Cannabis

Optimistic of you to assume any of this will end in 2028. Trump and his fascist goons are already priming the electorate to accept a 3rd term. He’s not going away until he’s dead.

It all needs to get a lot less complex and confusing. I know the complexity is a byproduct of the defederated nature of the whole thing, but it’s also the primary thing limiting growth. The fediverse is never going to grow to anything other than a tiny niche if it isn’t immediately understandable to people who have 0 background in tech.

I’ve been voting for 12 years longer than you and that’s the same for me in general elections. The way I see American electoral politics, you vote for who you want in the primary. They end up losing to some shitty as corporate stooge. Then you vote against the fascist in the general election.

2004 Primary Elections (it was a presidential year, but there were more elections than just for president). I was actually 17 at the time and still a high school senior, but the law in my state was that if you were going to be 18 for the general election you could vote in the primary. I’ve voted in every primary and general election since.

Yes, of course it is.

Like any privilege, having ‘pretty privilege’ doesn’t mean your life isn’t difficult or that you don’t have problems. It just means that your looks aren’t one of the things contributing to those problems/difficulties.

Well, whatever it is, when I was a toddler my parents mentioned to my pediatrician that I loved eating hot peppers (apparently I would just grab them off the shelf in the grocery store and chow down. It was a bit of a problem for my mom because I wouldn’t wait for her to pay, or so goes the story she likes to tell). The doctor told my parents that I don’t have receptors to detect capsacin. I haven’t had it independently checked as an adult. Maybe they were mistaken or my parents mis-remembered what they were told.

Regardless, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what you refer to as feeling like getting maced while sneezing or laughing. I haven’t been directly maced before, but I have been in a crowd that got pepper sprayed. It burned the fuck out of my eyes and lungs, but I didn’t notice it anywhere else.

One of their commandments is to not “take the Lord’s name in vain”. Modern Christians have interpreted this to mean not using the word ‘god’ as an interjection or swear. What was actually meant by it was to not use god as a justification for things that do not comport with god’s religious teachings. You know, like claiming god says you should hate trans people, or that god has chosen you personally to be in charge of everyone. You know, the exact thing Christians do all the fucking time.

Rather than “god damn” I usually say “gods damn”. I’m not religious at all, but I’d rather someone mistake me for a polytheistic pagan than a Christian.

My mouth doesn’t have the receptors to detect capsacin, the chemical that makes spicy food burn/hot. I can eat the spiciest food imaginable and it will not burn my mouth at all.

That said, those receptors exist in other parts of my body. Very often while I’m sitting on the toilet I’ll realize my dinner the previous night was particularly spicy.

Also, after more than 1/3 of a century of eating spicy food indiscriminately, my stomach lining has taken quite the beating.

The coffee certainly makes me need to poop!

Eating a banana while drinking coffee. Perfectly complimentary flavors.

Mental asylums as they existed in the US before the 80s were often little more than glorified prisons. They did all kinds of horrific things to people which today we would consider torture.

That said, most people (not all, but most) who were in mental asylums were there because they had very real issues they needed real treatment for. Most people were not getting the treatment they needed, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t need something.

The mental asylums absolutely needed a lot of reform. Most probably did need to be shut down, or, at the very least, the entire staff needed to change and they needed a completely new philosophy of care. What this country absolutely did NOT need is to just throw all those people out onto the streets to fend for themselves. It seems to have been a lateral change for the people who needed help and a negative change for the rest of the country.

I’m not sure I would use the term “mental asylum” as that has a lot of cultural connotations I don’t think we need or want to bother with. However, I do think the federal government should provide massive amounts of block grant funding to states to open new facilities which can provide inpatient services to people who suffer with mental health problems. These should be founded on a care-first framework, not the torture prisons of yore.

My Samsung Galaxy Buds+ work with gloves. I work construction, so I have work gloves on quite often. The tap to pause/double tap to skip forward/triple tap to skip back works perfectly with work gloves on. Can’t say I’ve ever tried it with winter gloves, though.

I got banned for calling a guy a “fascist sanewasher” and refusing to post an apology when a mod messaged me to tell me to apologize.

I don’t have an active account anymore (mine got banned because I called someone a fascist sanewasher and any new account I try to make gets immediately banned), but I still browse Reddit specifically because there are several subreddits for my local area (my county, my suburb, and the big city nearby) which are pretty active. I get a lot of local information from there which really isn’t available in such a concise way anywhere else.