Ah, dammit.

If people had any idea how often being even the least little bit kind to someone in that situation can give them the hope they need, they’d be a lot kinder.

I bounced at a few gay bars. You lose track of how many kids are finding the first moment of acceptance they’ve ever had. Or the ones that linger as long as they can because they don’t have anywhere to go home to. Or the ones that are at the end of their rope, out at a bar because they need something resembling human kindness to make it one more day.

It’s better than it used to be, but there’s still plenty of people out there afraid, ashamed, or alone with no idea of how to keep going. Not just the kids, but adults, even old farts like me. There’s people my age that still haven’t come out at all, and more that don’t feel safe or ready to come out more publicly. There’s people older than me that have stayed in the closet longer than I’ve been alive.

Your get into this kind of situation, you do what you can. That’s all you can do.

Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

Yup, best keyboard I’ve ever used. They made slightly different versions over the years that fit my hands as well, but none that lasted the way those do; mine is still fully functional.

Fwiw, and I don’t know if it was intentional or not, it’s embarrassed and wielder, not imbarrest or wilder.

The vibrator of slicing.

This is a knife with two saw-like blades that move back and forth, allowing enhanced slicing of cooked or raw meats.

It gives advantage on all intimidate checks, with a +2 if wearing fishnets and/or high heels

¿Porque no los dos?

Dude, I am happy as hell for you that it took this long to experience one.

Instrumental metal is what you’d search to get where you want to be. There’s plenty of bands that don’t have vocals at all, and even more that do instrumental tracks here and there.

Thing is, you’ll run into a pretty broad range of styles under that heading since a lot of sub genres are defined by vocals and/or lyrical content. But instrumental is a sub genre of its own. It just gets defined by the lack of vocals rather than any distinct sound like the way thrash is going to have that “thrashy” vibe.

Edit: Animals as Leaders is pretty much the go to recommendation for instrumental metal. They run closer to prog than death, but so do most instrument only bands.

Nothing new to add, but since crowd sourcing answers is more reliable when you have more of them, I figure it’s worth it.

As everyone before this said, it isn’t a perfect compatibility, so you can’t just grab any random kit and be certain it’ll be 100% right. But, there’s a decent chance it will be, or that you can improvise things enough to get it to work long enough to get the exact right bits.

Biggest problem I’ve run into over the years is flappers not making a good seal, and the pipe not fitting well. The flapper is harder to deal with, but the pipe can usually be made to work with a gasket cut to size, long enough to get a better one at convenience rather than having to run right back out.

Well, I can say this much: never discuss your philosophy on life and death with your doctor, because you’ll need to find another doctor after they flip their shit and assume you’re going to off yourself.

Just got head!

Unseen alchemeticals looks like a blast :)

The Manitou

It’s the only horror movie that ever gave me a nightmare, even as a younger kid than I was when I saw it.

My parents were willing to let me watch horror movies pretty young, depending on the exact movie. Like, old school fifties and sixties era horror I was laughing about at 5. So they had gradually loosened the limits up because it never bothered me, nor did I get obsessed.

So we watched this one one night after I picked it out at the video rental place (vhs). It wasn’t scary per se, I did way more laughing than anything else because the effects were not impressive.

But the core idea of it, that stuck in my brain apparently, because that night, and a couple after, I had the nightmare of the Manitou growing in me.

I’ve seen it as an adult a few times, and it isn’t exactly a great movie, despite being a fairly classic example of body horror. Decent, not not great, and you have to overlook the era’s film making style.

The Wikipedia link

The trailer

I’m not aware of where it might be available, but YouTube has a few clips.

I’ve never had anyone, online or irl, know that it existed, much less having also watched it.

You dumb fuck

Well, there’s a whole shit ton to unpack about identity.

Let’s start with definitions.

Ethnicity is essentially genetic. There’s usually an associated culture that goes with a given ethnicity.

Culture is the combination of practices, beliefs, and “tradition” of a given group, whatever that group may consist of.

Nationality is where you live.

Race is a loose grouping based on primarily skin color and the region one’s ethnicity came from.

Identity is the parts of those things you internalize, what you self label as.

So, based on what you’ve said in your post, you’re multiethnic, a mix of multiple peoples and places. You can freely choose which of those you integrate into your identity. It won’t ever mean that you aren’t those things, as regards external factors like the kind of hair color you have because of being north african in ancestry.

You could freely choose to integrate Mexican culture into your identity, or not. It would not, however, change your nationality.

If you move to the states, then you’d also have to deal with the legal side of things, which is not the same as identity. It’s an ugly truth, but race matters here, way more than it should. As such, you can’t really just pick your race on legal documents. It has to be as accurate as it’s possible to get, or there can be consequences. If you look white, but put down black, it’s going to end up being a pain in the ass for you.

However, since race itself is arbitrary in a lot of ways, there’s some wiggle room. There are some pretty damn dark white folks, and some pretty damn light Hispanics. And it isn’t like most people can look at someone and tell if they’re greek, arab, or south american. A lot of forms specify the difference between being white Hispanic and white, non Hispanic.

So there’s room to pick your race unless you’re black, in which case, it doesn’t matter what ancestry you are, you’re black and stuck with it because the us is fucked you in that regard. You don’t even have to be of African descent to get shoved into being black, you just have to be dark enough. Which is very fucked up, even for a country as fucked regarding race as this country can get.

So, you do have to be thoughtful in what you put in official documents, or it can end up fucking you later on.

But we can all identify as whatever we want, within reason. My pasty white ass could try to identify as black, but it ain’t going to end well, despite having grown up in a black neighborhood and having a lot more in common with my neighbors than the arbitrary similarities I’m supposed to have with other crackers. But if I want to internalize my Irish heritage, nothing is stopping me. Same with my German heritage, the traces of Polish, Welsh, Spanish, and Scottish. I can identify as man, as a southerner, as a resident of my state, of my town, as an american, as whatever, really.

Largely, as long as there’s no cognitive dissonance to overcome, most people don’t give a fuck about someone else’s identity. Like if my pale ass says I identify as black, that’s going to be strange enough that people are going to wonder if I’m an idiot, a troll, or pulling some kind of racist shit. If my big bearded ass puts on a dress and claims to be a woman, there’s going to be people that can’t accept the difference between the claim and the visual reality. Now, if I shaved and lost more muscle, it wouldn’t be as hard to overcome. You see what I mean? The more people have to think against their senses and preconceptions, the harder it is to lay external claim to an internal identity.

There is the flip side though. If you come here, claim the identity of whiteness, but you don’t also lay claim to the external factors of the culture of white america, then it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, you aren’t going to have much support. And yes, there is such a thing as white culture in the US. There’s actually multiple versions of it. It’s just hard to see since it dominates all the other race based cultures, and becomes the default american cultural base. But it is distinct from the more general american culture.

All of it is largely a construct though. Even ethnicity has a degree of arbitrary limits to it, since most ethnicities aren’t isolated enough in origin for there to be no bleeding between a given ethnicity and one a hundred miles away in origin. And, an ethnicity may ignore subethnicities in general usage, like “black” Irish largely being ignored as an ethnicity that’s distinct from Irish. And you’ll have regional variations that get ignored in the same way.

There’s really a lot to it all. More than I can reasonably pack into a comment and it still be readable by most people (screen reading is harder to follow than printed). So I’ll not belabor the subject.

The real advice is to not bullshit. Treat any paperwork as needing as direct an interpretation as possible, and leave identity out of it, relegating identity to non official usage

More like a pride of lions bringing down an elephant, or maybe wolves on a bison.

1v1 dragon slaying would still be more like a badger taking on a tiger.

Player characters (as opposed to non d&d dragon slaying stories) aren’t usually as ill prepared as a cat is vs a human, and rarely “hunt” alone. PCs have better weapons than claws and teeth, and the ability to coordinate attacks reduces the advantage of size and power the dragon has more than the comparison between a cat and a standard, unarmed human.

I do, however, love the idea presented :)

Hmmm, if you’re asking if the external flow of what we perceive as time would shift according to an observer’s state of mind, that’s doubtful.

But our perception of time isn’t the same thing as the flow of time. Our temporal sense is definitely subjective, and there’s been some research into that (though damned if I can recall the details without looking it up, and I’m getting a bit brain fried tired, so not up to doing so).

Anticipation, be it fearful or happy, definitely shifts how we perceive time.

Well, that’s an accurate origin of latino.

But that doesn’t mean someone is obligated to internalize being latino. That’s extra true when a person is the child of immigrants. They can be raised within their parent’s culture, and then take on varying degrees of identification with either that culture, or the surrounding one.

And there’s nothing saying that someone in the Latin American country they’re born in can’t separate themselves, at least internally, from the culture of their country, or their region.

That’s true of any culture. You can be from the us and take on any degree of identity as an american, or reject that entirely and build your own identity on any number of factors.

You never met anyone that’s of latino origins that assimilated fully into the culture of a different country? It’s pretty common. My best friend’s husband is Nicaraguan, and identifies as that, Latino, and American. He’s got siblings that were raised in Nicaragua before the family moved here that outright ignore that culture and don’t even speak Spanish with anyone poster than their parents. He’s got nieces and nephews that embrace being latino, but not necessarily Nicaraguan, and vice versa.

A sense of cultural identity is largely voluntary.

No idea about anyone else, but I tend to only chime in if the question spurs some kind of thought, or I have a story that matches, or some other kind of quasi useful input.

So it can be weeks before I jump in, or multiples in the same day.

I’m not sure if it would be better or worse, but even in places where organized crime is stable and relatively low key, there’s not much in the way of cooperation.

Like, in the city I used to work in, the drug trade was pretty much owned by one group, gambling by another, moonshine by a third, and if you wanted guns, you tended to deal with the drug guys, but that was because they had outside deals with one or another of the cartels (I have no clue which) where they could get more than just the same stuff you could buy on your own legally (but would probably buy a stolen one if you were looking for something for a reason). This meant that they ran the trade de facto, despite it not being something they cared about if someone else sold guns here and there.

Now, the cartels did have people that were killers. But not hired guns, so to speak.

But those groups didn’t really communicate. There weren’t regular meetings to divvy up the city’s vices or anything. They just didn’t fuck with each other because they weren’t set up to handle other trades.

There were some Russians that tried to move in at one point, running heroin, but they went away. Went away being a euphemism for eating a bunch of lead salad, which is bad for one’s longevity. Supposedly, and I was not involved in the shit at all, it was handled in house, nobody asked the cartel for any help. The cartel wouldn’t have been willing to send their men up, fight some group anyway. They’d just wait and make deals in other ways. Not worth it in terms of risk/reward. They’d sell guns to the gang, but not manpower.

Again, supposedly, there was an Armenian gang that ran gambling at one point, and they got busted which opened up room for the mixed group to pick up the pieces. But that was before I paid any attention to any of it. Only reason I paid enough attention to pick that kind of stuff up was bouncing and doing security. The guys running shine liked to swing dick around bars sometimes, trying to play a protection bullshit, and the titty bars I bounced sometimes were fairly popular with them in that regard and because they could get free attention.

Also have a friend that made high interest personal loans for a few years, and he had to pay a cut to the guys running the gambling. I mean, didn’t have to, it was just easier and safer. One of his uncles was a moonshiner, so he knew some of those guys as well.

From what I gathered, that’s the way most cities operate. There may have been a time when there was more broad organization, but afaik, that was dying out in the eighties.

However, pretty much any city of any decent size has some kind of organized crime. It’s just a matter of how big the group is, and how much they control. Some places, you’ll have one of the national level gangs running things, others it might be all small groups running territories within a city. Shit, it isn’t just cities. The drug trade is like that out here in the boonies. Only difference is that you run into specific types of drugs being handled by a group. Locally, there’s a bike “club” that more or less runs the meth and pills, but weed is a free for all, and coke is really only for making crack, which is spread all over.

Anyway, that’s going way off topic. The point is that there’s rarely any kind of cooperation at all, much less enough to have some kind of justice system in place.