southsamurai

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.

Pretty far in the past now, the kid has gotten a lot more resistant to fear over the years.

But, back when they were about 7, ghosts were the big fear at night.

Solution: ghost incense. One of those things I pulled out of my ass in the moment that worked like magic.

The kid didn’t want to go to bed. Was asked why. The answer was that they didn’t want ghosts to come get them.

In a rare flash of genius, I said “Well, I can fix that. Ghosts can’t go anywhere when you burn a stick of a special incense. I keep a box of it around for emergencies.”

We lit some nice smelling stuff, and said the magic words, and that was that.

Now, the next day, we had a nice conversation about how ghosts aren’t real, and even if they were, they’re ghosts, they can’t hurt anything. The kid asked if we could burn the “ghost sticks” anyway, just in case we were wrong lol. So it became the bedtime thing. When the kid would get tired, they’d show up with a stick of incense and ask me to light it.

By the end of that summer, the kid had said they weren’t scared of ghosts any more, but can we use the incense anyway, it smells nice.

Sometimes, trying to convince someone that their fear isn’t based in reality is not only impossible, but counterproductive. For a kid, it’s all about helping them manage the fear, give them control of it.

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.

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

Hell, be an rpg hero and make it a lending library to your actively playing associates.

The only parts of my collection that I don’t lend out are the absurdly difficult to replace box kits. Even then, I’ll make copies of the material. My kid’s d&d group plays 5e, but the DM has borrowed some of my 3.x books for ideas, and has (with full supervision because I’m a little protective) had access to my spelljammer box (before they redid it).

Besides, I may end up running a game again. Most of my regular players have expressed interest, and it’s only scheduling that keeps it from happening. Shit, I might even do a game with the original rule materials some day, the way I used to do ad&d short games (a few months of a story, or breaking out a module) when we were playing 3.x

You gotta get some foghorn leghorn in there to make it really work :)

Because humans are assholes. That’s it, the entire reason.

Normal is a difficult thing to quantify.

That being said, if you’ve got enough loose dead skin to roll up into balls with a sunscreen, you aren’t exfoliating well during your bathing.

You always have some dead skin that’s going to come loose under friction and with the goop softening it up. But if you’ve got a bunch of it, you gotta scrub more.

You’d see the same thing with lotions.

I say, I say, you need to seize the means of production, boy.

Horse shit is what you’ve been told by the people you mentioned.

Your manhood, or anyone’s manhood is not based in sex. Period.

Now, there are differences in how you’d go about navigating a long term relationship that involves sex, depending on how well you know yourself sexually (which goes for any other aspect of the self, but that’s tangential). But there’s nothing wrong, or lesser, with discovery in a partnership rather than spread out over multiple encounters prior to the partnership.

It is true that it takes trying things, repeating them, and experimentation to develop self knowledge. This is true of sex as much as it is with food, music, art, whatever. So there is the risk that as the partnership progresses, the people involved may discover that their sexual needs differ enough to be a problem.

But the truth is that the best sex comes when partners are paying attention to each other, communicating both during sex and in between times. Short term partners, you never have time to develop the kind of in depth knowledge of each other for the sex to be truly stellar the way it can be with someone you spend the time and effort with.

So, you won’t even be missing anything that spectacular by having only one partner as long as both of you are willing to work to make sex good. I promise you, the best sex I’ve ever had was with long term partners.

The only benefit to “playing the field” is giving yourself time to get to know yourself better outside the bedroom. Knowing what kind of deal breakers you have, knowing how you navigate disagreements, learning from mistakes in particular, that is something you can pick up piecemeal just as well as with one partner.

Sex? Not so much. You will not be a better partner in bed just because you’ve had experience. Know why? Because no two people are exactly alike with sex. Yeah, you have to figure out the basics of where to put things, and that’s pretty universal. But what works to satisfy a partner can vary immensely. The kind of stuff that’s mostly universal is in books if you don’t want to just try things with a partner. Erogenous zones tend to be fairly universal as an example, in that most people with the same type of genitals will mostly respond to touches in some places more than others.

You still get variances even in the mostly universal things though, so you still have to communicate along the sexual journey with a partner.

And, no matter what any idiot or asshole says, neither vaginas nor penises get worn out or otherwise made lesser by use. Yeah, stds exist, but that’s a separate issue easily addressed by medical tests. Your GF’s body is just as fresh and lovely as it was with her previous partner. She could have been doing gang bangs and you would have no need for jealousy, though that testing would be a very good idea to do before getting started sexually.

No bullshit, y’all will be fine as far as any previous experience goes. Hell, it isn’t like a single partner does anything except maybe let a person know how to tab A into slot B so things can get started. That’s the only difference between the two of you, so don’t let other people’s stupidity screw with your head about it.

Coffee shops go back pretty far tbh.

That being said, it’s only anachronistic if your setting is this world. No reason why the equivalent of an inn wouldn’t be serving a stimulant beverage of some kind.

Go screw

Well, yeah. That’s the idea. Why would they go this far and not go all the way? They know damn good and well that as long as they keep things just barely on the end where genocide isn’t stated as a goal, and they maintain a position of alliance with most of the west, nobody is going to actually stop them.

Hell, without starting a world war, I’m not even sure they can be stopped.

On the world stage? There aren’t enough nations with power that actually care about Palestine. Yeah, leaders will make noise and pretend to care, but Palestine offers nothing to the major powers worth intervening for.

Sounds sociopathic, right? That’s the leaders of most of the world. People drawn to power rarely have the ethical rigor to wield said power. Those that do, still have to deal with oligopoly, hidden fascists, and the reality that no nation can really take action without upsetting the whole damn thing.

Technically, you can still get it, but the 7 layer burrito was my go-to order when I was on the road and forced to have fast food. The Taco Bell in the next town over was right off the highway, so as I would be zipping between patients, it was usually the only realistic option other than a truck stop that had put people in the hospital three times. So, you know, l decided to live, mas or not lol.

There was a point in time where I ended up eating a lot of taco bell. Enough that I’d had everything on their menu at least once, up until 2005. After that, I haven’t been able to work, so no zipping around three counties wiping butts, which means no need for fast food except as an occasional thing. So I’ve lost track of if they’ve had any temporary stuff or not.

But, yeah, the 7layer was bomb. Like I said, you can still get the same thing by messing around and adding things to other burritos, but that’s a pain in the ass for drive through, if you feel me.

I love that you recognize the original hillbilly usage :)

Nah, go bugger lol. One side of my family is mostly from potato famine Irish, and we all love some corned beef. It’s definitely on the menu for holidays

Nah, it has some irish origins, just not only Irish