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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Not necessarily.

    There are still legal routes, the chances of congress not laying down on the job, etc.

    Then, you’ve got the first line of citizen action, protests and non violent direct action combined with people helping each other until the legal stuff has a chance to work.

    Beyond that, right now, across the country, small groups are trying to organize. Most of them as a form of more assertive resistance and/or a safety net for trans people, immigrants, and other targets of the current administration.

    There are also smaller groups than that organizing for the possibility of having to fight.

    That does include people just as batshit as the more rabid right wing, but most of them are less eager than the crazies to get involved in an asymmetric civil war. So they aren’t very visible.

    But there are people working at all levels to resist and turn things around.

    The way out is for everyone that can to be ready. To take risks to protect each other, and to do what they can when they can.


  • Well, as others have said, it’s more likely to be a mild allergy with that specific presentation. Check with a doctor if you can, food allergies are no joke.

    However, sugar can cause an unusual sensation in high concentrations.

    First, it’s hygroscopic. It pulls water to itself. Second, it can absorb through mucous membranes. Third, even in baked goods, it has a crystalline structure.

    When it’s mixed in at low concentrations, it would be unusual to have any sensations associated with the product being sweet from sugars (as opposed to artificial sweeteners).

    But at high concentrations like in icing? Yeah, you can have lingering sensations just from sugar doing its thing to the cells at the surface of your mouth.

    I wouldn’t think to describe it as itchy, and never tingly, but I’ve experienced a tickly, kind of irritated sensation before, enough so that I went looking for what it might be.

    You can test it by creaming a small amount of sugar in a small amount of butter and eating it. If it produces the effect, it’s likely the culprit. If it doesn’t, talk to your doctor because you really don’t want food allergies going undiagnosed.


  • Patient transport is one of those things where you get bored. If that’s a problem for you, it would be better to keep your toe in with other branches of nursing.

    Disclaimer: I was a nurse’s assistant, so I didn’t do that job, just know people that did.

    Also, I’m assuming you mean critical care transport.

    You’ll definitely run into moments where your skills are put to the test, but it’ll be in between a lot of waiting around. That may seem like a good thing, and it definitely can be. But it’s also why a lot of nurses end up leaving transport for other branches.

    The good thing about that is exactly what you said, you can use that waiting time to keep up on literature in the field. So, if you do eventually get bored of transport, you’ll still be up to date and have that experience under your belt. Any variety of intensive nursing is a huge plus when looking for a new job, pay raises, etc. Transport isn’t as intensive as emergency, flight, icu, or even some surgery; but it definitely hones people’s skills with communication, improvisation, and the core skills that you’d need in an ED or ICU. Those skills are always welcome in other settings too.



  • Jeez, lots of things.

    I’m still friends with most of my exes that were longish term (at least a year together). So there’s no bad feelings that would make me reject an item, and out of those, no longing for them. There are a few that if I had anything from them, I would have donated it to something, but not many; obviously not hung up on those.

    The main one is a teddy bear.

    Which may seem weird, but there’s a reason. When I got it, my dog was young. She would normally tear up any stuffed toy playing with it, and the household rule is/was that if it’s on the floor, it belongs to the dog.

    But my dog, out of all the stuff she’d cover in slobber and love to death, wouldn’t do it to that one. No idea why.

    But that’s not why it’s still important to me.

    Well after me and that ex parted ways, I became disabled. This came along with a shit ton of pain, which had me contemplating exercising my right to death.

    That toy, my dog would bring me when I was crying. At the time, the bear sat on the headboard, tucked into a little nook. I’d be balled up and hurting, and my dog would try to make me feel better. It wouldn’t always work. When her being her wonderful self wasn’t enough, she’d get the bear and bring it to me, and push it into my face until I took it, and then she’d curl up with me and sigh.

    The bear sits on a bookshelf now, because the nook it sat in is now my wife’s nook to keep things handy. But it’s where I can look over and see it.

    Now, it doesn’t remind me of my ex at all. It reminds me of one of the best dogs I’ve ever met.



  • Realistically, you’re lucky you didn’t. Excessive force is a thing, and you’d have trouble convincing a jury that his dick was a threat to your life.

    A punch to the jaw, sure. Even a kick to the dick, no problem. But once you stop swinging your dick here, you know damn good and well that actually using a weapon on some perv is not going to end well for you. Some places, just brandishing it could get you in more trouble than he would get into for wagging weenies.

    Also, dude. A leatherman? As a weapon? You’d have been better off leaving the blade shut and using it to reinforce your hand for a punch, or using it like a yawara. You go trying to actually use that blade on someone, and you could lose a finger.




  • On average, yeah.

    But you gotta remember, there’s a fresh wave of r/efugees coming in, and there was one not that long ago.

    Lemmy is mostly people that left Reddit, rather than having been a separate culture of its own. So there’s plenty of the same things that make reddit a difficult place to be.

    Lemmy tends to be more forgiving overall, outside of the politically focused instances, and some of the more… assertive belief systems that have communities and instances.

    As others have already said, lemmy.ml is a dedicated leftist space, and it’s hard left, even outright tankie at times (far left and authoritative). So you don’t want to go there about politics, you won’t have a good time.

    Lemmy.world catches a lot of hell because some of the mods and admins are a tad whack, but the users are typically not going to fuck with you.

    Sh.itjust.works is probably the closest in vibe to reddit, good and bad.

    Those are still, iirc, the three biggest instances. So you’ll have more users, which means the percentage of assholes in the human race equals those instances having higher numbers of assholes, but that really is the issue.

    My advice to anyone new on lemmy is the same as it was for new reddit users. Hang back a while. Stay chill. Observe the culture of lemmy as a whole, and any community you want to participate in.

    It is the internet though. People will say shit they’d never dare to in person. But I’d say there’s less of it here than most forums. And, I also tend to see more compassion too




  • I don’t have any credentials that make this an informed opinion.

    With that disclaimer, have you ever trained dogs?

    You hear things being said like a dog is as smart as a toddler, and it’s supposed to indicate that the dog is really smart.

    Have you ever trained toddlers? They aren’t as smart as most dogs.

    But smart how? Problem solving? Language acquisition? Logic?

    Intelligence isn’t one thing. It’s a complex of systems that allow an entity to navigate and hopefully thrive in a given environment. Part of that isn’t even conscious. It comes from how our brains deal with memory, and there’s only so much you can do about it.

    In any real sense that matters, no; crows aren’t are smart as humans. But it’s only a matter of degrees of complexity from the various articles and documentaries about the little buggers. They seem to think in similar ways, just not with the same capacity in any given way. Like, they seem to understand the basics of comparison of numbers, but they don’t do math.

    But they do learn new things amazingly fast. Faster than some humans I’ve known. A lot actually. That’s one part of intelligence. A big part.

    I genuinely believe that if environmental conditions ever favored them developing a similar kind of intelligence as we have, they wouldn’t take that many millennia to be taking on basic algebra. They’re one of the animals that seem like a candidate to do what humans have done, evolving brain power to be maximized as a survival trait. A lot of what humans are, physically, is in support of the kind of thinking we can do.

    Like I said, I don’t have a background that qualifies me to speak with authority about this kind of thing. But I do have the type of intelligence that could. Crows don’t, so I’ll take that as a win ;)


  • Hypothetically?

    As long as they’re old enough to reasonably be expected to be an equal partner in a relationship, there isn’t a limit.

    Assuming that someone can exhibit that criteria by means other than age, as long as it’s legal.

    But that’s hypothetically. There’s no way in reality that I’m going to have enough commonality and connection with anyone still in their teens, period. Not gonna happen.

    Even early twenties, at this point in my life, I haven’t met anyone in that age range that I could be a good partner for, nor they for me. It’s about stages of life and motivations and goals.

    I can’t imagine actually going the distance with anyone younger than thirty at all. If I were still single, and setting up a dating app, that’s where I’d set the lower limit, and I’m fairly confident that nobody at the very bottom of that limit would be a good match overall.

    That being said, my wife is over a decade younger than me, so I’m well aware that age itself isn’t an inherent limit to long term compatibility. It just greatly limits the chances of it working. Once you hit a 20 year gap, there’s just so much in between, in terms of experience, life goals, and shared perspective that it is stacked tall against it working as a true partnership. Since that’s what I want, not just someone to live with and have sex with, it ain’t happening in reality.

    When me and my wife fist met, I was dubious at the gap, 13 years. But I was still in my late thirties, so someone in their twenties that was very sure of what they wanted in a partner made sense. Still does, over a decade later. So big gaps can work out, as long as you don’t rush into things.

    But now, at 50, how the hell would me trying to build a partnership with someone in their twenties work? I remember my twenties, I remember other people at that age. Me now wouldn’t think me then would be a good partner for a woman my age. And he wouldn’t be. He would have tried, if it came along, but there’s just so much that happens to a person in twenty years. It’s astronomical odds of it working.



  • Ima be real.

    You can absolutely make bread with no recipes, no training, and little or no guidance. It isn’t brain surgery. Water + flour + yeast + time×heat = bread. The only question is how good the bread will be.

    Go to the store, pick up some yeast packets. Pick up a bag of bread flour.

    Take two bowls of roughly equal size. Put a few cups of flour in one. In the other, put clean water until it feels like it weighs roughly the same as the one with flour.

    Toss a few pinches of salt in the flour. Empty the package of yeast into the water. Walk away for about fifteen minutes. Come back and as long as the yeast is making a few bubbles, you’re good to go.

    Mix it all up. Pinch it, punch it, roll it around a while. Get all the flour nice and wet, adding a little water if you need.

    Walk away for a while. Check on it every fifteen to twenty minutes. Once it’s puffy, knock the air out of it, and roll it into a ball or a loaf shape and put it in a pan. Walk away and check on it until it’s roughly twice as big. Throw it in the oven, maybe 375 to 400. Bake it for a half hour or so, check on it to see if it’s done. Probably won’t be, but it never hurts to check. Poke a thin stick in. If it comes out gummy, keep cooking until it doesn’t.

    When it isn’t, you’re done. Pull it out, let it sit. Wait a half hour minimum, then cut.

    That’s it. That’s bread. Won’t be the best, won’t be inedible.

    Thing is, if you do it again the next day, it might not come out exactly the same. That’s because precision is what gives you consistency.

    But that’s how you test out bread making with minimum investment.

    No bullshit, no joking, bread is simple. It was being made with zero precision before the written word.

    The hobby of making bread, or the profession of making bread can be very complicated. But the hobby only needs to be as complicated as you want. If you want to chase your ideal loaf, and be able to produce it almost exactly the same every time, rabbit hole doesn’t describe it lol. But you can turn out consistent bread that will make people think you are the yeast god with nothing but a decent scale and a little light reading.

    A scale and some bowls are all you need to make amazing bread. Bread that you’ll be proud of. That’s because once you get down to measuring ingredients by the gram, you’re as precise as you can get. Anything under 5 grams of difference, nobody is going to notice anyway. Most of the time, except for salt, anything under 10, and they won’t notice.

    The rest is technique. Learning when to stop kneading, temperature and time, that kind of thing. You can’t buy gear to give you that. You can buy gear to make it take less time, but that’s a different thing.

    As far as the sourdough goes, yeah. You can control the tang fairly easily. It’s all about how you feed your starter and how you ferment the dough once you’re using the starter. You can make bread with such a low degree of acidity that you’d have to know it was sourdough to tell it is. Just feed the starter well with heavy discarding, and the bacteria that make it tangy won’t have time to produce the acid in the starter. If you then do fast fermentation, they won’t have time to do it in the loaf. But, tbh, at that point, you might as well just buy some yeast. Part of the point of sourdough is that acid.

    But damn, once you do get the basics down and you’re turning out bread that’s exactly what you wanted, every time? That’s fucking gold. It’s worth the precision and the fiddling around. Hobby or not, you can get to that point in less than a year of practice at home. Less at a bakery with guidance. You’ll get to where you don’t worry about recipes because you can feel the flour and adjust the water in the mix to account for humidity. That does take a hundred loaves or so, but that’s doable.

    You’ll get plenty of control as you learn, if you want to



  • Tbh, part of what makes it so heavily loved is the details. It’s a masterpiece of world building. So fans tend to react poorly to the idea of anyone messing with it.

    Then there’s the fact that the estate ight abstracted. It’s still the people that loved him and lived with him. So they won’t likely allow it to stay up long, so it would be something that would have to be distributed peer to peer. That’s fine for what it is, but it makes it more niche than it otherwise would be.

    I’m not even sure how it would be done without gutting it to the point it’s a different story. You can kinda synopsize parts of it and save space/time, but it would only reduce the overall size by about a single book because there’s so many of those side scenes that would still need to be addressed, you can’t just entirely cut them.

    After I started writing, which was before the last two, I had a fresh perspective on editing. So I was looking for bits that might be rearranged or shifted or reduced. There’s definitely stuff in there that could be condensed. The problem would be doing so without wrecking that distinctive Jordan voice. You’d essentially be rewriting entire chapters, and even Sanderson with all the notes and guidance still didn’t perfect that voice

    A fan cut? I’m dubious. A cliff’s notes would be better, imo. That at least doesn’t mangle the good parts in the name of brevity