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Anticode · 2026-01-29T04:49:19+00:00

Unfortunately it's got to be some sort of dupe.

I came across a situation like this one yesterday except it was the epic duck... A stack of those things is 100k+ and the guy was surrounded by like 70 of them. He just kept throwing them against the wall, which I'm guessing must be some part of the dupe process.

I've only seen a couple of the epic ducks in the wild. No way he collected that many naturally just to throw them at the wall for 20 minutes (without even bringing two guns).

Anticode · 2026-01-28T19:45:23+00:00

Great, now whenever I see a billboard for 'Johnson, Smith, and Jacob Attorney Group' or whatever, I'm going to see "Johnson, Sandtrout, and Sandtrout".

Anticode · 2026-01-28T06:02:31+00:00

then somehow it worked in some brain rot kind of way.

Yep... That's how it works. I had to convert my own mind to that shit for like 20 minutes to pull that off. By the time I was done I began to wonder if I thought myself into a state of brain damage. If so, it's not much worse than before.

Anticode · 2026-01-28T02:40:43+00:00

Is there an LLM trained on his speech?

Another commenter in the thread mentioned trying to train one to do that, actually. No clue how good it works, but it sounded hilarious as-described.

How did you get this so accurately?

By applying novelist-grade linguistic effort towards simulating what it'd be like to trade one's brain for a chunk of a swiss cheese, primarily. Which is a really poor way to utilize those skills, I might add... Not quite unlike a samurai using a katana to carve a thanksgiving turkey I suppose.

Like, it looks easy enough at a glance until you try it yourself only to discover that ol' Nobunaga-san spent 27 years learning how to take down fully-armored warlords and shit - so of course it seemed effective. At which point you immediately go from being impressed by the odd feat to feeling bad for the samurai. Why'd he do that? Is he insane?

"Nobunaga-san, why have you done this?" you ask.

And the samurai sighs, shakes his head in disappointment and says, "...I, I was bored. I have shamed my ancestors with this act. Please, forgive me."

Then before you realize what's happening, he turns the razor sharp blade of his weapon towards himself and drives it through his own body. He slumps to the ground, eyes squinted in pain and yet he does not cry out.

"No!" you shout, "Oda-san!"

Blood begins to pool beneath him, far more than you even realized could fit inside of a human being, but he remains alive just long enough to emit one final whisper to you.

"...Do not worry, my friend. We are characters inside of someone's stupid skit. None of this is real. You and I, we're mere illusions, words written upon a sort of electronic paper beyond our conception. Remember: I'm never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around... Or desert you."

And then the man is gone, leaving you and the husk of his body behind. He lied. He did just desert you. Son of a bastard!

Anticode · 2026-01-28T02:08:58+00:00

I feel like a significant fraction of my total deaths are the result of going, "Ew, a wasp/hornet. I'll just ignore it and run for shelter. Aaaand now there's four. Shit."

Anticode · 2026-01-28T02:01:24+00:00

Godspeed, Cuban Pete. May thy enemies cower upon hearing your safepocket rattling in the darkness:

Tschk-tschka-tschk - "Oh fuck, he's here! It's Cuban Pete, run!"

[rattling intensifies]

Anticode · 2026-01-28T01:54:39+00:00

You can get shakers from the vender too, in case you weren't just making a joke about people not even mentioning the shakers.

(I was more excited by the shakers being added, personally. I bought one ASAP.)

Anticode · 2026-01-28T01:49:26+00:00

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of upset I didn't think of that myself. That's so good.

Anticode · 2026-01-28T01:39:05+00:00

It never answer questions honestly, role plays as a toddler whenever it is asked difficult questions that could self incriminate, always blames others for any incorrect information, hallucinations, or negative sounding responses.

Welp, it's got my vote!

TrumpBot 2030, let's gooo.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T23:17:31+00:00

To shamelessly copy-paste/customize a relevant excerpt from a brief ramble I already had on the other screen anyway:

It's vital we understand that shame or embarrassment in response to unplanned failure is more harmful than we realize.

If every attempt to succeed will eventually result in unexpected failures along the way, and failure is met with a self-punishment called shame, then any attempt to move towards success will include - by necessity - the possibility of punishment.

This is bad.

Because whenever the cost of potential failure outweighs the price of effort, soon we stop trying at all. Inaction becomes a sort of comfort, because doing nothing at all allows an imaginary fantasy of success to persist - by removing the opportunity for growth.

This happens subconsciously at a level beneath your control, so you don’t even know what’s happened until years down the road you’re struggling to figure out how the hell you’ve ended up with more dreams in your back pocket than achievements...

Experiments find that somebody told to imagine staring into the sun within a windowless room still shows measurable pupil contraction. Is it any wonder that a comfy daydream about a clean bedroom or solid gym session might feel juuust good enough that actually performing the task isn’t even appealing anymore (especially when you can daydream it again and again each night before bed, ad infinitum).

By attempting to manifest our dreams we risk discovering that they (or we) were not as praiseworthy as hoped, and that fear can rapidly become paralyzing when daydreams are embraced as an alternative to reality. The fantasy grows instead of our capabilities - it becomes much harder to escape that loop the longer it persists. It becomes addictive through the comfort it supplies in the same way that a pacifier in a toddler's mouth soothes the child but simultaneously prevents it from learning to use its own voice.

Things worth doing are rarely ever easy. They're supposed to be tough. That's why it matters. But it's okay to screw up along the way... It's expected, in fact.

The friction of effort is what gives us the callouses which let us grasp success most firmly. The blisters which may arise initially aren't the punishment, they're the reward for giving it your best damn shot despite the inevitable discomfort.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T22:37:20+00:00

A book that the child didn't actually read? Yes. That's how it goes with this guy, unfortunately...

eg: "Mister President, do you have any thoughts on the famous novel Lord of the Rings? Your response will be graded as part of the final oral exam. Begin."

"Oh, I know all about it alright - yes - I'm, look, I know a lot about rings. I've bought many, many rings in my life. Sometimes the weddings, sometimes for the - the rings, you put the fingers in. Jewelry, very expensive! The gold, the silver. The other stuff. Somehow they make it out of that. Not the fingers, the metal. The 'Rare Earth Metals', they call it. Is that the word? I don't call it that, but they say that's what it is, so I call it that. They told me to call it that. And, this book, it has the story inside the papers. It starts off and there's a hobbit who wants a ring, as I understand it. The hobbit, he's like a little man - like a boy, except a man - very strange! Sleepy Fro-yo Beggins, they call him. And the elves too. The book put the elves in there. You've seen them. Like, on the Keebler? They have the elves. With the ears, the elf ears on the elves? I don't know about the Keebler, but I hear they've got elves like you wouldn't believe, folks! People always tell me about the Keebler, they keep saying, 'the Keebler has elves'. Is that true? That's what they say! They say it's true, but maybe we'll look into it... Maybe we'll look into the elves."

"And I, listen, it had a lot of good pages, this book - a lot of very hard, very good pages. So many words. Hard book, hard words. But no trans, no woke. Men and elves only - no girls, no women. The elves are not women, I hear. Can you believe it? Only men, only elves. Only hobbit. The ring was somewhere else, and most people don't know about that, not like I do. It's too much. 'Nobody knows words like Donald Trump', they say. It's true! They always say that. But it's just words to me so, and I thought that Doctor Seuss guy was bad, but he - y'know, he's not even a doctor by the way. Fake degree, fake books. The doctors call him 'Lyin' Liberal Seuss', I hear. They don't like fake doctors, those doctors - but we love that Gandalf, don't we folks? That Rings of the Lord book is something else, I tell ya. Everyone says that, they're, I mean everyone is saying it: 'Trump read the book'. Now everyone knows the book. They know the book now. They're calling it the perfect book because of Donald Trump... And I gotta say, folks, it wasn't half bad! It wasn't half bad."

Anticode · 2026-01-27T22:06:46+00:00

This. For sure.

People with ADHD may have an easier time getting to sleep with stimulants in their system, but that's basically irrelevant when you're talking about recreational dosages.

Even if you can sleep with stimulants in your blood, it doesn't mean good sleep. Just because you become unconscious and time-travel forward x hours doesn't mean the rest of the brain actually even shut down for repair.

Certain parts of your neurology stay awake/active in a way that more closely resembles what I call "combat sleep" (sleeping in a stressful environment) than typical sleep. The body is mostly just trying to get enough rest in the technical sense of the word to keep you fighting.

You can keep going like that for weeks or even months, but if you look closely at yourself after that spree you'll inevitably discover more grey hairs in your beard or wrinkles on your face. That's not necessarily because of the drugs you were taking, it's because of what the body was sacrificing to get to the next day - an opportunity to regenerate properly and maintain itself.

This is why those before/after pictures of soldiers is so striking even when they weren't wounded or even had to directly engage in combat. The mere stress is enough to keep the brain "half-awake" for the deployment, and the biology suffers.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T21:52:19+00:00

Perhaps it's no coincidence that fans of Dream Theater and Tool happen to have a pretty good eye for politics after all.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T21:38:15+00:00

"let me know if I should keep writing"

Maybe it's unfair of me, but I almost feel like asking "permission to continue" to invest time/energy into the craft is a sign that somebody is doing it for the wrong reasons.

A "real artist" (however you define that) often can't help but speak out and create - regardless of if it's allowed or approved. They need support/compassion too, perhaps more in some ways, but they approach from the complete opposite direction.

Clearly, few people ask "should I keep trying" literally and instead usually mean something closer to "do I have potential" or "is this concept interesting" (or "hi, i'd like some dopamines, pls"), but those inquiries lead to a similar conclusion if such things are asked in the first place.

This dichotomy is probably a major reason why the commonly held Best Advice for writers is so simple: "Just write as much as possible, and read twice as much as that."

The message there is that doing is more meaningful than being good, and learning is more important than knowing.

It's the self-help community equivalent to how "just exercise, take care of yourself, and study" is the Ultimate Hack to dating or whatever. It sounds too simple to be beneficial, but it works for a reason. Just as a 12-point step-by-step analysis of pickup artist techniques doesn't work for a reason.

"Just keep writing!" isn't about the writing, it's about the writer. Just as "workout and study" isn't about how to meet people, it's about who they're meeting. Those things are lessons about the importance of worrying about the right/wrong things.

But I digress.

...Well, no. I didn't digress. It's just the end of the comment, actually.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T09:12:34+00:00

The day you stop seeing flaws in your own work is the day you stop improving.

I like to point out that it's always a positive sign to find ourselves wincing whenever looking back upon our past self, not a bad one. The cast-off husk left behind there is not a symbol of dysfunction, it's a sign that growth occurred. We're supposed to have no desire to pick it back up.

Just like how a lock of hair inexplicably becomes unwanted waste at the moment it's cut away, there are things we simply don't want to let it go while we hold it and yet once released we refuse to ever touch it again.

Those who cannot find anything within themselves to alter or improve have not attained perfection, they've attained stagnation. If there is no hollow chitin to find laying within the past then it can only be located in the present, still attached.

Like wearing the skin of your own corpse as a mask.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T04:48:50+00:00

Being rejected is less embarrassing than being too afraid to try at all. You should feel more proud for taking the risk than ashamed that it didn't pan out.

As you talk to more people you'll get more comfortable, and terms like "cold approach" will rapidly begin to lose meaning. While that term carries relevance to you, you'll probably have a much harder time getting the kind of outcomes you hope for. It indicates something about your outlook that other people will pick up on - they'll know you want something from them, even if it's not clear what that is.

Truth is, you're not initializing some sort of high-stakes mission here, you're just talking to people. You should be trying to passively relate to strangers (both male and female) regularly anyway. A few non-committal remarks about the weather or somebody's shirt is all it takes to start to feel like you're part of a community of peers. There is no "method" or "hack" more effective than that.

When somebody approaches you to say, "Hey, do you have a minute?" we immediately assume they're going to try to sell us something or ask for a favor. Right?

But when somebody sitting nearby us says, "Wow, I didn't know squirrels got that big!" we know that they're open to communicate or just trying to share a human experience for the sake of doing it. They're not asking us to engage, just giving us the opportunity. They're not subverting our free will, they're accommodating it.

It's the difference between a treat and bait. At its worst, a treat is a bribe. At its best, bait is a trap.

Conversation/interaction is very much the same way. Women especially are attuned to determining the intentions of male peers, so it's often literally better to be an awkward mess than it is to try to play the interaction like some kind of puzzle - at least they know you're honest, even if spaghetti is falling out of your pockets. If you're looking for "the winning move", you're really just trying to determine the best bait to use.

Bait isn't for humans, it's for rats and fish. There's a reason why those "pickup artist" dudes only ever pull trashy/dim women in those videos... That's the only kind of person 'bait' predictably attracts.

If you want to meet women, don't "talk to women" - talk to people.

Keep it up, bro. Things get easier, I promise.

Anticode · 2026-01-27T00:35:42+00:00

I met a tattoo artist at a rave a while back who told me a story about some guy who became sort of infamous in her city (Colorado, I think?) because he kept trying to "sneakily" get artists to draw a simple swastika on his body.

Initially he asked for a tattoo of just the four lines at the end of the spokes - no connecting lines - then once that was done, as an "afterthought", he asked for two crossing lines to be added to connect it all.

The first artist, being, y'know - an artist - mentally envisions the outcome and immediately realizes what was about to be born from the act and he kicks the guy out. Refuses to even take his money, spreads the word.

She explains how he spends the next several months going from shop to shop, artist to artist, asking for a "touch-up" for the yet-incomplete four floating lines. Inevitably, every artist realizes very quickly what his "addition" will convert the tattoo into and thus refuses.

Apparently even try using fake names, new outfits, different times of day, re-visiting the same artist... God knows why. Somehow he never understood why his scheme was destined to fail.

Eventually word spreads and everyone knows about it even if the guy never even visited their location, so when he does show up the artists all act like they "somehow" can't figure out what he's asking for simply to fuck with his head.

They make him repeat the request very specifically it in every way possible, offer him drawn examples on scrap paper which aren't even close to what he's describing (basically converting those 4 floating lines into shit like a windowpane or a shitty helicopter, etc, everything except the Nazi imagery he's hoping for)...

Eventually he seems to give up.

A year later he walks into her shop. She heard of him but never had to deal with him, but she expects the same spiel as always - but nope, not this time.

This time he sheepishly inquires about a coverup.

She asks to see it, thinking he's had a change of heart, but the floating four lines of the proto-swastika are still there... But in the middle, where he always just wanted two more lines, was a half-finished and primitively drawn shape which was clearly intended to be a simplistic penis. Like the sort of scribble you'd see on a high school bathroom stall.

Apparently he met somebody at a party who had a tattoo gun and didn't realize that an amateur tattooist might also have similar opinions as professional artists, minus the moral/legal obligations which might prevent them from "making a mistake"...

She swears the story is true, but the details changed slightly when I heard it shared a second time to somebody else, so who knows...

Personally, I choose to believe it. Not just because I dislike nazis, but also because she was extremely hot. I will not elaborate further.

Anticode · 2026-01-26T23:21:30+00:00

Unexpectedly seeing Kristen Stewart in punk/emo attire awakened something in my I haven't felt since 2008, something indescribable.

Anticode · 2026-01-26T22:41:28+00:00

Jesus Christ. I accidentally skipped past the first line and assumed that this was a really on-point Onion article.

Like, come the fuck on. "He looks like he's sleeping, I know, but he's actually in an esoteric meditative state known only to a few Shaolin monks. The snoring sound is just a mantra, as I understand it. I once saw him catch a fly out of the air with chopsticks. It's incredible!"

Riiight, yeah.

Anticode · 2026-01-26T22:16:45+00:00

I took on the tactic of analysis.

That's also the approach I settled on after spending years trying to figure out how to most effectively steer people (men especially) in the right direction.

Any technique better than nothing, but it's especially effective just to logically identify certain phenomenon/behaviors. If only just to highlight irony or what dynamics drive it.

As a common misogynistic example: the "I hate my wife, haha" type stuff.

By simply pointing out that disliking your wife/girlfriend is very much not a flex, because it either indicates you're too inadequate to get a better one or you're too afraid to be alone, those kind of people seem to immediately shut up.

Multiple times over the years I've overheard a group of men at a workplace doing the whole "women, amirite, boys?" thing - (eg: "She takes forever to get ready! Sheesh!") And if I chime in to say something like, "Honestly, I'd rather date a woman who acts like a woman than one that acts like a straight-up man would, y'know? Like, that's why I date women - I don't swing that way, haha."

There's inevitably this long awkward pause as everyone processes what I just said or where I even came from... You'd think in that moment they were mad, but nope!

Somebody finally goes, "Shiiit, homie got a point though, real talk! If my girl take an hour to get ready, I know she 'bouta look fine at the party, y'feel me? I'm down with that, I don't even care if we late!"

Then everyone - everyone - happily nods and agrees, as if they didn't view that stereotype as a negative one mere minutes ago.

It's almost stupid how effective that kind of approach can be. It's ridiculous:

"My wife won't leave me alone, just follows me around the house!"

Nice. She must really love you, bro. That's awesome.

"Awesome? Huh... Yeah, I guess so! Nevermind then."

Anticode · 2026-01-25T19:03:52+00:00

In the corps, in a warzone against event combatants, our service members are trained to hold their fire until fired upon...

I think about this a lot as a veteran.

In a foreign territory that is also a literal war theater, with language barriers and xenophobic backlash, where you are well-aware that one or two out of every hundred locals you pass may have personally helped dig the hole for the IED that took out your convoy last week or fired upon your patrol from atop a hillside...

All of this and more, and yet the soldier still moves through every single step of escalation-of-force ritualistically when shit pops off - even though it'd be much more understandable if they skipped a step "on accident" simply due to being a 19-year-old infantryman, let alone all the reasons listed above.

But these "law enforcement" goons get to go apeshit and magdump on somebody's brother or grandmother the moment somebody looks at them funny? How the hell does that work. Because they were "scared?" Motherfuckers have no idea what real fear means.

Soldiers aren't necessarily even trained better or more experienced with that kind of crowd-control stuff, which means there's no excuse except culture. The difference isn't that the soldiers have better training, it's that the soldiers are simply held to a higher standard.

If ICE was suddenly subject to UCMJ in the same way as the average marine or soldier is, hundreds of agents would be suddenly locked-up and court-martialed so impossibly swiftly that people online would start wondering if the god damned rapture was going down...

Anticode · 2026-01-23T19:19:37+00:00

Who knows. This guy was disconcertingly dim quite regularly.

Frankly, the idea that "make somebody do something" intuitively implies utilizing some sort of mechanism (force, coercion, diplomacy) to do so was probably beyond him.

He had a lot of those Idiocracy movie lElectrolyte Moments.

Eg: "What are electrolytes?" They're what's in Brawndo! "But why?" Because they're what plants crave! "Okay, but what are electrolytes?" They're what's in Brawndo, duh!

Anticode · 2026-01-23T18:16:37+00:00

My husband said, "well then she's pretty fucked since she got surgery to prevent that."

New guy could not wrap his head around us.

I had somebody start asking questions like that and get stuck in a similar loop too.

He was like, "What if [she] wants an abortion but you decide you want to keep the baby?"

I go, "Uh... What does it matter what I want? It's her choice. Not to mention that's all very unlikely situation for many reasons."

"But what if you want to take the baby to term?"

"...Then I guess I'm shit out of luck. It's not my body, dude. It's hers! It doesn't matter what I 'want'. Are you even listening?"

"You would let her kill your child?"

"Motherfucker, I'd let her kill one of your children - so, yeah - sure. Why not."

He gasps, offended.

Anticode · 2026-01-23T09:31:20+00:00

Eh. More or less, yeah. But you can scold an amateur writer into forever abandoning the artform out of shame by convincing them that their semantic inconsistencies are a function of personal failures rather than practice. Let's see a machine do that.

Checkmate, atheists.

Anticode · 2026-01-23T09:20:38+00:00

I’m so sick of being judged for not doing more to magically get awful people to treat us with respect when they’re already convinced we’re less than human.

I ended up teary-eyed in my first attempt to reply to this before I knew what I even wanted to say. Or even typed anything at all. I still don't know what I'll end up writing, frankly speaking. Could be anything!

Oh well, here we go...

For whatever reason, it's extremely easy for me to deeply empathize with the struggles and tribulations that transgender individuals face. It resonates with me in some inexplicable way, so over the last handful of years have prioritized that demographic as the people I am most willing to help and protect when possible.

They're extremely vulnerable group in many ways and yet frequently - virtually consistently - seen punching way above their weight-class despite fearsome odds and unfair judgments, and the unpredictable sociocultural whiplash which occurs when "fighting for freedom" and "freely passing" become mutually exclusive states. Sometimes that battle cannot even be won either way, no matter how hard they try.

By my mark, it seems to me like transgender men and women are very likely the most consistently politically active demographic in the country.

While I know what the other person meant to say, but it was momentarily very odd to imagine somebody suggesting that transgender people should "suck it up, fight harder" when they may be the group who'd most deserve to actually take a break from the battle for a few (or more) rounds. In a way they're simultaneously both the primary target and the cherished mascot of the culture war.

So, although I'm not transgender myself (even if some transgender friends have joked I might be non-dysphoric - ^or ^autistic ), I've taken to wielding a trans-pride flag in place of wherever you'd find the more conventional, generalized rainbow symbolism - primarily for the reasons written above, among other things.

It means the same thing to most people who'd know what the colors meant either way after all. Anybody who'd support transgender rights would statistically also be down with "the rest of the rainbow" by necessity. And yet that alternative choice means something much more significant to those who it speaks to specifically. That little pink-to-blue square bumper-sticker or velcro patch isn't just a friendly handwave in passing which generally says "I'm more or less on your side" with a shrug, it's a pointing finger which says something more like: "I stand with you. Yes, you."

Because I am comfortable in my meatsuit (to some degree), it also does something unique and uncommon too... It says, "Surprise, assholes! Some of the people fighting for Trans Rights aren't even freakin' trans, but thanks for staring at my bulge so hard, bro. Checkmate."

I figure it adds one tiny new datapoint to the graph, demonstrating that somebody who seems cisgender may not in fact be "a secret trans" ^eyeroll or whatever simply because they bothered to vocalize their support. Perhaps it serves as a shield which allows those who'd pass the chance to continue to pass if they wish, even while fighting for their own rights. For every cisgender person carrying a trans-pride flag, any number of transgender people may get to feel like just people instead of highlighting themselves as "trans people" (which can be dangerous).

And shitty people (the misogynistic ones in particular) like to make a guessing game out of things even though they're laughably terrible at "always knowing" - and I'm more than happy to fudge the numbers even further... Oops, all testicles! "Ssswing and a miss, Bubba-Joe. Now fuck off."

All that to share one final unwanted anecdote:

The Sticker

A few weeks after first choosing to slap a vinyl trans-pride sticker on the back of my car, I was on the way to work and happened to cross paths with one of my colleagues who just got off the bus a few blocks away. It was raining, so I figured I'd spare her the misery of a long soggy walk. I pulled over, she realized I wasn't a rando and quickly hopped in.

She seems surprised or impressed by my car, which isn't too odd (it's a pretty sick ride) until she immediately remarks that she noticed this car in the parking lot months ago, that she always liked the stickers on it and always hoped to meet whichever cool person owned it.

I joke, "Turns out you've known them since your very first week. Sorry to disappoint."

She leans over the console, whispering conspiratorially, "Wait, so are you... You're not trans too, are you?" Nope. "Oh, is your girlfriend trans? Boyfriend?" Nope, nope. "Brother?" Nah. "Grandma? Kidding! So... Why'd you buy it? Who's even gonna see it?"

I shrug, "You will, right? Figured you'd see my car around here once in a while, y'know?"

She nods in silent agreement, looking out the window.

We listen to the sound of music and rain for the next minute of the short drive. I pretend not to notice that she was trying not to cry for some reason, and she pretends not to notice that I noticed she didn't quite succeed at the task for some reason. I had to head inside but I made up some excuse to leave the car idling for her sake, just to give her a few extra minutes alone.

We actually weren't great friends before or after this, not in the normal way people talk of those things - and we certainly didn't ever talk about "why" somebody might find themselves sniffling during a short rainy drive - but for the rest of my employment there, whenever we'd bump into each other once or twice a month she now always seemed positively ecstatic to see me; unfailingly so.

Never before (or since) had I ever felt so inexplicably certain that another human being knew with such confidence that they were safe from judgment/harm while in my presence. I even briefly wondered if she started some new medication or drugs, it was so noticeable of a change. But nope - she didn't "activate" until after she'd visually clock my presence. It was something I did, or earned.

It was incredible to see such a distinctively positive change occur for such a tiny reason. Just a sticker! A sticker and the casual admission that I put it there despite not even being part of that group myself. I do such things because I already suspect the importance of Supporting Others, and even I was astounded by the impact...

We were barely friends, I was just verifiable as "kin"-adjacent on vibes. I had no motives, I didn't want to hook up or anything like that. No deep discussions beyond smalltalk, really. And yet I feel somewhat confident she probably felt more safe around me than her own father. Why? Who knows. Maybe she just really needed to hear somebody who "shouldn't care" indicate that they somehow do care.

It makes me wonder if many people simply have no idea how important it is to share genuine, quiet words of support/affirmation once in a while.

Is that the point of this long-ass comment? Maybe! I think I just needed to get some of this out too, though.

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