Being treated only as a font of knowledge, a hard worker, a reliable friend (when the friendship is otherwise not rewarding), having a lot of tools, etc, is kind of crappy. I at least get pleasure from sex. Honestly, if I had my druthers of how folks reduce me, I wouldn’t hate being valued for being good in bed.

I wonder if the friend with the truck ever feels like that.

The pain aspect is something you should address. First with your partner if their technique can be changed, and second with a few doctors. This one is like a layer cake - maybe you’re ace, maybe there is emotional context (that could be entirely unrelated to your current situation) that causes physical discomfort, or possibly there’s a physical component that your doctor might be able to help you with. Or some combination of all of them, because people are complex.

But romantic asexuality is definitely a thing, as is a number of variants within it.

You don’t message your homies at 2 am to tell them you miss them?

Until I saw your comment, my (flippant) response to the person you replied was going to be “Because Congress hasn’t figured out how to use Polymarket.”

Which is a far less eloquent corollary to your comment.

They did read my memoirs!

It’s all made up anyway!

(I thought the nose shadow was a weird mustache.)

Maybe she saw his their profile and realized she wasn’t interested after all.

In same camp of supporting the sentiment, I played this out in my head.

Okay, but what if they’re open carrying a large gun?
[Bad outcome]

Okay, what if they open carry and have a body camera (that they turn off while in the restroom, obviously)?
[Bad outcome and ignored by media - bad outcome]

Okay, what if there’s a group that’s open carrying and have body cameras?
[Bitch, did you just determine they had to form a militia to go to the bathroom away from home? Sigh.]

I don’t know the solution, other than for people to mind their own fucking business.

I’m late to this train, but I recently got into Dimension 20, and the GM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) has some incredible characters. Here’s a fitting quote from one of them:

Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?
Video source (YouTube short - sorry)

Very probable. I was also not the most economically secure back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

A long time ago, someone said something really useful to me about oversharing online:
“I would like to fuck you, but I’m afraid you’ll write about it on your LiveJournal.”

And on that day, I became a lot more selective about what I shared online. At least when it relates to others. I’ll tell you all about my childhood trauma.

Not just that, but since they nuked everyone’s pensions and started investing retirement funds into the stock market, it has become both a measure of wealth transfer, and a way to ensure that if the market tanks, the folks with more liquid stock assets could get out first! The workers with their retirement plans are limited in how much they can move assets around.

Which is to say: It’s both a measure of wealth transfer and a giant Ponzi scheme!

I’ve begun to use nonsense statements, made up words, and random vocalizations to make the bots think they couldn’t help me. That usually gets me to a human faster.

My circulation is terrible. I’ll have cold feet and hands while my core is too hot. Sometimes I will move the blanket so it’s over my feet and arms but my body is just under sheets. I need a blanket that is like a reverse vest.

That’s the dream. After years I finally got serious about learning/implementing VLANs and have begun to isolate everything out/properly firewall them. Most of the smart home stuff is already Z-Wave/Zigbee, but the few devices that aren’t are mostly already migrated onto a dedicated IOT network, as is the hubs, where only devices that have business talking to each other can even see one another.

I have yet to play with tailscale, but it’s on the list.

I like smart home stuff. I hate my privacy being invaded. It’s a very thin line to walk.

A company recently released a product that promises to be Matter compatible. By the time the product arrived, they edited their product description to say it worked with Matter if you bought their always online hub, created an account, let their hub talk to the internet, and then installed their internet-connected plugin to Home Assistant. (So it’s not that HA talks to these devices, or that it talks to their hub. It logs into the company’s servers to get the current state of the device.)

I wrote a review outlining this. An AI bot sent me a message offering me additional products from this company. (Ha!) And included the line “We strictly adhere to data protection regulations” … in the U.S?

Laughably misleading.

I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.
My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.

Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.

He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.
And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)

But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”

A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?

For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)

As we saw with his first two impeachments, impeachment is not removal. So long as the cult of personality continues to support him, so too will the Republican Party.

The problem with Gavin Newsom is they could swap him with Billy Crudup doing a bit and I wouldn’t notice.