Toth

For real? I'm still hoping somewhat it's still you being so taken aback that you are interpreting it in the worst possible way and she will come back apologizing after she calms down. Then again, this somehow sounds like... 90% of online dating exchanges where even the tiniest mistake in how you present yourself can get you shafted. If she's really interpreting trying to relate with personal experience as narcissism of someone she barely knows, I'm almost inclined to say good riddance. You don't want to walk on eggshells for the rest of your relationship. (though I'm now also taking note that it's apparently extremely common that people will be immediately suspicious because of this... god, it never surprises me how hard this all is)

I know, but I'm not watching it for the horror aspect. I am very aware of how detached I am to the stuff depicted. I just find it very grounding to remind myself that these people are going through hell out there while we are spectating at the sidelines, debating the political repercussions of weapons deliveries and then moving on with our lives. Even though without the deterrence of NATO and nukes, this could have easily been our war.

Well, not going to dive too much into this topic. But I also consider the OP question and the question about the increasing qualification demands of employers to be entirely different topics. For the first one, I went to university to get my Master because my job necessitates it. Will I ever use all of the knowledge I learned there as a teacher? Likely not, though I do appreciate the more in-depth knowledge on the subjects I am passionate about regardless. And of course the skills to acquire more knowledge. But with that I probably sound like a broken record since pretty much everyone here seems to have made the same experience. I guess it was also a great time being surrounded by people with very similar interests, though unfortunately I was still really bad at connecting and too busy getting my degrees as fast as possible. To the second topic... well, it is something I have noticed as well. Employers demanding work experience even for trainee jobs is a very common theme, showing that they don't want to bother training themselves. At the same time both my parents don't have high school degrees and still got jobs a long time ago that nowadays they very likely wouldn't have gotten. For me it shows firstly a willingness of companies in the past to invest in them and finance their job education. A willingness... that is still there, Germany is much better at that than most other countries, but even there the companies still want proof that applicants will not turn out unwilling to work for their needed skills and end up a waste of money. Therefore the high qualification standards even for that. My father forced me to write applications for dual studies when I was doing my high school finals and I was pretty much laughed into the face at every interview. They REALLY expected you to have more experience than a puny high school degree to even get a foot in. So... I do understand why it turned out like this, though find it quite sad at the same time. I must also say, as a teacher... even though it's quite damning an observation, but it sadly is the case that we are giving high school degrees to students who can barely read and write. That's not much of a secret, but also the result of the massive stresses put especially upon primary schools and the low budgets they have to deal with while having to educate kids with precarious home situations and zero knowledge of the German language. We as a society really need to re-think how much education in general is worth it and how we want to invest to ensure that everyone, no matter their financial and parental background, is getting all the tools they need to have a fair chance. Because right now, that's not happening and that's the other big main reason why education is treated as a sorting algorithm.

This... explains quite a lot what I witnessed last week. I have the (probably quite unhealthy) habit to occasionally check videos posted of combat in Ukraine to get a vague grasp on how things are being fought out. Last week alone there were FOUR videos uploaded on Reddit where you can see wounded Russian soldiers immediately after going down taking their rifle to their chin and pull the trigger. Some of those were amidst combat situation where you'd somehow think they have been brainwashed so much, they wanted to avoid capture at all costs. But half of those were of those where Russian soldiers got a leg hurt by a drone dropped grenade in their own trench. You'd think it would be fairly simple to pull them out and give them medical treatment, but even there, immediate suicide when getting wounded. It's ludicrous. It's absurdity. It's quite harrowing to see. Another video from last year also burned itself into my mind, this one was posted from the Russian side. There you saw officers walking through the apocalyptic wreckage of an ammo dump after a HIMARS attack and there were still wounded begging for help left and right. They barely paid attention to them, essentially stating that they were beyond saving anyway. Judging scenes and reports like this, I just have to think those ridiculous casualty numbers are more believable than not. This army, this damned country is just shambolic.

Given how I tend to post here: If I'm not updating, I'm definitely okay! Now I better go back nursing massive neck pain and headache... -.-

That could probably work, but I'm weighing this against me having to save up a ton of money to buy a house for me and my mother so that I finally can get more privacy, which in turn solves a lot of the issues I currently have that can't be fixed by just changing my mindset. If it gets really bad, I will think about this. The thing is, as a teacher I am applying to civil servant status, which comes with a hefty long-term increase in pay and pensions. But you have to get certified by a medical doctor who also combs through your medical history to prove that you won't make it until retirement. Technically seeking help for mental help isn't a guaranteed exclusion criteria anymore, but if you ask around there are still plenty of horror stories of teachers having seen therapists only once to bridge a rough spot in their lives and having to fight costly legal battles because that was used against them. Meanwhile the last time I was at the medical officer I was asked point blank about mental health history and she seemed very happy to hear that I got nothing, only criticizing me for my stiff spine. Since a lot of the time I wasted yesterday was by frantically scrolling through mental health sites and forums I'm following until I was utterly tired out, I'm going to go out on a limb and prescribe myself a drastic computer and online time-out from here on out. That should help me get more time for exercise and meditating.

No. Can't afford the career consequences of doing that. I have to get a grip on my own, at least until I have my civil servant status. Though I really don't know what is going on with me. I never felt this badly before. Usually three days without social contact aren't affecting me like this.

Oh shit, I had a really bad anxiety episode this morning and completely blacked out for most of the day. Couldn't correct any of my exams that I wanted to have corrected till Wednesday. Fuck... I guess I really need to get my shit together and start my mindfulness routines earnestly. Because if I really need to calm myself, my inner voice is just becoming sentient. So basically I had a free day that I wanted to use for my preparation for the week and exam correction that would be neat to have finished until Wednesday, but at the same time my mother also got to go to her work much later, which resulted in her bustling around like usual and me interrupting myself at each turn. So I lean back, close my eyes and focus on my breath while trying to let pass all those thoughts about intense loneliness, nearing self-imposed deadlines, stuff that I'd like to prepare, wondering why I barely got anything done on the weekend... and then, especially in regards to my loneliness, my inner voice literally just said: "You know, we REALLY WANT to think through this, you can't ignore me forever!" I tried to outlast the voice, but obviously my mother interrupted me again as she seemed to have taken to need my clock on my desk to know what time it is and check it every minute to see whether she can still get her bus. And that was enough for me to loose that sparring contest and I was left ruminating for most of the day as I was slowly crawling through my prep work. In the end, so far, I haven't managed a single exam. In the end I guess I'm just addicted to misery...

Mmh, last I checked acts of resistance so far were limited to stealing railway signalling equipment.

You are aware that Belarus is part of a defensive alliance with Russia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Organization That thing may be in trouble given how Russia blatantly refused to do anything after Armenia invoked Article 4 last year when Azerbaijan attacked them, but Russia will certainly have to retaliate when NATO countries attack a country they actually give a shit about. So no, will never happen. Though I have been wondering these days whether in such an event of Belarus getting forced to join the attack or even get forcibly annexed, whether the CIA may be willing to loose a few crates of javelins on their way to Ukraine that just so happen to end up in the hands of Belarussian opposition parties...

So not all doom and gloom! Crossing fingers!

Depends. We have discussed the pro's and con's of Russia taking Belarus and forcing them to join the war effort before. It's a good idea if you want to make this war three times more messy and take the risk of sparking a civil war at your doorstep in which you have very little left to intervene with. Given how both the population AND the Belarussian military vocally oppose joining the war, much less getting annexed by Russia to be used as cannon fodder... I'd consider that risk of loosing Belarus as a safe haven to launch rockets from to be far too great for it to be a sensible idea to bet on Lukashenko's death. If anything, as Putin I would be shitting bricks about the possibility of chaos erupting there due to a power vacuum. Then again, Putin hasn't acted the most rational these days and I can't completely deny the possibility that he could have been told he can stave off assured defeat for a couple more months by throwing Belarus under the bus.

I basically just did this:

Another food experiment inspired by Tasting History: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/971086032424562718/1106985104527609996/20230513_174253.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/971086032424562718/1106985104955412650/20230513_173954.jpg It's pork with apples from an Ancient Roman cook book named De Re Coquinaria. The pork... tastes pretty much as you would expect pork to taste like. The sauce however is the main protagonist. It consists of cumin, coriander leaves and coriander seeds, mint, honey, white wine vinegar, Garum, Asafetida (as a replacement for the extinct Silphium), Defrutum and starch. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/971086032424562718/1106591886594035772/20230512_163725.jpg I can't stress enough that it's really, really good. It is very sweet, slightly sour, though I thoroughly boiled out the vinegar, while at the same time has a certain rich intensity that is hard to describe. I suppose most of that is the Defrutum, but the combination of other ingredients certainly plays into it. I then also put it onto leftover spaghetti from yesterday. Not quite historically correct, but still Italian and the original recipe is for leftover pork as well.

Curious about the differences of authoritarianism and fascism. After all, there is a difference in telling your people "everyone lies, everyone is crooked, so just don't bother questioning anything at all!" to keep your populace apolitical like Russia did and the "we need to all stick together because the nation and fighting the enemy is more important than truth!" thing that Russia increasingly does to activate their populace. The students are all in their early twenties because it's one where you can catch up on your high school degree after being out of school for a while. It's still definitely a hurdle to have a detached discussion without "rooting for your team like in a football game" (a metaphor I've occasionally used to defuse some outwardly patriotic students). Her interests... absolutely no clue, actually.

Nah, that would be a major no-no and pretty much the only act that could get Kyiv nuked with limited western retaliation. While I am still skeptical about this offensive pushing the lines back this dramatically, I think the best we can hope for would still be Ukraine throwing out all Russian troops in the Donbass and then laying siege to Crimea until Russia is forced to withdraw.

Today I put aside a girl from one of my classes that I think I mentioned before. Essentially the only Russian student I have at the moment who... is very firmly pro-"Russia" in this war with no other reasoning that she feels she has to because her family is Russian and she has relatives in Crimea. Before that I had only one Dagestani boy who was more like "Haha, look at all the Russia sucks memes!". But since I'm intending to now feature the Ukraine war in our politics lessons I wanted to tell her that it isn't my intention to corner her, but at the same time wanted to tell her that I'm very concerned about how defensively she approaches... all political topics, really. I know this is extremely incidental and can't be used to explain Russian expats in general, but on the other hand I found it... oddly interesting how she behaves and can't help but wonder how much of that comes from stuff she picked up at home. So basically her go-to kneejerk reaction is that... she states she simply knows nothing whatsoever about history and politics. But she uses that also as a shield to not engage with anything either. The task is to simply describe Weimar Republic election posters? She doesn't know the symbolism of anything, so she can't even describe what she's seeing. It's all pointless to her, so she just completely blocks and gives up. Today we had political cartoons. A guy trying to hand out flyers but nobody is around and all the flyers lie on the ground? She doesn't know what idea that situation tries to convey, so she won't even describe it. Of course we previously had a situation where the Ukraine war was metioned. She very hesitantly interjected that Russia had every right to invade because the people there want to be annexed, which prompted another girl she is friends with to give a whole barrage of well put reasons why that's bullshit. The Russian girl sheepishly admitted that she actually doesn't know anything other than what's she vaguely picked up from home and ceded the point. I got the impression that she really, really, really doesn't want to get put into a spot where she has to argue with her friends and she today in our talk confirmed it to me that she fears that she's going to get into trouble with them because her opinions are totally opposite. She however still claimed she truly doesn't have any common knowledge whatsover, only opinions and nothing else. So I explained to her that the main purpose of our lessons isn't to pick a side to root for, but instead to understand why conflicts happen, how we can understand actors and use that knowledge to anticipate world events and argue what channels can be used for peace and what limitations there are on those. So I really need her to at least look at facts and engage with them. I hope that got through to her. In any case, I found it quite... troubling to see how she wasn't displaying the apathy or even the entrenched rabid jingoism that I had somehow expected, but instead an extremely stubborn refusal to engage with anything remotely political.

My bet is on repeat-elections until he's happy with the result.

And Russia already did! I think the heartrending clips were linked here even. Fucking disgusting shit.

Never went to any clubs or parties, so don't have anything to add. But I am currently somehow moaning my efficiency when I was a kid. In high school, I considered Fridays "Free Friday", where I would after school sit down at the computer and just play videogames or write on my stories. Every other day of the week including weekends were for studying, though if I was finished with all my stuff and all my chores, I would still occasionally have time for myself. Nowadays? I don't know why it happened, but if I am attempting to do the same thing, I feel ZERO relaxation and then spend the whole weekend an anxious mess procrastinating at the PC for 12 hours and not getting anything done until Sunday night 10 pm in a frantic nightly dash I manage to more or less get my preparation for the week done. Then, obviously, I'm too tired to get much done after work within the week, mostly just trying to recuperate from the weekend. Rinse and repeat. It's infuriating how little I get done and how quickly my life fades in front of my eyes because of that...

Okay, thankfully the frame rate drop was a one-time thing. Apparently there is some kind of memory leak somewhere because when I went back to Star Wars interworlds, it was never again so badly stuttering, but the framerate did dip here and there the more I played. I guess this means I just have to avoid playing for long stretches of time... time I don't have anyway, so I'm fine with that. So I continued a little and made more money doing sector patrol missions, mine clearing and some awkward taxi missions where I better don't think too hard about where my passenger had to get crammed into, given that I was still only flying my TIE Fighter: https://i.imgur.com/Fdi4Ng5.jpg My most intense fight so far had been me getting lost on my supposed patrol of Ord Mantell and engaging in a battle at Ithor instead, aiding a small imperial battlegroup against Mandalorians. I took out two of their fighters but then had to turn tail as the next wave came in with more firepower and me... well, not being able to take any kind of firepower. In any case, I made a solid 700.000 credits and made it so quickly that I was considering doing some more missions to get the mining ship straight away that I had eyed for the long term, which should cost me about 1,2 Million. However I am impatient and I want to see as many ships as possible. So I bought this little thing: https://i.imgur.com/Qn2RNal.jpg The TIE Shuttle's interior looks extremely rough and I have even more difficulty entering and exiting as I had with the TIE Fighter. But I guess that's just part of the charm... Well, now I will try my hands at a little trading. Especially because the TIE Shuttle is hardly capable of anything else. I tried to shoot a criminal civilian craft earlier and... somehow couldn't make any damage. Oddly, mine clearing works. Makes me wonder why I even bothered buying the slightly more expensive guns.

Since the old one was locked, I guess it's fitting if I for once start a new one and using it to tell the tale of my next step to some self-fixing. I bought this book here to try out its Mindfulness program: https://images.thalia.media/00/-/4edad5defefb436b8d3fc35325204d4d/mindfulness-taschenbuch-mark-williams-englisch.jpeg It is... certainly interesting. The first ten pages were a bit of a drag as it kept emphasizing again and again and again and again that this is all proven and will definitely help. Since it is proven that it is helping, so you can be rest assured that it is going to help. Then it goes into the interesting tidbits. The first daily meditation routine is one where you only for a minute sit erect, close your eyes and focus on your breathing and only your breathing, acknowledging thoughts wandering in and letting them pass without allowing them to "take root" so to speak. The explanation for that I found the most interesting. It says intrusive thoughts are a primeval survival reflex gone haywire, with our brain looking for similar thoughts in our memories and matching them to a current situation. However when those memories are bad, they tend to attract more and more of similar ones as our mind jumps from one bad thought to the next and that drags down our mood and even triggers our flight reflexes when this has gone on for too long, causing us to stress and tire out. The book therefore recommends to become aware of those thoughts and... letting them pass without acknowledging them in the slightest. I was already aware that... not listening to intrusive thoughts is essentially at the very core of all strategies to fix yourself, but I found that explanation why they are a natural aspect of life very eye-opening and giving me a lot more motivation to try earnestly. The next chapter then was about positive triggers behaving the same way, happy memories brightening our day the same way negative ones drag us down. They also mention again that story that I already knew about how even a forced smile could make us feel more at ease this way. Amusingly, I... kind of wanted try that out in practice right away. A little. By smiling slightly the entire way from the train station to the school. At first I must admit I felt... really weird and self-conscious, even tense as I noticed I changed my posture reflexively. Enough even to get a tingling sensation in my spine for some reason. Halfway through my mouth started to ache even though I wasn't smiling all that much. I also noticed I got bombarded with flashbacks to classmates telling me to stop smiling, perceiving it as an attack or just finding it ugly. Now doing that mindfulness thing, I just completely ignored them and let them pass. Some observations: First, that somehow caused me to be more conscious of other people's expressions... apparently I also suppressed my reflex to avoid looking into people's faces to avoid them feeling uncomfortable about meeting eyes. And... oh well, I did note how deeply entrenched the scowling of most people on the street was, however I did also note that it wasn't directed at me despite me feeling like I'm walking around like Mr. Bean. I also did note when arriving at school, how... most of my colleagues actually had donned an eerily similar smile to my own that I hadn't noticed before, notably even keeping their expression up while complaining about shit. Later on I kept "emptying" my mind and letting any and all thoughts just fizzle out as much as possible. I must admit... I'm really not used to it. It actually kind of did feel relaxing and I'm maybe imagining things, but I did feel like my head wasn't working as hard as it usually does, it felt like taking a break mentally. Which... scares me a little, I must frankly admit. During surveillance duty I heard students try to make fun of me and my mind was empty. Later on my way home an old woman stumbled and fell trying to cross the street and my mind was empty. A large amount of police cars rushed past me and my mind was empty. The book says that you can gain a lot of "active" time switching your brain from "Doing Mode" to "Being Mode" and just taking in your surroundings instead of thinking about things. I have the odd realization that thinking about lots of shit all the time is a big part of what make me myself and since the intrusive voice shit-talking me narratives my entire life, silencing it leaves me with nothing. That... I fear makes me dull. Which is odd, because the book stresses that "Doing Mode" is autopilot, even though I use it as the basis of all my decision making and that "Being Mode" should help you make conscious decisions, while mine so far just makes me space out. For example the time I had spent meditating was time I usually would have used to go through the motions of my next lessons mentally to make to prepare myself what I will say and how. Something I didn't do and I must admit today's lessons felt a lot more frontal and a lot worse in terms of time management because of that. Then of course the above mentioned instances of me just... seeing stuff happening around me, taking in the pictures, but not having any thought processes to spare to react to them in any sensible way. I... suppose that's why the next lessons all incorporate a "routine breaker" where you are supposed to break out of autopilot and experience things slightly differently while still in the mindfulness mode, which I hope helps striking a balance between ruminations and becoming a vegetable. Up until then I don't think my rather extreme interpretation at the moment is particularly wise, even though the book went to great lengths to explain how a lot of ruminations originate in our brain getting tasked to solve problems that can't be solved straight away and then just going for a loop of negative associations. Interestingly the book then gave a long explanation of the factors that make one mentally resilient: Having a sense of coherence, comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness in my tasks. Which... I have I guess. Those are things I am valuing when using my work as a sense of purpose. So I guess it confirms why I think I'm still high-functioning despite my anxiety. Of course the moment of truth came when I arrived home. My mother arrived shortly thereafter and immediately berated me for bringing out the garbage too early when I arrived and then went on about why I never listen and then some other stuff. So... I emptied my mind again and kept it blank throughout the onslaught, but I in doing so felt a hot bubbling in my gut that I can't even try to categorize. It's not like I wouldn't have been this passive otherwise, but the way I now went about it, I felt both passive and... quite dim. But given how I had already made some interesting observations, I will keep at it. We will see how this changes me after eight weeks...

Mmh... okay, I should have expected that. It IS X4 after all and a Mod that gives it five times the size and many, many factions just sounds like it's asking for trouble. I was flying around at Muunilist minding my own business when all of a sudden my CPU cried in agony and my framerate tanked... accompanied by radio chatter of a nearby battle. I guess that's where those guys were heading before: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/859069547172331570/1102609042951655555/20230501160410_1.jpg Mmh... I will try and go back to the game later. I hope that fixes the issue, but on the other hand I fear it simply won't get better with the limitations of my budget PC.

Well, I've been on a space game binge yesterday. First playing No Man's Sky. Was trying to farm credits by fixing up crashed ships, but after a while my game glitched and I came upon a crashed hauler that was somehow stuck in the lift-off animation and couldn't be interacted with, but the marker pointing at it still didn't disappear, barring me from finding any more ships. Quite a bummer. I guess I will have to move to the next system. Though I probably should give up trying to hope for an S-class ship this way and settle for an A-class. Already sold an A-class Explorer which probably could have been a neat hero ship. After that yesterday night I jumped briefly back into X4: Foundations. I installed the ridiculously impressive Star Wars Interworlds Total Conversion mod and took the masochistic imperial start where you have to explore the whole Star Wars galaxy in a TIE Fighter. Tried to make my way to the next shipyard to see how much I need to save up for a small freighter, meanwhile cramming plasma conductors into the glove box to fool a little around with trading, while at the same time I stumbled across three 'criminal' ships that the TIE was surprisingly able to one-shot. I suppose when you have no shields, barely any hull hitpoints and no FTL, you at least get some gnarly guns. It sure felt quite epic and were the easiest 1500 credits I made so far.^^ Unfortunately towards the end I figured out again how to do quests and found one where you have to fix leaks on a space station. OF COURSE one of them spawned on the inside of the model and I was unable to get to it without trying to glitch inside the station. Very frustrating. Especially after I had so much trouble getting to reach the ejection panel inside the TIE to go for that space walk in the first place. The cockpit is just so tiny and round that you can't physically reach it while standing up, you have to crouch towards it. But otherwise this mod is just astonishingly ambitious and makes quite a wondrous first impression. I had been slightly confused why New Republic and Rebel Alliance are both factions, but their website states that the mod is set early in the Legends universe and that the New Republic is still in its infancy while Rebel Alliance still nominally exists in order to free more systems from the Empire. Okay. Then it's weird that the Khaak have been replaced with the Yuuzhan Vong, that made me looking forward towards a NJO setting. I guess it's just an amalgamation of the whole timeline then. In any case, being at war with three factions (New Republic, Rebel Alliance and... Mandalorians for some reason) is bad for business, so I will try to figure out how to appease them. And maybe hopefully upgrade to an X-Wing as a hero ship, because that lack of shields gives me anxiety. Edit: Okay, managed to squeeze myself into some crevice and finish the mission! Yay! But unfortunately after that did a very long escort mission for a Banking clan freighter and all of a sudden when I was nearly there he just said "Thanks!" and the mission disappeared, without me getting any rewards. Booo! But hey, at least it gave me an opportunity to explore some new systems nearby.

Ha! But wow, making yeast sounds infinitely more elaborate than anything I have touched so far in my pointless experiments. Hat off to her! And well... next time if I'm going to make an attempt at it, I will actually take tiger nut flour, which... oddly seems also much cheaper than the whole tubers for some inexplicable reason. However because I bought in bulk to avoid shipping fees, I still have 1 kg left, so there will be some more experimenting until then. And please don't take it as an offense, but I'd very much prefer no happy birthday wishes. This whole scheme was an attempt to overwrite my discomfort about this shit day with presenting something unusual in an attempt that that may blunt my misery and may help metreat it normally. Without it I'm hit by the full brunt of how much I hate it and really don't want to hear anything about it.