Fondots

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8
Does my friend's response rub anyone else the wrong way? (lemmy.world)
 

This is gonna be a bit of a weird one, try to keep an open mind.

I went to a nudist resort with a couple friends a few times last year, it was a good time, we're hoping to go back a few times this year once the weather warms up again.

It's not a sexual thing, it's just nice to hang out without pants, no laundry to do when you get home, etc. There are some swingers who frequent it, but they're very respectful about it, they'll ask if you're "in the lifestyle" but if you're not they don't pressure you and let it drop. None of my friends involved in this story are swingers.

I've been kind of floating the idea to a few other friends I thought might be interested. It's a mixed bag, some are open to it, others aren't, not really surprising there, my own wife isn't interested, and I get that it's not everyone's thing.

Two of the people I floated the idea to are a married couple. We'll call them Will and Janet (not their real names.) Will wasn't interested, but Janet was open to it.

The resort posted their event schedule for this year recently, so I've been talking with the friends I went with last year to figure out when we want to go. We narrowed it down to a couple events we're interested in, and I've been letting my other friends who were interested know so we can figure out our plans.

Janet messages me back after I tell her what weekends we're planning on. Said she asked Will and that he wasn't comfortable with her going so she's going to pass.

And that just kind of rubs me the wrong way. Every relationship has a different dynamic of course, but personally I have a hard time imagining telling my wife that "I'm not comfortable" with her doing something she wants to do unless it is something outright dangerous.

Little extra context, we're all in our 30s, we're all mutual friends, it wouldn't be particularly unusual for any of us to go hang out with anyone else in this group. I've hung out with with just Janet before, we have spare keys to each other's houses, and I'm pretty sure my mom regards them as basically extras of her own children, in short we're all close and trust each other.

The other friends I went with last year are similarly close, a couple, we'll call them Erin and Steve. Will's actually known Erin longer than I have, and probably worth mentioning, went skinny dipping with her and some other friends once back in their teens or early 20s. They never dated or anything like that, she's just kind of "one of the guys" the dudes there were gonna jump into a frozen creek naked so she joined them. And Steve is a very chill dude.

Will is also not a controlling guy. This is the first time I've ever heard anything like that from him (albeit second-hand through Janet) very much a live and let live kind of dude. He's maybe a little prudish and old fashioned in his own tastes, but accepting that his tastes aren't for everyone.

I'm not really planning on pushing the issue, for all I know Janet got cold feet and is using him as an excuse, and unless I see any other sign of him getting weird, I'm just gonna chalk it up to their relationship dynamic being different from my own. But I just kind of wanted to see if that rubs anyone else the wrong way.

Could Trump's "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation" order defund vasectomies? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you cut the hood off your jacket, do you have less jacket?

Could Trump's "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation" order defund vasectomies? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The inner part of your foreskin and glans are a mucous membrane, similar to the inside of your mouth or eyelids, when you remove the foreskin the glass is exposed, dries out, and keratinizes.

The skin of your penis is also supposed to be mobile and slide along the shaft, it's sort of like a bearing, if a circumcision is done tightly it can't do that and you may need lube for masturbation or sex that wouldn't necessarily be needed otherwise.

The frenulum is often removed in circumcision and is one of the most sensitive parts of the penis, so removing that obviously loses some sensitivity

Definitely seems like it minimizes or destroys some normal functioning to me.

According to you, what happens when you die? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's just nothing.

Asking what you experience after death is a nonsensical question, you don't experience anything at all.

What did you see/hear/feel/experience back in 1066 during the Norman Conquest of England?

You weren't there, you weren't alive then, so you didn't experience anything at all.

That same sort of non-experience is what awaits you after death.

Trump back to golfing after demanding federal workers return to office in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago

I'm not certain what the president's "normal" hours/workweek are really expected to be, I kind of assume that is theory it's kind of a 24/7/365 gig for 4 years

But I feel like it may be worth pointing out that if you work a normal Monday-Friday gig and take no additional vacation, your weekends off would add up to about 29% of the year off.

If you get, say, 10 vacation days you're now up around 31%

Personally I work 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, so even if I don't take any of my PTO and depending how the calendar works out on any given year I'm sitting at just about 50% of days off the job (provided I don't come in for overtime) for my normal schedule, though I technically work slightly more hours than someone who does a normal 40 hour work week.

So I don't think just looking at raw numbers of how many days off they took is necessarily a useful metric.

How many hours they actually spend working and how much they manage to achieve is probably much more important, though I suspect it's difficult if not impossible to get real metrics on that

I suspect that trump probably isn't the type to put in a full 8 hours of actual work, and even if he does get roped into an all-day meeting, it's probably not particularly productive since they'd have to spend the whole time explaining the basics to him instead of actually getting anything done. And I'm sure the only reason he ever brings work home with him is so that he can sell it to the highest bidder from his private bathroom/copier room.

RFK Jr. says he's resigned from anti-vaccine nonprofit as he seeks nation's top health official job in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The idea of pain doesn't really factor into my issue with needles, I'm not worried about it hurting, I'm just skeeved out by the needle itself.

If it were an option I'd gladly take needle-less vaccines and blood draws that hurt 10× worse (which still wouldn't be that bad, needles really don't hurt much)

Hell, if they hurt more I'd probably have less of an issue with them. I'd rather have an actual reason to dislike them instead of just a random case of the heebie-jeebies for no particular reason.

US Air Force resumes teaching video on first Black pilots after DEI review in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago

Without knowing the content of the training or the actual intent of the people who decided to pull it, it's pretty hard to say whether it was malicious compliance, or just plain-old compliance.

However, it got at least one republican's feathers ruffled (the one who called it malicious is a Republican)

So if they knew it would get that kind of reaction and did it specifically to do so, that would be "malicious"

I could certainly imagine someone in the airforce deciding "You know, Alabama has pretty much nothing to be proud of except for the Tuskegee Airmen. I bet if word gets out that we're stopping this training, some Alabama politician will make a stink over it, and make us roll it back. Then when they get on our case about other 'DEI' training, we can point to this as an example and say 'well we tried to stop that one and you got butthurt about it, and these are more of the same kind of thing, so either make up your fucking minds or get off our fucking backs and let us do our god damned jobs'"

Again though, without knowing their actual intention it could just be plain ol' compliance or even just incompetence that led to this.

Relevant again: How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms. in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think it depends on how you use those different sites

I transitioned from Reddit to Lemmy pretty seamlessly like you did. Around the time it became clear they weren't backing down on the API thing and other bullshit, I looked up some reddit alternatives, chose Lemmy, and kept right on doing what I was doing on Reddit.

On the other hand, I'm having a bit of a hard time ditching Facebook.

The difference is I know the people I'm friends with on Facebook, I have actual relationships with them, I'm there to interact with those specific people. Leaving Facebook without finding a decent alternative and getting those people to switch with me (which probably means they'd also have to convince their other friends to switch too) means losing contact with those people.

On Reddit and now Lemmy, I'm basically here to read articles and have conversations with strangers about those articles. I don't really form lasting relationships here, I don't recognize usernames outside of maybe 2 or 3 big names. If they weren't full of the worst kinds of idiots, trolls, bots, and scammers I could pretty much get what I'm looking for from the comment section on a news site.

Some people do build those kinds of relationships here though, they come to Reddit or Lemmy, at least in part, to interact with specific users and communities that they have some sort of connection to, and when you have connections like that, it gets pretty hard to leave that platform. Unless all of your friends leave at the same time and go to the same platform, you need to either lose some friends, split your time between the two platforms (neither of which may be as good as what you had because not everyone is there) or you have to find some other way of staying in touch and keeping the friendship going (which is often much easier said than done)

Pixel Watch adding Emergency SOS confirmation step in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I work in 911 dispatch, I'm sure there's a lot of bias involved here like the number of people who own apple watches vs pixel watches

But as far as I can tell I haven't gotten any accidental calls from a pixel watch. I have gotten countless from iphones and apple watches though.

I haven't really looked into how they work, how to trigger them, what settings you need to turn on and off, etc.

The apple devices I know play a pre-recorded message for their fall and car crash detection. I assume but don't know that pixels do the same sort of thing for these SOS activations.

Also somewhat recently apple finally added "a press 0 to end this message" feature and I can't be more grateful for that. It used to be the message kept looping until the caller turned it off, and since a lot of these calls came from old people who barely know what a cell phone is, people who were shaken up because they were in a car crash and not thinking straight, or just plain confused idiots who are trying to figure out why their watch is talking to them, trying to get them to turn it off was a fucking battle.

The accuracy of these activations, in my experience, is pretty hit or miss. We get a decent amount of them, but I don't find them to be a major issue overall. We get a call, listen for about 30 seconds, if we don't hear anything unusual we hang up and try to call them back. Send cops out to check the area, if they pick up and say there's no emergency then all's well and good. If they don't, cops go drive by and either see an emergency or don't.

Even before smart watches and crash detection were a thing, we were getting plenty of butt dials, I haven't noticed a significant uptick in that since they started rolling out, so not really anything I have a strong opinion about one way or the other.

Why are my posts being downvoted? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Couple thoughts

It's already been touched on but you posted the same pic in a few different subs in a short time frame, that can come across as spammy. Lemmy overall isn't as active as say reddit, so depending on how people browse, what they're subscribed to, etc. that could mean you're taking up a pretty big chunk of their main page which can be annoying when you're seeing the same thing a half dozen times.

Some people are just weird about NSFW posts in general and downvote it when they see it.

I'm pretty sure some people also tend to downvote clothed/bathing suit/lingerie pics in NSFW communities because they think it should only be for nudity.

I'm no art critic, but in my opinion it's just not a particularly good photo. Not that you yourself are unattractive but I just don't think it's a particularly flattering photo.

And on titsonastick, I'd argue that it's not a particularly good fit for that community. Not that your pics don't necessarily belong there in general but I don't think that picture does a great job of showing off how skinny you are vs how big your boobs are.

And finally complaining about or questioning downvotes is a pretty good way to invite assholes to downvote you more

For the record, I haven't down or upvoted any of your posts. It's not necessarily my personal taste but I don't find it egregious enough to warrant a downvote. People have different personal philosophies on how they vote, I tend to scroll past most posts and comments and only up if I find it to be particularly good or useful, I've enjoyed lots of posts that I didn't bother to upvote, and only tend to downvote outright spam, bad faith arguments, and outright racism and stuff like that, but others will vote on pretty much everything in front of them.

In some countries (such as the USA), sending encrypted communications via Amateur Radio is illegal, but how likely will the government actually enforce it, and how severe would the consequences be? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago

I'm maybe not the best person to answer but I think the general idea is that it's supposed to be an open communication for any licensed person to use and any that anyone is allowed to listen to, and it's supposed to be used exclusively for non-commercial purposes, and there's some additional regulations about who can use it and how

If you're sending encrypted transmissions, no one can tell if you're using it appropriately or not. You may be transmitting on frequencies your license doesn't give you permissions to use, you may be using it for commercial purposes, you may not be identifying properly, etc.

Radio frequencies are a somewhat limited resource. There's only so many frequencies allocated to amateur use or to different commercial uses, etc. If someone's using amateur frequencies in a way they shouldn't, they're tying up those parts of the spectrum so that properly licensed users can't use them for the purposes they're reserved for

And if they're encrypted you can't really differentiate the lawful from the unlawful users making it harder to police.

Is there anything stopping constant impeachment votes? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

it would need a majority vote to even get started

Which seems to imply that the absolute first step is for there to be a vote.

So I think OP's question is really- "Even though it's not going to go anywhere, why can't democrats just keep asking for that initial vote for different chargers to clog up the house?"

RFK Jr. says he's resigned from anti-vaccine nonprofit as he seeks nation's top health official job in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'm not at all ashamed to say I don't like needles. I'm not an overall squeamish person, blood doesn't bother, I've gotten all kinds of nasty cuts and scrapes and I just clean them up, throw some bandages on, and continue about my day. But something about needles specifically really skeeves me out. If the process was to stab me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine in there I wouldn't mind it nearly as much.

It's probably part of why I'm not great about going to the doctors for a regular physical and such, in the back of my mind I think that they're gonna find some new excuse to stick me with a needle, and I'm even worse about getting blood work done (also there's a part of me that feels really strongly that they should just be doing it as part of the physical. Surely this dude who went to medical school can handle a quick blood draw, so why should I have to go carve more time out of my life to go sit in another waiting room at LabCorp or wherever?)

That said, I can still suck it up and get my flu and COVID shots every year. Definitely helps that my work (county department of public safety) has someone come in to do it at my workplace so I can't psych myself out of scheduling an appointment, I'm gonna be there anyway so i might as well get it done.

7
Blower not blowing (lemmy.world)
 

I got in my 2007 4runner (SR5, V6, 4WD for you AutoZone types) to go to work last night and got nothing out of my vents. Made for a chilly commute to work.

I'm not mechanic but I know how to Google a problem and can generally be trusted with a wrench or screwdriver if I know what the problem is, so I narrowed it down to 2 most likely issues- bad blower motor (duh) or a bad relay.

So I came home, tapped on those parts with a tiny hammer (allegedly sometimes that works) and poked at some things with my multimeter.

It looks like I'm getting 12v at the connector to the blower motor, so am I right in thinking that's a pretty sure sign that it's the motor itself that's bad? I'd think that if my problem was the relay I wouldn't be getting anything there.

Just kind of looking for a little sanity-check, already ordered a new blower and it should arrive sometime today (prime same-day shipping is a magical thing sometimes) but should I be steeling myself for a cold drive to AutoZone to pick up a relay?

6
For anyone around eastern PA, Sunny Rest Resort has posted their 2025 Calendar (sunnyrest.com)
 

Also of note-

It's their 80 year anniversary

They've chosen not to raise their rates this year

Rates are 50% off during their "shoulder seasons" in May and September

Still kind of dipping my toes into social nudity, but I made my way there twice last year and had a great time and look forward to going back. Last year I camped out for their beer fest and came up for the day one other weekend.

For those who have strong opinions one way or the other, they do have a pretty active community of swingers, I was asked a few times if I was in "the lifestyle," but it never felt pushy and never made anything weird, and everything out in the open stayed pretty much PG except for the fact that everyone was naked.

I've heard that some of the regulars can get kind of cliquey that wasn't my experience, but I haven't been there enough to really comment on that.

Hopefully I'll see some of you around this year.

54
Another damn trump/election post (lemmy.world)
 

The other day I saw a post somewhere on Lemmy, it seems to have been taken down or at least I'm unable to find it again, by some dickwad asking, pretty clearly it bad faith, why people felt like they needed the day off from work or school after the election. It was full of him bitching about basically people being too soft if they couldn't handle their feelings being hurt and that sort of garbage. This was basically going to be my reply to that.

I work in 911 dispatch, that should tell you that I'm the kind of person who can handle stress well, i've dealt with some crazy shit both at work and in my personal life, I don't think anyone is going to claim I'm someone who's easily rattled.

And still, despite all of the things I've seen, done, heard, and been a part of, I have never felt as physically sick from stress as I did watching the election results coming in Tuesday night.

I was at work, and in the midst of it as it was becoming clear that Trump was going to win, right around 2AM, I got one of those really insane calls, the kind of thing that makes the evening news and that they make true crime TV shows out of, that normally leaves even a hardened tough guy like me a little bit shaken-up, and all I felt was relief because something finally came along to wrench my mind from the election.

I woke up the next day still feeling sick to my stomach. My wife woke up in tears. I spent the day feeling like I was lost in a fog, and by the next day the fog lifted giving way to a simmering rage that I'm not sure will ever go away entirely. Luckily Wednesday and Thursday were my scheduled days off this week, I genuinely don't think I could have worked Wednesday night feeling like I felt.

I'm an old boy scout, I took the scout motto of "be prepared" to heart, I believe that most people don't really rise to the occasion but instead they fall to their level of training, and all the other sayings and such about preparedness and self-reliance and all of that, and I've prepared myself so that I am rarely at a complete loss of what to say or do in any given situation, I have plenty of training and life experience to fall back on.

No one ever trains you how to watch democracy die.

Or how to handle something like ¾ of your country turning their back on your most deeply-held values either by actively voting against them or by not even caring enough to bother showing up to vote.

And nothing prepares you to look around you in a 911 dispatch center, surrounded by people that people are supposed to be able to trust to stand for justice, safety, law, order, security, fairness, equity, compassion, basic human decency, who are supposed to stand up for and provide assistance to vulnerable members of our community when they need it most, who like to pat themselves on the back for being the "calm voice in the night" or the "thin gold line"...

... And realizing that most of them either don't care or are actively rooting for a man who stands for the exact opposite of all of those values.

For the first time I can remember I feel well and truly lost. I tend to be the guy people turn to when they have a problem because I know how to fix it or I at least know how to find someone who can. I don't know how to fix this, and I certainly don't have a guy for this. I'm gonna keep on soldiering on until I figure it out or I guess I'll die trying, but I really don't know what my path forward from here is going to be. And if I need some time to figure this shit out. I certainly won't think less of anyone who needs the same.

And everyone deals with different kinds of stresses differently and more or less successfully than anyone else. Despite the crazy shit I've managed to deal with, there's other more mundane situations that some people can handle just fine that I can't hack. Put me in a regular office environment with reports, paperwork, deadlines and presentations, and I'd probably be burned out in a week. It's like the old saying about trying to judge a fish by its ability to climb trees.

It's ok to not be ok right now, honestly I think anyone who says they're ok right now is either faking it or a psychopath. Don't be afraid to ask for help, if you have it in you, try to check in on others to make sure they're doing ok and getting what they need too. The only way we're getting through this is together.

26
[QUESTION] What are some of your favorite spicy/super flavorful dishes? (lemmy.world)
 

Looking for some inspiration, my wife's out of town this week babysitting he grandmother with dementia, so she's been eating a lot of very bland, old-white-lady-palate-approved meals (her grandmother once described some jarred vodka sauce as being "too spicy")

We're both pretty adventurous eaters and spice-lovers, and I know it's driving her mad by now, so I figured I'd welcome her home in a couple days with a dinner full of all the biggest flavor bombs I can find

Help me light her taste buds on fire, decimated my spice cabinet, and make my toilet tremble in fear of what is to come.

10
What are your favorite upscale places to go and things to do in or around the city? (lemmy.world)
 

The wife and I have been looking for a good excuse to dress to the nines and have a fancy night out

So what do you got for me, Philly? Fancy restaurants, swanky cocktail bars, jazz clubs, the opera, black tie galas, anywhere we're not gonna be "those overdressed weirdos" if we show up in a nice suit and fancy dress.

63
Friend had a baby and is having a rough time, red does not seem to understand what "postpartum" means (lemmy.world)
 
17
[Question] best ways to freeze lunch meats and cheeses? (lemmy.world)
 

I recently got my hands on a very old but still totally serviceable full-sized deli slicer, and my local restaurant depot is very liberal about handing out day passes to anyone who walks in and asks for one, and the savings buying a whole log of meat and slicing it yourself are pretty bonkers, totally worth the pain in the ass that is breaking it down to clean when I'm done.

Of course it's just the wife and I, and 6lbs of Pastrami is a lot for us to go through before it goes bad. So far I've mostly been getting a few friends to chip in and divying up stuff between us or doing a little bartering and trading lunch meat for homemade bread and such, but I'd like to start freezing some to have on-hand.

Anyone have any experience with this to share? I have a vacuum sealer and a deep freezer to work with.

Which meats freeze well, which don't? Is it worth trying to slice it then package and freeze it in smaller portions, or should I freezer larger chunks of meat then thaw and slice it as-needed? Should I just abandon the idea of freezing and stick with the little ad hoc food co-op thing I have going?

Of particular interest to me is homemade roast beef and turkey, I'm never going back to the deli counter for those after I've been making my own (those boneless turkey roasts are amazing for this purpose, even if I'm sure there's a little meat glue involved in them)

Also cheese, I've never really contemplated freezing cheese until I found myself with a 9lb block of Swiss in my fridge. My gut says cheese doesn't do well in the freezer, but my gut has been wrong before.

I also kind of like the idea of having pretty much a lifetime supply of prosciutto in my freezer, although a quick Google search seems to tell me that prosciutto does not freeze well at all, which seems odd to me, since it's pretty low-moisture I would have thought it would freeze spectacularly well.

Besides that, anyone have any other cool ideas about what I can do with a slicer? I've already sliced down some beef to make cheesesteaks, and when I get my smoker up and running when the weather gets nicer I'm going to have a go at making my own bacon, and will probably use it to slice down beef for jerky as well.

12
My dad and sister went out shopping on black Friday one year (lemmy.world)
 

This is a true story.

My dad and sister went out shopping on black Friday one year. The went to a local mall that was of course packed. They went to drop a couple of their bags off in the car to free up their hands for more shopping. On their way back to the car, a lady who was driving around looking for a spot pulled up next to them and asked

"Are you two going out?" Hoping to nab their parking space if they were leaving.

To which my dad answered "No, we're related" earning some befuddled looks from the lady and some amused Snickers from my sister.

19
Sunflower making herself comfortable at her grandparents' house (lemmy.world)
 

Sunny is, as far as we know, a purebred Malinois, she's almost 4 years old, and is a strong contender for being the Laziest Malinois in the world (which still means she has more energy than any other dog I've ever known)

Some Malinois like to catch frisbees, run up walls, chase bad guys, parachute into hostile territory, etc. Sunny just like to wait for you to get up so she can steal your chair.

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