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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Storage, temperature control, and airflow.

    The storage part is the big one, imo. You keep animals in a barn, you don’t want to fuck around going to another building for their food, cleaning supplies, etc. It’s also more efficient land space wise. Building one or two levels up uses less land, which can then hold pastures, a different barn, whatever.

    But it really depends on the type of barn. There’s multiple types that gained popularity in the states over time. The oldest styles were English, with simple construction, lots of space for animals, with the storage above, but with usually only two levels. Here in the Appalachians, you see a lot of crib barns, which tend to be shorter on average, and are more for grain storage than animals. There’s tobacco barns all over the south that are one or two stories, but the stories are shorter than the ones meant to hold animals and hay.

    There’s a kind of barn that’s specifically built on hills so they have a basement/cellar.

    The kind of barns for different types of livestock vary from the ones solely for crop storage as well as each other.

    But the reality tall ones are almost always animal barns because you need the height more. You can store grain or whatever on a single level, and just add a little extra height for whatever airflow you need without having an entire extra story.

    But when you’ve got livestock, especially cattle, the storage in the same building becomes mandatory, as does having a lot of extra height for good airflow. You get manure with livestock, and if you don’t have good air moving around you end up with sick animals, no matter how well you clean up. There’s modern methods that can sorta bypass the manure issues, but they have their own problems.

    Even smaller animals like chickens, where you won’t necessarily have a second story in full, you’ll have a higher roof just for air to move. That’s also why the old style longhouse barns work so well. You get a long building with doors at each end, high peaked roofs, with hay storage above. The air moves freely, which cuts down spoilage of fodder, eliminates mildew from built up moisture, keeps the animals healthy (it even reduces disease spread in some cases), and you get the ability to drop hay down instead of having to haul it around.

    A three story barn isn’t common afaik. It’s usually two stories, with a high peaked roof. It ends up being three stories high, but there’s only two levels. Some do have an attic built into them, but it’s pretty rare since it reduces the benefits. But even that depends on where you are and the type of farm you’re on.



  • Oooh! I was just talking to someone with a serious hot take.

    So, back during covid, I had cause to interact with the sheriff of our county. We became friends. Maybe not bosom buddies sharing the contents of our hearts or anything, but I can talk to the man about what ACAB really means and he listens instead of being a dick.

    So, the subject came up earlier today when I stopped in his office after a dental appointment.

    His hot take was that if it had happened here, he would have done his job; arrested the man, processed him, and posted guards on him 24/7 until he was shipped back to NYC. But he said he also wild have personally been present at any questioning or handoffs to make “plain fucking sure nobody did anything stupid”.

    He also said that he agrees with why the man is angry, but that murder is too far. Then he said he’s worried about the man because he wouldn’t know who to trust with him. A fairly conservative country county sheriff outright admitted that he wouldn’t trust most cops to keep the man safe.

    He even expressed concern about the safety of the people that called in the report in Altoona.

    That’s probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard from him. He’s normally a fairly unbending sort when it comes to violent crime. Never let them out of jail again type of unbending. But for his thought to be worry about the killer? That’s fucking wild.

    Anyway, beyond that, it’s kinda mixed. A ton of my friends are left leaning to full on leftist. So i expected some support. What surprised me among friends is that nobody is arguing that the guy needs the book thrown at him, even among my more moderate friends, and the smattering of conservative ones that aren’t so conservative I can’t be friends with them.

    Relative wise, my family is politically mixed. And it’s still new enough that I haven’t talked to everyone because how the fuck do you have a conversation with that many people in a week without a gathering? But the usual group chats are leaning more on the side of the guy than on the CEO. The older family tends to be more about him needing to be in jail, with a few calls for the death penalty, but the “in jail” folks aren’t exactly ranting and raving.

    The most extreme of the families, of which I’m not the most extreme, but I ain’t exactly not extreme at all, they want the guy out of jail. Some are calling him a hero, others more of a victim of the system, but the main group chat of us lefties is devoid of any hate for the man at all.

    In other words, it’s not a consensus at all. It’s about what you’d expect over any situation where a regular guy does something illegal as a move against the status quo.


  • It’s the way he treats people. Not in public generally necessarily, he keeps a good facade up afaik. But word gets around behind the scenes.

    Back stage workers at venues, local security (which is how I ended up hearing about it, working with guys that were contracted by a specific venue he performed at multiple times), hotel staff, that kind of thing.

    We’re not talking about diddy level assholery, let me be clear about that. If he’s ever pulled that kind of thing, it’s news to me.

    But insulting and harassing staff, going out of his way to cause extra problems for people, making unexpected and absurd demands, insisting on last minute changes to lineups at festivals, just generally being a smug, condescending dick with zero cause, that he does.

    Now, I never worked anywhere he performed at, but the stories came from multiple people that didn’t know each other. Often enough that it stood out.

    One time when I was part of a crowd at a local multi-act street concert, he delayed his show so long that one act had to leave to make their next show, and another got cut off in the middle of her set because of local ordinances about lights and sound. The delay didn’t get explained to the crowd beyond “unexpected technical difficulties”. But later on, talking to people behind the scenes, it was prima donna bullshit. Arguing about not being the closer (despite not having been on the slate in that slot when he agreed to perform), arguing about wanting to wait two hours so that his lightning was better, but not wanting anyone to go on before him because his gear was already set up

    Just throwing a little hissy fit about everything until he ended up screwing over the crowd, leaving us with nothing for hours, and missing two acts (one entirely, the other partly) in the middle of a hot southern summer.

    So, a lot of the crowd just left. Which meant the concession workers lost money, and it screwed up traffic in and out because the flow wasn’t timed as expected.

    Then, when his punk ass did get on stage, he only did three songs, when he was supposed to be doing a half hour of music. The extra time was just him hyping his next shows.

    Complete douchebaggery.



  • Well, there’s not much to go on. We don’t know you, we don’t have any access to your friends, and you didn’t tell any story that might help us guesstimate what’s going on.

    That being said, a lot of the time someone gets pegged as the “kid” of the group, it comes down to either their relative age, or their behavior.

    Some people are just naturally more childlike. Not childish, though there can be overlap. The kind of folks that are bubbly, or energetically happy, or tend to have a certain naivete, that kind of thing. It comes off as younger to some people, so they’ll start treating that person as younger than they are.

    But the other part is that sometimes even a year of age difference changes things when it comes to perceptions and group dynamics. You’re 21, so if they’re 22-25, it really can be enough of a gap to set you up in their heads as the “young” one.

    That’s the stuff that tends to be common enough to fit without knowing more, or assuming anything about motivations.



  • Oh, hell yeah.

    The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.

    The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.

    Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.

    Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.

    I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.

    That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.


  • Knew several, dated one. The one guy was a bit of a douche, but the one girl was cool. Both of those were from Germany, different parts.

    There was a girl from Milan that was awesome. Just one of those people that’s able to make anything fun.

    Those, however, were in a higher grade than I was at the time, so there wasn’t as much interaction.

    In my junior year, there was a girl from Madrid in my grade. She and a girl I had dated that was from Mexico City were both in the same Spanish class I was taking. Kind of a chance for them to work on more conversational English, and for us americans to have native speakers to talk to. What it ended up being was two kids that spoke Spanish so fast and so well, with slang and accents that the teacher couldn’t keep up with that it was a comedy. The girl I had dated wasn’t an exchange student, she had immigrated with her parents, and was a citizen by that point. And they didn’t always get along, what with the cultural divide and differing personalities, but the teacher was such a twatwaffle that they had more fun screwing with her than arguing lol. But the Spanish girl was really nice. Went out of her way to help other students, and put up with my bad spanish that was part the Castilian that we learned in class, part the stuff the girl I had dated taught me, and all done with a southern accent.

    There was also a guy from France that year, but I never had any real interaction with him. Seemed decent from what I heard about him, and he was certainly friendly.

    But then, there’s Junko. We shared an art class. She was Japanese. She was also a bit of a metalhead, and an amazing artist. She blew away everyone, including the teacher, on any project we did. Just astounding skill, and wildly creative with it. She ended up sitting between me and a friend of mine just randomly at the start of the year, and a few days later when we both had on band shirts, started gushing about Iron Maiden. She brought in her painting of Eddie, a slightly modified version of the somewhere in time album cover.

    So, it was on. The three of us would sit there working on whatever, talking about music.

    Which led into me and her working on a project together. A sculpture of Eddie lol but it was fun, and it was a long project we were expected to work on outside of school.

    We liked each other a lot. After the project, it just turned into us hanging out pretty much any time her host family was okay with it. At some point, a few months in, we’re sitting in class joking about my dad greeting her in bad Japanese every time she comes over (he was stationed on Okinawa during his army stint) when someone asked if we were dating. I was not aware that we were, but Junko just piped up with a yes and kissed my cheek.

    Apparently, she like, like liked me. I did her as well but at the time I was about as clueless as it gets. I can’t say it was love, but she did make my heart do funny things when she’d laugh, which was often.

    So, the rest of the year, we dated a bit more intentionally. The closer it got to the end of the year, though, we knew it was going to end, and we also knew it wasn’t something that was long term enough to make any kind of plans. So that was pretty much it. By the time she went home, it was essentially just friendship with occasional kissing. But there was a deeper affection, we just didn’t pursue it. She wasn’t moving here, I wasn’t moving there, so no point in letting things get too involved, you know?

    We did exchange letters for a few years, though that petered out until email became a thing got each other’s addresses and kept in touch that way off and on. She had called my dad to find me. It’s been a few years since we last communicated though.


  • Eh, it kinda depends.

    Is she running a company or other organisation that derives income from the labor of others? If so, it doesn’t really matter what the income level is, she ain’t working class in the sense of owner and labor classes.

    And it has been a loooong time since her income from just her own work was at a level where she fit the usual ranges of “working class” in terms of pure money flow.

    But, she does still at least partially derive income from her own labor (singing, dancing, etc), so you could say she fits by that standard.

    However, there’s people that would say any entertainer can’t be working class because it isn’t labor, but they’d say the same about someone working in an office, even if the office worker made less than them.

    That’s the thing with terms that have multiple usages, it’s harder to pin down a single answer.



  • Well, the way I’ve seen it explained is that anything over 4 can be an orgy, as long as nobody is just watching. Otherwise, it’s just group sex.

    However, I’ve also seen the argument made that 4 can be an orgy so long as everyone is involved with at least two other people at once.

    Me, I say it’s a small orgy when it’s over 4 but under a dozen.

    In this case, it was nine people. 4 dongs present. But they were all putting things into each other (if you count tongues, and I do) and mostly with more than one person, so it wasn’t just group sex with enough people to count as an orgy.

    And yes, I did watch for a while. It was. . . interesting. It was too weird to be arousing, what with the suddenness of it, and the location, and the utter lack of aggressive exhibitionism. Like, obviously they wanted to be seen, it was public. But it wasn’t like they were paying attention to being seen, they weren’t just watching people watch them. It was almost performance art tbh, just performance art with jizz.


  • In an ideal world maybe renting homes would be something that isn’t parasitic. But the world isn’t ideal, and you end up with housing as investment, which means housing shortages, housing inflation, and housing restrictions.

    Yeah, the big landlords are worse, but even the small ones are almost always going to be sucking the blood of their tenants beside because it’s a losing proposition from the get-go. Think about it for a second. If your relatives bought those houses as an investment, no matter how nice they are about it, no matter how “fair” their rents, they’re part of a bad and broken system, they’re profiting off of other people’s need for a basic, fundamental thing that can’t be escaped.

    It isn’t like someone that has a big house and rents out a room, which is still kinda parasitic on the far left scale of things because it means they don’t need that house in the first place, but let’s be fucking real and admit that nobody should be forced to move just because their kids left for college or whatever, and now there’s a spare room. The further left you go, the crazier that kind of asinine thing gets, but extremes are gonna extreme, ya dig?

    But once you’re consolidating property for the sole purpose of charging other people to live there? Yeah, landlords, no matter how nice they may be, are fucking over everyone.

    It’s like ACAB. Yeah, we all know that some individual police officers are probably not actively fucking people over and such, but they’re part of the system, and if they aren’t actively working against that system, they’re part of the problem too.

    Your relatives probably are decent folks that are just trying to get ahead in a capitalist world where that kind of investment is stable and effective. And I can’t hate, nor abide hate towards, people that are really just doing the best they can. But they’re still parasitic. A medical leech is no less a parasite because it happens to pull a clot out. A mosquito is no less a parasite because it’s just trying to make babies. The comparison isn’t exactly 1:1 there, but you get me, right?

    I don’t waste my hate on people like your relatives, I save it for predatory companies until and unless the small fry are assholes alongside being parasites.

    But you can’t genuinely believe in the more common "left"ideologies without recognizing the flaws of capitalism. When you look at those flaws, you begin to realize that it really doesn’t matter what scale things start at, it always gets worse.

    Along those lines, let’s say your relatives are fucking saints. They do everything right by their tenants, only making enough profit to ensure their older days are safe.

    Then they die, as we all will.

    Someone inherits those houses. Again, even if they’re saints, they didn’t do a damn thing to build those homes, they took no risks, did none of the work. So, even if they sell them and abandon being a landlord, they’re profiting off of all those years of rent payed in. And if they don’t? Do they just run those few places as a landlord? Just continuing to profit off of others, they aren’t worse than what came before, but they aren’t better

    But, at some point, you’ve got these homes owned by some great-great-great-whatever, and why? At what point is that not parasitic, even when everyone along the line does nothing other than be landlords? And what happens when you run into someone inheriting that isn’t a saint. They either expand the empire, or go slum lord, or start abrogating their responsibilities. And you end up with the same kind of situation as the worst landlords.

    I’m not saying there aren’t benefits to renting as a renter, there are. But when the housing is an investment, rinse benefits start disappearing fast because that’s how it works. At some point, to realize that investment, either rent goes up, or the place gets sold at a profit, which sends rent up. Housing as investment is inherently parasitic, no matter how good the parasites are to their host


  • Weird?

    A full on ceremonial magic ritual. Weird because they just rolled up in a van, started unpacking things, did it, then packed back up and left. It was obviously well planned and organized. When I asked one of them what was going on, and the initial response was nervous, I explained that I have no problem with it, just curious, and another one said that just didn’t have the time to explain, but I’d thank them for it if they did.

    A small orgy. Weird because you don’t expect it in public.

    A line of young men marching in clown shoes, and nothing else. Frat initiation. Dong was flapping. I don’t think it needs explaining why it’s weird.

    Three drunk rednecks who lost a bet pulling up to a leather and cowboy gay bar and asking if there was anyone that would spank them. I volunteered gladly. I then spanked them and told them if they ever tried to start trouble anywhere I worked, I’d fucking curb stomp them. One of the most entertaining events in my entire time bouncing that particular bar.

    Weird but disturbing, a bunch of people hovering over someone trying to figure out if she was dead or not. Not trying to help, not doing anything at all other than debating if she was breathing. Weird because wtf, you assholes. Also why it was disturbing. Woman was drunk off her ass, passed out, and was likely damn close to death because she was hypothermic. Cold to the touch, and the EMTs said she was in rough shape overall. And yes, I had to make the call to 911, none of the assholes could be bothered, and cell phones were present.

    I can keep going, I’m 50, and spent a lot of my years in jobs that had me out in public a good bit lol. You live long enough, you accrue a book worth of weird shit people do in public (and private).



  • Lmao!

    We got pet chickens last year. First a hen that wasn’t a hen, but a rooster (and I made a comment recently about him in a different C/). He was at a neighbor’s, but wasn’t being taken care of, so the neighborhood had an intervention, and somehow we ended up with the only rooster in the batch lol.

    Anyway, we got an actual hen a few months later because chicken math. But we got her much younger, from someone that hand raises for pets. It was in late October that we got her, so she couldn’t go outside when it was under a given range pf temperature, and rather than putz around, we just kept her inside because we’re right up on the Appalachians, and it’s colder than frosty’s left nut pretty much all day.

    So, she’s this cute little black chicken. A little ball of fluff. She’s clicking her little toes all around, pooping and being adorable. She was still being trained to use pads to poo. One day, my back is flaring up, and everyone else goes to run errands, so she’s on the bed with me, on a pad next to me.

    She was ignoring me and everything, just preening, until I went through some of my favorite YouTube throat singing videos. Which ended up via algorithm playing an otyken video.

    This little bird starts hopping around, peeking over my arm to see what is what. She then proceeds to kinda sing along. Not really singing along, but chirping and going pew-pew the way baby chickens do, and practically dancing.

    You know how the one singer does the high parts, where she’s almost screaming? That sent the little pullet into overdrive. She’s bouncing and chirping and jumps on my chest to watch the video.

    Well another track comes on by a different artist, and she starts the baby bird version of squawking, which is adorable in itself. Highly upset, pecking the screen until I click the next video by them. She then goes back to happily dancing and singing on my beard instead of the the pad. Which resulted in a happy bird, an entertained me, and a beard with poo on it.

    Despite the poo, it began a regular afternoon event for the two of us. We still bring her inside every day because she’s just too damn joyful to have around, and we do get predators in the yard despite the fence (which, since the hurricane has been more often, though the rooster has beat the crap out of anything that gets in, see the other comment I made for that lol).

    She comes ruuuuunnnnning through the house as soon as my wife or kid puts her down, jumps on the bed and starts pecking the tablet.

    She has her own playlist now. About half of it is Otyken. The rest is a mix of bluegrass, some other throat singing, and some random tracks that she enjoys. She nestles in next to me, on a pad, I prop the tablet up and hit play. She sings and pecks and sometimes gets up and dances around happily.

    We do that for about an hour, then she takes a nap.

    You know what’s absurd though? The only reason I agreed to chickens as pets was because they would be outside, and the kid would handle them. Instead, all winter last year, I had a bird in my beard, and now she follows me around any time we’re inside or outside together.

    I kid you not, evening would come, she’d get a little drowsy. She’d hop up onto me and pew-pew at me until I’d lean the seat back so she could get up under my chin, arrange my beard to her liking and sleep there until bedtime. I couldn’t move. Utterly pinned down for an hour or two until it was time for her to go to bed for real.

    She’s too big for that now, mostly. And she rarely wants to. But it’s an unusual day where she isn’t cuddled up with me, with her playlist going. When I’m staying elsewhere for one reason or another, she scolds my wife and kid all evening, going back and forth between my spots where we cuddle. She’s got her little perch on the arm of the couch next to me. But, every now and then, she’ll get on my leg and command me to lean back, then climbs up to my beard for a few minutes. It isn’t often, but sometimes she seems to remember it and gets all insistent about it.