Postulate: it is impossible to properly appreciate the internet if you have never looked something up in a really large collection of microfilm or microfiche.
I don't really feel that old, but:
I just realized I don't know what the word "library" even means to someone who has never had the physical/tactile experience of looking something up in a card catalog cabinet full of index cards bound on brass rods in serried ranks of deep wooden drawers.
Postulate: it is impossible to properly appreciate the internet if you have never looked something up in a really large collection of microfilm or microfiche.
It is amazing how many people have told me that their doctor (never named) told them not to get the #covid #vaccine because they (the doctor) have been seeing "too many people who got sick from it."
In case you're not a natural skeptic, people who tell you this are lying. They have invented a fictional doctor into whose notional mouth they are putting their own crank opinions. It's a way to commit the "appeal to authority" fallacy even when there is no authority.
For today’s adventure in rurality, I just encountered a very large white man wearing a mullet, a camo hat that says “I like the way it tastes”, and a shirt emblazoned with “DRUNK WIVES MATTER” as big as would fit.
Today I learned that the Romans called doggy style sex "coitus more ferarum" which is to say "sex in the manner of wild beasts".
I'm a guy. Apparently we think about the Roman empire a lot more than women think we should. Just doing my manly part to support the team!
https://books.google.com/books?id=76vPu_G2UkgC&pg=PA204#v=onepage&q&f=false
This has reminded me of a blogger sex blogger named Jen (aka "the drunken whore") from 20 years ago who preferred to call this position "puppy style". Those links have not survived, but another blogger whose links have not survived took "puppy style" and ran with it: http://www.erosblog.com/2004/03/01/more-puppy-style-sex/
Someone near me is threatening to sell meat pies at a garage sale in a trailer park today, but they admonish: “REMEMBER BE KIND AS MY GRANDMA PREPARING FOOD”
Note well I am *NOT* going to buy mystery-meat deep fried hand pies out of a cooler in the front yard of a random trailer at a trailer park, but I deeply want to know why this is understood as a situation where people are gonna be mean to Grandma. Do people, like, go up to the dear old lady and yell at her about unregulated kitchens and food safety guidelines on hold times for unrefrigerated food?
When I looked at you and your maskless sputum-spewer from behind my N95 as I hurried past you in the store, could you tell from my eyes alone what I thought of you?
I don't think so. I don't think you recognized the look in my eyes. But you have seen it before.
It's the same look as people get in all the zombie movies when they finally realize that your character has already been bit, and is trying to hide the bite.
#covid #mask #pandemic #zombies
In my normal at-home workspace, I can literally lean back in my computer chair and rest my elbows on the edge of "my" bed while I stretch my back.
Except, inevitably, my elbow instead comes down on the warm fuzzy muzzle of a snoring 70 pound dog.
Right now there are THREE such dogs snoring on my bed.
I don't know how I am supposed to stay awake, much less work, under these intolerable working conditions.
Never underestimate the power of a canine pack to compel naps!
#dogs #ForcedNapping
I live near the kind of small town where the hot food deli at the Sinclair gas station advertises on Facebook that you better get down there right away if you want some of their every-Wednesday beef and potato stew because it always sells out so quick.
And I'm thinking there's literally nothing easier to make at home than a big pot of stew. It's just not a thing I can imagine buying at a gas station. #Rural #Food #FoodDesert #Foodie #Stew #BeefStew
@73973abe I do know that's the standard advice, but for me, tiny open wounds heal quickly and I have antibiotics if I need them. Whereas the sealed blisters go for days and days without healing. I have cremes for the itch but why treat something itchy for a week that I can convert to a tiny wound that's painless and heals in 48 hours?
If I tell my #dogs "move your butt" and nudge them gently with my foot when they are sleeping in the middle of the kitchen floor like the ass-pains they are, they will make a huge offended production of moving. But if I absolutely clock them in the face with a heavy booted foot while trying to step over them and say "whoops, sorry" they won't move an inch. Usually they just open one eye for a second and go right back to sleep.
Dogs understand & are endlessly willing to accept apologies.
TV was on NBC this AM from watching severe weather coverage last night. Caught a bit of Steve Kornacki running down #polling on the 2024 election.
My overwhelming takeaway is that the establishment #Democrats have every intention of handing the #presidency back to the party of cruelty and stupidity.
They KNOW by EVIDENCE that younger voters aren't going to turn out for their propped-up do-little gerontocrat. They don't care: they're gonna run him anyway.
#SteveKornacki #CrueltyParty
My Zoom social happened after all. The other four participants had a lively discussion about the Barbie movie. I expressed surprise that they'd all risk another case of covid (they average about two acknowledged cases each between them) for a pop-culture movie.
In the pushback and lively discussion that ensued, it became clear that they see Covid caution as a binary: they did (now they don't) take precautions. They never ask "is this particular event worth its specific set of risks?"
For me, in-theater movies seem like a particularly bad risk/reward bargain. Risk is high (close proximity to many others, mostly unmasked, uncertain ventilation) and reward is slight if you can watch the same movie in six months at home with better snacks. It doesn't pencil out.
Honestly I save most of my Covid risk budget for unmasked face-to-face socializing in small groups with known-to-be-Covid-cautious friends and family. I haven't been in a crowded room since 2019. May never be again.
Saw a tabloid headline somewhere about Leonardo DiCaprio squiring around some way-too-young-for-him actress/model and my first thought was "Gross, she was probably one of those teen girls who got imprinted on him by going to the theater dozens of times to watch him drown beside a perfectly good hatch-cover raft." Only then my math brain kicked in (my math brain is very slow and very smooth) and I realized she hadn't even been BORN when that movie came out.
One thing that never stops being hilarious is when a performative Christian thinks talking about "getting on my knees" signals piety and prayer, while the rest of the world hears it as "blowjob, blowjob, blowjob!"
Etsy sent me mail with a subject line promising five bucks off EVERYTHING. (They capitalized it like that.)
Inside: "Eligible shops only; see terms." So, not everything then?
I know corporations are soulless, but at some point you would think the humans involved would have to pause and say "this is terrible, it looks dishonest, because it is dishonest, we can't possibly send it like this."
Then, the dawn of hope: remembering that I have a good #urban friend who has promised in the past to do my shady data-hoarder downloads on his heart-of-the-civis unlimited fast fiber. Then, pricing cheap-to-mail flash USB drives and discovering that while I wasn't watching, they've gotten down into "coffee and a muffin" price territory for the size I need.
(Although to be honest, I haven't paid cafe prices for a muffin in years, because seriously, I can make a dozen better ones at home for that kind of money.)
The #rural #pain of a data hoarder and #porn #collector who finds a huge dimweb trove of men's magazine scans available for download in convenient zipped collections, only to look at the file sizes and realize that downloading them would blow out my entire monthly data allotment for September and most of October too.
Then, the dawn of hope: remembering that I have a good #urban friend who has promised in the past to do my shady data-hoarder downloads on his heart-of-the-civis unlimited fast fiber. Then, pricing cheap-to-mail flash USB drives and discovering that while I wasn't watching, they've gotten down into "coffee and a muffin" price territory for the size I need.
@5bb3243a Even in the USA, even in the *urban* USA, this is more of an ongoing culture war than settled issue. It's a reliable fight-starter anywhere on social media, because there are absolutist zealots on both the "outdoor cats are an immoral abomination" and on the "keeping cats exclusively indoor is cruel" sides of the debate. Although I do believe that the "outdoor cats are an abomination" forces have been "winning" in a sheer-volume-of-rhetoric sense in recent years.
@d310ea91 Sweet, yay!
I have been building up a lot of anger in the deep rurals where I live at the fact that there aren't *any* medical providers that require or practice masking in their facilities.
The other day I saw a military account of some infantry that got decisively routed, so much so that they abandoned their trenches and booked it to the rear with great vigor of action. So swiftly and energetically did they run, that their own artillery observers mistook them for an enemy ATTACK and called in a devastating artillery strike on the field across which they were retreating.
The Great War? France? 1916? No. Ukraine, 2023. History doesn't repeat, but it echoes REAL DAMN LOUD.
I thunk up a joke toot that would have been genuinely funny in context.
Except for one teeny little insurmountable problem...
The joke would have depended on indirectly invoking an ancient misogynist canard, one popular in my youth but rarely heard or seen today, that's designed to oppress women by making them self-conscious about their bodies.
There's no joke so funny that it's worth giving the least breath to a vile meme that's (hopefully) on its way to a well-deserved death.
Anybody who thinks the pussy upthread is "hairy" needs a detailed remedial course of instruction in 20th-century porn and/or normal human bodies. It is fuzzy at best.
I... may have been toiling in the #porn mines for too long.
I just saw a boosted toot from an infosec professional/business whose brand/nym is a form of "Lock Down Your Life" -- but of course my jaded #kinky eyes/brain took it in as "Lock Down Your Wife".
#whoopsie
I don't know about y'all but sometimes I suffer GENUINE PAIN trying to work a sponsor's link smoothly into my posts. I only do disclosed sponsorships but the best sponsored posts still shouldn't feel overly commercial in most cases, at least IMO.
If I could pick the anchor texts it would be child's play, but of course that's usually the sponsor's preference.
I'm serious, this is the toughest writing challenge routinely encountered in my professional life. #GoodProblemToHave
@4b816d9c@0eb69558 One thing I've learned in twenty years of sex blogging is that most people in most places seem to be having bad (or at least unimaginative) sex, and usually with less frequency and variability than they would prefer.
@0eb69558 It truly was depressing. It felt like he was reacting to his own mental caricature of a "here's what active consent looks like" checklist/script from a poorly-designed middle-school sex education class, as misconstrued in angry words by a pickup artist and a so-called men's rights activist on some shady alt-right podcast. She was less hostile, but I got a strong sense of "we managed to hook up without saying a word back in the 1980s, so why isn't that still good enough?"
@0eb69558 uses a comforting phrase in that post ("kisses at the speed of consent") reminding me of a disturbing meatspace convo about consent I had recently with a couple of boomer-minded relatives.
They both think it's fine to infer consent from "she went there, wearing that, and didn't say no".
He brutally mocked explicit consent, especially if it's reconfirmed as a hookup progresses, as "too much". So I blew their minds by arguing for enthusiastic consent instead. They were NOT keen.
As my reward to myself for having to endure the disturbing discussion about consent, I meme-jacked her today with my repeated use of the phrase "predator capitalism" while she was bitching about Microsoft and Google making the web not fun anymore. She liked the phrase so well she started saying it too, and she's from the "people just don't want to work any more" part of the bourgeoise.
Just saw someone raging about AI-generated book covers with "faces stolen from actors".
OMG, do they have a GoFundMe somewhere for reconstructive surgery? Are the faceless actors getting care?
My point here is that if you want to engage with the real challenges and difficult arguments around control-of-likeness and payment for authorship in the digital age, you've got to be tall enough to get on the ride without tendentious metaphors. Stop talking about it like somebody carried away a goat.
It takes a special brand of arrogant hubris to send emails that say "Do not reply to this email because this account is unattended."
Don't send fire downrange if you don't want return fire. Who doesn't know this?
Here's an interesting exercise for any of you who aren't terrified of legalese. If you see press about an oppressive web-censorship bill, get ahold of the text and dive into the definitions, focusing on who is covered, who the bill puts at risk of legal jeopardy, who is required to jump through hoops to comply. Think about whether or how much it would apply to you and limit what you could publish on your blog, if you had a blog. You might be pleasantly surprised.
@0eb69558 So well do I know the pain of harboring my own idiosyncratic SEO goals that are achievable in theory (because nobody else wants them) that I could not resist doing my part to further yours: http://www.erosblog.com/2023/09/07/popsicles-no/
Can anybody tell me why the cover art for modern romance novels with rough chiseled scarred muscular semi-shaven hirsute male protags always seems to feature dudes with smooth hairless waxed-looking chests and a soft airbrushed ethereal glow? It doesn't make sense! I dunno who this salon-mangled male stripper from Los Angeles is on the cover, but he's not the ex-Green-Beret Montana cowboy that Our Heroine falls for inside!
Although it's not for any rational reason, I am so eager to restore this lost memory that I actually sent a Signal message to the woman I spent most of the 90s with. Most of our media consumption was in common in those days, and I watched a lot of things with her kid that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. She may well remember what I do not.
Please help me out! Sometime in the 1990s I became enamored of a quote, after Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty speaking about words meaning precisely what he chooses them to mean. Some #movie #villain (I think) said "Words mean what I PAY them to mean". Perhaps the #Riddler in a #Batman movie? Brain no work! I can't remember! Now I want to say it in a post and I really want a precise link/cite for the amusement value. Please help? Boosts appreciated.
#Writing #Research #90s #HumptyDumpty #1990s
Although it's not for any rational reason, I am so eager to restore this lost memory that I actually sent a Signal message to the woman I spent most of the 90s with. Most of our media consumption was in common in those days, and I watched a lot of things with her kid that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. She may well remember what I do not.
@7a770747 OK, fair. But when it's very much the same flavor of nonsense as my interlocutor spouts in other areas of their life, should I assume that this ONE time they have been duped by an off-screen authority?
I've had several Patreon pledges deleted already in September. Perhaps I annoyed some patrons, but I prefer to believe that we're all just doing our best to get by out here, and patronage is always an optional/luxury expense for people.
Consider this your irregular reminder that a Patreon pledge, no matter how small, is one of the best ways to reassure me that hanging in there with my deeply unfashionable sex blog is something that people value!
@0eb69558 uses a comforting phrase in that post ("kisses at the speed of consent") reminding me of a disturbing meatspace convo about consent I had recently with a couple of boomer-minded relatives.
They both think it's fine to infer consent from "she went there, wearing that, and didn't say no".
He brutally mocked explicit consent, especially if it's reconfirmed as a hookup progresses, as "too much". So I blew their minds by arguing for enthusiastic consent instead. They were NOT keen.
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