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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • Favorite is relative, usually the one I’m listening to at the moment. But I keep coming back to the Okkervil River album, The Stand-Ins. It’s a companion album to The Stage Names, about the losers and also-rans, so it’s full of sad songs.

    My favorites, though, are the last two:

    Calling and Not Calling My Ex, about a man who stagnated after breaking up with his girlfriend while she pursued her career. (Rumored to be inspired by Will Sheff’s relationship with Scarlett Johansen.)

    Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979. Campbell was the first openly-gay rock star under the name Jobriath, and now mostly forgotten. He was manipulated and exploited by his manager/agent, and retired from music in 1975 to an apartment on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. He died there of AIDS in 1983.



  • That looks like it should work. Just a couple of thoughts: The default gateway is irrelevant. That’s only where the OS sends packets that don’t match the netmask. Since these addresses all lie within the same /24 range, the default gateway will never be used. It wouldn’t hurt to check the ARP tables of each OS to see whether the VM MACs ever show up on the remote host or VM. Are the two hosts connected with a cable, or via WiFi? If the latter, VirtualBox has to do some software trickery to make bridging work, and I can imagine that perhaps some WiFi devices wouldn’t play nice.


  • Indeed. I stopped going to general admission live music shows years and years ago, because no matter where I’d stand in the crowd, that’s the spot that people would choose to force their way through to the bathroom, or bar, or to smoke, or wherever drunk people at a show go. (And go they do, the shifting around never lets up.) There’s really only so much being elbowed in the side or shoved in the back constantly that one can take before it starts to feel personal.

    Then I realized that when other people would scan the crowd for an opening, it’d seem like the spot where I stood was a good choice, because there was visually a gap. Above my head. Because I was usually the shortest man there. (Which is somewhat unusual for me, but the fact that it was always the case at shows should’ve been a hint.)

    I did try to stand my ground a few times, but then just risked getting into fights with drunk people, and/or getting slapped with the bullshit Angry Short Man label. Best just not to go. Especially since I couldn’t see the band anyway, what with the 6’6" guys who’d decide to stand up front.

    So yeah, really tall people do see things differently, and if you see others as figuratively beneath you, or as invisible, well, I hope you have to sit in a coach seat for a flight to New Zealand.




  • Straight women give oral sex an average of 5.14 times per month.

    I did a web search on that phrase, and found a number of sources which cite it as the average number of times the average American gives oral sex. But they all leave out the definition of average: Does this number represent the number of blowjobs given in a year, divided by the number of straight women, divided by 12? These are infographic-type sites that cite each other, and I don’t have time to chase down the original source of that number, but it seems unlikely.

    One of the pages that I found reported that 59% of women* give oral sex. So if 41% of women give 0 blowjobs in a month, those 59% have to pick up the slack. Then, subtract the proportion of women who would, but are not currently sexually active. That would leave a much smaller group giving a lot more oral sex, if that was the definition of average. (I guess the 28% of women who describe giving it as pleasurable are each doing it more than 20 times in a month?)

    Instead, I suspect that that number describes the number of times that sexually-active Americans who engage in oral sex give it in a month, which makes for a very different total number. (Or, if it really is # of blowjobs / # of straight women, I’m going to be very upset with whomever is getting my share.)

    * I learned from this research that 52% of straight men give oral sex. WTF, guys?





  • Not real great. I’ve always taken the advice to “just treat women like people,” and have had a lot of great friendships with women as a result. Then, for a few months some years ago, I decided to follow the “just be confident” advice, and forced myself to behave in ways that felt to me very transgressive and boundary-breaking. It worked stunningly well, but I just can’t keep it up. That’s not my personality, or my romantic style. I need some indication that a woman is interested in me, and pushing past her initial resistance makes me feel queasy. But, I’m not attractive enough to get those kinds of signals often, so, the single life it is.