Earth Sex in the 21st Century: A pulp break/open thread

@Bakunin

Hugs Offered

I hope the bigot is fired in short order.

Welcome back SFHC! Renting your home sucks. I’ve never had a good landlord or landlady in my life, the best of them were the ones that had clear rules and stuck to them. I’ve been turfed out of my home in the past too – they claimed they wanted to do renovations and then move in themselves, but lo and behold a month later it was back on the rental market at a $500 rental price.

– Then the bottom of the rental market fell out and it sat empty for a year. We had been good renters for like three, four years before that. Never bothered’em once, kept the place in good repair. They decided to throw that away for the chance at getting a bit more money, and it ended up biting them in the end. Kharma did its work quickly on that one.

I hope you’re well and that all of you are having a lovely day!

Random replies on Mexican grocers…

my town has a restaurant and grocer operated by Hispanic folks, they have Mexican Coke, bottles, pressed-on lids, cane sugar… mmmmm….

They also have a counter where you can wire money to literally every Spanish-speaking country in the western hemisphere… stick THAT in your “MAGA * “, trumplings!!!

* … “many Americans gargantuan assholes”???
“make assholes gain acceptance”???

… hmmm… I gotta work on this….

Those covers are pretty terrible ? I can’t imagine the contents are much better.

Personal updates:

My dissertation is almost complete. My supervisor wants a longer bibliography, but other than that it’s quite good apparently. The crime novel, that was born from the dissertation, is at 23,000 words.

I went to the doctor today for my pill check up. It’s all good. My blood pressure is fine. Next week I’m going for blood tests to check various things because of the pain I get in my hands and fingers. Doc can’t decide if it’s a vitimin D deficiency or rheumatoid arthritis.

My Aspergers/ASC diagnosis was finalised in June, I have a support worker now, for 90 minutes every fortnight, and I go to the adult autism forum cafes and groups a few times a month.

The EPP patchwork quilt I’m making is getting bigger by the week, it’s now 13 x 13 1.75inch hexagons now, and I want to get it up to 35 x 35 hexagons so that it’s big enough to cover my bed, but the pain is slowing my crafting and writing down.

My sister may be moving in, she’s finally realised something I’ve been saying for years – her partner of 10 years is an emotionally abusive dick.

My books are almost all shelved, I only need one more shelving unit for all the books downstairs on my TBR pile.

So, that’s me. Hope you’re all well. Bakunin, I hope your gfs aunt gets what she deserves for her behaviour. Z&T, best of luck. Forms scare me too.

https://onourterms.barnard.edu/article/finding-common-ground/

https://medium.com/@bmcoston/reclaiming-my-fear-i-will-no-longer-stay-silent-about-michael-kimmel-bde8602fee55

Michael Kimmel

Off-Topic, but a month-ish ago, I finished “Angry White Men,” and I’ve read some excerpts from some of his other work. This is disconcerting, but not surprising knowing the overwhelming amount of sexual harassment by men in command positions….

Regarding “Gor” books – a SF bookstore in Berkeley years ago had a sign posted about why they didn’t stock them. It was a sample page from one, followed by the terse comment ‘This is why’.

I thought the Priest-Kings were an interesting look into John Norman’s psyche. They’re hyperintelligent alien bug-things that live lives dedicated to science and control of Gor. Their only weakness is the Golden Beetles, unintelligent alien bug-things that have golden hair, and produce a pheremone that causes Priest-Kings almost irresistible pleasure. While immobilized by this, the Priest-King is attacked by the Beetle and drained of its precious bodily fluids.

Wow.

I’m pretty sure that the Starship Intercourse was James T. Kirk’s first command.

@Z&T – Your neighbors sound lovely! So happy your appointment is over and wasn’t as stressful as you thought it would be.

@Surplus – I’ve been referring to them as the Stasi. Normally I would just ignore them, except two of them are on the board and have the power to levy fines. Association boards seem to be magnets for petty busybodies.

What’s needed is some small, chronic issue to keep them occupied, like ants or puddles. If they’re going to make a hobby put of complaining, might as well redirect their energy away from humans.

Congrats on the dissertation, Nanny Ogg! Sounds like pretty good news all around.

For my own part… I’m giving ‘no meds’ a go. I’m in such a stable situation now, with my new TENURED (yay yay yay yay) job and everything. If I’m ever gonna try going without meds, now is the time to do it.

So I’ve told you before that I have this mental illness that occasionally causes me to hear voices, see things in the corner of my eye, various illusions, thought insertion etc… Also, mostly because the academic job market sucks, I’ve dealt with a lot of anxiety for years now. Or, rather, I’ve had physical symptoms that my psychiatrist said were anxiety symptoms, even though I didn’t, so to speak, experience that much anxiety in my mind. These have included stuff like nausea that at times almost completely prevented me from eating, and racing heart beat. I’ve also had terrible insomnia. So for years I’ve been on Haldol, Xanax, Propavan and Inderal. Haldol against schizo-symptoms, Propavan for sleep, Inderal against the heart thing and Xanax as a back-up when the others fail. Still having horror movie experiences despite already being on a high dose of Haldol? Pop a few Xanax and all the fear goes away! Still insomniac despite having taken two Propavans? Xanax makes you finally go asleep! Still pounding heart despite a hundred fucking milligrams of Inderal (normal dosage for anxiety is 10-20) – Xanax finally calms down the old pump!

There were two problems with this: 1. Unwanted side effects (I’ve begun developing facial tics from Haldol, for instance, and my psychiatrist wanted to prescribe a fifth med against tics but that one gave me horrible side effects…). 2. I eventually began to develop a Xanax addiction. I started taking it more and more often. For the longest time I alternated between trying to make do with only the other meds and then failing and ending up with Xanax anyway, and being in complete denial that I even had a problem with the drug. (And Xanax is such a nasty drug which can cause, among other things, early-onset Alzeimers and chronic untreatable depression.) I eventually figured out that it just doesn’t work to rely on the other drugs for normal functioning, but lacking a back-up when they fail. So I decided I’d try to go completely off my meds once my new and more stable life had started. And now I’m doing it!

So far, things seem pretty good. My schizo symptoms are pretty mild, they feel managable… In the evening (for some reason, my heart only ever acts up in the evening) I’ve had a slightly raised pulse, but then it went back to normal after a little while on its own accord (previously, my heart could literally race for hours, at the end of which I’d be super exhausted). I’ve had to lie for quite some time in bed before falling asleep, but when eventually doing so, it feels like the sleep I do get is of pretty high quality, much better than it used to be.

Related to this I hate hate hate when ever-so well-meaning people, trying to combat the stigma that surrounds psychofarmaka, make it sound as if taking psycho pills is completely unproblematic. I especially hate the comparison with diabetes and insulin. I admit that I don’t know that much about type 2 diabetes, but my brother-in-law has type 1, and he’d literally drop dead within a couple of days at the most if he didn’t take his insulin. Sure, mental illnesses can kill people through, e.g., suicide, but no one is gonna drop dead because their body ceases to function without the meds. Also, insulin is a naturally occuring hormone in the body. Although diabetes in the long run usually negatively affects the body in various ways, insulin in itself (unless you overdose it) has no negative effects on the body, because it’s supposed to be there. Haldol, on the other hand, is an alien substance you put into your brain, inside of which it hopefully does some good but usually also some bad. It’s just not comparable. Finally, if my BIL were to cease taking insulin, there could be no rational reason for him doing so, but my deciding to try to be med-free is perfectly rational.

Ok end of rant. But wish me luck with my mental health.

It’s kind of hard to say which cover for those fine literary masterpieces is the most ludicrous. After careful consideration, I think the one with the spacesuit with the plastic bra gets my vote.

@dvarghundpossen

Yeah it’s so weird that different people have such different reactions to the same meds…

There was an interesting programme here a year or so ago. It was an investigation into whether it was worth using private health care as opposed to the NHS.

The upshot was that, no, generally you had equal, and for more serious stuff, better treatment using the NHS.

The one exception though was in medicine management. Doctors were fine at recommending the basic treatment; but it seemed very worthwhile consulting a specialist who would work out which particular drugs to use, what combinations, in what dosages, at what intervals etc. It took a few sessions to ‘fine tune’ the regimes. But people seemed to get a genuine benefit from it.

The sessions weren’t cheap. A full series of consultations was running into hundreds of pounds. They did however say this was the best thing you could do in terms of ‘bang for bucks’ to improve your own personal treatment regime.

The sessions weren’t cheap. A full series of consultations was running into hundreds of pounds.

That actually sounds pretty cheap to me. Of course, I’m American, so I’ve had to pay hundreds per month to just have the ability to perhaps pay for a doctor’s visit (which you need for a referral to a specialist).

It was $250/month to get the cheapest coverage. Plus an annual deductible of $7k that on this plan you have to pay before coverage even starts to kick in means I’d have to pay $10k in a year before my insurance would cover anything.

Of course, this was because I made the decision to quit the awful, abusive job so that I could get a degree, so I no longer had emploer-sponsored health care. It’s really expensive to be poor here.