• 3 Posts
  • 569 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle




  • Well, I’m not in a situation where I can go otc for headaches. I’m already using acetaminophen (paracetamol for the brits) non stop for chronic pain, and I have to save ibuprofen for stuff that never responds to other pain control methods because I’m an old fuck and I’m not supposed to take it at all, and it causes problems when I ignore that and take it anyway.

    Luckily, my headaches almost always stem from stress and/or muscle tension in my neck, so it’s very rare they don’t respond to non chemical methods, and I happen to have prescription meds that are prn for those things if I want/need.

    But, for headaches, I used to find caffeine more effective than analgesics, nsaid or otherwise. Even when I wasn’t drinking caffeine regularly (which means I know that it wasn’t just caffeine withdrawal causing the headache to begin with), a cup of coffee usually got rise of a headache faster and more thoroughly than NSAIDs.

    But it was usually acetaminophen that would be my first pick when I went the OTC pill route. Less likely to irritate my already irritating bowel syndrome issues.

    Tbh though, none of the OTC analgesics are great at getting rid of a headache. Some of the older studies and double blind tests I saw put them about the same as placebo for headaches, though that’s been years since I looked up anything about it.


  • Is this really Linux drama though? It seems more like political drama that ended up jizzing on Linux.

    I mean, yeah, there’s been drama after the decision was made based on legal issues brought about by political drama, but this part of it isn’t, if you get the distinction.

    The only real linux drama part, as far as I can see is the crappy way it was announced, which isn’t what most of the people involved in the drama after the fact are complaining about.

    I dunno, I’m not complaining about the post here, just talking about the overall issue itself using the post as a jumping point.

    Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that foss development can’t be immune from political fuckery (no matter how justified or unjustified it is). Everyone that’s going to be involved in development is going to live under some nation’s thumb, and is vulnerable to any legal ramifications of that nation. So there’s no way to prevent a project being strongarmed; all that’s possible is having enough people that can review the code do so, so that any fuckery that affects the project is known, so that everyone can decide what they want to do about it as individuals.

    As long as individual people have the ability to use any foss software they want on their own devices, there’s a limit to how bad the fuckery can get. Tbh, I’m more worried about corporate fuckery in foss projects than governmental


  • Anecdotes okay? If so, read on.

    So, I’m cishetero, but have been involved with gay culture in specific, and broader LGBTQ+ culture generally. I was also a beard multiple times over the years, including for a lesbian couple that ended up being a bit more intimate.

    But, yeah, there’s definitely dynamics with lesbians akin to top and bottom. Afaik, the terminology isn’t used often for lesbians, but it’s there in that regard too. Back in my younger days, an exclusively “top” lesbian was sometimes called a butch, whether or not they were butch in the more common sense if presenting in a more “masculine” manner. And, that was true of “bottom” lesbians being referred to as femme, even when they presented masculine.

    Mind you, there was predominance of butch lesbians being tops in a sexual sense compared to being bottoms. It was fairly unusual to run into the stereotypical butch lesbian and have them not also want to be the more active partner, and even to the extent of not wanting any sexual acts being performed on them at all. By no means a universal thing, but it was common enough that people would be surprised when a butch lesbian wanted to receive head.

    Being masculine presenting or feminine presenting isn’t a reliable predictor of sexual dynamics, but it’s not far off from reliable in my experience. Men and women, not just women. I’d say 8/10, the closer to a generic "masculine"presentation a person is, they’re a top in the bedroom. Mind you, that’s based on people willing to talk about such things fairly casually, which could leave out a ton of people that aren’t that way, but just don’t like talking about their sex lives in a group at work or party or other gathering.

    The best lesbian friend I’ve ever had, that literally saved my life at least twice, was butch as hell. Flannels, boots, truck, went hunting, and mirrored male mannerisms with zero effort. But she was most definitely a bottom sexually. She would complain like hell that everyone wanted her to do all the work, every time, and all she wanted was some hot making out where the other woman was in charge, followed by “my pussy getting ate like a fat kid at a pie eating contest”. She didn’t mind reciprocating, but what made her most happy, most satisfied was being “bottom” in a sexual sense. But, being butch as hell, the women into her tended to assume she was going to be in control and be the active partner exclusively.

    It seemed to me that the butch lesbians had a harder time with being stereotyped sexually than the femme/lipstick lesbians. It wasn’t as big a surprise to people when a feminine presenting lesbian wanted to be the more active party, or to be in charge even from the bottom. Power bottom lesbians exist in the same way laid back tops do, though a bit more frequently from what I’ve seen and heard.


  • Hmm, the movie choices are easier. My kid isn’t quite ready for Kubrick’s more intense movies like a clockwork orange, so that kind of thing.

    Reading wise, when I’m reading to just chill and enjoy escapism, I gravitate to fantasy and urban fantasy. Right now I’m going back through the Laurell K Hamilton stuff. Kinda trashy for the most part, but there’s some nice light reading in there. I’m flipping over to Stephen King when I get tired of the trashy parts of Hamilton’s series, which have fantasy, but close enough in some cases. But I’ll also reread my favorite Vonnegut and Palahniuk books too, when I’m wanting comfy reading rather than new stuff.

    Music though? Damn. I’d probably start with metal since that’s the genre I most enjoy loud. Hit up my playlist with my absolute favorites, then take a break and do some deeper cuts. If/when I came back, it would probably be either bluegrass or old school hip-hop. Again, that’s because I like feeling the music as much as hearing it. If I still had time and a break for the ears to relax, over to classical for the same reason; I always start with tocatta and fugue in D minor with that. There’s some superb recordings of it that can shake the fillings out of your teeth with a decent subwoofer.

    Gotta take breaks when cranking the volume though. Ear fatigue is a thing, and actual damage is possible too


  • Heh, I actually get those sometimes. I’m disabled, so the only real barrier to complete freedom is family, and I can sneak in a few days a year where I’m alone all day, and sometimes over night.

    For real, the only thing I’d do that I can’t do when everyone is home is crank the fuck out of the music. My wife gets migraines easy, and my kid seems to be following suit unfortunately. So really turning it up until I can feel the bass in my guts is a rare treat.

    But you can only do that for so long before the ears get tired. So the rest of the time would likely be reading without interruptions.

    I’m pretty fucking easy to please lol.

    I sometimes house sit for my best friend, and that’s essentially what I do there, just not that loud with the music because the pets don’t like it past a certain point.

    Sometimes I’ll pop in a movie that isn’t to the liking of the family instead of music, and enjoy the more immersive sound. Which, I could also watch things they don’t enjoy as much with the sound up, but why not have both factors my way?

    Mind you, I can do those things with everyone home, but it takes planning and I’ll still have interruptions. But doing them always has the risk of causing my wife hours or days of pain and misery, so it’s something I prefer to just wait for. Kinda makes it more enjoyable tbh.



  • Tangent!

    I used to prefer being DPS. And then I played the first game that made healers and tanks fun for me. Shaiya. Wasn’t the best game overall. Kinda bad, and a ripoff of some parts of WoW. But it was fun to heal in, and very fun to tank in. You really could change the entire gameplay based on how you tanked, and how you healed.

    Then I moved over to battle/war of the immortals. Again, flawed games, but tanking and healing were fun. Healing more than tanking in those two, but still more fun than DPS.

    When I switched over to Neverwinter as my main gaming focus, the way they had the classes be able to handle tanking and/or healing was the most fun I’d ever had playing in PUGs. I could pop onto my haste cleric, keep everyone alive while also boosting them and put out play damage solo. Paladin? Same idea, only the team wouldn’t get hit much if at all. The fighter class was essentially pure tank, and good at it, but not as much fun as paladin for me.

    I had more fun playing supports, heals and tanks than I ever did on DPS. It didn’t hurt that, on the games I played, I was great at tanking and healing. Enough so that my guilds/alliances would plan events around my schedule, even when the people were on the other side of the planet. Even on Shaiya, which was totally pay to win, I could out heal and out tank players that dumped tons of cash into it.

    I miss it sometimes, but I’d have to rebuild my gaming PC to be able to play neverwinter now, because no way am I starting completely over on the ps5 with a controller that makes it much harder to play those classes. And none of the console based MMOs really entice me currently.




  • Why doesn’t it?

    Because autistic people haven’t set up the same kind of community for the same reasons, with the same history.

    You gotta understand that LGBTQ+ isn’t even that old as a term. I’m 50, and I was damn near an adult before LGB was an initialism that you’d see often. Tbh, you only really saw it at pride functions, rights functions, and very rarely in LGB media. The T being added in is what? Maybe fifteen years old? It’s hard to remember when trans issues became unified on a large scale with gay issues (using gay as a catchall term here, not an exclusion; back in the day it was very often lumped under that term for whatever reason), but I know it wasn’t fully integrated in the early 2ks, since I was still able bodied and interacting regularly with rights activists. It was getting there, but the T wasn’t added across the board yet.

    The Q and other additions are even more recent.

    Autism as something other than an illness that needs management is pretty similarly new to the public consciousness. So autistic people didn’t have the same kind of community of exclusion the way LGBTQ+ people did. They were patients, not minorities.

    That may seem like sophistry, but if you look at aspergers, there was a community, it just wasn’t one of exclusion in the same way. That community had a lot more similarities to little people (dwarfs) than gay people in terms of how each group interacted with Neuro or physical typicality. There’s definitely a lot of prejudice, and condescension and bullshit involved with being autistic or a little person, but it’s not the same as being actively hated and even killed for being born as you are.

    So LGB people came from a place where community was safety in a way that someone with autism doesn’t experience. Trans people do too. As do queer and “other” groups distinguished by sexual orientation or gender.

    Safety in numbers was literal safety.

    The political and social side of banding together was essential to that safety. Every “letter” added means more people working for equality and fairness. Every “letter” means more voters, more money, more influence.

    Autism, on the other hand, hasn’t needed that yet. So far, all the various aspects of autism can be addressed as a group despite the various aspects of its expression the sensory sensitivity group and the focus related group are part of the same spectrum, that can be easily navigated by social and political efforts as a single group by default.

    Lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals aren’t the same spectrum. The lived experience of each group (and for bi men and women separately) isn’t inherently linked to the others. Sexual orientation may be a spectrum, but it has different social and political ramifications for each version (and the versions that came into aw areness later). Pointing at a lesbian and a gay man and saying “those are the same thing” makes a lot less sense on a social level.

    This isn’t to say the lived experience of autistic men and women is the same, it most definitely isn’t. But both of those groups can benefit from the same efforts in a way that lesbians and gay men couldn’t until they banded together more.

    Now, should there be delineation between the different presentations of autism the way your post suggests? Not for me to say. I’m not involved in enough autism groups to have knowledge of whether or not the greater community would benefit from it. And, being an outsider, there’s limits to how much I can pick up from observation compared to someone that’s living with autism. There may be a very pressing need to split the categories of autism so that social and political efforts can be improved.

    But that’s a separate issue from why it hasn’t already developed such a system.



  • Unusual overall? A lot, since she’s a chicken, and they’re batshit crazy.

    But unusual for a chicken would have to be her habit of cuddling. She doesn’t do it often, but when she wants to cuddle she cuddles the hell out of you she pecks my arm until I wrap it around her, then borrows her beak into the crook of my elbow then starts her little content chuckle/purr.

    After that, there are only two rules: no touch, only cuddle. And no moving, only cuddle.

    Anything else is met with an indignant rage that can’t even be matched by a church lady at a strip club getting teabagged. There will be squawking, and you will obey, or suffer the Wrath of Marans (which rhymes with Khan, and the s is silent because it’s french).

    The Wrath of Marans is mostly just more squawking, followed by angry stomping. But it’s terrifying if you squint really hard. Okay, if you squint real hard and pretend you’ve been shrunk to the size of a particularly small mouse.

    The Wrath of Marans can also be doled out for other crimes such as; not surrendering the biscuit, not surrendering the peanuts, not surrendering the completely inedible piece of aluminum foil in your hand, or the absolute worst crime of all; Picking The Chicken Goddess Up to Prevent Her Pecking Things That Will Hurt Her. Which can be elevated to all caps as needed. Which is just the same thing with extra squawking and some growls.

    You pull the string, the pointer spins and lands on: The Chicken says BAAAAAWWWWWWK! I WILL EAT YOU, PITIFUL HUMAN!




  • Eh, I am an asshole.

    Friends are hard to make. It’s even harder to find good friends. The key is to move through life open to the possibilities as they come.

    Given enough time, and the willingness to be a friend, regardless of whether or not it works out at any given time, you’ll find people. Might take years, might get lucky at any time.

    No bullshit, the real secret to having friends is being one. You’ll meet people at work, at stores, at events, wherever. If you comport yourself as the kind of person you would like to have as a friend, it is inevitable that you’ll meet someone that wants that kind of friend too. From there, you do your best, and let them do their best, and see where it goes.

    It can be harder the more unusual you’re desired friend traits are. But that’s not the point.

    It’s okay to “fake it til you make it”, btw. If you want a friend that’s compassionate, but you’re more of a stiff individual that isn’t moved by others, you might need to learn compassion by faking it. But as long as you’re acting with compassion, you’ll eventually either learn it for real, or become so good at mimicking compassion that it becomes the same thing. And that’s true for almost any trait. Hard to fake raw intelligence, or being tall, but stuff that’s behavioral? Absolutely possible to pick it up as you go along.

    Be the kind of person you want in your life