DeltaAro

Trigger! Thanks to this I had a nightmare, that Elon Musk bought Arocalypse, renamed it to Xarocalypse, and gave us users an ultimatum that we should be "extremely hardcore" and display "exceptional performance" - or we will be kicked from the forum.

I literally got my name misspelled once in the official ID card. Maybe I should've taken this as a chance to start a new life without all the baggage 😄 ... and also without any social security benefits, uh-oh. 🫣 I thought people spelling my name wrong were impolite, but after this experience ... if the civil servant who does nothing all day but issuing ID cards spells it wrong, they're forgiven. 😇

I know the dinos! I love it!!! 🤩 Professionally would be suit for me. This is ok, but black-tie events... 🤬 It is so expensive and time-consuming to get into a dinner jacket (I don't even own such a thing). I guess you can't argue about looks. 🤷‍♂️ But the fact is, they all wear deliberately ripped jeans, though most punks do the ripping themselves. But you can't tell me it's natural wear. At least in 99 % of cases, it's not. And I couldn't do that, ripping perfectly good denim. 😭 Maybe there are some tricks, but it still reduces the stability of the jeans and the holes tend to get bigger. I had a 15 oz Japanese raw denim for five years, which I wore constantly and which was washed >200 times. And aside from the normal fades, the stitches and fabric were as good as new, it just didn't fit me anymore. Would that be possible with a ripped-jeans. I don't think so.

I should've added those earlier generations. Interesting that they still work, pretty high quality. I tend to throw away or donate such old hardware... but that's just me, cause clutter. Also, Playstation 2 must have had one of those ancient ports like SCART. Do you need an adapter for it?

I'd like to play it, but not with the bugs! Can't support that! While Blizzard pulled every capitalist trick in the book, to extract money 💸 from impulsive gamers, at least Diablo IV was totally without bugs and had a flawless launch. I think it will be a disappointment for people who really like the classical system. You have only one controllable character, and it is now like a spectacle fighter, similar to Devil May Cry. I don't mind it. As long as it's not like in Elden Ring, where YOU were the mob and the boss had all the fun beating you up. 🤕 Regarding all the rest, it ticks all the boxes of Final Fantasy. It's very classic and mature, you can go back to Final Fantasy VI (which I played on an emulator 😆) for similarities in the atmosphere.

Isn't denim one of the most popular fabrics in the world? 🙃 How can it be punk-inspired? Or do you just mean the typical stuff like ripped or acid-washed jeans, with lots of patches?

Never seen it! It is totally normal for adults to like stuff which kids like. Otherwise, you weren't even allowed to like sweets, except for dark chocolate or licorice. Also, I didn't want to put down Nintendo players, so don't listen to me, have fun 🎮. I just think that if I grew up having a Nintendo console, I'd still love them. Instead, I subconsciously associate them with envy, since everyone in my school had one except me. So when I made my own money, I felt inclined to buy the biggest, most expensive console at that time, which was the Xbox One. Not any of that "child stuff", because that would've meant I missed something. That concludes the psychoanalysis of my console complex, which is a very important first-world problem. -- FF XVI looks great, and has a great story so far. It has prominent chocobos and moogles etc. but the fighting system is totally different. And the Espers appear now via the "Monstrous Transformation" trope, like in Attack on Titan. The bosses are as usual rather spongy, so I play it in story mode.

I never developed brand loyalty to Nintendo. As a child, I wasn't allowed to play video games. 😪 And later, I bought into the stereotype that Nintendo consoles are for kids. Like gimmicky and under-powered. 🤔 Since Zelda, is always going to be exclusive, they should make a Zelda anime for the rest of us, that would be great.* * oh wait, I looked it up: there was one in 1989 with a rating of 6/10 in IMDB. Bad rating for such a big franchise. It's like the 6/10 of the 1978 Lord of the Rings animated movie. So I actually mean: a high-quality Zelda anime.

What may be the favored gaming 🎮 platform here? Multiple choices allowed! For those of you who play retro games on emulator, which would be technically PC (but not really because they aren't native PC games), I added the "emulator" option. Personally, I play on PC and PlayStation 5.

Why do you all have Nintendo Switch? 😭

Anyone else playing Final Fantasy XVI ? After 40 hours of Diablo IV, I decided that I need a break from isometric perspective. 😄

Hey Latin...! Death this the corner stone of our nation? OK, I'd rather not visit this country.

I like slow fashion and having a minimalist wardrobe. So naturally I wear a rugged casual style. My favorite brand is Momotaro Jeans. I have a lot from them and contrary to the name they don't make just jeans but the full range of clothing. Really top-notch quality and extremely durable. Their unique signature is two white stripes somewhere, so that's a way I stick out a bit. 🙂 For me, it's exactly the other way around. 🤪

I recently got the Github Pull Shark Gold achievement. 1024 of my pull requests merged.

Aro soul mate!

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018) This isn't a horror movie, but an anime about a terminally ill teenage girl and her relationship with some weird introverted loner boy. The idea, I guess, was to subvert the teen romance genre, which would've been nice. But it totally fails. "Introverted loner boy" turns out to be rather creepy, so all suspicions others have were justified. Also, we learn that platonic relationships don't work. Long explanation with spoilers here.

I find this difficult since it's so connected. Plato's vision entails that beauty is the ultimate telos of Eros. Also, Eros rules all, even "friendship". In Lysis, Eros is put aside a bit, and - surprise! - no satisfying result is achieved. Of course, there are many non-SAM aros, but most would still distinguish lovers and friends. The Symposium and Phaedrus push the idea of an "objective beauty" which is strange enough. But I also can't accept that it all boils down to beauty anyway, it's not realistic. Perhaps I approach this too prosaically, but neither sexual nor romantic attraction IRL works like this. Sure, physical beauty is a very important factor. But often people can feel attraction to people they wouldn't describe as beautiful. And intentionally attracting sexual attention in a way that is "too obvious" is regarded as tasteless, and never beautiful. Beauty is a refined quality. Also, certain peculiarities often cause attraction in people, which are quite different from the look that perfectly fits some beauty ideal. To quote another famous philosopher, Descartes: I loved a girl of my own age ... who was slightly cross-eyed; by which means, the impression made in my brain when I looked at her wandering eyes was joined so much to that which also occurred when the passion of love moved me, that for a long time afterward, in seeing cross-eyed women, I felt more inclined to love them than others. Similar arguments apply to the "beauty of the soul". How could we even rate character traits like extroverted vs. introverted? Those may be very important to us in friends, but it's ridiculous to say one is "more beautiful" than the other. Yes, but with or without beauty as the spiritual telos? I want to add that it's difficult to pin down Plato's opinion about it. If he was fully behind the forms as a sort of objects, the non-refuted counterarguments by Parmenides in the dialogue of the same name, like the Third Man argument, would be strange. PS: maybe I write an essay about "Plato for aros and aces", including his reception in the Renaissance, when the modern understanding of "platonic love" was created. I mean, Plato (or Socrates) is one of the few philosophers who wrote something interesting about love.

That would be just annoying, but you're ashamed about it to an unhealthy degree... I'm sorry that you feel this way. While most people are ashamed of their kinks a bit, you obsess about it, so it's a very strong and deep-seated shame, which is not normal. For Freud, neurotic thoughts and behaviors are to some degree rational, or understandable, given the patient's circumstances and biography. They're a sort of coping mechanism - so the psychoanalyst needs to get to the (hidden) root of the problem. For cognitive behavior therapy, on the other hand, neurotic thoughts are squarely irrational, and there's no root. The CBT-therapist has to directly attack the neurotic thoughts and expose their irrationality. Of course, I don't want to discourage anyone from going to a therapist, but this is my big issue with psychotherapy: You have these two fundamentally different and incompatible approaches. Which one is right? I can't give you an answer. I don't know. Maybe both, and it depends on the patient? So instead of always aiming for this "100 % solution", which maybe you'll never achieve, you should in the meanwhile try to make your situation more tolerable. What I know: those thoughts of shame will just cross your mind, it's unavoidable. But analytically thinking about them will make it worse. Don't try to engage them. Don't try to argue with them. Don't try to refute them. Try to "observe" them. Now, the problem with this advice is that even this is understood mechanically, and then you'll make it worse. There is no mechanical technique you can apply. It's rather about training and cultivating a more relaxed attitude to your thoughts. You cannot not think them, they're automatic, and that's fine. But you can choose to do something else than deliberately thinking about your thoughts. While thoughts are involuntary to some degree, complex thought and focus still takes effort and is voluntary. By their nature, thoughts are fleeting, we get easily distracted or lose our train of thoughts. And you probably would agree this is true for all thoughts, except for your thoughts of shame. If we give thoughts more importance, they become more intrusive and even more "important". It's such a cliché, but it really is like the Chinese finger trap, the harder you pull, the worse it gets. Of course, this is easier said than done; because your brain will try all kind of tricks to convince you that you have "a problem" that desperately needs a "solution" now and you must think about it.

My, oh my, that's a real problem! Good aros nurse their hatred to all things romantic. Keep themselves pure, don't yield an inch to romo. Don't you know? Confess your wrongdoings here: How are You a 'Bad' Aromantic Spectrum Person? ... hey, why does this have scare quotes around the bad...? 🤨

I find "boyfriend" / "girlfriend" a very ridiculous English word, because you also use it for people of an age which is way older than "girls" / "boys". But many languages are arguably even worse off, since the same word for "friend" can mean platonic friend or lover.

"platonic" exists as a word for ... allos to emphasize that a relationship isn't sexual / romantic, and everyone's fine with it, no hard feelings, no sexual or romantic attraction (at least it's not strong) - and this though this relationship would be assumed to be sexual / romantic (e.g. same age, opposite gender) aros to precisely distinguish this non-romantic attraction (desire for friendship, etc.) from romantic attraction The Symposium is more about love as ascent to the Form of Beauty (which obviously contradicts the split attraction model, that sees aesthetic attraction as an attraction in its own right). I think that in Phaedrus, we find more concrete ideas that can be applied to a relationship. According to this dialogue, a platonic relationship would be one where sexual attraction is strongly present but mostly not acted upon. OK, sex is still "allowed" to happen as an "accident" or a "slip-up" in some rare instances, but better not! In Plato's chariot analogy, love makes our soul spread wings because the soul remembers the Form of Beauty, and wants to ascend to it. Beauty in this world is "instantiated" by a beautiful boy (or "beautiful person", though Phaedrus [just as the Symposium] is about homoerotic male love, or more sinister, the Athenian institution of pederasty). But the bad, ugly, black horse (the appetitive part of the soul) gets unruly when it sees the beautiful boy and pulls us to the beloved so to have sex with him. Platonic lovers resist the temptation, and over time the black horse gets disciplined. After death, our soul rises from the body, and tries to ascend to the gods and ride with them to reach the place beyond the heavens. Here it can experience the Forms themselves, which results in a sort of salvation. But black horse will pull us down to earth, if it was not disciplined, and we will not ascend. I do not think that many aros are sympathetic to these ideas, since they come across as sex-negative and aphobic at the same time. The modern usage is heavily influenced by Renaissance-era Neoplatonism, which brought Plato's idea more in line with Christian values, so that platonic love usually means that sexual attraction isn't present. Why is this word used? Maybe because friendships where we assume romantic/sexual attraction are suspect (usually opposite genders). E.g. think "friend-zone"... the contempt in this word! So people can put a positive spin on it and insert the name of a famous philosopher.

I know there was a thread about aromantic video game characters, can't find it, but ok, I post it here. In Diablo IV, you can play rogue, which is obviously the right choice for aros. (but please not red!!) I applied green arrow tattoos on my character and also found a transmogrification (actually armor, this means you can change the appearance of your character's equipped armor without altering the stats; pretty neat system) in the swamp area with green clothing / armor. Diablo also has "titles" and if you craft all incenses you get the title "aromatic". Ok, sadly without the 'n', but it's as close as we get! Still, this title is a lot of work, and I haven't got it yet.

Of course, many or even most allos don't engage in such behavior. But there's a minority that is titillated by the thought of trying a "forbidden fruit". Yes, and because of this she thinks she's allowed to do stuff that actually fits the definition of sexual harassment. Totally normal... not.

You didn't read my answer to your post, right? 😜 Ok, here the ultra-short version: I feel if I were "cured" of my aromanticism, I wouldn't be me anymore. I just wonder why it's that difficult to prove, if it is supposed to be this effective. The evidence from trials is just disappointingly weak or non-existent, but it should be dramatic. Yes, that's a very common argument. But parents might treat the child differently (e.g. become calmer) because they have high expectations that the homeopathic remedy will help, which in turn calms down the child. For this reason, clinical trials are often double-blinded, i.e. even the doctors treating the patients don't know who's getting the placebo.

Homeopathy isn't really folk medicine, but a system of alternative medicine conceived by the 18th century German physician Samuel Hahnemann. It's based on the idea that "likes cures like", e.g. drinking coffee can cause you trouble falling asleep. Therefore, coffee should be used against insomnia. Now, most people probably wonder: doesn't this approach just make everything worse? But homeopathic medicines are extremely heavily diluted substances. Imagine one drop of coffee mixed in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, since you can repetitively dilute a dilution, you don't actually need that much water. Take 1/100 from a solution and dilute it, take from 1/100 from this dilution and dilute it, etc. And again, most people probably wonder: how can a substance which is so extremely diluted have any effect at all? Well, Hahnemann believed that the way the substances were diluted, with violent shaking, would activate the vital energy of the substance - the more you dilute a substance the more powerful it gets. Obviously, homeopathic principles are very different from conventional medicine (and even common sense). Because of the dilutions, criticism of homeopathy is never that it is harmful by itself, but that it doesn't work. It is "just" the placebo effect - though this effect can be pretty strong, especially for mental conditions. But some people may waste precious time trying out homeopathy for serious illnesses. E.g. Steve Jobs should've been immediately operated for his cancer. Instead, he delayed surgery for 9 months trying such approaches, which likely worsened his prognosis. Undiluted, yes. But if you do not believe in the principles of homeopathy, all he ingested were sugar pills. It seems to be standard treatment in homeopathy for "repressed emotions" (such a stupid trope that aromanticism is about this).