I have a similar problem. I usually don't study for stuff and still manage to get an acceptable grade in most cases, when I study it's much higher but I usually don't see the point. I've always been this way. Back in primary and secondary school I usually got 90 to 100% without ever studying but college is more challenging so my average was lowered to around 80%. It's still good, but it could be so much better.
Exams tomorrow, I didn't study.
I think I will get about 80% but I could have easily taken 95%+ if I studied.
Why does this happen.
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>enter bus
>mayor wants to live stream video games with you on twitch
what do?
Learning how to make better coffee at home has been one of my lockdown hobbies. Started with just a simple aeropress, and now I'm going down the rabbit hole of espresso and learning how to grind, how to distribute and tamp correctly and how the end result tastes if you get certain things right or wrong.
What's Bernds coffee setup at home?
What kind of coffee do you enjoy? Is bernd a V60 drinking hipster or getting by on instant?
Can you tell the difference in taste between different beans and roasts?
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Such soul. Do you brew it in one of those hot sand things? Or just on the stove?
Also does it not get very bitter if you grind it that finely and then brew for a minute or two? If that were an espresso it'd be absolutely disgusting and likely choke your machine.
And how do you avoid drinking all the coffee grounds?
Have any Bernds done research into their families? If yes, what did you find out?
I managed to research family members up until the 1700s. They were all dirt-poor, though. Just labourers and farmhands, very few people who actually owned anything. And the few that did, had it taken away. So my grandparents basically started at zero and were all traumatised from events during the war. My family is so poor, nobody even had photos until the 1960s and no phones until the 1980s.
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no, but aunt has done a lot of research and sits us down with old photos and such describing family going back many generations. Some were pretty powerful and rich in New England but apparently were loyalists and fled during the revolution. There goes my patriotism. I am ashamed to discuss this irl with people
I have smegma pearls.
Today I have popped a REALLY old one. The smegm oozed out as a long snake.
I need to understand the root of my problem.
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Well it's just two weird bumps... They get refilled all the time, no inflammation though... I suppose this is some sort of smegma buildup occurring in the lacunae under a circumcised glans. Why does the skin grow over it again and again though? IIRC, smegma itself is the "old skin" from the glans surface, so some of that surface tissue is trapped under the skin or something.
Pure magic.
Also oozing those smegma snakes is kind of "blackhead popping" enjoyable. That day when I made the thread was the first time I managed to open the second pearl, which was bigger, but I couldn't ever pop it. That time It oozed a snake that covered a half of my thumb nail.
There's this guy at work who has gone off the deep end. He just shitposts on slack in public channels all day. It's been like 3 weeks idk how he hasn't been fired
One of my coworkers is a weed addict and he either comes 3-4 hours too late to work or doesn't show up at all. Maybe in 1 day of the week he comes on time, if lucky.
He's like that for more than half a year now but nothing happens, apparently he is talking a lot to our companies psychologist and she protects him.
I like nudism and there is actually a nudist club with it's own property for being naked on and doing naked sports, but I'm afraid to join because I would get boners and it would be embarassing.
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I'm a 29 yo male going to female ~40-42yo cognitive behavioral therapist for about 4 months now. I'm rather Kein, but in the last few years I turned fullon Bernd (I haven't used IBs before 2018, because I had actually other things to do).
A few sessions ago I started telling her that I've started getting things to kys already months ago. Last session I updated her on that matter, because things suddenly progressed (I guess I'm more lazy than actually depressed and even kysing needs drive and motivation kek) once in a while and promised her to update her, so I did. she got worried. She said "you gotta get that stuff out of reach, give it to me, or give it to a friend etc)" I said no, I don't want to give it to anyone else because that would feel like a major setback and going back to square 1. No one would hand it back to me knowing what it is. I tried to change the topic but she didn't had it.
Stuck in the conversation where she wanted to hear me coming up with a plan for such safety measures, she said something like I really don't want that you kill yourself, because I like you, but she also added that she can't prevent it anyways. I didn't know what to say and just didn't say anything. She did neither, but somehow her eyes got glassy and I was thinking like "what? She ain't gonna cry in front of me any moment, is she?" she looked sad and I couldn't really look at her for long, because it made me feel bad somehow. It's been a few years since I made a woman cry, you know.
Anyways, I then said "I could put the stuff in my cellar compartment. I'm a lazy fuck, going down to get it is really kind of out of reach for me". Then she suggested putting it there and giving her the keys for the doors and I just agreed, because I wanted to talk about other stuff.
Afterwards I told her about a book I want to read that I ordered, because without knowing too much about it the few plot lines I read felt similar to my situation. I also mentioned that there's going to be some kind of love story according to a sentence I read in the preview. She then suggested that we could read it together. I hesitated for a moment, because I haven't read a book with someone else before and wasn't sure if 50 minutes of therapy is going to be me reading the book to her. She's gonna buy it too. And we read it for ourselves at home and 50m therapy might become my book club. Or something. I'll see
Also, about two weeks ago she already told me she doesn't have time on the 12th and I was feeling it had something to do with Valentine's day and her involvement with a male person. Long fucking weekend and such. The idea made me sad of course, because I'm pretty Bernd and lonely and back then was also a little in love with her already. Of course. Last session she told me she doesn't have time on Friday, because she's got a therapist workshop coming up. This made me feel relieved a lot.
I know what (erotic) transference is and of course it is in my case.
My question is: is she fucked in the heda, too? Erotic countertransference does exist and I always got a few impressions she's flirting with me. Is this all normal therapist behavior? Is she deliberately fucking with my head? What is going on here? The emotional distance to her I had before is gone and I just want to love her. It feels good and like some moody mood lifted off me, but I don't think it will end good like me returning to my former distance.
Did you know that reading books together is a couples thing?
I won't tell Bernd which book, because I don't want you to ruin and spoil this romantically magic moment for me.
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Had been having phone appts with female therapist for 3 months because of corona. She came back and she was like 7 months pregnant. She says "please let me know if you have any feelings about me being pregnant and we can talk about that, because therapy can be kind of a weird relationship." I say "It reminds me of the girls I got pregnant in high school. One had a miscarriage because of drugs, and the other one had her friends throw her down the stairs and kick her in the stomach." She says "oh my gosh! do you want to talk about that?" I say "I looked them up later and they got fat. I was like 'ha ha, serves you right'."
You're emotionally stunted and falling into a role where you're going to have a hiccup if you discontinue therapy if this disingenuous
one sided relationship you're forming continues to stagnate.
Don't let your imagination run wild. Try coming back to reality or become forward with your feelings towards your new therapist. Her role right now is to listen to you and try to steer you in the right direction. You're falsely believing this is healthy despite your romantic feelings for her.
During the early days of the right-wing dissident political revival in America some felt that presentation was extremely important. These commentators looked at the rising success of Donald Trump’s “populism” and inferred that “good optics” (a term stolen from corporate capitalism) was the path to victory. The problem with this assumption is misattributing success to the wrong factors is a sure recipe for future disaster. In the case of Trump in particular, the “success” has proven to be incredibly dubious in the first place. I’m also being very generous here, it’s much more likely that all the crowing about “good optics” was from bad actors behaving maliciously and does NOT represent an actual strategy.
There were two assumptions made on the basis of optics:
1. Look like a mature, respectable individual so the media and state don’t treat you as a costumed Nazi.
2. Appeal to the average normal American by cultivating a more “professional” and patriotic appearance.
On point 1, we can declare any attempt to change the media or state perceptions of dissident political figures a complete and utter failure. The news continues to call literally any rightwing male a “white supremacist”, even if that white male happens to be a black Cuban leader. The default setting of the propaganda networks is to scream “NAZI” at anyone outside the neo-liberal paradigm and a business suit doesn’t work as a cloaking device to make you invisible to the secret police either. “Ricky Vaughn”, the originator of the “wignat” meme is facing Federal charges along with a slew of attendees to the Capitol protest. Commentators like Nicholas J Fuentes that were extolling the virtues of Trump’s “optics” just prior to the January 6th rally are now cowering on Twitter and disavowing any participation in the actual storming of the Capitol Building. “Good optics” ended with a shirtless man in a Viking helmet becoming the public face of MAGA and stop-the-steal in the international media. This is absolutely more ridiculous than ANYTHING that happened during the 2017 alt-right activist rallies.
“Qanon Shaman” and other MAGA cultists utterly demolished the second idea under an avalanche of horrible garish American anti-aesthetics. Clearly the “average normal American” doesn’t exist anymore and he doesn’t have a “Sunday best” outfit in his closet either. There are precious few “normal Americans” left, and the weird little awkward manlets on the internet trying to appeal to them haven’t found any either. The final collapse of Trumpism was packed to the gills with shabbily dressed Boomers dancing to Rage Against the Machine and following a leader not exactly known for his cool, clean-cut professionalism. This is a vulgar, nasty, collapsing nation full of enraged rabble, there is simply no one left to sell on a pitch of “respectability”. Compared to the antics I saw during the last months of Trump, dudes dressed in Superman onesies with Swastika armbands banging rubber chickens on trashcan lids would’ve been “better optics” than those deranged Magatards milling about like confused Saturday morning Costco shoppers. At least the Super-Nazis would’ve been making some kind of performance art statement about the sad condition of American democracy.
Donald Trump did not take power because of his “good optics” either, he took power because a net worth of 3 billion dollars buys you an awfully big war-chest for campaign spending and it goes a long way with frustrated, desperate Americans looking to give the system the middle finger. If anything, it was Trump’s bad optics that resonated with people, not his business suits or the red, white and blue.
From a conceptual point of view, moderating your statements and calibrating your physical appearance to appeal to pre-existing tastes is a mind-numbingly stupid gambit anyhow. Your job as a political dissident to is to break down existing norms and convert people to radicalism, not to sell out to the status quo. If confronting people about the realities of Jewish power makes them uncomfortable, too fuckin’ bad for them. The “American Nationalism” crowd ultimately retreated on hard questions while simultaneously waving around the American flag like a security blanket, and all they got for it was Federal arrests stacked on top of a complete political defeat. I haven’t forgotten that these were the exact same individuals accusing more radical right-wingers of being “Feds” either nor is that irony lost on me. All of the hiding under Trump’s coat-tails didn’t work either though, and at the end of the day MAGA/Stop-The-Steal/Good Optics was a dead-end that has currently revived far more interest in pursuing programs to stop “domestic terrorism” than anything so-called “wignats” have ever been responsible for.
The logic of “good optics” lead people to embrace deradicalization rhetoric that lulled them into a false sense of security so overwhelming a good number of them walked into the biggest trap ever set for political dissidents. One would be very tempted to think this was an intentional conspiracy to entrap gullible patsies by a collection of cynical grifters taking money from shadowy figures to do it.
I want everyone to learn from this object lesson though. We are dissidents, we are radicals. We must acknowledge who we are and that the state is desperate to throw us in cages and make us into public examples to anyone else that dares to object to the current neoliberal paradigm. There are no short-cuts, no easy ways out. The target is already on our backs and it isn’t going anywhere. By being serious minded the “theatrical revolutionaries” dressed as goons are quickly weeded out, making “optics” a superfluous concern in the first place. We must also not hesitate to criticize “thought leaders” that are half-hearted cowardly charlatans. Ask yourself this, would a leftwing radical tolerate a mealy-mouthed Tucker Carlson? The rightwing cannot do incrementalism, it has been a losing strategy for 150 years.
“Optics” is over, this is a deadly serious struggle, not a high-school dance.
I once made this thread two years ago, so here it is again.
When I was 14 years old, I was given the decision to either stay in Germany or go to Japan for a few years because of my fathers new job.
I didn't have much to lose so I decided to go abroad.
I lived in Niigata (marked on the population density map, first picture). It is a rural province of Japan which is said to produce the best rice in the world.
It is one of the poor provinces of japan, which is experiencing a harsh depopulation during to more jobs and much better wages in the regions around Tokyo and Osaka.
In the 2nd picture, you can see how Japan is divided. The gray provinces are rich, and the greeen ones are rural and rather "poor", it can be compared to modern east and west Germany.
People living in the gray provinces often make fun of those in the green ones, calling the green provinces "裏日本" (ura nihon) which translates to "the hidden side of japan", as nobody really cares about it.
Niigata might be poor compared to Tokyo, but in return crime, polluted air and wage slavery is not a thing there.
In the 3rd picture you can see Niigata's rice fields. In Niigata it doesn't matter where you go - as long as you are not in a city, you will be surrounded by rice fields.
The 4th picture is Mt. Yahiko, a very beautiful place to go hiking to, as there is also an old temple and a traditional village on its top.
I went to school normally and tried my best to somehow not fail the tests, had some friends and all in all life was good but also a lot more inconvenient compared to my life in Germany.
Those who care about the everyday life in rural japan of a gaijin teenager are welcome to ask me anything in this thread.
That being said, I did not take too many pictures as I was not on vacation. Also many of the pictures from my old iPod touch have been lost. Still I tried to gather as many pictures as possible from chat groups and my old Laptop to somehow show Bernd what life looked like in Niigata.
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Obviously yes, as the boards of Japan are 99.99% Japanese.
The most popular boards are actually textboards and not imageboards, so something like memes do not exist in the Japanese internet as we know them and the word Miimu wasn't even known there until maybe two or three years ago, the "cool kids" on Twitter and Instagram would start to post Pepe and larp as a foreign meme pro.
Also, these textboards have a massive userbase and therefore a huge impact on society.
Tons of artificial words are created there and many of them will find their way into every day Japanese a few years later. The amount of internet slang in Japanese is incomparable big compared to the English one.
I'll give an example.
Pic related is the explanation how the Chinese character for grass, 草 (kusa), is now widely used for "lol", even by chads and stacies. Some people even say it irl but that's cringe.
笑う means to laugh, and its pronunciation is "warau".
In the early days of the internet, only 笑 (wara) was used as a smiling emoji replacement.
However this was annoying to type, so people just wrote a "w" at the end of a sentence, and the funnier something was, the more W's they would add at the end, pic 2 is comments on a random video.
Now, some people said "wwwwwwww" looks like a grassfield, so the chinese character for grass, plant is now the new "lol".
There are even expressions like 大草原不可避 which roughly translates to "The steppes are inevitable" and basically means ROFL, or LMFAO.
Words like this on fucked up ways are created every month, they come and go, some stay, others don't.
What do you think of feminism?
Not as bad as Imageboards claim.
While I do believe that women are inferior to men in a couple of things, they should not be treated any worse because of it.
Feminism was needed in the west until a few decades ago, however modern western feminists do not want to be treated equal, but special.
We have the freedom of speech so they can think and say whatever they want, and if they decide to hate men and therefore don't breed, it is a self-solving problem.
