Captain Aggravated

At some point you’re going to struggle to put a capable x86 machine in a device that small.

Are we talking “nations that have an official Lemmy instance” or “nations in which some private citizen or resident just happens to host a Lemmy instance?”

I mean, sure. It’s easy to accuse me of being uniquely bad at sex, right? “Are you sure it’s not a YOU problem?”

Well according to the women I’ve slept with I’m simultaneously great and terrible in bed depending on if she was breaking up with me at the time the topic came to discussion. She’s either faking it in bed and the truth only comes out months later, or she’s having a good time in bed and trying to hurt my feelings while she’s angry at me. Which is why I brought up dick size. I don’t care if women care about dick size. I have a normal average medium-size dick and I’ve never been told that by a woman, it’s either huge or tiny depending on her desire to boost or bruise my ego. I’ve had the same woman say both.

I’ve asked every woman I’ve slept with some variation of Do you like that? What do you want to do? What’s your favorite? I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a useful answer out of that line of questioning. The most common response is an indignant “I don’t know!!!” like it’s an inappropriate question to ask at this moment. Or an “uh…yeah” or the surprisingly common continue to rhythmically moan as if no question was asked

Faking orgasms to get sex over with faster and then agreeing to have sex again with the same person is not the behavior of someone who wants to cum during sex. It’s such a dumbass way to go about achieving that goal that it’s just easier to believe the goal is something else.

She’s either got the notion in her head that there exists a man who “just knows” what she wants and she’ll never have to verbalize her wants or needs because he “just does” what she wants. Maybe she’s seen an old couple whose routines are in perfect sync and they fall apart without each other, and romcom movies have her convinced he just exists somewhere fully formed and all you’ve got to do is bend over to pick up dropped papers in front of the right business executive to get it, not spend 40 years of marriage living together, communicating, arguing, winning, losing, compromising, choosing battles and, pause for gasp, sometimes doing things for him too. So she just tries out a man, when he isn’t precisely what she has in mind she ghosts him and moves on to the next one.

Or, she’s willing to get on her back if if means a free meal at local fancy restaurant she can post to Instagram and maybe also even eat.

All sex is transactional, all women are whores and all men are johns, it’s just we have this weird cultural thing where it’s a crime to say “Look can I just Venmo you?” so we have to do things like pay for sex with flowers and chocolates and restaurant meals and jewelry and alimony.

“I faked all my orgasms” is up there with “your dick is small” on the list of “things women always say to men they’re angry at” so at some point his ability to care if its true or not burns out.

Just about the time me and my mother started brainstorming solutions, my father walks in the room and says “What are y’all fussing about?” and when the situation is explained to him he rolled his eyes and threw a pair of his tennis shoes at my feet.

And when is the next circle jerk about how making an account on the Fediverse is too complicated for “normal people?”

I’ve weighed in a few times on the “choose a server” thing on various federated platforms. When signing up for a Fediverse service, you’re presented with the following contradiction in terms: “Choose an instance. Your choice does not matter. The choice is yours.”

There are two ways to fix this:

1. We embrace “the choice doesn’t matter” and the new user gets assigned an instance automatically. I think this will require some kind of formal agreement and a badge of compliance among server admins, a kind of verified checkmark. Enforce a common set of moderation rules, maintain some technical requirements like uptime and version updates etc. and agree to accept anyone who clicks the random button, you get a checkmark and randomly assigned users. The Windows software install wizard asks you “You want to go with the default settings or you want to make some decisions for yourself here?” Operating system installers do the same thing, and the “something else” choice is often last or less prominent. Because most people just want it to do the normal thing, but sometimes people have a reason to pick something specific. “Join a random server” is a big prominent button, “or, pick a server manually” is a hyperlink just below it.

2. Make the choices meaningful. I see this one happening the most on Peertube where storage and bandwidth are both significant costs, so the instances there are more likely to segregate by type of content. “We host arts and crafts” “We host video game let’s plays and speedruns” “We host travel and nature videos”. Even if you have eclectic tastes, that choice has meaning and thus isn’t as paralyzing.

Male puberty happens a bit later than female puberty; at almost 14 he’s either in the thick of it or just about done.

I don’t think male puberty is quite as “what the Lovecraftian fuck is happening to me right now” as female puberty. His voice either has or will drop, this isn’t physically painful but it’s not fun how people react to it sometimes.

He is going to GROW. When I was 15 I outgrew a pair of shoes overnight. Came home from school one day, took my shoes off, went to bed. Woke up the next morning, those same shoes didn’t fit. In the next couple years he’s probably going to have some joint or bone aches just from growing so much. My parents fed me Tylenol which did basically nothing, I’m not convinced Tylenol works. It’ll slow down by the time he’s out of high school but where girls are pretty much at adult size at 18 boys will keep growing a bit into their early 20s.

He’s gonna get stronger. Sometimes it’s going to sneak up on him; prepare for the occasional moments of didn’t know his own strength style clumsiness.

Physical activity is a good idea; sports, marching band, shop class, if you can get him up and moving during the day and not packed into a classroom it’ll be good for his brain. Boys don’t really do well sitting in a classroom all day.

For the above three reasons he is going to have a VORACIOUS appetite. I ate 5,000 calories a day and struggled to gain weight in high school. Let the kid eat. A hungry teen is an angry teen. Somewhere around 19 or 20, either in college or in the get a job part of life, that growth spurt is tapering off and there’s less physical activity inherent in life, so the need for calories is going to decrease but his ordering habits won’t. 19 years old is about time to start ordering medium combo meals.

You can expect a certain amount of teenage moodiness; his brain is rewiring itself. He’ll have feelings. Society isn’t okay with this. He’ll learn how to express nothing but anger or amusement. This is ultimately for the best; once he’s an adult he will be expected to do two things: Work and die. Having feelings is accomplishing neither of those so he is expected to…never do that. Some people will ask him for displays of emotions; he will quickly learn that they are not interested in his actual feelings because those would require, like, dealing with or whatever. They want to see an impromptu rom-com performance.

Unexplained genital pain is never normal in males; “it hurts, and it has hurt for awhile now” is reason to see a doctor.

I have an S10e in service, it’s perfectly fine.

I saw whoever has the Nokia name now is selling smart phones designed to be end user disassembled and repairable, but they’re really mum about how long their software support is.

Food Lion (East coast, not sure if they’re national) has a fairly good loyalty program. Your loyalty card number on the physical card or in the app are the same, you can load coupons to it so they’re applied at checkout if they’re relevant, you can use their ordinary website if you don’t have/want to use a smart phone app…it’s non-cancerous.

I have a few to recommend:

• SEA and Astrum. Almost interchangeable calm and chill space documentary channels. If you’re like me and get a spinny mind around bedtime, these are great, they hold my attention to keep my mind from racing and are calm enough to drift to sleep while listening.

• Bedtime Stories. Anything from urban legends to strange disappearances told in a campfire ghost story format accompanied by hand drawn illustrations. Sometimes wanders into hibbidy jibbidy but fun nonetheless. See also Wartime Stories for a similar format focusing on stories from/about the military.

• History For Granite. I read this guy as an armchair archaeologist who is interested primarily in the pyramids and megalithic structures of ancient Egypt almost as much as he is at sniping at Zahi Hawass. Possibly a bit of a crank, though his wild ideas tend to be things like “The pyramid was designed to remain open for worshippers to routinely enter” and he often focuses on the engineering of the structures and layout of the stones.

• Nexpo. Short for Nightmare Expo, purveyor of creepy stories.

• Captain KRB. Video essayist, fond of minecraft, retro media, and occasional odd stories like the Voynich manuscript or the Cicada 3301 mystery.

• Lemmino, started out as a top ten list channel, has pivoted to long form documentaries on a “when it’s done” basis. Topics range from the history of the “Cool S” graffiti symbol to the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

• Ahoy. Churns out one, maybe two videos a year on the topic of video games, primarily video game weapons. Typical format will introduce a weapon, say, the M-16 combat rifle, discuss its real world invention and service history, then its depiction in video games and possibly other media. Peppered in are other more general video game topics; his video on Polybius is particularly good.

• This Old Tony. A dude named Tony whose got a hobby machine shop full of dad jokes in his garage.

• Clickspring. Australian dude who makes soul-achingly beautiful videos about clockmaking and machining. Go watch him build a clock out of raw brass and tell me your life hasn’t changed.

• Tech Tangents. One of those guys who will hold an 8-bit ISA card in his hands with a look of utter rapture on his face, he repairs, restores and documents old computer and gaming equipment, and operates a capacitor wiki. He once reverse engineered an ISA adapter card to get a very early CD-ROM drive functioning…live on Twitch.

Fix things. I don’t know what they did to my father but the man starts getting twitchy and starts scratching at his face if he hasn’t ordered anything from Amazon in the last few minutes. I have to STOP HIM to give me a chance to repair things.

“We’d prefer you didn’t use the word “Source” in the game title. You wanna sell Black Mesa on Steam?”

Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don’t know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just…hired.

Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.