It’s more of a public speaker thing than just a politician thing, but… Well, politicians are all public speakers, so it makes sense that that’s the context you’ve seen it in.

It’s literally a practiced gesture - public speaking makes use of some gestures that telegraph well to crowds, but seem unusual otherwise. IIRC, that fishing rod grip is an alternative to gesturing with a fist - it looks less aggressive, but gets the point across.

Holy shit, I learned something from Lemmy Shitpost!

Honestly though, one of these has been draped over a fence in my neighborhood for like a week, and I’ve been wondering what it was.

I had a military history professor, and he felt the same way. He opened his entry level classes with a speech that amounted to “nobody should be here because they want to work in military history. ROTC kids and military buffs only; all you can do with what this class covers is teach this class, and this lecture hall has as many students in it as there are jobs in this field.”

all those chilly willies

Yeah, I heard the weather was pretty bad this year. Ngl, though, I feel feel like my fragile sense of masculinity would be much more threatened by a bunch of massive flopping songs on a hot day, than it would be by a bunch of tiny chilly willies on a cold day.

…Hold up. Poor/middle class guys with small schlongs drive huge trucks and loud cars. Does this mean that rich guys with tiny tallywhackers go into politics?

I mean… Honestly, I could probably afford it better now: the insurance at my old job suuuuuucked, and barely covered any of it. I’ve got slightly better insurance now, and noticeably better pay, so affording therapy wouldn’t be an issue. It’s also definitely a good idea - I’ve been toying with the idea of going back, since it’s been helpful to me in the past.

The issue would just be figuring out what to tell my wife. I don’t really want to tell her that I’m going back to therapy because of how it ended up last time; but I doubt that “oh, sorry I wasn’t available for the past hour, the reason why is none of your business” would lead to a less severe reaction.

Yeah, ngl, I’m kinda curious about the strudel now.

Like, if it’s good, cool - now I have someone else’s old family recipe for strudel, the origins of which I will refuse to elaborate on.

But if it’s bad, then it’s hilarious that they wrote a fluff piece on the Goebbels family, but included a recipe that would make people hate them again. "This strudel is shit! Fuck this magazine, fuck Goebbels, and fuck this terrible dessert!"

Not as such, no. In a lot of ways, she’s a great person, and I do genuinely want to be with her… But damn, she’s absolutely terrible at judging how her actions will affect others.

My tale is also lacking a bit of context: she’s mildly immunocompromised, and she moved back with her (much more immunocompromised) family in 2020 to take care of them through the pandemic. I spent that year living completely alone… And, with nothing but myself and my shit-ass job, I was honestly doing worse than ever.

When she moved back in 2021, she did a lot to help me. In fact, she’s actually the one that suggested that I try therapy, and it really did help a lot. She encouraged me to apply for jobs again, and supported me through a bunch of rejections… Honestly, at the time, the only thing that I would have complained about to my therapist was how six months into therapy, she started assuming that I had been complaining about her the whole time.

And to be really honest, if it weren’t for that, I don’t think I’d be saying all of this right now. She pushed me away from therapy because she felt nervous and insecure, but if I’d stayed in therapy, I would have had someone to talk to about the whole cat situation. Instead, I took the easy way out and dropped therapy, which left me feeling kind of isolated when we adopted and gave up the cat… And that just kind of snowballed.

Looks fantastic!

Yeahhhh… I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I’m spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!

It’s because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that’s really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.

Idk about that…

When you practice something, you’re actively changing your technique to elicit better results. You’re not making huge changes, but rather a series of miniscule ones that add up.

For instance, I could sit down with a flute and a piece of music, and play it decently. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible. If I play it the same way every time, it’s always going to sound decent - but it’s always going to have the same wrong notes, the same rushed passages, the same intonation issues… If I practice it, I can make changes over time that fix those things. I can fix my fingerings, even out the rushed bits, adjust my intonation… But then I wouldn’t be doing the same thing anymore, I’d be doing something slightly different.

Some (but not very much) of the bullshit they ramble on about is in there, but it’s not in the important part.

All of the fire and brimstone, Sodom & Gomorrah, “I am a vengeful god” shit is in the Old Testament. Sure, the Old Testament is important (it’s like half of the book, after all), but it’s important as backstory. It’s literally just the Torah in a different order, included because Christianity started as a breakaway sect of Judaism.

The part that actually pertains directly to Christianity starts with a list of “begats,” some very confused shepherds, and a barn baby getting presents. The New Testament is mostly about helping others and being tolerant; and the star of the show, Jesus, literally goes around telling people that they can get into heaven just by being nice and helping the needy. He gets angry exactly once, and goes on a table-flipping rampage because someone else was taking advantage of poor pilgrims. It’s the kind of thing that a lot of the Christian Right would call “hippie bullshit,” but it’s also the entire point of their religion.

Well, yeah - before you’re born, they want you have a life; after, they tell you to get a life and quit whining. Sounds pretty “pro-life” to me!

(/s, because tone doesn’t carry well in text)

Sorry if I was unclear - he moved to not hold a vote on whether we should become Open & Affirming for ten years, and the vote on that passed.

By tabling it for ten years, they avoided having to put “ALSO, STILL NOT OFFICIALLY COOL WITH GAY PEOPLE” in the annual report every year. No matter how nice and supportive folks actually were, having to reiterate that we weren’t Open & Affirming made us seem… Well, Closed & Disparaging, like the Catholics down the street.

I actually asked the guy about it a few years later, when I was old enough to actually pay attention to the annual meetings - he said he was pretty sure that the old lady didn’t have ten more years left, and he wanted to make sure that it passed the next time that it was voted on.

I mean… He’s not wrong. I grew up in a fairly relaxed Christian church, where the emphasis was on the part of the Bible where Jesus says “don’t be a douchebag,” and “wait for them to die” was something they actually did.

For context, it wasn’t about anything bad. When I was a kid, the church kept voting on if they wanted to be Open & Affirming (basically just taking an official positive stance on lgbtq folks). The church was already lower case open and affirming - the minister’s son was gay, as was the organist, and everyone was cool with it - but they needed a majority vote to become upper case Open & Affirming. Every year, one bigoted old lady who only came to church on Christmas and Easter would get all of her friends to vote against it, and every year it would get voted down.

The organist got tired of it, and he left. The next year, the minister went too. The year after that, when it got voted down, an old man near the front stood up and called out that he wanted to move to vote on tabling the issue for ten years. His wife quickly seconded, and the council held the vote… Overwhelming yes.

For the next decade, the lgbtq crowd in the congregation actually slowly grew: the church’s official stance was always quietly avoided, and the old lady was never there to make them feel unwelcome… Speaking of whom, her poorly-attended funeral was held about eight years later, and her friends stopped coming to the annual meetings.

When the issue of becoming Open & Affirming was raised again, it passed by a wide margin.

Training isn’t a bad option, though, especially since some jobs will pay you for it. Some trades do paid apprenticeships - the pay isn’t great, but it’s better than paying for training.

Alternately, manufacturing jobs can be pretty good. I had a friend who got a job working in a factory right out of high school - he started at $20/hour, with a sizeable raise after the first year.

You mentioned that the house is a century old - I’m assuming it was built as a single dwelling, and subdivided later.

If that’s the case, my best guess is that the basement had a problem with flooding during bad weather, so they busted holes in existing drainage pipes to allow water to drain from the basement. The leaky walls were most likely sealed when it was converted to an apartment, but… Well, drains drains are great until they back up - I would be concerned about water coming up through them in particularly bad weather.

So, uh… We have the same thermostat at my job. It’s not great. You can’t just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says “heat.” Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.

What if the concern wasn’t that he would have to use a disgusting bathroom, but rather that he takes horrible shits and didn’t want someone to know?

I mean, I’d certainly be embarrassed to have to tell the internet something like “I’m visiting my in-laws for a few days, and I really want them to like me. The problem is that I shit like a farm animal, and they only have one bathroom.”

It was more the lack of an explanation that hooked people, rather than just the not pooping - IIRC, we never ended up getting any real explanation for why this guy needed to not poop for a week.

It was honestly pretty great, people came up with everything from “he’s smuggling himself internationally in a shipping container” to “he’s determined to be the winner in a really weird Mr Beast video” to “he’s giving up on society to live with the sloths” before it started to turn into kind of a circle-jerk.

And of course, suggestions for stopping the poop included butt plugs, eating only cheese, butt plugs, a liquid diet, and more butt plugs.