The trauma of having grown up getting pirates, castles, and OG space sets for Christmas and birthdays, then finding out your mom gave them to the bratty neighbor kids while you were in college is real. I’ve reacquired some as an adult, which cost me about the same as my college tuition.

Yeah, but I work doggie daycare and both my dogs are deaf and one is deaf/blind. They’re leash trained and can function in a play group but my blind gal drifts while walking so biking is just not for her. I could probably get her to ride in a pull behind but she loves her walks.

Welcome to play, might possibly get torpedoed by Hegseth on their way home. Who knows?

I started drinking at 13 but never much. It wasn’t until about 15 i finally got blackout drunk. My peer group drank hard in the late 90s and were the binge drinking bar crowd of the early 00s. I’ve lost a few friends to ODs combining booze and pills, accidents while drunk, escalation to heroin, and once had to be resuscitated when i drank so much i quit breathing. It wasn’t until my late 30s that i finally got sick of living like that and reigned in my drinking. Now i never drink at home and maybe go out one afternoon for happy hour and am home by 10 rather than closing out the bar every night.

Alcohol is a rough one because it’s not only an addictive substance, it has a strong social component. When you drink hard your social circle becomes others who drink hard, if you try and quit you have no friends. If you have a hard time making friends while sober but are more at ease with a little buzz, you’ll end up right back at a bar. I’ve been going to the same bar for over 20yrs and there’s regulars who were there before me still on the same barstools.

4 out of 5 doctors misdiagnose the cause of diarrhea because they refuse to believe in ghost wasps.

I graduated in 2000 and a buddy bought a domain to host a forum so our friend group could stay in touch before social media took off. We kinda fell off when MySpace, then FB got big, but now that we’ve all abandoned the latter it’s how we stay in touch.

I live in walking distance to work and pass a gas station. Been watching it. Monday night on my way home at 9pm it was $3.20, Tuesday at noon it was $3.49. Tonight it was $3.59. And still my boss doesn’t understand why I choose to walk for half an hour instead of drive in five.

Also contains David Draiman’s autograph.

Pops is gonna get recalled for one last tour in Iran.

With the amount of money and access to tech that’s available over there you could build an advanced hydroponics greenhouse that would recapture at least 95% of your water (some obviously leaves the system inside the plants). Build that and fill your reserve tanks during the times you’re not under blockade and you could function for a long time. It might not be enough to feed your entire population a full serving of fresh fruits and veggies every day but it would minimize the impact in situations like this.

Most of the big names in scifi/fantasy/action/comedy, so here’s the less common personal favs:

Lake Placid, Hellraiser III, Beastmaster 1 & 2, Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal 2000, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, SLC Punk, Disney’s Robin Hood, Dead Alive, Night of the Lepus, MST3K the Movie, Aquateen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theaters, The Ewok Adventures

Are you encountering these kinds of people when you organize in person in your community or in the vast sea of internet anonymity? If they’re in the real world and so obtuse that your group cannot find any common ground to build on and they’re a liability, show ‘em the door. If they’re online you can attempt a discussion but when it’s obvious from their trolling or lack of response, fuck ‘em. They’re not in it for real change and their only effort towards it is to cause dissension among those willing to put in the work. Eventually this will boil over and leaders will emerge, some might be libs, some anarchists, some socialists, some tankies. Their broad views might differ but the short term goal of confronting fascism will force cooperation and survival. The dipshit playing “more leftist than thou” in their basement will continue to do nothing and will continue to post contrarian content even if the world shifts in their favor because their sense of self depends on being unique in their dissension. There’s also a very real possibility the loudest voices have no dog in the fight because they’re not even what they present themselves to be.

The internet can connect and foster discussion, but not everyone here is worth connecting with or talking to.

Ignore the people trying to stir up dissent among the factions of the resistance. The ability to make edgelord extremist memes is either a luxury of the poster, ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to stoke division.

The left does struggle to put aside differences of opinion on what the ideal future looks like, how to achieve it, and which fires need to be dealt with first. Extreme purity tests are also strangling us. We shouldn’t abandon our values but we also shouldn’t march to extinction patting ourselves on the back saying “well at least I never compromised”. We’re not just damning ourselves, we’re damning our families, our communities, and future generations.

Americans still have one shot at changing course; midterms. There’s a sliver of hope that elections still matter. It won’t instantaneously undo the damage done, but it would be a step. If that’s taken from us, either through cheating, interference, or flat out ignored… welp, fuck it, the America we knew, its pros and cons, is gone. Then every leftist and lib is in the same boat and we’ll be forced to join or die.

In the real world we are talking. While I think protesting is a lost cause under this regime it is a great place to network. When shit hits the fan it’s going to be your community that you need to rely on. Mutual aid networks, food growing/sharing, first aid, gun safety, plans on how to care for the most vulnerable, all that kind of stuff is getting discussed. That kind of stuff ignores purity politics because it’s not political, it’s just the values of the people involved.

You’ve seen it yourself, even the most peaceable of people are contemplating what a worst case scenario might look like and recognizing that a fight might mean shoulder to shoulder with those we don’t 100% align with. The French Resistance didn’t have singular political goal, “fuck these fucking Nazis” was good enough.

Without others you’re just a lone gunman fighting for your own opinions and values, like Ted Kaczynski mailing bombs. Some were for his “cause”, some were for personal revenge. If you publish your manifesto ahead of time you’ll probably get caught, if you publish after and it turns out you’re a selfish nut-job there’s no movement (except for maybe a handful of other nut-jobs). Even if you do succeed, realistically your targets are easily replaceable cogs, not the clockmakers. And the clockmakers are a bureaucracy, even the masters are replaceable, the entire factory has to be torn down. Is it that difficult to understand why we’re not yet at the tipping point where people are ready to abandon their jobs, family and social stability, and possibly lives to fight in the streets? It currently risks everything and gains nothing. Some of it is keyboard warrior talk, but I’d wager there’s a steadily increasing populace slowly preparing themselves for drastic action, they just want it to have real purpose and hopefully achieve something if it’s going to potentially cost them everything.

One of my longest, best relationships was with a woman I met at a bar. We were both regulars, had seen each other before, but had never spoken. Turns out we were both out for a rebound one-night stand after each ending a long term relationship. Despite not looking for depth, we ended up talking the whole night, went home together, then got up and went out for breakfast and spent the whole next day together. We absolutely clicked and moved fast, and even thought we eventually split we are still friends.

Personal opinion from 30yrs of dating- spontaneous clicks happened more easily before internet dating, hook-up apps, or all the digital pre-screening. Right or wrong people make opinions about each other’s digital footprints, which are often only curated half-truths or their attempt to sell their idealize self image without their insecurities. Or, with Tinder, a lot of people aren’t looking for a click and are walls up about letting it happen; the terms of the relationship are short and clear. When the first impression is each other in the flesh you can (generally) get a better feel for who one another are.

Also a decent chance it was the premature detonation of a device Trump was having delivered to those mean old jerks at the Nobel Prize committee.

I had an opportunity to buy a juvenile peacock. Why not? Learned a lot about caring for peacocks very quickly.

Speaking out does nothing because the people in power have called our bluff. They know that no matter what they do, how many laws they break, how many lies they tell, how many elections they cheat, the only backlash will be words. There’s no reason to stop what they are doing because there’s no teeth in the opposition, only tongues. They risk nothing and gain everything. American educational indoctrination’s greatest win was convincing people that resistance had to be peaceful to be just. The Founding Fathers tried words for about a decade before recognizing “words ain’t doing shit”. DM me when you all realize we’ve hit “words ain’t doing shit”.

Hell, they won’t even acknowledge that access to clean water is a human right. You can’t just drink what Nestle owns the right to sell you!