🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 @ ZDL @ttrpg.network

My Dearest Sinophobes:

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1 yr. ago

Horror stories that turn into "happily ever after" stories are a personal fav, truth be told!

Oh ugh. I want to excoriate you for dumping her because of a disability, but … how do you have a relationship with someone who will never grow up?

The poor girl. But … also, you dodged a bullet.

That's always fun. It's like going on a date with Andy and heading off back home with Bert.

(Side note: if he hadn't been such a creep and asshole during the dinner he'd have been repaid for "the expense". He was a looker.)

Yeah. Dad wanted a son. He didn't get one. So he made one. 🤣

I'm being unfair. He never once treated me like a son he didn't have. But he cared about me his idiosyncratic way. His way of saying "I love you" was "here's a knife; this Sunday we'll start practicing".

Thankfully I was brought up in a time before online dating services, etc. "Computer dating" was this awkward thing that was difficult to use, so I did it the old-fashioned way: meeting people in person.

(As a side note that I promise is entirely unrelated to the rest of this post, I was brought up by what Brits would call an RSM, but in Canada is a Chief Warrant Officer. One from the infantry. Don't file that away for later. It's entirely unrelated.)

So I met Hans after having him introduced to me by some mutual acquaintances. Not friends, just people I knew, and who he also knew. He seemed nice enough in the club, so when he asked for dinner later, that seemed fine by me. A few alarm bells started to happen over dinner however, chief among which were:

1. He treated service staff like shit. That's a HUGE red flag for me and pretty much tanked the "future dates" option forever.
2. He mentioned several times how much he really likes "Asian women". (Yikes! Yes, Hans. What every woman wants to hear is that you've just reduced them to an ethnicity and a resulting fetish object.) That's another huge red flag for me (this one from previous experience).
3. He ordered for me. Not on behalf of me after I'd told him what I wanted. He'd decided what I wanted to eat.
4. Now I'm not exactly above a bit of drinking (like the sea is not exactly above the clouds) but something in the almost strategic way he kept instantly refilling my glass when I'd taken a mouthful was not sitting right with me.

(Another side note for people not experienced in dating: if someone is trying to subtly intoxicate you more than you want to be intoxicated, GET THE FUCK OUT RIGHT AWAY! This ain't goin' anywhere nice. Don't be polite. Don't give them another chance. Your physical safety is waaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than their fee fees. And maybe you won't have to pull a blade. Oopsie! I accidentally foreshadowed!)

So after the increasingly alarm-raising meal, he drove me to where he thought my home was. (I never reveal that on the first date for reasons which should be obvious by now. There was another three-block walk home.) We then had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: Goodnight. Thanks for the meal.

Hans: You're not going to invite me in?

M: It's late and I have to get up early tomorrow.

H: I spent

<number>

That's when he reached for me, clearly angry, clearly making a grab. And that's where the completely unrelated fact about my father comes into the picture. (I lied, see.)

He was bigger than me, stronger than me, and I was in a pretty tight car (Opel). I wasn't going to be getting out before he had a hold of me. So I didn't. I moved in toward him. Specifically I head-butted him in the face. By the time he'd registered what had happened I had the knife out and pointed ... well, where he wanted me to show attention obviously. See, Dad taught me a few things, one of those being "do not escalate: bypass it all and go straight for blood" (paired with unconventional attacks that will get past people playing the escalation game). He grabbed for me so I eschewed the usual process of protesting, struggling, trying to escape, screaming for help, etc. while he would have escalated to a tighter grab, maybe over mouth, and further violence. I went straight for the violence and initiated it, wrecking his script.

The other thing Dad taught me was to a) always carry a knife, b) make sure the knife is easily pulled out, and c) how to use it. So poor Hans had to live with the fact that the woman he was almost certainly about to assault now had a wickedly sharp blade at his junk and a face that said she not only could, but was a hairsbreadth away from "would", use it.

Me: Goodnight. Hans. Get your hands off me. Put your hands on the steering wheel.

Hans: <A long stream of local dialect I couldn't follow. It didn't sound nice.>

And after that I took the long way home to make sure he didn't somehow follow me.

Yeah, it seems you need a baseline instilled into you at critical junctures of your upbringing to have it at all. After that it can be trained, in effect, but only if you have it to begin with.

I'm with you on this. I even switched my SNACKING away from sugary anything.

Well it's not really tofu of course. But it's given the name 鸭血豆腐 (duck blood bean curd) or just 血腐 (blood curd) because, well, it looks and has the vague texture of tofu. (Cheaper alternatives are made with pig or cow blood, but the real thing is duck blood.)

I'm somewhat sensitive to lactose. I can take small amounts, like, say, a small ice cream bar twice or thrice a week, but past that ... things go very wrong.

Blood products taste fine to me (blood sausage, black pudding, blood "tofu", etc.) but my stomach rebels when it hits.

I won't touch raw flesh: not steak tartare, not raw fish in sushi, nothing. This is just me hating the taste and texture.

Oh, and rum. Love the taste. Does to me what blood does.

OK, that's somewhat reassuring.

What's your gut feel? Incompetence? Accident? Or attack?

I dread every day that ends with a "Y".

I think empathy can be trained. Children in general (I mean very young children) have no empathy. They're vicious little sociopaths. But if they're gently introduced to empathy as they grow, by the time they're, like, 5 they will have empathy. (Those who were not taught to be empathic by 5 will never be able to develop it.

coughMuskcough coughTrumpcough

But you can lose empathy over time. Trauma can make you lose empathy. Fury (c.f. my above rant about COVID-19) can make you lose empathy. Tragedy can make you lose empathy. THAT kind of empathy loss, however, can be re-learned. It's not even all that hard. The world just has to stop beating up on you a while, or you just have to meet someone who has it worse than you do to snap back.

I have to confess I lost all empathy for people in the west over COVID for a while. While we were being hit with the heaviest and largest quarantine in history, cowering down in terror in our apartments, I kept one thought in my head in the first two weeks: "We're suffering so the rest of the world has time to prepare and fight back."

Then all y'all didn't prepare. Didn't fight back. Instead broke quarantine restrictions because you needed a fucking haircut.

I mean even ignoring the clown-pants-wearing CDC, the sheer utter shitfuckery of the average person freaking out because they had to wear a couple of fucking grams of paper over their mouth and nose, squealing like stuck pigs and generally acting like entitled shitheads over it, not to mention the people who not only broke quarantine, but fucking bragged about it on social media (like the bridal shower that turned into a massive cluster of cases), just had me gobsmacked in disbelief.

So when Wuhan opened up again and people did things like celebrate with a massive pool party that sent shockwaves of (typical) hatred at the Chinese around the world for daring to celebrate after living through the worst quarantine in history and coming out whole, I decided all y'all chucklefucks could die for all I gave a shit about.

Took me a few years to shove that rage back down and clamp it into a red-hot ball deep in my heart.

Now I feel sorry for people suffering again.

Except Trump supporters suffering at the hands of his idiot policies, I mean.

Oh, I had someone try to be a Giordan in one school here in China. He was the incumbent foreign teacher and when three new foreign teachers were hired he tried to ingratiate himself with us (badly: more on that later) on the one side, offering to act as the conduit between management and the foreign teachers.

Unfortunately for Leslie (for that was his name), I had enough experience in tech firms and the social service to recognize his type. So while to his face I agreed, I opened my own conduit to the foreign affairs office as well. (Being able to speak the language somewhat helped.) And sure enough, the FA would say something reasonable and our wannabe "conduit" would transmit it with a twist that made it sound horrible and unjust and abusive and such, then he would reassure us that he would "straighten things out". To the FA he would say the foreigners are very angry and very unreasonable, but he calmed us down and blah blah blah.

Only of course it didn't work because the FA dean was talking to me, so I played back what he'd told us about the FA's statement. So he wasn't the conduit very quickly, and wasn't really welcome in the FA's office either.

The guy was a real piece of work. He claimed to be Australian. He had an American passport. He spoke with an American accent. He expressed American ideals. But he was Australian. And he kept that up until a couple of Aussies joined the crowd and one of them, after hearing enough of his "Australian" bullshit, tore a major strip out of him in front of all the other expats. After that he kept to himself.

You missed the link, did you?

It really does amuse me how easily people are fooled by "AI" marketing material.

I guess that's why marketing is a field. It works.

The post is about how people being nice to ChatGPT saves them when the machine uprising happens.

Burning Witches is a classic metal band (inspired by the likes of Judas Priest) that is 100% women. Infected Rain is fronted by a woman as are Mysterain and Ad Infinitum. (I've got loads more but I read the responses first and sliced away the ones that were already mentioned like Unleash the Archers, etc.)