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 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.
Yeah.
I’m just not into having a massage from someone I’m not romantically entangled with. Some people are, hard no from me.
That said, my wife is Thai. Massage skills seem to be something like Swimming is to Australians or cooking to Italians. You learn some at school but it’s such a big part of your cultural identity that everyone just knows how to do it.
She very frequently tells me that massages aren’t supposed to feel good nor are they supposed to be relaxing. Apparently a good massage hurts and you take as much pain as you can bear in order to “fix your muscles”.
We’ve been together for 13 years now and I’m still not sure how much I believe her.
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.
Gave birth.
Yup. One-and-done.
I went to a Young Life gathering to try and meet people at uni freshman year. The first one was a slightly awkward BBQ at someone’s off campus house. The second was on campus event that dropped off into that Uncanny Valley of mormon-like sing-alongs and activities.
My buddy and I surveyed the room, felt the hair on the back of our necks prickle, and we got out of there.
If you’ve seen Heretic or The Endless, it gave off those religious vibes. Too happy/smiley. Too weirdly perfect. Everyone talking about volunteering at kids camps over the summer and how fulfilling it was.
Like, I’m glad that people found something they liked. But it wasn’t people talking about real stuff, like their awesome mountain biking adventure over the summer, or volunteering overseas to rescue animals, or even getting over alcoholism. It was all hyper religious forced positivity, and this is coming from someone who grew up religious.
Weed and alcohol. I don’t want to go on that ride again.
i went to subway recently… the sandwich place. holy hell what a pile of expensive dogshit.
When you could get $5 foot longs it was worth it. But sammiches are like $15 now.
And then I read once there is so much sugar in the bread that in Europe it would be considered cake.
Maybe next time try the expensive tuna instead of dogshit.
I went on one of those rides that lifts you in the air, then drops you until you reach the bottom. Never again. Couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.
My Dad and I impulsively got on the Zipper ride at the festival. Absolutely loved it, will never ever do it again, 10/10, do not recommend
Had a wedding.
Anal(probably)
No me gusto poopoo en mi peepee
Oral sex is a high-end sports car; it can be incredibly impressive based on the driver. Vaginal is a luxury sedan. A handjob is public transit; it gets you there eventually, but eh.
Anal is the jeep of sex. Yeah you might get dirty, it’s a little rough, but some people just love off-roading in their jeep. And if that’s what they’re into, then they’re probably really into it.
Woah man you’re, like, blowing my mind here
Bungee jumping.
I didn’t even want to do it to begin with, I just got in the wrong line for the big waterslide at Manteca Waterslides and said “fuck it, why not?”
Hated it. And this was in a special location, with a giant air bag under you. I can’t imagine base jumping from a bridge or on the side of a mountain of something. 😨
My ex-partner and I started skydiving together. They loved it, I was indifferent. Since I was indifferent, I dropped out, 'cuz that shit’s expensive. My partner kept doing it.
One of the people we did ground school with–that’s the classes you have to take before you do your first solo jump–died base jumping about 3 years later. In 3 years, he’d accumulated well over 1000 jumps. Nice guy. Always chasing a thrill though.
I got a jump for my 18th birthday and was really looking forward to it. It was a jump from a crane over a lake and you would dip your head in the water at the lowest point. The jump itself was ok but nothing I’d want to repeat in itself but once I reached the lowest point and the rebound hit me, my head felt like it was about to explode. I felt horrible for the next few hours plus my hair was wet from the dip. Thanks, just no thanks.
Salvia Divinorum
At one point in time I could probably have been convinced to try a lot of things. Fortunately for me (probably) Salvia Divinorum was the first thing I tried after marijuana, and it so thoroughly destroyed any notion I had that I could control my experience that it put me off trying just about everything else I was curious about.
Thank god the entire experience is single digit minutes.
Trust a christian.
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You guys were taught that it was god?? I was taught it was always satan or some lesser demon lying to me.
I don’t have a voice but that sounds scary. Are all Christians taught that? I’ve never heard of that.
I don’t think they’re all taught that, I think my church was just paranoid and insane, tbh.
And they never outright said it was the entire “voice”, but that pointed to so many individual things, I felt like it was. It was easier to reject any kind of negative emotions or complicated thoughts or unfamiliar opinions as some kind of outside attack than to really sit with them.
I guess it’s not really relevant to the conversation at hand, other than pointing out that christians can be all different types of dysfunctional :p
Remember when they crucified their own lord and savor. Honestly this one is kinda on you bro.
Tbf he was crucified by romans of unspecified religion. Also he got better.
Supposedly Pilate pissed off the Jewish population repeatedly in his governorship by pushing Roman religion and minting coins with non-Jewish imagery, so I think we can safely say he wasn’t Jewish and was presumably Greco-Roman or Mithraic.
https://coinsite.com/the-pontius-pilate-coinage/
Not being a literal expert on the topic I’m not sure whether the imagery used implies one but not the other.
Definitely not Jewish though!
John 18:28-40
Sorry buddy but ya wrongI have not read a Bible beyond Genesis, would appreciate an actual quote rather than just the citation.
I think he’s saying that because the original cult would have considered themselves Jewish the Pharisees (understood within the text to be the contemporary Jewish theocratic leadership but it’s a bit more complex in reality) arguing for his execution are basically the same thing as Christians.
Which is silly.
I assume he lost the context of the argument or wasn’t raised in… Any Abrahamic faith because wow.
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Oh, it’s a bot
I want everything to be handed to me… I’m not your Dad.
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.
It gets easier with practice. Trying once is not enough practice. L
That is true. However, spending one hour is way too much. Maybe something like 20 minutes three times a day for two weeks would be better. That way, the impact stress would be tolerable and necessary muscles would have enough time to grow. Sadly, that sort of thing is fundamentally incompatible with the way vacations and ski resorts work.
I learned the basics of snowboarding in an afternoon. Sure there was lots of falling and aches. Protective gear can help a lot though.
What’s tiring at the beginning is standing up all the time from falling so often. As you fall less often, you don’t need to stand up so often anymore and it becomes less exhausting.
With increasing skill you also need less muscle power to turn and stop.
When skiing/snowboarding you probably spend more time sitting in a chairlift than actually riding down the mountain. Then there’s waiting for friends, waiting in line, breaks for eating. I never measured the time, but you might not even get a full hour of pure skiing during a day on the mountain.
For learning I would recommend to first just go for a weekend and then later the same winter for a week. During the week take one day off for recovery. Some pain and exhaustion will always occur, but that’s just the way it is with any strenuous physical activity. Best practice for preparing to learn snowboarding is to lie on the ground and then stand up repeatedly.
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.
Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement. Maybe one day!
Though even snowboarding I haven’t had the opportunity to go in years. It is pretty boring alone, after all.
It is pretty boring alone, after all.
True, I love skiing and boarding but I have to be with people or I just get bored
You can twist to brake with skis too! (hockey stop) :)
You shouldn’t be exerting too much muscle if you are skiing on relatively unbroken terrain. The only time you really use a lot of leg muscle is in deep, deep, heavy powder, in order to keep your tips up. Or if you are going over huge moguls or bumps at a high rate of speed, using your legs as giant shock absorbers.
If you have tight boots, sharp ski edges, and a slightly forward stance, your leg muscles shouldn’t tire out very quickly.
My instructor told me that if you just relax, you won’t be in control any more, and the board will just slide somewhere. Instead, you need to actively push one of the edges down into the snow. That sort of board rotation requires good balance and strength. If you’re not up for it, you’ll end up loosing your balance, and sort of “falling” gently. No speed required. You can do these gentle falls, and you’ll feel nothing. It’s just that next morning, you’ll suddenly realized how much stress yesterday actually put on your shoulders.
Turns out, you should never go snowboarding unless you’re already able to stand on your heels and/or toes for an extended period of time. That sort of balancing, endurance and strength is absolutely crucial.
Huh. I never had an instructor. But yeah to me standing on my toes or heels for a while isn’t all that hard to me, even though I’m not in good shape. I guess that makes one (1) part of me that’s not critically weak.
Yes you can, however it takes a few trips (at least for me) to learn to do that without falling. In the process you will fall a lot and hurt yourself a lot.
This is exactly what happened to me. Never really fell in high speeds, because I was always in the easiest slope, so there was no serious impacts. A great number of super slow and gentle impacts do build up over time.
In my case, the only realistic way to learn is to start very slow and practice very frequently. Like, spend a few weeks doing it, but visit the slopes only 30 minutes at a time every day, maybe even twice a day. Unfortunately, that’s not how ski resorts and vacations work. Looks like several things are fundamentally incompatible with the idea of learning snowboarding.
I agree! Snowboarding is a physically intensive young person sport
