Nepenthe

Well yeah, of course the problem here would be child support and not divorce is functionally impossible in Missouri.

That was very nearly my exact same thought. Maybe not for curious children with carrot-sized fingers, but for adults, how convenient! Business competitor’s body won’t quite fit in your fancy frunk? Just while away on your phone for about 10 minutes, let the cat do its magic, and off go the legs! Travel-sized!

Middle-age would be in your 40s-50s. Not to diss my dead relatives too hard, but you’re thinking of old fucks that would have any solid opinion on that. In a handful of years, the music middle aged men will be up in arms about is *NSYNC.

Things like, say, an increased need for vitamin D supplements in colder climates, because you need sunlight to manufacture vitamin D to make serotonin and the increased melanin blocks what little sun is available way up north? Sure. That one is a difference off the top of my head that people really just don’t think about.

Kidney function is provably not one of them and never was, so you’re gonna have to fuck off with that. I usually make a conscious, concerted effort to be a better person than I was on reddit, but you already admitted in another comment that you don’t know shit about medicine and you seem bothered in the opposite direction regardless.

So with the possibility of this topic being your emotional support knowledge base out of the picture, the only horse you logically seem to have in this is that seeing ethnic minorities demand that we stop allowing them to die by reason of nothing annoys you to have to listen to.

If that’s not the case, I might be a bit quieter and rephrase everything you said forever, because it does not look like you want it to look. If it IS the case, get the fuck off my platform.

On the one hand, I feel really proud that I got under your skin so much that mine is the only contribution you’ve ever replied to in the 7 months that whole account has even existed. Someone just clearly isn’t having a good day if that’s the one thing that set off a professional lurker.

But also, like…I thought about this all through my quesadilla and it’s just really sad? Is this like Incel Logic: Hobby Edition, where you’re either born perfect and flawless or you’re a permanent shit failure and therefore whichever way the coin falls, you never have to work at anything? Like Big Education is a trillion dollar industry now, and really society is divided up Airbender style and you just didn’t get the CalArts gene?

There’s only one kind of person I can see falling for this weak-ass angle, and it’s the kind of person who’s never taken up any recreation for more than 1-2 days in their whole life because they don’t start out amazing at it and you can’t fail at anything if you never do shit. And honestly, I’m kinda bummed out that you have to live like that. You know you can just look up tutorials for anything these days.

A lot of people you read about who grew to be leaders in their field by some ridiculous age like 25, spoke fluently in 5 different languages, etc. etc. did so because they had three things: dedicated one-on-one tutors, an appreciable collection of slaves and/or other general servants to free up their personal time, and enough family wealth to pay for both from the time they could walk.

Mozart was composing as a toddler, but he also came from a wealthy family of musicians that taught him basically nothing else. Ever. That was the one thing. He hyper-specialized in music and socially he was the guy that got bored and did cartwheels and meowed in public. If Mozart was in your position, with the kind of loving care and finances most students have today, he would have been the kid in class who beatboxes over the teacher.

I’m actually still coming to terms with this myself. with mixed success. I’ve always loved art, but I’ve never been where I want to be. I’ve been making strides again, but the further I take it, the more it becomes apparent that 90% of the problems I’ve ever had with it were not me, they were because no one ever bothered to teach me. And I’m pissed about the decades I lost simply because child me was never shown concepts that would have changed everything.

Do not judge your own accomplishments on the same scale as someone who had ample time to devote to their studies because their family had house slaves doing everything you have to do by yourself.

True. Problem is, I would consider the question still valid on the basis that not every embryo successfully implants.

IVF can up the odds of success by using multiple embryos at the same time in the hopes that at least one of them will work, which is why people who go for IVF sometimes end up having quadruplets and such.

So every time one or more IVF attempts fail, what, they have to inform the government their 7th child in a row has died? Every post-coital period, do I hedge my bets?

Oh no. Kinda seems like we should be funneling money into welfare, huh. Maybe something livable so those that can’t find or maintain employment aren’t digging in the trash? Bad times for anyone who expected perpetual growth.

My dad would have been a boomer. Guy did have the advantage of entering the workforce during a time when it was still not only possible but even normal to expect to hold the same job for decades, but that and a kid who cared about him were about all he ever had to his name. And then he lost the job too.

He fought hard as shit, but with zero legs up and several of them permanently down, he never managed anything resembling the life he (or anyone else) hoped for, and after he died, the palliative nurse told his remaining family he was better off.

Being born in a lucky generation makes it easier, but it doesn’t guarantee one has it easy. It’s not an age group, it’s a behavior. Not that we aren’t already in the Find Out stage, for that to matter. But the fewer people under the impression all the bad people are going to die out, the better.

the plant was death because he put it in a closet because he bought in a woman and she could think he was gay so he hid it 👍

Well, what if she mistakenly saw him as a dependable person who could provide care for the most basic of life forms?

The manager of that store was the same one who, to name just a few occasions:

• Disregarded safety and climbed up the boxes herself when doing truck, resulting in a large container being dislodged from the top and landing directly on an employee’s face, breaking his nose. She begged him not to tell, and he really should have. While I can’t say that she 100% wouldn’t have paid him off, he was also just really nice.

• Made fun of another employee’s weekly pay in front of all their coworkers. It was only in the double digits because they’d had the flu for weeks.

• When a customer bought a candy bar, stood there in line and ate the entire thing, then immediately demanded a full refund because they “didn’t like it,” forced me to complete that refund because the customer is always right.

• Calmed a different customer over the holiday rush by publicly and very loudly threatening to fire me. The complaint had been quite simply that I (quote) “wasn’t smiling enough” and this must have ruined this person’s entire holiday spirit. Unbeknownst to the customer but fully known to my boss, I had just cremated my brother two weeks ago. The PTSD from that year’s rush is just barely starting to fade twelve years later.

In short, the manager of this particular store would do whatever action was the cruelest to others with the least amount of effort on her part, but then fall all over herself to brown nose A Customer.

No, I’m not aware she was made to pay for the door. She very likely would have been allowed to shop if she physically could have.

Not even solely relegated to old people, either, unless the fediverse thinks 30-40 is old. We had one woman come by our shit little dollar store about 20 minutes after we’d closed. So, long enough for us to start counting out, cleaning, etc., but not long enough to go home yet.

Noticed the door was locked. Noticed those of us not still busy were hanging out and chatting while we waited, surreptitiously watching this person. Visibly read the store hours. Tried the lock again.

Started prying open the door while we all stared in horror, ended up breaking it, then threw a whole fit to boot because we couldn’t sell her anything with all the tills in the back room and we kept trying to kick her out for some reason.

She wasn’t even high. She was just that entitled, because very often for suburban moms, the rules don’t apply if you don’t let them.

Fable does this too. At least the third one. I’d married a beggar with the honest intention of lifting up one of my kingdom’s most socially aware instead of settling for some brainless, peacocking noble, and all he did with his time on the throne was become a national embarrassment on the same old street corner.

So. Remembering the existence of this “Henry VIII” achievement that I’d thought I was never gonna bother getting. I took my beloved beggar-king down to the treasury, positioned him at the very top of the overflowing pile of gold he always seemed to forget we had, and shot him in the head. And then I started thinking about that achievement.

There were a lot of NPCs that really did bug me.

Which seems to be what they’re taking advantage of here. Palestinians currently fall under Jordan’s nationality laws, which dictate that

Individuals born to a Jordanian father are automatically Jordanian nationals at birth regardless of birthplace. The status is not transferrable by descent to children of Jordanian mothers unless the fathers are stateless or their nationalities are unknown. For nationality purposes, Palestinian fathers are never recognized as stateless whether they hold citizenship of any state or not.

From my limited understanding, purely because they are the children of Palestinian refugees, Belgium can’t make them stateless.

Ok. Mini-rant because I can’t contain myself atm. Do you wanna know a badly-kept secret? I’ve been making art on and off for 29 years. My ass wishes I could draw too. A ton of artists wish they could draw.

Talent will only give you a leg up, and mainly just at the beginning. The rest, all of us have to struggle for and I’m quite sure very few of us appreciate having to do so. And no matter how good they get, there is always something they have no idea how to do yet or they have some idol whose style they envy more than their own. Or they’re the type that only hates what they make because they’re the one who made it.

Van Gogh had a painter friend named Gauguin, and they were both jealous of each other. There is no magical point that one hits where you feel like you’re Good Enough. The best you can aim for is the kind of steady improvement you don’t even notice happening except on a scale of years, and the confidence to acknowledge those improvements instead of hyper-focusing on every way it isn’t what you saw in your head (it never is).

Go get a pencil or your ipad or whatever. Youtube is by far your biggest friend. Go look up videos about how to actually see what’s in front of you instead of what your brain insists must logically be there. USE REFERENCE. Trace a photo over and over, then immediately try the same thing freehand – this one is super useful, because a lot of drawing is also muscle memory. Break things down into simple shapes and then build on those. Use the open space between objects if you need to, to trick yourself into drawing something complex without getting lost in intimidating structural details.

When you’ve got those down, move onto perspective and composition. Cry a little if you have to, then get back to it. Because now you’re able to do whole backgrounds. People? Do tons of deliberately imprecise gesture drawings. Give your OC a terrifying robot head, a pillow for a torso, and springs for limbs. But go get. Your pencil. And be ok with drawing at first like everyone thinks they draw.

Barring that, my second choice is singing.

I think we very much do understand it’s a problem and there is not a whole lot women can do about it that we aren’t already doing. The majority of feminists would love for men to see a fucking therapist. They keep fighting it tooth and nail, though.

They’ll either not open up at all for fear of being judged, or they’ll ONLY lean on the women in their life. The one or two women in their life, because in my anecdotal experience they don’t seem to stick around women they can’t sleep with.

You guys want and desperately need actual emotional support, but you seemingly refuse to support each other. When we tell you to so much as just give each other the compliments you’re looking for, it’s met with whining because the respondents want women to do it. Even though mainly the compliments we get are…also from women, and going along with this request puts us in harm’s way.

A lot of men are so beat to shit from such an early age that they can’t even put a name to a lot of emotions besides anger. Which causes them to be both unable to manage what they can barely explain, and to feel significantly uncomfortable (outmatched) in marriage counseling, watching their wife run circles around them.

But biting the bullet and improving on emotional literacy via counseling and/or self-study and deep reflection never seems to strike the fancy. Their date has to teach them. And they WILL be fighting every step of the way.

I would love to date someone who doesn’t define their entire existence through their job. That’s nearly the entire reason two out of my four relationships fell to pieces.

-I- didn’t give a shit. I met one of them when we were both homeless and said yes anyway. But if I made more money or they got laid off at any point, both of them would have a months-long binge drinking breakdown regardless of what I said.

You know you could just stop, right? That’s what’s incredibly frustrating about this for me. A lot of problems that are specific to men seem to be an issue of self-image, and are thus self-imposed, and you could just. Stop.

I can’t make anyone not pick me up by the throat, but any day you could just wake up and decide your paycheck doesn’t actually fucking matter and never date someone who thinks it does.

You could be excruciatingly nice to people for no reason instead of demanding women do it, work out what’s going on with you and tell people about it, and give them both barrels if they think a human being needing help is gay.

As much as I feel for men as a group, it’s the empathetic part that makes me want to hold them upside down and shake them till the sense falls out. Take. Care of each other. Fix the thing.

But the boxes were taken to the dumpster, yes? With time saved, even? Someone in a managerial position would rather hire, train, and pay a devoted garbage person instead of three adorably unpaid raccoons?

The saddest part of this was that I’m so used to the creationists’ approach to covid that before finishing the headline, I genuinely assumed it was a woman trying to rid themselves of every ounce of their own DNA in a bid to outfox the government.

That’s where we are right now. Were I correct, I would not have been fazed. I always loathed that movie with everything in me, but I think it’s because I saw it as meaning to entertain rather than to warn.

Ukranians threaten to castrate russian POWs. Russians castrate Ukranian POWs. Now both sides are even and they can turn right around and invade their own country again, instead of thinking they own someone else’s.

Where your own post is concerned, I’m going to have to take an undisclosed amount of time to think about whether I’m going to take seriously a story that seems invariably to hail only from Russian news sources when it says mean things about the country Russia is loudly invading.