Bel Throat, a condition of the larynx where the sufferer is unable to speak because of nervousness/anxiety. Often suffered by brides and grooms at the altar.

I was on a leash as a kid in the early '80s 😂 I forgot all about it until I saw this post. It was just when we were out shopping or something, it wasn’t like I was tethered to a post in the back garden. But honestly, a leash on young toddlers just seems like a good idea to me, especially if you have 2 or more kids and you’re all out together. Lots of tragedies could have been avoided if little Willy and his new superpower of self-determined locomotion wasn’t able to suddenly take a sharp 45° turn and sprint headlong into oncoming traffic. Abductions would be a lot harder to pull off, too. Thinking of James Bulger, specifically 😔

I also think it’s way nicer/less “abusive” than placing the kid in a buggy/stroller and wheeling their grumpy asses around like yer bell-ringing fella from Breaking Bad. They have zero freedom in that case, whereas on a leash they can at least walk around a bit and expend some of that crazy fizzy energy.

they do if u kiss me

Lower res, for sure. Modern GPUs/drivers and some media players can do a decent job of making them a bit nicer to look at ‘on-the-fly’, too.

On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.

Knowing my luck, probably cancer.

Is the water just a funky visual thing, or is it serving some purpose? Weight modifier? Palm-cooling?? Miniature sea-monkey aquarium???🤔

The moon, or just into space where I can float around and see Earth from a good distance.

Do you remember being a very young kid, of maybe 4 or 5-years-old, and riding your bike without stabilisers for the first time? Riding around your neighbourhood with that feeling of limitless time and seemingly bottomless reservoirs of pure joy? Or the first time you played a video game? Or the first time you went to the cinema? Basically any fun and novel experience. You could almost physically feel the birthing neurons branching through your brain in real-time like orgasmic, electrified roots. The joy of simply having your consciousness come ‘online’ more and more.

Well, I’m in my early 40s now, and I haven’t felt that way since I was that very young child. But I don’t think it’s because I’m too jaded to enjoy things anymore, it’s that I’ve experienced almost everything there is to experience in a normal everyday life, and there’s not much left that is so new and shocking to my consciousness that it will trigger that magical experience again. And so there is no further branching of neurons and no further giddy joy at simply doing something hitherto completely foreign to my brain.

I think visiting space, and especially landing on the moon, would give me that feeling again. It would be the last truly novel experience I definitely have not felt before, and it’s not one that I can sorta kinda experience vicariously. I mean, I’ve never killed anyone, but I know what an abyss of unquenchable guilt feels like, I know what the terror of being caught after doing something bad feels like, I know what it feels like to be so haunted by trauma that I have nightmares about it for years after. So I can just extrapolate from that and get a general idea of what it must be like to have done something that awful. My imagination can conjure up those sorts of ideas if I want it to, and while I won’t get 100% of the way there, I can create a ballpark estimation of it. But going into space - leaving everything and everyone who has ever existed behind - and being somewhere so literally alien to my evolved senses, that’s not something I can get a handle on just using my imagination.

I could be wrong of course, and going into space might simply be like visiting another country in the shittiest, most cramped Ryanair flight imaginable, but it’s the only thing I think has the most chance of giving me one last brain-bukkake before I clock out.

Shame it’ll never happen 🤷‍ Maybe I’ll start a twitter account sucking Elon’s fetid little dick and he’ll invite me to use one of his rockets one day. Then while I’m in space, I’ll take out a trans flag and play a shitty cover of Nazi Punks Fuck Off à la Chris Hadfield 🫡

🍊

I agree. I’m talking more morally and less legally. I’ve seen countless videos where a woman is feebly tapping or shoving a man, the man is clearly physically unbothered and unhurt, but his ego is bruised, so he KOs her with one punch. Then the comments come flooding in about how she deserved it, “equal rights equal fights” etc.

It’s not a fair fight. Of course there are exceptions, there are exceptions to everything. But for most people most of the time, a woman hitting a man is nowhere near as physically impactful as a man hitting a woman. The ‘toolset’ is undeniably different.

If a 5-foot man slaps a 6-foot man, and the 6-foot man laughs and then beats the shit out of the smaller guy and stomps on his head, most people would look down on the bigger man for taking it too far with someone he could easily beat and who presented no real physical threat to him. It’s like that. I’m not denying the agency of the woman, or saying that her assaulting a man is fine, it’s that the response to it from the man is usually an order of magnitude more severe with half the effort. And again, I know there are exceptions to this. Men can be abused and beaten by women, domestic violence against men should be taken more seriously.

In street/bar fights, where a woman is picking a fight with a man, the man is rightly restrained by societal pressure to not unload on her the way he would if it were a man picking a fight with him. This isn’t sexism or baseless gender roles or any of that, it’s because most of the time, untrained men are wielding a sledgehammer to an untrained woman’s carpentry hammer (untrained in combat sports, I mean). So in that way, it’s not a double-standard despite sounding like one, no more than it’s a double standard to not beat the shit out of another man half your size when you would beat the shit out of him for the same offence if he were your size or bigger. Not that we should beat anyone up, of course! But it happens and will always happen, so it’s nice to have at least one broad rule in an otherwise-ruleless endeavour: men shouldn’t beat the shit out of women unless they really need to, to defend themselves from an actual threat, a threat to something more than their ego or temper.

P.S. Thanks for replying without calling me a misandrist or telling me to kill myself 💗 Genuinely appreciate it!

Loneliness.

Men hitting women is different from women hitting men.

I don’t care if people - even strangers - see me naked. I don’t walk around nude or anything, not because of shame or embarrassment, but because I don’t wanna inflict such a visage on anyone against their will. But someone having seen my dick doesn’t make me embarrassed at all. For example, if someone walks in on me changing, or if someone yanks my pants down as a prank out in public, none of that bothers me in the slightest. In fact, I sometimes feel like I have to pretend to be a little embarrassed just because I worry that people will think I’m into public exhibitionism or something. It’s better for the other person if I pretend to be shocked/panicking. It’s weirder for them if I just stand there with my shlong out and start talking to them like nothing is out of the ordinary. But I really don’t give a shit.