southsamurai

Man, I don’t let people take pictures of me. Not even nudes, none. I haven’t allowed anyone except my wife and the DMV to take any pics of even my face in fifteen years, and the exception was our wedding.

I’m weird, I know. Tough shit lol.

Now, I have used a camera in “bed”, but not recording. More like a mirror kind of thing, at an ex’s request. But that’s not the same as filming, imo.

As far as tying someone up, I’m actually pretty vanilla in my preferences. I don’t have any real kinks. But I’m kink friendly. I’ll play along with most things to some degree, and that includes bondage. I actually really dig bondage photography, though not on a sexual level. I just enjoy the way it ends up framing the human form in a way you can’t get without it. It’s visually compelling.

I dated this one lady, back around 2002 ish that liked being tied up, and liked being filmed or photographed. So, sometimes we’d do that, just with the understanding that I don’t do pictures of myself.

Sorry to inform you that I’m cooler ;)

They can fuck right off.

Why? Because they don’t need to know shit about you, me, or the cookie monster as long as we follow the rules.

If I wanted some random stranger to know about me for their own purposes, I’d sign up for Facebook.

Even a voluntary survey is defeating the purpose of avoiding corporate forums. Why are they gathering the data? What are they going to do with it? How can we be assured they’re destroying the data even if we are okay with their goal? Nah. It’s a step in the wrong direction for lemmy as a whole.

I like you, little dino buddy.

Fwiw, some advice for the wave of fresh r/efugees

This isn’t reddit. It looks similar, and it is similar by design. But it ain’t reddit. Hang back, lurk a while and try to absorb some of the lemmy “culture” before jumping into anything hot button at all, and be aware that lemmy is not a single thing.

Lemmy is not one big site. It’s a whole bunch of sites run by individuals and groups. On each of them, you’ll find communities (and it is communities, not subs, sublemmies, or similar). Every specific site, called an instance, may have different rules from the rest. So pay attention to where you are before jumping in all het up on a topic.

You might be on a community on dbzer0.com now, and find a community called c/paper. You might go over to sh.itjust.works and find another c/paper. This is part of how lemmy works. It is not a mistake, it is not a problem. But it is confusing. So be aware of it, and factor it in when you decide to post or comment.

Because it’s lemmy, not some corporate bullshit.

They might want it, but they don’t need it

Nah, that idea can bugger right off.

Lemmy doesn’t need a “corpus of data”. Researchers can either request that people contribute, or they can bugger right off and scrape like anyone else.

Admins don’t need demographic data at all.

40? There’s one guy with multiple accounts.

Yeah, the whole key to it is to be aware of the situation that women are in.

Position your body so that they aren’t “cornered”. No touching at all, no looming, choose your words to be an invitation rather than pressure. Part of that is making an introduction first, rather than just going for it.

Make the invitation open and honest, as well as appropriate to the venue. Include, right after the introduction, an offer to bugger off if you’re intruding.

You can do all this while still being confident, and presenting yourself in a way that matches your inner self. If you’re a bit of a show-off comedic sort, great, follow that up with some humor. If you aren’t, then stay real.

Example. You say, “hey, I’m southsamurai (well, please don’t impersonate me), is it cool if I join you?” You’re asking permission as well as initiating contact. You could go with “hey, I’m southsamurai, and I’d like to join you for a bit” if they say no, you give them a smile and walk away with a polite wave. If they agree, take a seat or whatever, and lead off with “thanks, just tell me to bugger off any time you want. So, how bout them bears?” The bears part is to gauge their awareness of the omnipresent threat of ursids, not a random example of smalltalk. If they didn’t offer a name, ask their name right after joining them; but most of the time, if they don’t offer a name, they aren’t interested and are just being polite/avoiding trouble, so be aware of that and be ready to bugger off.

As far as positive humor goes, that’s subjective for the most part. But avoid telling jokes. Seriously, no knock knocks, no gags or bits. If that’s part of who you are, great, but it’ll otherwise be one of those things where you’d be rolling the dice. You get the right roll, they’re into standard jokes, and laugh. Roll wrong, and they have to decide whether or not to laugh to make you feel better, whether or not the joke is positive and friendly or not.

The more performative you are, the more it turns into you showing off rather than treating someone like a human being first.

So, if you aren’t the sort for casual and neutral joking, don’t try to learn it. Just focus on being who you are, while showing interest.

But, the most important thing, imo, is to never reach a point where you have to wonder if you should bugger off. Do so instead. If you feel the vibe is working, offer your contact info and outright say that you’re going to head off and not impose on their time. Most of the time, if they are into you, they’ll either stop you, or make some kind of gesture like giving you their contact info, or ask if you really have to go, something like that.

The rest of the time, they haven’t decided yet, or they aren’t into you at all, and either way it’s better to just bugger off with a smile and a wave. Just, for fucks sake, don’t go around hitting on everyone around after that, even in a singles meeting group.

You don’t have to be uber handsome. You just have to be clean, smell decent (no fucking axe or cheap aftershave), and be respectful. I’m not saying that is going to make every woman love you, I’m saying that part of being attractive is putting in basic effort for your state. Looks are inherently subjective, though there are some common factors that make a big chunk of average attraction. You can’t control your features, but you can control bathing and putting together a decent outfit that matches your self.

It’s not a surprise though

Look, if you don’t include florescent black, why even bother?

Nah, don’t have to go that far.

There’s a dozen ways to inhibit, remove, or otherwise negate underlings.

Observation is a big one. Nobody is perfect. Watch, find weak links, compromise them that way. Apply social pressure from the edges, use the same tools they use if necessary: misinformation. Rumors, innuendo that weakens their position as underlings. If you do that one enough, then nobody gets trusted, it applies pressure upward as well because someone has to do the grunt work, and the higher you push that up the ladder, the more stress it places on the system.

But it all starts with knowing who it is and finding ways to move based on that, what position they hold, what ties they have that can turn into knots that bind them.

It doesn’t even take organization. It just takes people who can stay in the pocket, stay cool, and observe instead of doing stupid shit. Gather information, spread it via trusted contacts only. Hope that it reaches someone that can apply it usefully. Let a network build that way and form a good opposition from beneath.

It doesn’t have to, or even best work by, going hard. Yeah, there’s no such thing as a bloodless revolution, but you push that off as long as possible to as few targets as possible. But the way to do that is to find levers to pull, and those names are a start for that.

I mean, that’s one avenue to go.

You can’t strike at the top, not without a shit ton more resources and planning than most people have access to

But slowing it down by taking out the underlings? That’s feasible. They can’t protect everyone all the time

I’m saying that this is the end goal the right wing, particularly the general Republican party and the Christian right in particular have been working towards since Nixon. The southern strategy, combined with the oligarchs dominating the party.

Democrats have never had a good plan to oppose that, and still don’t.

Even if Kamala had won, which was never likely, it would have been someone, at some point in the next fifty years because the first Trump term stacked the supreme court, and the party pushed hard to put decisive cases up.

There’s no way the halfassed efforts that democrats have been using my entire lifetime would have prevented an eventual lock on Congress and the presidency.

Mind you, I’m fairly convinced that had kamala won, there was a plan in the works for an outright attack. Not a genuine right wing revolution scale attack, but a disruptive series of attacks on the power grid and infrastructure to sow chaos and strengthen the militarization of the police even more, get people used to marshal law, etc. But that’s impossible to prove, and unsourceable.

In a roundabout way, any democrat winning would have had exactly as much effect on their long term plans. They’ve been working at this, laying multiple options down so that as soon as opportunity rose, they could strike in one way or another.

Voting can’t fix that. Voting democrat can’t fix that for sure. There is no viable alternative party to oppose it, and there’s no time to build one, despite the feeble bullshit being tried to rebuild the democrat establishment. You can’t take a party that gives lip service to the populace, but works to maintain the status quo of corporate interests on average, and turn it into a serious engine of change.

We’re past the point of waiting four years and hoping. We were past that when Biden eked out a win. But nobody took that respite to even try and shift things.

Best advice hidden at the very end

You know, a lot of comments are bringing up voting like there was any chance of votes preventing this. A lifetime of gerrymandering, court stacking, propaganda, and general fuckery led to this, and the only question was when the religious right wing and oligarchs made their move

Voting? That’s not shit.

What matters is real change brought by real people.

The people that didn’t vote? That wasn’t all protest non participation. Voter turnout has always been low because the average person just does not care.

Which means they won’t care if the people that do care tear down the currently successful right wing revolution with a counter revolution. All you have to do is keep just enough comfort during transition, and nobody will lift a finger from that group. They will not give a flying fuck at all.

Frankly, even if they did care, they’re also the segment least able to do a damn thing about any of it. They lack the will, the training, and the functional personal motivation to do anything but hunker down and wait, even if their comfort level does drop to the bottom.

I can’t say that’s good or bad, but it is what it is.

It’s up to the people that care to make changes. Right now, the right seems to care a fuck ton more than anyone else, so they’re pulling it off.

Sorry, but you are hereby ejected from the southern naming convention panel.

As all right thinking individuals know, a critter is any non human that moves under its own power or surprises us by being alive but looking like it shouldn’t be because it doesn’t move under its own power, like yankees and coral.

A varmint is a critter you don’t want in your garden, on your farm, and may be shot on sight, like coyote, raccoons, or yankees.

Edit: you may also substitute the following corollary to the definition of critter: any living thing which Ellie May Clampett would be likely to adopt.

Yeah, I gotta echo the hassle of it.

I dunno if you had time limits or not, but if you did, and you weren’t throwing a hissy fit when the limit was up, you’d be a rare duck indeed.

It doesn’t help that gaming does turn into a form of addiction for some people, adult or not. They’ll chase that dopamine hit, well beyond what is reasonable. Hell, I know that, and I still catch myself feeling it, despite not being a dedicated gamer.

The sooner our brains start that process, the worse it can get.

Mind you, I do personally know kids that do okay with screen limits. They’ll definitely look for any opportunity to extend it, but don’t go crazy with it. The problem is that they had to learn self control to get there. And that ain’t happening at 5 for sure.

Remember, you just said “when our parents went to bed, we sneaked out of our beds” and “started playing… all night long”. C’mon, you know that’s not a healthy and well adjusted response to a reasonable parental limit. You were chasing that stimulation against your parents’ express wishes, in a way that was harmful because sleep is a vital part of brain development and overall health.

You’re relating a memory that demonstrates exactly why your brother wants to delay the bullshit. Since some kind of screen time has become essentially mandatory in some schools, he’s not even going to be able to delay it for long, but every year he does is another year that addiction to stimulation gets delayed too. Those arguments and tantrums get delayed.

Nah, it was mostly rote. But, I was reading pretty early, and my family did use a looser form of phonics with all of us. When it was a read-along, they’d point out words that didn’t fit normal phonic rules, and explain a little. Read-alongs were super frequent for us. Daily, for most of my childhood, though I kinda “graduated” into doing the reading somewhere around 3rd grade for the second wave of cousins on one side of the family.

My mom’s family runs high to dedicated readers, so it was always a thing where someone was reading something out loud to share a passage or whatever, even when it wasn’t one of the adults reading to the kids as a group. And all our parents were super into reading to us individually too.

In kindergarten, it was straight into it, no phonics involved at all. But it was still mostly group based reading. First grade, it was individual work, with vocabulary, reading, and writing as parts of the language arts section of class. No phonics, and really no sounding things out at all. My first grade teacher was sweet as all get out, but did not play around with lessons.

Well, our 2 and a half are doing well. Volunteer hen is freely expressing her opinions about the speed with which treats arrive.

The rooster is still dumb as rocks, but still my buddy.

The true pet hen has found a new friend.

My kid got a stuffed chicken with little chicks that can be zipped into cloth eggs, which can be taken out of, or shoved up the plush hen’s rear. Adorable.

Well a few days ago, my kid comes into the living room with the plushie. The real hen had not encountered it before.

Well, our glorious little sassosaur starts trilling and purring, and paying allll kinds of attention to this new “hen” in the house. Now, this hen and my kid have a rather dubious agreement going on where the hen will peck the kid until the kid does what the bird wants. Obviously, this is like negotiating with captain Pike in his beep-beep chair, only with more pecks and squawking.

After a few minutes of happy chicken noises, this hen waggles her tail, gets riiiight up on both the kid and the plush hen and settles in for a nap while doing those sweet little trills that hens do when they’re with their flock. Which, the apex predator normally does while snuggling with me, but the kid is too fidgety for that normally. But stuffed hen bridged that gap.

Since then, when she comes in for the evening, she starts looking around for her new buddy, and will peck the kid’s feet until she goes and gets the plush.

However! This newfound friendship does not extend to the little butt chicks. When those are present, no pecks are spared. They either go right back up their mom’s butt, or out of sight otherwise.