Apytele

@Apytele@sh.itjust.works

I love genuine questions and people putting in the effort to love and understand each other better. If you come at me just wanting to argue I’m going to troll you back. FAFO.

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Apytele ,

This is what I mean when I tell people this is a joke about creationism.

Apytele , (edited )

Those emergency room visits referenced were almost certainly not necessary and just the result of overly fussy parents (addendum: excluding weird allergic or idiosyncratic reactions to dyes and whatnot). It'll do really weird things to you circadian rhythm and you'll have some utterly surreal nightmares, but that's not anything you can't manage at home. It's suuuch a light sleep aid it's not going to sedate enough to mess with the drive to breathe and your body won't convert enough of it to serotonin to do that either. It doesn't really matter how much you take either.

The LD50 (average amount it takes to kill) is over a whole gram per kilogram of body weight in rodents and is basically unestablished in humans. That's an insanely large amount as far as medication dosing goes, especially since we're talking by kilogram of body weight. The max established safe dose (no nightmares) that melatonin is routinely sold as is like 10mg total for an adult, so the person would probably need to swallow an entire 100-count bottle for every kilo they weigh. Also I almost guarantee any pediatric overdoses were the gummies (obviously), so they would have to eat a 100-count bottle of the highest dose gummies for each kg. Babies don't even start eating solid food until around 6 months when they'll probably weigh around 6kg, so picture an infant getting open and chugging down a half-dozen 100 count bottles. It's a nonsensical picture.

The daycare workers should still be fired asf though that's super weird and yeah those kids should be getting regular checkups to make sure this hasn't messed with their growth or anything.

Apytele ,

True!

Apytele OP ,

I said local. I would encourage you to vote democratic at the state and national level but that's not what this is about. Everyone pretty much already knows who they're voting for in that part of the election. It's the mayors and school board people we need to flip now too though if we ever want to get out of this. A pause button only helps you if you do something with the time you bought. The fact that you still had to make this conversation about the national race IS the psyop.

Apytele OP ,

Cool, but people can do this right now on the toilet while shitting. They can start working on that other stuff when they actually have time. Baby steps here. Also you need third parties running things before you can get that done anyway because democrats won't do that for the exact same reason they'll never actually get rid of the Republicans.

Apytele ,

Yes and no. I've had to insert a LOT of meaning to get a story worth any substance, and I've had to do a lot of editing to get good images. It's really good at giving me a figure that's 90% done, but that last 10% touching up still often takes me a day or so of work.

Apytele ,

Yeah if half my patients just went out and found constructive hobbies that they can do with other people I would actually be really hyped. I especially like seeing young men stop fixating on women and just go develop things about themselves that are likeable and interesting to other people in general.

The craziest part is that I'd actually kind of prefer that they do this in most cases. Half the time this will be like 75% of what the therapist will tell them to do anyway and the other 25% is stuff like "stop getting most of your hydration from diet coke" and "yeah your dad was just kind of an asshole boomer; that happens a lot actually."

And I'll probably get shit for it again (but maybe I'll explain it better this time?) but it's actually really concerning how many people are leaning on therapy right now. I'm not saying it's their fault, but saying more people need to go to therapy isn't actually going to fix the issue. It would be like if were constantly maiming and injuring people and saying the problem was not enough people going to physical therapy. Therapists absolutely need to be a thing, but most people wouldn't be having these problems in the first place if we hadn't commoditized human interaction and largely eliminated publically / benefactor hosted social spaces.

And by commoditized I mean we've created this culture where we have all these rules for who gets to be mad or sad in each interaction and who is supposed to support who, often with the exchange of money involved. And I'm actually mostly talking about the service industry even more than I am about the mental health one, it's just that their bullshit is seeping over to us and making the mental health (and general healthcare) industry a toxic sludgepile too. The only therapist I could get to call me back is part of a large online franchise that basically pimps them out like onlyfans models except my insurance pays and there's no flirting or tiddy pics. I haven't had the heart to pry into how much they're actually making but I doubt it's a lot.

TLDR: I don't like modern "just go to therapy" culture because I think it's completely missing the point. Even if we were properly staffed, the healthcare industry can't conceivably fix the rest of society on it's own. Also just fix housing already ffs. It will literally just put a cap on the mental health crisis. Like if we just took blackrock's real estate and put homeless people in it the mental health crisis would just be like 80% solved. I'm not even kidding.

Apytele ,

This is a very fitting reply; nobody cares when it's causing a famine in Uganda or the ocean is swallowing the Philippines or whatever. The people with the power to actually change these things won't get upset until hurricane tradgedeigh is stripping the siding off their mcmansion, and by then it'll be a few decades too late.

Apytele ,

People really underestimate how much COVID just completely emotionally hamstrung this new generation of young adults. Right in the middle of the most socially important life stages (identity vs role confusion and intimacy vs isolation) and they spent two years of it in literal isolation. The people who were already well into adulthood were hurt by the isolation as well, but at least they have an existing interpersonal framework to try to revert to. These kids have next to nothing.

Most unique looking celebrities?

I'm working on a side project studying variations in human facial features. It's been helpful to study celebrity faces because it's easy to find numerous reference photos. I've actually got a fairly good range of weird looking white men, turns out Hollywood is pretty flush with those, but it's been harder to find unique looking...

Apytele OP ,

Truth

Apytele OP ,

She was one of my picks, she makes those giant peepers look good as hell.

Apytele OP ,

Yeah but it's hard to find multiple angles of people who aren't as well known...

Apytele OP ,

I could use more of everything, but I need those the most, yeah.

Apytele OP ,

...I mean...?

Apytele OP ,

Oh that's a thought, thank you for clarifying

Apytele OP ,

So if you're interested this is an AI project I'm working on to make "Character LoRAs (low-rank adaptations)." A LoRA is a small model you can nest within a larger AI model to help get more specific faces, poses, styles, etc. My end goal (if I keep working on this long enough) is to make a set of visually distinct "characters" that don't look like any one real person. That way they can be used to tell stories, and will look consistent image-to-image. I want to pick out some distinctive features so that a) it will be easy to tell them apart, but also b) there will be adequate racial/ethnic representation. I also want most of them to look pretty average from a "western beauty standards" standpoint because western beauty standards need to fuck off in general. And it's really hard to find average looking people in existing character LoRAs because most people are using StableDiffusion to generate porn, so they're all cute anime girls and one or two attractive anime men. I want multiple solid, consistent options that just look like overall normal people!

Apytele OP ,

Exactly what I'm looking for, thank you!

Apytele OP ,

Oh sisko's dad!

Apytele OP ,

He mostly has pretty average facial features but it has been interesting seeing how build comes through especially with the more heavyset combinations.

Apytele OP ,

No just DS9. I shipped tucker and t'pol really hard but that had a lot more to do with how old I was when enterprise came out than it does with me actually liking enterprise. The other three I just never quite vibed with somehow. Not like with DS9 for some reason.

Apytele ,

☝️ there's a fine line between maintaining personal safety and allowing conservatives to create divisiveness, and not everybody knows how to keep their balance. Hell the only reason I know is because I've basically made a career of taking care of people who want to kill me.

Apytele , (edited )

Emotional validation of a sense of the world being against them. A looot of people are significantly happier to be proven right about the world being horrible to them personally than change their own outlook or behavior. It turns out our evolutionary psychology STRONGLY favors not having to reprogram anything and will generally move to protect your existing psychological coping scheme before trying behavioral changes. It makes 0 sense but I watch it happen all. the. time.

The only real way to force someone out of it (and even that only works like half the time) is inpatient care where you can control the environment enough to be able to be nice to them safely. In the community often the only safe way to deal with people this delusional is exactly what this doctors' office did: refuse service / tresspass or if you're an individual just give them a clear berth. And even inpatient care is only worth it if there's an actual psychiatric disorder involved. If they're just a prick its going to cause more problems than it solves.

Apytele ,

I've heard of a couple sinkings lately. Not that that contradicts your statement about docility, in fact I intend to add to it. Multiple little pods / small groups of species with similar cognition / intelligences (especially elephants, but also whales and often corvids) have been known to get fed up with humans' shit and go on targeted rampages. They don't think too dissimilarly from us, and revenge is certainly a pretty big human motivator.

Apytele ,

At the very least if people know they can get their affairs sorted ahead of time. We had to write a paper in school on the importance of advance directives and the case study I used was a guy that finally just had to be arrested and dragged to the ER in handcuffs (ppl w dementia can get... interesting) when if he'd had an advance directive and designated a surrogate decision maker, that trusted person could have just signed off on him gently being led to an appropriate care facility. Instead all of his loved ones were stuck watching his slow and very public decline without any way to save him from himself.

Apytele ,

We need to turn it off and on again.

Fun fact for anyone reading who doesn't know: if you're ever in the room while someone is being defibrilated, make sure you're not touching them in any way. The electrical shock can stop your heart too!

My department only does this to brains though.

Apytele ,

Oh god I was worried they killed him horribly this is actually probably fine and almost an expected setback.

Apytele ,

For a technology that could someday help a quadriplegic interact with the world fully and independently again I'm willing to tolerate some hitches. There's a reason they didn't pick some full on walkie talkie for their first human trial, and there's a reason that kid looked motherucking hyped to have brand new technology that he's the first human to even try installed directly into his fucking brain. The problem is abled people thinking this is fundamentally for them. Bby no, they're trying to help people walk again, even if the legs are robots. You're looking at the wrong risk-benefit profile.

Apytele ,

yes, screw the quadriplegics so you can feel good about staying on your moral high ground. Your hill to live and die on takes much higher priority than people who can't shift their own body weight developing holes in their ass I can fit my fist in but still not be able to see the bone because it's covered in maggots. Yeah there need to be guardrails in place to keep him from doing silly shit with it and make sure it's affordable for the people who need it, but a) the technology is still in it's infancy b) how about you put all this piss and vinegar towards political action to beef up the FDA (who are already regulating this situation per the linked article?). While you're at it the CDC could use a little more money and public backing too. How about you go out into the world and encourage people to trust scientific institutions more? There are about a thousand different ways you could be expressing these morals in a way that actually helps people instead of just making you feel better about yourself.

Apytele , (edited )

Hi I'm a psych nurse with my own mental health issues so I've both had done similar problems and worked with hundreds of other people who have had similar problems.

a) get yourself into one of those alanon groups for family and other loved ones of addicts. They will give far better advice than I or any other internet person ever will.

b) decide on your boundaries now and communicate them clearly at a moment that he's in a good headspace (don't just pop it on him right after the wife files for instance).

c) Your personal boundaries are very personal, but I do recommend you decide on how much money you're willing to give him and how. It could be anything from 1k towards the debt if you're exceptionally kind and have it to give him, to just offering to buy him a good meal now and then. If you ever help with rent or anything however, I highly recommend you pay the person he owes directly so he doesn't have a chance to think he can solve all these problems with one more because it'll finally be his big win.

c) Also decide how much you're willing to get yelled at because I can almost guarantee he's going to get frustrated with those boundaries and cuss you out at some point. You don't have to lay this out in detail but I do recommend you at least say "I do expect to not be abused." And he's not going to be joking he's going to bring up any traumas or mommy issues or whatever skeleton in your closet that he knows about. I know because I've done it and watched hundreds of other addicts do it. It's a normal response to both the internal chemical changes as his neurotransmitters re-level AND all his interpersonal relationships shift to healthier ones. You're still not obligated to sit through that. So decide how much you're willing to take now. If your line is physical aggression, decide if you're willing to put up with him getting in your face without swinging, because a lot of people who have gotten good at being addicts know how to toe lines real good so you better paint them bitches crisp.

d) recommend whatever mental health resources you can talk him into going to. Anything from support groups (AA has a lot of spinoffs for other addictions, but 12 step is usually better for more spiritual people. If he's particularly secular, try SMART instead). Also definitely encourage him to go to a psychiatrist. Even behavioral/nonchemical addictions can significantly alter brain chemistry in a way he may need a leg up to really overcome (behavioral addictions are things like gambling, binge eating, video games, and porn vs chemical ones like heroin, meth, etc. As an aside, weed is kind of a grey area, it's not super chemically addictive, but it can definitely be behaviorally so for the wrong person).

e) if you're really down for it, learn a few formal crisis intervention strategies. You could try taking a mental health first aid class or reading a book but to give you a leg up I'll tell you the skill that took me 10 minutes to learn and I literally use it every single night I work: S.E.T. communication or Support, Empathy, Truth.

Support - a simple statement that aligns your values and desires with his.

  • "I really want you to get this debt handled. I want you to get out of this and stay out of this.

  • "I want to stand by you and keep helping you with this."

Empathy - a simple statement about your understanding of why this has been difficult for them.

  • "and man it's a shitload of of money you're probably looking at like mount fucking everest."

  • "and I know you're going through it right now"

Truth - a possibly less simple statement of the best way they can step with you towards that goal. The other two steps are to give you the best possible setup and help him feel heard to get him in just the right headspace to really hear this part.

  • "I can't buy you out of this and honestly I don't think it would help you in the long run if I did. The best way to get this paid off is to not get into more shit and take what you have now one step at a time."

  • "and I wanna be here for you to lean on through this but I can't carry you. To keep working with you on this I need you working with me. I'm gonna give us both a day or two to let the steam blow off, and then I'm gonna come back and try to talk this out again so we can get back on the same page."

It doesn't work 100% of the time but compared to fumbling your way through these conversations it's practically magic.

This brings us to f) if he does get hot, DO. NOT. ARGUE. do not argue when people are not capable of responding rationally. It tends to just increase the irrationality and nuke any working relationship that's been built. He might do great for the most part but every once in a while the dopamine or adrenaline or whatever else is gonna hit just right and he'll turn into a straight asshole for a short period. Just tell him you're both gonna take a breather (phrasing it as a "mutual" breather may help him take it less personal, but if he asks, tell him you needed time to process how he treated you, don't let him make it about what you said unless you did actually say some dumb shit) and don't talk to him for AT LEAST 15 minutes. I say at least because depending on how wild he gets you might need to extend that to like 3 days or so, maybe even more. 15 minutes is just the average time it takes adrenaline to dissipate and I use that timing a lot to reapproach people at work.

Hope all this helps!

Apytele , (edited )

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/651cc409-55a8-4d2d-9a13-45c7f330f048.gif

Honestly the funny part is that the addiction med isn't even really my specific subspecialty, it's just that it is personality disorders and there's a LOT of overlap in the behaviors they present with as well as just general comorbidity.

Apytele , (edited )

You're confusing Al-Anon with Narconon

Apytele ,

This is the best comment on this topic. Brief, but clearly and nonjudgmentally identifies the cultural context that easily could have led the original commenter to have come to this conclusion.

Apytele ,

My favorite was the parent who told their kids their eyes change color when they lie. Now the kid closes their eyes real tight every time they lie.

Apytele ,

I would have said rent but also I've been eating a bunch of takeout so I had just been attributing it to that. I'll believe it though.

Apytele ,

As I understand it a good few nazis actually did flee to south America, so it's not like they just scrambled that one together from random bullshit.

Apytele , (edited )

Right like stimulants are super useful but more like for that guy in one of the world wars (who took way too many but other than that) and to his credit he did escape the Russians and lived to be like 70 or something. He also caught and ate a bird raw during this time period. Hang on actually let me go find the Wikipedia article.

Ok I'm back. I pasted the story here because I think it's important to read BEFORE seeing the picture.

Koivunen was a Finnish soldier, assigned to a ski patrol on 15 March 1944 along with several other Finnish soldiers. Three days into their mission on 18 March, the group was attacked and surrounded by Soviet forces, from whom they were able to escape. Koivunen became fatigued after skiing for a long distance but could not stop. He was carrying his patrol's entire supply of army-issued Pervitin, or methamphetamine, a stimulant used to remain awake while on duty. He consumed the entire supply of Pervitin, and had a short burst of energy, but soon entered a state of delirium and eventually lost consciousness. Koivunen later recalled waking up the following morning, separated from his patrol and having no supplies.

In the following days, Koivunen escaped Soviet forces once again, was injured by a land mine, and stayed in a ditch for a week, waiting for help. In the week that he was gone, he subsisted only on pine buds and a single Siberian jay that he caught and ate raw. Having skied more than 400 km (248.5 mi), he was later found and admitted to a nearby hospital, where his heart rate was measured at 200 beats per minute, and he weighed only 43 kg (94.8 lbs).

He died in 1989 at the age of 71.

The Article

It's also my understanding (now, I've forgotten where I read it though) that his thought process on the matter was that when he was trying to get one out of the bottle but his gloves were too thick to get just one, so he said "fuck it I'm probably gonna die anyway" and poured them into his palm and just slammed then bitches back.

Apytele ,

Stimulant withdrawal in general is just shit (cocaine withdrawal is well-known to cause suicidal ideation), but yeah I would rank nicotine as the worst personally. Of all the times a patient just about straight up punched me in the face, nicotine withdrawl is about 50% of my top ten.

That said, there's some key differences between caffeine and nicotine that probably contribute to this:

  1. the obvious: caffeine is completely flameless. Even a vape has a heating element that I don't want anywhere near cotton bedsheets with oxygen literally on tap from pipes that run through almost every interior wall in every patient care area. In theory they can have as many cups of coffee as they want and it's super easy to taper with half-caff (or similar) if they are ready to quit. (Caffeine also doesn't put anything into the air that could harm someone with a respiratory disorder or allergy).

  2. More importantly: The caffeine withdrawal management options we have replicate the sensory experience of consuming the drug MUCH more closely than nicotine. The hand-to mouth behavioral pathway centers the experience on almost every place in your body with dense sensory nerve clusters. The only way they could make either nicotine or caffeine more addictive is by finding a way to also involve your genitals. The patch just does not cut it, but half-caff just might.

Now my work does also have nicotine lozenges, which help with oral fixation and better replicate the peaking and troughing blood levels of intermittent use, but that doesn't help with the hand motion. A significant portion of smokers are self-medicating either ADHD or one of the similar disorders, and you'll notice they LOVE to fidget with their hands (remember fidget spinners? They were supposed to be for kids with ADHD). I've been trying to talk my work into buying those quit-go inhalers (it's a plastic tube with menthol flavor) but you know how admin weasels are with their yacht money.

Apytele ,

No but it's a beatiful picture and I encourage you to keep enjoying your friend's company!

Apytele , (edited )

And apparently even flourosis is only a cosmetic ...illness? Honestly if Americans weren't so obsessed with the cosmetics of teeth they might not even really notice. Like to the extent that people will strip their enamel in an attempt to whiten them. Even I had to look up what it was.

Apytele ,

...the flourosis is caused by too much flouride. I'm saying people are worried about the side effects of too much flouride when they're pretty much entirely cosmetic anyway. If you're gonna "um akshully" on the internet at least Google it first.

Apytele ,

My suspicion is that it's supposed to be a prion which is a misfolded protein that causes other proteins to also misfold which eventually just makes a giant mess of your brain and kills you, similar to how a badly executed pivot table might crash your computer. The obvious difference is that we can't reboot your brain. The closest we've gotten is probably ECT, but even that's just mostly an in-joke between me and my coworkers about it just dumping all your neurotransmitters out so they can be marie-kondo-ed back into the right places.

Apytele ,

You win some, you lose some.

Apytele ,

Even better if he just paid her to do it or knew her mom through church and set him up or something else just totally mundane just to fuck with him. Like this:https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/496be8dc-fb62-4965-ba27-30335cfbb0ee.jpeg

Apytele ,

The gym isn't a bad place to meet girls, but I wouldn't cold approach them for the most part or assume any who do talk to you want a relationship.

My best advice is that if you really like the gym and fitness, take a class at the gym that is likely to have more women in it, like yoga or a dance class. Do try to pick something you actually are kind of interested learning more about, though. It'll give you something else to focus on and take the pressure off trying to meet people. It'll also make you look better as a potential partner if they can personally watch you working hard at learning something.

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