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15 Sep, 13 tweets, 4 min read
the last time i held anything resembling a real job i noticed i wanted someone in the organization to get mad at me for not producing very much output and hold me to a higher standard and no one ever did
there's a scene at the beginning of the suicide squad where bloodsport's daughter is visiting him in jail and she *wants him to get mad at her for stealing* and gets mad at him for not doing that, which reminded me of this

also reminded of the chapter in running on empty about permissive parents - they explicitly call out being too permissive and never saying no to a kid as a kind of neglect and this was probably the most surprising and unintuitive chapter to me in the entire book
i'm not really sure how to talk about this bit but like - okay, so i periodically socially withdraw from everyone for weeks or sometimes months at a time and one of the worst things about that experience is learning that nobody really needs me for anything
and tbf i've carefully set up my life so that nobody needs to depend on me for anything specifically so that i can do that withdrawing, it just turns out that it sucks a lot more than i thought. it makes me feel... expendable? replaceable? useless? i don't quite have words
like i lowkey feel like i've been wasting my life for years and in some sense i needed to do that but also i've been waiting for someone to get mad enough at me that i can tell it matters to them that i am doing this and they want me to stop
there are at least two components here and i don't have great words for either of them, one is like "i want what i do to matter to other people" and the other is like "i want someone to believe that i can do much more than i'm doing"
the funny thing is that as i was going through all of this privately the other day i remembered that @uncatherio actually did get mad at me about approximately this, twice, the first time long before i could really metabolize it and the second time right when i was on the edge
i mentioned awhile ago that i was trying out the ideal parent figure protocol - it's significant that when i was doing it i was exclusively working with an ideal mother, infinitely loving and accepting, all that jazz. even that was hard. i didn't feel ready for ideal father
that's changing though. the ideal father... again i don't have great words for this. the ideal father has standards. there are values he wants to pass on, skills he wants to teach, dangers he wants to guard against
"standards" doesn't mean that his love is conditional - that's one way father energy gets twisted and distorted and then people rebel against it - but that there's a difference between being strong enough to defend the village vs. not and his job is caring about that difference
but it's so complicated. masculinity gets harder to do and transmit the more complicated the world becomes. what are the values worth having? what are the dangers we really need to defend against? these are increasingly hard questions to answer in the 21st century
i don't really have a conclusion for you here but this is some background on why i've been pondering over decisiveness and will

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More from @QiaochuYuan

15 Sep
apropos of nothing in particular, high-profile liars and cheaters and scammers fascinate me because the more high-profile they became before they got caught the more they reveal about what it is currently most profitable to pretend
i am thinking about elizabeth holmes but also anna delvey / sorokin, the fyre festival guy, the youtuber dream who cheated at minecraft, crypto scams generally
anyway please enjoy this very interesting video about a different guy who got caught cheating at minecraft, there's actually a cool explanation here of what tipped people off that the runs seemed fake

Read 6 tweets
15 Sep
poll (also would love to hear more detailed responses): have you ever "just decided" or "just willed" that you would change in some way, e.g. give up smoking or drinking, become a kinder person, a large change like that? if so, did it stick?
i'm gonna try to just decide to become a person who can just decide to change, i'll let you know if it does anything at all
wow this is the most informative poll i've tweeted in awhile, thanks everyone
Read 5 tweets
15 Sep
do they let you just barge into a gym and do some sets without signing up for a yearlong membership or whatever
absolutely gagging to pump some iron rn but not excited about paying for more than like a month at a time. i guess i can... just... ask?
phew. they give first-timers a free day and then they do either yearly or monthly. perfect
Read 7 tweets
13 Sep
tried to install minecraft shaders again and it is making me feel like an idiot somehow. i tried downloading forge and then optifine and forge was fine but optifine made minecraft crash, and now i can't find it to get rid of it because i... can't find the mods folder
i think it's supposed to be in /Library/Application Support/minecraft but there is no such folder and i don't know where else it would be

i really don't understand how a mac's file system works at all

anyone know where i should be looking?
this did it, thanks. the one under my username was hidden. jeez

Read 4 tweets
12 Sep
sometimes if i sit around or lie down doing nothing long enough i experience a thing i’m not sure i know a word for. like an interruption in my self-consciousness or self-experience? a discontinuity in my tracking of what is going on? anyone know what i mean?
i’m used to that thing being continuous so it’s weird to experience it even temporarily shut off. i might just be falling asleep, not sure. i don’t think that’s always what’s happening tho
hmm @meditationstuff is this “reverie”
Read 7 tweets
11 Sep
good art in a game can be a double-edged sword. if a game offers you a beautiful landscape and nothing to do with it, it’s more of a 3d painting than a game as such. imo there’s an art to “gameplay and art integration” that i’ve actually never seen anyone discuss
minecraft is a great example here; everything looks beautiful and you can interact with all of it. the structure of an ocean temple or whatever is not just pretty art, it represents a collection of blocks you can mine and repurpose. your field of view is full of game-relevance Image
compare to, to pick a random example, bravely default. my main peeve with this game is that when i’m walking in a town i can look at either the top or the bottom screen, and while the top screen has pretty town art the bottom screen is a million times easier to navigate by Image
Read 7 tweets

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