One time I got struck by a car while on foot. It flipped me over the top and broke a few things, including cracking a vertebrae in my neck. The fucker driving probably thought they killed me because they hit the gas right afterwards and sped away.

When the ambulance came I tried to argue against getting in it. Told them I’d drive myself if I didn’t feel better after a night. It’s hard to argue when you’re all twisted up on the ground, tho. Anyway, that EMS wasn’t having any of my shit.

On the gurney I went and off to the most expensive 1 mile trip of my life.

Me, dead inside at my boring ass job, watching people living out their best lives.

I can drink a lot of beer and I can drink a lot of apple juice, but I can only drink a couple of ciders before I am done.

Did you grow up in a renfair? 😛 I never even met anyone who had ever drank mead until I was in my late 20s and hanging out with DnD nerds.

Since the 1970s, in the US beer consumption has steadily gone down 20%, wine up 40%, spirits took a deep dip but came up to 105%.

Growing up I definitely had friends that very quickly switched to mixers as soon as they could or wouldn’t drink beer but I’d say, as a whole, a general trend, less people in today’s times have grown up with bitter profiles being a necessary part of their imbibing, be it alcohol or caffeine, so when they do get that first sip of some old skunk beer they understandably recoil. Since they have no reason to continue drinking it when there’s a Mike’s or White Claw next to them… that’s that. I hear way more people say they don’t like the taste than I did 20 years ago. But it’s just a pet theory, might be other factors going on, too.

You’re on to something about choosing flavor profiles though. After about a year or two drinking sugary creamy coffee I gradually switched to black. I like the flavor, as well as dark chocolate and stout beers. I think some people are wired for it, like in the examples you provided. Interestingly, I’m not super crazy about sour, and I’ve met a few people who absolutely love it. Candies, drinks, etc.

I have a working theory that the availability of sweeteners has altered drinking preferences over generations.

When I was growing up everybody drank coffee and beer (and smoked cigarettes, which is probably a little related but a different story).

Coffee and tea were the only feasible way to get caffeine. Sure, cream and sugar was available and used, but as you get more acclimated to the taste you can forgo the stuff and just drink it black.

Likewise, beer is what you had. That was it. There were no sweetened alcoholic drinks in the can or 12 oz bottle form. With the exception of wine coolers but that was marketed more towards older women. And those usually only came in 4 packs. You could do wine or hard liquor with a mixer, but that was expensive and/or likely to get you hammered too quickly. If you wanted affordable casual drinking with friends you were drinking beer. And there weren’t even craft beers or microbrewers, just watery chilled donkey piss like Budweiser, Coors, etc.

Most people who started drinking did so with beer. By the time you had a year of sneaking beers with your buddies you were already used to the taste. Hell, I remember when Zima came out and it was a big deal (it was one of the first widely available easy to drink sweetend adult beverages, probably malt, I would guess).

And weed wasn’t common either, except in very secretive circles, so if you wanted a buzz, you were drinking.

Anyway, now you’ve got a whole cornucopia of alcoholic drinks that are easy to sip, caffeine that tastse like a soda, and vapes that taste like candy.

Nobody has to ever acquire a taste for bitter things again.

How old are you? (this is a legit question, not trying to judge or anything). Do you drink coffee? If so, how do you like it?

At this point I think the only way forward is for enough like-minded people to sort of stake their claim on some semi-walled off portion of the internet and greatly limit access from swaths of IP addresses.

Sort of like web rings 2.0. Everyone, or enough people, will have to chip in on costs and provide either money or hardware.

There will have to be some sort of regulatory body with voting members.

To be ‘in’ the site has to abide by certain advertising restrictions and privacy agreements.

A decent use (finally) for llms would be to audit the private index and remove slop. I think we’re just at the beginning of what will be a resource hogging AI arms race.

It’s sort of what we’ve been trying to avoid since the beginning but it seems inevitable at this point.

Plot twist, you absorb each other’s souls when you marry them and move into their lair. An enemy to lovers rom-com of the ages.

Yes, you need to rub it in. Pretty deep, actually. You’re not getting pregnant because it’s all over your back, or belly, probably. Hope that helps.

I don’t believe this at all. Sounds like more guerrilla marketing disguised as news.

If only we (the collective users) spent more time creating a framework and vision of how the Internet should develop and aggressively pushed back on attempts to deviate from it…

When the people refuse to convene a governing body with teeth, the vacuum is filled with opportunists.

In a sense we are suffering from our own success. A place where anybody can build anything they want digitally. Left a ripe field for unrestrained commercial interests to infest the whole thing. Now it is bloated with human and AI slop to such a degree it smothers everything else and every major tech push is tuned towards data scraping every morsel.

Correct.

To get closer to the gist of your original comment…

Any hang ups you have about being intimate with another person will largely vanish once you get a little practice.

Sex and intimacy is a skill, not just in the physical sense but in the vibe building sense. Don’t worry, you’re going to fuck it up a bunch before it starts to come together.

If you’re afraid you’re going to slip up and do something that will turn him or her off… you will, lol. But in the end it’ll be fine.

There is tremendous power in being able to choose your role. Masculine, feminine, non denominational, ha ha. Rough and tough, suave and sensual? Master, sub, equals? You want to be the daddy? Or you want to be mommied? You want to cry a little in their arms? You want to take them to heights of pleasure never felt before? You want to have a spiritual moment with them? These are all just variations, themes, props, you can pick up and play with. You don’t have to be any one thing.

And, if you find that you actually do trend towards the effeminate, there are plenty of women who find that cute, too.

It doesn’t matter. At the end of a life you want to be able to say you got to experience it all. Leave nothing on the table.

Alright, I’ll bite.

My young friend, I’ll tell you this: it’s perfectly fine to be exactly as you are. As long as you’re not hurting anyone with your behavior, you are free to express yourself in any way you like. Be who you want to be and how you want that to look like and you’ll gain the respect of others and yourself for living with authenticity.

The ideas and labels and history we have about ourselves, whether we are worthy of love or not, if we’re good enough or not, are largely illusionary anyway. They can be very persistent but in the end they are as malleable and ephemeral as any concept. Smoke and mirrors of the mind. You can let these conceptions of yourself lead you through a maze of confusion, twisting this way and that, your whole life, or you can abandon them, climb over the walls of this self constructed maze and be free now.

I guarantee that no matter what you’re into, how you present yourself, there is somebody out there that is into it. Don’t worry about what some broad spectrum of people might or might not like about you. Instead, judge each situation as it arises and attend to the specifics of that interaction.

When you are younger, you have little personal data collected about life to go off of. As a result, a lot of theories about people and the world are based on idealism, stereotypes and cultural biases and generalisms rather than first hand experience. The reality is that things are not these caricatures that are formed by our grasping minds but way more varied and nuanced.

Sure, there are superficial people in the world, a lot of them, in fact, depending on how their day is going, and you may not be their cup of tea. But over all you’ll find that people care way less about you (both in a positive and negative sense) and way more about how you make them feel. All the facts about you are very insubstantial compared to the impact you have on their esteem in your relationships with others.

One of the best developments in my life came when I stopped trying so hard to be a certain person or present myself in a certain way. It seems like the way to success is to be a certain way. I was afraid if I wasn’t manly or tough enough that I wouldn’t gain others’ respect or it would open me up to being attacked. Like you, I had some real life experiences that reinforced this perception. I have lived through certain situations where weakness absolutely would invite the wrong attention from very monstrous people. It very much was a matter of personal safety to be intimidating and to correct other people’s opinions on that if they didn’t agree. And later that bled into relationships with others. Our entire world view is shaped by key moments in our upbringing. So I thought I had to be a certain way and spent a large chunk of life not feeling I could be any other way. With guys, as well as being macho, or at least without weakness, when dealing with women, too. It was a waste of a life.

But the world is not your abusive upbringing, or a prison, or a reality island dating show, or any other artificial environment. It is vast and varied and filled with people who do not make up a monolith, and you can’t please or impress them all. Or even the majority. It’s much easier to just be you. Accept others as you would like for yourself and don’t cast your pearls before swine. It’s important to see the world as it is rather than assuming it is because for survivors of abuse their perceptions are often biased very heavily towards negativity. So stay in therapy.

And one last note about women. While it certainly helps to be… flexible with how you come across with image, and interpersonal vibes, and handling relationships, on the whole most women care way more about you being someone they feel safe with, someone they trust but aren’t bored by, than anything else. There are some vague universalities about attraction, but rarely are they absolute or limited to just one thing. For every woman who likes one type of guy, there is another woman that likes something entirely different. And, on the whole, women are way more accepting of variety and their criteria for attraction is different than men’s. A lady might be attracted to the manly man neighbor who chats her up while working on his motorcycle and then later her eye turns towards the the gentle warm guy serving her coffee who always has a smile and joke for her.

What ever role you want to play, there is a woman who will go on that journey with you provided you treat her the way she wants to be treated.

In short: You are exactly who you need to be right now. You can always improve how you navigate life but the quality of who you are is exactly right, right now. So just be at ease with that fact. You are worthy, good hearted, and a lovable person. Don’t ever forget that.

Edit: I’m going to leave this comment here because it’s funny, but after a little exchange I have given him the benefit of the doubt.

What do I really think?

You’re fishing for good wank material for some sub/sissy/humiliation kink and you find the whole range of responses from this section more intoxicating due to authenticity of the replies, potential for heated or derisive exchanges, and the thrill of being sneaky about it. As compared to just posting in some nsfw fanfic/roleplay, obviously.

In a few weeks you’ll probably ask a related question in a different section.

I’ll check them out, thanks

Sheesh, the description sounds like a Behind the Bastards episode.

Can’t wait to give it a listen. Thanks

I’ll have to check that out. Thanks

The Y.

Wow, what a great site. I like the cut of this guy’s jib.

Yep