southsamurai

@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure I have anything that can help you directly. Things are looking ugly as hell right now, but it doesn’t look like most people here with a green card are going to be treated badly. At least not yet.

  But more in general, the way I’m coping is multi tiered.

  The primary is by being ready for what I can be ready for. The secondary is helping other people be as ready as they can be (though that’s a fucking minimum right now, as I’m recovering from an injury). Third is local organization and planning, which I can do while injured at least.

  Then there’s just getting on with life as best I can. I kiss my wife, hug my kid, pet my chickens, fuck around on lemmy, whatever.

  That last, that’s what I’d suggest you focus on. Nobody ever has a promise of tomorrow. You could get struck by lightning, hit by a car, whatever. Worrying about the governmental shit beyond your ability to fight it if the fight pops off is pointless. Just enjoy the now, and be prepared as best you can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, yeah, a bit of a jerk.

  It’s not the facts that matter, it’s how you deliver them. If you don’t focus on what the kid doesn’t have, and focus on what they’d have to do to make it, you’d get the same thing done.

  If you add in that they’re expected, while still under your responsibility, to also work towards a secondary goal that’s within reach without needing a ton of luck on top of talent, you set them up to both work on their dream and have a realistic fallback plan.

  Doesn’t really matter what it is, when the kid’s dream is one that they can’t make it purely by working at it, it’s our job to prepare them for the possibility of success, no matter how unlikely, as well as presenting reality.

  I partially raised a nephew years ago. He wanted to be a musician or a pro skater. Talented in both (more as a musician), but both of those fields take more than ability to make work. Even skating, which isn’t mostly about who you know and what contacts you can make, you gotta bust your ass every single day practicing like a pro does, and start competing. I explained all that, showed him how to find information for himself, and said he still had to make school his first priority until he was an adult.

  Well, turns out he didn’t actually like competing, so skating went to the wayside a year or so later.

  He started focusing more on music, and started doing small shows here and there, and liked it. But he did hit that wall where you have to not just hustle, but have the right contacts, or make them. So he switched gears like a lot of creative sorts do and got a job he thought might be interesting in the short term while he worked at music as a secondary.

  He ended up enjoying that job enough that he decided to do music more as a hobby. Still does. He still skates too, and he’s almost in his thirties now. He’s also starting his own business in the industry he liked, and went to school to get a basic business degree per my advice.

  You don’t have to ride their ass, or insist that they abandon a dream. You just have to give them the best advice you can, and let them do their thing as long as they’re meeting core necessities along the way.

  It’s even perfectly fine to tell them that there’s limits to what you’ll do and provide while they chase a dream; support doesn’t mean you have to let them stay in the basement with no actual source of self support on a practical level. It just means that you give them the room to get there if they can while also navigating regular life.

  Hell, it’s perfectly fine to be blunt about their chances of making it at whatever. Telling your kid that he’d have to reach a level of skill that would take more work than realistically possible is fine. Telling him that he’s got an incredibly long and impractical road ahead of him if he decides to try is fine. And it’s definitely fine to say that he’s got to do it on his own merits, without any nepotism or favors involved. You can even give an honest evaluation of his skills and athleticism, though you gotta be gentle with that.

  What never works is telling than that they can’t, that it’s utterly out of the question and you’ll never have their back. That’s a recipe for a kid you never get to see as an adult.

  Shit, man, who says you’re even right? Get some outside opinions on the kid’s skills if you’re going to play the heavy and be sure you’re right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Gigolo?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is likely a picture of your house on the internet.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kinda.

  You can’t actually see the house. It’s covered from above by trees, and from the road by trees and shrubberies.

  You can see the fence a little, and the roof of the shed from the road, if you pan around a little, but not the house itself.

  Which is lucky, I guess, since my sasquatch looking ass like to hang around naked on the front porch mocking the gods

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Trust me, when it comes down to chickens, the chickens always come first.

  Why? Because they are vicious little buggers, and if you try to make them wait they will eat you.

  "Oh, hello monkey, is that a treat for me in your hand? How lovely, nom nom nom. What? I took your finger with the lovely dried bug? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that an open wound in your hand for me? Nomnomnom. What? I’m not supposed to devour the flesh from your bones? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that a bone sticking out from where your finger used to be…

  You get the idea.

  So, I ban say with authority that if the egg had come first, the chicken would have eaten it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  True, true

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to seek medications for depression (in the USA), when it could be takes away for political reason?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the location and specific cause don’t actually matter.

  When deciding what, if any, medication you should take, having a reliable supply is a major factor, and that can go kerflooie even in a perfect system if something goes wrong during manufacturing.

  So, what it comes down to with depression meds, is what are the consequences of stopping cold turkey?

  Some of them, if you stop with no “weaning” period, the effects can range from mildly unpleasant all the way to lethal, though the lethality isn’t like it can be with things like beta blockers where there’s a rebound effect possible.

  So, if you’re in a situation where you’re concerned about sustained access to a medication, research it thoroughly before starting. Not all antidepressants are the same, so working with your provider to get on one that’s easier to come off of suddenly is a wise choice. Or, discuss the issue with them and see if they can arrange something in house if your access is dropped.

  Some psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health clinics can actually provide meds directly, in some cases. So you might be able to be weaned off safely at no cost or very low cost, if the worst happens.

  There’s also the option with some medications to wean yourself off if you have a supply in place to work with. It’s going to vary a lot because the type of med matters, the delivery method (as in caplets vs capsules vs pills, etc) matters, and how long you need to wean off can be longer than whatever supply you have.

  The key is to be as prepared as possible.

  With all that in mind, it should be reasonably safe to begin treatment currently. Just talk it through with your provider, and go from there

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So, sundar pinchai can be added to the list of CEOs that suck?

  Because a lot of the time, it’s weird that when the company does nasty shit, nobody names him as the head asshole in charge the way that other companies and ceos get handled.

  The dude has been in the driver’s seat for pretty much every major deterioration of Google/alphabet for years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If restaurants just microwave their food can I just get the frozen version and cut out the middle man?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, some of the foods at chains like that are made by either their own food factory, or under contract to a company that does it. I can’t tell you what chains and what foods in specific because it’s been too long since I discovered this.

  But, it means that you’ve got a couple of options.

  The most realistic is you just hope that the chain sells their stuff in grocery stores. Some do. Iirc, tgif sells a goodly number of its appetizers that way. I wanna say Applebees does too, but I don’t really pay attention to that section of the freezer aisle.

  Less realistic, but not impossible, is to check at the restaurant. Some of them will actually sell the products like that. It’s pretty rare, and you’ll pay the full retail price, but you can then take it home and heat it up yourself.

  And, sometimes, you’ll find employees stealing the stuff and selling it. No bullshit, it happens. Happens in fast food as well, for that matter. Used to know a guy that would take requests from burger king. You catch him on the right day, you could get a giant box of the whopper patties for twenty bucks. He’d just pad the waste reports over a few days, and afaik, nobody ever caught on.

  But, yeah, pre cooked chain restaurant food is usually produced in bulk at a factory, same as your typical frozen foods ata grocery store. Just with bigger packages. Have a cousin that used to work at one, though I can’t remember which chain it was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you eat shrimp shells when eating shrimp?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t, because it would require a trip to the hospital. Ain’t allergies fun?

  But they’re not exactly easy to digest anyway, and how they’re cooked matters to the people I know that do eat them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Infintevalence pretty much nailed it

  We’re country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.

  While we’re in driving distance of a good hospital, it’s a drive, not something in town. There’s just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.

  And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you’d need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.

  It’s a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don’t already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.

  It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that’ll move out

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can't wash just one hand⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Being real, this is the kind of shower thought I prefer.

  This particular one is inaccurate, but it’s still a proper shower thought; something that you might think of idly while your body is busy and your brain is on autopilot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you pronounce "centaur" and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Southeast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you pronounce "centaur" and why?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sin tar is the usual way, though it’ll sometimes come out more sin tawr, where the au is a bit more drawn out.

  Sin tore is a fairly common one.

  However, sin tar is more common, at least with what I’ve heard in meat space. That’s a fairly limited thing though, since most of the people I have talked to over my fifty years have been fellow southerners. We do tend to use softer vowels in most cases, and tar is softer than tore in the way we tend to do vowels.

  However, with the latin and Greek origins of the word, I’d argue that the tar or tawr would lean closer to that than tore, just because of similar words. When an au is present in medical terminology (which is where almost all of my latin and Greek comes from) it usually gets pronounced aw or ah, not oh.

  But, I never hear anyone pronounce the initial C as a K, and that’s the way it would have been in both of those languages originally. The Greek version is spelled with a K, when written with the usual alphabet rather than Greek. Kentauros.

  Which is an aside.

  Wikipedia lists the two I did as the usual pronunciations, fwiw. And all the dictionaries with audio options are either those two, or slight variations of them, where the au sound is rounder or flatter than the norm.

  Thing is, it’s a word in a living language. Whatever the original English pronunciation may have been, that can change, so supporting a pronunciation is kind of meaningless. What matters is consensus over time, and by location.

  So, a regional accent that sounds more like cent-ur is just as valid in that region, it just isn’t standard. So would any other variant be, if there’s enough people using it to be called a consensus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are the Roman numerals based on what your hand look like when you count?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, the roman system developed from even older systems.

  They’re tally marks, with a twist.

  You take a stick and cut a notch, that’s one. This works up to a point, and that point is 4 or 5, when it becomes unwieldy, and our brains have trouble using the groups of notches.

  So you need a new mark to denote a grouping. The v notch is basically adding a / to the already present \ or | tally mark, denoting that the new symbol represents a group of the previous ones.

  Different methods have 3 base marks, with the fourth being the new one, others do it at five.

  Roman numerals stop at 3 individual marks, and there’s no record of why. But avoiding 4 repeating symbols is consistent with the higher numerals as well.

  Basically, once you hit |||, the next number with be the | subtracted from the next higher digit. It works with IX, as well as XL, XC, etc.

  But, the idea you suggest is sometimes presented as a possible origin for the earlier systems. Thing is, other tally systems that originated separately follow the same basic concepts, without using the same V symbol, but using other cross marks. Not that it matters because nobody knows. Nobody back then passed the information along.

  It does kinda make sense, but the idea that it’s the simplest way to make marks on sticks and stones does too

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What ongoing projects are you working on?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I need to get back to it, but I’m repairing a couple of knives.

  One was my dad’s first knife. Beat all to hell, and needed the handle repaired or replaced. Decided to repair it, but finding the right size cutler’s rivets or the equivalent has been a pain. Recently found some that should work, but there’s been too many physical obstacles to me getting the work done.

  The other is a similar knife that I’m making a fancy handle for out of some stabilized cedar I had used on a folding knife a few years ago. Didn’t want the material going to waste, so I bought an old knife with a missing handle to use it on. Same deal though, every time I go to work on it, something delays me and then either the arthritis flares up, or I injure my back again lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do animals think we're cute?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem answering this is that there’s an uncrossable barrier involved.

  We can’t, at this point in time, accurately and definitively detect the internal perceptions of animals.

  We can, to a limited degree detect how their brains change during a given events. We can observe behaviors as they exist. And, it is possible to compare those to human equivalents.

  But they are, at the end of the day equivalents. There’s simply no way, at present, to ascribe human concepts to the way they think. The best we can ever say is that animals seem to respond and change in rewards ways that are similar to, or even identical to, the way humans respond to a given stimulus.

  “Cute” is a pretty vague concept to begin with, and it’s a concept that refers to a complex series of internal reactions we have to external stimuli.

  With all of that said, some animals do seem to respond to humans in a similar way we do to animals considered cute by most humans. That’s the best we can do until someone cooks up something that lets us more fully track what’s going on inside an animal’s mind.

  Thing is, mind is a concept in the first place, and it isn’t exactly defined in measurable and totally objective ways as of yet. So, we’d first have to find a way to “read” human minds before we could start to try and compare that to animal minds. So, that some seem to is likely the best answer we’ll have in our lifetimes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Lemmy only popular in the western World?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s mostly an English language forum. But there’s instances that are set up in German, and I wanna say Farsi (don’t hold me to that, I’m going off what someone else said it was). There’s communities that are Spanish and Portuguese based, though I can’t recall if there’s instances in those or not. I’ve seen Cyrillic posts and comments, though I couldn’t tell you anything more than that.

  So, it’s not totally western world, just damn near it.

  There’s a decided lack of Asian presence in years terms of instances, but there are users that have said they’re from japan, korea, and thailand (iirc).

  I’ve yet to run across anyone saying they’re from anywhere in Africa.

  South America, I’m not sure if you count as western or not, but there’s definitely some folks from Brazil, and I wanna say Venezuela? But it’s been a few months since I ran into that conversation, could have been something made me think Venezuela when it was somewhere else.

  But, tbh, lemmy started out as, and still is, a reddit offshoot. Reddit was not only predominantly western, but predominantly american in user base. Lemmy seems a little more diverse than that, and also seems to be shifting at least more European than reddit ever has been.

  I’m pulling all this from memory of seeing people talk about where they’re from, over mostly the last two years, since before the reddit debacle in 23, I maybe used lemmy a handful of times, just to keep track of how it was going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we even do mens vs womens sizes for clothes?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s part of why I shifted to baggy stuff. More comfortable, easier to shop for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With every exhale, we're smelling the inside of our lungs.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the smell of mucous membranes.

  So, the same smell as the inside of your nose and sinuses.

  Which is, essentially, the smell of slightly salty water with traces of protein. Which barely smells at all

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We unwittingly ingest each other's dead skin cells all the time. This means we all practice cannibalism on a regular basis.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Soooo, that means there’s no good reason to not lick strangers? Sweet :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we even do mens vs womens sizes for clothes?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, depending on who you ask, vanity or capitalism.

  Women’s sizes were chosen.

  Men’s sizes are typically measurements, usually waist × inseam and neck × sleeve × chest

  Women’s sizes are harder because they have a wider range of measurements needed to get a good fit. Bust size, waist size, and hip size can have different ratios to each other, even when the waist size is the same. So, Wanda might have a 20 inch waist, a 58 bust and a 36 hip measurement. But her sister June might be 20 waist, 36 bust and 58 hips. Obviously, clothing measured the way men’s is wouldn’t give as reliable a guide.

  So, way back when mass produced clothing came onto the scene with standardized sizes, something needed to be picked.

  Turns out that a size 6 sells better than a size 20, even if the actual measurements are exactly the same. Not that men’s clothing is immune from vanity capitalism, you should see the clusterduck that is XL sizing.

  But, with “dressy” clothing, mens shirts are usually going to be measured. Women’s sizing, particularly dresses and pants, they go by the fairly arbitrary numeric system based on ratios. Just don’t ask me how it was calculated originally, I never cared enough to find out.

  Thing is, while those sizes were originally meant to standardize things, that no longer works. You go get a size 6 in one store, hold it up against a size 8 from another, and they’ll be the same measurements. Why? Because they’re playing a numbers game based on vanity. Some places, a size 6 is unrecognizable as an actual size, it’s just so far off from the median.

  Also, I use size 6 a lot because it was, at one point, the “default” size for models and mannequins. I think that’s changed, but it stuck in my head, so I tend to pull it up as a baseline example. I know it’s usually what’s used for fitting models, which is a whole thing of its own. It varies a lot more nowadays for runway and catalog work though. Height is more important in catalog work afaik.

  Anyway, tangent aside, shoes are a bit more practical. Women’s feet have a slightly different set of angles, so just a toe-to-heel measure wouldn’t work exactly the same between men’s and women’s feet. I can’t recall the exact points where measurements occur to get the different sizes, but that’s what it comes down to. You have to measure the feet differently to get a good fit.

  Which is the overall why none of the clothing sizes will cross over well.

  Yeah, a men’s XL is going to fit a woman with a given bust measurement about the same as a women’s xxl (iirc, don’t hold the exact conversion as fact, I’m just pulling from memory here), but they may not fit the same.

  A men’s dress shirt is going to fit a woman horribly, even if it’s the right chest or neck diameter. It’ll be cut for a bigger waist, with longer arms. But a woman’s dress shirt will fit z better*, because that’s taken into account.

  Funnily enough, men that lift a lot of weights end up having trouble fitting men’s clothing sizes as well. You get something that fits your chest, it won’t fit your waist (unless you’re a power lifter, where you tend to see less difference between chest and waist than in bodybuilder circles), and it may not fit your neck worth a damn. Buy for the neck size, your sleeves can be baggy.

  The patterns used don’t scale up the same as the human body does as it puts on muscle. It’s still not as big of a pain in the ass as it is for women with significant differences, but it is a pain in the ass lol. I’ve never been able to buy a suit off the rack. I’ve only had a few, but they all had to be tailored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you do if you encounter a skunk?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Make plenty of sound so they aren’t startled by you coming up on them suddenly.

  If you do encounter one, step slowly away until they either run off, or you’re far enough away to change your route a little to avoid the specific skunk.

  Skunks are pretty damn versatile. Like raccoons, and possums, they adapt easily to urban and suburban settings. They’ve been in and around most cities for a long time, but you don’t know about them because they’re typically shy and avoid high traffic areas.

  If you do see one, chances are that moving to the other side of the street is plenty of space for them to not feel threatened.

  But, they don’t spray willy-nilly, so you’d likely have warning before it got that far. They’ll typically try to avoid confrontation at all, and just keep the business end pointed at you. If you aren’t coming closer, they’d much rather avoid wasting their spray.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the fuck do I find out where and when all these protests and rallies are happening?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Up to a point.

  And, when the kind of pricing protesting going on is against a fascist regime attempt, don’t you think that maybe guiding people n to avoid the corporate infrastructure is a wise thing?

  I mean, that and telling people to Google it instead of using an appropriate forum is douchey as hell

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the fuck do I find out where and when all these protests and rallies are happening?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, have you actually tried to search for shit lately? It’s a fucking mess

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some slow acting poisons?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, in a historic setting, use something readers will recognize, as well. Arsenic, Mercury, that kind of thing. They’ve been used as a poison, and have accidentally poisoned, for so long that they’re tropes of their own. Both of those in specific were available in the region you’re using.

  Plus, they’re going to be really easy to describe the actions of, and don’t require medical knowledge to understand the effects of. Well, the stuff that’s going to be useful to show on page anyway, the stuff that happens inside organs might take a little.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmy-like fediverse forum that lets you post things to your "profile"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely sounds more like a pixelfed use case.

  But, any instance can work, just communicate with the admins and make sure it’s cool, then create a community and set it to mod only posting. My cousin used to do that, and it worked fine.

  There’s a couple of communities set up like that as well.

  Generally, you won’t look like you’re spamming posts, unless you’re spamming posts. Like, set yourself a time limit between posts, and spread them out.

  or do single posts via topic on your personal C/, and include related links/media as comments the way forums did stickied posts for things. Helps keep from reposting stuff too, since you can scroll a thread easier than a C/, on most apps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What mythologies have poor representation in media, in your opinion?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And, they’re treated as a monolithic mythos, as though the myriad peoples all had the same, exact set of beliefs and entities. It’s a mess