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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Well, security isn’t 100% the same as private, if you meant here as in this C/, rather than here as in this post. I tend to favor security over privacy, when only one is possible, but there is a small difference in how they apply to phones.

    But, yeah, afaik, rooting a device decreases security. But if you can’t/don’t want to jump through hoops, not having it is also a decrease in entry level personal choice. But that’s true of any android rom, not just graphene. It’s just that graphene is explicitly against root because of the holes it can cause.

    Again, on my end, root isn’t currently high value. The things I would do with root access aren’t worth the extra hassle and decrease in efficacy of graphene to do what it is intended to do.

    Mind you, there are devices I would root if I weren’t too lazy, for a small number of options. Just being able to easily use older apks is becoming a huge pain in the ass, and it’s annoying enough that my irritation will eventually outweigh my laziness on a couple of devices, just not those I use for anything beyond playing games and writing fiction (where keyboard choice matters a lot on android, and my keyboard of choice is 32bit based, which you have to root for two of my devices to fix).

    Anyway, tangents aside, I appreciate your extra detail :)


  • 100% love it.

    I was worried that I would try it, not be able to use it for my needs, and be stuck hating what android has turned into, but not yet able to jump ship for linux phones (because moving to apple is as bad as what android is turning into).

    Instead, graphene reminded me of why I loved android in the first place. It genuinely works so much smoother, I don’t have to worry about much of anything at all, but can relatively freely do whatever the fuck I want on my device.

    As usual, you do have to be aware that some apps just will not cooperate with any OS changes that aren’t OEM. And graphene isn’t root friendly. So that’s why the “relatively freely” is present in the previous paragraph. Within those bounds though, holy crap is it a better experience than anything else I’ve ever used since my lgg3 was new. Faster, better battery life, and zero bloat to deal with. That’s compared to pixels I had fucked with that weren’t the same model as the one I was so generously given me by a great friend. Can’t say for sure that if graphene was available on my other devices that it would be better in terms of speed and battery life, since that’s hardware dependent to a great degree.

    But I can say that when I fucked around on pixels newer than the one I have, that they were less responsive and drained battery faster doing similar tasks, despite having newer hardware.

    I’ve said it elsewhere before, but my experience with graphene pissed me off. It makes me so angry that this experience isn’t the default experience for all devices, out of the box. I hate that until the recent announcement, that having this experience meant being limited to the shitty choices Google made for pixels (like no sd card, not the chipset or anything like that). I’m hopeful that the Motorola option is realistic for me once this phone has met its end of life. I’m riding it until the wheels fall off though lol.

    Legit, if you aren’t limited by work requirements regarding apps you have to use, and your bank app isn’t pissy, don’t hesitate. I haven’t been this happy with any device since I put lineage on an old tablet years ago and it fit my needs so perfectly I couldn’t believe it. Even my beloved g3 didn’t work as well with any rom as this pixel does with graphene.



  • Okay, real answer time.

    But we gotta ask more: okay for who?

    A dental dam provides (or can provide) protection to both parties.

    Since going ass to mouth is inherently high risk, the person performing analingus is going to benefit more from it in that regard.

    So, anyone objecting to you using one while eating their ass should be told to eat your ass as you walk out the door.

    That being said, dental damns do change the sensation of oral endeavors for the recipient. Same as condoms or gloves, the texture just isn’t the same. Unlike those, using a dental dam takes a bit of skill to make work. So you know, “okay” is likely to be as good as it gets without practice. Goes for eating pussy too.

    Me? It’s like being in the mafia; one slip of the tongue, and you’re in deep shit.

    Also like the mafia, I ain’t joining in without multiple kinds of protection.

    Butt, if you put the time into using them with a partner that’s open to a mutual learning curve, the end result can be very pleasurable, even orgasmic.

    The key is to remember that the dam is not great if it’s used the way it is in the mouth in dentistry. It can’t be a static barrier and actually feel good. So you need a decent sized sheet that allows you to move it with your mouth and tongue (again, this applies to both analingus and cunnilingus) without also exposing your mouth to the anus and its immediate surroundings. It also doesn’t do any good if the damn is slipping around so much that it gets twisted, resulting in both sides having contact with the recipient.

    So while you’re trying to move the dam to cause stimulation, you also have to keep it fairly limited in how far and how it moves. It’s a learning curve

    Also, an instructional video: https://youtu.be/3l2oi-X8P38


  • Races are mostly arbitrary groupings, based on skin color more than anything else.

    Ethnicity, however, is less arbitrary, but still contains some arbitrary factors. It’s usually going to be based in culture or national origin, depending on who’s using the term.

    So, Swedes do have their own ethnicity, though you’d find arguments exactly what ethnicity they’d fall into, but it would likely be different than Brits.

    Ojibwa people are very different culturally from, say, Cherokee people. There’s even a good degree of common features that vary. But some people will still try to lump them together as “native American”, even though that term is almost as useless as “white” or “black”.

    Truth is, we’re all mixed to some degree. Except maybe the sentinel island peoples, or other isolated groups. Even then, it isn’t like they didn’t get to wherever they are without traveling, so they mixed with something along the way, even if you have to go as far back as when Neanderthals and what gets called modern humans were still fucking.

    That’s part of what makes ethnic groupings partially arbitrary. It’s unusual for no movement between groups to occur, even across pretty damn brutal landscape barriers. Big rivers, mountains, they aren’t totally impassable. Even deserts can’t keep humans from fucking each other in small numbers as they travel.

    However, you can usually go with nationality and ethnicity being linked, though there’s so many exceptions that it’s absurd to do so. Just look at Nigeria and try to sort out the various groupings there and not notice there’s barely an overall national connection between them. And that not everyone in those groupings are even all in Nigeria to begin with.




  • My default was always active listening. It took me a while to develop real skill at it, then longer for it to no longer be something I had to turn on.

    There’s exceptions of course, but most people that are expressing emotion publicly do just want a chance to vent and be heard, no matter what that emotion is. Anger, grief, confusion, fear, whatever it is, just having someone gently say “hey, I can see you’re having a rough patch, can I help?” Is all it takes usually.

    Sometimes, you might have to go further, draw out the personbehind the emotion. Sometimes, they don’t want to be bothered at all, and just couldn’t find somewhere private before they broke. In that case, you’d be surprised how often they still pull themselves together for someone offering real support, and you can then guide them somewhere they can break down alone, if that’s what they really want.

    But mostly, just being present, really listening and giving just enough feedback that they know you’re paying attention instead of just being a fencepost, it helps.

    But tears? That’s easy. If they’re giving you those tears, you accept them as the gift they are. Especially if someone breaks through the usual barriers with strangers and reaches for physical comfort, you just give them that shoulder and make soft noises while supporting them. If they aren’t in contact, extend a hand, just a hand, to where they can reach it if they want to, but not so far it becomes insistent. Then you just listen and let their tears wash away enough of the raw emotion until they can talk.

    At some point, most people wind down a little and start apologizing. When you give them a genuine smile and say something akin to “hey, it’s okay, we all have to look out for each other”, or “it’s okay, we’re in hospital, it’s gotta come out sometime; I’m just glad I was here to listen”. If that’s a genuine thing, if you mean a sentiment like that, it’s like aloe on a sunburn. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it takes the edge off long enough to regather and cope just a little while longer.

    I’ve been on both sides of it. Hell, three different sides: patient, family member, and caregiver. There’s no single,perfect path through it, but someone even trying to help and fucking up is still a great balm








  • I dunno if crazy is the right word, but you do run into people no longer giving a fuck the older they get. However, you also get them settling down and chilling out more as well.

    The key to the kind of thing you used as an example is that if you can retire with a decent nest egg, you now have both time and funding to fuck around and find out in ways you can’t before that era of life. Mind you, you also have to get there in good enough shape to fuck around at all, but that’s tangential to this matter.

    In my years doing end of life care, my patients were obviously past they point of getting up to serious shenanigans, but they would sometimes have family that were quite fond of finding fuckery to get up to.

    One thing I noticed about old dudes was a proclivity to cars that were well beyond the horsepower needed for daily tasks. Anything from standard sports cars to serious machinery like one guy that had a pro street 55 bel air. Which, since I got to drive the thing, was bitchin!

    Now that I’m in my fifties, I get it even more than I did back then. Life is fucking short. None of us get out alive, so there’s a tipping point where one’s give-a-shitter takes a flying leap. Since life is also often brutal, it makes sense that once you’ve done the expected bullshit, spending what time is left rotting in a chair by a window ain’t exactly enticing.

    Only thing keeping my crippled ass from souping up my little 4 banger and seeing how tight I can get it to corner at speed is budget. I’m in that window where my reflexes are still solid, and my experience is deep, so taking opportunities to push the envelope like that makes sense.

    I reckon that once I get even older, I’ll have less to lose as well, so I might end up doing something batshit like strapping rockets to a car just for the lolz. I’ve seen the destruction curve of the human body as it ages, so I’m not exactly enamored of longevity what with the shitty quality of life that’s nigh inevitable.

    But for real, the majority of old folks are just tired and want a fucking nap.