Pretty sure they mean non-Americans who can’t vote in our elections.

Food related patterns would be pretty strong indicators for me as well, I think.

I only eat after 4pm (sometimes only from 6-10 or so) and people comment when I actually eat earlier than that, especially breakfast. I almost never use condiments or salt (I’m on a very low sodium diet and have been most of my life; I don’t use salt outside of baking, and that’s half salt). Give my dopple unsalted fries and you’ll know right away.

Drinks would work well for me as well - coffee made a very specific way, or room temp water, mostly (I actively dislike cold and hot water).

That’s ok, everyone else does that anyway :)

The middle is what relationships between the two top extremes ends up looking like, for both.

Sure but it could also be simsimulation and maybe they can play as us on a grand scale and if so they maybe can tweak the war, dissent, and natural disaster settings down a bit… you know for the sake of recovering from the fun part.

Cuz idk if you ever played simcity and set loose disasters, recovering from them suuuuucked when it got out of hand.

Men do sometimes have boobs, and women tend not to find them attractive (some do ofc) because they are a sign of a poorly maintained body.

If they were a normal feature both sexes had regardless of health, like women sort of do (tho it is still absolutely based on health and hormone levels so this is kinda disingenuous) it would probably be like nice legs or nice butts; one can appreciate nice ones but it wouldn’t be a secondary sex characteristic anymore, so neither sex would be likely to have the present level of obsession with them.

I don’t think women would be particularly concerned with breasts if men had them, too… for one thing even lesbian women don’t tend to get super giddy about breasts now because they are exposed to them a lot more readily and less sexually than men are, so they just aren’t special in any way, even if they are a lesbian’s preferred physical characteristic. This would become true for men as well re:female breasts, but more than that, I can’t really think of any male physical trait that similar numbers of women like the way men like breasts. And I doubt breasts would end up being it for women.

It’s kinda amusing if you think about it but men are absolutely obsessed with genitalia and sex in a way women just aren’t, usually, and that translates to being absolutely obsessed with one’s own penis, such that it -is- a big chunk of the male personality (for the record I’m not saying this disparagingly, I find the differences to be fascinating as a fellow ace, and just listened to a book about erectile dysfunction where this exact tendency is mentioned many time for its usefulness as a diagnostic tool to determine if ED is caused by physical or hormonal issues). And along with that obsession with their own genitalia being the obvious appendage of all their musings, comes a twin obsession with a single highly obvious female body trait, breasts.

Women just don’t operate like that at all. Maybe it’s socializing, maybe it’s inherent, but either way, I don’t think breasts on men for women (or any other trait, frankly) would or even could be like breasts on women for men. I think the problem is that male secondary sex characteristics are basically optional. Men basically get body hair, bad smells, a lump on the throat, and the ability to put on muscle more easily. Other than the Adam’s apple, which isn’t particularly prominent, none of those things are necessarily permanent. You can shave and shower and if you don’t use your muscles they fade, so men don’t have “one major trait”, like breasts, and women are thus more varied about the trait they find most attractive.

For the other questions - women shirtless normal? I mean that’s just a socializing thing. There have been cultures where women are topless just as readily as men and it’s nbd. This is entirely puritanical nonsense.

For breast cancer color - did you know pink used to be a boys color and blue girls? I see no reason the color couldn’t stay pink. But if it was a big deal for both sexes I don’t think it would ever have risen to the sort of prominance it has in society now. Breast cancer as a big deal is because of women making it a big deal because it disproportionately impacts women and men don’t tend to advocate for women’s issues. But if both sexes were impacted it would be more like lung cancer or something, just sort of non-gendered PSAs about your boobs trying to kill you.

Here’s a fun thought experiment in similar spirits.

If complex intelligent life evolved an an encrusted ocean moon (like Europa, which has liquid ocean topped by miles of ice crust, preventing any light or anything from penetrating to the depths), what would their technology look like, and what would their view of the universe be like?

The University of Wisconsin system of schools is well known for being good for the sciences, while still being state colleges, and thus more affordable for average individuals, particularly residents of the state.

However, in pursuit of profits, some of their academic hiring decisions have been…. Unfortunate. I won’t name the specific school this occurred at as the problem occurs across the board for associate+/-lecturer positions. And it occurs in most states. Education as a whole in the US has been commodified, and thus reduced.

Nope, I’m also a brown thumb due to having the attention span of a newt :) but I’m trying to figure out a way to make that tendency work anyway. Lazy indoor gardening. $10mil idea, which I’ll never profit from :)

If I can, literally everyone can (with freely available plans I’m developing! Because I like creating but the follow through… oof, nope…)

If you want to grow herbs, specifically, tho, I highly recommend water beads. You can get them on amazon for water bead blaster things, some 4x120,000 for under $10, which makes like a couple gallons of beads? They are also available at various retailers if you don’t want to support Amazon, expensive when bought for plants, cheap when bought as a toy. Go figure. You can mix your powder nutrient solution (10/10/10, with whatever additional nutrients you may need) with water, soak the beads in that water, plant the stuff in the beads, and then just sort of let it do its own thing, top it off with plain water as needed to retain the volume. If the herbs die, meh, just extract the nutrients from the beads with distilled/ro water for a day or so, let them dry, remix the nutrient and plant new ones!

You’ll get a good feel for what plants need and how lazy you can be with them. The water beads dry out as they are used up, but don’t really evaporate, so it’s a super clear sign to replenish them, with none of the disadvantage of organic soils (poor drainage, poor moisture retention, nutrient overload, etc.)

I’m planning to try the beads as a medium for strawberry rhizomes in the spring… I think they will do a decent job for some of the everbearing varieties. Or they won’t ^_.

I really need a friend who can keep a schedule so I can try my ideas… 😅

The kind who uses their platform to spread misinformation, in my experience. :)

I mean… my bachelors was largely neglectful tbh… if I didn’t know what I wanted to learn and how to learn it, it would have been nothing more than an extension of k-12.

They will let just any old shitbag teach certain credits… like my natural science 101 class, taught by a guy who bought into “organic is better”, “mindfulness will fix all your problems”, and various other pseudoscientific bullshit… such that my final essay (science is my auti special interest; I couldn’t ignore it…) was dedicated to pointing out each and every one of the pseudoscience claims he made in class which were demonstrably false (with citations). He initially gave me an A on the paper and then thought about how much I was insulting him and downgraded it to a C. That C was so worth getting. Fuck that guy. I learned more disproving his nonsense than I ever would have listening to him about anything…

But I also took a biostatistics course where the professor led by asserting creationism. Dropped that bitch right quick and complained to faculty about it (feel free to believe whatever nonsense you like, but I’m not paying tuition to hear your pet theories about thermodynamics proving creationism). Fortunately that was day two of the class, and still within time to drop. Unfortunately replacing that class fucked up my schedule for the semester big time.

And those are just two of a handful of issues with higher ed, and my school was actually one of the better for science curriculum… I started a masters program and dropped it when I got bad grades on papers for using accurate but simplified language (I’m a science communicator; using esoteric language is not something I do, even if I can easily do so. My life goal is to make science approachable for the masses, not a clusterfuck of specialized terminology that doesn’t even resemble the same term from another field)

I vote absentee, as do most of the people I know, and after 2020, none of us are mailing our ballot back. We are taking them to the in-person voting areas and dropping them off with staff.

In 2020, there were reports of ballots being dumped, and so far there have been reports of drop boxes set on fire and stuff… it’s hard to trust, because of republican stooges seeding chaos, and enough of a pain in the ass to fix if it gets messed up that we aren’t taking chances.

Edit: seeing to seeding

I wish I had easy access to fresh food like this… actually I’m a lot closer to having that now, since we actually have a real grocery store again where the one from 10 years ago closed down… for the past 10 years it was 30 min by highway to the closest, now it’s 20 min by bike (assuming being in shape for it) or 10 by car, which still isn’t super close but it’s a lot better. (The closest farmers market that isn’t just people selling junk they made is still half an hour in either direction)

My friend lives like 10 min walk from a grocery store and goes daily as a result. Gets good discounted foods and fresh produce regularly.

But I’m working on some indoor gardening systems that… might… assuming they work nearly as well as I hope… might make a difference to my tastes. (Tho I do strongly prefer veg already, and don’t eat a lot of meat. It doesn’t agree with my stomach. Tummy likes fiber.) I just got a batch of oyster mushrooms started on cardboard (because why the fuck not compost my trash into food???), and 50 radishes are sprouted for a weird attempt that probably won’t work. worth a try.

I did this with my shark(nado) bagless vacuum. :)

Mmmm you gotta do the twist break, where you push sideways on the bottom part to see if you can snap off the entire clip piece, rather than having that shitty nub left.

But if you end up with the shitty nub by accident, you gotta bite that bitch off.

In college I bought myself a 50 pack of those cuz I lose shit a lot, and that clip never lasted more than a few hours on any new pencil…

What’s up with the nose flamingo?

Its stakes go to nothing.

Is it just like… taped on or something? (VHB/silicone?)

I have a necronomicon, but it has very basic binding, and I haven’t read it.

It was a housewarming gift that made me go “the fuck mate, you want me to die and leave the house to you or what?” Which was apparently the exact right response.

Same because the only answer is “someone who hopes it’s sentient”.

I don’t have a minds eye for something to fade from, so that question doesn’t really make sense to me. I have my eyes and then when I close my eyes it’s either black or eyelid colored, nothing else, and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like. Tho I do have super-vivid visual dreams these days (which did not happen until my late 20s, but aren’t at all uncommon for people with aphantasia) and because I only have open-eye sight and these dreams that seem totally real, I frequently have to ask people if things actually happened. It’s very disconcerting, but my understanding is that dreams are not really the same as waking minds eye anyway.

Rather than a visual representation, I’ll have a verbal description ready as soon as I see an item. So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”. It probably serves the same function as a visual representation, although perhaps with a bit more required specificity. I don’t really describe things to myself unless I need to, though, so I guess my thinking is sort of abstract. I know the traits something has, and can recall them, but typically don’t explicitly list them unless I’m describing for someone else.

One perk of this is I’m great at describing things I’ve seen or made up, a downside is I’m terrible when people describe things to me. Since I’ve never seen the thing being described, it is a super arbitrary list of usually non-specific features and I don’t care at all. I skip clothing descriptions in books, for example. Don’t care. But when I describe things, even made up things, I’ll run through a list of the features it needs as a minimum to be the object for my mind, which is usually vivid detail for others, as the ball example above.

Idk if I see things differently eyes-open, I don’t really think so, but that’s always been a curiosity of mine since there’s literally no way to know what other people see. I have mild impairments as a result of not being able to visualize, like I’m largely face blind - I have to pick out specific features and traits and use the combination as identifiers. I get a ton of false positives, and almost everyone “feels familiar”. Beyond that, I’m pretty sensitive to colors and patterns. Idk.

But the -way- you ask that first question makes me curious; If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball, would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example? Do you, personally, require the visual representation to “know” the object?

Not really, but typically if I can see someone else do a motion I can self-insert the movements I’d need to make to duplicate it, so that might just be a disused function for me.

Although that’s a good question, because I do have special memory that I use for a lot of things, and it involves movement, but maybe not in the same way someone else would (eg I can count the windows in my place by simulating a walk through my house and “opening windows” like I do on nice mornings, but I often forget about out-of-the-way non-opening windows because they aren’t part of my muscle memory)

I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.

My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.

If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.