I've been in therapy for ten years.

Recently, I hit a local minimum. I saw where the rest of the curve would take me, if I did not change somehow. It would end me early—maybe even in a few years or less.

And I saw what was holding me back.

I've had emotional scars accumulated from an early age. That kind of trauma seems to have a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy; my life has been replete with repeated traumas. I've been reliving those root traumas over and over again, in my own mind, overlaid atop later events that only found correlation due to triggering those old wounded emotions.

I understand this to be called "CPTSD" in more civilized parts of the world than where I live: the United States. (As far as I know, the DSM-V does not acknowledge CPTSD.) I digress.

In therapy, I had identified two deeply wounded "parts" of myself: one represented by an ostracized seventeen year old Exile who attempted in all but direct intent to end himself and the other an emotionally abused and rage-filled ten year old Inner Child.

Recently, I healed the seventeen year old part. I saw how it was hurting me. Its expectation, its fear, of exile fueled nearly half of my life. My therapist and I pushed on it. What was preventing me from changing?

It was the fear of what I would become without it. Would I lose my wife? Would I lose my identity? Would I lose everything?

But it was this or my life. So, in that moment, I made a choice.

Instead what happened was something unexpected. The Exile flourished. It was as though my teen and 20 something years had been rewritten: a Back to the Future moment. It was no longer The Exile. It was transformed into something else entirely. It became strong and confident. Tapping into that part, by choice, I now seem to be able face most situations that would once cause near panic with, instead, determination. I persevere. I even seem, at times, to flourish.

However, the rage-filled Child remains. He is more activistic. He still has the sense that he will be punished for some perceived wrong. When provoked, he doesn't feel anxiety from these imagined tortures, he feels rage.

In my meditations, now, I attempt to integrate with this newfound strength to then reach out to and show more compassion to the Child—to salve his fear and show him that we, together, as a being, are now strong. I am hopeful.

In these ways, I am remade.

I still recognize old pieces. And, yet, there is so much new, so much yet undiscovered, that I confound myself with what is now easy and what remains difficult (but difficult in new ways). I am increasingly kinder to myself, allowing more connection with others, particularly those I would once consider incompatible, and perhaps even beginning to become physically healthier.

I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Or, perhaps, I am only now stepping into that light, after decades.

How have you become more than your past traumas? How have you transformed for the better? How did you accomplish it?

EDIT: I shared this in the hope that it inspires. There can be healing, though it can take years and much effort. I would love to hear your stories of hope!

EDIT2: Feeling self-conscious, this all was decidedly not a humble brag. I never imagined that this sort of abrupt transformation was possible. However, it was a culmination of literally a decade of therapeutic intervention and hard work.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? —Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then: "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “Gay Science”, 1882

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

• Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, 1928

“Humans desired reasons. Reasons for pain. Reasons for sadness. Reasons for life. Reasons for death. Why were their lives filled with suffering? Why were their deaths absurd? They wanted reasons for the destiny that kept transcending their knowledge.”

“And that was God.”

• Kentaro Miura, “Berserk” (83), 1996

What's it say about life, hm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day.

• Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective”, 2014

The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming from its tremendous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”, man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

• Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus”, 1949

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

• Charles Darwin, in a letter to Asa Gray, 1860

In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"

But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.

Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, “An Alien God”, 2007

The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

• Joseph de Maistre, “St. Petersburg Dialogues”, 1821

One night in times long since vanished, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. Everything opened up before his searching thoughts, wonder upon wonder, terror upon terror, all blossomed in his mind.

Then woman awoke, too, and said that it was time to go out and kill something. And man took up his bow, fruit of the union between the soul and the hand, and went out under the stars. But when the animals came to their water-hole, where he out of habit waited for them, he no longer knew the spring of the tiger in his blood, but a great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives.

That day he came home with empty hands, and when they found him again by the rising of the new moon, he sat dead by the waterhole.

• Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Last Messiah”, 1933

For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

• Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

This realization threatens to put us in a persistent state of existential fear.

• Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”, 2015

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax…

• Ernest Becker, "The Denial of Death", 1973

In the literature of supernatural horror, a familiar storyline is that of a character who encounters a paradox in the flesh, so to speak, and must face down or collapse in horror before this ontological perversion —something which should not be, and yet is. Most fabled as specimens of a living paradox are the "undead," those walking cadavers greedy for an eternal presence on earth. But whether their existence should go on unendingly or be cut short by a stake in the heart is not germane to the matter at hand. What is exceedingly material resides in the supernatural horror that such beings could exist in their impossible way for an instant. Other examples of paradox and supernatural horror congealing together are inanimate things guilty of infractions against their nature. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this phenomenon is a puppet that breaks free of its strings and becomes self-mobilized.

[…]

Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet—a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.

• Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

Why, then, was the human race not wiped out long ago in great, raging epidemics of insanity? Why are there so few individuals who succumb to the pressure of life because their acuity reveals to them more than they can bear?

A consideration of the spiritual history and present state of our species suggests the following answer: most people manage to save themselves by artificially paring down their consciousness.

• Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Last Messiah”, 1933

Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.

• Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”, 2015

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

• Ernest Becker, “Escape From Evil”, 1975

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

My husband and I are ignorant out of touch Americans just now catching up on 2024’s competition (“Rim Tim Tagi Dim” is my personal winner).

I know a few highlights from previous years (“Euphoria”, “Discoteque”, “Think About Things”) but would love to know what highlights I’m missing from previous years and decades.

Let me know any and all recommendations you have, whether it’s just a good song, or whether the performance itself is worth looking into.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Quick search on Tildes brought up this five year old post asking how many folks here are asexual - spoiler alert, no replies which identified themselves as ace.

I was asked in the Pride Month intro thread by @arqualite about my relationship, and @Sparksbet shared his experience, and while I didn't want to derail that wonderful and celebratory discussion by talking too much about my one specific relationship, I also definitely want to talk about myself as well, so I am super hoping for two things for this thread:

1. Some discussion about ace spectrum in general - questions, answers, curiosities, insights, anything that might be helpful for folks new and old to the concept, on every segment of the spectrum or attraction layer cake

2. Just one tiny sub comment where I could use some advice and get some clarity .....and a digital hug if you could spare one

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Hey all! I've been thinking about buying a domain and building a personal website for myself -- at this point just a personal website with links to my socials, my CV, maybe any interesting projects I want to publicize. Maybe someday I'll decide I want to add a blog or build a webapp or something, but for now it'll be something simple and static.

My programming experience is very much not in the frontend side of things (I'm a data scientist and mostly use python day-to-day). I played around with HTML messing with my Tumblr theme enough back in the day that I'm reasonably sure I can build something solidly web 1.0, and I've toyed with stuff like Jekyll in the past. But I was wondering if I could use this as an opportunity to build up some basic skills that I could put on my resume for the future. But I have no idea what's out there that would be useful and quick to learn but wouldn't be massive overkill for a project like this.

I also have no idea how web-hosting works and who to go with if I want to build a personal website myself rather than relying on something like Wix or Wordpress. Most of the easily-Google-able advice is for different use-cases. Advice is either people who want something user-friendly with minimal coding like Wordpress or it's for something properly big and commercial, neither of which is me.

Anyway, I know we've got a lot of suitably tech-y people here on Tildes, so I'm hoping people here have good advice for this sort of use case. Thanks!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Where do you find support and friendship? Who are the folks who encourage you and add positivity to your life? It can be anything from a local gym to a sewing group to an online forum. I'd love to hear about every's little supportive corners and community networks!

• this was kicked off by the Bro summer waits for us all thread.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like degoogling, elections and alex jones. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was suspecting.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Alright, so one of my favorite things to do at night is throw on a great audiobook and play a video game...but it has to be a very specific type of video game. No meaningful dialogue or plot, no math or strategizing, and lots of hyper addictive gameplay that you can almost do subconsciously.

Here are the games I've found like this so far:

1. Trials Rising (and it's predecessors). I've actually made some global leaderboards in this game. It seems so simple when you start the campaign mode, then you learn about ninja mode and it's suddenly a different game.

2. Olli Olli world

3. Skater XL, Session, Skate series, Tony Hawk series

4. Lonely Mountains Downhill

5. Descenders

6. Any multiplayer shooter (COD, Fortnite, etc.)

7. Trackmania - not my thing but it definitely scratches this itch for a lot of people.

8. Mudrunner and Snowrunner series.

Here are some that did not work for me.

1. Sekiro - I just get too into it. Can't multitask.

2. Vampire Survivors - just not into it.

3. Rogue likes - never enjoyed them.

4. No Man's Sky - amazing game but I prefer to play it co-op. Already conquered it anyway.

Any other suggestions?

Next horror film is the cannibal horror movie Ravenous from 1999 directed by Antonia Bird starring Guy Pearce in the leading role.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Since this is the month of horror movies, did you find it scary, unsettling, creepy, eerie, spooky or horrifying?

The rest of the schedule for June is:

• 17th: X (2022)
• 24th: The Exorcist (1973)

Hey, so I'd really just like to get an idea that's been in my head for god knows how long out into a program, even if it's just a demo of what I've imagined. But I never had enough knowledge in a particular engine to just get the idea out. My main programming knowledge is from Java classes, and I've dabbled in enough in HTML/CSS, Javascript, SQL, Powershell, etc. enough to get through classes, projects, small scripts, deployments, etc, so I have programming experience from a conceptual point. But I've never really worked with GUI elements in a serious manner outside the Cocoa IDE handling all the heavy lifting. Any time I get the itch to tackle this I give GameMaker or Godot or something else a try via some tutorial, I never get to the end of it. I figured learning by example would help, but I forget most of the basics on how I'm supposed to set up an object or attribute... Then I try it the other way around where I try to learn it bottom-up and I get overwhelmed if I lose my way in the middle of a process... It's extremely frustrating, I swear I've been through this about three times in the last seven years or so.

I'm curious, has anyone had this much trouble with this? What did you do, what was your in?

I'm trying to get away from the lifestyle of taking a shit ton of photos and then laboriously organizing them at a later date. I could totally take a photo, switch to the gallery app, select that photo, and then move it to the right folder, but as many tilders can probably relate, that is not conducive to the ADHD lifestyle. I need something at the point of contact.

I'm gonna try to be brief. This is the worst I've ever felt, weather-wise, in my life, and it's only the start of summer. It's heavily negatively affecting both my physical and mental health. I can't even properly work. I don't have AC. I can't afford it. Everybody around me is suffering very similarly.

I've been following climate crisis for years, but I've never thought I'd see such an extreme worsening this early. Even if I knew in theory that anomalies like this could happen, as it's very widely agreed upon that they would, it's much different to live through. It's hell on earth.

I'm one of the luckier ones, relatively speaking. There are over hundred thousand people dying from heatwaves each year. It's probably much higher than officially reported, because most governments don't track heatwave deaths. Millions and millions of people in India have been experiencing bigger and bigger water crises. Just in 2019, 600 million people faced a water crisis in India.. Hundreds of millions of people in Africa are suffering due to climate change related climate extremes and food security crises.

I also just found out that a location in Antarctica exhibited 70F (38C) higher than normal temperatures this year. Faster than expected, right?

I think this is inexcusable. Oil companies and such knew what was coming. There are countless documents and studies detailing this. Here are a few.

• Exxon confirmed global warming due to their emissions was happening in 1982.
• American Patroleum Institute similary knew in 1980.
• Exxon knowingly spread climate change denialism in response (source 1, source 2)
• Even in 2015, Exxon was dodging responsibility, telling people to "read the documents". So, two scientists, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, did that. And found out that Exxon acknowledged global warming in the internal documents, while they denied it in public (article 1, source 2). In other words, it's been empirically shown that they fucking manipulated the public with full knowledge.
• Exxon is not alone. ExxonMobil, Chevrontexaco, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Conocophillips spent 3.6 billion dollars for lobbying in US alone during 1986-2015.. 61% of these expenditures are after 2006, when climate change started becoming a hot topic. So, when they attracted attention, they doubled down.
• Another document is of American Patroleum Institute from 1998, showing they intentionally focused on exaggerating the uncertainties of climate science in front of the public.
• Big Oil still opposes science and us. A study published in 2019 shows that ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total spent 1 billion dollars on lobbying and branding after the 2016 Paris Agreement.
• Oil companies are not alone. A study examining the 2000-2016 time-frame in US found that "fossil fuel and transportation corporations, utilities, and affiliated trade associations" are all major climate lobbyists. Only 3% of the total climate change lobbying was done by environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations.

These crimes are inexcusable. The people responsible should pay for them. And these should be treated as crimes against humanity and the planet, of the highest degree. These people don't deserve anything but to pay. They are the evil, who, in great awareness, have unreversibly damaged the planet, caused untold suffering. They still continue to do this, and even if they stopped now (hah!), their evil will continue to haunt humanity and a myriad of other species for unimaginable generations.

They should pay.

Today is my last day at work and my boss wants me to BCC anyone I have ever sent an email to announce my departure.

I have tried exporting all my sent messages and trimming the list by advanced sorting out the duplicate email addresses in excel, but messages with multiple recipients are plentiful and need to have the emails separated into individual cells at the very least.

I also tried the .NK2 file route. I downloaded the MFCMAPI program to find my hidden autofill contact file, but it can only be exported as an .xml or .msg file and I don't know how to handle those files properly to get the data I need.

Does anyone here have a solution to automatically add every autofill contact on Outlook as BCC recipients for a final email?

EDIT: I found a solution that worked for both of us. I emailed the clients I remember as the most important and set up an automated reply to handle those I forgot to message.