What?

Are any of the instance admins anywhere paid? It’s not the norm for sure. Who would be paying them?

Fwiw, you’re right.

Pain in the testicles gets referred to the abdomen because the nerves involved lead up there. It’s kinda like how you can slam your hand in a door, and it’ll also hurt at your shoulder where the nerves connect there

Little bits of referred pain like that happen all the time.

Yup, that’s exactly why it does it@

Like I need help bombing. Last time I did open mic, you could have called the club Nagasaki.

I guess so. Just doesn’t seem the same to me.

Kinda hard to be on a power trip from the mod actions when the point is to mess with people. That definitely is a power trip in its own right, or can be, I just don’t think of it as the same kind that this community focuses on, ya know? It’s essentially semantics, or quibbling over things though, not something I’d get het up over. Anyone that thinks it is, I ain’t mad :)

Nice :)

Ahhhh, he must have been reading about himself and blocked me, I can see him without being logged in

I mean, that’s a shower thought for sure.

Kinda vague, but I get what you’re saying. I think I do, anyway.

It isn’t just true on the obvious level either, where a nova at the wrong/right time and place could wipe us out.

You don’t have to go all woowoo either, though anyone into that is free too. Small changes in the universe at large can have ripples all over, though that kind of change seems to be pretty rare at the current age of everything.

But, the kind of small changes, like minor collisions of rocks have their own smaller ripples. It might take centuries or millennia to get rolling, but that’s essentially the theory behind planetary formation, little things bouncing around until they turn into big things.

You’re forgetting that trolls exist.

This wasn’t a power tripping bastard, it was just an asshole trying to fuck around. They’re already banned afaict. The communities they started are

Man, ain’t it weird how tastes can vary so much? It’s the bergamot that made me like Earl Grey, which was what made me finally enjoy hot teas at all.

Yeah, I gotta echo the hassle of it.

I dunno if you had time limits or not, but if you did, and you weren’t throwing a hissy fit when the limit was up, you’d be a rare duck indeed.

It doesn’t help that gaming does turn into a form of addiction for some people, adult or not. They’ll chase that dopamine hit, well beyond what is reasonable. Hell, I know that, and I still catch myself feeling it, despite not being a dedicated gamer.

The sooner our brains start that process, the worse it can get.

Mind you, I do personally know kids that do okay with screen limits. They’ll definitely look for any opportunity to extend it, but don’t go crazy with it. The problem is that they had to learn self control to get there. And that ain’t happening at 5 for sure.

Remember, you just said “when our parents went to bed, we sneaked out of our beds” and “started playing… all night long”. C’mon, you know that’s not a healthy and well adjusted response to a reasonable parental limit. You were chasing that stimulation against your parents’ express wishes, in a way that was harmful because sleep is a vital part of brain development and overall health.

You’re relating a memory that demonstrates exactly why your brother wants to delay the bullshit. Since some kind of screen time has become essentially mandatory in some schools, he’s not even going to be able to delay it for long, but every year he does is another year that addiction to stimulation gets delayed too. Those arguments and tantrums get delayed.

Nah, it was mostly rote. But, I was reading pretty early, and my family did use a looser form of phonics with all of us. When it was a read-along, they’d point out words that didn’t fit normal phonic rules, and explain a little. Read-alongs were super frequent for us. Daily, for most of my childhood, though I kinda “graduated” into doing the reading somewhere around 3rd grade for the second wave of cousins on one side of the family.

My mom’s family runs high to dedicated readers, so it was always a thing where someone was reading something out loud to share a passage or whatever, even when it wasn’t one of the adults reading to the kids as a group. And all our parents were super into reading to us individually too.

In kindergarten, it was straight into it, no phonics involved at all. But it was still mostly group based reading. First grade, it was individual work, with vocabulary, reading, and writing as parts of the language arts section of class. No phonics, and really no sounding things out at all. My first grade teacher was sweet as all get out, but did not play around with lessons.

Well, our 2 and a half are doing well. Volunteer hen is freely expressing her opinions about the speed with which treats arrive.

The rooster is still dumb as rocks, but still my buddy.

The true pet hen has found a new friend.

My kid got a stuffed chicken with little chicks that can be zipped into cloth eggs, which can be taken out of, or shoved up the plush hen’s rear. Adorable.

Well a few days ago, my kid comes into the living room with the plushie. The real hen had not encountered it before.

Well, our glorious little sassosaur starts trilling and purring, and paying allll kinds of attention to this new “hen” in the house. Now, this hen and my kid have a rather dubious agreement going on where the hen will peck the kid until the kid does what the bird wants. Obviously, this is like negotiating with captain Pike in his beep-beep chair, only with more pecks and squawking.

After a few minutes of happy chicken noises, this hen waggles her tail, gets riiiight up on both the kid and the plush hen and settles in for a nap while doing those sweet little trills that hens do when they’re with their flock. Which, the apex predator normally does while snuggling with me, but the kid is too fidgety for that normally. But stuffed hen bridged that gap.

Since then, when she comes in for the evening, she starts looking around for her new buddy, and will peck the kid’s feet until she goes and gets the plush.

However! This newfound friendship does not extend to the little butt chicks. When those are present, no pecks are spared. They either go right back up their mom’s butt, or out of sight otherwise.

Unfortunately, we watched Section 31.

It was mediocre at best as a movie, and horrible as a star trek movie.

There’s also been some psych reruns in heavy rotation by me wife and kid, which means I’ve caught some of that. I don’t like binging shows, so I mostly ignore it, which means I’ve enjoyed the parts I’ve caught.

It used to be Google scholar. It was pretty easy to find good stuff when I was digging into it. Not sure if it’s still a reliable place though

Ahh, probably the one that gave visuals of bloat and skin slippage.

I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies (did some hospice work, ran across a suicide in the woods, and a few accidents), but I’d never seen that segment of decomp.

It’s both worse than I expected, and somehow not as bad.

Depends on your weird.

I write, so there’s a ton of stuff on decomposition, forensics, and related subject matter that are weird by some standards.

I’ve got stuff on niche mythology too, for the same reason. Along with that is stuff on modern paganism, syncretic religions, and related subjects. Again, weird by some standards.

But I tend to think the morbid stuff is what would catch most people by surprise.

Nah, it’s one of those things where I know everyone has their own way of managing relationship decisions.

It isn’t abusive, it isn’t an out of line way of responding, and it’s a reasonable boundary for a monogamous marriage. It may or may not be a boundary that everyone has, but it isn’t unreasonable.

Now, me? I’m fine with the concept. Me and my wife sometimes travel without each other, and with friends of the “opposite” sex. To us it wouldn’t be an issue. If we didn’t trust each other, we wouldn’t be married.

I might or might not be comfortable with where the resort is though. Some places just aren’t reliably safe for any tourist, much less a naked female tourist, though I doubt a reputable resort is going to be any more unsafe than any hotel in that regard. Those places tend to have decent security.

But, nah, no red flags here. Just a married couple making a decision together.

The only thing one person can do is get armed, get trained, and get ready.

You know, you’re both right.

modern sci-fi is indeed a collective thing that has evolved from its roots. The seed that grew into sci-fi was indeed Mary Shelley.

However, that depends on the term modern meaning something different from sci-fi as a whole, and when you cut off the start point of modern. If you count all science based fiction as modern, then Shelley is the defining origin.