Rant and Rave, Cry and Complain

Rave: We have many cucumbers, Radishes, and pinto beans in our garden. :) I have to make more pickles!! :)

(What I like is your encouragement, not your barfing! Hope you get better soon!)

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Doc gave me something to hopefully reduce the night-time pee trips

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My doctor advised me to drink little to no liquids the last 2 hours before bed.

Rant:

I spent three days building a lengthy, detailed written commentary about something. Shared it and there was zero engagement, despite hundreds of views. Not sure if it's because the userbase of the platform is simply unacclimated to longer written content, or because it's something about the post content itself. It's not a controversial subject, just a lot of history, information, and observations about something closely related to the platform I posted it on. Which, obviously, a lot of people were interested in because of how many views it received. Just no written engagement.

I'm debating whether to delete it and post it elsewhere. It's always nice to have some kind of feedback, and I'm a bit embarrassed lol.

Rave:

My dracaena marginata had been shedding its lower leaves by the bucketload for a few weeks, and I finally found the correct fertilizer on Sunday. I woke up today, checked on the tree, and there were no new fallen leaves. I'm so happy because this was the first houseplant I purchased. It looks a bit leggy now, of course, but I'll take it! I watered the spider plants too, and they're looking perky again. They're such responsive plants; it's fun to see the leaves lift up after watering.

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Originally Posted by Lang

Rant: At 2:00 in the morning I was throwing up. Not feeling too great. Not much Lucidity last night because of it.
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FryingMan: You got this!! :)

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In fact, I did! I woke from a phenomenal, long, vivid LD this morning :). Yay! Maybe a lifetime top 20 LD. The only downside to very long LDs is....remembering it all is hard! I lost the beginning / middle of the dream. I had the feeling in the dream that it had been going on for about an hour or so. I usually do not get this feeling (often the moment of lucidity is very short, and completely remembered from start to finish), so I tend to trust it.

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Originally Posted by andreasdevig

My doctor advised me to drink little to no liquids the last 2 hours before bed.

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I'm trying this. It's not obvious if it's helping or not. It might, just MIGHT be eliminating one waking's pee trip. I need to keep more careful records to be sure. But I'm trying that plus the medication.

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Originally Posted by Lang

Rave: We have many cucumbers, Radishes, and pinto beans in our garden. :) I have to make more pickles!! :)

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We're not farmers or gardening people by any stretch of the imagination. But in the last couple of years I've slapped together several large rectangles out of wood boards left over from construction projects, stuck them in the yard, and filled them with store-bought soil and poured in the sediment from the septic system. Different things grow well in different years. Last year the cilantro went wild and we had two crops, this year its' "meh" and we'll be lucky to get one. But it's sweeter and fresher right out of the garden than even the local (very good) farmer's market (not to mention the store, *shudder*). Some middling success with green onions, but I eat a high volume of these and so I went through the small crop in about a week. Strawberries went crazy this year, but it takes so much land to create a decent crop, a couple square meters just doesn't cut it. But they're very sweet! But the big new thing this year is pumpkin and zucchini. Put in 3 market-purchased baby zucchini's and they've all taken off, two generating a couple monsters that are ready for harvest, and more on the way. The baby pumpkins were stuffed into separate planters and they're gradually turning our yard into a scene from Little Shop of Horrors!

So yeah, it's great to have your own crop!

Spoiler for long post:

Spoilering because it relates to my last post. It's also long and I sound like an old fart.

I've hoped to engage with more lucid dreaming communities so I can network some more. I feel out of date, and I've heard murmurs that certain communities have highly active discussions about events and new developments. I was intrigued by the idea of knowing firsthand about events and conferences.

However, this week was disastrous and demotivating.

I tried participating in a certain group recently. There were some nitpicky and petty members who badmouthed people behind their backs, and it seemed permitted by the mods. There was a lot of misinformation being spread because of telephone-style information propagation. Articles that referenced blog posts, that referenced youtube videos, that referenced Dreamviews posts, for example, and the attributions and information had become unfortunately misconstrued or even lost in translation. There seemed to be no demand for meta posts, which I learned after I published something about said misinformation to crickets. I had spent days writing it, but it held no value to the community which I genuinely did not expect. I had seen many comments about how "x is a myth", "y isn't true" during my time there, so my assumption that more people would appreciate the post seemed solid.

Currently I wonder if it was simply too long, and therefore indigestible for casual scrolling. The idea makes me sad.

Next I considered humouring discord servers again. I had joined a few in the past, but I seldom participated (or stayed) because they were too fast or too cliquish, or the overall vibe was too vociferous for me. I wondered if I had simply been joining the wrong servers. I hopped into a lucid dreaming discord server to say hello and share advice. Unlike other servers I had joined, nobody said hello to me, nor the other newcomers who showed up shortly afterwards, despite bots mentioning newcomers in the conversations. There was a lot of passive small talk, nothing I was really interested in talking about. I inched into the chat when someone mentioned SAT. People recognized me. Everyone who commented assumed I was a man. People started typing, then I received three(?) questions within a minute or two of each other. Seconds later, all the questions had already vanished past the top of my screen. I was in the process of answering the first question when the others showed up.

I saw more and more comments getting posted and I felt addled. Kind of overwhelmed. It was like a switch activated in my brain and went, "no, stop typing, just get out now". It's like every part of me wanted out of there ASAP. So I just commented that the chat was moving a bit too fast for me, and I left. Not the best exit, but I couldn't do it.

It was an extremely active server. It was the highest number of people I've seen active in a lucid dreaming community in years. However, it hurt in a profound way other servers didn't, because as someone who grew up on forums and on Dreamviews, I was naturally predisposed to compare it to Dreamviews. The activity on discord is very different from forum activity. Discord just operates differently, and I wish I'd remembered better from earlier efforts. There is no time to catch one's breath. There is FOMO, because you can go an hour and miss two hundred comments, not knowing if there was valuable content in there, and if you don't check relatively fast, the comments will all get pushed up into the nethersphere and become less and less accessible and because of that, catching up becomes an urgent, Sisyphean task. You can't reply to someone in a channel without the implicit suggestion that you're available, immediately, to talk to everyone else too. There's no way to review older advice/comments easily, because scrolling up, up, up is more labour intensive than clicking a few buttons back in a forum thread. There is far more digging through comments on discord, because people often post very short comments like "cool" or "gn". Interaction-wise it might be fine for some, but functionality-wise it's a nightmare.

Moreover, I'm frustrated that Discord seems to be such a hotspot for the community. There are upsides to Discord, but it's not good as an information repository. It's not good for many kinds of interaction. It's stressful. It's too fast-paced. It's hard to help people if you just get dogpiled immediately. I'm frustrated in myself because I can't keep up. I hate how I feel precluded from participating in a community that literally recognizes me, and wants to talk to me, but simply isn't located on a platform that makes it easy for me to respond effectively.

This is a very significant realization for me, because I spent years wanting to re-integrate in the LDing community, finally took the chance this week, and it hasn't gone well. I don't think there's a place for me, or people like me anymore. I'm deeply upset and I'm not sure where I'll go from here.

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Originally Posted by Puffin

(Discords vs. forums)

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Yes, the state of LD communication for those of us focused on quality content and discussions is quite disheartening. Discord is a live chat platform that grew out of the gaming world, not a serious information exchange medium. I count myself lucky that DV was still very active when I was just getting off the ground in the LD world.

The quality of online information has gone steeply downhill with the rise of youtube, reddit, and discord. The quality of the participants hasn't improved, either. It also makes me sound like an old fart (which I am, relatively), but "Why, I remember, back in my day, the people in the LD community were vibrant, innovative, imaginative, and highly competent." Now it seems that instead, it's mostly a very young crowd, impatient, who just want to use LDing for fantasy fulfillment. They whine and whine when they don't get the LDs they're hoping for after a few days of effort. Nobody, it seems, knows how to read, or has no desire to read, and especially, nobody knows how to *learn*. They want to be spoon-fed simple techniques so that they can bang their favorite celebrities in dreams.

Online communication also takes a lot of time. I'm focused on my LD practice, my other hobbies, and taking care of family obligations. That doesn't leave a lot of down time for writing and reading forum posts.

Maybe that's one reason the community seems to skew younger these days?

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Nobody, it seems, knows how to read, or has no desire to read, and especially, nobody knows how to *learn*. They want to be spoon-fed simple techniques so that they can bang their favorite celebrities in dreams.

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Yeah, most don't understand that it take hard work to fully understand the subject. Some end up doing some really stupid things that either harm their health or waste their time with techniques that are not fit for them.

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Online communication also takes a lot of time. I'm focused on my LD practice, my other hobbies, and taking care of family obligations. That doesn't leave a lot of down time for writing and reading forum posts.

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Same here.

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Rant: super busy...

Rave: My sunflowers are now 8- 9 feet high! They should be opening up soon! :)

Rant: Still very busy...

Burning up! Not feeling too great.

Ah - hope you feel better Lang!!

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Originally Posted by Oneirin

Ah - hope you feel better Lang!!

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Thank you! :)

Rant: I bruised some ribs and it hurts if I sneeze. Super busy.

Rave: The Team that rooting to win, on.

Went to post things and the internet logs me out of this site.