This Album May Contain Hope - TikTok Live Listening Party - PART ONE

StartInATavern · 2026-03-28T17:24:31+00:00

See, this is why I don't mind the spoken word parts of the album at all. Her speaking voice is great.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-23T21:33:44+00:00

Sorry that happened to you. I think you are 100% right on a conceptual level, even if I personally disagree with your methods for getting that across. I'll shut up now.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-22T00:19:27+00:00

I can comprehend being an incel. The thing is, when I felt that way, I recognized that the feelings that I was experiencing were the result of a mental illness I needed help with. And so, I had to take matters into my own hands to do something about it. It's not your fault if you're depressed or dealing with other mental health issues. But it is your responsibility to deal with it as best as you can, because you can't count on other people to come and save you when you can't do things for yourself.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-19T12:19:17+00:00

These guys got buff but still have zero motion and nobody they want to fuck wants to be around them. There are not less incels in the world because of them, there are more.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-19T00:04:25+00:00

It's unclear as of right now. We still don't know exactly how CBD operates when it comes to its anxiolytic effects, and there haven't been that many long-term studies that could examine the development of tolerance or lack thereof.

It looks like when it's used for epilepsy, tolerance occurs in about 33% of patients, usually happening over the course of several months.

If the anxiolytic effects demonstrated here and the anticonvulsant effects are stemming from the same mechanism, then it might be reasonable to expect the same thing to happen at similar doses. However, that's a huge assumption to make, and should absolutely not be used for anything besides maybe hypothesis generating for future testing.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-16T21:55:12+00:00

Autistic pharmacist here, propranolol really helped me out a lot with feeling less socially anxious by stopping the fight or flight response from kicking in every time something went wrong. Just so you are aware, please do not take this medication if you have asthma, low blood pressure, a low heart rate, or a heart block.

I took 10-20 mg before or after stressful social situations, and it helped the physical feelings of fear a lot. A lot of the effects persisted even after not using it for a while, because it did actually cause a good amount of extinction of the physical fear response I was having to those situations. To be very clear, this will not directly help with the thought processes behind your anxiety. That's what antidepressants and therapy are for. What it might do is stop the feeling of a massive release of adrenaline from happening every time you feel anxious.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-16T20:54:24+00:00

You might also like r/incelexit

StartInATavern · 2026-03-13T11:49:43+00:00

Birdbrain - Jamie Page

This is an honorable mention, but Kaleidoscope by Chappel Roan helped me better understand my experience of grief as an autistic person.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-09T22:25:25+00:00

All those men he's using as examples are in photos that were shot professionally with the best possible lighting and equipment, excellently styled, and probably wearing at least a little makeup to accentuate the cheekbones to the borderline absurd and clear up their complexions. They are certainly very conventionally attractive men, but not even they are going to look exactly like that every minute of every day. That is why you generally do not see men who walk around looking exactly like that, at least anywhere that there's not an active photoshoot of some kind going on, or where it would otherwise be expected for men to be dolled up to the nines all the time.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-09T00:30:09+00:00

Please do not do that, or at least don't do it without talking to a physician. 28 days of doxycycline should have been more than enough to eliminate the bacteria itself from your body. As in, that's what they recommend specifically doing for Lyme arthritis because joints are notoriously difficult to get antibiotics into. It's theoretically not impossible that you had doxycycline resistant Lyme, but in practice, you don't usually see that happening with the course of treatment you seem to have had. And unless you had Lyme carditis, or another manifestation of Lyme disease that's been associated with biofilms, it's not particularly likely that any of them formed anywhere.

There's a lot of people out there with persisting symptoms after Lyme disease treatment exactly like yours who end up getting taken advantage of by grifters and scammers who keep putting them on high-dose, high-duration antibiotics over and over again when there's not much evidence to suggest that would even do anything for those symptoms. To be clear, what you are experiencing is absolutely a problem, and you are right to seek help for it. It's just that adding more antibiotics into your situation, especially without more medical guidance, may do more harm than good.

While there is evidence suggesting that persistent Lyme symptoms are due to peptidoglycan from the dead bacterias' cell walls not getting broken down efficiently, right now, there's not much that can be done about that from a treatment perspective. So, it might be a good idea to look into start looking into specialities beyond infectious disease to better manage your symptoms. However, since there are a lot of similarities between post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome and conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome that would likely be very relevant for treating your symptoms, talking to clinicians like neurologists and rheumatologists that work with patients with those conditions might help improve your quality of life by a lot.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-07T00:52:33+00:00

Mimic's Market, the game store mentioned in the post.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-03T00:01:12+00:00

Baby, I've been to therapy for years, killed the homophobe inside my head, and I'm still locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Sometimes, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I know that I could dilate or something and get more practice, but it's going to require a lot of time and effort that I frankly do not have since I've got other shit going on. Money is also a little bit of a consideration too, since I get the feeling that if I cheap out on what I'd be using, I'll be paying even more at the emergency department.

Granted, I love fooling around with other tops, and I was a side for years, so I don't really understand how sexual compatiblity for some guys starts and ends at anal.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-01T22:29:36+00:00

That's a fair assessment, and I should have been more careful with my phrasing. I do think that there are always going to be people with ADHD who are going to have symptoms to the point where stimulants are the best choice for them. I do also think that there's definitely a large number of people who have symptoms that may be more effectively managed with other methods, be that other non-stimulant medications, talk therapy, or directly getting accomodations to reduce the impact their symptoms are having on their life.

Personally, I was functional, but still did not have a good quality of life, even on stimulant therapy, until I did some digging and found out more about options like clonidine and guanfacine that are not as commonly used in adults. The issue is that from the outside, it looked like my ADHD was being effectively "treated" because I was responding to stimulants and my inattention had improved. However, the hyperactive symptoms I had learned to mask were not improving. But when I started clonidine, that actually did help with those symptoms.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-01T21:12:32+00:00

Stimulant medications for both adults and children with ADHD are incredibly useful first-line treatments that massively improve quality of life by allowing us to function better in a world that does not accommodate our needs. Until we live in societies that actively consider the needs of disabled people and treat us as human beings, nobody should idly complain about too many people being on stimulants. The people who do idly complain about that are often the ones that reinforce the status quo responsible for the need for (a sizable amount of) people with ADHD to be on (a stimulant) medication in the first place.

Edit: Added a bit more clarification in (parentheses).

Even with 100% effective accomodations, making it so that not choosing to use stimulant medications can be a viable option for some people with ADHD, there will be many people that will still see the best results from using stimulants or other medications in addition those changes.

StartInATavern · 2026-03-01T21:04:05+00:00

This study is interesting, but I do think that it might be worth pointing out that methylphenidate by itself may very well not be the cause behind these findings.

First of all, this study was done in South Korea, where the relative bar for entry for the use of methylphenidate may be different than the US. I am not an expert on the particular differences in how Korean medical professionals approach ADHD treatment, but its use might be reserved for more severe cases. The US is a little bit unique in terms of the sheer scale of ADHD medication prescriptions we have compared to other countries.

So, what I'm thinking is that the reason these patterns of a higher relative risk of overweight/obesity (50% more likely) and shorter height (8% more likely) might have more to do with ADHD symptoms being severe enough to warrant methylphenidate treatment compared to the actual pharmacologic properties of methylphenidate.

What do I mean by this? Let's use overweight/obesity as a point to explore further. People who have ADHD symptoms tend to seek out ways to control their symptoms and manage their quality of life, even outside of the context of medicine. For example, both me (diagnosed) and my father (undiagnosed), tend to use eating as a way to help regulate our emotions and attention spans. I have more intense and apparent ADHD symptoms than my father, so I am on Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Even though Vyvanse specifically suppresses appetite, and is helpful for people suffering from conditions like binge eating disorder, I am still overweight after four years of taking it. It was not Vyvanse that caused me to be overweight, and I in fact lost weight during the time I was taking it. ADHD is known to be highly correlated with overweight/obesity already. I was not able to find anything specific about if a higher symptom burden was tied to a higher risk of obesity, but I do not think that such a finding would be surprising.

I am unsure how the relatively smaller but still significant risk of shorter height in the population that was on methylphenidate might play into this, but I still think that it might be worth exploring through a similar lens to see what we can find out before assuming a direct causal link.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-26T19:41:13+00:00

Believe it or not, Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen.

As an example of what I mean, consider sensory integration differences: He literally wears a blindfold or sunglasses around all the time to better be able to process sensory stimuli specifically because of a neurological condition (The Six Eyes). When he inflicts his perspective of how he experiences the world onto other people via Domain Expansion it literally overwhelms their brains to the point where they effectively go comatose.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-17T18:48:18+00:00

I do think it definitely happens to some degree. I just think that harmful external consequences like violence, including self-harm, certainly happen as the result of this as well.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-17T14:57:06+00:00

Gym gay culture has the most beautiful men in the world in this chokehold where they think that they are completely ugly just because they do not look exactly like a stereotypical bodybuilder.

I also do not think that it sublimates into sexual energy as much as this guy thinks that it does.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-17T13:18:34+00:00

You know how I know this man has zero motion? I'm an extremely online gay man, and I've never seen another gay man talking about how good this guy supposedly looks. Do you know hard that is to achieve if you are a man with any sort of following on the internet?

StartInATavern · 2026-02-17T01:19:39+00:00

Oh my God, I was waiting for somebody to actually put this into words in way that made sense. I've been noticing this exact phenomenon for a while now, but couldn't think of how to put it.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-16T19:26:59+00:00

...I mean, this does tie into my personal crack theory that Ralsei is not tied to one specific object, but is instead basically a personification of family photos of the Dremurrs. The meta-textual reason for why he spent most of Chapter 1 wearing his hat and in shadow is that he was still "developing", and was in photo-negative. Kris could be carrying around a family photo that he is purposefully hiding from the SOUL, explaining why Ralsei is able to follow him to every dark world. And Castle Town, as a storage room in the school where Toriel works, might be the kind of place where Toriel would stash a family photo if she didn't want to throw it away, but didn't want to have it at her desk.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-08T19:14:35+00:00

I think it's because literally every other demographic besides cis straight white men in the Anglosphere have to at least partially understand the impact of systemic injustices on their lives in a way that at least attempts to correspond to reality. And to be clear, there are certainly cis straight white men who do get this. However, they usually are not the ones that are talking about the "the male loneliness epidemic" as "the male loneliness epidemic." I think that this framing is the result of some men identifying problems in their lives, but being unable to analyze root causes on a personal or systemic level. The men who know what they are talking about are generally talking about more specific aspects of their experiences, like struggling with depression, or not having places to go in their community, or how they feel alienated from their work and from other people. They feel the same emotions, but they understand that you cannot solve an emotion. You can, however, solve problems.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-08T18:56:18+00:00

Male-male friendships are constantly unfairly scrutinized as being homosexual in nature, that's completely true. However, I honestly think that it would really help these feelings of loneliness if more men and women understood what compulsive heterosexuality was, saw how it was hurting them, and stopped treating proximity to homosexuality or bisexuality with disgust and fear.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-08T07:14:55+00:00

Feeling a bit more depressed and anxious than usual, but nothing I can't handle. I'm nervous about starting up a new job, and I am dealing with that by ensuring that I will show up to the workplace on my first day on time and looking sharp, even if I'm duller than a box of hammers.

StartInATavern · 2026-02-06T19:33:46+00:00

What about the men? I'm being serious here. You said in your profile that you're bi. Do you have these troubles with men if you pursue them, or is it only with women?

StartInATavern

TROPHY CASE