I used to drink an inhuman amount of caffeine. It made starting my meds kind of hard, because the caffeine started actually affecting me like it's supposed to.
So I was suddenly very jittery and nervous. For a bit I thought it was the medication, but then one day when I was making myself a cup of black tea I stopped and went, "...hey, wait, caffeine?"
Weening myself off of it was brutal. I started trying to drink one tea a day, then switched to green tea and very gradually decreased the amount of caffeine. I still occasionally get cravings, but luckily I can trick my body by drinking decaf tea.
It made me so fucking cranky, by the way, caffin withdrawal sucks.
I understand. I grew up a fundamentalist Pentecostal. It's taken a lot of time and growth to move past that, and I've been an ass and had to make up for it.
My problem is mostly that celebrities have a lot of influence and power that they don't treat with the proper level of respect. If you have an audience of millions, you should consider the example you set. It's part of the price of choosing to be a celebrity as your job.
This guy is responsible for contributing to a lot of cultural miasma- making up for that takes more effort than apologizing. It requires actual growth and an effort to make amends. You have to not just change, but try to fix the things you broke and help the people you hurt.
A lot of celebrities will performatively apologize, but not do anything and that's really annoying.
Do you have any evidence that he's made an effort to make up for his behavior that goes beyond words? This is an honest question, I never followed him because of random happenstance, so I don't know.
Fancy savings account for retirement that's stored in stocks so it can explode at any point. Basic perquisite to ever retire in the US. Many people don't have them.
Depends on the place and context. I don't know as much about the Chinese market for these things, but in a lot of cases for Japanese/Korean titles in this genre there's a number of fascinating elements that combine to make it appealing.
It's about beautiful men and can focus on them a lot, for one, but it also offers vectors to discuss and engage with dynamics and/or social things which women are discouraged from expressing. A lot of the time, one of the couple in Boy's Love (for example) is intended to be a bit of a proxy stand-in for the female reader. They're more often the viewpoint character, and they get to be more vocal about sexual desire for men than a woman may feel comfortable writing a female character expressing.
They also can engage with some kinds of stories about bigotry that can intersect with women's problems in sympathetic ways; and, if you're trying to deal with something that's really sensitive or traumatic as a woman, then having male characters go through something similar can give the appropriate level of emotional remove.
Also, pretty men kissing!
Like, I've been reading CLAMP stuff again and wow those are pretty men!
I'm not a woman, mind you, but I've been reading this stuff for, like, 15+ years and these are my (incomplete) conclusions.
Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on "destroying books is bad," is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.
It's that they're devouring the contents of people's brains for the ability to replace them that's concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.
By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.
Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn't how humans are broken, it's what is breaking them.
Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can't even feel pride in our work because it's profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.
Where's the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.
It's permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.
The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.
Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.
On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren't constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.
If you want to reverse this trend, it's going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.
It's pretty depressing, but that's the situation as I see it.
*I'm not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.
This reminds me of when I shadowed a librarian in high school and they talked to me about how people got really upset with them throwing away books that had multiple reprintings and were in awful condition.
Because people as a whole lack the capacity for nuance, I guess.
I just want a job with a living wage now, and it's agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.
...so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?
Wouldn't work out. World's too complicated for simple answers like that.
Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There's people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government's trend to self destruction and fascism.
Even though it's increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the "difficult to pass" territory and not the "a few compromises" one.
It's increasingly hard to find things that are like that for everyone. It's an unfortunate trend that means I have to very aggressively curate my feeds to keep from being dragged into it.
I used to drink an inhuman amount of caffeine. It made starting my meds kind of hard, because the caffeine started actually affecting me like it's supposed to.
So I was suddenly very jittery and nervous. For a bit I thought it was the medication, but then one day when I was making myself a cup of black tea I stopped and went, "...hey, wait, caffeine?"
Weening myself off of it was brutal. I started trying to drink one tea a day, then switched to green tea and very gradually decreased the amount of caffeine. I still occasionally get cravings, but luckily I can trick my body by drinking decaf tea.
It made me so fucking cranky, by the way, caffin withdrawal sucks.