Hmmm I think I will go with “fandom”, or being a fan of something. Like, I enjoy concepts. But there’s no universe or product or franchise or sports team or whatever in particular I would consider myself a fan of.
edit hope this counts as behavior lol
I never got plastering logos for whatever brands you love to consume on everything you own. Like buying decals and stickers and shit to put all over your car, laptop, whatever else. Since when do we pay to advertise for brands…?
u better BELIEVE i have a bad dragon sticker on my phone
I mean fandom can be general. the world science fiction society or whatever its called is basically at its core about written science fiction and not about one in particular and comic con is about any comic and gen con is about any gaming and anime cons are about anime. I get ya though. I mean I went to these things and when I was there I was like. This is my people. All the same though I always felt like sorta the biggest hanger on. I loved all the stuff but I like was no good with dressing up or whatnot. I mostly like to look around, go to interesting panels, and then spent all the rest of the time in movie or game rooms or con suite.
I’m the opposite, if it doesn’t interest me enough for me to know EVERYTHING, then it isn’t very good.
I could tell you so much about the lore and words of: halo, star wars, mass effect, video games from before my time, elder scrolls, D&D, homesick, undertale, STALKER, niche internet topics from my era…
Being a fan can make you part of a group. Especially great for people without identity. Slap a sticker on that empty personality!
Sport hooligans
Watch Green Street. It’s a fun and entertaining hobby.
This one hits a little too close to home. I always feel unsafe when going outside during a football match, especially if it’s between Raja and Wydad (two Moroccan football teams based in Casablanca with the most hostile fanbases I’ve ever seen). They’ve definitely killed the appeal of football for me.
I will say, as someone who does not come from a soccer playing country, it certainly seems like the worst sporting behaviour comes from soccer fans. You get it sometimes with American football and even more rarely with Australian football or rugby league, but 9 times out of 10 a story about violence erupting at or after a sporting event and it’s soccer hooligans. Even here in Australia where the audiences are tiny compared to our main football codes, the violence is likely to be with soccer.
I hate it when a small handful of people ruin the fun for everyone.
No one cares about other sports in my country so the football hooligans (or soccer hooligans as you call them) only get more attention.
Going to concerts. It’s too loud and it’s crowded, I just don’t see the appeal.
And while we’re at it, dancing. It’s unnatural, I tell you!
I’m not a fan of dancing. Love going to my local symphony concerts though. Never crowded; there’s no moshing at an orchestral concert. You get your seat and you sit in it, and you clap when the piece is done.
Plus the music’s just so much better.
You must be fun at parties.
Don’t know, never been :P
Going to concerts. It’s too loud and it’s crowded,
I go to seated events and wear loudness-reducing earplugs, so that solves both issues. If it’s a standing-only concert, I stay at the side areas to avoid the crowd. As for the appeal, I just want see the artist perform the songs I like live. I listen to technical music so it’s awesome to see musical skill up close.
There’s something about going to an event with like-minded people, listening to a band you like live with (often, not always) optimized sound for the space, and 99% of folks uninhibitably jamming out and having a good time.
I can definitely see how the experience would be unappealing to some folks, though. And I should note I’m more of a gig goer than concert attendee - so sound optimization is hit or miss, and the jamming out % is lower. Still fun, still not everyone’s cup of tea.
Edit: Idle thought that came up reading this back: what is music, for you - as in, what is your relationship to it? Where does music live in your world? Is it something that comes out of a machine to fill silence in your space or block out noise? Is it something produced by humans, of which MP3s/FLACS/CDs/Vinyl/radio waves etc. are just imprints/simulacrum for wider dissemination?
Basically, is it an activity, or a product at its core? Not really expecting anyone to answer (though they can), just a reflection I personally found interesting. Many acceptable answers.
A happy-ish medium is a well-captured live performance or jam. Alive 2007 (Daft Punk) is a pretty good example of how that can be a thing, for me at least.
Music is so hecken different to everyone, talking about it feels odd. Even sound feels/sounds different to a lot of folks, in enjoyable (soft music for a nice vibe, or a loud af chest-rumbling show) and not-fun-at-all (jarring or unwanted sounds, near-total silence for some) ways.
But yeah, I tend to crave the decibels, because I still have the ability to hear, and must not value it lol… Skull rattling is better to me than unevenly-mixed-in-room jamming, but both can be great in different ways. A fun, more personal experience is nice, but I need sensory overload to recover from, or it’s almost not worth the outing.
I know this is old, but I liked pondering the question because I made me sappy as heck, so I’ll share it with you:
Music is like a cheat-code to life, especially my internal life. The music I listen to determines my emotions, my energy level, my focus and drive, and what activities I want to do. Without music playing I’m like an empty shell. With music I recognise my existence.
I am not musical myself and I know nothing of production or quality, only what I enjoy and how it makes me feel. I was born to be an audience, and that’s a huge part of who I am and how I operate daily.
I have no problem communicating with people through verbal means, but I don’t get body language beyond the obvious (e.g. smiling). I mean, I get why people do it but I don’t get how people do it. Generally this isn’t a big deal but it does make dating really frustrating. I can communicate my own interest indirectly through verbal innuendo, but if the other person is doing anything non-verbal then I’ll miss it.
Most of them
Wanting to look rich… Like, who the fuck cares.
People who stay with abusive partners the first time they are abused
Feeling some kind of national pride. You didn’t choose to be born where you were born. Borders change and move, etc. The place my grandparents were born in has changed countries at least 3 times since then.
Tribalism in general
Being proud of anything you didn’t do or choose is odd to me. Like, there are plenty of things I’m happy about being, but not proud of them, including where I was born, appearance, (except for the parts of it you DO, like fitness or makeup, I can see those are accomplishments), ancestry, heritage. I don’t get national pride unless you are someone making the nation better and are proud of those improvements.
We should take pride in our country in terms of making it a better place, and by that I mean making it better for everyone. Not turning it into a right wing hellscape which is what is happening to most countries.
If we could internalize the notion that real patriotism is the drive to create a better tomorrow for the people instead of blind conservative hatred of the unfamiliar we could do so much good.
Exactly. That’s a much better written version of what I was going for. Instead we have Musk spending money that could be used for good to make places worse. I’d love a leftist to have a sit down with him and pick his brain.
I’m going to be the ‘tenth dentist’ here and say eating spicy food.
I understand that eventually people build a tolerance so it hurts less but I can’t comprehend being willing to even reach that point, especially since it’s still not completely pain free I have been told.
Those I’ve asked say it’s a really good flavor, but to me that sounds like being willing to eat a handful of broken glass (assuming no long term damage) as long as it tastes good. There are other foods that taste good and don’t hurt, not even slightly.
I am a masochist
I’m actually curious if you mean that literally - in another thread we came up with a theory that enjoying stuff like BDSM, etc and enjoying spicy food could actually be linked by how sensitive someone is to endorphins.
I’m likely not at all sensitive to them, so for me pain just doesn’t lead to pleasure (besides trivial things like scratching an itch)I do enjoy the feeling of pain but it’s not particularly sexual tbh, if I had to compare it to something else I’d say it’s a sort of sensory seeking thing? Idk
I find that really interesting - and can’t relate to it at all. I suppose if what I do counts as sensory seeking it goes in the opposite direction (I mean porn) but pain is definitely a pure negative for me that I do my best to avoid.
I think there might be something to the endorphin theory (and my apparent lack thereof)
Plus spicy isn’t even a flavour. It’s the sensation of heat receptor nerves being chemically stimulated.
I fully agree, to me it doesn’t add any flavor at all and even overwhelms other flavors the food would have.
But it’s kinda funny that the comment my client currently shows directly below yours says “The pain itself is a flavour!”
For me, eating spicy food calms me down. I suffer from anxiety and eating spicy food allows me to exist only in the here and now. I am of course not saying that everyone who eat spicy food is anxious, it is only my personal preference.
Normalise self harming with chili powder /s
That almost makes sense to me, the same way something like slapping one’s own face might.
The pain itself is a flavour! Different spices hurt in different ways, and if you can build up a tolerance, it can be a delicious flavour!
Statements like that make me feel like an alien who just landed here: I believe you, but it’s so totally outside my experience that I genuinely can’t make sense of it.
I honestly used to be the same, the only reason I pushed through and built a tolerance is because I had strong salty food cravings when I started HRT. I was staying at a friends place and for salty all they had was a ton of spicy ramen packets, and I ate so much I got used to it, heh.
IIRC it produces endorphins, though for a significant amount of folks not well enough that they’ll subject themselves to it.
That part doesn’t make sense to me either - people don’t generally intentionally stub a toe or bite their tongue or whatever, but those activities would release endorphins also.
Exercising is about as close as I can think of that people regularly do and releases endorphins, but it of course has direct benefits and not doing it has drawbacks, and it should not really hurt that much to begin with.
Getting a tattoo would also, but I assume most people do that for the result and not the experience.
It’s funny you mention tattoos - my favourite part was the huge endorphin rush it produced. I’d wager the whole tattoo ‘addiction’ thing tattoo artists and the heavily inked are familiar with is usually endorphin based, with aesthetics serving as justification.
You’re right about stubbing a toe or biting your tongue, but there are other activities people engage in that involve a direct seeking out of pain (Drag’s in this thread talking about an unfortunate one, then there’s stuff like certain activities in BDSM play [which, a surprising amount of the time, isn’t always a precursor to sex], etc.). With enjoying really, really spicy stuff, there’s the stimuli [pain], the endorphin release, and the justification and side effects that may bolster justification (‘flavour’ even in cases where little is actually detectable beyond ‘mouth hot’; satiation after getting food in you, etc.).
I’m just some random guy speculating (I’m sure there’s studies somewhere, though tricky to do direct research ethically), but I imagine it goes something like this for a lot of folks in a lot of contexts:
Stimuli -> Pain -> Dopamine release. If dopamine response is greater than pain response, is a good thing (then justified with reference to specific stimuli and context of stimuli). If pain response is greater than dopamine response, is a bad thing.
…reading it back I think specific type of stimuli, context, and the subject’s predilections are very relevant to this calculation, but not a psychologist or neurologist, so idk.
I like this theory, I wonder if liking spicy food is often correlated with enjoying activities like BDSM and tattoos and such.
I could just have roughly no response to endorphins - I know pain killers such as oxycodone do basically nothing for me (to the point that I don’t bother taking them when prescribed)
That would kinda explain a few things now that I think about it… Very interesting.
It’s a (mostly) healthy way to engage in self harming behaviours
I see where you’re coming from, but you have to consider - THAT is how good it tastes, that people are willing to eat it even though it hurts. Other foods taste good, but I wouldn’t eat them if they hurt me (if my teeth are sensitive, I’m happy to avoid ice cream even though I love it). But if I overdo chilli, my mouth can be on fire and the hardest part to deal with is not the pain, but the tension between waiting a minute for it to calm down or eating more immediately even though it’ll make the pain worse.
Spicy food is so good people will put themselves through hell to eat it. Repeatedly.
Huh. Yeah, still can’t imagine a flavor that good.
And even very mild spicy food strikes me as less flavorful than without the capsaicin, mostly because of the (even slight) pain taking my attention from the food itself.
I used to love spicy food. I’d frequently deliberately seek out the spiciest foods possible. Now I prefer actual flavour.
If your spicy food has no flavour other than heat then that is a chef problem. Thai food has incredible levels of flavour. And is also very spicy.
Nah, my focus of interest has just shifted.
It doesn’t hurt if you don’t go too hard though, in my experience. To me at least hurting and burning sensation from spicy food are not the same.
Especially in Mexican cuisine chilis have each their own flavour and it’s this distinction that I enjoy. But I don’t go crazy on eating sole habaneros for example.
Sounds like you have built up a decent tolerance already.
That’s quite likely. I can’t really be objective in assessing this.
However my story is a bit different. I didn’t eat a spicy thing in my life until I went to Mexico. They I’ve immediately started with the carnitas and loved the soft from the get go. I don’t really recall the pain stuff. Again, unless I went way too much, which I don’t like.
Are you allergic or something? It’s not that it hurts, it’s just heat
Just sensitive. There’s an extremely small range between nothing and pain where maybe it feels like heat to me, but then physical heat also just becomes pain when there’s enough of it.
Littering is one of those things I struggle the most to understand.
I can somewhat grasp it in extreme cases, like when you’re dealing with something really dirty and there’s nowhere to put it. But I’m talking about casual littering - things like throwing candy wrappers on the ground when you could just as easily put them in your pocket.
I don’t think anyone sees themselves as a bad person. Even when we engage in bad behavior, we usually have some story we tell ourselves to justify it. But I can’t put myself in the mindset of someone who casually throws trash on the ground for someone else to clean up. It’s kind of like walking around and cussing at random people - it just doesn’t make any sense. You have to know that you’re the problem.
I don’t think that dropping rubbish is necessarily that bad. The problem comes when it persists in the environment for hundreds of years because it’s not biodegradable.
How do you separate the two? The fact that it persists in nature for hundreds of years is what makes it bad. I don’t mind someone throwing banana peels into a forest.
Yea, that’s what I mean. I call rubbish anything that gets thrown away though, so for me a banana skin is still rubbish but it is not bad in the same way as a plastic bottle. I probably wasn’t clear enough in my downvoted first comment. But I am sick, so forgive me.
Banana peels take up to two years to decompose, unless they’re in the right environment such as a compost heap where the process speeds to 6-9 months
That’s still lightyears ahead of cigarette butts and plastic bottles, but a lot of people don’t realize how long their trash lasts for
Cigarettes are one that particularly bother me, because they’re so gross even compared to most other litter, but throwing them wherever is so normalised among smokers.
I’ve argued with litterers before and it goes along the lines of “it’s already messy, everyone’s doing it”. Same sort of excuses you get from cheaters and such. I don’t mean to go all edgy Joker but there’s probably things you and I do that are a problem but we don’t see it because everyone else does it too. Eating meat and emitting tons of co2 for example.
“Then don’t add to the mess” is my usual response,
I’ve had smoking friends who refuse to stand further from a doorway and blowing it in peoples faces with the “air is already polluted with cars” argument
Me:”then don’t add more!”
It’s a weak argument. One with the easiest hole to poke. Also great answer if you’re trying to filter out the idiots from your friends group.
Most people are courteous enough not to idle their car with the exhaust pipe right in a doorway. Their analogy is some serious mental gymnastics.
I feel this a lot. Many criminals who have done wretched things at least have a comprehensible motivation, but littering? Cigarette butts in a nature reserve? It’s nihilism, solipsism. That honestly scares me more. I can grasp that some people’s care is misguided or distorted, but a lack of care at all? How do you even contend with that?
I’ve put wrappers in my pocket on numerous occasions and lost them over the course of the next hour (usually depends on which clothes/pockets) so that might be part of what causes there to be so much litter but I have never intentionally thrown anything into nature besides a banana peel when I was a child. Throwing the banana peel into nature felt wrong but probably still is better than having walked a couple of hours with it to reach a mixed bin where it would rot and then maybe be burned.
Be of good cheer! We Americans have come a long way since I was a kid in the 70s. If I sent younger folks back, they would shit kittens. This is the UK, but it feels the same. Shit was mounded on the highways. People would casually chunk fast food bags. Can’t remember that last time I saw that. Cigarette butts used to fly like tracers at night. Again, haven’t seen that in ages.
More good news! Sorta. I haul loads of trash out of the woods and waterways around here. To the point where my wife and kids are like, “Daddy! Don’t mess with that!” I’m borderline obnoxious about it, done stupid shit to get a plastic bottle or fishing bobber.
Experience from these adventures tells me that most wasn’t deliberately tossed. Don’t know how to qualify that, I just have a sense for how long it’s been in the sun, how far it’s buried, the type of trash, whatever. It blew off a boat or pickup bed, overflowing trash can flowed downhill with the rains (loads of that), got loose from the trash man and never picked up, drunk and “oops”, stuff like that. Kids ditching beer cans so to not get busted is crystal clear! :)
I’ve cleaned out the woods around here, miles and miles of trails, and there’s hardly anything new to find. Always a little surprised when I see new litter. Know what I do find half the time? My own trash. “Hey! That’s my coozie!” or “How did I drop that?!” or “Shit. Missed my beer can on the return trip.”
Pick up more than you lay down, we’ll all make it.
We’re all guilty of littering. Even the most careful of us will drop something without noticing- And I know I’m not the most careful. So I try and make up for what I’ve dropped by picking up bits of litter here and there.
Especially out in nature. When I see a bottle top or something, I tend to think to myself that the person who left that there is a bit of a dick. Now I have a choice - pick it up, or leave it there.
If I leave it there, then suddenly I am the dick I was complaining about.
I saw some dude in a small convertible chuck a whole-ass fast food bag out of his car at a stop light. I sped in front of him and called him a cunt. He was VERY angry. His lil rage-out for some great dashcam footage.
When walking to a train station, I find fast food meal bags and empty plastic bottles in the sidewalk every day. If it’s not too gross I take it with me the 30 meters to next public bin.
I really don’t get it. Wherever you’re going, there will most likely be a trash bin. It’s not gonna impact your fuel costs. What are they thinking?
I still refuse to understand why littering is so common in my country. It seriously makes the cities look horrible.
Still remember the just piles and piles of garbage at the beaches and shrines around Mumbai.
I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
What?
I meant that I thought the garbage situation in my country was bad enough, I didn’t expect something worse.
Over compensating when an injustice is learned. We don’t change anything meaningful, it seems, and when this happens, we create a whole new problem
People who treat their friends as more unconditional than ethics.
Using LinkedIn
A lot of ceremony-like events confuse me.
They seem designed to be as tedious and gruelling as possible. Consider Graduation Ceremonies, or the ceremonial part of Weddings. Just hours in a hard chair, listening to some old motherfucker blabber on and on about random bullshit. (the parties afterwards I understand and respect, even if I’m the opposite of a party person. The only thing I like about parties is the excuse to dress up and eat cake. But hey, people enjoy dancing and drinking and stuff, that makes sense to me.)
Is this some Neurotypical thing I’m too Autistic to understand? Like do people actually enjoy this?
EDIT: Actually, since I brought up drinking when talking about parties.
… I don’t comprehend people that like alcoholic drinks. It’s one thing to enjoy the feeling of being buzzed, we all want to turn off our brains sometimes, and of course it is literally addicting.
But I am talking about people who apparently enjoy the taste. Every type of booze I tried tasted like something between “medicine” and “actual poison”.
People will spend a fortune in Wines and Beers and they all just taste bad. Then they’ll swear up and down “no no dude, this wine is super sweet” and then you try it and it tastes like every other wine, which is to say it tastes like you took grape juice and sucked out all the joy.
I can’t understand someone that want to attack another country, go to war, just to take some piece of land. And then want to die for this reason.
People should just learn that you can’t get everything they want in life and deal with it in a good way.
Tell that to the capitalists running the world
The people declaring the war are not the same people fighting the war.
To add to this, I can’t understand how a bunch of people can so-easily be whipped up into a frenzy to “go kill those people because glory or something” and don’t feel how they’re being manipulated.
Like when some autocrat wants to play chess with peoples’ lives, it’s really surprising how there’s not really many (if any?) documented cases of people just being like “Huh, sounds like a problem for Lil’ Bitchard the Twelth to solve like a big boy doesn’t it? I’m not dying over your silly disputes.”
I guess that’s why it’s usually a first step to reinforce oath-taking and thoughtless nationalism into culture as quickly as they can…
just to take some piece of land
That’s not really what wars are about though. It’s usually some internal power struggle.
It used to be about that.
