DeltaAro

They suspect that we experience romantic attraction like them, but just suffer from an anxious and avoidant personality. If we finally find a partner, we'll experience love and connection and be forever grateful to the people who pushed us out of our comfort zone.

That would be great!! There's also a gallery of aro art (many of it high-res or vector, which you can't post here) 👉 HERE. There are no restrictions to get included, except it should be aro-themed and not be overly NSFW.

From a secular standpoint, death can mean the event of dying and the state of non-existence. This muddles the waters: Do we fear the event or the non-existence? We observe that the vast majority of people strongly fear death as an event and endure a lot to avoid it. Because of the loss it means to us. Of course there are exceptions, like Socrates or Seneca for example, but those are considered especially wise. So I'm a bit skeptical that this can be so easily separated from the fear of "death as state". It's easy to say when you're young and healthy ... Fear of death-as-state is usually attacked by the famous argument of Epicurus: "If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not? Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear." But first, emotions aren't rational or irrational anyway, only in a metaphorical sense. Second, his axiom: "It is irrational to fear what you can't experience" is strange. Why do people write a will? Or when a dying mother fears for the future of her children, this would be considered "irrational" too by Epicurus' axiom. So his argument has some serious holes. IMHO, just because something happens to everybody, it doesn't make it better. Of course, it is in some sense good advice to accept what cannot be changed. The problem is that it is impossible to find out "what really cannot be changed" with absolute certainty. E.g. @SwiftySpeedy now is into cryonics. I'm very strongly convinced that with current technology this doesn't work, but there's a chance I'm wrong. There is no big temptation for most people because it is widely regarded as a fraud. And on one reading this is true, but trivial and uninteresting: death is the limit of life and belongs to it this way. But in a more serious sense, it is doubtful: if materialism is true then death terminates life under any sensible understanding (consciousness), so the state of being dead does not belong to life.

Hi, that would be great. 👏

This will trigger more and more requests... nip it in the bud! 🙅‍♂️😄 I also don't get the joke. What did I miss?

I can keep 🔐 secrets. I'm good at fixing bugs 🐛 and cleaning up 🧹 code.

Some of it can be difficult to cook, e.g. Christmas pudding. And honestly, I haven't tried most of the dishes. My aversion comes from two reasons: the "meat" (offals, suet). And its calorie density. Of course, back in the days 100 % of the animal was used, couldn't let anything go to waste. But in other countries, those recipes didn't become national dishes. I wonder what traditionally happened with the good pieces of meat? Were they exported? And the money spent on gardening? 😏 I like British tea (and shortbread), though. OTOH, though I'm a weeb, I don't like Japanese tea. Certainly. And it's the latter option. The full story is convoluted... so let's jump to ... tl;dr wrong IT decision (first ASCII database instead of Unicode, but later switching to Unicode), software of questionable value rolled out ("helping" clerks with an MS-Office-like autocorrect feature); clerks weren't properly trained I just think that civil servants never get any compliments, only blame, since it's a job where the best you can do is to be correct. It's nice that you take care. I also try to do it. And even go the extra mile when talking to international clients, to make some effort to get the pronunciation at least roughly correct. E.g. not pronouncing Chinese "Xu" as "Ksu". But sometimes genuine mistakes happen. Also, I'm always shocked how clumsy some people are when using a computer... In some cases, it's general (cultural) ignorance. Like my aunt Julika is made a "Julia" literally all the time. Probably the brain "autocorrects" this for some people.

I found it on https://httpstatusdogs.com. And that picture was already there in 2012. So cute! I also found one there with a cat:

Remember... (spoilers)

News 📰 1. There was a second U. S. senate hearing about AI generated art: Pretty civil, but boring. Not even senators who are amusingly clueless. 2. Lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt dismissed

I could go into some personal TMI, but I leave it very short: I was groomed as a child by a much older teen, but dodged it last minute. My parents downplayed these incidents (though they never ignored the most inconsequential "wrongdoing" by me), because he was the son of my parents' friends. But this was very serious, as it turned out he was a committed SO who later abused other children. So even though "nothing happened" to me, it had a bad effect on me, since I felt betrayed and unable to trust adults. But I don't consciously feel any connection to my aromanticism. I looked for studies, and found two linking CSA and asexuality (not aromanticism) but they were just speculation, that asexuality is a "defense mechanism". One would assume there should be hard empirical data for this, but I haven't found any. Very old, but still relevant (it's about asexuality to aromanticism): In short, many people are aro/ace and never experienced CSA. And the other way around. Yes!!

Baldur's Gate 3 I finished Final Fantasy XVI, but I rushed it in the end. I don't mean that the side content was bad. But we have 2023, a year for gaming 🎮undreamed of.

Ah, ok, I kind of suspected you meant "morality," but I still thought about the deep philosophical implications if you meant "mortality". 🙃 First, I'm kind of amused how far this "emotions are chemicals in your brain" idea has spread. Could we post some evidence for it? 😋 Even if emotions are caused by chemicals in the brain (which is a complex issue, as the debate about SSRIs has shown), I think we shouldn't conflate that with being chemicals in the brain. Moving charges have a magnetic field as an effect, but "a magnetic field is just moving charges" would still be wrong. Right? Second, there is also a difference between romance and other, "more banal" emotions. If romance can be reduced to something mechanistic, it feels way worse (well, for allos) than for anger. Romance is assumed to be this magical, wonderful, mysterious, deeply intuitive feeling. If it turns out to be just chemicals or biological programming or something similarly prosaic, the discrepancy between pretension and reality is huge. OTOH, anger is just anger, and mostly regarded as bad. The idea that it's baggage we inherited from our cavemen ancestors and which doesn't fit our very advanced society... this you can find in every second self-help book. But the self-help book author who writes something like "romance is your caveman brain convincing you that you found an acceptable, compatible long-term mate" is going to be out of business soon. Even if they would describe friendship this way, it would be more acceptable.

What does that mean? Yes, why not? The world "real" is ambiguous, so you can do lots of shenanigans with it. "X is just Y, so X is not real" is one of them. It's easily said. But what "not real" means in this context, and why we should believe this reasoning... this part is usually left out. E.g. compare with Margaret Thatcher's infamous remark: "They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families."

We don't know for sure. This is more of a slogan, strictly speaking. And not proven science, which is just a correlation between the emotion and the brain activity. Of course, you cannot prove that other people experience a certain emotion with absolute certainty, we just try to infer emotions from behavior. There may be aros who believe that all allos just pretend, and romantic attraction does not exist, but they must be rather rare. I feel you mean concepts like "soulmates" and not romance in general. Yesss. 🙃

Please give the resolution! Ted Lasso?? 🌍➡️🌍📱 (TV show / anime)

Emotions are often regarded as judgments (or valuation) that are also subjectively experienced. I mean, you know subjective experiences like hunger and pain - emotions are felt similarly (positive and negative ones). Mr. Spock also make judgments, e.g. he wants his friends to be safe, for example. But he doesn't subjectively experience something on top of that. Like fear for his friends' safety. I'd go a bit further and say that emotions maybe aren't judgments that are experienced. Judgments need to logically consistent, but emotions don't need to be. If I'm in a contest together with my friend and my friend wins, and I lose, I can be happy for my friend. Logically, my friend winning means that I lose. For a pure judgment, "I prefer my friend to win" entails "I prefer that I lose". But emotions aren't that rigid. I can be genuinely happy that my friend won, but not be happy that I lost. You just assume that everyone else in the world has a mind that works like your own. That's not the case. I assure you that emotions exist.

PS: The latter one is just a preliminary draft that I maybe include in a larger artwork.

Solarpunk (dream aesthetic, not my real one)

Yes, comfortable and durable usually do not go together, unless you buy very expensive. I prefer durable, since I got used to really heavy fabrics over time, but sometimes it feels like putting on armor. 😄 Personally, I buy only vegan fabrics, but some animal fabrics are just WOW. I was gifted a Yak wool sweater once, and that one is extremely durable and comfortable ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. That would be nice. I can barely sew on a button. 🫣 But for the easy stuff, I have a friend. For more complex stuff, the Vietnamese tailor lady down the street. So I never felt pressure to learn sewing.

Usually, at this point, the PR specialist or lawyer then steps in. I realize that, what I felt were light-hearted attempts at bipartisan humor, hurt people, and for that I am deeply sorry.

The guy ... 😉 Sometimes women's fashion is uncomfortable, too, e.g. pencil skirts or high heels. We don't know how this developed, we can't even answer why men just won't wear skirts. Originally it was likely from horse riding, but why are we stuck with it? 🌨️ Duffel coat!!⛄❄️

I wonder what you all mean? Less restrictive fit? E.g. tunics? But also, from my experience, women's clothing is more "comfortable" because it has lots and LOTS of elastane 😈 in it. Wasn't this thread about fashion? 😉

When that happened to me, I had to search for my birth certificate, which was still in my parents' house, and very well hidden under layers and layers... it took me the whole weekend to find it! 🥵 But it was more than overdue to take that to a safe place. PS: my aunt lives in New Zealand and her first name is "Julika" - maybe an unusual name there. 90% of clerks there seem to think like: "I don't believe your name is Julika. That's not a real name. You must have miswritten your name. You surely meant Julia, so I'll enter Julia. I don't even need to ask for confirmation!"