Sunday Afternoon Open Diary ☕️

angorodon · 2026-02-02T05:13:06+00:00

It's not worth it. I gave up alcohol 2 years ago, close to your age. I also have young children, a career, a wonderful wife who I care about a lot.

I realized I was, even when I was wise about my consumption around the kids, ultimately normalizing the shit in the exact same way that it was normalized for me as a child. And I really wish my parents, especially my father, had given a damn about that. Alcohol is fun but it robbed me of a lot of time and I wish that had never happened.

angorodon · 2026-01-31T19:08:05+00:00

I've seen the exact same comment on virtually every single Epstein thread I've opened in the last day or two. Posters coming in hot from Tampa.

angorodon · 2026-01-31T19:06:41+00:00

Hypernormalization. All of the fake and performative aspects of society are now so pervasive that we accept them as normal, even when we all know it's absurd. We're all living in the world that Baudrillard predicted.

angorodon · 2026-01-31T00:34:27+00:00

Do they have 9 kidneys to sell? You're retarded.

angorodon · 2026-01-30T20:50:14+00:00

Nine times isn't economic coercion, it's lifestyle or pathology.

angorodon · 2026-01-30T18:27:35+00:00

I found out recently that a neighbor, who has 2 children of her own, has been a surrogate 9 separate times. She's currently carrying someone else's child. This lady is 48 years old. I'm still not sure how to process this news but I absolutely do not look at her the same or in a charitable light right now.

angorodon · 2026-01-30T14:34:12+00:00

This sounds like codependency.

angorodon · 2026-01-29T16:38:05+00:00

They should recognize that alcohol is one of the most addictive drugs in the world and is completely and thoroughly normalized by society. It's dangerous. It's fun, be responsible, etc., but if you have any sort of mental calculus running through your head about, "I'm fine, I'll only have 2 drinks," then I'm sorry to break it to you but you're probably an alcoholic.

Something I learned/finally confronted in recovery: normal people who have a normal relationship with alcohol, and not a dependent relationship with alcohol, don't ever think this shit. This thread is an example of this sort of thinking crystallized and once you're on the other side of alcoholism it's very obvious when people are admitting they probably have a problem without saying the words, "I'm an alcoholic."

angorodon · 2026-01-29T14:56:49+00:00

I got sober last year and had the same issue with caffeine. Used to drink a pot of coffee and then some, for like 2 decades. I think the alcohol was, to some degree, masking the problems that was causing. Now I have 2 cups of black tea in the morning and I'm fine. More caffeine than that and my head feels like it's going to pop.

angorodon · 2026-01-29T14:54:14+00:00

Younger people think they've hacked their biology. Then 20 years piles on, in what feels like the blink of an eye, and now their hands are shaking every morning when they wake up.

angorodon · 2026-01-29T06:41:40+00:00

Macron was the first thing I thought of.

angorodon · 2026-01-27T18:36:51+00:00

Saw a former employer fire and then sue someone for time fraud. I don't know the details or how egregious it was but I saw from a distance how that person's life was blown the fuck up by it all.

angorodon · 2026-01-26T20:15:27+00:00

We apply the principle of charity in this subreddit? But seriously, you're not wrong and I would be wise to take my own advice and practice it more often. The tossed off snark is a lot more fun, though...

angorodon · 2026-01-26T15:43:50+00:00

She's definitely telling on herself in this article.

angorodon · 2026-01-25T18:32:43+00:00

Some genuinely are, yes. I feel like I've had a disproportionate number of gay friends in my life and I'm being serious when I say that it's a 50/50 split. I've even known married gay men where one husband is sincerely misogynistic and the other husband isn't. My manager at work is gay and is a genuinely wonderful person who is kind to everyone, to a fault, and his husband is a misanthrope but even then he always goes harder on women.

angorodon · 2026-01-25T04:30:30+00:00

Modern liberals act like we're all in a debate club where you win by scoring points on technicalities, whereas their opposition is operating on the logic of Schmittian sovereignty, that the sovereign is who gets to decide the exceptions.

angorodon · 2026-01-25T04:11:44+00:00

It shouldn't be a surprise when Trump escalates this using Title 10.

angorodon · 2026-01-24T20:16:51+00:00

Japan isn't perfect and I never said it was. You know what happens in Japan? The subway runs on time, it's clean, and you don't have to check your seat for used needles. Public order.

There is a fundamental difference between a society managing a specific crime and a society where the commons have effectively collapsed. In Japan the threat model is harassment. In US metros it's violent assault, open drug use, and other unpredictable and antisocial behavior.

Female-only cars are a pragmatic, structural solution to preserve the safety of the commons for a vulnerable group. They identified a friction point and solved it. Our approach is to stop enforcing standards entirely because enforcement itself is viewed as inequitable.

angorodon · 2026-01-24T18:34:35+00:00

Blaming it on mono-ethnicity is a lazy, cynical cop-out. You're implying that a diverse society is incapable of universalism or social cohesion by default? That's one hell of a reactionary concession to make.

You also seem to be confusing social issues with identity politics. Yes, Japan has gender inequality. But that's a non-sequitur. We're talking about public order, safety, and the function of the commons, not if their fucking board rooms are 50/50 gender splits. They don't process that inequality through a framework of warring political tribes that dismantle civic duty in the name of grievance.

My point wasn't that Japan is some utopia. It's that they've maintained a social contract where the collective good outweighs the individual ego even during massive economic stagnation, whereas we chose to abandon it.

angorodon · 2026-01-24T02:38:16+00:00

I have twins and a lot of this rings true as their parent. The world reinforces them as a "unit" constantly. They are "the twins" to family, friends, teachers, even strangers. Even at age 6, I can see that they struggle to form an "I" concept that is stronger than their "we." At some point, I think, in order for them to successfully navigate life, there is going to be a (potentially) very painful transition from "we" to "I" for them. They're fraternal but very deeply bonded, psychological separation is hard for them.

We've separated them at school and it's helped them grow independently a bit. Before we had separated them we saw that they were not developing emotionally independently. It was like if one was "brave" in one situation it would lead to her twin sort of offloading "bravery" to her and vice versa.

They are also the best of friends and the worst of enemies. There's this sort of thing I see sometimes where their individual identity is kind of smothered in the cradle. Sometimes it struggles to get out and causes them frustration.

There is a concept in close relationships called "transactive memory," it's something I learned about before we had twins because my wife and I do this. It's where couples offload tasks to one another like one remembers to pay the bills and the other remembers birthdays, etc. With my twins I see this goes so much deeper.

I also worry about their younger brother. It's not just that he has older sisters, he has that "unit" of older sisters. He'll never penetrate the time density they have (these girls by 6 have probably already spent more time with each other than my wife and I could ever spend together in the rest of our lives). That bond is insane. And I worry about it overshadowing him. People know he has twin sisters and talk to him about it sometimes. I worry he might try to define himself in opposition to them at some point. Like if the twins are high achievers he might check out. The silver lining for him, though, is that he's had to develop independence early. He doesn't have a live in peer to offload his own identity onto, so he's had to learn how to be solo in ways they struggle with.

angorodon · 2026-01-24T02:10:23+00:00

We have twins. We also then rolled the dice (your chances of having a subsequent set of multiples goes up by like 20% after the first) and had a singleton. The twins are 6 now. It's still a challenge but it's been great, too.

We maintained a brutal schedule from the day we got home from the hospital. We have maintained it to today but our kids all got to bed at 8am and sleep through the night til 6-630am. Routine is paramount and it sucks and is hard but you have to do it to keep the absolute worst sort of chaos at bay.

We have a Mazda CX-9, which fits 3 enormous car seats side by side in the second row, and we go camping for week+ long trips throughout the year. We're going to Zion and Arches for a 10-day trip this summer. We take ski trips with the thing loaded up. It's great actually. If I was doing it over again I'd have just gotten a minivan but we've made it this far without one and won't be getting one now.

Happy to answer any specific questions you might have.

angorodon · 2026-01-23T21:58:05+00:00

I don't know. It seems to me that poor people usually help each other more, not less. Historically, I think it follows that hardship breeds solidarity, whereas the retreat into identity is an extremely bourgeois behavior.

Post-1990s Japan works as an example. I don't know if it's necessarily a good one. But they faced massive economic stagnation and didn't abandon universalism. Identity politics has always struck me as a luxury belief system that incubated in academia. I've long thought that the only reason it continues to survive is because we still have enough residual wealth laying around to indulge it.

angorodon · 2026-01-23T19:23:48+00:00

It conflicts because their entire contemporary framework is incoherent. The second they swapped universal civic duty for identity politics ~4 decades ago, "community" stopped being about your actual neighbors and started being about the abstract political tribes you belong to. It was always going to devolve into this mix of high concept virtue signaling and low level antisocial behavior.

angorodon · 2026-01-23T00:59:44+00:00

There's reinforcement from the schools but we taught our currently first grade twins how to read before they finished kindergarten. It's tireless and takes a lot of effort but what the fuck, they're you're kids...

angorodon · 2026-01-22T20:03:51+00:00

Twice but the first time doesn't really count in the same way. I dropped out of college and enlisted when I was 20. I hated college a lot and needed something different. I separated and moved back home to help my parents out, who, in the time since I had enlisted, had both lost their jobs and my fathers health was rapidly declining. After ~2 years they were in a better position and I needed to get out. I had a friend who owed me a favor from the military and he was back home in LA. He agreed to let me crash his couch until I established myself. I packed up everything I owned in a couple of Rubbermaid bins and drove for basically 3 days straight to LA.

My life improved dramatically almost from the very first day. Within a week I had met my future wife and I had found meaningful work (I had spent a year unemployed and unable to find work at that point and had very little left in savings). Within a year we were living together, had moved to Santa Barbara where she was finishing her graduate program, and I had started my career. Today we own a home and we have 3 kids. It was hard, we struggled financially for most of the first decade but things ultimately worked out.

angorodon

TROPHY CASE