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?

I’ve never heard of that, personally (and I’m ace-aro, in case you mean for me specifically, not super sure where that actually fits). For me I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m 2 standard deviations below average height for adult women, and furniture isn’t actually made for kids’ proportions, unless it’s for toddler-size kids. My feet don’t touch the ground in 90% of chairs, which puts uncomfortable pressure on the back of my legs, so I have a strong aversion to sitting normally. My short cousins are all the same way.

I thought this was just the “nerd who spends all day at a computer coupled with a strong nonchalance toward proper etiquette” (possibly neurospicy) stereotype. I could be equally mistaken tho.

I used to as well. Sitting like a normal person is super uncomfortable for me; cross leg or bust.

Then I invested in an old hospital bedside table kinda like the one below (the kind on wheels that you can raise and lower with a crank, paid like $10 for it at a thrift shop) and a comfortable chair (if I could afford a recliner I’d use that, instead I just use a regular big fluffy comefy chair).

I’m still flexible enough to sit like that, but I’m too old for it to not be a terrible idea. The wheeled table allows for a lot more options for sitting abnormally, legs over the arms of the chair, even laying on the couch.

Honestly I think if this pans out, it will go well beyond just care related to reproductive issues.

I mean there’s got to be some sort of reason that medications and interventions (and illnesses too) sometimes have such dramatically different effects on male and female bodies, and if there are actual biological changes that occur like clockwork for women, that could go a very long way to explaining why and counteracting that issue.

(I’m just speculating for fun here)

Based on the sash, this is a woman celebrating a birthday or bachelorette. Due to the pattern on it I’m leaning toward birthday, as bachelorette sashes tend to be solid white.

She’s probably hammered, having been day drinking since 10AM (that’s what those sashes are for; to give lunch goers a clear visual warning sign.) and based on the shadow line and assumed time of year (I’m just assuming it’s not northern California in winter, but it might be) that is probably like 4-5pm, so she’s been drunk for a solid while, probably in the sun.

So very drunk, good mood woman gets an idea that twerking poolside (very possibly to no music or music played off a shitty phone) is the way to keep the party going (a shockingly common sort of happening at those two categories of sash-wearing events). And for that one guy, far far too old to have any shame left about being a creep, she’s absolutely right.

This makes me wonder, though, if those dumb attention seeking sashes exist outside of the us (baseball hat in background seems to indicate US)… I’m sure they must in some form, but I really sort of hope it’s just here that people are so self absorbed as to think a birthday or wedding is a free pass to be a public disaster. (Also there used to be a trend of wearing a sash so strangers would staple money to it, but thankfully that seems to have died…)

That’s about what I was making in Wisconsin to canvas as well.

Aww man I’ve never been to a two-floor+ Menards :( none of the ones around me are (they do have the lumber loft but that hardly counts).

Now I feel like I’m missing out.

I like to just say “That period isn’t relevant to my work history, is personal, and I won’t be discussing it further.”

I’ve learned through many shitty jobs that any company that brings it up is one I probably don’t want to work for anyway. If they feel they have a right to know what I’m doing with “non-productive” periods of time before I even work for them, what other boundaries will they want to cross if I don’t meet some unspoken arbitrary metric? But if they accept that answer and move on, I consider the question a yellow flag rather than red.

Wisconsin doesn’t have party registrations as part of voter registration (we used to, back when I first registered, which is likely why there’s some partisan representation, but not for a long time), nor do you need to be registered with a party to vote in the primaries (everything is on one ballot, you can just only vote for one party).

So that huge chunk of “independent” is probably “new” registrations from the last 15 or so years. They just don’t have data because it stopped being a tracked metric.

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… 😅

As someone who has worked in hospitality within the last few years; nope!

Servers expect tips (they shouldn’t), bartenders expect tips (they shouldn’t), sushi chefs (counter service style, where they basically are your server) and other “show” workers expect tips (they shouldn’t).

To-go orders, regardless of the source, including counter service, are not ever expected to tip, and the people working host stand or to-go are making more hourly because nobody is expected to tip those people. If you do it’s a nice bonus but it is NEVER expected. If anyone tries to make you feel bad about it (literally a fireable offense in the vast majority of places), just tell them they make above minimum wage and if they need more that’s between them and their manager, not you.

For a sort of… long-past personal anecdote that’s totally still applicable… I used to do counter service at an airport and we had tip jars… because airport. It wasn’t worth tipping for, but I wasn’t going to like… argue with tips on top of the shit wages we got (7.25/hr starting work at 3:30am)… I’d seed my jar with my own money every day and make 4x what the other servers made, or about $100/shift on top of my wages… I did nothing extra or different or special, and if I didn’t get tipped it was very whatever.

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 seeing chaos, and enough of a pain in the ass to fix if it gets messed up that we aren’t taking chances.

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’ve gotten several things like this, especially in the last week or so. Same with texts. I’ve gotten dozens. Reported them all as junk and blocked them. Idk how many of the unknown calls have been get out the vote; I don’t answer unknown calls, but there has been a dramatic uptick in that number as well, including a number listed as “survey call” every 2 days for the past 3 weeks.

I already submitted my vote on 09OCT… so much for useful public record, I guess.

Living in a swing state fucking sucks around election time, leave me alone, damn. Let’s get rid of the electoral college just so we don’t get fucking hounded for 3 months every 4 years by a bunch of complete strangers who don’t know a damn thing about us. Spread the love. (Yes it would be good to get rid of the EC anyway, but I want it purged for purely selfish reasons)

Aluminum isn’t really a great option either. Modern cans have to be lined with a coating of plastic to avoid corrosion. Sure it’s a super thin coating, but it’s plastic all the same (and can contain some pretty nasty largely unregulated chemicals like PFAS)

I’m here for glass, though, and maybe we’ll find a good replacement for the lining in cans if plastic bottles aren’t allowed.