get used to points 3 (which is most similar to what you wrote) and 4. 1 Wiktionary: (psychology) To understand the behavior of others as a product of their mental state 2 phrased in a slightly hyperbolic way

If one inverts the colors of Arocalypse it looks like an underground asexuality board:

I don't think this qualifies as anti-romantic. But it was surely painful.

Forth is certainly super-esoteric and so there's no good reason to learn it. Aside from that, I don't know if it's a bad programming language. Software development is like a black art for me, anyway, I don't know what to think about it and go with the masses. Still, we live in a world where teenagers embarrass multi-billion dollar software companies, all my apps are buggy in some way and we have massive -moments, which we don't see in any other industry: If I compile with -Wall (enable all warnings), neither GCC 4.8.2 or Clang 3.3 from Xcode make a peep about the dead code. That's surprising to me. A better warning could have stopped this but perhaps the false positive rate is too high over real codebases? C has many quirks and weird subtleties (again, I don't know if it's good or bad!), but at least it can be easily comprehended fully by a single human. For C++ even this isn't true anymore. Probably C++ manages to surprise even Bjarne Stroustrup sometimes. And while I know C inside-out, C++ feels downright scary for me in its baroque complexity. Because: [On finding a large firework called "Python"] Showing a remarkable similarity to the programming language bearing the same name, the Python firework was easy to light and produced spectacular results. "Does Perl have a firework? NOOOOOOOO!" I said. If Perl had a firework, it would probably have 4 different fuses, 2 electric starters, a solar mirror so you could light it without matches, and three different kinds of flint. I'd probably still be trying to figure it out. A C firework would produce a louder, faster explosion and blow off my foot. C++'s firework would be even more spectacular, taking off my leg and killing some of the children around me. — Joey deVilla …AND I DO NOT WANT TO KILL INNOCENT CHILDREN!!!!! So, is software development in a pathological state like “chemistry” before Lavoisier? It seems to me that way every day, though it would be a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome for me to claim that it is. Maybe it's just the best that can be done.

Yes, I forced myself to interact. Go to Irish Pub (yes, that sounds weird, but this one had some kind of special reputation), chat, invite home and so on. But picking up strange women sounds extreme for my standards! What could more extreme measures be like? So I had sex 3 or 4 times (depending how you count) this year, but that already has taught me that I'm at least more normal than I assumed. I feel soooooo bad1 to put it that way, but if all the sensual acts2 aren't “tainted”3 with romance, they surely feel completely different! Just nice, normal, instinctual. Without any of this “otherworldly vibe” that romance brings with it… 1 like approaching “monster territory” 2 okay, there wasn't even that much of it going on. I wonder how common ONS which look like in movies are? Do they even exist? 3 I think that the problem was exacerbated by my past romantic partners being incredibly romantic. I probably wouldn't recommend it, if you don't have a high tolerance for low-brow sci-fi. All the current “no humanoid aliens” space adventure shows (Killjoys, Dark Matter and The Expanse… have I forgot one?) have in common that platonic love is given at least the same importance as romantic love. Since The Expanse is so much better on any level than the other two (and it's also one of the “hardest” sci-fi series, not goofy fun), I would start with that, if you haven't already seen it. The “bounty-hunter-specific reasons” are explicitly mentioned, but I guess, it's also hinted at that it has something to do with her special life experiences.

More examples, please!!! A movie with anti-romantic elements in a different sense is probably “James Bond: Moonraker” (yes, the super campy one ). If you haven't watched this gem… cliché Bond villain in Nehru jacket tries to create his own master race wants to kill off the whole world population to repopulate the planet from a space station James Bond + Bond girl (luckily, she's an astronaut) sneak into one of the Space Shuttles flying to the station in orbit he takes a look into the freight room the passengers are all beautiful couples (part of the breeding stock), deeply in love with each other. take home message: you can be capable of feeling the deepest romantic love and still be such a deranged monster that you're willing to be complicit in a plot where all of humanity gets killed. And in the end, the not-so-romantic Bond saves the day, of course.

I wonder if it's really 100% romance free because: NB: Often romance in violent movies seems more realistic to me! If you save each other's lives or go through some horrible stuff together, it seems plausible to me that you get very close together that fast (as it happens with romance in normal circumstances). Oh, the opening post mentioned Rogue One. What about the next most obvious example Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens ? Not 100% romance-free (that little bit rekindled Han + Leia romance), but no romance* between Finn and Rey. * pretty much the only good thing I can say about the story, which spoiled the movie for me. I don't expect high art, but when I watch a $250 million budget movie, I do expect some level of professionality, not multiple gaping plot holes and -inducing moments. I don't understand what went wrong here. Any professional screenwriter should be able to produce a much better script. It felt downright amateurish, like fan-fiction.

awww…

I indeed wanted to hint at a spectrum here, but only in an imprecise way: a spectrum considering the “average stability” we do observe in arrangements where sex happens. Yes, your comfort zone seems so small that you might be, no not a monster (you remember that thread?), but a bit … straining. On the positive side, I don't think that it is totally fixed. I managed to get rid of very, very peculiar preferences (or less euphemistically, strong aversions) by “exposure therapy” in the last months. Now my preferences are only peculiar. But YMMV. I'm basically approaching it like Yalena ‘Dutch’ Yardeen from “Killjoys”, though she once stumbles and, regretting it, says: I usually know better. Shouldn't have slept with someone I care about. Some relationships which people have here sound very nice, but I have no idea how they manage to get them and make them work. Maybe it's less difficult than I believe, but I'm like totally clueless in this regard.

One by one, fifteen monsters called “angels” invade earth and are defeated with mechas piloted by psychologically disturbed teenagers.

There are vineyards around my city in all cardinal directions. It's impossible to avoid drinking wine. So yes, I sometimes drink socially.

oops, I've noticed that ... we're repeating essentially the discussion from a year ago in this thread:

Okay, .... she seems prejudiced against guys. Seriously, who would normally expect this? That seems to be a very uncomfortable position give oral sex.

Wait... how did she misinterpret it? As sign of your romantic love? I actually liked cuddling in my short-lived “romantic relationships”, which was misinterpreted in this direction; my brain doesn't register cuddling as romantic. I probably would also be physically much closer with friends, if this wasn't misinterpreted as either awkward romantic approach (female) or gay hit on (male), despite genuinely not having such intentions. I thought I had achieved the status that I'm fine with anyone throwing romantic stuff at me as long as they do not ever expect me to genuinely reciprocate it. But then, I forgot about... hand-holding... *cringe* I think that I make an exception about THIS. Because it's just impolite: “Hey, we're in love ♥ so it's fine for us to occupy the whole side walk! ♥” Probably connected with a belief that it's very difficult to get sex outside of a romantic relationship and and that it is very not nice to aim for it anyway.

♦ Ace of diamonds - demisexuals and demiromantic aseuxals ♣ Ace of clubs - grayasexual and grayromantic asexuals