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off topic open thread

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

When you’re a swinger on OkCupid

By David Futrelle

I‘m taking a break from the usual misogynistic horror today to post some pulp novel and, er, “nonfiction” covers. The theme: The (retro) future of human earth sex!

Also, this is an open thread. No trolls!

Wait, are we required to be wearing these outfits now?
The worst thing about sex is all the math
Everyone’s always looking for an upgrade
Those spacesuits don’t seem very practical
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Moggie
Moggie
6 years ago

Alan:

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.

Drug interactions really ought to be handled better. I had been taking a combination of meds for nearly a year before a pharmacist did a double-take at my prescription, and said “uh, you probably shouldn’t be taking more than x mg of y in combination with z. There’s a known interaction, which can cause muscle damage. You ought to talk to your doctor about that”. Gee, thanks, my doctor and other pharmacists! Shouldn’t this have been flagged by software?

Pharmacies dispensing on the NHS can offer a free “MUR”: medicines use review, where you get a consultation (in private) with a pharmacist, and can discuss your dosages, any side effects, concerns you may have etc.

Moggie
Moggie
6 years ago

Notable pumpkin-headed LARPer Seb Gorka has been handing out fake Fox News business cards. He’s still a Fox contributor, but I guess he doesn’t qualify for the real thing. He’s such a wannabe that he just went ahead and had his own knock-offs printed. Sad.

Who?
Who?
6 years ago

Moggie: Calling Gorka a LARPer is kind of an insult to people having fun with LARP.
Since this is a book tread I mentioned a SFbook I am currently reading(because it is really good.
Mur Laffertys Six Wakes needs perhaps no recomendation again (because up for the Hugo) but if you want a good SFNovel with 6 clons who awake on a ship where there former boodies have been murdered and they don’t remember anything and it gets more interesting from there, take it and enjoy it.

Dvärghundspossen
6 years ago

So, I can finally post again… Anyway I’ve tried a number of different neuroleptika and Haldol really is the best for me in terms of desired effect vs undesired side effect. It’s just that ”best” in this context doesn’t equal ”great”, or even very good. And I think that’s the case for lots of mentally ill people. There are meds that allow you to function okay and whose side effects are tolerable, but that’s as good as it gets.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
6 years ago

@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:

Association boards seem to be magnets for petty busybodies.

One of the great truths I learned in University, from dealing with club and student society politics: there are people out there whose primary goal in life is to find a small enough pond that they can be a big fish in it.

My corollary to that, that such people would then defend ‘their’ pond out of all proportion to any actual threat, I would later find out was basically Sayre’s Law.

Freemage
Freemage
6 years ago

Goddammit!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/13/politics/keith-ellison-denies-allegations/index.html

The timing sucks, there’s some real strangeness there, but the baseline allegation is credible (in particular, they’ve managed to get some off-the-record corroboration that the woman was talking about the incident in the months that followed–in the he said/she said arena, that’s a tipping factor for me).

Which is a shame, because Ellison was generally one of the ‘good ones’ on the Dems’ side. This was abetted simply by how often the racists came out of the woodwork because he was not only black, but also a practicing Muslim. Simply being that in-their-face about his existence was enough to get evidence of how badly the GOP had been co-opted by the worst humanity has to offer.

But at the end, I’ve got to stick to my principles. I can only hope one of the other four candidates in the primary is still a strong progressive.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

@Jenora Feuer:

One of the great truths I learned in University, from dealing with club and student society politics: there are people out there whose primary goal in life is to find a small enough pond that they can be a big fish in it.

One can also find evidence of this just about anywhere that hosts a batch of moderated online forums — though, not here. Sample random Facebook groups or similarly, though, and it’s quickly evident.

My corollary to that, that such people would then defend ‘their’ pond out of all proportion to any actual threat, I would later find out was basically Sayre’s Law.

A related phenomenon is how the less evidence there is, the more bitter the dispute, in a lot of cases. Because if the evidence wasn’t equivocal one side would have won already. (Usually. If there’s a ton of money at stake on the factually-wrong side, then you will see billions spent on fanning the flames of controversy artificially. See also: tobacco safety; climate change; all the rhetoric spewed in an effort to sink Tesla and electric vehicles more generally…)

@Dvärghundspossen:

I’ve been put on the psych-med-go-round when the industry was having fun misdiagnosing my ASD as all kinds of unrelated things. One of the meds they put me on, when I was around 10, was Haldol. It turned me into a zombie and had one particularly awful side effect, periods of just feeling a general malaise. No specific pains, nausea, negative emotions, or anything one could even name, just a general discomfort. It was like being tortured, except for the absence of pain, if that makes any damned sense.

I’ve been living med free most of my adult life and functioning well enough that way to have an apartment without being evicted, go to the grocery store and the like to get supplies, and yes, get a CS degree which was not apparently enough to make the industry interested in hiring me. Lately I’ve been on a med, but not a psych med: Zantac, for recurring heartburn that was interfering with my sleep. Aside from that just the odd painkiller, antibiotic, or what-have-you to treat an acute condition such as an injury or infection.

I wouldn’t go on Haldol again even if offered a large sum of money to do so. Especially after hearing it can cause dementia with prolonged use. My only asset is my mind; without that I’d have nothing.

Z&T
Z&T
6 years ago

@ Dvarghundspossen,

I am in no way a medical person so take the following as just “something I heard”. “Friend of a friend” even, my friend told me a story about one of her friends who had bad insomnia.

And right up until you said “insomnia” I was thinking – that sounds like symptoms of bad insomnia. And a tale my friend told me about someone else..

I will just relay what this friend told me, and to make sure I remember correctly, I phoned her up and asked to come over (she lives right down the street and is glad to help me finish the rest of the beer.)

OK. What this person told her, about bad insomnia (which they wound up hospitalized for.)

They’d stay up for days, could not sleep, began to “hallucinate”. Person in question has ingested a lot of drugs too, including acid (LSD), so they know their hallucinations.

Visual and auditory and “seeing things out of the corner of the eye”.

Person in question went on common (prescription in the US) sleep meds such as Ambien or Lunesta (friend does not remember exactly). Which did not work, and, or, made things worse.

This individual said they were like “asleep and awake at the same time”. And like there was a dream going on “in the peripheral vision”.
Awake and dreaming, at the same time.

And this person related these tales to their other hallucinogen enthusiast friends and they were all hot to try it! Yelled at them O HELL NO! You do NOT want THIS!

Not a “fun trip” at all.

Anyway, Dvarg, the way you describe your experiences sounds so similar to what happened to a friend of ours. I called T over to read it too and she said it sounds almost exactly the same as what this person told her.

And again, just a “for what it’s worth” on our part here, we are not med people in any way. I was just thinking, maybe the ‘sleep angle’ is something to look more into?

Best wishes from all of us here 🙂

Dvärghundspossen
6 years ago

Thanks Z and T! I actually have some of these symptoms even if I do sleep properly. BUT insomnia makes it way worse. And unfortunately this can create a kind of vicious cycle, where I worry about losing sleep since sleep loss makes everything worse, and because I WORRY it’s harder to sleep!

@Surplus: ugh, I’m glad you were eventually properly diagnosed!

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

Thanks

TreePerson
TreePerson
6 years ago

@Katamount

I might have actually seen some of those comics,
I like the manga style alright myself and I’ve been able to find a fair amount of happy consensual hentai with my kinks but pretty much anything with elves is going to be rape for some FSM damned reason among lots of other misogynistic excrement to dig through first (also why does every translator translate otokonoko as trap? Its not accurate its just a trasphobic internet meme.).

On the up side there actually is consensual tentacle stuff its really rare but it exists, I even decided to commission a submissive anthro-tentacle-monster from an artist on FA.

In completely unrelated news I survived another kidney stone so that was “fun”, but my mother and sister took/went with me to the ER and were really good about using my pronouns so that was nice.

Ariblester
Ariblester
6 years ago

So, I read this article on The Verge:

Toward a taxonomy of men online

and I’m not sure if I’ve just been Sokal’ed, or if I’m just not drunk/high enough to grasp its profundity.

Cyborgette
Cyborgette
6 years ago

So today I learned from a very informed source that UK based TERFs are often openly antisemitic online.

This… Really does not surprise me at all any more. Discourse by TERFs against trans people has already struck me as spookily similar to Nazi discourse about Jews – the conspiracy stuff, the accusations of secret institutional power and ritual child abuse. It feels the same, and hits an almost identical set of trauma triggers…

I’m hella scared, TBH. Wish I were in a more functional state right now.

Z&T
Z&T
6 years ago

@ Dvarghundspossen,

I worry a lot too. I overanalyze things as well. Decided to spend $1 on a scratch off lottery ticket, the way this one worked is “match three like amounts and win.” Or, match two like amounts + a ‘ double symbol’ and win double that amount.

I had two $5 and two $100. I knew then I would not get the double symbol because it wouldn’t work. Unless you could win double two prizes, but I doubt it.

Yeah, analyze everything and take the fun out of it! I can’t help it.

I did win $5 YAY! 🙂
This is big time excitement to me.

FWIW about “eaten posts” here, what I have noticed is, if I post something and it doesn’t show, OK then if you got to ‘home’, then the topic again, then I do see the post.

Old macbook here. Might work for others too. Might mean something about the disappearing comments too? Something between the ‘page breaks’ or ..

I don’t know. But I will attempt to analyze things I know nothing about, also 🙂

ETA this time this posted right away. Sometimes that happens also. ?

Ohlmann
Ohlmann
6 years ago

The amount of food shaming in France is *really* grating on my nerves today. Could people stop caring about what any other people eat as long as they aren’t like their husband/wives or their caretakers ?

Note that it’s against litteraly anyone : not just me, who is smack in the middle of standard weight range, but also against a sportif dudebro who is thin like a twig, another colleague who is a retired boxer, a gal who is actually trying to gain weight to support a pregnancy. At that point, I wonder if they truly have no awareness of the problem.

Skee_Ball_Player
4 years ago

I guess they played the skee ball all the time their spaceship was flying to the destination point… interesting how many goals they achieve? xd