Luckily (less luck an more a nigh religious isolation and mask use habit) I missed getting covid. The timing of me quitting and covid starting was a wonderful thing though. I can’t imagine trying to maintain that addiction with all the risks being increased and supplies of the cigarettes being lower.

I had started chantix well before the first reports started making it into my awareness, and by the time the first waves of deaths here in the US were puckering buttholes, I was done smoking, and had moved over to zero nicotine vape pens to handle the habits of having something to do with my hands and mouth (other than trying to suck cock at glory holes, which didn’t seem wise with covid raging anyway).

The masks originally muted the allergies when out in the world, but this house is old as a Neanderthal dick, and at least twice as dusty, so I was often tempted to just wear a mask at home too lol.

Fuck, that was a wild couple of years. Covid was fucking traumatic even though I never caught it. My anxiety spiked just now remembering how bad it was.

The key is figuring out when to use assertiveness vs aggressiveness vs gentleness. And, to learn how to do the first two while being respectful and the third while still insisting on at least basic respect.

It ain’t fucking easy. But it is true that assertiveness shifts behavior, as does aggression. People respond to both, and often in ways that seem the same on the surface. But aggression only results in hidden ill feelings, so it’s not usually good to use it if you aren’t fully sure it’s the right stance to take.

Learning that judgement is not a fun experience.

I wish I could keep goats here. I’ve always had a love of the little buggers, even the ornery ones.

Those eyes are part of that, though it’s more the personality. I wish you and yours all the joy life can bring you

They do exist, though I dunno if you’d find any examples online

But they suck for most uses because there aren’t number words.

Like, in print or cursive, the word “pool” exists as a distinct combination of letters that can be recognized even with sloppy writing. I’m using that as an example because I’m dyslexic and that’s one of my favorite examples of how I manage to read as fast or faster than someone that isn’t.

However, 1984, 1776, 2025, they don’t necessarily have the same “weight” in memory where you would recognize them if the numbers are connected.

And with math connected numbers would be a shit show from top to bottom.

So there’s really no use case for learning connected numbers. They aren’t useful, and cause problems. Why learn Cyrillic if you never run into books printed in it? Even that would be a more useful thing to teach in schools than connected numbers. There’s no good reason for connected numbers except for private notation. Even then, you’d not save much time unless you’re writing a shit ton of numbers, and you’d better be able to practice both doing them and reading them if you want those notes to be useful later.

Afaik, nobody uses them at all nowadays. For anything. So finding instructions on how to do it isn’t likely online (though I’m going to check just out of curiosity and edit in if I find it). It would be unlikely to find any of the old texts that teach it even in a decent book collection.

Couldn’t find any, but decided to do an example from memory

As you can see, even discounting my shitty skills in writing on screen, there’s some serious issues with reading connected numbers.

American biscuits are a form of quickbread. Chemically leavened, with fats worked into the flour.

Super simple in terms of ingredients, and fairly easy to make (though also easy enough to screw up).

You take your flour w/leaveners, then cut in whatever fat you’re using; butter, lard, bacon grease, shortening, whatever.

Then mix in the liquid. It’s usually milk, or milk products like buttermilk.

From there you very gently work the dough until it’s sticky and can be formed.

If you want flakier biscuits, you roll and fold a bit, getting laminations and then cutting. If you want them soft and fluffy, do nothing but form them into balls by hand. In between, you roll them out to preferred thickness then cut. Cutting can be like in this post, or using a round cutter.

You then place them on a lightly greased pan. If you want softer sides, you place them close enough together to make sure they touch as they rise in the oven. For crusty sides, give them space.

Biscuits, particularly southern style biscuits, are an art form of sorts. The least rigid kind of baking there is imo. There’s a ton of variation in textures and flavor.

Dude!

Dude!

Look at that fucking crust, all golden brown and sexy.

You gotta throw an nsfw tag on those biscuits!

That goat is photogenic as fuck!

And a tru enviro-homie to boot.

Selling stale parsnips

Gods, I quit smoking back in 2020, and my allergies have been brutal ever since.

Like, it’s freaking winter here, can I not get a month break at least? No? So it’s snotty nose and itchy eyes for me then.

They get called the feebs by some folks

I know you asked for women here, so please forgive second hand info and a small bit of personal interjection.

You’re far from the first woman to express that feeling. I’ve heard similar many times, and damn near exactly that a handful of times.

Yes, as folks have said, it’s most often from people that end up being trans or some variety of non binary/agender once they figure out what labels do feel right, but it isn’t exclusively that. There’s some folks that have dissonance with the label not because they aren’t women, but because the label of it carries social baggage that doesn’t match their inner self, rather than womanhood not matching their self.

I’ve had conversations about it because my own sense of masculinity and manhood (not necessarily the same thing) often didn’t fit external concepts, leading to friction. Something as minor as having long hair was enough to cause social friction that made my journey as a boy becoming a man rockier than it should have been.

What I’ve had expressed to me by women that are cis, and place themselves on the binary is as much about not being able to integrate what they sense in themselves with external concepts. Even when they fit those external concepts like enjoying makeup, there can be a disconnect so great as to make them wonder if maybe they’re trans simply because the way the world treats women can be so damn wrong. That kind of dissonance needs resolution eventually.

I will say that femininity is no more rigid than masculinity. For the most part, the real defining limit is what the person finds as their own expression of masculinity or femininity. When they find that balance where their own sense of self is no longer dependent on those external concepts and pressures, that’s when real femininity comes into play. A tomboy can be just as feminine as your prototypical “girly girl”. It’s just a different expression of femininity that happens to also match some aspects traditionally labeled as masculine.

Really, when it comes right down to it, we all have to find our own self-labels and balance them with our concepts of masculinity/femininity.

Going back to my personal journey, I discovered that part of my internalized masculinity is wrapped up in being exactly who and what I am, as a man, and to hell with external concepts. I’d be just as masculine, as much a man in high heels and skirt singing Celine Dion because I’m in balance with my masculinity. This was not always the case. The few times I did drag as a bit of fun felt decidedly un masculine because at the time, I’d never had to evaluate how much gender roles and appearances actually mattered to my own sense of self.

So, while you didn’t ask this at all, I would say that if you want to be called a woman, you deserve it, period. Doesn’t really matter if you’re trans, cis, or other, you’re as valid a woman as any other.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to have the goal of internalizing that label in order to be a woman, you don’t. But you can also be very feminine in how you present yourself and not be a woman, and you’d deserve to not be called one either.

hype? Pretty much any because hype is almost always artificial.

But fans? I can’t say any band/performers don’t deserve their fan base. You pull the crowds that need what you’re making, so you inherently deserve them.

I can say that some fans do over hype the talents of what they like. It’s perfectly okay to be a middle range musician, and it’s perfectly fine to like them and recommend them exactly as they are.

Like, backstreet boys. Solid pop boy band. Had some great songs, but most were just okay pop. None of the members can really be compared to someone like Freddy Mercury, or Pavarotti, or Marvin Gaye, but they all had good voices to some degree or another and used them well. But their fan base back in the day was all about the hype, the fannishness of it. So they got hyped way beyond what they were.

That’s the curse of a lot of pop performers, and it is the curse of teen/tween targeted pop for sure.

A lot of that kind of performer has to totally undo their family friendly (which is a bullshit term to begin with) focus to ever really grow musically. Look at pretty much every Disney escapee for examples. Timberlake, arguably the best example of someone escaping that trap without having to piss off the original fan base, still drags some of that curse with him while producing some very good pop music.

Now, KISS? Since that’s the example in the post, I think you run into the trouble of hindsight. At the time they gained their initial popularity and success, they were a damn great live band. A KISS show back then was something most people had never seen, and the hype was justified

But they suffer from the success curse. Other people took what they did and did it better. So now the hype is essentially all nostalgia, so it feels out of place. Legit, go back and check out footage of their live shows and compare it to the standard rock bands of the same eras. It wasn’t until they went full idiot and tried to abandon the makeup (and all that went with it) that they lost the thread. At that point, they kept trying to summon up what they’d lost and never regained their mojo. At this point, a KISS show just doesn’t do justice to what the hype says. It can’t, because it isn’t the same band despite being mostly the same people.

But they were always mid tier songwriters (even the ones I fucking love were mid tier compared to a band like The Band that I tend to enjoy less).

So, that kind of thing is why I don’t jump on hype or shit on hype. It’s usually artificial, and it’s also usually generated by dint of numbers. So hype never carries well.

But it’s also why I never object or care about someone like Taylor Swift having a massive fan base either. She writes and performs for her target audience. She does that very well, no matter what else anyone thinks about her. Any pop performer is trying to do exactly that. Even niche subgenre performers that are actually trying to sell their music try to find a way to target a fan base (even if it’s only people that would object to being called a fan base).

I would, at this point in my life, also say that at least checking out hype can be worth it. Even if you don’t like whatever it is, you’ve shared something with other people, and that’s a net positive. Plus, you might run into a few songs you do like from someone you don’t otherwise enjoy (like shake it off from Swift for me)

Legit, this isn’t that shitty a question.

However!

I met your dad at the glory hole, and he was pretty good on his knees

Eh, it’s definitely not power tripping. They explained their reasoning, gave a limited ban, and did so politely.

Whether or not the comment violated rules could be debated, but they erred on the side of caution. Since we live in a world where even a meme community can be a target for hatred and nastiness, the mods erring on the side of caution is necessary. That isn’t something I’d be willing to debate at all. Some communities just need extra vigilance. That’s one of them.

I think you’d be well served by taking this chance to reexamine what you said and how you said it. The same basic idea could have been expressed in a way that didn’t even get close to the rule, plus ways that didn’t get as close much less be so close as to be indistinguishable from breaking the rule about targeting validity of terminology.

Maybe you didn’t intend your comment to be taken as it was. I’m willing to believe that. But you do need to be aware that it sure looks like someone trying to dance around a bad faith argument in hopes of trying to play a semantics game to bypass a rule. Loopholes don’t actually exist for this kind of thing, and shouldn’t. You abide by the spirit of the rules, or gtfo. So, if you weren’t doing that, then you gotta recognize the dubiousness of the comment and accept that future participation in that or similar communities requires an extra level of thoughtfulness in constructing comments.

Edit: the title of your post here is at the least misleading, and at worst an outright lie. The screen shot included in the post shows it as originally a temp ban ,as does the mod log. The perma ban seems to have happened based on your behavior after the temp ban, which is fully on you

My dude, bandanas exist. Clean hands on your own bandana is as good as it gets.

Find what they call trainman, signalman or similar ones. They’re bigger, tend to be easy to find in thicker fabric, and can do other jobs as well.

As you roll up to the sink, pull the bandana out, drape it around your neck. Wash, shake a little, grab the bandana and dry off.

It’ll go right back in your pocket and not cause any problems very slightly damp. If need be, leave it hanging loosely around the neck or out of the pocket so it’ll dry.

Kitchen. You save water by washing your dishes as you pee

It can be a hard watch, no doubt. I’d disagree about it aging well, but I think I get where you’re coming from with that too.

It’s one of those movies where you have to kinda be in the frame of mind to look at it like abstract art sometimes. If you try and watch it as an actual sci-fi movie, it’s gonna fail hard (the SPACE part makes it seem like a sci-fi film, but it really isn’t).

It suffers from some really artsy (as opposed to artistic) pacing and editing at times. And I like the movie a good bit.

Well, yeah, it’s normal.

When you find goodness in the world, and it shares a common denominator, it is perfectly normal to develop some degree or another of affection/attachment for that common denominator. You don’t have to be depressed for that, it just makes it easier.

It can turn into an unhealthy obsession, and it’s possible that the motivations may not be without strings (cults and such), but those aren’t going to be the case every time.

Like, for me, I have a deep and abiding love for gay culture, specifically gay male culture, because of how much love I have received from that subculture. That has expanded over the years to embrace the entire rainbow of the LGBTQ+ community (with some extra affection for my trans folks). You go for a while needing acceptance and open appreciation, you’re going to end up returning it when a specific group is where you find it.

Truth is that the more sub a subculture is, the more likely the people in it are to be outsiders in some way. Maybe marginalized, maybe just atypical; but whether they were individually outsiders that found solidarity, or they became such by joining the subculture, outsiders have a tendency to be at least a little more accepting of other outsiders (though you run into some weird shit where you get schisms sometimes).

And it can be local. As an example, I’ve had universally great interactions with juggalos in my area, but they can be major dicks in other places. As another, furries tend to be really chill with non furries that accept them but can have bitter faction wars with each other.

Don’t let yourself get sucked into any cult shit, but otherwise find the goodness of humanity wherever you can, and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with that

Waaaaay back, there was the iran-contra trading cards. Basically some stylized art with descriptions of the people and events involved. They sold modestly well.

There were 30ish cards in a box with an image of Ollie North on the cover.

There’s been other, similar, things done over the years as well. So the idea itself is obviously a good one. There’s something about that kind of concise structure that makes skewering whatever socio-political target an entertaining thing. But, they’re also not likely to be something widely popular either. It’s basically a reformatted political cartoon, even if you’re using photos rather than artistic representations. Those tend to be the purview of a fairly narrow audience.

The more serious they are, the narrower that audience is. After a point, it turns into being solely for the terminally obsessed identity politics crowd, and they’re boring as fuck.

An eBay listing to give a look at what was done with the idea back then

Of course, at least under normal circumstances.

Like humans or wild animals, a pet is going to have their full sensory array available. Even a blind and deaf animal can pick up vibrations as someone approaches then, feel changes in air movement, etc.

Since hands are different sizes, even if they were asleep at the moment of contact, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose hand was on them. Obviously , that might be negated if the hands are similar enough, but I would suspect that even then the differences in how a person pets them would be useful.

You could likely create a situation to bypass everything and “fool” a pet, but that’s what you’d have to do.