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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’m trying to involve imagine the taste, and can’t quite manage it. We don’t eat pizza often nowadays, but ima have to try a single bite like this the next time we do.

    I think it’ll be horrible, where the good things about a Reese’s cup get drowned out by the cheese and sauce, and the wonderful acidity of the sauce is drowned by the high sugar content and heaviness of the peanutbutter fudge.

    I’ve had too many weird combinations defy my predictions to totally poopoo the idea, but I can’t get my brain to combine those flavors in a pleasant way.



  • I feel that.

    Back when I was a caregiver, pain assessment was a bit of a pain lol. I’d have patients with cancer, and they’d just not notice something like a sore forming because it just got drowned out by chemo, or whatever. I’d do the daily thing of asking about their pain levels, and how the hell can they answer? They’re at a constant 8 to 10 range, so it’s kinda pointless to try and rely on pain signals to find new pains that need help.

    Mind you, I was doing other checks, so nothing got missed, but it could have.

    And, like you said, the usual “script” for checking on pain breaks down with chronic pains. You have to really get detailed, focus on tiny changes in pain with them.

    And, even knowing all that, I still have trouble communicating my own pain and issues because it’s just so overwhelming sometimes. I sometimes joke with a new doctor or nurse and tell them it would be faster to list what doesn’t hurt. Except it isn’t really a joke.

    So I just keep compartmentalizing everything and try to be a good patient lol.


  • Yeah, might work if the starter he used was fully isolated, but I kinda doubt that was done.

    But it always kinda trips me out how even experienced bakers think sourdough has to have some kind of magic seed to work as sourdough. It doesn’t matter what you start with, the flour you feed with, and the environment you’re in are going to have yeast already present, so you’ll eventually end up with whatever is in those being what’s doing the work, not what was in the inoculation.

    Same with the lactobacilli, whatever strain is present locally is going to end up as the working strain.





  • Nah, I think the gist is that DC, and the parent company, have a skewed view of what their characters mean compared to the way Marvel and their parent company use theirs.

    You’re over thinking rocket’s screen time as a factor. It’s the fact that marvel, and Disney, knew damn good and well that the characters they picked for the early MCU phases would work and knew enough to not crap on the essence of the characters. Yeah, they threw comic canon onto a back shelf, but they referenced it while establishing the universe and characters as they went.

    DC no longer gets the heart of their characters, they think of them as monoliths, these too large for life epic things. And that means they refuse to just make a movie about the characters as the fans know them. They also refuse to do proper world building before expecting fans to jump aboard.

    Now, there’s a dozen reasons for that opinion, more than anyone but a dedicated comic geek would bother with reading. Suffice it to say that DC has the same trouble in their comics sometimes. And it shows the difference in “philosophy” between the people running the companies and how they want to maximize their IP. I wish I could say that it was more about the execs actually caring, but that’s not realistic, it’s about making money off of the property first, and anything else is just luck.



  • I mean, that’s part of pain tolerance. It isn’t just how much pain you feel, it’s how much you can take.

    Chronic pain has taught me a lot about what is and isn’t bearable. Things that when they were new would leave me sobbing, I now don’t even show more than a frown and gritted teeth for on a good day.

    Part of that is taking the pain, putting it in a little box cake “I will not fucking quit” and throwing that box into the depths of the mind where it can’t bother you for a while. Your body still hurts, you still know it hurts, but you keep going until you can’t, and the pain can just fuck right off.

    Now, let me stub my fucking toe while doing all that and it cuts right through all of that and says “nah, dawg, you gonna feel this”. Different pain, and acute.

    So, little shit like shocks and needles in muscles, and the like, you know they’re coming, and they go right in the box with the chronic, and into the oubliette of agony.

    That kind of pain testing? That’s totally within mental techniques’ ability to ignore. Your pulse will still change, blood pressure too, but it’s still a distant thing that won’t reach you for a while.

    But everyone is different. You can take two people with the same injury, and they’ll tolerate it differently, even if they’re siblings of the same gender.

    Part of that is indeed built in, but there is always a psychological component to pain perception.

    Now, please note that I’m not saying that walling pain off and ignoring it until you’ve injured yourself is a good thing, much less better than letting pain guide your actions so that it isn’t worse later. I’m just saying that the green text is realistic, and the person responding like that may not be bullshitting, they may just have worked on managing pain.





  • 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.

    .


  • 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