It probably depends on the music festival you’re going to but there was one I used to go to every year

It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.

And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I’m not saying that that’s a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it’s more than a lot of people normally do.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

Philly-area millennial.

Among friends and family around my age, I have probably around a dozen or so people or couples who own their homes, one of whom inherited it, and one who bought it from family for cheap

And many more than that who rent, live with their parents (who often but not always own their home) and a couple whose housing situations aren’t quite what you’d call secure but aren’t quite homeless either.

As for myself, I’m kind of caught in paperwork limbo living in a house that’s owned by my mother in law, that she’s agreed to sell to us and we’ve been given carte Blanche to do whatever we want with it, are responsible for repairs and maintenance, but actually getting shit together for a mortgage is being way more of a pain in the ass than it should for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

In my parent’s social circles, the vast majority own homes or have in some way secured some kind of long-term housing for themselves, like one who basically gets their apartment rent free by being some kind of property manager.

The pain really isn’t that bad

And at least for me, the worst parts of it are more on my sort of FUPA area, not so much on my dick and balls themselves, so for the service I get, it’s only like 3 patches around the edges that actually hurt. Might suck more if you’re planning to get more than that done, but I can’t really comment on that myself.

And again. It’s only for an instant with each rip and then it’s over, by the time you’ve flinched it’s already stopped hurting.

Lemmy (and other fediverse services) users are mostly here because we have some strong opinions about mainstream social media, and those opinions are tied closely to politics these days.

If we didn’t, we’d probably be on Reddit, xitter, Facebook, etc. instead.

And if you get a bunch of people with strong opinions about something together, there’s a good chance the conversation is going to go in that direction sooner or later.

And like others have said, everything is politics, basically every aspect of life can be tied to politics in some way.

And there is a lot of political stuff going on all around the world that everyone really should be concerned about and following, and there’s a lot to discuss about it.

And I get it, it can be exhausting. I definitely wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to pay as much attention to politics as I do.

The best thing you can do is to be active in communities you want to see have more activity. If no one’s posting the kind of “non-political” content you want to see, be the person posting it, if you build it they will come. Be the change you want to see.

In general, all Lemmy servers have the same content as every other one because they’re federated. There are some cases where instances have defederated from each other, and admins have done bans and such that I think may change what content is available to you

Also you’re on .ml, which is a pretty explicitly political instance. I don’t know all the technical details but I’m also under the impression that the mods and admins there are pretty quick to bring their ban-hammer down hard on people who disagree with them, so that could potentially be having some effect of what you’re able to see, though things are certainly looking pretty political from over here on .world too.

Get waxed, I’ve been doing it for a couple years now, worth it.

Hurts a bit when they pull it off, but not nearly as bad as you imagine, and it only hurts for an instant, not like it’s a pain that’s gonna linger around with you.

Smoother and longer-lasting than you could ever hope to manage with a razor, and no risk of cutting yourself

Depending on your skin, maybe you could have some issues with ingrown hairs, but I’m pretty sure if you’re prone to that you’re probably gonna have those issues shaving too.

My only complaint is the price, the place I’ve been going charges about $75 (+tip) for their “basic” service, which is just shaft and sack. I’m personally a really hairy dude and I feel like it would look weird for me to go beyond that and have bald patches on my crotch and ass crack, and I’m certainly not gonna spend the time and money for a full body waxing.

The full, most premium package to get all of you junk and butt waxed with all the extra goes up to something like $150 (+tip), and there’s a few options in-between so that you have a sense of the price range.

Which I do think is a pretty fair price for the service, but it’s also certainly not cheap. Personally I kind of justify it because I’ve known people who spend that much or more or haircuts about as often as I get it done, and i shave my head myself with a safety razor, so my haircut expenses are basically 0, so just kind of trading one grooming expense for another.

I usually go about a month and a half between waxings, first week or two there’s no noticeable hair regrowth, and by the 6th week I usually have about the required ¼ inch or so for waxing. Takes about a half hour for what I get done.

In some places it can be hard to find places that do it for dudes, and not all employees are trained or willing to do male waxing, so don’t ruin it for the rest of us, wash your ass and junk and don’t be a creep.

Normally 5-7 between my shirt and pants.

2 front and back pockets on my pants

The little watch pocket on jeans and such

One or two shirt pockets

Occasionally I wear cargo pants or shorts which adds 2+ more pockets

And if I’m wearing a jacket, that adds a few more. My most commonly worn jacket has 2 hip, 2 chest, and 2 inside pockets

And if I’m fishing, even I don’t know how many pockets are on my vest, pretty sure that adds a dozen or so

Wallet goes in my back left. Used to be my right but the way I sit that started to give me some sciatica issues no problem since I switched pockets. I also switched to a thinner wallet which probably helps as well but that came well after switching sides

Back right usually gets a bandana

Things move around between my front pockets a bit.

I usually carry a pocket knife and if it has a clip that gets clipped to the front right, no exceptions. If it doesn’t have a clip it could be in either front pocket, or possibly a belt pouch.

I usually have a pen on me and if my shirt doesn’t have a pocket that goes there as well.

I’ve been sporting a curly handlebar moustache for probably 15 years now, and if I’m wearing jeans or something else with a similar little watch/coin pocket, my tin of moustache wax goes there. Otherwise that tin goes into whichever pocket I find it’s rattling the least against whatever else is in that pocket.

Phone switches back and forth between my left and right front pocket, based mostly on which hand I was last using it with. If I was just aimlessly scrolling on my phone or texting someone I probably had it in my right hand so it goes in the front right. It occasionally also ends up in a jacket or shirt pocket.

If I was using it while I was doing something else, like maybe looking at a recipe while I was cooking it was probably in my left hand so it goes in that pocket.

If I have cargo pockets it sometimes ends up in one of those. One of my pairs of hiking pants has a pocket that fits it really nicely.

Keys generally get clipped to a belt loop on my right side, the case for my earbuds gets clipped on my left. Other times they end up in a jacket pocket or usually my front right pocket.

I usually carry a small notepad with me, like with the pen it preferably goes in a shirt pocket, otherwise it usually ends up in my right front, or if I have cargo pockets one of those.

I had a math professor from Nigeria

The dude spoke like 6 different languages, but when he first came to America, he barely spoke a word of English (which is how he ended up in math, numbers work the same in any language, and probably why he was really good at teaching math)

But the dude had seen some shit in his day, and we’d occasionally get some absolutely insane lore drops about armed militias and such rolling through his village, I’m pretty sure he spent some time as a child soldier, he’d occasionally get a little nervous if he heard a helicopter fly overhead, etc.

I’m glad he taught math, because like I said, he was really good at it, but man, I would have just signed up for a class to hear him talk about his life.

Different steaks for different purposes

If you’re just gonna plop a slab of meat on a plate with some potatoes and such, I’ll go ribeye any day of the week (although there are other cuts I may actually prefer truth be told)

But if I’m making maybe tacos or something, I’d probably go for the sirloin

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Besides that, I have a book of poetry that I’m not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.

I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn’t live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I’ve pieced together about them.

Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn’t a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven’t found any issues with her father.

She’s very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.

A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn’t see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn’t something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)

Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.

They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother’s insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn’t heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn’t remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like “I’m worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]” but she can’t tell me what’s supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.

I’ve given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter’s home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.

During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.

I of course had to search out what she had written.

At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn’t actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I’d pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.

Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It’s more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.

Yes, that is clearly what I meant when I used the plural form of the word “accent”

/S (because you really seem like you might need it.)

Were the actual bigots and racists so mean to you that you can’t bring yourself to face them, and so now you’re just gonna go around digging up week-old posts to make up things to get offended about so you can pretend you’re actually standing up for something?

Go find something worth actually getting offended over.

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

Probably the coolest thing since I started learning it is some of the weird places it turns up

If you read the comic series Saga, the “blue” language is Esperanto

It shows up in the background of some movies and such as a generic “foreign” language

The watch brand Movado is an Esperanto word (movement)

I’ve never dived too deep into in, but I know there has been some research into native Esperanto speakers (denaskuloj) because that’s a thing that exists

Basically none. A couple friends have learned a little bit with me, and I’ve sought out a couple Esperanto books, podcasts, etc.

But otherwise I can’t say that I’ve ever randomly run into another esperantist I could talk to, and I’m not the type of person who seeks out clubs and conventions or making friends with strangers online.

But it’s an easy language to learn, and I feel like it’s taught me how to learn a language, and I think that I’ll be better prepared if I ever decide to try picking up another language somewhere down the line.

And while I’m not holding my breath, I like the idea of an international auxiliary language, and while there’s some valid criticism of Esperanto for that purpose (like that it’s too eurocentric) it’s probably about the best option that we have right now since it already exists, there’s people who actually speak it and it doesn’t have all of the weird grammar rules and such that natural languages all tend to have.

I believe in esperanto it should be

bonvolu stakigi la seĝojn ĉe la fino de la tago

Literally translates to something like

“Please make stacked the chairs at the end of the day”

The measure of a good story isn’t in a brief description of the premise, but in the actual telling of that story. A good writer could take something mundane like putting on your socks and make a funny, interesting, or thought-provoking read out of it, and a poor writer could make the most absolutely amazing thing imaginable a slog to get through.

I see nothing glaringly wrong with the premise of your story, but it’s all of the other details you don’t want to give away and how you tell the storf that would determine whether it’s a good story or not.

So the question really is how are you as a writer?

I’m pretty sure this is at least the second time I’ve seen you asking this question somewhere on Lemmy, so at the very least you don’t seem to have a lot of confidence in your own writing abilities.

And maybe that’s warranted, maybe it’s not. I haven’t read any of your writing to be able to say, and even if I had, just because I do or do not personally like it doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad or good, it’s a matter of taste.

Start writing. Share some of what you’ve written with others and solicit criticism. Take that criticism into consideration and write some more. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the people you’re writing for (maybe it’s others, maybe it’s just yourself) are happy with what you’ve made.

The first things you write, in all honesty, probably won’t be good. As a talking dog on a children’s cartoon once told me “sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something” you gotta start somewhere, and unless you’re a rare generational talent who’s naturally gifted at writing, you’re not gonna be starting from the top.

Scrolling through your history I see a lot of “do rich people do X” kind of questions. And I feel like that’s sort of your way of doing research into this project.

And that’s good, the best stories have some aspect to them that’s grounded, that feels familiar to them in some way, that things actually could play out in real life the way it does the pages.

But remember, this is your world, your character, your story, you make the rules and while it’s good to keep things grounded in reality, it’s also good to ask “what if?” Even if there had never been a biracial drug-addicted rich-kid street-racer (based on some of the things you’ve asked) in all of recorded history, it’s your prerogative to write a book based on the concept of “but what if there was?”

A lot of your questions also make me think that you’re pretty young, or at least just don’t have a whole lot of worldly experience for one reason or another. That’s not a knock against you, that just means that you’re at a great point in your life to start building knowledge and experience about the things you want to write about. Don’t rely on Lemmy to spoon-feed you those answers go out and find them for yourself.

Read. Read absolutely everything you can stomach. Reading is probably the most absolutely important thing to learn how to write, how can you hope to write well if you don’t know what good writing looks like? Read fiction, read nonfiction, read news articles, stories, biographies, memoirs, comics, short stories, epic novels and multi-part series, read analysis and criticisms of other writing, read theory on how to write, read new works and the classics, read about philosophy, psychology, sociology, science, art, math, etc.

And think about what you want your own writing to be like, and what worked and didn’t work and why in all those things you read.

And don’t limit yourself to reading. There are stories all around us- on tv, movies, all over the internet in various forms, and most importantly real life, go do things and talk to people as much as you are able. Experience as much as you can, and think about how it all makes you feel and how you’d write about it. Talk to people who have used drugs, maybe see if there’s some kind of volunteer opportunity at a rehab clinic near you. Go to a racetrack, maybe work on your own car. Good luck finding an in to get direct access to the mega-rich, but there’s no reason you can’t try, sometimes you might be amazed at what’s possible if you just ask- there’s only about 6 or 7 degrees of separation between you and almost anyone else in the world, the odds are pretty good that you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows exactly the kind of person you want to talk to if you just care enough to chase down those connections.

Learn about black culture. Learn about Japanese culture. Learn about the experiences of biracial people. Learn about the lives of people around those people. Learn from their own perspectives and from the perspectives of outsiders looking in. Learn about the rich, learn about the poor, and all of the complex interactions between all of these different groups of people and when, where, and how they all intersect.

And again, just write. The only way to learn if a story is any good is to actually tell it.

I work in 911 dispatch, understandably once in a while I get a caller who is just absolutely losing their mind over whatever is going on that they’re calling about

And sometimes pretty much the only thing I can do to grab my callers attention and bring them back around to listening to me is to just kind of repeat sir/ma’am until I get their attention they come back around to realizing I’m trying to talk to them.

If I can get their name, I use that instead and it’s more effective, but that’s not always a given.

Just sitting there in silence until they get their shit together on their own doesn’t work, and more likely they’re going to just hang up on me.

And repeating whatever question I need answered really just kind of goes in one ear and out the other while they continue going off.

Their name or sir/ma’am is punchier, it has a way of cutting through their panic and grabbing their attention saying “you are being addressed right now and the person addressing you needs your attention”

And I really wish we had a good, gender-neutral equivalent of that. It needs to be polite and professional, and maybe a bit authoritative-sounding, so something like “dude” obviously won’t cut it.

And I need it both for trans/non-binary people, and people whose gender just isn’t clear on the phone because they’re in a panic, calling from a potato, and/or just have a somewhat ambiguous voice.

Normally I just have to pick one and go with it, and they’ll either correct me (in some cases, choosing the wrong one might actually be more effective at grabbing their attention because astonishingly (/s) people don’t enjoy being misgendered and they jump at the opportunity to correct that) or they also just roll with it.

But I’d really like to avoid that if I can, and I haven’t really found a good option for it yet.