southsamurai

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.

It used to be Google scholar. It was pretty easy to find good stuff when I was digging into it. Not sure if it’s still a reliable place though

Ahh, probably the one that gave visuals of bloat and skin slippage.

I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies (did some hospice work, ran across a suicide in the woods, and a few accidents), but I’d never seen that segment of decomp.

It’s both worse than I expected, and somehow not as bad.

Depends on your weird.

I write, so there’s a ton of stuff on decomposition, forensics, and related subject matter that are weird by some standards.

I’ve got stuff on niche mythology too, for the same reason. Along with that is stuff on modern paganism, syncretic religions, and related subjects. Again, weird by some standards.

But I tend to think the morbid stuff is what would catch most people by surprise.

Nah, it’s one of those things where I know everyone has their own way of managing relationship decisions.

It isn’t abusive, it isn’t an out of line way of responding, and it’s a reasonable boundary for a monogamous marriage. It may or may not be a boundary that everyone has, but it isn’t unreasonable.

Now, me? I’m fine with the concept. Me and my wife sometimes travel without each other, and with friends of the “opposite” sex. To us it wouldn’t be an issue. If we didn’t trust each other, we wouldn’t be married.

I might or might not be comfortable with where the resort is though. Some places just aren’t reliably safe for any tourist, much less a naked female tourist, though I doubt a reputable resort is going to be any more unsafe than any hotel in that regard. Those places tend to have decent security.

But, nah, no red flags here. Just a married couple making a decision together.

The only thing one person can do is get armed, get trained, and get ready.

Ehhh, that’s an easy thought.

But what about when your memes point to you being in a group that is now illegal, or oppressed? What if something you said a year ago is now being looked for as a sign of possible opposition?

It’s nice to think “I have nothing to hide”, and for the most part, most people don’t.

But that conversation about who’s picking the kids up from school is enough to help pin down where you’ll be at a given time, when you’ll be apart from your family, it gives an insight into family dynamics, it gives hints as to your personality, and your partner’s.

You stack that with exchanges about groceries, errands, etc, and now anyone who can get access to your measures messages can predict a lot more about you

Since fascism in particular is coming back with a vengeance, your can’t even predict what you’ll be targeted for.

Now, take all of that info, combine it with location data that’s even easier for a government to get, and you’re fucked.

Don’t forget that a woman was arrested because she helped her daughter obtain abortion pills. They got the info via Facebook, but with the messages being gone would have prevented that, or made it much harder.

This is the world we live in now. None of us are safe, none of us can rely on the rule of law. It’s rolling the dice as to what can be used against you.

Problem with that kind of stuff is having it not be currently available. You can’t just up and sell a bunch of superconducting cable without someone wondering how you got it. With precious metals, selling off small amounts won’t draw as much attention.

You can, possibly, keep your stash of platinum secret for the rest of your life, claim you made a trade or whatever. Superconducting materials take a lot more backstory to explain not only how you got any, but how you keep getting it. Unless you sell it all at once, which is still going to cause attention, and you end up with the possibility of the funds being frozen or seized.

Since nobody else even has superconducting cable at all (afaik, anyway), you could even end up in deep shit with people wanting the secret bad enough to fuck you up.

Well, the obvious and practical answer is a giant block of some kind of precious metal. Whichever one has enough value per unit of weight that it’s essentially an insane amount of wealth that can fit in a fairly small space. That way, you can have a big brick of whatever it is in your closet, chip off bits and sell them off after a little work shaping them. Gold is the obvious pick, but maybe platinum would be easier to work with in terms of turning into a sellable form.

It partially bypasses the whole thing where you have to figure out how to nicer launder big amounts at once, or worry about flooding a market. You just causing use it to supplement whatever income you have, and have that safety net as needed.

However! This ain’t a practical situation.

Let’s get a little more interesting. Ignore any of the the tricks to try and get infinite uses, that’s no fun.

I think the most fun thing would be a personal flight device that never needs fuel, and protects you from the effects of the flight. Magic carpet, jetpack, not really too hung up on the exact form as long as it’s usable without drawbacks. Like, if it’s a flying carpet, it needs something so bugs and weather aren’t messing up the flight. If it’s a flying car, it would need to be essentially radar proof unless it came with freedom to go anywhere, and could still avoid other flying things

I think what I would want the most is something that can heal though. Just fix any disease, any injury, like that. Not necessarily aging, I don’t want to live forever. I just want to be healthy while I live.

If the object could also extend the life of animals, that would be perfect. To be healthy again, and never lose another companion? That’s worth selling your soul for.

It really is a great thing. Not just for the advice, or even having people that understand intimately what you’re going though. It’s also having a space where you don’t have to pretend.

Check around. We’re up here in the Appalachians, in a rural area, so our group is essentially a tri-county thing because there’s just not enough people to maintain a group in a single county. So if someone is looking for a group, it helps to not only check for their town or county, but nearby places too.

Yeah, it’s printed out en masse. Everyone in my disability support group gets one. It basically says something along the lines of the case having been evaluated, and benefits will continue.

I gotta wonder if people that propose this kind of thing have only interacted with older people in nursing homes or something.

If you think that age is some kind of limit to long term thinking, you definitely have little or no contact with older people that aren’t impaired.

If anything, the older people I’ve been around, even the ones in nursing homes, are better at long term thinking and planning. Comparing that to coworkers, fellow students in college, you know, the 25 to 50 range of people, I’d say that increasing age gives more perspective on what long term thinking really means because they’ve already seen the consequences of previous choices.

You think age removes a vested interest in the future? Nah. Capitalism does, greed does, but age means you are more likely to have kids, and grandkids, and great grandkids. That’s the future older folks start worrying about.

You don’t have to be a narcissist just because you’re old. Why the fuck do you think that someone hitting an arbitrary age means they don’t have a concern for the future? That’s a serious question, not rhetorical. What kind of people are in your life that you think that way?

People talk shit about boomers, but I’ve sat with people of that generation, and the two before them. Sometimes on their death beds. Usually when they’re facing the specter of their mortality, even if it isn’t that close. You have no idea how rare it is for them to not worry about the world they’re leaving behind.

The whole idea of their kids having a better life was so damn central a thread of the literal boomers that it might as well be their motto. The bad, short term decision-making they did wasn’t in their sixties or seventies, it was in their twenties and thirties.

This whole concept of generation warfare, and ageist bullshit is nothing more than a smoke screen blinding us from working together in constructive ways.

Like, I get that you think this is some kind of great idea, but it shows exactly how little perspective you have. We need the experience and considered decision making that’s the hallmark of the typical “senior citizen”, just as much as we need the energy and out of the box of the young. And we need the direct, hands on per perspective of the ages in the middle that are finally seeing what their decisions have led to, and know how things are working currently to help implement the new ideas and guide the long term ideas into the future.

Seriously my homie, don’t buy into the bullshit that the politicians are actually good examples of their generations. They aren’t. They’re the power chasers, the ones that hold the system as a goal in and of itself. They’re gaining their power in a system that rewards narcissism and sociopathy with more power.

You want to change who can hold positions of power? You gotta break free of the idea that those positions are the positions we need. The more power that is vested in the people, the more checks we have on the bigger picture, the better. Just limiting the ages of the people in office only means we get younger power mongers and sociopaths tearing things apart.

Go look at the young right wing. You think they’re going to be better than the older right wing? I mean, c’mon. They aren’t any more forward thinking than their older counterparts at all. If anything they’re worse because they rush shit along and do shit so they can gain power faster.

This is just such bad thinking.

Afaik, and you can’t use crowd sourced info like this as some kind of realistic guide, it should be handled by his case worker. I’m not very familiar with cali state stuff, only what I’ve picked up talking to online support groups. But, iirc, he should get something in the mail every year telling him what, if anything, he needs to do.

My yearly letter is just a “you all set” kind of thing, but I’m east coast, so it isn’t a guarantee of anything for his state.

Best bet is to contact his case worker and ask. If he doesn’t know who that is, contact the local dss office and they’ll be able to help to some degree or another.

Ahhh, I’ve won a goodly number of things.

Back in school, me and this one girl spent years going back and forth as spelling bee winners.

Won a watermelon seed spitting contest.

Jr high, I didn’t win shit except some bad memories, but that’s off topic lol.

High school, I took a couple of weightlifting wins.

After that, as an adult, it was more hit or miss. Never anything worth money, or not enough to matter.

I am still absurdly proud of winning a biscuit cookoff at the county fair. Not even joking, I was up against old southern ladies that had been making biscuits longer than my dad had been alive. I had been working on perfecting my recipe at that point for about ten years. I won that fucking ribbon twice. It’s all about technique, how you handle the dough.

While it was kinda low key, no prizes, no ribbons, nothing physical, I won a cross school sparring session at the dojo I went to. We cross trained with several other dojos of various arts. But the guy that owned our dojo got five of those to all get together and do this big session.

Basically, you go in and you spar. Light contact only, you have to protect your training partner. But you get in the circle and you go until you tap, or someone scores a hit that would be a KO. Next person steps in when that happens. I was taking classes in both Japanese jujutsu and American kempo. This was maybe a year into things, so I was still raw as hell.

We were in three groups, beginners, intermediate and advanced. I was thrown into intermediate. I can’t recall how many of us were there total. I wanna say it was a little over a dozen in that group, plus maybe twenty in the beginners, and a handful in advanced.

Anyway, I was third in. I did the full group. Got damn close to an actual KO when an axe kick was faster than I thought. Was damn near choked or otherwise close to tapping more than I can recall. I was breathing fire and eating bitter. Like, my throat was in more pain than anything else because it doesn’t matter how well you hydrate, you’re panting and struggling so hard it gets dry in seconds. And I had to pause twice to vomit, hence eating bitter lol. I can’t recall the japanese phrase for it.

Anyway, the first two guys cycled back in, and I managed to scrape out an arm bar and a leg lock. The circle starts again, and I’m wiped. Like, my arms are rubber, I’m dizzy and can’t see straight, I’m wobbling all over the place. I don’t even remember the last two guys. But the last one got me. Basically just pushed me over lol. I had nothing left in the tank. But I was the only one in any of the groups to go a full circle.

I have no clue where it came from. I’m not exactly Mr stamina. I was a power lifter, I wasn’t built for that kind of sustained effort. I damn sure didn’t manage the feat the next meetup lol. Did well, but not running the circle well.

But! I did get my dinner and drinks paid for out of it.

Later on, as a bouncer, I got into some real fights and some of those were way less of a “win” in my mind.

About the only thing I’ve ever won that came with enough money to amount to anything was a chili cookoff. Prize was a hundred for the winner. So, you know, not a big prize or anything. This was small time stuff. I did do some other cooking stuff at a state level, but never got wins. I spent that hundred on my nephew. He wanted a guitar, and had been saving. He had found one he liked at a pawn shop, and was short something like fifty bucks. So I gave him the hundred to finish it off and get some strings or whatever.

Southern Appalachians

The damn yankees don’t realize that snow is different here. We tend to get mixed precipitation more, and even when the roads are prepared for cold weather, or can get stymied by the way we melt and freeze over time.

Snow ain’t the same everywhere, and in this neck of the woods, it tends to hide shit you can’t plan for.

Oh yeah.

It isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it really is nice. It takes getting used to, but it cuts down on the need to move to the touchpad or mouse. If you’re working in tight quarters, or have mobility issues, or hand issues, it can end up being a major improvement. It’s a ymmv thing of course, but I end up using it more than I thought I would when writing.

Neither.

IDGAF if anyone remembers, and I ain’t reminding anyone.

About the only thing I care about regarding my birthday is being allowed to nap without interruption lol.

Dammit. Now I gotta do this to fuck with my kid

Yeah, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet, and with the difficulty being reported on models I haven’t tried, I’m not willing to jump into any of the current options.

Even the pine phone I got to play around with for a few days was prone to connection issues, and that’s a bit of a dealbreaker

Kinda, yeah, though tiktok working as a short visual exchange with comments isn’t exactly the same