SkookumTree
8d ago
To bite a bullet: lack of exposure to non-negotiable danger with permanent consequences.
British aristocrats were fond of mountaineering and yachting, and perhaps these taught young men and women about risk and danger. Mountains don't care; nor does the sea.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Eh - maybe in like New York City, where hunting as a pursuit is very uncommon (what are you doing in NYC if you love hunting?!) but in a suburb that isn't super blue, it's just something someone has, either for protection from human predators or for hunting.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Of course, you still have individual sports. Our heroes and heroines can choose to try to git gud at swimming or running, with no other competitor than the clock. If they're successful, they make the team; the criteria are usually "who was fastest at the last race" with little room for subjectivity. Is it hard to become a decent runner starting from being mostly sedentary at 14? Yes, but I've seen it done plenty of times.
SkookumTree
8d ago
You also lose the cognitive ability to enact a successful plan for ending your own life. This is an incredibly frustrating paradox.
Also - I am with you. I do not want to be around with dementia. Please. Use morphine to "manage" things, or some other kind of sedative, and make me comfort care only. Let an infection take me out and cremate me. Scatter my ashes in the woods...I always loved nature.
SkookumTree
8d ago
They could have been a decent release valve for the biggest autist or something in the village...the 1/1000 village autist who might have a bad temper or something.
SkookumTree
8d ago
There are also a BUNCH of people who have mild EDS and are lucky/managing it well and are therefore more or less asymptomatic. The person I knew who painlessly dislocated her own elbows every time she made her bed thought she was normal and didn't have any pain or symptoms. Unfortunately she got got by an autoimmune disease but mostly recovered. Same with the flexible guy I knew that fell off his bike and went to the doctor, where he learned he had mild EDS.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Devil's advocate that these people are all doing yoga or something and so becoming very flexible. On the other hand, how's that making their skin stretchy?
SkookumTree
8d ago
I mean - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome comes with a number of hard to fake symptoms such as unusually stretchy skin. Someone who was mentally ill or something might manage to systematically injure joints and make them unstable. You have autoimmune disorders, EDS, depression, autism, ADHD, anxiety, gender fluidity/queerness, and possibly high IQ/intelligence linked together.
For what it's worth, I am backing the RCCX-theory horse here.
SkookumTree
8d ago
In some places: the attendings are better dressed than the residents, who are in turn better dressed than the medical students. Full suits, for example, are for attendings and maybe chief residents; it would be unusual for a resident to wear one.
In others, the medical students are better dressed than the residents, and the attendings can sometimes be confused for the janitors. These shabbily-dressed doctors are often the most clinically knowledgeable.
SkookumTree
8d ago
Thing is - that brutalist/modernist architecture was 1) legible and 2) inexpensive. There is a place and time for ugly concrete block buildings and it is probably good to be able to build buildings that are machines for living, aesthetics be damned.
SkookumTree
8d ago
I mean - people are building things like timber frame houses for a hell of a lot less than $3 million each.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Pretty much, or is it going to fuck up my judgement and lead me to consider drastic Hock like shit in the future. Assuming I'm around to consider drastic Hock like shit.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
For what it is worth, I think that by far the most likely explanation is that our abusive shithead is essentially functioning as a con man and being extremely dishonest about what his intentions are. Our spergy hero is mostly what-you-see-is-what-you-get; however, he is dogshit at marketing himself.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Dating will get easier when you're either a student in a promising profession
I disagree, based on what I've seen happen with my classmates at a US medical school. And the residents. It only changes once you are an attending.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
What career should I pursue? I seem to lack the discipline or whatever for university or other such independant tasks.
Something where there is a shortage. Also, if you're autistic, get yourself tested for ADHD - a lot of us have the combo meal and medication can be very helpful.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Assuming that I survive the Hock, how do you think the experience will change me as a person? Do you think it would make my judgment worse, or make me more likely to try crazy shit like this again?
Yeah. I doubt that Mottizens are looking to unload one- or two- person mountaineering grade tents...but I might be wrong.
As far as avalanches: there are relatively broad valleys as much as a mile or two wide with meandering rivers there. The mountains are a couple of thousand feet above the valley. I am no avalanche expert, but I am not sure that I'd be likely to trigger an avalanche over half a mile away that can endanger me...while traveling on flat ground. Of course, there are also narrow valleys as well. Ridge travel is a possibility, too - but I really need to seek out some local advice, which I'll be doing by writing to people living in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass. They've got to be riding around on snowmobiles and have some level of local knowledge and metis about travel in avalanche terrain...
Wind slabs are a concern, especially with the sugar snow/depth hoar I might encounter, but melt events seem very unlikely when temperatures haven't been higher than 10 above for months.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Please don't insult my intelligence by backtracking and claiming that "ambulances" can refer to something other than domestic violence. You said 'the question facing unattractive people who want to date is this: "Where do you want the ambulances?"
The guy with the 450-pound partner and the woman married to Smokestack our engineering hero aren't facing domestic violence in relationships. The ambulances can be and often are domestic violence, but they can come from plenty of other things as well. Like congestive heart failure from supermorbid obesity. Or good old-fashioned lung cancer from a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and smoking pot like fucking Snoop Dogg.
Consider the sky high - 80 percent, by some metrics - abuse/victimization rate reported by autistic women. This is still well north of half even if you just look at autistic women with normal IQs.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I think the test breaks down at that level. I'll grant you that you're say one in a thousand, maybe ten thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred thousand. But if you were one of the top thousand people on the planet...I'd think that your writing would be better than it now is. Not that it isn't very good...but is it 'top 1,000 people writing in English who are alive today'? Not all that sure.
Also: do you have classmates that could memorize entire encyclopedias or medical texts, word for word? I've seen people do some fairly impressive feats of memorization - such as 'memorizing a 100-slide PowerPoint deck after reading it once and tell people that a thing came from slide 67'. No, he wasn't autistic, as far as I know.
I think that the average researcher is way more determined than the average doctor - it's not uncommon for researchers to have been preparing for careers in research since they were in junior high school. I've known researchers who, as undergrads, answered emails and worked on projects from ER hospital beds. Well, one - but the rest of the lab didn't think it was that big a deal that her boss asked her to do work from the hospital bed and mildly reprimanded her for thinking it was a bit much.
Put it this way: plenty of researchers could do the equivalent of passing the anatomy final on day one of medical school. Very few doctors could have done the same.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
academic qualifications as a proxy for IQ (and thus a proxy for good health, if weakly so).
There's also hobbies as proxy for good health - someone who lists marathon running as a hobby is relatively unlikely to be unhealthy. I don't know how you could screen for good mental health or...lack of propensity for autoimmune disorders. Anecdotally, a disproportionate number of high-achieving ambitious women wind up with autoimmune disorders, and some are reasonably healthy and can do things like pole dancing or hiking. Although they have chronic fatigue or chronic pain. So there's that; if you're interested, the RCCX theory by Dr. Sharon Megalethery seems plausible although I'd take it with the whole shaker of salt.
If you're really stretching it...ballet dancers and gymnasts seem to really be a mixed bag, they're likely to be in that cluster of 'smart, determined, somewhat neurotic, queer, neurodivergent, potential autoimmune issues' that RCCX theory kinda points to.
What do you mean by "someone like me"
I mean: dreaming of a career in the NBA would be pretty realistic if I was seven feet tall, the NBA scouts for pretty much anyone seven feet and breathing - but at 5'6" I'd be the second-shortest player in NBA history, after 5'3" Muggsy Bogues. And even for a six-footer who loves basketball, it's more of a pipe dream than anything realistic.
I was asking essentially about whether or not my standards, as I'd described them, were unrealistically high. For what it is worth, based on what I've seen: unattractive people who would like to date need to choose where they want the ambulances. No, not the Hock. The Hock is stupid and pointless, and it may be a kind of prologue for things that will happen later in my life. Let me just say that I personally know two autistic women that knew damn well that they were very vulnerable to predators yet chose to date anyway. They fell prey to said predators. One is happy that she chose to date and the other has some mild regrets and thinks whatever wisdom she got wasn't worth it. If she had it to do over, she'd have been celibate. On the male side of things...let me see. Morbidly obese wives, supermorbidly obese wives, wives that tried to strangle their 10-year-old child, one attempted stabbing by a girlfriend, one successful stabbing by a girlfriend that very nearly killed the guy but he made a full recovery. Attempted stabbing guy's in a healthy relationship with his wife, one of the autistic women had a husband that raped her who she then divorced and then got in an OK relationship with a reasonably functional and well-off civil engineer that smokes pot and cigarettes like a chimney. So there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and if it's an oncoming train it usually doesn't kill you.
As I've said repeatedly here - I do not think that things are any better for unattractive women and they are probably worse. As a man, I'm not privy to as many of the tales of woe from that side of things, but hear other short and/or spergy guys - or their children - sharing stories of the things they or their parents endured. I believe I'll be going through Hell of one form or another. I realized, I think, rather late, possibly too late, that the question facing unattractive people who want to date is this: "Where do you want the ambulances?" But you need to and should choose, and that choice, freely and willingly undertaken, is in itself noble.
For what it is worth, I do not think that telling people about the Hock or even people learning that I Hocked and survived is going to do all that much for how attractive I am. In the words of Steve from the Friendly Southern Gossip discord: Sufficiently extreme challenge will just be thought of as stupidity or mildly suicidal. No, any benefit from the Hock will come from freezing the neuroticism or perhaps the hypocrisy off of me and making me accustomed to pain, discomfort, and struggle. That this pain, discomfort, and struggle are considered pointless and idiotic is a feature, not a bug: living What's Eating Gilbert Grape or some other shit is kind of on a par with that. Ask @Southkraut; he warned me in no uncertain terms about how bad an idea it was to marry someone that was digging herself a very early grave with knife and fork - or any other addiction.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Christopher McCandless
Respect for the guy
Timothy Treadwell
Respect, but jackass got his girlfriend eaten
Green Boots
Respect
The Titan
Some respect, but also come on guys, you cut too many corners.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah, fair enough, my family's basically bush league new money at best.
Eh. I openly said I liked abrasive blunt (autistic-coded) women who were caring. I got perplexed reactions for liking unruly hair and unshaven legs, but not much else.
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