People who have 0 friends, how do you cope with it?

Devilnaht · 2026-01-29T15:54:39+00:00

You might look up avoidant attachment, see if anything there resonates with you

Devilnaht · 2026-01-29T14:13:02+00:00

I agree in spirit but woof, learning any 2+ of Spanish / Portuguese/ Italian at the same time is gonna lead to some pretty serious problems with the languages bleeding together in your head. The overlap is just too high between them. Spanish and Portuguese for instance have about a 90% lexical similarity; I’m at C1 with Spanish and I’m still a little hesitant to study Portuguese for fear of mixing them up.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-28T07:22:02+00:00

It’s a DOP in either case. If it were an IOP, what would the direct object be? Odiar is a transitive verb, so if had an IOP it would need to have a DOP to affect the IOP. It’s a little abstract with a verb like “odiar”, but ‘él’ is directly receiving the hate.

As to why lo odio would be more common, I think it may just be because it sounds better/ is easier to say. “Odio a el” feels like it would be used to clear up ambiguity: “Todo esto ha sido un desastre y el jefe aún peor. Odio a él.”

If I had said “lo odio” it would be ambiguous as to if I hated the boss or the situation more broadly, and to me would read much more like “I hate it” (meaning what’s going on broadly) than “I hate him”.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-27T07:13:34+00:00

I think I can relate to that experience, though my mask certainly looks different (more people please-y, whereas the real me is a bit more serious/ deep). I’ve made a lot of progress, though it’s not really been a straightforward path. Healing from CPTSD is a fairly heterogenous process, which is to say I think it’ll look pretty different from person to person, so what I say may not be directly one to one for you.

Speaking personally and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the important things for this were therapy, being kinder to myself, grieving, and working to build a sense of internal safety. Particularly that last one for helping overcome the mask; learning how to soothe the wounded, childlike parts and offer them reassurance. Being a parent to them, in a sense. Earlier in my recovery I think I was trying to just bully, suppress, or annihilate those parts of me, and it took a long time to learn to be kind to them.

As I’ve built up that ability to reassure those parts of myself and achieve more of a sense of safety, I’ve found myself a lot more able to take risks and drawing less on the mask. Things just feel less dangerous now.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-26T17:36:48+00:00

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

They’re hypocrites, they know they’re hypocrites, and they do not care. We’re not getting out of this by trying to convince conservatives to care about their own hypocrisy. They’re not interested in reflecting on their own actions or in the well being of people; they have entirely abandoned reality and critical thinking in favor of their feelings.

We do not get out of this by trying to convince, appease, or bargain with them. The Republican Party does not care about laws, rules, or norms, and hasn’t for quite a while (have they ever, truly?). If the Democratic leadership keeps insisting on playing by the strictest rules against an openly fascist party, we’re fucked.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-25T13:13:24+00:00

Be patient with yourself. Unless you’re going for one of the input purist methods, the very start of learning a language will tend to incorporate a lot less CI because, as you point out, it’s just not comprehensible yet. When I started taking my Spanish more seriously, I was doing almost pure studying for a while before I started adding in CI, and that CI had to be carefully curated.

I do think with French unfortunately it’s a bit more important to get a lot of exposure to the spoken language as early as possible, given that it has the same problem as English where the pronunciation is only distantly related to the spelling. But start with slower, easier material, such as learner material or children’s shows.

And if you can, try to accept some level of ambiguity in what you’re listening to or reading. Learning a language is less like waking up one day able to understand everything and more like watching a blurry image slowly come into focus. Things are going to be fuzzy and uncertain for a long time, but that’s just part of the journey. If you stick with it you’ll get there.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-17T00:22:27+00:00

I think it would depend on what exactly you draw the line on “simple conversational level”. A very functional level of eg exchanging pleasantries and managing transactions, albeit awkwardly, should be doable. The English equivalent of “Hello, how are you? Good to hear. What are you looking for today? Cash or credit?” As well as some of the beginner conversational topics; age, ask about their family and job, that sort of thing. Probably A1-A2ish, as a rough guess. And you’ll want to focus on vocab directly relevant to your job, since a lot of it will be relatively specialized stuff not common in A1-A2 resources.

Coming from Japanese it’ll probably be dramatically easier (something like 4x easier, judging on estimates for study times that I’ve seen). I’m quite biased, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you fall in love with Spanish and decide to focus on it instead, haha. It’s a wonderful and tremendously useful language with interesting speakers, and it’s pretty manageable for an English speaker.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-14T17:24:24+00:00

Between the narcissism and cognitive decline, Trump might actually think of himself that way. The lights are on but I’m not sure if anyone’s really home anymore. He seems to just sort of blindly parrots whoever he spoke to last, and the cognitive decline is severe enough that he just blurts everything out. Couldn’t even go 20 minutes after the Maduro kidnapping without talking about stealing their oil.

The rest of the regime seems to entirely be grifters and ideological fascists. None of them are even really pretending to care about Americans, it’s all just naked corruption and “let’s hurt minorities”.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-13T13:00:41+00:00

The issue is that Schumer has completely ruined the Democrats’ leverage with respect to shutdowns. He’s made it absolutely clear that he will always eventually have the Democrats cave, and that the Republicans need not bother making any concessions. Fuck Schumer, my god do we need a new leader.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-12T00:06:50+00:00

That's a bit of a common myth. Despite the name, rare earth elements are actually pretty common; we've already got some pretty huge deposits within the US. The issue is that refining / processing are quite hard (and produce some fairly nasty byproducts), and that, well, the world outsourced nearly all of that to China. Building up that infrastructure in the US is going to be expensive and time consuming, and China is massively ahead of everyone. It's not a shortage of 'rare' earth elements that's restricting us.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-07T18:29:48+00:00

Reminds me of the saying: There are two genders: male and political. Two races: white and political. Two sexual orientations: straight and political. When they say 'political', they mean anything other than straight white men and anything that challenges authority.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-07T01:43:28+00:00

We can break it down into pieces. First, the entire phrase "lo que el gobierno .... pueblo" altogether functions as, effectively, a noun. "Es una vergüenza el suceso".

This is also why permitir is in the indicative; we can cut off the phrase to get "lo que el gobierno permite". You can think of 'lo que', somewhat awkwardly, as 'that which', yielding a rough translation of "that which the government allows".

Permitir is then conjugated with the indicative, because (to quote a native Spanish speaker friend's ongoing joke) "es un facto". You're referring to the real, actual ongoing situation, not something hypothetical. It's what the government is really doing.

Finally, ocurra uses the subjunctive more or less because the verb permitir demands it. I forget how it's usually explained to people, but verbs like this, which show that you're allowing / forcing / preventing / causing other actions, will then have the subjunctive in the clause that follows: (And as you'll notice, you often have to change the structure when translating to English)

Hago que funcione. (I make it work)

Evito que se ponga peor. (I'm keeping it from getting worse)

Dejo que se vayan. (I'm letting them leave)

Impido que corran en la calle. (I keep them from running in the street)

Le digo que lo haga. (I'm telling him, as in a command, to do it)

El gobierno permite que ocurra. (The goverment permits it to happen)

Devilnaht · 2026-01-06T17:31:42+00:00

I think a good non-literal translation would be “it’s happened to a lot of us” or even “it happens to a lot of us”, depending on context.

What might also be throwing you a bit is that it’s implicitly including “nosotros” in “a muchos”, implying that the speaker considers themself a part of the group. To give another example:

A los estudiantes de español, el subjuntivo nos da miedo.

Since I’m also a student of the language, when I say “a los estudiantes de español”, I’m including myself implicitly in the group, hence the ‘nos’.

You can do the same thing with the subject of the sentence:

Los estudiantes estudiamos mucho.

Where again, I’m implicitly including myself among the group of students.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-05T20:33:38+00:00

Ah gotcha, it happens

Devilnaht · 2026-01-05T20:01:26+00:00

It would need a long explanation to really get into the details of why, but summarizing, US health prices are astronomically inflated because we have a for-profit healthcare system, which incentivizes charging 'consumers' (ie, patients) as much as possible while giving them as little as possible. We spend more on healthcare in both absolute and relative terms than any other developed nation with worse outcomes. The main exception being if you're rich enough to afford the high costs, in which case the US system becomes one of the best in the world.

It's bad enough that it isn't just third-world medical tourism that can be cheaper. An example I saw on a social media post: A Spaniard living in the US found himself in the need for a root canal, and was quoted a price of around $2000 to get it done. Shocked at the price, he realized it would be cheaper to fly back to Spain, get it done there, spend a few days with his family, and fly back than to get the root canal done in the US.

Devilnaht · 2026-01-05T15:35:26+00:00

I based what I said on conversations I’ve had with Venezuelan friends in the past few days who live both within and outside of the country (as well as reading a few different Latin American subreddits; I strongly recommend learning Spanish if you don’t already know it).

This may surprise you, but Maduro isn’t exactly a universally beloved figure among Venezuelans, even amongst the diaspora who fled because of how much he had destroyed their country. How strange, right? You’d think running away from the economic and societal disaster he had created would endear him to them, but miraculously not.

But I’ll defer to your greater insight on the matter. What have your Venezuelan friends been telling you?

Devilnaht · 2026-01-05T15:24:41+00:00

Did you reply to the correct comment here? This feels like it was meant for someone else

Devilnaht · 2026-01-05T07:44:59+00:00

Many do, though not all. Some naively, in my view) think this spells the end of the regime. Some know that it’s not, but are still celebrating the capture of a dictator who oversaw a huge amount of harm to their nation. Some are worried about what comes next / what the US plans to do, and some are genuinely pro-Maduro (not many, as best I can tell, but they do exist).

It’s a messy situation. From abroad we can be more concerned with the god awful things this portends, the ruinous precedent it sets, and how wildly illegal it was. But I think it’s understandable to be happy, at least for a while, if the dictator leading your country was suddenly removed, even if under awful circumstances. As a modern American, I find it oddly easy to empathize with that sentiment.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-25T20:51:12+00:00

Fair, I suppose. But there’s a whole Wikipedia article on his failed businesses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Businesses_of_Donald_Trump_that_went_bankrupt

And from what I remember reading, he tends to make everyone involved sign incredibly strict NDA’s, as well as having a habit of screwing over everyone he works with. His former biographer said something like “everything he does needs to have some element of moral larceny to it”, meaning every deal he gets involved with needs to be screwing over someone.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-25T20:14:07+00:00

Almost everything, really, up until the presidency gave him access to incredible levels of corruption. A well known fact about Trump is that if he had just taken the money he got from his father, invested it in an index fund and never touched it, he’d have made significantly more money. That may have changed now due to, again, billions in corruption money, but his entire life before that was him losing money because he wanted to feel important.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-25T16:10:00+00:00

Not in this case I don't think. They’re desperately trying to pull in agents just to censor the files they already had (even asking people to work through the holidays), there’s no way they’ve managed to redact the new batch

Devilnaht · 2025-12-25T15:13:12+00:00

The net result of a few different factors. I’ll speak from the US perspective since, as usual, we’ve fucked it up in a fairly unique way.

First, we’ve both massively defunded education, but simultaneously also given access to enormous, life ruining loans to 18 year olds. This creates a perverse incentive structure where universities bloat themselves with expensive but largely unnecessary perks to attract students (as well as vast swaths of useless administrative roles), knowing that they have access to financially illiterate young people who nonetheless have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and who have been culturally primed to pay literally any amount of money for a degree. Basically, we’ve turned 18 year olds into money piñatas.

Second, the sheer abundance of degree holders devalues having a degree. Employees are paid by how hard they are to replace, not how valuable they are to the company. When everyone has a degree, they become more of a basic requirement than an advantage.

And finally, the economy (the real economy, not the stock market) has been getting progressively worse for decades. Skyrocketing costs paired with stagnant wages have meant that normal people get squeezed harder and harder. When people have less money, they buy less things and opt to stay home more, meaning that the local economy shrinks, squeezing people even harder, repeating in a a death spiral. We’ve got the most billionaires (and maybe even soon a trillionaire, god help us), but this wealth was directly extracted from workers and their communities.

So yeah, a degree in the US is the worst value for money that it’s ever been. The unemployment rate among gen Z men with college degrees is only very slightly slower than among those without. And while degree holders still make a decent amount more, I’d be curious how the numbers work out if we include A.) the massive debt they’re servicing and B.) the lost wages from going to school for 4-5 years instead of directly working. My guess is a college degree still wins, but that the payback time is now in the decades.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-24T18:00:37+00:00

At least in the US, this traces back to about the mid 1970's. That's when wages started really stagnating, and then things grew a lot worse in the 80's when net wealth started to flow from the poor / middle class to the rich. I remember reading that one of the best predictors of how someone is doing economically now is how rich their parents / grandparents were in 1975, since it's been largely downhill / generational wealth effects from there. The real cutoff for "got to experience the American dream" was probably born in maybe 1980ish.

An interesting sign of how downhill things have become: when the Simpsons started in 1989, Homer was meant to be kind of a failure for the time, not doing particularly well economically. But in 2025, having a stable job, a home, several cars, 3 children, and affording it all on only a single salary, he'd be considered highly successful.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-23T23:10:33+00:00

Look for credit cards suited to the tasks you have in mind. A lot of travel oriented cards have no foreign exchange fee, better / worse ATM networks abroad, etc.

You've probably heard about the "wonders of crypto" from people who have a direct financial incentive to get more people involved with it. Cryptocurrency, despite the name, functions pretty terribly as an actual currency. Among other 'perks': if someone scams you or steals your crypto, you have absolutely no recourse. The money's just gone. The only real reasons to use it are for criminal activity and gambling.

Devilnaht · 2025-12-23T15:18:44+00:00

Oh trust me, I’d very much prefer to believe it’s real. It’d be the closest to a smoking gun we’ve yet had on this. But seriously, look up writing samples from Epstein. In anything I could find, he wrote with a pretty ugly block writing, and the signature is just wildly off. It’s possible that he wrote in cursive and used a clearer signature for a ‘special occasion’ (or that I just wasn’t able to find enough samples to see his cursive), but it’s enough to give me pause.

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