Reading between the lines, this definitely sounds like a form of sex addiction that you’re experiencing. Any kind of addiction is best tackled with professional help, and second best with the help of friends. I would strongly suggest in addition to seeking professional help, also talking to your friends saying “hey this is something I’m struggling with” and if they can be accountability buddies that’s even better!

Any addictions I’ve kicked and lifestyle changes I’ve made have been most successful by slowly adjusting. Quitting cold turkey is the easiest way to fail. Unlike my changes which were kicking coffee/caffeine, and reducing screen time, yours is is a perfectly healthy process gone awry, so your goal may not be complete elimination, but just a reduction back to a healthy level. You seem reluctant to share your current baseline, and I won’t push, but the easiest place to start is to say “I can wait another 20 minutes before I do that” and put it off a little, and just keep putting it off a little longer.

Maybe you might find doing a healthy habit every time you feel the urge to musturbate helps, such as doing 5 reps of a calisthenic exercise (excercise is also helpful in redirecting the blood that would otherwise be headed south!) or drinking some cold water (when I was quitting coffee I’d put my glass of cold water right next to my coffee. Every time I would reach for the coffee, I’d redirect my hand to the water and only go for the coffee if I still felt I needed it after the water, which most of the time I didn’t!) or maybe you’re just needing something to do with your hands and that’s how you end up masturbating some of the time. In that case, have you tried investing in some kind of fidget toy? Maybe try keeping that in your lap so every time you find your hands going for something to fidget with you can move to the fidget box or whatever instead.

It’s all about slowly shifting your normal, the same way that habits are formed just in reverse. It’s not going to feel like you’re making a big change at any point but tracking progress can help. Keeping a daily log of how many times you masturbated, when and for how long can help to see the trend. I would also suggest including the consumption of sexual content in that log. Just like masturbation it is perfectly healthy and fine for adults to consume sexual content, but too much of anything is going to be bad for you, and you’ll probably want to figure out your current baseline and goal for that as well.

Small steps can make a big impact in the long term. Just being able to set a small goal each day of “I’ll wait a couple more hours before I do that” or “maybe I’ll tackle cleaning today’s dishes before I rub one out” can add up faster than you might think. When I was quitting coffee, reducing from 64oz per day down to about 12oz per day only took a few weeks of active effort and was relatively easy with these methods, but eliminating down to zero took actual commitment. Reducing my screentime also took a few weeks to adjust the habits and baseline so that now I reach for a book or go work on a project instead of playing a video game for 4 hours. I haven’t pushed it to zero and that’s not my goal, so I’m close to where I want, I just have to keep this new baseline for a while so that it sticks

I literally only started caring about doing anything when when I decided I was trans. Kind of hard to start a hobby when you literally don’t enjoy doing anything at all.

Mental health can be a pain like that for sure! I’d still super encourage you to try something even if it’s just going for your stupid daily walk for your stupid mental and physical health. Even if you do it just to spite me and prove me wrong!

Sounds like a good plan to go try stuff on with a friend though! Lean on your friends while you heal, that’s what friends are for!

As others have said, the very first step should be therapy. 1 week after a hard breakup is not the time to be making major life decisions if you can avoid it. I know it sucks but you’re going to need time to heal. The way you wrote this it sounds less like discovering yourself and more like a form of rebound.

Since it sounds like you’re really grasping for something real to do right now, I’d suggest picking up a hobby, ideally something working with your hands/body in the real world like drawing or painting or sewing or running or biking or something

I also wonder if you need to spend more time figuring yourself out. Go to the mall and try on some clothing and see how it feels. Play with your hair a little. But mostly I’d suggest focusing more on a hobby for a few weeks and let your questions about yourself linger for a bit while you get through the roughest first part of the healing process

1 week after a breakup is again not the time to make life changing decisions. 1 week after a breakup is definitely the time to start therapy, poke at some new hobbies, go outside and move more and maybe go clothing shopping if you have the budget.

My understanding is that some lemmy instances don’t allow direct file upload, so linking to another site is the next best thing

But I can see what you mean seeing a painting on canvas is a lot different

This was an interesting discussion I had with my family when we went to the Uffizi Gallery. I wanted to see the brush strokes, to feel something, but some of my family members were very focused on checking the check boxes of “yup I saw that” so seeing the birth of Venus from across the room peering over a hundred heads and struggling to see any more detail from being the centimeter thick glass than I would from a high quality scan on my computer was hardly memorable, but finding a small piece that spoke to me in a side gallery that only a couple of other people walked into was absolutely mesmerizing. I couldn’t tell you the name of the piece or the artist without looking it up, but I can tell you that was a magical feeling.

Some of my family members saw the entire galleries we went into, I only saw a subset because I took the time to look at what spoke to me, and honestly I liked that far better than sprinting past paintings and sculptures just to “see” everything

Trump doesn’t care about being implicated in corruption, he’s already established even in the legal sense to be a criminal and a rapist. Being implicated for more rape isn’t going to make any noticable change. But what does a strong man really fear? Being perceived as weak. Being perceived as less of a man than any other. There is something he’s burying that is going to make him look really bad to his base, that a sane person with morals wouldn’t realize is that notable but will be completely devastating for a strongman wannabe dictator. I’m so curious what that is mostly for the human psychology aspect of what actually does scare trump and keep him up at night?

You put it way better than I did about packaging before plastics! There’s so many fascinating examples of things being reused back in the day because of the cost that would never happen today, and will need to start happening again if we want to avoid a societal level catastrophie

Crying Indian is such an interesting nugget of history. Paid for by the plastics lobby who saw the writing on the wall of getting regulated for excessive trash. This same plastics lobby also coined the term “litter bug” and tried to get the world to forget that bottled drinks were sold in reusable bottles that would be deposited, washed, refilled and resealed. But also like you said, the standard procedure was to just toss your trash outside and not worry about it before this campaign, in part because nearly all packaging was biodegradable if not completely reusable until about a generation before this ad campaign (the Ford model T literally came with instructions to reuse the crate it shipped in to make the truck bed for example)

What were the impacts of Roots? I remember watching it in middle school for one of our history classes and I can appreciate that it gave me perspective on what slavery looked like but that was decades after its release that I saw it

I would argue that Rainman (1988) being a lot of people’s first introduction to autism propped up the autistic savant trope

Hackers (1995) did not reflect reality at all, and entirely made up a look, sound and feel of hacker culture for the film. Tech press largely panned it as rediculous, unrealistic and innaccurate, but hacker culture actually morphed into something close to what was depicted in that film because it’s honestly way cooler and way better than what the actual hacker culture was at the time

Others have already pointed out really good examples like Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle which spawned a lot of food safety laws, or Wargames (1983) basically prompting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Edit to add: I also remembered another very influenctial author at the turn of the century was Henry George who wrote a now under-discussed book called Progress and Poverty which is widely credited for triggering the beginning of the Progressive Era

In a similar vein, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species basically kicked off the entire field of biology with the scientific theory of evolution

For context, the animated family movie genre was on a trajectory for much deeper and more thoughtful movies, if a bit darker that would appeal more to adults. Then Shrek hit the scene with a banger soundtrack, subversive comedy, and some really good dunking on Disney. Shrek then absolutely shrekked the box office and ever since then basically every animated film has been chasing the bar that Shrek set

There’s also an argument to be made that Shrek indirectly lead to the massive western market for anime as adults seek prestige animated films that aren’t being produced in the US

I’m working on building a little demo with Saltcorn before bringing it up to my boss probably in a week or two as a strong contender for our EHS system replacement. We’ve got a mess of an EHS system with a ton of stuff that isn’t actually EHS-related bolted on that we’re replacing it with 3 systems, and one of those three will be for the non-EHS stuff which my boss is currently wanting to build in-house from scratch using AI. I’m hoping to help him dodge that thermonuclear warhead of a mistake by showing him an existing platform that will scale much further before costing us a ton in development costs to maintain

My big argument is going to be on cost+effort front with the added benefit of being open source so we can control it no matter what happens with the vendor

Danny Go is so weird because it sets off all of my kids slop sensors but it’s actually pretty decent. Gets the kids moving, it’s generally fine content wise, doesn’t overdo the cuts between shots or have too much going on on screen to destroy the kids’ attention span, but my gosh its stylized like so many slop channels I have to double-take every time

OH IVE GOT A MOUTHFUL OF CRAAAAABS

Maybe just a quick way to fill a gap that had formed between the frame and the glass?

Damn straight for the jugular with that list!