Neither, and also all of the above, plus the list isn’t long enough.
Seriously, it’s not the only two options.
Sometimes cool people do drugs. So do people with mental problems. So do all kinds of other people. But, doing drugs can’t make you cool if you aren’t already. And you don’t necessarily have to have mental problems to use/enjoy any given drug, though some drugs may change that for you eventually.
Well, yeah. Me, my wife, and my kid live with my dad. I’m almost 50.
Mind you, I bought the house from him. But the whole “can’t have a family home” thing where you have to live separate from parents or grandparents to be an adult is utter bullshit. It is often easier to navigate the interpersonal stuff when it’s the classic nuclear family and the kids move out to start their own, just because relationships and the work of them is exponential based on the number of people and the number of relationships between them. If you’re the parent and the landlord to an adult offspring, that’s two complicating factors in making things work peacefully and (hopefully) happily. Add in another generation, especially when grandparents are part of the child rearing, and shit can get messy fast.
We make it work by the framework of: my house, our home, your room.
The house itself is mine, I have final say in structural changes, repairs, etc, because I’m the one on the hook for any legal issues that derive from such. But the running of the household is by consensus of the adults, and input from the kid, with agreed on boundaries. Within those boundaries, if you’re in your own room, you do what you want. The kid is aware of what the boundaries are, and that they won’t be changing when they become an adult, and they’ll have the freedom of choice to stay or head out, knowing there’s a safety net here they can rely on.
They ever have kids, those kids would have the same choice.
Yeah, a house can only hold so many people before it becomes a chaos that isn’t bearable. No matter how big the house, that remains true. But a family home is still a very valid and good choice where life makes it useful/necessary.
Shit, on my end, if the kid stays here until they’re in their fifties, I’m happy as hell, as long as they’re here because it works for them. They’ll be inheriting the place if I get it paid off before I die anyway.
I moved back here as a temporary thing in my late twenties. Left the city I had been working in and was looking for a place of my own. My best friend came with me, and when my mom finally moved out post divorce, it just kinda worked until I had to buy the place. After that, it still worked, and the people involved have changed a few times, but there’s this wonderful sense of connection and security knowing that we all have a place to be if we want it.
Yeah, might work if the starter he used was fully isolated, but I kinda doubt that was done.
But it always kinda trips me out how even experienced bakers think sourdough has to have some kind of magic seed to work as sourdough. It doesn’t matter what you start with, the flour you feed with, and the environment you’re in are going to have yeast already present, so you’ll eventually end up with whatever is in those being what’s doing the work, not what was in the inoculation.
Same with the lactobacilli, whatever strain is present locally is going to end up as the working strain.
“I give this orgy 5 stars!”
Too bad the dress wasn’t macrame, then you’d also have macrame and cheese
The system is still broken
Man, I truly appreciate the effort and passion you put out there. That’s some beautiful humanity inside you.
The only thing I can say that doesn’t insult what you put out is that, as wonderful as it would be for your hopes to come true, I simply don’t believe it is possible without tearing down the country built on slavery, oligarchy, and sheer hubris, and starting fresh. The system isn’t just broken, it was never whole.
Again, I am so glad to see someone put that much thought into a response to my sheer disgust at the world, and bring hope into the subject. I can’t debate the fine points of it without dishonoring the intent there. So I’ll just say thank you.
And people went the fuck home
I would say that any time a group is targeted, deprived of freedom and moved into brutal conditions, comparisons about exactly how bad a given version of a concentration camp is kinda ignores the point that they’re fucking wrong by nature. They are a stain on humanity, period.
And I actually include prisons in the United States as morally equivalent since there’s a disproportionate amount of minorities targeted the be put in there. But at least they had the pretence of due process, so it isn’t the same thing.
And make no mistake, the “holding” facilities were indeed intended to treat humans like filth. And they’re designed in a way that has led to rampant death.
The only reason that deaths haven’t reached genocide levels is no active killing, it’s all passive so that people can ignore or and pretend they aren’t responsible for each and every death that does occur. Any citizen of the United States bears the onus of what w.e did to the Japanese citizens in ww2, and we bear the onus of what has happened, and is still happening to our fellow human beings in this hellholes currently.
What I’m doing here is expressing my disgust with so-called activists and militants that claim to want serious change, but will not risk anything to do it. And yes, it is impossible to do alone, it takes feet on the ground, willing to take any action necessary, and that’s risky. Every attempt to organize a serious effort that I could find failed because nobody was willing to take action. They wanted to fuck around, have a little circle jerk about how bad it was, and go home.
We, as a population, have stood by while our fellow man have been treated worse than we treat animals. Which is pretty bad, if you’ve ever seen industrial farming.
One million, one thousand, one hundred, even one is too many.
You know, I was tempted to just give you a bit of a troll and tell you to blow me, but damn dude.
Pull down everyone in power and rebuild a nation. That’s what revolution is
Man, you can’t even get people to do anything about actual concentration camps. Like, some people tried to organize raids on the places where humans were being held because they dared to cross a border, in horrible conditions, including children. Nobody did a gods damned thing. A lot of fucking noise about how “somebody” should do something, but they couldn’t.
Yet another black man was murdered by police a few years ago, and people did rise up a little, but didn’t have the will or stamina to do the job all the way to the finish.
Truth? The people that think they’re all progressive and good are fucking complacent. They really think that they can fix the system from the inside without any sacrifice.
Fuck, you can’t even get far left radicals to actually do something concrete.
Meanwhile, the far right has ridden on the coat tails of racism and hate until they’ve been taken over completely by the racists and fascists, but they’re united enough via identity politics that they’ll never, ever let go of what they’ve gained without an actual, real fight.
Eh, it is kinda watering down the original punk, as a term for what the original punk movements represented. But that’s language. No matter what a word starts out meaning, people can use it for something else. If that new use takes off, there’s nothing that can stop it other than people as a group ceasing that usage. Isn’t that cool? See what I did there?
Tbh though, once a word gets used a new way, and it spreads, it’s just as likely that the original usage fades away. Don’t forget that words like idiot and moron had a more clinical jargon usage originally.
Living languages love shifting. Humans are sort of like birds with words. We collect shiny ones and play with them.
The various _punks and _cores are just a current example of playing with words.
As far as disliking or resisting that kind of appropriation, it can be frustrating. Anyone that was a punk back in the day would likely sneer at some of the _punk iterations, possibly calling anyone using them a fascist (and if you’ve never seen the show The Young Ones, you really should just so you can see an early version of the caricatures of what punks, hippies, and such were. Real life punks and hippies were a much more diverse and interesting thing, but less funny).
My advice as a fellow old dude that knew some of the old school punks? Just shrug and smile. Change is inevitable, might as well just roll with it.
I have my moments lol.
And anyone would blow all three.
Okay, I think I may have to try this eventually.
Man, it depends on how you think fucking up a chance is. Long story ahead, warning.
So, I was raised by hippies. My dad is/was a country as fuck hippie, but still. So I had access to the library of two laissez-faire parents. This meant I was rather precocious about some things.
Which matters a little in the story.
My mom was a stay at home mom until I was in high school. She got a pretty shitty job, but made friends.
This included a lady that was maybe two years older than me (and I was legal in our state), and gorgeous. I’m talking she could have been a pinup model. Curvy, with these soft, gentle blue eyes and non-bottle blonde hair that was like silk.
Needless to say, I was rather happy to have this lady visiting often.
It turned into her sometimes visiting when my mom wasn’t home (which started happening more since there was a rift between my parents) and hanging out with me.
Now, I was not the suave and sophisticated motherfucker I am today, but I did have some game. And I was not an idiot about everything. So as the flirting escalated on both sides, we were both quite aware that it was going to end in something spectacular. I didn’t know if it would be just sex, or something more intense, but we were two trains heading towards each other with no brakes.
Annnd, it didn’t happen.
My mom fucking cock blocked me. No bullshit, she decided to make her friend swear to not date or have sex with me. Since this woman was a good sort, she promised and kept her word. But, since she was a good sort, she told me the truth when she called a stop to things.
Words were had with my mom lol. Which, I’m not getting into her reasoning beyond saying that it was not a reason I consider a good one even more than thirty years later after being a parent myself. That’s a whole different story.
Anyway. Years pass, and there’s always this fire between me and this lady. It’s a small town, so we would run into each other regularly when I’d come into town to visit (I had moved to a nearby city for a while). But it never happens.
And then I moved back home. Moved into the family home in specific. Which is another long story, but not relevant here.
So, my mom was in the process of moving out at that time, and dragged that process out for two years lol. But her friend would still visit, and that fire started burning harder and higher.
There was a kiss on my birthday. I was asleep, and she came to wish me well. I had been sleeping. And I saw her angel face when I woke up, and damn. I just pulled her into me and our lips melted into each other. Other than my wife and when we finally met in person, it is the best kiss I had ever been involved in. Fucking choirs were singing hallelujah.
But she had made a promise. That my mom refused to let go of.
So, some more time passes, my mom moves out, and I’m in the process of buying the family home (another long and boring story). I get a call. It’s her, calling from a bar saying she’s had too much to drink and be able to drive. So I go get her.
She doesn’t want to go to her home, for good reasons. So I bring her to ours. She says ahe wants to get drunk, and would I take care of her while she did. I’m Mr fucking sober buddy (for real, I’m known for it), so I agree.
There’s flirting, there’s some serious conversation about the situation, but there’s mostly just us playing cribbage and bullshitting. Why? Because cribbage was what she wanted to play. No idea why, she couldn’t give one.
She gets to the level of drunk that I would have cut her off for safety’s sake. She passes out on the couch, I get her into a safe position, and set an alarm in the next room to check on her in a half hour. I figured if she was fine then, I could sleep and she’d be fine.
Well, she was fine, and I turned in. Only to be waken up as she’s climbing into bed with me. She’s mumbling something, and kinda pushes her bottom against me before passing back out.
Now, I can not state clearly enough how good she felt next to me. Soft, warm, and even under the bourbon, she smelled divine. Just her personal scent, no perfumes. Maybe a hint of her soap. She was in her underwear. My body reacted. It reacted strongly.
But, even though I have never been perfect, one thing I have never done is take advantage of someone like that. Never have, never will. So I put a pillow between us, cuddled up, and went to sleep.
She was gone when I woke up.
We lost contact. Or, more truthfully, she wouldn’t return calls, and this was before cell phones, so there wasn’t the same immediacy of knowing that someone is deciding not to answer as there is now. She could have been busy and not at home. But after a bit, I gave up and figured that something had happened where she didn’t want contact, and left it at that.
Except. Small town.
We ran into each other maybe a year later. A little awkward, but I just waved and smiled, and left it at that. No pressure, that’s another thing I’ve never liked doing.
But she calls a few days later, wants to talk.
She tells me that she’s sorry. Not for ghosting me (that wasn’t a common term then, I didn’t even hear it for years after that), but for being so horrible that I didn’t want to have sex with her that night!
She had gotten tipsy with the intention of losing enough control to not care about her promise. Once she got home with me, and I’m being Mr fucking sober buddy, she thought I was not into her, so she got more drunk to make a move herself.
And, here’s the kicker. When she climbed into bed with me, she wanted me to have sex with her. That was the entire goal of the evening, and she genuinely thought it was a good idea that she get so drunk that she wouldn’t feel bad for it happening. Then, when I didn’t rape her in her sleep (which is what it would have been, in my mind then, and still is now), she thought I was too disgusted by her drinking to want her at all.
The lady did have some issues, obviously.
I reassured her that I had wanted her from the first time we met, and it had never changed. But I was a little upset, and asked her if she really thought I was the kind of person that would do that to someone. And she said “that’s just how men are”.
Which says it all, doesn’t it? Kinda encapsulates the kind of life some people suffer through, to be left with that as something that they not just accept as part of an ugly world, but think it’s normal and that it’s okay. She really was hurt that I didn’t want to have sex with her while she was unconscious.
It was a long conversation after that. But she was with someone, and as much as I cared about her, and still wanted her, I was fine with that being the end of it. I still can’t wrap my head around the dissonance of her thinking I could do that. Like I said at the beginning of this, I was precocious. So I was not shy about discussion sex casually, and had talked about sexual issues with her. Drunk sex had come up in conversation. I had said I wouldn’t be comfortable with it since it just felt skeevy. So it wasn’t like the matter was new to the both of us.
Hell, I had even clearly stated in one conversation back when I was still in high school that my biggest turn on is being wanted. Not just in a casual sense, but being actively desired. There’s a magic in it for a big, hairy dude, and I was big and hairy even then. Not many of my peers were into dating a damn sasquatch, you dig?
So, I don’t know that I fucked up the chance. I kinda think she did. But I guess it counts.
Eh, grills are kinda meh, imo. They do protect from impact, but that’s not as likely as you’d think. But dust and debris? Grills are useless. You need something that will prevent things like that from getting on the speakers and causing deterioration over time.
Unless you’re including screens and meshes in grilles, and some folks do.
But yeah, it’s cheaper, and people like to see the speakers, so it helps sales. No bullshit, I’ve lost track of how many people have been weirded out that my car system is covered by a screen. They think you have to see the speakers or they’re somehow fake or made of cheap materials. Like, motherfucker, I built that damn box for one thing. But car speakers are exposed to sun and heat and even worse dust. Not having a screen over them is silly.
.
It does get stuck in there. Just don’t make the mistake of going out in public until it fades lol.
I had an NPC during a table top rpg session that was my excuse to do my foghorn leghorn voice. Spent all afternoon doing that voice, and couldn’t stop when I made a beverage and snack run.
I already have a southern accent (technically a mountain accent, but that’s quibbling), so hamming it up can get absurd lol
It’s neither beneficial nor an inherent detriment.
It doesn’t provide enough padding to matter for anything, and the dangers of it bring grabbed are vastly exaggerated (been doing martial arts and grappling in one form or another since jr high, if you count a little wresting then, so over thirty years with breaks here and there, and bearded the entire adult time).
At best, blows will slide more and cut less, but not enough to really matter. At worst, having it grabbed hurts, which can be a bad distraction, but it isn’t so sturdy as to not be easy to escape. It either pulls loose if their grip is bad, pulls out if their grip is good enough, or makes sure their hands are easy to reach, and allows you an easy access inside their reach.
Every little pro has a con, and vice versa, with none of it being a deciding factor.
A ponytail is worse, and a braid worse than that.
Besides, anyone with a beard that isn’t just full mountain man is going to be oiling or otherwise treating their beard. This makes bare handed grips next to useless on them. And if you’re in a full contact sparring session, you’ll have other options to keep it from being a horrible thing.
Seriously. I have never once been tapped out because of my beard. I’ve never had any idiot during my years as a bouncer be successful in using it against me. Now, I have had to trim or shave it back because of having wads of it snatched out, but that’s still a very minor issue compared to the other things that can happen in a fight.
If anything, the fact that people tend to have this weird reaction to a big, bearded guy compared to just a big guy, you get in less fights in my experience outside of training or a job. Going places with a full beard, even drunks wouldn’t fuck with me the way they would other big guys. There’s a bit of some kind of reaction where people think a beard = tough sometimes. No clue why, just that it’s often enough to have noticed.