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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Jeez, lots of things.

    I’m still friends with most of my exes that were longish term (at least a year together). So there’s no bad feelings that would make me reject an item, and out of those, no longing for them. There are a few that if I had anything from them, I would have donated it to something, but not many; obviously not hung up on those.

    The main one is a teddy bear.

    Which may seem weird, but there’s a reason. When I got it, my dog was young. She would normally tear up any stuffed toy playing with it, and the household rule is/was that if it’s on the floor, it belongs to the dog.

    But my dog, out of all the stuff she’d cover in slobber and love to death, wouldn’t do it to that one. No idea why.

    But that’s not why it’s still important to me.

    Well after me and that ex parted ways, I became disabled. This came along with a shit ton of pain, which had me contemplating exercising my right to death.

    That toy, my dog would bring me when I was crying. At the time, the bear sat on the headboard, tucked into a little nook. I’d be balled up and hurting, and my dog would try to make me feel better. It wouldn’t always work. When her being her wonderful self wasn’t enough, she’d get the bear and bring it to me, and push it into my face until I took it, and then she’d curl up with me and sigh.

    The bear sits on a bookshelf now, because the nook it sat in is now my wife’s nook to keep things handy. But it’s where I can look over and see it.

    Now, it doesn’t remind me of my ex at all. It reminds me of one of the best dogs I’ve ever met.


  • On average, yeah.

    But you gotta remember, there’s a fresh wave of r/efugees coming in, and there was one not that long ago.

    Lemmy is mostly people that left Reddit, rather than having been a separate culture of its own. So there’s plenty of the same things that make reddit a difficult place to be.

    Lemmy tends to be more forgiving overall, outside of the politically focused instances, and some of the more… assertive belief systems that have communities and instances.

    As others have already said, lemmy.ml is a dedicated leftist space, and it’s hard left, even outright tankie at times (far left and authoritative). So you don’t want to go there about politics, you won’t have a good time.

    Lemmy.world catches a lot of hell because some of the mods and admins are a tad whack, but the users are typically not going to fuck with you.

    Sh.itjust.works is probably the closest in vibe to reddit, good and bad.

    Those are still, iirc, the three biggest instances. So you’ll have more users, which means the percentage of assholes in the human race equals those instances having higher numbers of assholes, but that really is the issue.

    My advice to anyone new on lemmy is the same as it was for new reddit users. Hang back a while. Stay chill. Observe the culture of lemmy as a whole, and any community you want to participate in.

    It is the internet though. People will say shit they’d never dare to in person. But I’d say there’s less of it here than most forums. And, I also tend to see more compassion too


  • Well, that’s kinda the point.

    If you assume that all we get is what we have while we’re alive, then that life becomes the point

    A lot of people that reach the conclusions you have, opt out. They move into a commune, they go vagabond, they may choose to just flit between jobs and find whatever fun is in them.

    Or, they may decide to become focused on finding purpose within the world that is, the societal structures as they exist. Some of those devote themselves to service, or find jobs that they believe make life better for others.

    Some stay in the framework of things, but do the bare minimum and focus on their off time their purpose.

    The point of it, from that point of view where this is all we get, is to find what makes staying alive worth it.

    It isn’t like the certainty of no afterlife removes your ability to live and love and do good things. It can make it harder to bear the bad things of life as well, but that’s anything really.

    The point is what you decide it is.





  • Being real?

    Half-assed motherfuckers that talk big shit, but won’t do a damn thing when someone else is taking the risk of trying to organize shit. Like, motherfucker, a year ago, you were all rage against the machine, now you’re fucking Taylor Swift.

    Don’t talk shit out at the shooting range like you’re Mr Che Guevara jr, then be all piss baby when someone tries to get something moving. Wah, I can’t. Wah, maybe next weekend. Wah, maybe if you can get more people.

    Fucking useless motherfuckers.

    Like, you punk-ass little wimp, GTFO. Calling motherfuckers bootlicker and capitalist pigs until there’s an possibility of doing something. Fuck you, and fuck everyone like you


  • Gotta frame the ideas first.

    A human right is something that should be inalienable. It would be something that, when violated, suppressed, or interfered with, would cause some degree of problem, regardless of the country or other geopolitical framework.

    A civil right is a right which would similarly cause an individual some degree of problem, but only within a given geopolitical framework.

    As an example, voting. In any state, it should be a right that every individual human have a say in their own governance. But voting is only one possible expression of that underlying right, and wouldn’t be applicable in all settings. That it is the most direct and obvious expression is separate.

    So, no, I don’t think the right to be forgotten is a human right, as it only matters within limited contexts. But it should be considered a civil right.

    Now, if anyone doesn’t like those terms, fine, feel free to use your own. They’re just what I use in my head for organizing ideas, not some kind of official thing.

    The only reason the distinction matters is that we currently live in a world where not everyone agrees on what are and aren’t human rights. When a given culture outright rejects things that another holds central, there’s not going to be consensus. That’s not to say that the consensus would be right, but if everyone agrees on it anyway, then the distinction ceases to matter because they’ll effectively be the same thing.


  • Well, like I keep reminding my teenager, teenagers are idiots.

    They can’t help it. Their brains are still cooking in puberty juice

    Every single person you’ve ever known was an idiot as a teenager. The only questions are how big of one, and was it obvious to everyone around them or not?

    But, yeah, that general kind of idiocy is pretty common. “I’m so random! hahahahah!” It’s a thing. Back in my day, we didn’t have the benefit of the internet, so we had to be loud when we were being idiots for attention.

    The meowing part is just a variation on a theme that runs through teenagers where a vaguely inoffensive noise is used often enough and long enough to become offensive to the ear.

    An example of teenage stupidity: back in high school, me and one of my friends had a pact. At any point, one of us could call out “Merry Christmas!”. The other, regardless of when or where it was, had to respond with “shitter’s full!” The price of failing to do so? Nothing at all, it was just two idiot teenagers being idiots. The staff at school were smart enough to ignore it and eventually we stopped because we moved on to other stupidity. Well, for a while; the last time we ran into each other was a year ago, and we were in our late forties, but I called out Merry Christmas, and he sure as fuck yelled out that his shitter was full.

    I never said adults weren’t idiots too ;)


  • Plenty, though it’s a general thing rather than some rigid code. And these are my rules, not necessarily things that everyone should be doing. When it comes to that, Wheaton’s law covers everything well enough lol.

    First, in full honesty, I sometimes will break my rules and engage with assholes, trolls, or other bad actors out of sheer boredom to entertain myself, and I’ll often throw all my other rules out the window if they’re enough of an asshole.

    So, my number one rule is honesty. I refuse to lie. For one, I’ve come to value the freedom of being exactly who I am too much to fuck around. For another, I’m too fucking old to keep track of bullshit, so I’d fuck up eventually anyway. Now, I’m not saying I’ll never wrap a truth up in fancy clothes for entertainment sake, I enjoy telling stories for my own fun and I’ll tell them in a way that pleases me. The facts are always true, though the way they’re expressed might make it seem otherwise.

    Like, I sometimes break out stories about my friend Spider. If I just say that he mouthed off in a bar and got me into a fight, that’s fucking boring. If I say that he pulled out his penis because the was worried he broke it, that’s less boring, but telling the story in one line is a waste when describing said penis is so much more fun. Same with my stories about my cousin, Fucking Ryan. I’m not ruining a good story by writing it down using minimalism, I’m going to tart that bitch up and make it a ride, you dig? It’s all true, but if I say Fucking Ryan stole a hamburger from me, that’s not as entertaining as describing the ketchup leaking from his pocket.

    Second, if I choose to answer a question, I try to answer it to the best of my knowledge, without too much in the way of judging that it was asked. You ask about how to tell if you broke your dick, the answer is going to be about how you tell, with no more than a return question about why you need to know. That is negated when the person asking is a douche, where I will give them shit about them being a douche, but I’ll still answer.

    Third, I try to remember that I’m talking to other humans. Sometimes the bots and ai generated stuff makes that hard. Other times, I fall into the trap of reacting to what’s on the screen rather than the fact that a human put it there. This is the rule I fail to follow the most. A lot of the time, that doesn’t matter because humans are assholes, and some of the shit they say is worth some backlash. But I try to take a second and think about what might have caused someone to say something shitty that is out of character even if I don’t know them.

    Which leads into the fourth. There’s a limit on how many slaps I’ll go into a slap fight. I figure that if I can’t either redirect the person into a real conversation in three or four comments that also include not taking their bullshit, it isn’t worth continuing. That means that I may tell someone they’re acting like an asshole, but I’ll also be trying to get them to break out of it and move on. Believe it or not, it works. Not all the time, but it amazes me how often just telling someone they’re being a dick, and that I’m just another human trying to interact makes them stop and think for a second. Works best with folks that are already attacking an idea instead of a person, but are just being dicks to the person as a side thing.

    What it all boils down to is extensions of Wheaton’s law. Ways to not be a dick, or to be less of a dick.




  • The only time a mod account being active matters is when the community isn’t being moderated.

    As an example, one of my meat space friends mods two or three communities, and never posts, and hasn’t left a comment in something like a year. But he still checks in daily, despite the communities being low traffic.

    On the opposite end, I’m running my mouth all over lemmy daily, but none of the communities I mod have any activity at all because there’s no point to them, which means I never check them any more. So I look like an active mod to some eyes, but he doesn’t. That’s despite neither of us having ever had to take a mod action at all.

    If there’s a community already established, and it isn’t active, try posting there for a while and see if it becomes active a lot of people actually scroll all because it’s more interesting on average. So new posts to a dead community can draw eyes, and maybe lead to activity from others.

    If that doesn’t work, starting another one is worth the effort.

    That being said, sometimes, if the community is on one of the bigger instances, starting the same thing on a smaller one can work out well



  • Man, if only you knew. Maybe you do, I dunno.

    But the scale they’re using doesn’t even begin to cover it all. There’s some things that show up as a smell in poo, like diabetes in particular where you get a fermented fruit smell underneath the usual scatole forward smell.

    There’s medications that make some unpleasant odors, with opiates being one of the more subtle but distinctive ones. Fish oil for cholesterol is unmistakable. Antibiotics throw the entire digestive tract into chaos, so there’s a span where poo can smell kinda neutral before the bacteria rebound, and then you get some weird mixes. Poo can smell like a dead body that’s starting to bloat (and gods, that smell is one you’ll never mistake as anything else) after antibiotics. Which isn’t surprising that cadaverine is possible, but when it’s the predominant smell, it’s crazy until you run across it enough times that you don’t literally run to your charge nurse thinking something’s wrong.

    What’s really fun is when you run across someone that’s post-antibiotic, has a ton of medications that generate smells, and eat bad. I once smelled what I thought for sure was a dead, rotting skunk. Which I have smelled before, so it isn’t a random comparison, it smelled almost identical. That one hit me one morning going into a patient’s home, and I was dreading trying to sort out how to handle a dead animal stinking up the place, because who handles that for the patient?

    But I went to check the patient first, of course, and it was them.

    Those biochemical factories in our intestines are amazing, and horrible.




  • Well, not sure what you mean for certain.

    However, nerve blocks are used to reduce pain, or reduce nerve signals.

    The pudendal nerve services the general pelvic floor, iirc. I know that it can get impinged and end up causing a wide range of problems, with chronic pain being the most common.

    By injecting the nerve and surrounding tissues with medication, you can reduce or even eliminate that.

    Back before ultrasound, you’d have to palpate to feel the site to know exactly where to inject. The image shows the approach used to do so. Afaik, nobody does it like this nowadays. It’s all done with imaging, with ultrasound being the default to the best of my knowledge.

    In other words, if yo junk is burning, taking a finger up the ass and a needle in the taint might actually be better.


  • Me and this dame have a date with destiny.

    She walked into my place, all long legs and short temper. She asked if I wanted to go and shoot something.

    Of course I did. But first, we needed to solve a mystery, the mystery of the French Hen. Why is she sassy? Why is she the boss? Why is she capable of melting hearts with a single bawk? A true femme fatale, dressed in black and wearing a raspberry beret; the kind you find on a pretty chick-en.

    Yes, until we could discover what had this hen in such a mood, there would be no shooting, no fighting, no fun.

    I suspect the answer lies in biscuits, but dare we risk our fingers to find out?