Dharma Curious (he/him)

If you can afford them (they can be shockingly expensive here in the states!), actual wooden shutters are very attractive and work quite well at cooling a home.

But, if you’d like to keep your view and stay cool, awnings are another option. They keep the window in shade and prevent heat from entering the home nearly as well as just blocking the window, while allowing the window to, y’know, keep on windowing.

If you’re somewhere without a ton of regulation or nosy neighbors, awnings can be made super easily with just some poles and tarps, or even a sheet of plywood depending on how much you care about appearance.

Glit walked slowly across the plain, eyeing the group of hunters that surrounded the creature. It was large, much too large for the tribe to eat before the meat spoiled.

As he approached he could hear the argument already.

“No, rapal, you take that part! It was your spear that slowed her enough for us to catch her!”

“But it was your arrow that finally brought her down, Jatam, you should have that part for your family! You have 5 younglings!”

They would carry on like this for hours if left to their own devices, none wanting to be seen as greedy.

Glit approached and broke into the conversation,

“Hunters, good hunting,” he said loudly, “Karana has smiled upon you today! The beast has laid down it’s life for the survival of our people!”

The hunters beamed, proud not only of their work, but now in the secure knowledge of it’s righteousness. The hunt has been approved, sanctified by the Storyteller, the one who speaks for the gods. They know they will be rewarded.

The hunters began disemboweling the enormous creature and cutting the choicest sections of meat off of her as Glit began to tell the story of Olana, the great Mother Elephant. He has told this story many times, but the hunters never tire of hearing it. When the work is done, and the story is told, Glit will reward the hunters and walk back to the tribe with them.

Well that’s going on the list

Beat me to it. Mine was “storytelling and sexually gratifying the hunters in exchange for food”

If you don’t mind me asking, are you visually impaired? We think my mom may have non-24, but the doctors have said they’ve never seen it in someone who wasn’t legally blind or totally blind. It’s been very tough on her in the last ~20 years or so

Also, you said there’s decent healthcare in your state. Are you in the US? If so, I’m not sure about proctologists, but there’s normally some kind of community GP/PCP clinics in most cities, but my trick has always been finding one in a fairly rural area within an hour or so of the city, and if you can manage to convince them you live in the county, there’s normally much better care out there, since they aren’t as overwhelmed as they are in the city itself. Not technically legal, I’m sure, but it’s always helped me. Free clinics in Metro areas are so overwhelmed and underfunded, but outside the city they’re still underfunded and overwhelmed, but not quite as bad, at least in my experience

Again with the “definitely not a doctor” preface here, but I’m still working under the assumption that prostate massage/play would be good for this. Or, at least, doctors have told me that prostate stimulation is good for prostate health in the long run… But maybe that’s prevention and not cure?

Also… I won’t be eating steak for a while…

So, I am so very much so not a doctor, and I would seriously consider consulting one.

However, from experience, the inflatables aren’t necessarily the best for prostate stimulation. They’re great for that stretch feeling, but it sounds like that’s not what you’re into. I’d consider looking into actual prostate massagers, some of which are very small and don’t give you that uncomfortable feeling. But seriously, talk to the doc about it, too, please

I don’t have this model, but I do have multiple inflatables. Generally, they’re very fun, but not great for using in most positions, as you will knock the end of it off and it will deflate immediately. It’s a safety feature, but once it happens 2 or 3 times it weakens the seal, and after that it just pops off after you inflate it more than a few pumps.

Holy shit! I do remember those now that I see em. Haha

I don’t know those! Link?

Yeah, it makes for a great story, but in the moment it was fucking terrifying. Especially considering that’s not the sort of environment I’ve ever been comfortable in. I don’t do drugs or party like that

Kind of. The only TV’s that had it were the living room and my parents bedroom, so we had to make sure no one was home haha

I’m actually currently writing my mom’s! My life has been positively mundane compared to hers!

Copy paste from another time I told the story: Placeholder comment because I need to go back to sleep. Someone remind me and I’ll tell y’all about rescuing my brother from a maybe kidnapping in Mexico.

Okay, so, me and my brother visited Mexico. It was a fairly small town, not a major place like Cancun. Had an amazing time. Ended up meeting these two bartenders that we became friends with. Their boss, who legit made everyone he met call him El Jefe, would come by and steal their tips and get drunk. We were there for a week. On the last night, I’m on the other side of the town (10 minute walk away) trying to seal the deal with this dude I’d met, and my brother was at the little bar hanging with our bartender friends. I get a call from him, panicked, as he whisper yells that El Jefe asked him to come with him to another bar he owns. He’s in the car, El Jefe is flying down the street, he’s doing cocaine off the dash. Please come get him at this other bar. He sends me one of those location pins that update in real time.

I tell dude that I’ll help him finish later, and take off to rescue my brother. He’s only like 5 minutes away, and has stopped moving. I go into the club, and start looking for him, but he’s not there. I’m asking folks if they’ve seen him, and trying to get closer to his pin. Finally, I find his phone, there’s some random ass dude who has it, and when I tell him I’m gonna need that phone, he tries to act like it’s his. I explain to him it’s my brother’s. He acts like he’s gonna swing at me, so I drop El Jefe’s name. That, combined with the fact that he’s 5’nothing and I’m 6’3 and near 300 pounds convinced him of the error of his ways. He gave me the phone, and I moved on in my search. I talked to the bartender, who explained that El Jefe had been there a few minutes ago, and had left some coke for me because my brother told him I was meeting them there (neither I nor my brother do coke). I asked could he tell me where they were headed. He gave me an address about a mile away. I took off.

I arrive at the house, by this point it is nearly 2 in the morning. It looks like just a house, but the lights are on so I knock on the door. I am greeted by a woman with the largest breasts I have ever seen in real life. They’re enormous. And she’s topless. Now, I don’t speak Spanish. I know enough to ask where the bathrooms are, and (I smokes at the time) where I could smoke at. Other than that, it was Google translate and gesturing for me.

However, I did not need Spanish to understand that this woman was a prostitute, and was very keen on the young American in front of her (or, at least his wallet). I tried to explain I’m trying to find my brother, but she wasn’t having it. Grabbing at my crotch, trying to pull me into one of the bedrooms off the (very nicely decorated for a brothel) living room. As my actions at this moment were less Liam Neeson and more Jerry Stiller, I decided to just come clean with her with one of the only Spanish words I knew “yo soy Mariposa!”

Now, I know that’s a slur, and I’m sorry if it upsets anyone. But at the time, it was the only thing I could think of. An hour before hand, the phrase had been… Relevant.

It was like a magic spell. Her entire attitude changed, and she was finally able to listen to my words. Once we cobbled together enough Spanglish to understand each other, I gave her the coke from the club as a thanks, and headed off to find my brother where she told me El Jefe had taken him next.

I arrive back at the night club I’d gotten the coke from, and I see El Jefe’s car this time. It’s parked in an alley behind the club, against an outdoor stair case. I go up the stairs and open the door to a private little fucking rave on the top floor of the club. They’ve got their own bar up here, and if I remember correctly, you can’t get from one floor to the other from within the club.

I see them at last! My brother looks mortified, trying to get to the entrance, and keeps getting pulled back by El jefe, and El jefe dancing with fucking scar face levels of coke on his face. It’s insane. I go up to them, and El jefe is all excited to see me, asks if I want some more coke, do I wanna party, he has a pretty boy all picked out for me if I want.

I tell him no thanks, we’ve gotta go. He gets pissy and says I’m being rude, stay and party. I tell him we’re leaving, and before I can react, he swings at me in all hiscoke fueled glory, completely missing me by a country mile. I stand up and tower over this man and explain we have a plane to catch in the morning. He finally let us go, and we head out.

Our plane the next day was delayed, so we ended up spending two more days there. In that time, El Jefe apologized for swinging at me, and gave us a tour of some of the apartments he rents.

We still keep in touch on Whatsapp, and he invites us to his enormous birthday party every year. He also says he’ll rent me an apartment there if I want to do private security for him. He talks to my brother more than me, though. He really liked him, and he calls me El Gigante. He really, really wants us both to come work for him. From what I gather, he basically runs the entire town we were in.

My dad was “that dad” back in the 90s and 00s. You know the one. He always knew some guy with some stuff that maybe fell off a truck. He was a tree climber at the time (tree surgeon, really. To this day in his late 60s, for all his faults, the man is an artist with a chainsaw), and he would use his climbing gear to climb the poles and hook up cable for people he knew, for free. One day during the late Clinton administration, he came home from the flea market with about 30 black market cable boxes. We, and everyone we knew, had free everything from then on. Got every channel, including the porn channel. You could lock it out with a pin code, but in my parents used the same code for everything, so we knew it. I watched so much fucking porn it was insane. I think I was the only kid around that wasn’t super impressed by the quantity of internet porn when that became a thing.

I was impressed with the existence of gay porn, though. Haha. Stupid porn channel had no gay porn, I had to settle for the 1/3 of a second of dick before it went into her mouth

That whole trip was pretty incredible, tbh. My brother actually got kidnapped briefly on our last night there

When we went to Cancun (Isla Mujeres, actually) all the food was Americanized or just seafood. Our bartender at this little beach hut bar thingy became a good friend (still in touch, nearly 10 years later) and he heard my brother and I complaining that all the food was super Americanized.

He told us to rent a car and he would take us to the most authentic Mexican food in the world… So we rented a car, and dude drove us over an hour away to his abuelas, and she cooked us food, and it was the best food I had ever had. Incredible.

Could also be a business you owned for a year after getting a business license. Owned my own for a while from 2012 to 2014, and it’s been my employer on all my resumes since. I never include any shit I did after, just keep that one as if I worked there as a supervisor from 2012 to present day. Works wonders.

Doesn’t come across as rude! Always happy to be educated.

Okay, so, it was my understanding that the ultimate end goal, say, 200 years after the revolution, the society would be practically the same between anarchists or communist. That just the means and transitonary state would be different. Once the state has withered away, once we have achieved classless, stateless, moneyless, it would be virtually or actually, and definitely practically, the same.

I’d love to know to more if that’s not the case, and how they would differ. To be honest, I knew more 5 years ago, but I’ve forgotten a lot of theory and checked out pretty substantially for a while.

Oh Lord, ask someone smarter than me! Lol. I was clarifying terms more than anything else. Communism is an end stage, an eventual goal. That’s the big sticking point between anarchists (hi!) and communists. Communists believe in capturing the state so that it can be transformed and eventually wither away to become a communist society, anarchists believe in dismantling the state and creating communism directly. There are other differences, including how we define terms such “the state,” but that’s the jist.

I guess firstly, I should probably out myself that I’m not a Marxist leninists, but more along the lines of a syndicalist or platformist. Council communist is a semi appropriate term. I also don’t believe the same system that would work in rural Tennessee would be viable for urban New York. I believe in democratic, worker control. Consensus democracy and direct democratic control. The trouble is, I, and many others, don’t believe that communism is possible in just a single area. It would be subsumed, attacked, overthrown. It, by necessity, must be either a world wide movement to achieve True Communism™, or it would need to be isolated, insular, and completely or near completely self sufficient. The latter option is, frankly, kind of shit, and in my opinion, when combined with more authoritarian means and the “capture the state” side of things, leads to dictators and shitty conditions.