I’d hold off another few years. There’s just enough published info pointing towards risks being higher under the mid twenties. The brain never stops developing, but that first twenty years in particular is easier to disturb since the development is more significant.

At 18, you’re still putting the polish on some key centers, so fucking with that for a little hedonism seems unwise until there’s more and better research available.

Me? I think I’d hold off until at least 21-23. Honestly, I’d do the same with any mind altering stuff. It’s not long to wait, and going at it too early can have long term consequences. There’s plenty of time to experiment and enjoy all sorts of recreational pharmaceuticals.

Iirc, I had my first (of three lol) drunk at 17, and while it did no harm as a one-off (not much will tbh), I also didn’t really sink into the experience the same as later experiments with mind altering. Mind you, I’ve never liked being drunk, and avoided any of the high addiction potential stuff, but the difference in my second drunk compared to my first was massive just by dint of being 21, just a few years of added perspective on what I wanted out of it, and how I approached it.

Weed, that’s another one that my initial exposure in my late teens (18 or 19) was just not as good as years later (late twenties).

But, I can say that trying it once is worth it. If you end up not liking it, no big deal. I’d just wait a little longer. Weed, be it smoked, edible, or otherwise, is a very powerful experience when used infrequently. Steady use weakens the benefits of it for fun imo, but a few times a year? It’s nice. It enhances joy and good feelings.

Just be easy with edibles. They hit slow, but hard. You can always have more if you don’t get the degree of euphoria you want after a half hour, but you can’t take it away if you get too stoned, which is absolutely possible.

For humor, strokin’ by Clarence Carter. I’ve been known to say “ima put on some mood music”, then start that track and do a bump n grind to it. Surprisingly, it works often enough that I keep doing it.

More seriously, I favor Barry White for background music for sex. The combination of solid rhythms and that sweet baritone get the job done when a partner doesn’t have their own preference, but wants music.

That being said, Prince, during his symbol era, put out a song called 7. It’s not even a sexy song, per se. But the rolling rhythm and vaguely romantic lyrics work for me, and tend to work well for others, so it’s high on my list of songs for sex. As a single favorite, it takes the spot. https://youtu.be/9V-vcXOpG9g

Depressing though? I am not depressed by music, even sad music. Sad music may make me somber, but not sad.

However, if I need a good cry, the Dixie Chicks version of Travelin Soldier will do it damn near every time. Don’t even know why really, but I think it’s the voice tone and arrangement that push it into tear jerking rather than the lyrics, even though the lyrics are sad. That’s because there’s other versions, including by the original songwriter, that don’t make me cry at all. No other song comes close to the reliability of tears that one does.

Eh, in all reality, only English.

I have a small amount of Spanish vocabulary, but that’s not the same as speaking it.

I am almost fluent in medicalese, so I can sometimes kinda fumble my way through limited ranges of Latin.

I used to be able to do a little ASL, but never reached fluency, and I’ve lost damn near all of it.

Tbh, the thing about stills is only a big deal inside, unless you’re the one running the still and are close to it.

Outside? An explosion really isn’t going to fuck anything up. You get a big bang, some burning fuel, and that’s about it unless there’s a drought on. Inside, you can have more fumes built up, and the fire is likely going to spread to the building. So it’s more dangerous.

But meth production? Like previous comments said, that shit just keeps on giving well after whatever starts the process going wrong.

There’s really a massive gap in both danger and duration of the two kinds of fires.

I’m not sure if you’re mildly irritated at the compilations themselves, or that the “franchises” involved went way too long.

I’m a f an of compilations tbh. It’s a solid way to snag the whole schmear cheap (usually). I can just choose to ignore the ones I don’t like, same as I did when a given series started going to shit.

Spider-Man though, that’s a different kettle of fish. Comics run for decades, lifetimes in some cases. Movies about the same characters are going to be as likely to have extended production, with as many ups and downs as the comics do (and there are some horrible runs of even the best comic titles).

I’m with you on the laziness and risk aversion that makes 9 American pie movies happen. Or most franchises that start in a similar way. The first was a great movie, but it really didn’t need a sequel, much less multiplies that not only abandoned the characters and what little storyline there was, but stopped putting in effort to good writing.

Not that a successful one-off can’t spawn a decent franchise, it’s just that studios don’t put in the investment to make it happen.

Look at the Bond series. While there have been plenty of stinkers, it was approached as a long term thing early on and has also managed to have some great movies even as it aged. No high art or anything, but still some solid escapist action.

Bad body lol.

Between arthritis, a deteriorating back, and the extra clean-up and work involved in maintaining bread making (be it sourdough or with commercial yeast), it was just too many spoons.

I keep hoping my household will settle down enough that I have the inner and physical resources to get back to it though! There’s so much peace in the process.

Damn, I miss making bread. Just seeing the title makes me want to restart my sourdough culture

Well, there’s actually been research into it.

Since that shit is dry as hell, and there’s available articles about it, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/202202/why-it-feels-so-good-confess

This one gives a nice overview.

So, I’d say it’s pretty realistic to say that “confession” has mental health benefits.

That being said, true anonymity is going to be vital if you’re going to try to build something online. Not just for the people that might want to use it, but for you too. You really don’t want the legal issues if someone were to confess on your service and it became part of trial evidence. You may be thinking it’s not a big deal, that it’ll never happen, but it does happen already with social media.

The less you’ll be able to provide, the less hassle you’ll have. So keep that in mind. Reddit, Facebook, VPNs, they all deal with legal requests regularly, but they have legal departments to handle those to keep a barrier between the people running things and the consequences of users’ actions/words.

Me? No fucking way I’d even confess to jaywalking online, period. And I have never done that (that’s actually true, I’ve never been in a situation where it was useful. Small towns and infrequent visits to cities ftw?). I’d also advise anyone else to never do so.

Also, if you’re a priest/minister and your religion has a confessional seal, you have pretty robust legal protection about not having to break it, in many places. Therapists also have a degree of confidentiality that they’re legally required to maintain. Your online service has neither. So you’ll also have responsibilities above and beyond what therapists or ministers have. Well, you may, since local laws vary, and I’ve never heard of a lot of legal precedent around mandatory reporting for online services. But even if you aren’t currently required to report a range of things, not doing so might open you up to lawsuits and/or eager prosecutors looking to set a precedent.

I guess what it comes down to is: yeah, it could help people. But better you than me

Gotcha :)

Yeah, I think it comes down to what I said. No good reason to try and compete when they could scrape all the data that they would have wanted without having to build their own.

It isn’t like any of the big social media companies wanted competition anyway. They wanted to dominate their niche. Twitter for short messages publicly transmitted. Instagram for image based posting. Facebook for mixed media sharing, etc. You find a niche, dominate it, then leverage that dominance into cash flow, usually via ads.

If you go into the niche someone else already dominates, it’s an uphill struggle. You’re better off just waiting and either buying out the other companies, or otherwise gaining access to what they have that’s valuable.

Hell, that’s meta’s playbook for sure, that’s what they keep doing.

Google did try to kinda horn in on the Facebook style social media, can’t remember what it was called, but it flopped and they killed it. You’d think their greed for data for ad targeting might have made it attractive to at least try, but the fact that they eventually just paid reddit for access after a bit of a stink shows they had previously been hoovering it for free. Why invest millions or even billions when it’s already available without the investment?

I think that part of it was also that reddit didn’t start as a forum. It was digg mark2. A link aggregator. It kept expanding its scope and turned into a forum. It was a big deal when comments were added to reddit, a major shift in how it worked. A lot of people hated it.

That’s my take anyway.

I think the other comments assume you mean a big tech focused forum.

But did you actually mean a big tech forum, as in something like a meta owned and operated version of reddit?

If so, I suspect that it comes down to timing and relative benefit. By the time anyone realized reddit was going to be what it became, trying to edge into that kind of threaded ecosystem just wasn’t useful to them.

Google, meta, whatever, all they had to do to get the benefits that reddit could have given them was to scrape reddit. Trying to create a competitor would have been pointless.

Why are they saying it’s stupid?

The idea is solid, if not exactly new territory in terms of the rich young superhero thing.

So, if that’s what they’re griping about, screw 'em.

If they’re saying that trying to create a comic at all is stupid, they’re stupid. Nothing wrong with a creative endeavour, though if you aren’t realistically planning ahead on how to make it happen, that would be pretty stupid. Anyone can do their own thing if they have the talent to actually crank out the art and writing (most people struggle with one or the other tbh). But getting it published is a very difficult proposition. Indie artists struggle like hell, even if they do their own site and distribution.

So, if you haven’t planned that far ahead, they might be right that your plan is stupid.

However, if you’ve actually gotten some pages done, and they’ve read it and think it’s stupid, it comes down to how much you value their opinion about comics. Being real, some people’s opinions are shit on a given subject, so if theirs are known to be bad, then fuck 'em. But if they tend to have reliable quality takes on comics (or the craft that goes into them), maybe they’re right, no way for us to know.

But nah man, there’s nothing stupid about this kind of project in and of itself. Nor is the basic concept stupid.

For anyone coming along and starting to get riled up…

Go for it! Lemme get some popcorn!

Frankie Stein, of course. Monster on the outside, bubblegum on the inside.

Afaik, nobody knows where/when the myth started because it started organically, rather than being something like bumblebees not being aerodynamically sound, where there was poorly explained information that got spread from that point.

The most popular theory of the origin is that since veins look blue, and thus were drawn as such in anatomy illustrations, the idea got spread through wide ranging multi point origins. I’ve seen people argue for the veins looking blue as the genesis, with the idea being that someone asked why blue veins ran red when cut. But I’ve seen it argued that it wasn’t until the illustrations came along and faulty information was needed to explain that that it spread far enough to actually be taught by people that should have known better (like some folks, I ran into the idea in jr high, knew it was wrong because of family with medical training, and got in trouble for trying to say so).

But I have looked a few times over the years to see if I could run down a definitive origin story, and never have. Mind you, me looking involved searching for articles about it, rather than trying to run down historical references direct because I don’t have that kind of access.

Jeans? Kinda depends on the use.

Most days, I don’t do shit that dirties anything but underwear, which gets changed at least daily. So in most senses, any given pair of jeans can go weeks without accumulating anything but dead skin cells, some skin oil, and some of my pimp juice.

That being said, I ain’t going to wear the same pair more than three days unless my back is so fucked up that changing them isn’t realistic.

Given that I’ve accumulated jeans over the years in various sizes as my body changed post-disability, I have enough pairs that I could hypothetically change pants every day and not wear the same pair twice in a month. Mind you, I’m bigger than I was for some of them and can’t wear them. I’m also smaller than I was for some of them, and even a belt can’t make them comfortable to wear for long. So I have maybe a dozen pair that are in rotation, plus a couple that are for when I’m doing something really grungy (like OP’s mom).

Assuming my brain isn’t fucked (and I’m only on lemmy to keep myself from going nuts until I can head to the hospital for a family member, so it’s fucked), that would work out to any given pair being washed ten-ish times a year? I think? It’s math, so I’m probably wrong.

I do know that most months, I only have to do two loads of laundry that isn’t underwear. If I only wore jeans, the math would work out, but there are days I don’t wear jeans, so I dunno.

Man, if I ever find my books via their search, I’ll be so hyped

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.