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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • One of my favorite songs from Jim Croce, Rapid Roy the Stock Car Boy, has a whole verse on this!

    Rapid Roy, that stock car boy, He’s the best driver in the land He says that he learned to race a stock car By runnin’ shine outta Alabam’ Oh the demolition derby and the figure 8 Is easy money in the bank Compared to runnin’ from the man In Oklahoma City With a 500 gallon tank



  • As a short dude (5’ 0"), you give short dudes a bad name.

    You assume you know everything about everyone, you treat people like walking stereotypes instead of treating them like actual individuals, and you refuse to even consider that people are avoiding you for your personality instead of your height. All the while, you are blaming women for a problem that, even if it did exist as much as you insist, would largely be perpetuated by the men who run the clubs, not the women who can get in for free and usually just want to be left alone so they can dance with their friends.

    Are there a lot of areas where we face actual discrimination because we fall outside standard height considerations? Sure, I can think of several. None of them have to do with whether I get into a club. And you don’t make your case by using discriminatory language and being a misogynistic ass.

    I can guarantee you that your attitude is hindering your social life far more than your height. There are plenty of women who love short men, but so many of them end up needing to constantly worry about their man’s ego that they don’t think it is worth it.

    In other words: men like you, no matter the height, are the reason women choose the bear. Grow up, solve your own insecurities, and stop assuming that you know what is going through people’s minds every minute of the day.


  • While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.

    It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.




  • I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

    And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

    I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.




  • Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

    I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

    Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.



  • Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

    A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

    There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.





  • My memory for general facts. My husband has ADHD that impacts his working memory, so he is constantly losing or forgetting things. Meanwhile my brain will remember where he put down his measuring tape three weeks ago and why he left it there. I also remember thing like song lyrics, history facts, fantasy/sci fi lore, and other stuff almost indefinitely. I do not have a perfect/eidetic memory, just a very good one, according to most people.

    The downside of this is that it was cited as a main reason a psych, who agreed I met the criteria of being on the ASD spectrum, refused to give me an official diagnosis. He said that this meant I didn’t have a specific special interest, and therefore I couldn’t have autism. So now I have to find someone else who actually follows the criteria.


  • Good thing hormones are only prescribed in a minority of trans kids anyways, even though the vast majority of them do not desist as they get older. In fact, the majority of them continue on to transition as adults, and 99.5 or so percent of trans kids given just puberty blockers, much less hormones, grow to adulthood with no regrets.

    Also, before you ask, I can provide sources, but that which is declared without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, especially when the dismissal is in line with literally every major medical organization, including the World Health Organization, due to the sheer amount of clear evidence that transition is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria at any age.


  • We have more than enough resources to do both, and small companies like this are the way we prove the concept to industries for future installations ‘at the source’. Until you prove that it is a net positive, it can’t be sold, and you can’t improve on something if you’ve never actually seen the system function. We will need these systems to properly fix the climate crisis, and the sooner we start putting them to use, the faster we can improve them to the point of being able to make a difference.

    Again, I am not saying we should be doing this instead of renewable energy, just that we need to be doing both at the same time. Plenty of other companies and groups are working on wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, and other forms of renewable energy. We do need more companies presenting more ideas of how to clean the existing mess, otherwise we risk people thinking that we shouldn’t care about fixing the issue because ‘the damage is done’. That sentiment is becoming a very popular talking point among people trying to discourage climate solutions, and having examples like this showing that recovery is possible helps drive people to support faster and better solutions.