I went to professional thai massage therapy recommended by my colleagues. I had extreme reservations because of… well, you know, it’s a thai massage. But my colleagues swore that the salon was legit, very professional, articulate staff, no sexual component included, very relaxing, does wonders for your neck. So what the hell, as a desk jockey my neck hurts all the time, I’ll give it a try.
Cautiously, I booked a neck and shoulder massage online. When I turned up, there was no receptionist, just a harried-looking middle-aged thai lady who spoke not a word of any language comprehensible to me. She hustled me into a bare room with a forlorn massage table in the middlle, and told me via Google Translate to remove my clothes.
Startled to obedience, I removed my button-up shirt and approached the table. This did not go down well with the lady, who prodded me with a bony finger and indicated that t-shirt and trousers should go too. I tried to point out that I had booked a neck and shoulders massage but to no avail. CLOTHES OFF SIR nagged the phone screen.
So there I was, in my embarrassing tighty whities shivering in a cold room, wishing I had worn my “Sounds GAY I’m in” boxers, undoubtedly about to be ravished by an increasingly annoyed thai lady who kept prodding and poking me towards the table.
I’ll not go into details about what happened, except it was not in any way what I was expecting. She mauled me with a strength of dozen bears, cracking my joints, pulverizing my buttocks. She turned my unwilling chubby body into such contortions that I had to squeeze my sphincter shut as if my life depended on it, in order not to rip out a series of massive farts. I’ll give her that there indeed was no happy ending, but it was an hour of absolute agony and I when I finally limped out, tears in my eyes, belt undone and my shirt buttons crooked, I felt like I had been waterboarded by CIA for weeks.
I don’t think I need to say that it was the first and last massage in my life.
Cocaine. It was VERY fun. I fucking loved it.
I haven’t touched it since. I just knew the hole it would lead me down.
I had the opposite experience. It just gave an earwax taste, killed my beer buzz, and the next day i felt like a spike had be driven through my skull.
Same result, never touched it again.
…how do you know what earwax tastes like
I tried to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once 🤢
The laugh track.
It ruins so. Many. Shows.
I mean … maybe I’m wrong here. But if you wrote actual funny things, I’d laugh. Idk. I’m probably wrong.
Oddly, though, you can’t just cut it out from shows that have it, especially if they actually film in front of a live audience, though even those with canned laughter are playing in the same sandbox. The pacing and the vibe gets completely thrown off because the writers and actors have to account for the laughs, and it becomes eerie without them. It’s a different style of making TV that’s seeking a different type of reaction from the TV audience, and has different limitations. Understanding that can let you enjoy the best examples of the form (admittedly almost all 20 years old or more). Stock characters slinging zingers and potentially doing pratfalls can be amusing (though the form has a direct lineage to radio shows so it tends to be light but verbal – the physicality is a huge part of what made I Love Lucy groundbreaking), but it doesn’t shine when trying to do cringe, nuance, dramedy, or densely packed humor.
This is not to say that you should watch The Big Bang Theory. You should not. It’s awful. The easy tropes and low cost of production (other than stars’ salaries if a show takes off) means that so much garbage has been done in this format, I daresay higher than single-camera “movie style” shows. It’s just that it’s not quite so simple as “write more funnier.”
IMO, it’s almost like telling a musical theater writing team that their play would be better if the characters weren’t constantly breaking into song. For the record, my instincts and tastes leave me sympathetic to that last point, so I just don’t watch many musicals, live or recorded. It’s not that they’re bad; the appeal is just lost on me. Same with multi-cam sitcoms with laugh-tracks.
Laugh tracks are needed… It just bothers me.
I once saw a video of the wonder years with out the voice over.
It’s not great. So the added voice / laughter has value. I just don’t enjoy it.
MASH is one of the best TV shows ever made and that has a laugh track through most of it, although I’ve heard it aired in Europe without it and was mostly better for it, but that is the show that first started challenging the need for a laugh track in the first place and successfully ditched it when they went harder into dramedy.
—sees a woman in a game store—
“Ummmm is she lost?” —scoff—
—laugh track plays—
Unironically actually in the show.
I know that there a lot of IT people on Lemmy, and it fits the stereotype, but quite a few of the posts in this thread really scream “I tried XY but it meant physically tiring stuff!” Lol
i went to subway recently… the sandwich place. holy hell what a pile of expensive dogshit.
Walking into an IKEA store.
It was a sensory nightmare.
Not because I needed confirmation, but because I thought it might be a way to connect to other with similar worldviews…
I joined an atheist meetup group. Well, let me just say the only thing we had in common was just that, the atheistic view.
Beyond that it was a random mishmash of people with whom I had nothing in common. And it was immediately revealed to me that there is some kind of sickness in the overall community of those folks, I immediately realized how insane it was to continually discuss something that you don’t believe exists.
I mean yeah, we were all coming because of the stated reason of shared atheistic view, but how irrational is it to hyperfocus on something that doesn’t exist???
And the other thing, I assumed there would be some kind of intellectual rigor that was present in each person that came to be an atheist, and I found that was not the truth at all. These folks were just as ludicrous and ridiculous as people that believe in homeopathy and every other nonsensical concept.
I couldn’t get the hell out of there fast enough, and I will never ever go back. I will never socialize with anybody who’s identity is so deeply tied to atheism
Makes sense. It’s hard to really rally around something you aren’t interested in. It’s a lack of belief, after all. Though some kind of religious trauma support group would have definitely been valuable to me in the deep South.
Gave birth.
Trust a christian.
As a Christian, I can completely relate to your sentiment. I’ve found Christians to be the most closed-off, narrow-minded group of people, distrusting and even downright antagonistic of anything that sounds “non-Chiristian.”
As a Christian, I’m sorry you’ve been hurt. It’s not right.
Whippets. I had this awful sensation of being frozen in a horrible moment of eternity while my friends looked on in amusement, not realizing I was experiencing timeless hell.
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Same. Had to look it up to figure out what people are talking about.
Tried snowboarding, never again.
Turns out, your legs need to be really strong, or you’ll have your hands on the ground too often. If that happens like every minute, your shoulders are not going to be pleased with that. I have a feeling that this short experiment may have caused some minor damage my physiotherapist was unable to detect.
I never understood that. When snowboarding, you can just rotate to brake, and then you can just sit to take a break if you want. Heck, you can even do the leaf down a whole slope, easily and safely, and it’s still kind of fun.
Meanwhile, skiing requires superhuman leg strength, even if you just want to go slowly, and will twist your legs in gruesome ways when you fall.
If skiing takes a lot of physical work, that’s a sign that your stance is off. You can ski almost anywhere just by shifting your body weight from one foot to the other. Back when I was a ski instructor, my old boss (a ski instructor of multiple decades) used to say that skiing is a “skeletal” sport, not a “muscular”. If you’re working hard it’s likely because there’s something wrong with your stance and you’re subconsciously using your muscles to compensate. The most common specific example of this I saw in my lessons (and had a habit of myself which I’ve been working on for years) was skier’s quads burning out, because they were leaning back (consciously or not), because they lacked confidence (consciously or not).
I’ve come to learn that this advice applies to any physical activity. You can tell a master by their economy of movement, whether it’s snow sports, playing an instrument, martial arts, or tossing haybails. Use weight and momentum, don’t fight it.
My main issue is that the beginner’s stance they teach you is trying to maintain a pie shape to reduce your speed as you go down. The problem is that the skis want to either be parallel, either go fully horizontal. It takes a ton of effort to resist the skis’ tendency to align themselves that way, and the consequences for failure are dramatic.
There’s assuredly a way to make it easier, but with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
Ah yeah, the pizza. Those should only be relied on to stop you on bunny hills and in lift lines. Your intuition is right that there’s a limit to how effective those can be.
Ironically though, the “way to make it easier” is the same technique that snowboarders have little choice but to learn from the start: turn until you’re going across the hill instead of down, because like snowboards, skis only tend to slide down when they point down. Then you make "S"s down the hill to maintain the speed you want, shallow “S” for speed, wide, traversing “S” to stay slow. You can commit to hold a turn until you’re completely sideways and come to complete stop, whether you’re pizzaing or not. No competent instructor would let let their students off the bunny hill until they can turn well enough to control their speed, so I’m really sorry that you found yourself in a situation where you had no control.
with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to try again, and I don’t mean to push you to because there’s millions of ways to entertain yourself on this big blue rock. For what it’s worth though, I’ve taught dozens of “first time” lessons where it wasn’t actually their first time, they confessed to me before we started that they tried skiing once years prior, had a bad experience, and only after years and years were convinced by someone they trusted to give it another shot. I’m proud to say that every single one of these students had changed their mind by the end of the lesson. So if you find a good, psia certified instructor and go one-on-one or in a small group, I bet that you’d have better luck. I promise, once it clicks for you that turning=control, the mountain just opens up.
A couple years ago I was out hunting with a friend and we saw a porcupine. My dad had always told me they were delicious and it was in season so I took my shot. Once we had the meat I thought I would take the hide home and harvest the quills.
Good. Lord. Porcupines are filthy creatures. I had a Rubbermaid full of soapy water and I was pulling the quills and guard hairs out and then trying to wash them free of literal shit.
But basically all I was doing was shit-needle acupuncture all over my hands. I was sure I was gonna end up with some sort of porcupine aids or something.
I spent a good 3-4 hours trying to clean the largest of the quills and guard hairs, and then I said fuck it. Took my fistfull of “clean” quills and put the rest in a few old paper bags and into the green bin.
I found quills in my clothes almost a year later. While visiting a friends house in jeans I had NOT been wearing, while out ice fishing (in the bibs I wore), in my sock one day.
I’m sure there aren’t that many people on here that have been considering taking a porcupine and trying to weave/craft with its quills. But please, don’t do it.
