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What does confidence look like to a woman?
Physically, confident guys are much more calm or deliberate in their movements. There’s not tonnes of figiting etc. They just seem to be able to settle into a position and become relaxed. This also goes for walking – which comes across as more deliberate and natural. They’re also not generally concerned about how much space they occupy. Not like, randomly sprawling, but just able to keep square shoulders and longer strides. Especially as a woman, you can tell how confident they are when they’re hitting on you, based on the space they’re comfortable taking up. More confident guys tend to start closer to you (for instance when they sit down next to you at a bar), and not be so electrically aware of touching. Unconfident guys tend to get a bit jumpy, and sometimes almost glaze over when space starts to be closed.
In terms of speech, there’s rarely much wavering, no squeaking. All relatively level or appropriate. They’re not afraid to be loud, and are less apologetic if they’re too loud (although I dislike that last bit). Some guys are more measured with their Words and are comfortable saying less, some talk tonnes. But you never really get the sense that they’ve withdrawn or are critiquing themselves. They’re present and aware of what they’re saying.
In terms of eye contact, its moderate. They’re not afraid to look away from the person they’re talking to at the appropriate moment, and there’s no sense of stress or anxiety if the other person looks away either. It’s either an awareness that connection can happen without tonnes of effort (that’s the ideal type of connection) or that they are still in play, important, whatever, even if a person is a bit more withdrawn. Its also an honest eye contact. No hesitation, straight into your eyes. There’s a clear sense they’re at ease with being scrutinised.
There’s always going to be a sense of unfazedness in normal circumstances. I know I fuck up my coffee order if I’m asked suddenly, but confident people don’t seem to choke on their Words nearly as often. They’re also fine when things go minorly wrong. Getting lost isn’t an issue, they feel they can handle that (provided you have no where to be). Facing a drunk guy is just a case of going with the flow. there’s often a sense that if something more serious happens, they’re scanning the group to see just what kind of leader is needed and who’s best suited. Some fall to ego here, but some are also capable of gracefully taking a back seat and adding advice when its needed.
Smiles tend to be more forth coming, but this could also be to do with confident people being more out going. If they don’t smile often, then there’s more of a calculating sense to them. They’re comfortable being outside a group and watching reactions or just listening.
Basically, it comes down to ease. How at ease they are in and within themselves tends to translate to the ease at which they can do things. There’s less fretting on their role and more attentiveness to the situation at hand.
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What were Aztec sacrifices ritual actually like?
They were religious events first. The Aztecs believed that their gods got their sustenance from human sacrifice; and one of the basic duties of Religion is caring for your gods. The most important of these sacrifices were carried out during the 18 monthly festivals of the Solar Year. One of these, to give you an example, was the Tlacaxipehualiztli, the Festival of the Flaying of Men, celebrated at spring equinox before the rainy season, one of the most brutal and complex. We know about it thanks to the notes of the Spanish monk Bernardino de Sahagun, who in the 16th century interviewed old Aztec men who were still alive in pre-spanish Mexico and recounted how this festival was held in the Aztec capital:
40 days (or maybe even a year) before the festival, a captive (from war) was designated to impersonate the god Xipe Totec (Our Flayed Lord), and he was celebrated in public as living image of the God until the Festival. He was taught courtly manners, walking about the city playing a flute, smoking tobacco and being praised by the people and the Tlatoani (the leader). He was even wed to four young maidens representing goddesses. There were similar representants for other important gods (Tonatiuh, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Chililico and so forth). These slaves-gods were to be sacrificed on the main pyramid by cutting out the heart. There were six sacrifice-priests who cut open the slaves breast with an Obsidian knife and then cut out the heart. After that, the corpses were rolled down the pyramids stairs. The corpses were then flayed and their flesh given to important Aztecs. Moteuczuma would have gotten the best part, the femur. The flesh was then eaten.
Other captives would be clothed in the skin of the flayed corpses and adorned with the ornaments those killed earlier wore as “gods”. They were paraded through the city by their captors, and finally, on the next day, fought in mock combat against Eagle- or Jaguar-wariors (they only had a mock sword with feathers instead of obsidian). Once the captive was beaten down, he was sacrificed by a priest wearing the vestments of Xipe Totec. His heart and blood from his chest was then presented to the sun. The captor would take that blood, and walk around the city to the statues of the gods, feeding them by painting their lips with blood.
The captives corpse was then brought to his captors house, flayed, and cut up, his flesh given away and eaten. However, there was a special link between captor and captive, and the captor wouldn’t eat of the flesh of his captive. Poor or sick people would walk through the streets, wearing the skins of the sacrificed, begging. For twenty days, the priests, too, would wear the flayed skins, often adorned with gold and feathers, until the next festival (Tozoztli) approached. The skins were then stored in special containers in a cave in the Xipe-Totec temple.
There were certainly festival-like elements, but the main events were very ritualized and everyone involved hat a part to play and knew what to do. Even the captives were probably not struggling against their fate, but from what I’ve read, walked to the place of their sacrifice willingly, and played their part in the choreography. The religious part was the most important. The gods needed to be fed.
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What are the lessor known implications of hearing loss?
Something a lot of people, especially younger people, don’t realise about hearing loss is how much MORE there is to it than just “needing to listen to things louder when you’re old” or “some ringing” to varying degrees. My father has hearing loss which he incurred on the job – he was a radio DJ in the 60s/70s and between the sound levels at work and the sound levels at concerts he went to for reviewing purposes, he did permanent damage to his hearing. Tinnitus is one element, hearing loss of certain frequences is another.
But the most toxic thing about his hearing loss is how it’s affected his relationships. He is increasingly isolated as time goes by; he tunes out of conversations because he can’t understand people in a crowd, so at every party we go to I look over and see him sitting there either playing on his phone or looking glazed or smiling & nodding… but he’s always the first one to want to leave somewhere, dragging my mother with him because he’s bored. So socializing has just become a chore.
It’s also affected his relationships at home; he never hears us the first time we ask a question, but he’s convinced it’s because we’re mumbling (we aren’t). So he gets really irate irritated, even angry, and is frankly always ready to be in a bad mood.
Imagine if every single casual question your roommate/wife/husband/sibling/child asked you filled you with annoyance-to-rage. “What would you like for dinner, Dad? Dad? Can you hear me?” “What?” (said with a cold glare). “What would you like for dinner?” “WELL I DON’T KNOW WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS.” (said with total irritation, like we’re being a huge pain in the ass). All of this rudeness, all of this anger, comes from being deaf as a post.
It would be tempting to think my dad’s just an asshole with no manners, but he isn’t – when he has functioning hearing aids and this problem is greatly reduced, his entire demeanor is different. He’s easy-going, appreciative, participates, listens. But when his hearing aids aren’t working, as they aren’t now, he’s rude, ornery, dismissive, and critically doesn’t listen anymore because he know’s it’s just too much work and he won’t hear it all anyway.
I’ve known several people who’ve lost their hearing later in life, and they’ve all experienced this anger. It pushes people away, it isolates you, and leaves you feeling miserable. My great grandfather was stone deaf by his 90s and apparently used to occasionally pick up his walking stick at the dinner table, when people were talking amongst themselves (big family) and if he couldn’t hear them he’d just straight up clear the table with the stick. Imagine how angry you’d have to be to do that? This was a man who adored his family, and was never in any way abusive or difficult before his deafness really set in.
– goodhumansbad
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What’s it truly like to be Forever Alone?
People think it’s the alone of being forever alone that hurts the most, but that’s not true. Everybody’s alone sometimes, whether for periods when they’re not dating anyone or just for a weekend while their spouse is at a conference. Alone is part of the human condition. It’s the forever that pulls down the corners of your mouth just a little bit when you give someone a smile meant to indicate that everything’s okay with you even though you want to scream that nothing’s okay and never will be. It’s the forever that tastes bitter in the back of your throat when you see a happy couple walking in the park or laughing in a restaurant. It’s the forever that has you wide awake staring at your ceiling into the wee hours of the morning.Forever alone.
There’s an ongoing half-serious claim in our culture that men think about sex all the time. Every 17 seconds or so. That may be true for some guys but not a forever alone. After awhile you stop being able to think about sex, at least the way other people do. You can think about it abstractly, or when watching other people perform a stylized version of it alone in your room while you use your hand to joylessly complete a sad shadow of the biological imperative, but you stop being able to imagine sex as something you could be a part of. You see a woman in the springtime, her midriff peeking out from between the soft cotton of a shirt and the rougher waist of a pair of jeans. You start to imagine her naked, constructing a fantasy in detail, the way her breasts would sit against her chest, the soft down or absence thereof on her pubic area, and then you try to insert yourself into her presence and the fantasy crumbles to dust under the weight of its own absurdity. You know there’s no chain of events, no course of actions, that could lead to that ill defined imaginary room where the two of you would meet in an act of carnal congress. There’s no way to there from where you are, it’s not even an alternate universe, it’s an inconceivable one. It’s like trying to imagine a world where everything else is the same except elephants float around like helium balloons and have to be anchored by their trunks or they’ll float away. An inherently absurd thought. That’s the idea of you and her being intimate. So you look away from that tiny sliver of skin, trying to keep your face from contorting in pain and bitterness. Where other men might smile at her you don’t, because your smile sucks, and you suck. Forever alone.
Eventually you don’t even bother to build the image only to have it blow it away like a sand painting in a tornado. You imagine lesser things. The brush of a cool, soft, feminine hand against yours. Mundane couple bullshit like eating pancakes on a Sunday morning or watching a movie or just sharing your day with someone who gives a fuck and is not your mother. The other party in these pathetic little domestic tableaus is ill defined in your mind, because if you imagined her clearly enough to make her realistic then you know she wouldn’t want you. And even with this feminine blur, this placeholder, this blurry silhouette of nothingness you project your emotions onto, the person she’s with isn’t really you. It’s a better version of you, a thinner less obnoxious version who will control his temper before saying something cutting, who doesn’t geek out and talk too much, who is free from the flaws who make you who you are and assure that nobody else will ever want to share their life with that person. Then you realize that you’re fantasizing about an Archie Comics version of yourself making tomato soup for an undefined feminine projection blob, and you realize that even the part of you that creates these images doesn’t want to be with you and can’t imagine anyone who might. Forever alone.
Around you the world stays mostly the same. People fall in love, hit milestones, get married, have kids. You’re even jealous of the divorcees because you know that this is just a bump in the road for them, part of their journey. You’re still at the starting line watching them recede, wanting to chase them and catch up, knowing you never will. But while the world is almost static, you are aging. Moving through your life alone. You start to get bitter at the milestones you’ve missed and the chances you’ll never have. You see the graying of your hair and the years piling on like rust eating at the hull of a decommissioned ship and you realize that your opportunity for young love is already past. Even if you got it together and got in the game you’d just have a shot at middle aged love. It doesn’t matter if you think women age like a fine wine, what wine connoisseur wants to live his life without ever tasting the shocking astringency of the harsh tanins of youth. Even if that’s not your thing you don’t want to cut it off forever. But you have. You won’t even have memories of those very good years, as the song says, to keep you warm as you slide towards your dotage. All you have is your bursting store room of regrets and bitterness, and you can always cram in more. And you know that that rusty battleship will some day have a hole in its hull and be unfixable, good for nothing more than salvage scrap. You add up the time it would take to lose the weight, get your teeth fixed, figure out your professional career, the time until you can smile at that woman in the coffee shop with confidence rather than the stomach sickness of self hate, and you realize it all adds up to a very big number. Everyone thinks of themselves as eternally 22 but at some point you are forced to admit that you are 37 and half your life is over and the back nine of the remaining half is not a time when people finally get that whole dating thing right. If the window is not closed its halfway there and sliding fast. Forever alone.
All this breeds desperation and depression so you shove it back because you need to function, you need to keep eating and staying warm, you can’t just stop and feel. But your dam is fragile and it leaks. And when you see that girl whose hand you want to brush against, who could sit with you looking into your eyes through the steam coming off her coffee cup and just be, who could understand you (she probably couldn’t, but this is something men like to project on to women) you feel the dam start to buckle and the river behind it start to surge and you don’t want to break down crying in the coffee shop because that’s not what people do and if you can’t have love at least you can have dignity, or the appearance of dignity, or the delusion of the appearance of dignity, so you turn your face to the side, you hope and pray she doesn’t try to draw your attention (generally safe on that count, old chum) and you put one fucking foot in front of the other and continue down your sad and barren blighted path. Forever alone.
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What kind of things goes on in the mind of a deranged individual?
I used to masturbate onto birds at a local park. Not a thing that I’m particularly proud of but I became quite good at it. I was taking zinc supplements so I was shooting massive loads and it became something of a sport to me. For anyone interested here is your best strategy. First, you need to find an isolated spot so you don’t become a sex offender. I found a short kind of channel area where I saw the pigeons would congregate. Next, you arouse yourself. I was usually content with envisioning the occasional jogging lady coming over and taking a shit on my chest and that was enough to fuel the fire but if you’re not as sexually charged as me just take some porn on the go. After you’re good an horny, you get some bread. My pigeons preferred white bread but healthier birds might have a taste for honey wheat or maybe even multigrain. Fat, unhealthy birds are slower and easier to hit so remember that. Once you are seated on the bench and ready to do the deed, whip your roosevelt out and scatter bread out within a few feet of you. use your judgement based on how far you know you can cum. I was a lonely and depraved soul who could hit targets the size of a thimble at distances up to 4 feet. You wait for the pigeons to begin eating and to get comfortable with your presence. At this point, you want to coo gently and talk sensually to them to gain their trust. Now you’re finally ready to cum on your bird. This is a tough part because the rapid motion of masturbation is very frightening to the birds, so you have to be subtle. Once you master a technique, you simply wind it up and let it go, aiming depending on your past cumming experiences. I always came high so I would aim for the neck of the bird and catch it right in the face. It’s an extremely satisfying and erotic feeling, seeing those birds reel around covered in cum and maybe even transporting it to other places in the city. Either way I haven’t done it in years but every now and then I catch myself gazing wistfully at a flock of birds, cock throbbing and waiting for them to land close to me.
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