southsamurai

One problem

Batteries.

I’ve used old devices as many things: security cameras, a form of intercom, digital picture frames, etc. The real problem is that the batteries eventually go bad, and become dangerous.

For the few devices that have realistically replaceable batteries, that’s no big deal, but how many of those are left now?

No thanks to the potential fire, I’ll pass. The few devices I have left that I can swap batteries out are becoming harder to find new batteries for as well, so that’s an issue beyond their anemic hardware (I’m talking really old tablets at this point)

I can’t wait to develop my natural immunity to polio! Or smallpox!

The flu, why, without the vaccine you can develop a natural immunity every year, twice a year if you really want to!

Legit dude, what the fuck do you think “natural” immunity is? It’s catching whatever it is, being sick, and surviving it. You specifically chose colds and the flu as examples, and they’re the worst possible examples because they mutate so fast you never actually achieve immunity to anything; the version you have resistance to might come around again, or it might not, but you damn sure will eventually run across a strain that your body isn’t equipped for.

Like, I get that vaccines are confusing to someone with little education, but this is the internet age, you can look up the terms you’re using and make sure you aren’t fucking up your entire point. Like, the time it took you to type the post up, you could have looked up what vaccines actually do, and why they are/were the single greatest achievement of the human species.

You can go and get a shot of something stable enough and never get sick from it, ever in some cases. In others, you might get sick but it’ll be a few bad days instead of a week or more of misery (as is sometimes how the flu vaccines end up because of the aforementioned mutations, but other viruses are just a bit harder to stop entirely).

So, nah, fuck your natural “immunity”, that’s just a recipe for lost health and time better spent on something like reading up on why vaccines are fucking awesome, even in the rare cases of allergies or bad reactions.

My own lol.

Any of them

Well, of course there’s a benefit.

To anyone selling the ivermectin or whatever to people that don’t need it.

Seriously. That’s it. There’s zero benefit to taking medications like that if you don’t have symptoms.

Shit, I’m hostile now.

Legit, I’m usually nice to people, even though I hate people at large. But I don’t trust any motherfucker at my back until they’ve proven they can be trusted.

That’s how I would handle things in a crisis like that. Short term, low trust, mutually understood cooperation, but with safety valves.

It might make some kind of sense if there was anything close to feature parity, but at this stage in development, it just isn’t worth paying for at all.

Matrix doesn’t measure up to discord, signal, or telegram in terms of what you can do with it. If it’s going to be paid, it damn well needs to offer something useful for the money, not just lifting arbitrary limits.

Sync on my main tablet, because it has the best 2 column layout for my needs.

Connect on my phone where 2 column isn’t really a big factor, with summit as an alternative on there because I never have decided which of the two I prefer.

I don’t use lemmy on laptop/desktop because I dislike the experience via browser. It would be fine for passive scrolling I guess, but even with the various front end options, I run into more hassles than it’s worth when even the meh apps handle lemmy better and I just don’t need anything that could be gained via browser.

Kinda. Twice, depending on how you look at it. I did one of those “you can’t fire me, I already quit” things. The boss was just clueless and didn’t comprehend that when someone walks out at end of shift and says they’re not coming back, that’s quitting.

The other time was due to a switch in managers at a fast food joint when I was a kid.

One manager took a vacation, the fill in didn’t like long haired guys and looked for any excuse. He kinda got one, when I was late for a shift. Took the opportunity to say i was fired. Didn’t actually have the authority to do it, so it wouldn’t have counted even if the actual manager hadn’t come back and reversed it, though I didn’t know that at the time.

Our old pong console. I don’t know if it still works because it’s been boxed up for over a decade at this point.

Oldest in use? Probably my old texas instruments graphing calculator, but it’s dying. I got it back in the early nineties for college, and my kid was using it last year with homework, but the screen is failing and it sometimes just freezes until you pull and replace the batteries. So only kinds in use, and barely hanging on.

My VCR is newer and still sees use rarely, but was used daily for a few years in the early naughties.

Wait! The phonograph! It’s still functional and my dad got it in the early eighties, so it’s older than the pong console, but I think calling it electronics is dubious, so I dunno if it counts. But it’s the oldest functional electric powered thing we have that I know of.

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Not too bad.

But I was fucking around while trying to learn to ride a bike. Went too fast, hit a bump on a dirt road. Went over the handlebars, slid face first a few feet into a ditch.

Now, like I said, I wasn’t badly injured. It was all just scrapes and bruises. But they were deep scrapes from my forehead all the way down one side of my face, then my chest and belly, plus along the inner side of my right arm from trying to stop myself.

Every scrape was filled with dirt and gravel, which had to be picked out. Then it all needed flushing out. So by the time it was all done I was high from endorphins and crying and screaming, looked like a shredder had beaten the shit out of me, and was both throbbing and burning along the entire scraped section.

Then I had to go to school like that lol.

Gotta be possum. That shit is musky

There isn’t a single one for me.

However, I gotta put a lot of weight to the “all the way” that’s pretty much the default in my area. Mustard, onions, slaw, and what’s called either hot dog sauce, or chili sauce. Which, the sauce is similar to “hot dog chili”, but not the same; it’s a little different spices and in cooking methods. Secret family recipes abound.

It’s an amazing combination when paired with any of the standard store brands, or the “red” hot dogs the are popular here in the south.

I’m also a big fan of mustard and kraut. I tend to prefer it on fancier frankfurters and other kinds of sausage, brats and kielbasa in particular.

There’s the “pizza dog”, aka an “italian” dog. Has zero to do with Italy anything that I’ve ever seen, but that’s what it gets called sometimes. This is a double preparation dog. You cook the franks however you prefer (I recommend either “dirty water” or a mid tier beer boil). You then place them in buns, top them with your choice of tomato sauces like marinara, then with the usual “italian” melty cheeses; mozzarella, provolone, maybe some parmesan. Do this in a baking pan or whatever, then put it in at 350F until the cheese melts and slightly browns.

You can get fancier with that, but it’s absurdly satisfying just like that.

I don’t mind what I call a basic dog. Bun, frank, mustard and ketchup. That’s for when you’ve got a really solid flavored dog that you want to savor. The acid from the mustard and ketchup cut through the fats as you chew, bringing the meat flavors back across your palate in waves. But a lot of the time, I’d rather do kraut and mustard if the dog is really rich on its own.

I fucking love hotdogs tbh.

I don’t actually keep snakes because I’ve never had a living situation that I felt was healthy for them until after I no longer felt I could handle them to my standards. But I love the little buggers. The big buggers too lol.

Snakes don’t really have friends. They have friendly associates. They come to trust people, and as long as you respect that they aren’t social creatures, can be quite companionable despite not really having friends. Mutual respect and trust go a long way towards serving the same role as affection.

They can even enjoy human company. It’s just that the same kind of bond you get with social creatures isn’t there. It’s like the difference between a work buddy that you get along great with, but have no interest in outside of work; and someone that you have a deep connection to. Snakes are work buddies.

If a snake is voluntarily climbing around your neck, it ain’t going to choke you unless something weird happens. Usually, if it’s well socialized, you can pick it up and put it there, and nothing will happen. But you do run into snakes that aren’t used to being handled like that, or aren’t familiar with someone getting scared and reacting. But they still aren’t trying to kill you, they’re just reacting to fear. Kinda like if you run up to a stranger and grab them from behind. Most of the time, you’ll just get “hissed” at (which snakes don’t really do in this situation), but every now and then you get slapped.

People talk to them because people like talking to animals. It’s a monkey thing. I talk to my chickens all the time. They maybe understand ten words, but they like being talked to for whatever reason. Snakes aren’t as into being talked to, nor are other reptiles. But they tend to recognize a calm demeanor as non threatening, and may be soothed by a steady voice. But there’s plenty that could care less what we monkeys chatter about.

People that keep them have any number of reasons for doing so. But what I like about snakes is that they’re no bullshit. They’re gonna snake, all day every day. They feel nice to the touch, and sometimes enjoy being touched, and will give you plenty of warning if they aren’t in the mood. They’re also gorgeous.

I still vividly recall my first real exposure to a snake. Some guy went around local schools with exotic, but “safe” animals. And they must have been because nobody ever had any problems with his critters

But he had a massive snake. I can’t recall what kind it was. Boa or python, I’m not even sure of that, much less what kind. But this big ol’ gal was bigger around than my arm now and I used to lift regularly. She was cool to the touch, and curious about us little baby apes. She’d sniff with her tongue, and move her head to look at whatever kid was closest. You had to be super good to be one of the kids holding her while the guy talked about her, but if you were, and you were at the head, she was prone to hiding her head under arms. Which tickled, but was just awesome.

He had smaller snakes too, and those were almost as chill as that big one. I had one crawl up my sleeve once. It worked it’s way across my shoulders and pokes its head out of my collar. The guy was worried, but I was grooving on it, so the snake just stayed there until the end of the thing.

I dunno if schools would allow that kind of thing nowadays though. Which, as an aside, he didn’t just bring snakes, it was all kinds of critters; spiders, turtles (terrapins), scorpions, hissing cockroaches, mantises, all kinds of stuff. not all of that was handled by students obviously. But he always had snakes, and they were all super relaxed around kids.

Like I said, the only reason I don’t have one is that I couldn’t provide a healthy and optimal environment for a snake. I made the mistake years and years ago of trying to take care of an iguana. This house doesn’t have the space needed for a proper enclosure, so I ended up passing the iguana to a guy that was super dedicated to reptiles. Nowadays, I couldn’t do the work involved anyway, even if I had the room. Chickens are hard enough

If you actually live in those temp ranges, you’re fucked either way. Modern technology is what makes those ranges bearable.

That being said, I can bundle up pretty easy compared to mitigating heat.

There’s two ways to look at tattoos for a family member. Well, two common ones.

One is that names are a very direct reminder, and thus make it a very visceral connection.

The other is that, as art, names don’t hold up well, so something symbolic is both prettier and carry meaning beyond what a name can.

Now, I don’t personally think that tattoos need to be art. They’re a very personal thing, and just getting them for other people to see defeats part of what I love about them (despite only having ever gotten two out of my entire plan).

A person’s name in a place like you’re thinking is wonderful. Subtle, personal, close to the heart, so you can’t go wrong.

However, if you wanted something fancier, that’s not too difficult to brainstorm. I’d look at stuff that reminds you of him as the first place to think about. Like, maybe a flower that reminds you of him, or a favorite toy he had/has as a baby out toddler.

But there’s really no limit to options.