tl;dr: something with the murderbot / hexarchate / locked-tomb kind of vibe

I'm after something sweet but astringent to bite down on; this is the general tone I'm almost always looking for, and I've mined out most of the obvious seams of the stuff.

I don't mind whether it's fantasy or SF, I just want a chunk of emotional intelligence mixed with harsh conflict - with a modern, progressive take if possible.

LGBTQ-themed stuff tends to be good at this in my experience, but I'm not fussed either way. I'm not after romance/smut for its own sake, but it's fine as part of a bigger picture.

Suggestions?

As per title. I very, very rarely drink, and I generally just want to buy a single of something for a rare treat, however most beers/ciders/etc are sold in multipacks.

The pricing on the shelf is usually per-pack only, yet sometimes I see random products with single cans/bottles missing, and sometimes random products will have a little section of unpackaged singles, despite not having a separate price showing.

Is it generally OK to split an unopened 4- or 6-pack, or is that as weird and inappropriate as doing the equivalent in a supermarket? What even are the rules around this?

You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?

There's an emergency at the Facility down the road, and everyone in a six-mile radius is very likely fucked.

What is the sound that announces your fate?

• oooooOOOOOOOIPP, oooooOOOOOOOOIPP

• WAAAARK ..... WAAAARK ..... WAAAARK

• dyOOT! ... dyOOT! ... dyOOT!

• Something else? (please spell)

Not counting Choc Ripple, which are horrible.

You can get any number of chocolate-coated biscuits, but dammit I just want a simple chocolate shortbread or near offer. Hell, I'd settle for a giant Tiny Teddy, though those too are a bit industrial.

Just give me a pack of bourbons without the cream in, that'd do fine.

Is this some terribly rare niche interest all of a sudden? Am I really the only person in this country who would buy such a thing?

Yes I know I can make my own, it's just tedious - and the lack of demand for anything like it confuses and enrages me.

... or do they just make up for it with sheer unrelieved quantity of greenery, perhaps?

Okay, so this is weird.

I seriously don't do loud environments. My speech discrimination goes to shit with a bunch of background noise, and if I get into overly-spiky crowd noise (eg. loud bars / parties, with everyone yelling over each other and echoing off the walls), I rapidly overload and need to GTFO before I break down.

So why in the purple fuck is frantic glitchy breakcore the most soothing thing in the universe?

I've been listening to stuff like femtanyl recently, and the more IYTGKIUFUYGLICGXJYUGJTYUFLIHFUYGKJKHJGHYTFTJGHFDYGFDJHCHTRF it gets, the more it feels like my brain is sinking into a warm bath. It's like brown noise, but moreso.

Tha heck is going on?

Anyone relate?

So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.

When I was younger I was... abrasive, let's say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.

This didn't make me many friends, understandably.

Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y'know, tact, and... compassion for people's emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.

Well and good, the people I talk to don't generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.

But increasingly of late I've been hearing disparaging talk of 'people pleasers', which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people's needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.

I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.

I'm not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?

ETA for fuck's sake, even this post had to be censored down to go through. It took about 15 attempts.

A few times recently I've had posts refuse to go through with great big 'you've been blocked!' banners.

It seems to be very sensitive to mentions of being mean to people, not advocacy, just mentioning the existence of certain topics, and it seems to be way too hair-triggered.

I just now tried to post about the ethics of meat consumption, and why people see certain aspects as more troubling than others. Certainly nothing explicit or provocative, just the difference in perception between harvesting meat and deliberate unkindess - as abstract concepts.

I refuse to do the stupid zoomer thing of cens*ring words with numbers and punctuation, and frankly I shouldn't have to.

I'm not sure how you're meant to be able to have a sane conversation about ethics or politics if you're not allowed to mention people being mean. God knows what would happen if someone tried to report actions perpetrated in an akka-akka-kablooey-competition zone.

Could someone maybe take a look at the settings, because jesus christ.

For my money it's a tie between Eurydice's song from Hades, any of the tracks from VVVVVV and Still Alive. But what do you think?

I've been trying to post a - rather long - comment for a while, and it's just not going through. It just instantly disappears on old.lemmy.world, and sits there spinning on the main site - while one-liner comments elsewhere have worked as normal. I'm not getting errors, but that's kind of par for the course. Could it be length related?