I don’t really cross dress, but I have a pair of heels kicking around for a Halloween costume (Monty Python Lumberjack) and I occasionally trot that costume back out.

I basically went to payless (back when that existed, I guess the modern equivalent in probably mystery Amazon brand shoes) and found a pair that more-or-less fit. Staff was actually pretty helpful, apparently around October a lot of guys wandered into payless looking for heels for a Halloween costume. They pointed me right to where the biggest heels could be found.

I think getting a cheap pair was the right move, because they pretty quickly stretched out to better accommodate my feet. I have fairly wide feet even by male standards, and actually found them to be reasonably comfortable all things considered after they broke in (which didn’t take long, those shoes definitely weren’t designed for the stresses of a 200-whatever pound man moshing in them at a Halloween concert)

The harder part was trying to find a bra that even remotely fit my frame.

I think we’re going to need a little more context on who he is and how he’s using the word “goy”

It comes from Hebrew/Yiddish, so it’s a word used predominantly by Jewish people, and so not inherently antisemitic. It basically means non-jew, it’s roughly synonymous with the term “gentile” that you might be more familiar with if you’ve had a Christian upbringing.

How Jews use it of course varies a lot, plenty just use it without any particular deeper meaning, just a matter-of-fact statement that the person they’re referring to isn’t Jewish.

Some of course do use it with a bit of Malice if they value non-jews less highly than their fellow Jews.

I’ve also heard it used, usually somewhat jokingly, by Jews to refer to other Jews who aren’t acting in a way that they think is in accordance with Jewish customs. I remember one time my one Jewish friend who keeps kosher (kind of, he definitely bends the rules more than a bit) was teasing another Jewish friend who had ordered a bacon cheeseburger or something while we were out grabbing lunch, calling him a goy and lumping him in with the rest of the non-jews sitting around the table. It was all in good fun, just a bunch of guys joking around over a couple beers.

Again, I’m sure there’s some Jews out there who would do something like that and mean it as an actual insult.

If the person saying it isn’t Jewish themselves, that’s where you might have a case for their use being antisemitic.

I’m not Jewish, I could definitely see myself using goy or a handful handful of other jewish words and phrases I’ve picked up when I’m joking around with my Jewish friends. I might even call one of them a goy jokingly like in that bacon cheeseburger situation. Mostly though I’d probably use it to refer to myself, like if they were talking about, let’s say a Chanukah celebration, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I might tell them to need to explain it again in “goy” for me.

But if I’m not with friends that I have a good rapport with, I probably wouldn’t joke like that, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I’m genuinely criticizing them for not being Jewish “enough,” as a non Jew I really don’t think it’s my place to be making that kind of judgement.

And I certainly wouldn’t be using it seriously to criticize Jews. I wouldn’t call Israeli Zionists goys (goyim I believe is actually the proper pluralization) based on their Zionist beliefs, there’s plenty of totally secular terms I can come up with to criticize them.

I could also see an antisemite using Jewish terms like goy in a mocking fashion, which, yeah that’s pretty antisemitic, basically the same thing as a white supremacist making fun of a black person for using AAVE.

And of course, depending on the person, the tone, how they’re using it, their target audience, etc. it could be totally non-problematic.

I work in 911 dispatch, so getting people to calm down, stop what they’re doing, and listen to me is kind of a big part of my job. Things are of course a bit different in-person than over the phone, but here’s generally how I’d approach something like this.

If you know their name, use it. A lot. People respond to their name, that’s kind of the whole reason names exist. It will get their attention which is half the battle.

Getting them to calm down from there is the other half, and it’s not easy, especially if you don’t speak their language. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way though.

Not that they’re going to understand you in this situation anyway, but remember that no one in the entire history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down after being told to calm down. Don’t even bother trying that.

Try to get them to take some deep breaths, use some gestures.

Your hospital really should have access to some sort of translation service, either humans on location there in the room with you who speak the language, or some kind of service like languageline (not plugging them specifically, I have a lot of complaints about some of their interpreters, they just happen to be who we use at work) that you can call up and get on speakerphone. Google translate and such are wonderful tools, but they’re not perfect and sometimes you really want that bit of a human touch. I’ve also occasionally had some great interpretors who will chime in with some helpful bits like “they’re saying’this’ but in our culture that usually really means ‘this’”

If you can find an excuse to hand them something, maybe some paperwork, that can also sometimes kind of create a little bit of a break in whatever they’re doing for you to work with. They’ll probably stop screaming for a second to look at what was just handed to them, and then you can try to work on something.

Vaŭ

In Esperanto

Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don’t know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that’s just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.

Married for 7 years, together for probably about 10 total

Can’t really think of a time we wouldn’t have had that sort of exchange.

She’s also been jokingly threatening me with divorce since we got married. I’m pretty sure we left the courthouse holding the receipt for our marriage license joking that we needed to hold onto it in case we needed it for a return. Still have it around somewhere, someday we’re gonna put it in a little shadowbox with “in case of irreconcilable differences break glass” stenciled on it.

I understand that oil isn’t just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we’re also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

But I’d be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we’ve drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

I’m thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

Of course there’s also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you’d probably have to do it in a hard diving suit

I can’t offer a comparison with the other options, but I have a sofa baton U2, and I’m not really a fan. I haven’t spent too much time messing with it so maybe with a little extra setup it might work great, but the scroll wheel seems to skip around when trying to select different devices, a lot of buttons don’t seem to do quite what I’d expect no matter how I try setting it up, the IR seems to have a really narrow beam and is really picky about being pointed right at the device you’re trying to use it with, Bluetooth controls seem pretty unreliable, and I’ve never been able to get it to work work with my PC in a way that feels right.

I only judged people in a handful of cases

If you ordered fountain drinks instead of bottled sodas when we had both available, that’s kind of a dick move.

One lady once ordered a few cups of milk (in her defense, she did tell me when I delivered it that she was injured or her car was in the shop or something so it was an easy way for her to get milk without needing to go to the store. This was before grocery delivery really took off)

And I judged you if you gave a shitty tip or took too long to answer your door.

I’m also in the process of learning Esperanto (there’s actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)

I don’t foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it’s a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I’m a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road

There’s a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I’m not a part of any of them so I can’t really comment on the community all that much.

One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven’t been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she’s gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.

Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.

BotW and TotK are such weird games to me

They built these big beautiful worlds, and designed some really cool mechanics

And just kind of did nothing with them.

TotK was a bit better, but still fell pretty short.

Also it’s so weird that TotK is clearly a direct sequel to BotW, but there’s almost no actual continuity between the games. There’s a handful of characters that are missing without much of an explanation, and other characters from the previous game act as if you’ve never met them before. I get that for gameplay reasons you kind of have to start things over from square one in some ways, but it just felt weird.

And the weapon degradation never really felt fun to me. I feel like at the very least once you get the master sword and recharge it to its full power or whatever you should have that as an option that just doesn’t wear down, even if other weapons that do break might be better suited for the task.

And having to go out and farm a thousand different fish and master parts and whatever else to upgrade your armor is just bullshit.

I may be missing something obvious here, but put it in the cart?

Of course carrying a bag of some kind would also be an option, just a small backpack, messenger bag, etc. I have a surplus Czech military map bag I use for some d&d boosk and a folder of character sheets and such that would probably be about the right size for a portfolio, pretty sure there’s a ton of them still available from various military surplus websites for pretty cheap.

If you can put Velcro on the portfolio and the cart that could work. If the cart happens to be steel you could also do magnets

You could also strap, Velcro, magnet, clip, zip-tie, etc. some kind of bag, bin, etc to the cart specifically for it. Not sure exactly what kind of cart we’re talking about but some sort of a bicycle backpack with hooks to mount on a cargo rack may be an option to hook right onto your cart

If you want to get really extra, you can get an auto follow drone to carry it around for you, or if your workplace is cool with pets, get a dog with a backpack to follow you around, or perhaps hire a personal assistant (these last suggestions are not meant to be taken literally)

I’m not sure which version of my comment you replied to because I kind of waffled a bit on my last paragraph and edited it about 3 or 4 times in rapid succession probably about the same time you were replying because I didn’t like how it sounded, it felt a little rambly trying to cram it all into the comment, so sorry about that.

But yeah, I’m basically on the same page there, one of my versions did touch on that, lots of animals have instincts tied to the moon, more available light gives them different opportunities and risks, and we are, at our core, still animals with some weird instincts driving our decisions, and of course there are things like the tides as well, and who knows what other little effects the moon is having on us and our environment that might make us act a certain way, all with a reasonable, if not immediately apparent scientific explanation.

Sure feels supernatural though.

I work in 911 dispatch, and it absolutely feels like on and around a full moon our calls get weirder

We’re not necessarily getting more or more serious calls than average, so it’s kind of hard to point to any measurable statistic that would back up that assertion, and it’s not just people with psych issues calling and ranting at us, so you can’t even just go by mentions of callers “rambling” or “not making sense” in the notes of our calls, a lot of them are just bizarre situations that seem really unlikely or convoluted.

I’m kind of loath to label it as supernatural though. I feel like if there is actually a correlation and not just confirmation bias on my part, it probably has some reasonable scientific explanation.

Have luddite grandparents who would refuse to pay their taxes with anything but a handwritten check on general principle, and who wouldn’t have been able to work a Bitcoin ATM even if you were right there with them literally pointing at things and telling them what to do.

It also helps that they’re dead.

My parents are getting up in their years though. My mom’s still sharp as a tack and decently good with tech. She doesn’t exactly fully understand AI, but she’s aware of it and has a general ideas of what it can do, so I’m pretty confident her bullshit detectors can fill in the gaps from there.

And my dad… well he has my mom around. Probably about 20 years ago he was just about ready to give information to some scammer claiming to be from Apple tech support

Despite the fact that we owned no apple products.

My PC is hooked up to my main TV as a gaming/home theater thing.

I think my setup is pretty cool, it’s synced up to my Philips hue lights, surround sound, the whole shebang.

For whatever reason, I assume some sort of DRM nonsense, the light sync doesn’t work through the hue sync box and I have to use the PC app

The Hue app doesn’t support Linux, and from what I can find the app doesn’t work right through proton/WINE/etc. there’s a handful of people trying to cobble together their own Linux hue sync apps but none of them seem like they’re quite there yet.

I’m pretty sure that with the advancements made in the last few years I can probably run just about any game or program I want (most of what I use aside from games is FOSS anyway) but I do still have a bit of a bad taste lingering in my mouth from trying to get games and stuff running on Linux over a decade ago.

I started typing a few of them out, it became a very long long post, and then I set my phone down for a minute and it got deleted somehow and I’m not gonna retype it all right now, because I probably should have gone to sleep about 2 or 3 hours ago after getting off work.

But if you remind me later today, I’ll try to type some of them up again.

Also gonna get my disclaimer out of the way for it now

The problem with talking about the craziest calls is because they are crazy and often pretty unique incidents that sometimes make the news, someone could probably Google the details and figure out exactly where I work and I don’t particularly want to put that out there. And if I strip out the more identifiable details, that often kind of gets rid of the parts that made them so crazy so they just don’t make for as good of a story.

That said, before it got deleted I feel like I had a pretty entertaining and still properly anonymized post going, but it did only scratch the tip of the iceberg for some of the crazy shit I’ve handled.

I’ll leave you with one more story that fit the OP’s request for dumb calls though

I had to send police out to basically tell two grown-ass adults to say please and thank you to each other.

I got a call from a lady who was absolutely furious.

The problem was she wanted to park in a particular parking space, but there was some guy already parked there and sitting in his vehicle.

Now this was just public street parking in a busy downtown area. Not some private lot, or permit only area, or even the space right in front of her house I don’t think it was even metered or time-restricted. Just a first-came, first-serve space on the side of the street that anyone can park in.

So she asked him to move, and based on how she was talking to me, I suspect that she didn’t ask nicely.

To which he responded “say please”

Which pissed her the fuck off enough to call 911 about it.

I also get the impression that she did not, in fact, try saying “please”

I work in a pretty diverse county. We have some of the richest communities in the country here, and we have areas that are pretty economically depressed with high crime rates, we have semi-rural areas with hundreds of acres of woods and farms and we have areas that seem more urban than some parts of the major city that we border. We got a bit of everything here.

This particular story took place in a little microcosm of urban blight. It’s a rough, pretty urban little town, full of drugs, crime, homeless encampments, graffiti, decaying homes with boarded up windows, etc.

And the police in this town really are… something.

Overall, as far as cops go (which is a big qualifier,) the cops in my county are pretty good. I’ll go into that a bit more in my other stories if/when I get around to them.

The ones in this town are cut from a different sort of cloth though. Not that they’re necessarily bad, when shit is hitting the fan and there’s been a shooting or some other major incident, they’re exactly the cops you want running the show, they are organized and they get shit done

And they are actually very familiar with their community, it sometimes almost feels like they all personally know each and every person who lives in their town

However, for anything short of a major incident, it feels like they want nothing to do with it and calls end up sitting in pending for ridiculously long times even when they don’t seem to have anything else going on.

So how or why the police actually went out to this petty squabble in a timely manner is a mystery for the ages.

But go they did, and, per the notes they entered into the call, they “explained the concept of street parking to the complainant”

Now, my first instinct here is to say that my caller was an entitled asshole. And she absolutely was. But the other party wasn’t actually that much better. He chose to engage with and antagonize her, and while he did have every right to be there, he could have deescalated the situation at any time by just leaving. Was a parking space really worth wasting the police and my time over? What if she had escalated further and gotten violent?

Yeah I’ve been at it for about 7 years now, as a very rough ballpark I’ve probably answered well over 100k calls at this point, so plenty of opportunities to pick up some funny calls. This is just kind of a best-of list of funny calls that aren’t too traumatic or personally identifiable. I’ve handled some pretty crazy shit in my time here and I’d generally consider the area I work in to be a pretty boring and safe place, I can’t even imagine some of the stuff some other places deal with.

Ok, actual 911 dispatcher here, I have a few.

First one has actually happened twice, I’ve also heard a couple 911 recordings of this happening elsewhere

Caller is upstairs in their bedroom, and they hear some noises from downstairs. They start freaking out thinking someone is in their house.

I enter the call, stay on the line with them, and after a couple minutes a lightbulb goes off in their head, they crack open the door to hear a little better and say “nevermind, it was my Roomba”

The first time I think the caller’s boyfriend changed the schedule on her, and the second time the robot got caught on something and was making a lot of racket.

–

Next one, I have a child caller, he’s freaking out because he got Kool aid powder in his eye and it stung. Now, that would be understandable if he was by himself, kids don’t know better, but I can hear his dad talking to him in the background. Now I’m sure this kid was freaking out and this was the only way he could get him to calm down but c’mon man, rinse the kids eyes out and tell him to suck it up, don’t make me go through all the motions of asking this kid if he wants an ambulance and getting him connected to poison control and shit, be a parent.

–

Another call with poison control, it’s late at night, and this dude had just went to get himself a midnight snack. His wife had made 2 trays of cabbage rolls (ground beef wrapped in cabbage) she’d cooked one and left the other one raw intending to cook them the next day or freeze them or something. My caller chose poorly, and apparently ate more than one raw cabbage roll before realizing it.

He’s not having any symptoms, except for sort of a general disgust of having eaten raw meat. He’s not sure if he wants an ambulance, I eventually get him over to poison control because I was basically out of other options, and they basically tell him “look dude, you’re either gonna get food poisoning and spend a couple days throwing up and feeling like shit or you’re noto not really anything you can do about it”

Then he starts asking them about if he can go to the doctor to get prophylactic antibiotics or something. Just way blowing this whole thing out of proportion

–

Another one was actually a legitimate call, but took a turn for the stupid somewhere in there. We had a domestic going on, one party was inside the house, the other party was outside, they’re standing at the front door yelling at each other.

We got calls from both halves, I had the people inside someone else had the person outside. I tell my caller to just close the door and wait for the police. They do. All should have been right with the world, parties are separated, I get all the information I needed and disconnect.

Except like 2 minutes later I see we now have EMS going to that address.

Because my idiot opened the door to continue arguing and got pepper sprayed.

–

Caller sees a light flickering outside at a house several doors down from him. Thinks this is very suspicious. Officers go out there and close out the call with this disposition in the notes “Suspicious flickering light located, no criminal activity afoot”

–

We have a homeless person who calls fairly frequently, probably has some mental health issues. She’s pretty harmless, mostly just wants the police to give her rides to different places she’s trying to get to. Sometimes they even do it for her, but of course taking someone to a bank at 2AM isn’t exactly a top priority for police, so sometimes her calls end up sitting in pending for a while. And no matter how many times we tell her that we still have her call and police will be out there when they can, she keeps calling in to ask for an ETA and to make sure they haven’t forgotten about her.

One night she’s getting really impatient, standing around in a parking lot for a couple hours in the middle of the night. At some point she sees someone in a red jacket standing around in the parking lot way at the other end of the shopping center, probably a good 100 yards+ away from her.

He’s not approaching her, waving at her, doing anything at all to acknowledge her presence, but she thinks he’s suspicious and it’s making her nervous.

Lady, you’re also standing around in a parking lot in the middle of the night. Pot, kettle.

Anyway, after a while one of our officers calls her up to tell her to chill with the 911 calls because they’re busy with other shit, and then drops this on us- she apparently mistook a stop sign for a person in a red jacket.

–

We have a disturbance at a fast food restaurant. The usual, customer freaking out and trashing the place and yelling because they fucked up her order or something. Unfortunately, nothing too unusual there.

Except that in addition to the restaurant calling, the customer also called herself, basically to say “I’m trashing the place and causing a scene because they messed up my order.”

So… you’re basically calling to rat on yourself? Do you expect me to give you permission to carry on wrecking the place or something?

–

Got a call one night, this lady is freaking out because there was an animal on her lawn. She was terrified of it, talked all the way around her house to go in the back door because she didn’t want to walk past it.

What kind of animal? She didn’t know. She was too freaked out to even give me a vague description. Was it big or small? What color was it? Did it have fur, feathers, or scales? She couldn’t tell me.

Officers go out, it was a bunny.

–

Getting more into general stuff people frequently call about than specific stories.

We have a few major highways that run through our area. Once in a while for roadwork to clean debris off the highway, etc. they need to create a traffic break- basically get a couple work trucks or state police vehicles out on the highway in a line across all lanes with flashing lights and such to slow down traffic so someone up ahead can do whatever they need to do in the roadway without getting pancaked.

Again, these vehicles are clearly marked with highway maintenance or police logos, flashing lights, reflectors, the whole shebang.

And without fail, someone calls to complain about this.

–

So many calls about deer, raccoons, snakes, foxes. Opossums, coyotes, and all of the other local wildlife just kind of…existing.

–

Fireworks calls on new Year’s, 4th of July, etc. like not even just some jackass shooting off fireworks in their backyard, but the city or a country club or whatever putting on their own display with all of the permits and Safety regulations and all of that. People call and complain about the official municipal fireworks.

Not to mention the people who think they’re gunshots. Protip- gunshots don’t whistle and sizzle. I get calls about “gunshots” all the time where I can hear them in the background making very un-gunshot like noises.

–

No, I don’t know when your power is gonna be back on after the bad storm we just had. The utility companies have already been notified, it’s on them. Do you think the cops can just arrest or shoot the downed wires to get your power back on?

–

Confused old people who just want to know what time it is.

No because I’m married and my wife wouldn’t like that.

More seriously, It’s not a hard no, but I lean towards probably not, it would probably depend the specifics of their identity and the state of any medical transition.

In general, I’d tend to call myself a straight cis man. If I think long and hard about it, I could make an argument that I’m perhaps something along the lines of a non-binary person with a penis, who just happens to present in a traditionally “masculine” fashion in basically every way, and who is attracted to people with vaginas who present in at least a somewhat feminine way.

That’s a fucking mouthful though, and I’m just not gonna get into the weeds about that in casual conversation.

The fact that I’m a man isn’t really something that’s particularly important to me, I just kind of think of myself as a person. If somehow someone misgendered me it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (though it may get a chuckle because I’m a bald, hairy dude with a big busty beard and fairly deep voice, not exactly the picture of femininity)

And while I quite enjoy having a penis, I don’t feel as though I’d be particularly bothered by having a vagina instead (although you can miss me with that period nonsense, but I think most vagina-havers would agree on that point) and I’d otherwise live my life the same way.

And how “feminine” a theoretical partner would need to be actually gets a lot of leeway. I can find people pretty far into the tomboy/androgynous/butch/etc end of the spectrum attractive, maybe even preferably to the extreme “girly” end of the spectrum. There’s a line there where they’d be too “masculine” for my tastes, but it’s a fuzzy one.

And for me, a certain amount of physical attraction in a partner is important. It’s a pretty wide spectrum that I’m able to find attractive, but there are limits, and I have preferences and dislikes to varying degrees.

And one of those strongest preferences is that my partner have a vagina. I am just not attracted to people with a penis.

If we want to count it under the trans umbrella, I don’t think that me dating a non-binary person with a vagina would be out of the question.

Maybe even a FTM femboy type who hasn’t had or want bottom surgery.

MTF, which I think is more in the spirit of this question, is a bit murkier though. If they don’t intend to get bottom surgery I think that’s a pretty hard no. And even if they have or intend to I can’t say that I’ve ever seen, let alone touched, a surgically-created vagina, so I don’t know if they’d do it for me the same way as a natural one.

The best comparison I do have is that I generally consider myself to be a boob-guy, and while it’s not an outright disqualifier, fake boobs don’t usually do it for me in quite the same way as real ones, but some are better than others, and while I tend to like big boobs, I have nothing against small ones, and a mastectomy isn’t a deal-breaker for me either.

So I suspect that with bottom surgery, it’s a firm “maybe”

As for a trans partner who has not yet but intends to get that surgery, I guess it kind of depends on the timeline. I don’t really want to have sex with someone with a penis and a sexless relationship for me would have a limited lifespan.

All of that said, regardless of whether I’d date them or not doesn’t change how I’d view their identity. There’s plenty of women out there I wouldn’t date for any number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean I see them as any less of a woman.