gasmaskaesthetic

[gasmaskaesthetic]

Leo was in my top ten possible names for the upcoming baby. Ultimately decided against it but I have no idea if this would have been a point in its favor or not.

I hope the next pope chooses a cool name at least

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@popeleoxiv

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explosive material fucks harder but tornado zone fucks better

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i saw ur garlic post and see people telling you its easy to grow and i need to tell you they are lying to you. if you want anything useable out of planted store cloves. garlic as a plant HATES competing and LOVES nutrients and full sun it needs so so so much compost and fertilizer and you need to plant it pretty far apart or itll rust early. unless you have really loose black earth you're gonna need to buy well draining soil for it. the cloves will rot if the soil is too wet or clay but if it goes a week dry itll stunt its growth amazingly. most people who say growing garlic is "easy" have beds they have already composted into. its one of those plants where if you havent already prepared a fertile compost bed for it then its going to be a very stunted plant and u will get a bulb the size of ur thumb. and sometimes even when you think you did everything right and its got a long green shoot & gave you scrapes you will pull it out of the ground and see it tricked you and never grew past grape size anyway. this plant has wronged me

normally with asks like these i would just nod and internalize the info and move on without publishing it but i can't bear the thought of this passionate wall of text being lost to the void. i didn't know garlic could inspire emotions this strong

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You joke but I knew a guy who would go around his city finding and reporting minor code violations for a few hours every day. For free. As a hobby. And then he'd go home and regale his kid with tales of his civic heroism.

He was also a long-time contributor/editor at rationalwiki

the libertarian fantasy of safety regulations existing due to sadistic enjoyment of government officials oppressing the innocent small business is kind of hilarious the more you think about it. I hope there is actually a guy out there who just fucking LOVES recalling unsafe food in a sicko sort of way. i'd respect him.

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huh, some of my Floppy Nerd symptoms go away entirely when I'm pregnant and I wonder if it's partly about increased blood volume.

Sitting cross legged keeps your blood pressure steady? I’ve run low my entire life but rarely have issues because I sit cross legged no matter what. When I do have issues it’s because I was lying down and got up way too quickly

It's kind of a joke in the dysautonomia community that we all sit like pretzels and didn't know why until we got diagnosed -- we were unknowlingly keeping our blood up in our core.

Another fun thing I learned is that jaw clenching can be attributed to subcocious vestibular regulation. This has now led to a rather chicken or egg discussion in both the vestibular and TMJ medical communities because some people believe untreated TMJ leads to vertigo, while others are arguing it's the vertigo causing the TMJ.

Bodies are neat. Confounding. But neat!

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Guys I'm pregnant again. And while this baby was definitely wanted, I cannot recommend the timing (my most recent baby will be 15 months when this little guy arrives). This first trimester has been completely miserable.

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I've only got one example of how this might play out, bc my second child is 8 months old, but I let my oldest have a lot of control over how she engaged with groups, to an extent that was frequently rather awkward. Like "letting her not come downstairs for Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family until an hour in" awkward. And "letting her hide from a specific relative every time she saw him until she got comfortable even though he was sad about it" awkward. She is now 4, has an excellent grasp of whether she can handle a group outing or not, and is usually delighted by them.

(Like seriously this kid has better self-awareness and interoception than most adults I know. I will only take partial credit here, and only for noticing that it was something I didn't want to steamroll -- she's amazing)

Future children might humble me! And I'm not gonna pretend that kids never need a nudge, or that it's impossible to accommodate them into a corner by never pushing them to do something. So YMMV. But in this case, I'm glad I took the social hits to give her that kind of autonomy. I think it paid off.

settle an argument with my mom. is it okay to let a four year old decide he doesn't feel like going to another four year old's birthday party. his stated reasons are that he likes the birthday girl very much and would love a play date with her at either her house or his house but the party would be a whole bunch of other children all at once and he doesn't really feel like doing that today. I think this is perfectly reasonable. my mother thinks that if you allow a four year old to decide not to go to a birthday party just because he doesn't feel like it, it is a slippery slope to him never attending another social gathering ever again and missing out on a lifetime of joyous social gatherings and connections and memory making just because he was allowed to not attend little delicatessa's fourth birthday one day in spring of 2025. my counterpoint is that if forcing tiny children to go to every birthday party they were invited to taught them to enjoy and appreciate parties then I would now enjoy and appreciate parties, which I do not. try to avoid making this about my own tragic personal failings as an adult non party appreciator despite all my mother's tireless efforts to raise me into a civilized human being and just tell me

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Update on the cat I got eight years ago:

She had some kind of freak accident jumping onto a wire rack to get to her favorite window spot. She caught her foot in the wiring and broke four bones, badly. After X-rays and consults with the ER vet and her normal vet, we opted for amputation. The operation was on Wednesday and she seems to be recovering very well. Her mobility is already much better than I expected; her primary complaint is the cone (we got her a more comfortable fabric one, but she still dislikes it). I've tried to explain that if she'd leave the dang incision alone she could have longer breaks, but I still haven't managed to teach her English, so. Cone.

It has been a long few weeks lol.

Personal space, kitty.

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I can smell low blood sugar tho I didn't know that's what it was until adulthood (I just knew it was a good time to suggest that my type 1 diabetic mom take me out to get Starbucks).

I can definitely smell when my kids are getting sick.

I think I can smell uh. some subset of gastrointestinal problems? and no, not because of the reasons you might think, there is a very mild body odor thing that seems to correlate with IBS and whatnot (don't worry, it's subtle enough that I've only ever smelled it on partners and family. gotta be real close).

I think it was about a month into dating my betrothed that I first turned to them and said, “You smell hungry, want to get some lunch?”

“I what? I smell hungry?”

“Yeah, like, the empty smell. Aren’t you hungry?”

They were, but it was hard for them to accept smelling a state of being. After a few weeks of me pointing it out right before they realized it themself though they asked, “What does hunger smell like?”

“Bad.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“It’s like… an emptiness that goes past the mouth? Bad breath is more upfront but hunger is like you’re smelling stomach acid, it’s all the way from an empty belly.”

They started smelling my mouth in exaggerated silly fashion but eventually they did start to recognize it.

They’re now very smug when they get to use the skill back at me and inform me that I’m hungry.

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I wonder if something like "figure out what sort of grunt work is kinda your vibe" might have been a helpful addition to this class of advice when I was younger.

they say "pick a job you love" but this doesnt mean "pick a job whose products and or aesthetics you love" kinda like how if you love piano but hate practicing it then you actually dont love piano

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thinking about anastasia trusova paintings again

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I get the criticism and imo it isn't wrong...but. in my experience, aging hippie caricature types are actually just around, they're a type of guy, they fried their brains on drugs years ago and all that's left is the trappings of the aesthetic that they're still clinging to.

if they're still functional enough, they might run a head shop or something. the guy I'm thinking of who does that still has his family constantly putting out metaphorical fires to keep him afloat. last time I talked to him he was neglecting an infected spider bite and hosting shitty jam sessions with teenagers who thought he was kind of cool.

the hippies that *really* integrated their stuff and continued to grow *don't act like that anymore in that particular way.*

but there really is just this hollowed-out Type that you stumble into now and again. casualties of the sixties except they didn't die. I'm not talking about people who are merely just obvious products of their generation. I'm talking about the sad cases.

I think they are treated like comic relief characters because otherwise it would feel like horror.

episode four of She-Ra introduces the obligatory hippy characters and they’re just as annoying as they are in Avatar and every other cartoon series that feels compelled to include them for some reason.

cartoon hippies are usually filler characters as they’re too irritating to use very often and their passive nature makes them block the plot for a while until the protagonists route around them and get on with the real business.

it feels like a weirdly reflexive and anachronistic trope to include, like jamming Scientologists or antivaxxers into the story just because everyone else is, and it makes even less sense in shows like this: the protagonist of Avatar is literally a vegetarian monk who regularly meditates and goes on spirit journeys and wrestles with his belief in peaceful coexistence vs. the need to stop a war and spends an entire episode learning from a guru how to unblock his chakras and yet somehow the show also needs hippies?? meanwhile She-Ra is literally about a bunch of rainbow sparkle princesses, so again it’s hard to make hippies stand out against that kind of background.

and it’s lazy “humour” – it’s not actually funny – which reduces hippies down to people who talk stupid and refuse to use violence, but not in a cool principled way, just in a lame stoned way, it completely fails to engage with what made hippies relevant, what they got right and what they got wrong, why the movement existed and was considered threatening beyond a tie-dye aesthetic.

a good satire, like if you really want to skewer something, requires you to understand it and to some degree even to love it, you have to at the very least engage with an idea on its own terms in order to satirise it to a degree that even its proponents can’t help but laugh.

hippies are more than just drum circles and saying “man” a lot, and if they aren’t then they’re not remotely interesting! ditch them!

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it is not good but it is fun and if you eat too much it makes your stomach hurt

One thing I've always wondered about the USA is what that spray can cheese tastes like. It's in TV shows and stuff, I assume it's real. Cheese in a spray can. Unhinged concept. Does it taste good. And if so why would anyone in the USA buy any other cheese. You can just spray the cheese onto your spaghetti and not have to grate anything. Spray the cheese into a sandwich, no cutting slices. Amazing.

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my dad (adopted) likes to tell people he has seven children and he missed all of their births.

I have a friend who has one biological and one adopted son and I found out he likes to tell people “my firstborn is six and my other child is eleven” which is hilarious.

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So like an hour ago I just lear🪨︵︵ned that— what the fuck was that. Someone just skipped a rock across my post did you see that

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being slim is logistically easier. i miss being able to rotate in bed more swiftly