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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I dunno, I’ve kinda lost track of what is and isn’t gender expected in terms of “mandatory” skills, and when it comes to hobbies, there’s only a few that I’ve ever thought of as being outside of traditional options.

    But, yeah, like the example given, I’ve always been able to sew to some degree or another. My hands don’t let me hand sew big projects any more, but still know how to.

    I’m also okay with decorative needlework like cross stitching, and embroidery. Cross stitch was absolutely a gender norm for women on my mom’s side of my family, but some boys of my generation picked it up. Embroidery, I picked up in art classes in jr high school and just enjoyed enough to keep at it.

    Crochet and knitting were also a women’s craft/hobby on that side, and I tried my hand at both. Didn’t like knitting much, but crochet was a nice thing. Kinda stopped fucking with it after I moved out on my own though. Not much use for it, so it was pure hobby and I had other things I’d prefer spending money on.

    On my dad’s side, sewing was about women’s work, but everyone knew enough to patch up a torn shirt or replace a button. My grandmother was a quilter and prone to making her own clothes. I learned a little of both from her.

    Both grandmothers were good with a sewing machine, as was my mom. We had a machine when I was growing up, and my mom would make clothes. So I was fairly freely able to experiment with one. Never really got into it, but I can still turn out wearable items, as long as you don’t expect high fashion or expert stitching. Like, my hems are crooked as a politician, but the clothes will fit okay enough.

    Truth be told, my mom’s side of the family didn’t really care about gendered interest limits. Us kids were always allowed to at least try things out, and were expected to help with any tasks on demand. My sister can do some basic woodworking. One of my cousins played american football in high school, the only girl in her state at the time. All of the women except my grandmother can/could change tires and oil. And all of the boys can handle normal housework and cooking, and some of us played with dolls and such.

    There weren’t any hard lines drawn. Yeah, our grandparents stayed along pretty traditional lines, but they would teach any of us what we were interested in, plus helped make sure we could all handle basic necessities. The only real limitations were that most of the adults had similar interests, so we could only pick things up they knew about. You wanted to learn outdoorsy stuff, you could get a dozen people teaching you. You wanted to learn about repairing electronics, good luck unless it was old electronics (my grandfather did some of that in the Navy before he became an officer, but that way in the sixties lol).

    But, yeah, I’m always amazed when guys can’t even sew a button on their shirt. I carry a small sewing kit with me in my day bag, and an even smaller kit in my pocket organizer. Like, it’s a life skill, you need to know this shit, it isn’t just for women.

    What’s really funny in that regard is a guy I used to know. He’d crack jokes about my sewing kit, but dude worked with leather. And he’d sew leather as part of that. But he would say, “yeah, but it’s leather. That’s for men. Cloth is for women, dude.”







  • That whole album is pretty damn good.

    But this track was my second favorite off of it at the time.

    Obviously, mind playing tricks was my favorite, just like it was anyone’s that will admit it.

    But for the era, every track holds up well imo. There are weaker ones, but they haven’t fallen so far off compared to slicker produced tracks we’ve gotten used to since.


  • Great post! Definitely unpopular on every level, and with a solid explanation of your reasoning.

    I don’t agree, not in the way it’s presented, but it’s still an awesome post.

    The reason I don’t agree is that it isn’t practical. Well, not in the way it would need to be to make it useful.

    See, it’s not enough that a person be a donor for their organs to be useful. They have to die in the right place, at the right time, and in a way that doesn’t otherwise prevent viability. The difficulties of matching a donor to a living recipient isn’t really limited by people checking the box to be a donor. Not opting in just pushes the decision off to the next of kin. Making it opt out isn’t going to solve the limitations, so there’s no need to deal with all the legal rigamarole to get a system for opt-out in place, much less mandatory.

    As far as donating to science goes, the limitation is less about donors again. It’s proximity vs usefulness vs cost. You’d first have to overcome the social factor where the kin of the dead have a valid claim to determine disposition of remains, which is a huge barrier when trying to enact it.

    But they you still run into being able to get a body to a “science” in a reasonable timeframe. Which isn’t always possible. If I die right now, the chances of me getting to a program that can prepare my body for much of anything before decomposition would set in is low. Not impossible, just difficult because even that teaching hospital in the next county doesn’t use cadavers for education, or experimentation.

    I’m too far away from any of the “body farms” for use in that field of research. Even if decomposition wasn’t a factor, anthropology and osteology programs don’t really need more bones. So, if I specifically wanted my remains to go to something like that, I’d have to pay for it. Which is no longer donation in my mind, it’s just an unusual funeral. When my bones got to whatever university was willing to store them, they’ll sit in a box in a room and never do anything useful.

    There would need to be something unusual about my remains for them to be useful in education at this point.

    Medical research doesn’t need dead bodies often.

    So what science is it going to?

    The answer is none because the number of people voluntarily donating is already meeting demand for research.

    But, hey, maybe it would be worth setting up a cadaver transportation and storage system anyway. Maybe future research would need them. But, it would need to be set up. Preservation has to be done locally, so tack it onto existing medical examiner’s offices. They apply whatever method is determined to be best to the bodies. Then they ship them to some kind of centralized storage. We can build those over existing cemeteries, so it’ll be decades before we run out of land to build them on.

    Once there, staff would maintain the remains. Most likely frozen, since chemical preservation causes other hassles. So you’d have freezer cemeteries that can build upwards instead of outwards, which is definitely a good thing.

    Then, they can stay there until someone needs a dead body, but doesn’t need it freshly dead. Even has the side benefit of still allowed kin to visit!

    But, still, dead bodies aren’t very useful for “science”. Great for training new doctors though. So we’d always have enough on standby for that.


  • I doubt it’ll ever be redesigned.

    The reason it’s badly designed as is, is that people wanted specific inclusion into the primary symbol. There’s really no way to change a rainbow; it’s the standard spectrum of visible light being used as a symbol of everyone in their diversity being part of a group.

    To be any more inclusive, you have to put things on top of the already inclusive rainbow. A corner piece or an inset is the only way to do that that isn’t horrible looking no matter what it is.

    The chevrons from the side are at least visually balanced, though not well chosen colorwise. Then again, the representative colors weren’t chosen with being added to a flag in the first place.

    Once you start changing an established symbol rather than just coming up with a new one, design goes out the window. It’s no longer cohesive because it can’t be. It’s like the difference between someone planning a tattoo that covers their arm, and someone getting a few dozen tattoos on their arm. Shoving things together without a plan ahead of time is airways going to be less visually pleasing.

    But, visual pleasance isn’t what the flag is for, so maybe it’s more effective than something planned from the beginning. I dunno, but the fact that it isn’t “just” a rainbow does mean you can’t mistake it for someone liking rainbows in general, so that could be a benefit of that change.

    I don’t agree that the original rainbow flag has too many colors though. If you don’t have the standard color spectrum there, it isn’t a rainbow to most people’s minds, so it would be worse design. The standard ROYGBV is standard for a pigment rainbow for a good reason.





  • That’s the one he didn’t end up screwing up.

    Green hornet, the boys, preacher; those he managed to wreck the characters bad enough that or was no longer the same thing. Production values were high, but when you start fucking around with making major changes to characters, you’re changing so much that any minor changes you might have to make in an adaptation for it to work on screen turn into glaring flaws.

    I tend to use the example of Butcher finding out his wife isn’t dead, and that the baby is still alive too. At the end of the first season, that happens, and it undermines Butcher’s entire character arc, his motivations, and doing that means so many events that are driven by his obsession and trauma fall flat.

    There’s other examples, and I’m aware that Rogan didn’t make those decisions in isolation, there were other people involved. And, if that kind of poor decision making had been limited to one project he was involved with, or had been limited to less pivotal facets of the stories, I wouldn’t blame him as much.

    But he also was doing interviews and hyping the hell out them, talking about loving the original comics, including trying to get existing fans on board while claiming the projects were going to stay true to the original. But all the projects kept in the boys and preacher were the shock value aspects, which shows a lack of understanding the source material.

    For all the flaws in the source material of both those shows, they were character driven, with fairly clear plot development linked to who those characters were/are. So the versions that made it to screen are full of holes because the choices and actions are no longer believable.

    It’s this whole thing lol.

    Invincible lacks the production level interference of the boys or preacher, and didn’t change actual characters the way green hornet did. Which, hornet at least didn’t pretend to be the same green hornet, so it holds up better than the other two.





  • Oh yeah, chickens will wreck lizards, alive or dead.

    They really are predators, just not exclusively so.

    Our rooster sometimes gets in the mood and will go out into the brush and run down mice and such. The hens usually just grab what comes to them though. They’re plenty satisfied with their feed, the occasional egg that they don’t want around, and bugs. But if a small rodent catches their eyes, it is on. There will be mighty roars! Okay, more loud and satisfied buking with the sounds of thrashing as they dismember their prey.

    But they aren’t really mean per se. They’re just driven by instincts more than a lot of critters. They see blood, and that means food, even if it’s a flock member bleeding. They have to establish their hierarchy within the flock, and that does come with some (okay, a lot sometimes) pecking, but it isn’t being done just for the fun of it. It admissions maintains a stable flock and ensures resources for the ones that are on top if resources run low.

    As long as there’s plenty of food and space, they don’t kill each other intentionally, as in to eat. They’re just highly motivated, and it goes bad sometimes.

    They can be really sweet to each other, and to humans. My little hen is sitting here on the arm of the couch preening and seeking attention as I type this. Every evening when she comes in, we cuddle a bit before she naps. And she’ll nestle with both the other birds at times as well. She’ll also keep both of them in line with pecks as needed, including the big numpty of a rooster that’s twice her size, but ten minutes later they’ll be in their little spots next to each other being companionable.

    They aren’t exactly smart, or even highly complex in the way you might expect birds to be if you’ve been around parrots and their ilk. But they do have that mix of vicious instinct and affection that a lot of social animals have.

    If you’re interested, in my post history, last sunday I did my usual weekly comment in the !casualconversation@piefed.social pets sunday post. I put pictures of our three in the comment. The community used to be at !casualconversation@lemm.ee , but that instance is shutting down. But I’ve been telling stories about our adventures in chickening for a while now. They are endlessly entertaining to me lol.


  • Well, the degree and severity of what you’re describing isn’t what most people experience, and it seems like it is at an unhealthy degree of frequency and severity.

    I would say that anyone experiencing that kind of inner turmoil would benefit from evaluation and treatment. Trying to diagnose someone online is a sucker’s bet even if you’re a qualified professional, and I seriously doubt you’re going to find one of those here on lemmy randomly. But, yeah, if a family member or friend out here in meatspace told me they were experiencing that, I’d be helping them find either a psychiatrist or other mental health provider sooner rather than later.

    Most people do experience at least occasional intrusive thoughts, but not to that level. It’s very good that you recognize it’s an inner voice rather than a separate source though. It does tend to mean you’ll respond well to one or more of the various treatment options, which will depend in exactly what the root cause is. Likely, there would be a combination of medications and talk therapy of some variation or another.

    And, I suspect that even though most people need to try a few meds before they find the best options, that you will likely get relief quickly once that happens. So you’ll be able to approach other treatments and benefit from them quickly as well.