TheBananaKing

@ TheBananaKing @lemmy.world

Posts

21
Comments

487
Joined

2 yr. ago

3mo ago

Middle Aged Folks with no social group: How do you do it?
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TheBananaKing @lemmy.world 3mo ago
I had a shitty abusive childhood with zero social contact, so I never really learned how to have friends, or thus how to need or really derive much fulfilment from them; all my emotional needs and regulation had to come from within, and I am the part of a person that's left when all the bits that can't survive that are gone.
I got out of there eventually, but by that time it had kind of grown over; I eventually learned to be (slightly) social, but honestly it's a bunch of work for empty calories; I can spend the whole weekend's time/energy/spoons on some group activity but don't get to recharge and it's like not getting a weekend at all.
so in answer to your question I do a lot of hiking.

5mo ago

Would you become romantically involved with someone with vastly different religious views?

I'm atheist, and my partner was Muslim when I first knew her.

People say it doesn't mater - but honestly it really fucking does.

Imagine being in relationship with someone who never really left North Korea, deep down. There's so much fear, so much fear-driven obedience, and so much fear-driven defense of the indefensible.

I never really understood the concept of freedom of conscience until I was arguing with one of her friends about Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery - with her sentence delayed until her baby was weaned. Despite being really very progressive at heart, my partner ended up arguing in favour of it - and then later on was seriously pissed off at me for making her defend that.

She ended up deconverting several years later (certainly not at my behest), and things got immeasurably better from then on.

But that's not a possibility I'd recommend banking on. My honest advice is just don't go there, it's far more stressful than you think it is.

Lie on the beach in winter: the sun is pathetically un-warm.

Adjusting the angle at which you recline won't make the sun any warmer.

So your intuition is off here.

Imagine someone puts an opaque shell around the earth at cruising altitude, and cuts a metre-square window in it.

Put that window directly over the equator, wait for noon. You will have a metre-square patch of sunlight on the ground.

As the sun heads towards the horizon, the patch of sunlight stretches into a long east-west tail, just like a long shadow.

The same amount of energy is coming through the window, but it's spread over a much larger area on the surface, so there's fewer watts-per-square-cm hitting the ground.

Now move that window north 30 degrees. Wait until noon, and the patch is already smeared into a long tail north-south, and that's before applying any east-west smear. As the sun heads for the horizon, it's going to be even more spread out into a great big enormous oblong, extended in both directions.

Now, entirely replace that shell with windows, and through the raytracing gets more involved, the same principles are at work.

That's why mornings and evenings are cold, that's why winter is cold, that's why it gets colder towards the poles. You're getting a smaller and smaller share of the sunlight hitting the area where the earth is.