lizardywizard:

fierceawakening:

osberend:

fierceawakening:

osberend:

bakrua:

bewbin:

Why do people drink alcohol it tastes disgusting

you don’t drink it for the taste. u drink shit like apple juice for the taste. you drink alcohol to get rid of the bad taste that every awful person in your life has left

Maybe you don’t drink alcohol for the taste, but plenty of us do. I do like getting a good buzz, but frankly, the amount of alcohol I want to drink because (many) alcoholic beverages are fucking delicious vastly exceeds the amount of alcohol that would take me over the line from enjoyably to unpleasantly altered. Hell, depending on my mood, it often exceeds the amount that would take over the line from alive to dead. (Needless to say, I therefore do not drink as much as I want to.)

A lot of people who are just starting to drink drink the cheapest shit that’s available, and often that’s not very good. If they like the effects but dislike they taste, then they often keep drinking the cheapest shit that’s available, because “it all tastes like shit anyway.” It’s a vicious cycle. If your experience of alcohol is limited to Natty Ice and/or whatever vodka happens to be cheapest at the local liquor store, you’re not going to have a very good basis for understanding “what alcohol tastes like.”

if all alcohol tastes bad, does that mean people who like wine are doing absolutely nothing but posturing?

Remarkably, there are multiple people (who are active on the forum of a single comic) who actually believe this (and multiple others who believe different things that are equally nuts)! See this completely asinine xkcd comic, and an alarming fraction of the official forum discussion of it.

There’s enough of this going around that when I type “xkcd beer” (without the quotation marks) into Google, the third suggestion is “xkcd beer stockholm syndrome.”

The hell?

(And I say this as someone who hates 97% of all beer I have ever tasted, even.)

I find beer to be delicious and refreshing. Not all beer – I used to think I hated beer until a few years back when I was getting a tattoo and was having drinks with the artist afterwards (she’s a cool person, owns many reptiles). She gave me a Tecate and maybe it was because I was wired and dehydrated from several hours of being inked, but it was the best thing I could have had in that moment.

So I don’t like a lot of beer. I’ve tried fancy microbrews and supermarket brands alike, and a lot of them are shitty. But I will knock back a Tecate any day.

I don’t assume that people who like alcohol have Stockholm Syndrome; I simply assume their perception of alcohol is different. I’ve shared drinks that the people I was sharing with liked, that the people I was sharing with could distinguish flavours in, but all I could “taste” was the sensation of pins and needles.

I also perceive carbonation as causing pins and needles (before you ask, non-carbonated alcohol is still stabby). Similarly, I assume that people who claim to like soda perceive it as tasting more pleasant, and are not merely choking it down for the caffeine high. My avoidance of soda and alcohol alike is not a reflection on others.

(I note that–very often in speech, but occasionally in text–I have trouble expressing my theory of mind even when I actually do possess it. Acknowledgements that other people are unlike me tend to get lost on the way to my mouth. If someone sounds like they are claiming alcohol tastes bad to everyone, you might want to double-check that they actually meant it that way. I can guarantee you there’s at least one person in the world–*gestures at self*–who is likely to say that and not mean it, and where there’s one there might be more.)

Tags:

#alcohol #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see