u/AdvancedGuiProfile

I have conversing with /u/RMS-106 in another post, and something occurred to me, a particular division line, where most AGPs fall on one side or the other, maybe moving across the line from time to time.

Usually the question is put as "do you have dysphoria? Yes or No", but I think the more significant question is this, do you live your life in such a way that demonstrates that your feminine self ideation is more important to you than being with real women?

/u/RMS-106 seems to be on the other end of this spectrum relative to me. If you asked my "would you rather magically become a woman, or would you rather magically have, and be loved by, the most attractive women that you could imagine?" , he says he's rather be a woman, and that he has never had serious interest in being with women, despite feeling like an ordinary male otherwise.

I would have to say that while AGP is great an all, it manifests to me like really great self-pleasuring, like a super porn addiction. Of course I would rather be loved by the hottest woman I can imagine, rather than favor this porn addiction like situation. It would also allow me to just be an honest, ordinary man. I've always said that for me AGP sits in between ordinary porn and PIV, and I think this is broadly true for sissy fetishists, and AGPs who are in a relationship with a woman more often than not.

On the other hand, /u/RMS-106 has no interest in having a wife or girlfriend, and purely wishes to be a woman. To me, this seems like a fundamental difference and an extreme difference. I don't feel that I can relate to this at all. Sometimes when my relationship is going through a rough patch, I will have a brief distrust towards all women like "all women will just end up hurting me", but that's a different thing, and that's as close as I can come to relating to not being magnetically attracted to beautiful women.

The notion that no woman companion could ever be amazing enough to win out over the dream of "being the woman" is a bold and very unusual thing for a straight male to claim, but despite that, there are a lot of AGPs who seem to have a foot on both sides of the line.

For example, any man who decides to transition to female, he might still attract women, but his odds of doing so become smaller as a woman. Suppose he has a wife or has had many girlfriends, why does he eventually cross that line, even if slowly over time? He's now essentially saying, I can be a better woman for myself than a real woman is, can be, or could be. Is it because of a change in his personality as years go by? Does he lose faith in what real women could provide him? Do online communities fill his head with ideas that just weren't there before?

So I'd like to ask, if you had a choice, magically become a woman, or magically "bump into, hit it off, marry and live happily ever after with the woman of you dreams", which do you choose?

I've been finding the outdoor scene filming locations for season 4. So far I've found most all of them https://maps.app.goo.gl/ojcjGxYyCWXq6iqd9

Some are very easy to find, but a lot of them took some searching around.

One funny fact is that the black ops site where Reacher is caged, and Russel Plum's hideout are actually side by side in real life. The show has used those same old warehouses located near Hamilton in multiple episodes from past seasons.

The only two places I haven't found are the house that was ransacked, and the chop shop, but I think the odds of locating either is not great.

I was told it's better than DuoLingo, and I'm always on the lookout for something promising to be better than DuoLingo.

My first impression, I like the 8 bit aesthetic, promising to bring a new fun, retro game feel to language learning. It turns out it's just an aesthetic, there's apparently nothing retro about the content itself.

At first I have to decide if I'm a beginner in Spanish or intermediate, and coming from DuoLingo, you're basically a beginner forever, so I chose "Beginner" but found out quickly I should be "Intermediate" and it was more trouble than it should be to figure out how to advance to the correct learning tier.

The layout of the menu screens are confusing. Lots of redundant displays of user progress, which I don't care about; how many sentences you've done, rate of progress per day, all noise. If it doesn't suck, I'll use it every day. There you go.

When I click "Play", the only challenge type I'm interested in is vocabulary, so already the experience of the app is very monotonous and singular, like a flash card challenge with sentences around the word.

This by itself isn't terrible, but it's no better than a lot of other apps out there which are basically a thin layer of code on top of a database of translated sentences. When you click "teach me" it just shows you the answer and a text book definition of the word you were supposed to have chosen. It's very old tech, I've tried maybe twenty language learning apps in the past ten years that were all about as thin and dumb.

Of all the ways to learn a language, I've found that rote memorization practice like this is the least inspiring. I'd rather chew through a reader, or watch a show in subtitle and pause it every time I don't know a word so that I can look it up, and then un-pause the show, so that at least I feel invested in the subject matter. Just do a little something to let me care, like Duolingo and their little cast of characters.

DuoLingo's main drawback is that is just never gets too deep, it floats along the surface of learning; usually the words are there already, you just have to order them correctly. I'm doing Spanish, and I don't know shit about gendering or conjugations because it allows you to fly past all of that. The new AI "help" is good, but the teaching structure is foregone for cute characters and such.

But what I like a lot about DuoLingo is the personality, the variety of challenges, the freedom to choose between different challenges, like fake phone calls, speed runs, a new one that lets you walk around a library and interact, which is what I always imagined would work the best; using the target language in conjunction with practical problem solving. I really expected Clozemaster to impart more 8 bit video game elements, there's none of that from what I have seen.

Other apps that I had liked were LingoDeer and Memrise, because like Duolingo, they had variety and character to them, but I ultimately stopped using them because they were tedious in ways that Duolingo is not - they're based more upon punishing mistakes, and less about encouraging correct answers. Pain is a part of their design.

There was also a simple app that no longer exists, it's maintainers have not updated it to work with the latest Androids, which simply had you match pictures to words, and it was not comprehensive, but looking at all the cutely drawn pictures of objects was engaging. If Clozemaster had 8-bit sprite-style pictures of objects and you had to guess the correct word, that could have been a lot of fun.

Whenever I think about quitting my 9 to 5 and going into business for myself, making my own language learning app is always something I day dream about because I feel like even after all this time, and with the advent of LLMs and vibe coding, there's still a lack of language learning apps that don't make learning feel like absolute punishment. When DuoLingo "gamified" their app, the one thing they did that was most important was simply work on not driving users away with tedium and monotony.

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update, I tried about a dozen new apps, including all those mentioned in the replies. It wasn't great, a lot of the same old Duolingo-lite garbage that has been around for years, and new AI driven conversational interfaces that I was excited to try, but they kept misunderstanding what I was trying to say due to speech-to-text errors, and it was extremely frustrating. I'm suppose to say "mi amigo" it comes out "Ame", and the AI is like "Ame? That's interesting!"

What I re-discovered is 1) I like apps with lots of pictures and graphics, they keep me mentally attached, 2) I'm actually far along enough in Spanish that I need to stop using apps and just read/watch Spanish news, and put time towards ingesting the real thing.

Is it possible that AGP, as it relates to autism, is born out of a) not understanding women, and b) being intimidated by women, because we do not understand them, but long for them, at the same time.

When I look around at the neurotypical world, one thing that strikes me is how men tend to treat women like ordinary people. From my perspective, I'm thinking "can't you see she's a goddess?" To me, women are attractive, generally better natured than men, but I don't know how they think.

I feel like non autistic men genuinely understand how women think better. Of course, they're not 100% sure, and there is a whole "battle of the sexes" thing, but I feel like the average man is at least half way there, while I'm still flailing at the starting line. I think it even relates to my marriage; my wife has complained for years that I don't quite understand her, again, no man does 100%, but I think for me it's especially tough. At the same time, my obliviousness nature might relate to why she felt emotionally safe with me in the first place.

So what I'm supposing is, that creating our own woman, and being sexually intimate with ourselves, might be a coping strategy to the fact that women confuse us so thoroughly. This practice results in a version of a woman that is not confusing to us.

It's really hard to see any of this for what it is, because as is the case with autism, it's not all or nothing, it's more like an extreme version of normalcy. All men are confused by women, but we're very confused. All men are interested in hobbies, but we're very very very interested in hobbies. It's much easier to realize that you're different, than to realize you're well outside of the averages. We can and do often hide it, and pretend that we're normal.

The ironic thing is that, if I'm right, it means that a lot of men who wish to be women, are potentially less qualified to be a woman than an ordinary man who has no such interest at all.

The other implication of this is that, in the way that women confuse me, I'm objectifying them be default - they're a person, but I can't understand them as people. It might be fair to say that I treat them as though they're supreme beings, object-like insofar as a supreme being is an object. I might be guilty of objectification, but it's not born of ill will, it's my limitations.