I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper, at the time I got it they already hadn’t been made for about a decade, they weren’t super common to begin with, and I think a lot of them got cash-for-clunkered, so they were a pretty rare sight

Always got a wave when I passed someone else driving one.

And not for nothing, I really liked that car.

I think there’s a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.

I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t up to doing their lessons himself.

He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn’t exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn’t afford to have a car etc.

So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.

And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn’t keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn’t controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.

I’m not much of a kid-person, so I’m probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.

On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of “bullying,” I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn’t have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn’t like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.

And I don’t think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it’s probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn’t help.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

“You don’t.”

My area isn’t the hottest, but it does usually get up to about 100F for a day or two most years, and in the summer temps are in the 80s or 90s during the day pretty consistently, and it can be humid.

I have a mostly finished basement, I’ll spend a lot of time down there over the summer, it stays pretty consistently cool.

I’m lucky that I work night shift, so it’s easier for me to do stuff in the evenings or early morning before it gets too hot.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. I usually joke that in the summer that means air conditioning.

But if you don’t have a/c, opening your windows and getting some fans going can really go a long way to keeping your house cool.

Limit your time outside, find somewhere to sit down in the shade and take a break if you need to.

Dress appropriately for the weather, lightweight, light colored, breathable clothing, linen is great if you can find it. Maybe consider wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off your face and neck when you go outside.

Drink lots of water, find some cool foods to eat, watermelon, cold soba, ice cream etc.

Yeah, there’s plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that’s what you’re looking for, that’s a tougher nut to crack, I’m sure they’re out there but they’re not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven’t looked too far into that)

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

Yeah, personally I can probably just about dry shave against the grain with a piece of broken glass and splash on some acetone as aftershave and be none the worse for it, not too much in this world irritates my skin.

I figured it was worth mentioning it because I know it’s a concern for some people, but I’ve never had an issue with it personally with shaving or waxing.

Philly-area millennial.

Among friends and family around my age, I have probably around a dozen or so people or couples who own their homes, one of whom inherited it, and one who bought it from family for cheap

And many more than that who rent, live with their parents (who often but not always own their home) and a couple whose housing situations aren’t quite what you’d call secure but aren’t quite homeless either.

As for myself, I’m kind of caught in paperwork limbo living in a house that’s owned by my mother in law, that she’s agreed to sell to us and we’ve been given carte Blanche to do whatever we want with it, are responsible for repairs and maintenance, but actually getting shit together for a mortgage is being way more of a pain in the ass than it should for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

In my parent’s social circles, the vast majority own homes or have in some way secured some kind of long-term housing for themselves, like one who basically gets their apartment rent free by being some kind of property manager.

The pain really isn’t that bad

And at least for me, the worst parts of it are more on my sort of FUPA area, not so much on my dick and balls themselves, so for the service I get, it’s only like 3 patches around the edges that actually hurt. Might suck more if you’re planning to get more than that done, but I can’t really comment on that myself.

And again. It’s only for an instant with each rip and then it’s over, by the time you’ve flinched it’s already stopped hurting.

Lemmy (and other fediverse services) users are mostly here because we have some strong opinions about mainstream social media, and those opinions are tied closely to politics these days.

If we didn’t, we’d probably be on Reddit, xitter, Facebook, etc. instead.

And if you get a bunch of people with strong opinions about something together, there’s a good chance the conversation is going to go in that direction sooner or later.

And like others have said, everything is politics, basically every aspect of life can be tied to politics in some way.

And there is a lot of political stuff going on all around the world that everyone really should be concerned about and following, and there’s a lot to discuss about it.

And I get it, it can be exhausting. I definitely wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to pay as much attention to politics as I do.

The best thing you can do is to be active in communities you want to see have more activity. If no one’s posting the kind of “non-political” content you want to see, be the person posting it, if you build it they will come. Be the change you want to see.

In general, all Lemmy servers have the same content as every other one because they’re federated. There are some cases where instances have defederated from each other, and admins have done bans and such that I think may change what content is available to you

Also you’re on .ml, which is a pretty explicitly political instance. I don’t know all the technical details but I’m also under the impression that the mods and admins there are pretty quick to bring their ban-hammer down hard on people who disagree with them, so that could potentially be having some effect of what you’re able to see, though things are certainly looking pretty political from over here on .world too.

Get waxed, I’ve been doing it for a couple years now, worth it.

Hurts a bit when they pull it off, but not nearly as bad as you imagine, and it only hurts for an instant, not like it’s a pain that’s gonna linger around with you.

Smoother and longer-lasting than you could ever hope to manage with a razor, and no risk of cutting yourself

Depending on your skin, maybe you could have some issues with ingrown hairs, but I’m pretty sure if you’re prone to that you’re probably gonna have those issues shaving too.

My only complaint is the price, the place I’ve been going charges about $75 (+tip) for their “basic” service, which is just shaft and sack. I’m personally a really hairy dude and I feel like it would look weird for me to go beyond that and have bald patches on my crotch and ass crack, and I’m certainly not gonna spend the time and money for a full body waxing.

The full, most premium package to get all of you junk and butt waxed with all the extra goes up to something like $150 (+tip), and there’s a few options in-between so that you have a sense of the price range.

Which I do think is a pretty fair price for the service, but it’s also certainly not cheap. Personally I kind of justify it because I’ve known people who spend that much or more or haircuts about as often as I get it done, and i shave my head myself with a safety razor, so my haircut expenses are basically 0, so just kind of trading one grooming expense for another.

I usually go about a month and a half between waxings, first week or two there’s no noticeable hair regrowth, and by the 6th week I usually have about the required ¼ inch or so for waxing. Takes about a half hour for what I get done.

In some places it can be hard to find places that do it for dudes, and not all employees are trained or willing to do male waxing, so don’t ruin it for the rest of us, wash your ass and junk and don’t be a creep.

Normally 5-7 between my shirt and pants.

2 front and back pockets on my pants

The little watch pocket on jeans and such

One or two shirt pockets

Occasionally I wear cargo pants or shorts which adds 2+ more pockets

And if I’m wearing a jacket, that adds a few more. My most commonly worn jacket has 2 hip, 2 chest, and 2 inside pockets

And if I’m fishing, even I don’t know how many pockets are on my vest, pretty sure that adds a dozen or so

Wallet goes in my back left. Used to be my right but the way I sit that started to give me some sciatica issues no problem since I switched pockets. I also switched to a thinner wallet which probably helps as well but that came well after switching sides

Back right usually gets a bandana

Things move around between my front pockets a bit.

I usually carry a pocket knife and if it has a clip that gets clipped to the front right, no exceptions. If it doesn’t have a clip it could be in either front pocket, or possibly a belt pouch.

I usually have a pen on me and if my shirt doesn’t have a pocket that goes there as well.

I’ve been sporting a curly handlebar moustache for probably 15 years now, and if I’m wearing jeans or something else with a similar little watch/coin pocket, my tin of moustache wax goes there. Otherwise that tin goes into whichever pocket I find it’s rattling the least against whatever else is in that pocket.

Phone switches back and forth between my left and right front pocket, based mostly on which hand I was last using it with. If I was just aimlessly scrolling on my phone or texting someone I probably had it in my right hand so it goes in the front right. It occasionally also ends up in a jacket or shirt pocket.

If I was using it while I was doing something else, like maybe looking at a recipe while I was cooking it was probably in my left hand so it goes in that pocket.

If I have cargo pockets it sometimes ends up in one of those. One of my pairs of hiking pants has a pocket that fits it really nicely.

Keys generally get clipped to a belt loop on my right side, the case for my earbuds gets clipped on my left. Other times they end up in a jacket pocket or usually my front right pocket.

I usually carry a small notepad with me, like with the pen it preferably goes in a shirt pocket, otherwise it usually ends up in my right front, or if I have cargo pockets one of those.

three-band graphic equalizer

Different steaks for different purposes

If you’re just gonna plop a slab of meat on a plate with some potatoes and such, I’ll go ribeye any day of the week (although there are other cuts I may actually prefer truth be told)

But if I’m making maybe tacos or something, I’d probably go for the sirloin

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Besides that, I have a book of poetry that I’m not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.

I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn’t live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I’ve pieced together about them.

Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn’t a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven’t found any issues with her father.

She’s very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.

A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn’t see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn’t something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)

Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.

They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother’s insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn’t heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn’t remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like “I’m worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]” but she can’t tell me what’s supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.

I’ve given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter’s home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.

During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.

I of course had to search out what she had written.

At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn’t actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I’d pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.

Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It’s more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.