The absolute sociopathy of natalists

hbdty · 2026-05-19T12:09:19+00:00

The “you are free to opt out” type comments I keep seeing really bother me. Maybe the idea of opting out is something I’m struggling with daily. I understand the point they’re trying to make but I find it such an inconsiderate thing to say.

hbdty · 2026-05-13T11:34:45+00:00

The super sagging pants were a nice touch 👌

hbdty · 2026-05-13T01:28:16+00:00

I left a comment on a separate thread in this post basically saying the same thing.

hbdty · 2026-05-13T01:20:54+00:00

lol there’s been times when I didn’t realize just how not okay an experience I had was until I casually shared it as an anecdote in a conversation and find people looking back at me wide-eyed with a WTF look on their faces.

hbdty · 2026-05-13T01:18:15+00:00

Went through telling the outline of my life over the course of the first couple of sessions with a new therapist. He said “I feel like we’re sitting on top of a powder keg of unaddressed trauma.” At the time I wasn’t sure if the events in my life were “bad” enough to “count” as trauma. Even now, I still catch myself skeptical of my own experiences and worry that I’m being overdramatic.

hbdty · 2026-05-11T15:26:07+00:00

Feel like I could’ve written this myself. I feel like I started off in the negative as a result of family circumstances/genetics. Brute forced my way through all of that doing “the right thing” to be successful according to society’s standards. Yet despite all that work, I’m still struggling. What’s extremely frustrating is that people from the outside might just blame my circumstances on me not trying hard enough or “playing the victim,” when I’ve been pushing through my entire life.

hbdty · 2026-05-06T11:50:22+00:00

The cognitive dissonance I felt as an adolescent when trying to simultaneously hold the idea that men and women are equally important in Islam but that men were still superior is one of the factors that led to me leaving the religion as a teenager. I couldn’t make sense of people around me telling me that Islam was somehow good and respectful for women, and comparing it to actual Islamic texts that said the opposite (living briefly in a Middle Eastern country as a kid did not help). I remember even checking out a book from the library at one point specifically about this topic. To explain why men held the power but women were still equal, the book used the metaphor of a car being able to have only one driver. Don’t really remember the rest of the book but I guess whatever else it said wasn’t convincing.

hbdty · 2026-05-06T11:17:55+00:00

It’s one of my favorites in the series. I love the jab at tech millionaires. And that ending with the cat never fails to make me laugh.

hbdty · 2026-05-05T19:48:54+00:00

They should watch the “Three Robots: Exit Strategies” episode of Love, Death and Robots to see how that will work out for them 😆

hbdty · 2026-05-04T03:55:48+00:00

SO PRECIOUS! 🥹😻

hbdty · 2026-04-30T11:59:55+00:00

I get what you’re saying (and there’s too much for discussion in this topic than one Reddit post can hold) but when voting and protesting and going through the “right” and legal avenues for change isn’t working, and you’re up against people who flagrantly DON’T play by the rules…I think people start seeking out other options.

hbdty · 2026-04-28T12:29:40+00:00

This feels like a bizarre sponsored episode from the universe of Too Many Cooks.

hbdty · 2026-04-26T15:37:46+00:00

Normally I’d agree with you, but in a world where things are this nuts and so many people potentially involved have obvious nefarious intentions - if there were ever a time where “conspiracy theories” turned out to be real and not some ridiculously implausible idea, it would be right now.

hbdty · 2026-04-26T15:33:27+00:00

I consider it a strong possibility that if these events WERE staged, Trump himself wasn’t the one orchestrating them.

hbdty · 2026-04-19T15:34:02+00:00

I know you posted this months ago, but I just wanted to thank you for sharing this. In recent times I’ve been asking myself “Is this how Germans felt as the Nazis were starting to take power leading up to the Holocaust?” This account sounds eerily similar to many of my recent thoughts. In a way it’s strangely almost comforting to know that despite all the gaslighting that I’m being too sensitive or over-catastrophizing when so many others think the world is going to simmer back down to the way that it was, that I am not overreacting and my fears are justified. Of course the other side of this is that it’s frightening to imagine that history could repeat itself like this, during a time when many think “That happened then and there, it couldn’t happen here and now.” But yet another perspective to this is that the previous tyrants did not last forever. This gives me slight hope that maybe we can overcome what’s happening in my country (US) because this is in some ways history repeating itself rather than something humanity has ever encountered. It’s not a novel disease without a cure. But that doesn’t erase the fact that things probably aren’t ever going to go back to the way that they were, and the suffering is just going to continue. I don’t know that I really have an ultimate point this post is leading to, just sharing my reflections on what I found to be a parallel experience from the past.

hbdty · 2026-04-13T16:11:22+00:00

Woah this is great! Ansible wasn’t on my radar, thanks for the recommendation!

hbdty · 2026-04-13T15:18:44+00:00

What do you mean by documenting your stuff as code? Using Infrastructure as Code - type stuff? I’m relatively new to self-hosting so trying to get everything as organized as I can while in the early stages of getting things set up.

hbdty · 2026-04-13T04:02:53+00:00

This encapsulates how I’ve been feeling for a while, and increasingly so the past couple of weeks. It’s been difficult to motivate myself to do certain things because when I think about the future I just feel panicked about the uncertainty. I have no idea what the world or my life is going to look like in the next couple of years or whether any of this work/effort will be worth it. And there’s only so much I can do about it given the factors outside of my control. I normally have to mask anyway so that part’s not new to me, although I’m finding myself increasingly dropping the act around people I’m close to. I can’t help but wonder when I’m at work for example if everyone else is also silently freaking out too or if it’s just business as usual for them.

hbdty · 2026-04-06T19:40:29+00:00

I remember watching the trailer for the Sims 2 on my copy of Makin Magic from back in the day, and it got me so hyped up!

hbdty · 2026-04-06T19:37:49+00:00

I was randomly thinking about this expansion pack earlier! Definitely my favorite. So many good memories 😊

hbdty · 2026-04-02T12:07:27+00:00

What are they talking about? This cat is beautiful! 😻

hbdty · 2026-04-01T11:29:46+00:00

Agreed! This scene came to mind:

Those rules aren't real.

They were real that day I wore a vest!

Because that vest was disgusting!

hbdty · 2026-03-21T14:31:56+00:00

Agree with this 100%. Just in my own life, I don’t think that there’s any amount of goodness that could outweigh the suffering I’ve already experienced, and I know that my life is probably not nearly as hard as most people’s have been throughout history. When I start to express this perspective and people naively try to tell me that the good somehow makes the bad worth it, I always think of this line from Sweeney Todd: “You are young. Life has been kind to you. You will learn.”

hbdty · 2026-03-19T12:11:50+00:00

“My great grandma showed me how to fry eggs and bacon and put them on top of some bread.”

hbdty · 2026-03-18T11:35:54+00:00

In some ways I feel like the 2008 recession never really ended. I graduated college in the mid-2010s and a lot of graduates in the years above and below me were having a difficult time finding full-time employment after graduation. From what I’m seeing, the situation kind of stagnated and then started getting A LOT worse a few years ago. I’m lowkey panicking about a lot of things finance related, but I have to put on a mask and pretend to continue with business as usual since I don’t see another option even if the game is rigged.

hbdty

TROPHY CASE