Okay, real answer time.

But we gotta ask more: okay for who?

A dental dam provides (or can provide) protection to both parties.

Since going ass to mouth is inherently high risk, the person performing analingus is going to benefit more from it in that regard.

So, anyone objecting to you using one while eating their ass should be told to eat your ass as you walk out the door.

That being said, dental damns do change the sensation of oral endeavors for the recipient. Same as condoms or gloves, the texture just isn’t the same. Unlike those, using a dental dam takes a bit of skill to make work. So you know, “okay” is likely to be as good as it gets without practice. Goes for eating pussy too.

Me? It’s like being in the mafia; one slip of the tongue, and you’re in deep shit.

Also like the mafia, I ain’t joining in without multiple kinds of protection.

Butt, if you put the time into using them with a partner that’s open to a mutual learning curve, the end result can be very pleasurable, even orgasmic.

The key is to remember that the dam is not great if it’s used the way it is in the mouth in dentistry. It can’t be a static barrier and actually feel good. So you need a decent sized sheet that allows you to move it with your mouth and tongue (again, this applies to both analingus and cunnilingus) without also exposing your mouth to the anus and its immediate surroundings. It also doesn’t do any good if the damn is slipping around so much that it gets twisted, resulting in both sides having contact with the recipient.

So while you’re trying to move the dam to cause stimulation, you also have to keep it fairly limited in how far and how it moves. It’s a learning curve

Also, an instructional video: https://youtu.be/3l2oi-X8P38

Races are mostly arbitrary groupings, based on skin color more than anything else.

Ethnicity, however, is less arbitrary, but still contains some arbitrary factors. It’s usually going to be based in culture or national origin, depending on who’s using the term.

So, Swedes do have their own ethnicity, though you’d find arguments exactly what ethnicity they’d fall into, but it would likely be different than Brits.

Ojibwa people are very different culturally from, say, Cherokee people. There’s even a good degree of common features that vary. But some people will still try to lump them together as “native American”, even though that term is almost as useless as “white” or “black”.

Truth is, we’re all mixed to some degree. Except maybe the sentinel island peoples, or other isolated groups. Even then, it isn’t like they didn’t get to wherever they are without traveling, so they mixed with something along the way, even if you have to go as far back as when Neanderthals and what gets called modern humans were still fucking.

That’s part of what makes ethnic groupings partially arbitrary. It’s unusual for no movement between groups to occur, even across pretty damn brutal landscape barriers. Big rivers, mountains, they aren’t totally impassable. Even deserts can’t keep humans from fucking each other in small numbers as they travel.

However, you can usually go with nationality and ethnicity being linked, though there’s so many exceptions that it’s absurd to do so. Just look at Nigeria and try to sort out the various groupings there and not notice there’s barely an overall national connection between them. And that not everyone in those groupings are even all in Nigeria to begin with.

Wellllll, kinda.

There’s a no, in that retarded has the strictest meaning of being an inborn developmental barrier rather than an acquired one, but it has had so many usages over time that I don’t think that more limited usage matters.

So, it’s a qualified yes.

Animals other than humans can definitely suffer chronic tbi (traumatic brain injury) effects, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe enough it would cruel to not euthanize.

Dogs in particular can develop problems that would match colloquial usage of retarded for sure. I’ve personally seen dogs that took bad hits from cars have worse effects, but having memory losses, apparent cognitive loss, and definitely coordination loss are pretty common with even milder head trauma in dogs and other animals.

However, that’s not to say it always has to be from major trauma. You can have issues with repeated minor injury, in humans and animals.

It’s unlikely the level of play you’ve described would be a problem though. Just running into things on zoomies isn’t likely to cause the kind of bouncing around of the brain it takes to cause neurological deficit. It could, though I suspect it would take longer than most dogs live

You know, I don’t think there is such, at least not in the way I think you mean.

And it is a community that could use a lemmy representation. It would likely need to be on one of the blahaj instances just because having admins that are overtly queer focused will help keep things from being bombarded.

Yup, communities.

Shorthand is often just c/

They’re pretty fucking solid too.

Hard rock, with the occasional harder or softer tracks.

A few of my favorites

https://youtu.be/BX6KILafIS0

https://youtu.be/rHBxJCq99jA

https://youtu.be/GWTNGMAH500

https://youtu.be/R4IBaMQEuuI

Not in any particular order, just a handful from the playlist.

That was my exact thought :)

My default was always active listening. It took me a while to develop real skill at it, then longer for it to no longer be something I had to turn on.

There’s exceptions of course, but most people that are expressing emotion publicly do just want a chance to vent and be heard, no matter what that emotion is. Anger, grief, confusion, fear, whatever it is, just having someone gently say “hey, I can see you’re having a rough patch, can I help?” Is all it takes usually.

Sometimes, you might have to go further, draw out the personbehind the emotion. Sometimes, they don’t want to be bothered at all, and just couldn’t find somewhere private before they broke. In that case, you’d be surprised how often they still pull themselves together for someone offering real support, and you can then guide them somewhere they can break down alone, if that’s what they really want.

But mostly, just being present, really listening and giving just enough feedback that they know you’re paying attention instead of just being a fencepost, it helps.

But tears? That’s easy. If they’re giving you those tears, you accept them as the gift they are. Especially if someone breaks through the usual barriers with strangers and reaches for physical comfort, you just give them that shoulder and make soft noises while supporting them. If they aren’t in contact, extend a hand, just a hand, to where they can reach it if they want to, but not so far it becomes insistent. Then you just listen and let their tears wash away enough of the raw emotion until they can talk.

At some point, most people wind down a little and start apologizing. When you give them a genuine smile and say something akin to “hey, it’s okay, we all have to look out for each other”, or “it’s okay, we’re in hospital, it’s gotta come out sometime; I’m just glad I was here to listen”. If that’s a genuine thing, if you mean a sentiment like that, it’s like aloe on a sunburn. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it takes the edge off long enough to regather and cope just a little while longer.

I’ve been on both sides of it. Hell, three different sides: patient, family member, and caregiver. There’s no single,perfect path through it, but someone even trying to help and fucking up is still a great balm

Nah, down voting has a purpose that’s totally uncoupled from that.

It changes visibility in some sorting methods. This can serve as a way to filter out bad actors, bad actors trolling, and outright nutters.

It also serves as a partial safety valve. A lot of assholes are lazy assholes, and having them able to vote without interacting further is a very good thing.

Besides, nobody is obligated to engage at any specific level. Voting is a perfectly valid tier of interaction all its own.

It’s me, it’s always me.

I’m stuck in DDD land too. It totally sucks, and you have my sympathy

We got to pick, though most people stuck with the closest version to their real name. I did.

But we could pick any name, if qe wanted, which was pretty cool

Well, obviously it depends on which myth/legend/author is in play.

That being said, vampire myths were not prone to syringe teeth. The bite opens an artery, or just tears a patch out, and the blood comes out either under its own pressure, or assisted by sucking (I vant to suck your blood).

Typically, and I haven’t read every vampire fiction piece so ymmv, when syringe teeth are used, it’s for injection rather than extraction. Typically some kind of anaesthetic and/or blood thinner, with consumption still being via the mouth rather than the teeth.

Werewolf (or other therianthropes) shedding is less clear cut. In myths, I never saw any mention of it at all. At most, shedding skin entirely, or otherwise leaving behind parts of one shape when transforming was involved, but that was in creatures far away from what could be called werewolf. So, shedding hair like a dog or cat does isn’t part of traditional lore.

Unlike vampires, however, it does appear in modern fiction. Most often as a joke or aside, but it is present. The apparent reasoning being linked to how long the individual stays in their wolf/animal form.

In other words, it seems most writers have an assumption that the “wolf” won’t shed unless it spends enough time in that shape to have hair reach the end of its growth cycle. However, I don’t recall any examples of that applying in reverse. When in human form, it’s rarely covered, but the default is that weres who only shift monthly do have normal human processes, including shedding hair as it cycles.

But there are references to both here and there (please don’t ask me to remember which books, I have read way too many urban fantasy series to keep track of exactly which author uses what system). Wolves shedding when in wolf form even when only in it overnight does happen. As does humans not shedding hair, or regrowing hair they cut or otherwise lost, after returning to human form.

When it comes to this kind of stuff, there can be difficulty sorting out older myths from those that get passed around now due to stuff like dracula, the old universal movies, etc. Most of the scholarly, historical information is hard to find nowadays. It’s buried on the internet, and local libraries are more likely to have secondary works interpreting old lore than direct translations of the small amount of written records of such legends. But it is out there, if you have reason and motivation to slog through shitty ai search results.

Here follows geek/writer stuff, be warned.

Now, personally, I’ve used both shapeshifters and vampires in both written fiction and rpg play. My choices tended towards a time based factor for shedding. Since hair takes time to be shed in humans or other animals, my default is that any hair or fur is “new” upon the shape change. Thus, shedding would only be a factor after extended time in a shape. Indeed, one version of were-being I use has reduced aging because of that. Each form ages slightly slower than normal by virtue of the thing that causes the power (in my main worlds, it’s a magically linked quasi-virus symbiote), and each change hits pause on the other form, leading to life expectancy into the two hundreds or more. However, they would also shed less because the symbiote prefers a stasis when possible. It’s linked to fast healing.

Vampires in my main fiction and trrpg worlds are also symbiote virus based. Part of that is being able to inject a bolus of the virus through the fangs at will (and sometimes involuntarily), so fangs are essentially syringes in that setting. I have played around with the fangs being able to suck up blood, but it isn’t really viable on a “realism” level (yeah, it’s fantasy, but I try not to hand wave bullshit when it isn’t essential). The mechanisms for sucking parts in real world animals/creatures just don’t match what could work in human sized fangs, much less alongside injection.

That being said, my main universe has a vampire planet. And there are things there that can both suck and inject via the same body part. Larger predators there, which originated before the symbiote got there, developed fangs capable of doing the job. Humans that arrived there were not dominant as a species for quite some time. The large arachnid-ish predators there were particularly fond of human juices. Even after alterations by the symbiote, it took time before the new vampires had the power to be on equal footing, and much longer before they got powerful enough to dominate the planet.

Anyways, that’s the geek gush over lol

Sterility isn’t necessary for safe water. You only need it to be pathogen free, and lack dangerous contaminants.

So, beyond that, it kinda depends on what you think “clean” means.

I took a quick gander at how Ireland’s drinking/tap water is regulated.

Assuming whatever location is actually following regulations and standards, y’all got some damn nice water out of the tap. The EU regulations are great. There shouldn’t be anything pathogenic at any concentration to worry about. Since water there is treated, I doubt you’d have much of anything reaching your tap at all. You’d have more particulates than anything else, some trace minerals (which is a good thing), maybe some organics here and there (think bits of algae swept along).

Think about it like aquariums. You don’t want sterility; you want a healthy, flourishing biome because all those bacteria eat bad things.

It’s the same in water pipes; you get a good biofilm growing, and pathogens aren’t going to be able to set up shop, even if they do get past whatever treatment is going on at the source. I’ve even seen arguments against chlorination in water treatment because it’s indiscriminate. It can kill off the friendly stuff and make the system as a whole less resilient to unexpected blooms of something pathogenic.

If you ever set up ponds, you actively encourage bacterial growth as part of the process. There’s aquaculture guides where between the right plants, fish, and bacteria, you can end up with water so clean you’d want to drink it, and can, even starting from sewage contaminated water.

If you then slap a filter on to catch particulates, you’re left with something that’s more pure than if you sterilized the source water by chemical or other means.

Anyway, the EU standards for drinking water are top tier. Go look them up, it’s a really comprehensive and science driven set of standards. If your locale is even half-assing things, you’ve got great water indeed

Like the comment protist copied from Wikipedia, it’s generally considered to be a mix of coming out with the truth, and having skeletons in the closet. Back in the eighties, that was the explanation I heard most often when hanging out with gay folks.

Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s absolutely factual, I’m not aware of anyone that’s really dug into it with serious historical rigor. But it is at least the accepted explanation. And it makes sense, so I’ve never gone digging beyond talking to people alive and active during the early gay rights era of the seventies.

You can’t help others if you don’t take care of yourself.

So, you can’t take care of others’ shit if you don’t take care of your own shit first.

Which is a valuable lesson I learned while wiping asses for a living while having IBS. It just happens to apply here as well

Most of the time. There’s rare exceptions. It’s the old “if your only tool is a hammer” thing.

Sadly, part of those are just not wanting to take on a high risk patient at all.

But there are surgeons that will give advice based on the actual patient needs and recommend other treatments, and outright refuse to do a surgery.

But, yeah, surgeons in general assume that a patient coming to them needs surgery. That’s partly because they don’t tend to get patients walking in the front door independently. They’re going to be seeing patients referred to them by someone else that thinks surgical intervention is a possible best choice.

They’re also trained to think like surgeons. Once they’re into training as a surgeon, they learn the human body, and thus the application of medical science, as something that gets operated on. Every problem becomes one to address in that way because they’ve spent years shaping their minds to be very good at that.

It’s really no different in that regard than an it guy thinking of a computer problem in terms of their specialty, or a mechanic wanting to rebuild something that might be fine with a spray of wd40 and some duct tape.

Hell, surgeons regularly have to deal with patients insisting on a surgery when other modalities are more appropriate. It’s a thing they gripe about

Ngl, there’s still plenty of assholes in the current crop of under 30s and under 20s.

But, yeah, there’s a lot more of this kind of acceptance and decency. It’s a beautiful thing to see. I got to see a similar wave of change back in the nineties with gay people, men in specific, where the millennials were essentially defaulting to acceptance or outright active support. For my generation, we had a longer road to divest ourselves of outdated thinking, so watching acceptance spread was a different experience than watching the next generation just grow up without as much baggage.

Again, no generation has ever, or will ever, be a monolith of bottled belief. But it does seem like the curve of decency on average is looking really damn good right now.

Familiar

So, mint with cinnamon

Well, the key word is usually

Late term vanishing twin syndrome is a thing. It comes with its own set of issues as well. Since its also extremely rare, you’d have to be some kind of nerd to know it exists unless you’re an obgyn or at least a maternity nurse. I am neither an obgyn or a maternity nurse.

When it happens late term, and 7 months is very late term for it, you get an increased rush of complications, some of which can negatively impact the development of the remaining fetus. Hell, from what I remember, late term absorption tends to happen because there’s something going wrong already. Iirc (and don’t try to cite me on a test or anything), just being a little too cramped can trigger it, though it would be a very rare trigger for an already absurdly rare thing.

So, my best guess as a non doctor with zero access to the records of the pregnancy in question is that something happened to put the pregnancy at risk, and either your mom’s body or yours set off the cascade leading to the failure of the other fetus. It isn’t something that happens that late without some triggering event that’s outside of a normal pregnancy. When it happens early on, it’s a different story, it can happen for no detectable reason at all. But late term? Something went wrong that made it happen.

I’d have to go digging, and I’m currently brain fried, but one of the more common triggers worldwide is/was malnutrition. When the mother isn’t getting resources to grow both critters, either her body shifts to support one exclusively, or one of the two essentially cannibalizes the other. That one (again, I’m old and tired, so the iirc factor is iffy here) is most likely to happen when the twins share a placenta, or something like that (see, old man brain missing details).

Since you’ve said in comments that you were placed in an unusual orientation and/or location, that would point to some kind of issue with the uterus not having enough room for both fetuses (fetii? I think I like that better despite it not being duet correct lol). I seem to recall a case in India where a woman prone to twins had a pregnancy where this happened because her uterus had lost the ability to stretch the way they normally do. Something about scar tissue maybe? Been ages since I read about this stuff.

Anyway, late term vanishing twin syndrome is the terminology I know of. If there’s another, more formal terminology, iam not aware of it.