A bit unusual, but for me it was my boyfriend’s son telling me he’s grateful for me because I’ve helped his dad become less strict, more open-minded, and generally softer. He said their relationship is the best it’s ever been.

At first, he hated me because he saw me as a homewrecker, even though his mom explained that she was completely okay with her husband having a girlfriend. Hearing him tell me all of that, and that he likes me a lot now, really warmed my heart. It also gave me a sense of peace and relief, because I’d felt guilty toward him even though I hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

By "spoil," I mean things like:

• Smothering him in kisses
• Stroking his hair
• Using a soft or warm tone of voice associated with "puppy talk" or "baby talk"
• Telling him he's cute, precious, or any number of cutesy and diminutive pet names
• Praising him for who he is, not just what he does
• Holding and reassuring him when he's scared or sad
• Being the big spoon when cuddling
• Cherishing his soft or vulnerable emotional expressions
• Initiating affection and sex
• Treating his emotional well-being as equally important to her own
• Being playfully affectionate -- overwhelming him with kisses, tickling him, squeezing him, etc

My ideal relationship is one where she spoils me about as much as I spoil her, and we support each other and make decisions together as a team.

So, what do you think? Are my desires some kind of strange Oedipal amalgamation that doesn't really exist in real relationships, or is believing so just another cognitive distortion from my upbringing?

Looking for a little insparation for a wordbuilding project I am working on. I am curious what supernatural/ witchy ritual you have experienced, how you felt and if you'd do it again? :3

Throughout my adult professional life, I've encountered people who have a (to me, at least) very curious way of interacting with other people. They look at individuals as 'resources' and relationships as 'transactions'. Picture a spider's web of contacts where 'Bob' is replaced with 'has tools I can borrow' and 'Melissa' is replaced with 'can get me into my favorite club without a cover charge'.

I'm trying my best to articulate this. It's like these people only create relationships based upon what material gains it can offer them. They aren't really interested in the PEOPLE so much as the ADVANTAGE a relationship with them affords. Does that make sense?

Now to me, this is very bizarre. I just don't think this way, but I'm told that it's quite common - almost 'the norm'. Is this true? If so, I'm really bewildered by it. What do y'all think?

I've struggled to be musical all my life--took lessons, took college classes, did ear training, etc.

I think I finally cracked the code, and it's surprisingly simple:

1. Learn to play melodies by ear (starts with singing)
2. Learn only enough theory to:

• know your way around your instrument (scales, arpeggios)
• understand chords
• understand song structure

3. Experiment (ie have fun!)

The most anal formal exercise I'd recommend is learning to hear relative scale degrees (two very good apps available for that)--though I think that skill would be developed by transcribing (playing by ear), it's helpful for your confidence level to have graded exercises you can have some success with.

But my experience with most of my music teachers is they fall into one of two traps:

For classical music, it's:

1. Learn how to translate written notes into notes on your instrument.
2. Go to 1.

For instance: I was taking clarinet lessons and I remember my teacher saying goodbye to his last student--a kid--and the teacher said, "If you bring me the sheet music for it, we can learn to play it." And I thought what a missed opportunity that was for that girl to learn to hear and transcribe music--obviously not a skill he thought was important to the teacher at all. And I'd understand now wanting to do that for piano, which is really complicated, but learning to play a melody by ear on a single note instrument is a very achievable goal, especially when you have someone that can tell you what key it's in and what the first note is.

The trap for jazz music is:

1. Learn what are the "right" notes to play.
2. Play them in any random order.

I used to blame teachers for just being bad at their jobs, but I think students (and maybe parents/administrators) are also to blame.

I ran across a senior guy who was trying to get back into piano. He'd played for a few years and it was clear he had no idea of how to be musical--no idea of how to construct a simple bass line, no knowledge of how to define a chord. So I said, "Hey, I'll work with you even though I don't play piano, I think you need to learn this song and just play the root and the five in the left hand, and sing the melody while you play, and use a metronome." What an amazing exercise I thought: it would help teach him timing, develop his ear, develop his feel, let him be expressive with his voice, let him embody the melody, lear to work the bass, etc. Aren't I brilliant teacher?

You know what this guy did? He pulled out his phone to show me some recordings he did of him playing the song the way his music teacher had written it out for him; it was what I expected--just haltingly reading the music with no sense of time. I wasn't sure, but I think he wanted me to praise him for playing such a complex piece.

For him, and maybe for a lot of students (and certainly for parents and administrators), they don't actually want to master music, they want to impress people. And maybe for the musically disinclined, haltingly playing a complex written piece is more impressive than a 2-note bassline in time with an expressive voiceline sensitive to dynamic; since most people in charge of music education (parents and school administrators) don't know music, maybe they would promote a teacher who taught the former and fire a teacher who taught the latter..

For jazz programs, I think they've got a lot of theory they've got to cram into the kids heads, and we can learn theory a lot faster than we can develop musically, so if you're going to be judged on "performance" of your students, you'll be rewarded for having them be able to pass essentially paper exams set to music more than for having them skillfully play pentatonic blues.

I don't know what the answer is, but for some reason, actually mastering music is very low on the list for both teachers and students.

What's all y'all's experience with music and music education?

Lemmy is so Linux-focused and people are surprisingly opinionated about it.

So a month or so, I watched This Video STEAM Education: Putting an A in your STEM and i really liked the Idea. The basic gist is to teach science in creative ways, for example, instead of just being show the Bohr model of an Atom, you are given the know facts surrounding the the element, and are asked to reduce how they come together to form this specific model and shape.

At the moment, i am taking High School Calculus for the first time and its all going over my head. Suddenly Math feels like its more vibes than anything else, and its alot. The closest thing i ever took in normal math, that wasn't just an equation with an answer, was Simultaneous equations, and not gonna lie, While i didn't used to have math anxiety in high school, this stuff sure as hell scares me.

Some people in YouTube video mentioned how different ways of learning Calculus worked for them, that they were actually able to understand the topics

Some quotes:

As an adult I came to realize that math isn't taught very well in high school. In High School I got good grades in math, but I realize I didn't actually learn it very well. For example, I didn't actually understand what a Sine and Cosine are, I just learned how to plug them into a formula without understanding why the formula worked.

I got a much better understanding of Trigonometry when I started learning how to do some programming for making video games. I had to write code that would rotate a little space ship in the game, which required me to learn how the Trigonometric formulas actually worked.

Many of us think of games as just being arts and entertainment, so it's kind of funny that they ended up teaching me math better than school did. I realized I had a bias that I think a lot of people have, where they assume that math is supposed to be boring and difficult, but it doesn't actually have to be that way.

And

It was not until I got to college, took my first programming course, and learned about binary, octal, and hex that I understood how numbers work. It was a true lightbulb moment. I took CALCULUS in high school and this was the first time in my life that arithmetic made sense.

After the awe finally wore off, I just thought of the years of rote memorization I suffered through, the overwhelming confusion that came from staring at pages of complex notation because the fundamental building blocks were never explained to me. I could do the math, but I always struggled because I didn’t know WHY I was doing things this way. It made me think of the kids who had the same feelings as I did with even more basic math, and my heart hurt. It’s messed up.

And

I'm in Math, and every time I tell someone outside of Math I did my PhD in it, they invariably respond something along the lines of "oh, you like math? is it because there's always an answer and it's straightforward?" or "oh, you like math? I hated math, it's too rigid". It's kind of funny that people seem to have a perception of this massive divide between "hard" or "definite" sciences and everything "creative." There is so much more to math than algorithmically determining a solution.

All to say, as an Adult ^TM^ who isn't restricted by the rigid system of school, i have subjects and topics i want to delve into. Originally, i downloaded a bunch of High School Books that i thought i could start with, but i am now thinking there are better resources out there

Here are some subjects i am interested in:

• Cactus/Math
• Geography
• Physics
• Sociology
• Religious studies
• Pharmacology
• Linguistics
• Computer science
• Geo-politics politics and international relations
• Art Theory

Despite the infinite amount of information on the internet, just googling stuff is Ass. Not to mention the huge amount of misinformation surrounding basic concepts(at least High School Textbooks are reviewed by some form of experts). And i don't have the option of going to a library.

Also, lectures are said to be very ineffective for learning(they are more about cost than anything else). And i am not cuffed to any exams or expected to memorize every fact, so i am very flexible in the activity i can do(barring cost and time)

The copies would retain their memories and the previous version was quarantined and disposed of.

Edit: BTW your answer will dictate how the AI overloads will judge you.

ok so i've seen people say that lewd things are bad. why is that? i'd like to hear it from you personally.

i've come up with a variety of theories so far but none really track.

Looking for stories of times you interacted with a criminal organization in any capacity. Were/are there any infamous locals frequently talked about in your area (please don't dox yourself). Please give a genuine answer not a political stance. The only one I think I've had was a story I've told here before about having met an Aryan brotherhood guy when I was 12ish.

I see tons of games that are interesting, but the price tags are crazy. I want a game I can pour hours into and my expectations are sky high for the 100 dollar price tags. The games gotta be peak, but peak is subjective and I wonder what you all consider worth it in the Switch II library as of today.

Which Switch II games are actually worth picking up?

You are a senior executive at Adobe.

The CEO of Adobe summons you in his office.

You are in charge of creating a secret task force. The goal is to systematically undermine open source software such as Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive or GIMP. You have a $50 million budget. Nobody in the company knows about this project except you and Adobe's CEO.

What would you do?

The other day someone asked what kind of music I listen to and I said frank schauthiggua, they asked what genre and I said mostly cerebral catwave. It seemed like he took it seriously or he was really good at pretending to know what that is. I at least think I made those up. His reaction made me question...

I have almost no idea what any of the more specific genre tags I see on a lot of songs even mean. Has anyone already made something like a list of genres with some examples?

Edit: Thanks everyone, I'll check those on my next break or maybe when I get home if they get on my case about headphones at work

This is hypothetical - the glasses don't fact-check what people say, they somehow detect willful deception, like people expect polygraphs to do, but with high accuracy. Would people welcome these, fear them, object on privacy grounds? I think it would be very contentious. Would people feel different if they only fed the information to the wearer but didn't record or send it anywhere? What exactly would the issues be?

Just found out about pickled hotdogs. Sounds disgusting.

A year ago I broke up with my gf of 8 years after finding out she cheated on me and had been for a long time.

I quite literally have zero friends remaining at this point. Every single mutual friend has stayed friends with her and completely ghosted me. I can only suspect I've been slandered and that's why nobody wants anything to do with me anymore. I tried going to local shows as that was my community but it's completely sucked the fun out of things because it's a small city and there's always eyes on me from different corners of the room like I've done something wrong and I don't feel welcome anymore. So I've just stopped attending concerts which used to be my safe space. Standing by myself watching the band while people stare a hole in the side of my head isn't exactly enjoyable.

My lived experience has now taught me that 90% of people are cheaters, liars, and thieves, and while I know that's not reality, it's fundamentally changed the way I approach friendships. I don't open up to people anymore because I don't trust anyone anymore.

I don't think or care about my ex but the friends who ghosted me still cause daily intrusive thoughts. I don't know why I've been abandoned. No closure and no way to defend myself. I never expected how much more it hurts to lose friends than it does to lose a partner.

I miss my friends but they've proven they don't care about me so when they inevitably reach out to me there's no way I'll be able to forgive.

Probably I need to go back to therapy again but just curious if anyone has experienced similar.

You know the one. The dumb joke you chuckled at that now just comes out unbidden at random times.

My 10 year account got banned for voicing criticism of the fascist State of Israel

What got you banned?

What's your protocol regarding 'expensive' gifts (anything over $200). If the gift receiver no longer wants or needs it, does it go back to the giver, or can the receiver sell it or give it to someone else?