Flowers for Algernon and FUCK NO I DID NOT LIKE IT AND WOULD NEVER HAVE CHOSEN YO WATCH IT IF NOT FORCED!!!

It is good to know that Lemmy is correct. The answers were, mostly, either maruchan or shin black, both of which are correct. the maruchan is what you pick when you are broke/ sick and aren’t sure you’ll keep anything down, and shin black is what you pick when you want good ramen not from a ramen shop. $2 USD per packet is a little steep for not sure it’s gonna sit well. I have a very picky tummy though so maybe most people have fewer issues with feeling guilty about “losing” pricy food.

I read toilet and was very confused.

Thanks!

I grew up in the farm-y outskirts of a big-ish city. I got to catch lizards and tadpoles and toads in the creek nearby, and we’d collect reeds from cattails and weave them into little mats for fun. we’d walk/bike to our friends house without parents, just yell that your going to so and so’s and off you trot. We knew the farmer who grew the sweet corn we ate all summer, and the farmers who had the peach orchard and tomato fields we’d harvest from at the end of summer to can cheap produce for the winter.
The foothills behind our neighborhood were covered with grass and shrub, spattered with bike trails and caves right up to the tree line. There were foxes and racoons that you’d need to protect your chickens from. Deer would chill in our yard in fall eating the fallen Apples from around our trees. Flocks of starlings covered our huge cottonwood trees making a huge racket and pooping everywhere. I’d take a metal baseball bat to our big metal clothesline post to make a big gong noise to scare them off cuz they were so loud.

Then a fence went up, blocking us from using the hills, and they started construction on a bunch of high end mc mansions. They filled in the caves, killed the foxes and racoons, and paved over the creek to make a walking trail. More and more deer ended up as roadkill till they stopped coming to eat the apples altogether. Developers bought out the farmers to build more houses, first the tomato fields, then the corn, and finally the peaches were ripped out and paved over. The dairy became a giant strip mall for a Staples, and a Kohl’s, a donut shop and a sandwich shop. The road I walked alongside, barefoot, to play in the creek became too busy to be safe for kids to walk next to.

In summer we’d play outside and drink from the hose till we were too hot, then we’d run inside and stand under the swamp cooler to cool down. Year after year it got hotter and hotter till the heat was too much and we couldn’t play outside for too long because the swamp cooler wasn’t enough to cool us down anymore. In winter we used to make snow men and build igloos with buckets full of snow as bricks, and we’d trample paths into the snow drifts that came up to our hips. But year after year the snow banks got shorter and shorter and the snow came later and later until… I remember the first year we had no snow till after Christmas. The decorations looked so sad and stupid sitting on brown grass instead of coated with bright snow. That’s the last year I bothered to put them up. The more people moved to the area, the thicker the smog got in the winter. All the stagnant stinky car exhaust and fumes from the refinery got caught in the bowl of the valley all winter, till the hazy air was so dense you couldn’t see the mountains that surrounded us.

The world got hotter and more full of cars and houses all while the people got more stranded inside. Yes by the lure of Internet, but also to try to escape the heat and dust and smog. New neighbors in the big houses would snap at us to get off their lawn then smile like they gave a fuck the next Sunday at church.

Neighborhoods full of community became individuals in houses.

I’m only 34.

Agreed, none of the others are balanced properly or have good flow. Number two is the only option.

Japan for a month in November! Been saving for and planning on going for the last 20 years and I’m finally going! I’m so freaking excited!

I know Japan is redoing it’s electrical system to have no overhead lines of any kind so when earthquakes hit there’s not live electrical lines dropping on people.
Either way the point isn’t that this specific house is or isn’t a shit hole, it’s the idea that any house sold for so cheap must inherently be a shit hole. It might be, but the situation in Japan is different than the situation here because of aforementioned population decline and condensation into cities. There are many challenges to buying a home in another country not least of which in Japan is gaining the right to live there permanently, but as long as you do the work to ensure you know what you’re buying and that you can live there safely and legally once whatever works needs done is done, there’s no reason to assume a home like that in Japan is 100% a shit hole by nature. Especially since technology has advanced to the point that power and telecommunications don’t require a direct line anymore to be effective and affordable. Solar power and wireless communication is only getting better and better. Again, I’m not saying that house specifically couldn’t be a shit hole, I’m saying that in Japan specifically there’s no reason to automatically assume it is one. It will have problems but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be worth it if you did your research.

The interesting part about a bunch of the homes in more rural Japan is that they’re not actually condemned or shit holes. They’re old and would definitely need some love and attention but their population hasn’t been at replacement levels for a long time and people would rather live in a big city where they have access to all of the things so slowly and steadily the outer Fringe population areas in Japan have ben getting more and more empty leaving perfectly good houses to sit vacant for years. That’s not to say that there aren’t shit holes that aren’t worth the time it takes to go see them but a large portion of them are actually quite nice.

I don’t know about a metal cord protector but here’s a different solution just in case it doesn’t exist. when my cat wouldn’t stop chewing on cables, I got bitter apple spray, collected all the cables in my house, put them all in my bathtub and sprayed them all very liberally with this bitter apple spray, let them dry then plugged everything back in. Now the only time I have a cable get chewed through is when I just got something and I forget to spray it cuz I guess she still tests them just to be sure they taste awful. And believe me, it tastes awful. I highly recommend wearing disposable gloves while handling the stuff, especially while it’s wet and then washing the bathtub and your hands thoroughly once the cables are dry and back where they go. Blegh!

Here’s a would you rather! Would you rather have him be your massage therapist or be his massage therapist? No shaving or trimming or waxing is allowed in either case. If he’s your massage therapist he does a full body good deep tissue massage using forearms, fists, elbows, whatever tools need used to get the job done, not just the palms of his hands. If you’re his massage therapist, yes his body hair is long enough to accidentally tie in knots. What do you choose!?!

If it can be abstract I would snap away the acceptance of hierarchy as a method of social control, like historically speaking go back to the first people who decided that there should be a person in charge of all the things and have the people say “Naw, that’s fucked” and then that just not happen. Not that the idea of hierarchy not be in existence at all, because I think it would be more effective to have people recognize that it’s bullshit and intentionally build societies antithetical to hierarchy rather than to have society’s that are ignorant of its potential harm.

If it had to be a tangible thing that I could physically dissolve… Parasites? Would all parasites count or is that too broad? Cuz if we got rid of fleas and leeches and mosquitoes and ticks that would wipe out huge swaths of vectors of disease transmission. No black plague, no zika, no dengue fever. If we wanted to expand the definition of parasites even broader than the the bourgeoisie class might be included but I wouldn’t want to get my hopes up. XD

I theorize that it’s somehow based on skin undertone? Maybe? Just by my very limited personal experience, me and my mother have Olive tone skin and we get left alone and my dad and my other three sisters have pink toned skin and get devoured and I’ve seen that pattern play out in about 20 of my close acquaintances as well. I don’t know why that would possibly cause any sort of change besides maybe there’s some chemical makeup in olive tone skin that smells bad to mosquitoes? I don’t know, but me and my Olive friends seem to get left alone and the pink babies get munched.

Claire__ Saffitz x Dessert Person

Baker/ pastry chef that makes all sorts of tasty treats. Content is largely educational giving you tips and tricks on what she’s doing and why so you can replicate her recipe more easily.

Binging with Babish

Started out as one dude recreating food from films and shows and has expanded to having a dedicated anime food creator, doing fun food mashups for sports things, redoing episodes that he messed up on, and still doing food from films and shows.

Cheese and rice. Got me good.

At a time or total?

Played in the creek (pronounced crik), caught pollywogs and toads and snakes. Walked barefoot to the farm down the street to buy sweet corn. Heard stories about my uncles finding dynamite in a cave near the railroad and bringing it home and passing it around at school before the fire department confiscated it all as well as stories of my great grandma holding my great grandpa at shotgun point till he did the chore he’d said he’d get to months before. I remember the internet screaming at me when I picked up the home phone. My dad’s first cell phone was a Nokia brick. The first Galaxy smart phone came out the year I graduated highschool.

I stopped being so upset by it once I started examining social systems and propaganda. If you’ve been conditioned your whole life to think of women as weaker and smaller and someone to be protected to maintain your “manly state”, someone who doesn’t fit that mold is a threat to your subconscious sense of self worth. Same for women who don’t want to date shorter men, “if I’m not the property of someone who’s the biggest and the strongest, I’m worth less to this society.”
‘Society’ thinks men who are smaller than their woman are weak, and that the woman must be defective or she’d be with someone who ‘fits’ better. They’re dead wrong, but that’s the unexamined subconscious judgement that our society has conditioned into people. It’s easy to be less upset with individual people when you realize they just haven’t had the space to examine the abusive systems they’re forced to exist within.

Yay! I’m glad it helped. X) As to the faces, I use Gboard and there’s a ASCII art library in the list of emoji/gif options. It’s quite entertaining. (⁠_{⁠￣⁠³⁠￣⁠)⁠} ⊂⁠(⁠・⁠﹏⁠・⁠⊂⁠) ᕦ⁠(⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠)⁠ᕤ (⁠ノ⁠｀⁠Д⁠´⁠)⁠ノ⁠彡⁠┻⁠━⁠┻