Being real, it kinda sucked for me. Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard or anything, but definitely not GNR the way they had been doing music. It was essentially the end of the band for me.

Not bagging on anyone that enjoyed it, just saying it failed in every way on my end.

Oooh! I was just talking to someone with a serious hot take.

So, back during covid, I had cause to interact with the sheriff of our county. We became friends. Maybe not bosom buddies sharing the contents of our hearts or anything, but I can talk to the man about what ACAB really means and he listens instead of being a dick.

So, the subject came up earlier today when I stopped in his office after a dental appointment.

His hot take was that if it had happened here, he would have done his job; arrested the man, processed him, and posted guards on him 24/7 until he was shipped back to NYC. But he said he also wild have personally been present at any questioning or handoffs to make “plain fucking sure nobody did anything stupid”.

He also said that he agrees with why the man is angry, but that murder is too far. Then he said he’s worried about the man because he wouldn’t know who to trust with him. A fairly conservative country county sheriff outright admitted that he wouldn’t trust most cops to keep the man safe.

He even expressed concern about the safety of the people that called in the report in Altoona.

That’s probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard from him. He’s normally a fairly unbending sort when it comes to violent crime. Never let them out of jail again type of unbending. But for his thought to be worry about the killer? That’s fucking wild.

Anyway, beyond that, it’s kinda mixed. A ton of my friends are left leaning to full on leftist. So i expected some support. What surprised me among friends is that nobody is arguing that the guy needs the book thrown at him, even among my more moderate friends, and the smattering of conservative ones that aren’t so conservative I can’t be friends with them.

Relative wise, my family is politically mixed. And it’s still new enough that I haven’t talked to everyone because how the fuck do you have a conversation with that many people in a week without a gathering? But the usual group chats are leaning more on the side of the guy than on the CEO. The older family tends to be more about him needing to be in jail, with a few calls for the death penalty, but the “in jail” folks aren’t exactly ranting and raving.

The most extreme of the families, of which I’m not the most extreme, but I ain’t exactly not extreme at all, they want the guy out of jail. Some are calling him a hero, others more of a victim of the system, but the main group chat of us lefties is devoid of any hate for the man at all.

In other words, it’s not a consensus at all. It’s about what you’d expect over any situation where a regular guy does something illegal as a move against the status quo.

You know, I’ve used the idea in one of my fictional universes.

Which is, unfortunately, where it needs to stay.

See, a temple prostitute is just a prostitute with a big organization pimping them out, which leads to the same kind of abuse prostitutes already face.

Any pimp, no matter how wonderful they might be, is taking money out of the pocket of the person opening their body up for others for money. When that’s a thing, abuse is inevitable (and I’d encourage anyone doubting that to go look into the actual reality of temple prostitutes). Prostitutes already exist. Any of those rapists that would actually rape for sexual satisfaction only can already access a sex worker with minimum effort. So why would they be any less likely to rape just because the sex worker is in a temple?

Which, btw, my town is kinda mid sized, but rural. So not exactly a place with a stroll to pick up street level hos. But if I wanted to pay for sex, I know of three women that will gladly take the money and the cock. We have prostitutes even out here in the hills. So availability is not the problem.

You also forget that we don’t have any religions that are devoted to a deity or principle that venerates sex in that way. Even the closest ones aren’t going to be setting up brothels of faith.

So, how would you staff the temple brothel? If the faithful don’t exist in enough numbers to fill the jobs, then the people sucking off johns for the temple are just regular prostitutes. So you’d essentially need to create or revive a religion, then convert sex workers to it, or recruit non sex workers and convince them to fuck and suck for god. You know what a church that does that gets called nowadays? A cult.

The only way it would work and actually be an improvement would be in an ideal world, which is impossible.

We’d be better off legalizing prostitution, regulating it with safeguards to reduce harm (and it would be reduce, nor eliminate, even in places with legal hos, there’s abuse and sex trafficking and disease) and making sure that the sex workers have full access to whatever they need to protect themselves and be able to opt out with zero consequences.

Because if the sex worker can’t quit at will, they aren’t a sex worker, they’re a victim. And yeah, legal sex workers aren’t being held against their will for the most part, but do they have unemployment if they quit suddenly? Can they easily access public services to retrain? How about housing, do they have access to stable housing while they’re between professions?

It isn’t that the rest of us have all those things, it’s that we aren’t being literally fucked involuntarily out of fear of poverty and homelessness. It’s just a figurative fucking.

As it is, people that genuinely believe sex is sacred, and will perform sex acts with strangers exist. They’re just incredibly rare. You likely couldn’t staff a single temple from just those in a given city. And I’ve known some people that genuinely believe that way, that will have sex damn near at will with anyone willing to condom up and be nice during the sex. But I’m fifty, and have met four. Four in all that time. I don’t see that being very successful as a world changing thing lol, they’d never be able to sleep and still wouldn’t be able to drain the poison from a tenth of a percentage of incels.

It’s an interesting shower thought, but you aren’t the first to explore the idea. And it simply doesn’t stand up on its own outside the shower.

It’s the way he treats people. Not in public generally necessarily, he keeps a good facade up afaik. But word gets around behind the scenes.

Back stage workers at venues, local security (which is how I ended up hearing about it, working with guys that were contracted by a specific venue he performed at multiple times), hotel staff, that kind of thing.

We’re not talking about diddy level assholery, let me be clear about that. If he’s ever pulled that kind of thing, it’s news to me.

But insulting and harassing staff, going out of his way to cause extra problems for people, making unexpected and absurd demands, insisting on last minute changes to lineups at festivals, just generally being a smug, condescending dick with zero cause, that he does.

Now, I never worked anywhere he performed at, but the stories came from multiple people that didn’t know each other. Often enough that it stood out.

One time when I was part of a crowd at a local multi-act street concert, he delayed his show so long that one act had to leave to make their next show, and another got cut off in the middle of her set because of local ordinances about lights and sound. The delay didn’t get explained to the crowd beyond “unexpected technical difficulties”. But later on, talking to people behind the scenes, it was prima donna bullshit. Arguing about not being the closer (despite not having been on the slate in that slot when he agreed to perform), arguing about wanting to wait two hours so that his lightning was better, but not wanting anyone to go on before him because his gear was already set up

Just throwing a little hissy fit about everything until he ended up screwing over the crowd, leaving us with nothing for hours, and missing two acts (one entirely, the other partly) in the middle of a hot southern summer.

So, a lot of the crowd just left. Which meant the concession workers lost money, and it screwed up traffic in and out because the flow wasn’t timed as expected.

Then, when his punk ass did get on stage, he only did three songs, when he was supposed to be doing a half hour of music. The extra time was just him hyping his next shows.

Complete douchebaggery.

Vanilla Ice

One song worth a damn. Sucked as a rapper, sucks as a human being.

But ice, ice baby is still a fucking great track.

Someone needs to spring this guy from jail

Well, there’s not much to go on. We don’t know you, we don’t have any access to your friends, and you didn’t tell any story that might help us guesstimate what’s going on.

That being said, a lot of the time someone gets pegged as the “kid” of the group, it comes down to either their relative age, or their behavior.

Some people are just naturally more childlike. Not childish, though there can be overlap. The kind of folks that are bubbly, or energetically happy, or tend to have a certain naivete, that kind of thing. It comes off as younger to some people, so they’ll start treating that person as younger than they are.

But the other part is that sometimes even a year of age difference changes things when it comes to perceptions and group dynamics. You’re 21, so if they’re 22-25, it really can be enough of a gap to set you up in their heads as the “young” one.

That’s the stuff that tends to be common enough to fit without knowing more, or assuming anything about motivations.

free porn, which means you have to watch

Psst… We sometimes brew tea in a drip coffee maker, then water it down, and then put it in the refrigerator to drink cold…

And! Some of us will just throw tea bags in a big jar, put it in the sun for a few hours, then chill it.

the onion just spitting facts now

See, now you’re drifting into assholery, which is so disappointing because the conversation was pleasant. Have a good day.

I mean, they’re correct.

But fuck McDonald’s.

Oh. My. God, Becky

True, true, they do have a strong reputation for the highest grade bullshit out there

Have you ever been in a writing group? If so, our experiences have differed.

It isn’t all fiction. Depending on the group, it may not be fiction at all. Part of the point of doing them is to hone your skill and your craft (which are related, but not exactly the same). When you’re doing research and reporting, or working for a magazine, you’ll often need to quickly absorb information, translate it into language appropriate for the audience, and crank it out with short deadlines.

Now, I didn’t personally do any journalism at all, but I did do some research and reporting as a side gig. Ideally, you take notes and have references and all, but the core of what you do is hoovering information and regurgitating it, much like when doing a book report, or an essay for a class. There’s some of that, that you get better at with practice, where the results are going to improve over time, but the core ability to think on the go, start typing to crank out the basics and then refine, that’s something you have to have a baseline with.

The intro they had reads like someone that has the knack for it. They’re making a coherent statement that informs the reader of what they can expect, while conveying the limitations of the project itself. Someone that can do that, can type out 8 pages and it be a solid first draft. Might not be something that merits a top score, but it’s definitely going to be worth a passing grade, imo. And, as I said, the bare minimum of passing. If the rest is junk, that’s all they get.

I’m not even that good at it. But that didn’t stop me from essentially cranking my papers out in high school and college like you did. Just suck up the reading, then churn it out. Never got below an average grade, and usually got respectable scores. Wouldn’t pass muster in a post-graduate setting, or professional one, but it’ll do for everything up to that level.

It was then too :)

Sounds like a game me and my wife play when we’re naked in bed

Oh, hell yeah.

The big three would be, first, technology, with a focus on Linux and home networking/self hosting being way better.

The second is the depth and breadth of the LGBTQ community. You get way better info, better discussions, with less dross or interference.

Third, I gotta say that the meme presence is vastly superior across the board. Less stale bullshit, less reposting, more funny. However, there’s also a good degree of niche memeing that won’t make sense to outsiders of the community, and a lot political memeing that’s just rants in picture format, with no real wit or creativity. Still miles better than reddit.

Those are the ones where, even when I switched fully in 2023, I was like , damn, this is great here.

I’d also say that lemmy is better at being open minded inside niche communities. We don’t have the numbers of reddit, which is part of it; more people, more assholes. But when it comes to hobby/interest based communities, there’s less parroting of whatever the established answer is, and more real, friendly discussion. Like, the flashlight, knife, and general edc communities on reddit were insular as hell. You couldn’t offer up an alternative opinion on a frequent subject without getting screeched at. Here, you may get disagreement, but it’ll be nice way more often than not.

That last one is why I spend so much time on lemmy. You still get assholes (and I’ve been known to put my asshole hat on sometimes), but they’re somewhat nicer assholes, if that makes sense? But the majority of the time, people outside of political topics are mostly just nice. They’ll express support and compassion easier, you’ll see more thanking each other for discussions. Even when it isn’t like that, the good stuff makes it seem less important. So what I ran into a jerk? I’ll be having a pleasant exchange in twenty minutes, so it just doesn’t matter.

I mean, it isn’t even pseudoscience, it’s utter bullshit, but I get where the comic is coming from :)

Not really. I’ve seen people in my various writing groups do that and it be anywhere from meh the awesome.