Tootfinder

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

Carnell Tate could be Ohio State's next star WR: Top landing spots for 2026 NFL Draft

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/news/carnell-tate-nfl-draft-2026-landing-spots/…

Do catgirls like boxed wine because of the box? :eyethink:

Ran the #Wrapstodon thing on this server.
"Oracle" for me again. 😒
Other than My most boosted post and a count of 1443 posts and 250 followers I don't think it means much on a tiny server. Everyone here is in the top 75% of users because there are two users. 😆
The categories are:

Oracle: “You created new posts more than replies, keeping Mastodon fresh and future‑facing.”

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Social butterfly (replier): You replied far more than posting originals.

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Cool‑hunter (booster): You mainly amplify others via boosts.

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Pollster: You created lots of polls compared to everything else.

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Lurker: You post and interact relatively little overall.
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I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

@… A couple of #ThePlaylistSuggestion accent ideas. Some of these might fall into the category of novelty record. You can be the judge.
Gertcha by those lovable cockney chappies Mr Chas and Mr Dave
I Am A Cider Drinker by those lovable Somerset chappies The Wurzels
Ain't Going To Goa by those lovable southern good ol' boys (southern England, I believe, despite the accent), Alabama 3
Road Rage by Catatonia, because something about Cerys' voice on that song does funny wibbly things to my insides
Feel free to play some, all, or none. Half the fun of #ThePlaylist is choosing as much as listening!

POL-WL: Nach Tötung eines 87-Jährigen: Antrag auf Erlass eines Haftbefehls gestellt (Bezug: https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/59458/6224120) Wistedt/Stade (ots) - Die Staatsanwaltschaft Stade hat nach Würdigung der bisherigen Ermittlungsergebnisse heute einen Antrag auf Er…

Hierarchic-EEG2Text: Assessing EEG-To-Text Decoding across Hierarchical Abstraction Levels
Anupam Sharma, Harish Katti, Prajwal Singh, Shanmuganathan Raman, Krishna Miyapuram
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20932 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20932 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20932
arXiv:2602.20932v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An electroencephalogram (EEG) records the spatially averaged electrical activity of neurons in the brain, measured from the human scalp. Prior studies have explored EEG-based classification of objects or concepts, often for passive viewing of briefly presented image or video stimuli, with limited classes. Because EEG exhibits a low signal-to-noise ratio, recognizing fine-grained representations across a large number of classes remains challenging; however, abstract-level object representations may exist. In this work, we investigate whether EEG captures object representations across multiple hierarchical levels, and propose episodic analysis, in which a Machine Learning (ML) model is evaluated across various, yet related, classification tasks (episodes). Unlike prior episodic EEG studies that rely on fixed or randomly sampled classes of equal cardinality, we adopt hierarchy-aware episode sampling using WordNet to generate episodes with variable classes of diverse hierarchy. We also present the largest episodic framework in the EEG domain for detecting observed text from EEG signals in the PEERS dataset, comprising $931538$ EEG samples under $1610$ object labels, acquired from $264$ human participants (subjects) performing controlled cognitive tasks, enabling the study of neural dynamics underlying perception, decision-making, and performance monitoring.
We examine how the semantic abstraction level affects classification performance across multiple learning techniques and architectures, providing a comprehensive analysis. The models tend to improve performance when the classification categories are drawn from higher levels of the hierarchy, suggesting sensitivity to abstraction. Our work highlights abstraction depth as an underexplored dimension of EEG decoding and motivates future research in this direction.
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