Eww, I wouldn’t do him even if I were at gunpoint.

One doesn’t have to be internationally important to not want their audio recorded in their own private space.

The laptop I have now has its own camera cover, but when I had a laptop that didn’t have it, I was able to buy little slider stickers to put over it. I don’t want to link any particular website, but if you look up “laptop camera slider sticker” you can easily find them.

I hope they like me talking to myself in funny voices and belting out songs at the top of my lungs, because that’s all the audio they’ll get out of me.

“It” from South Park might as well be a reality.

Hard agree. But I’m autistic, and as far back as I can remember, I’ve avoided social interactions. My mom talks about how I happily played by myself as a toddler. I also remember a neighbor kid who seemed to call constantly to ask to play, and I turned her down over and again. (She eventually back-stabbed me, so don’t feel too bad for her.)

Some people legit like to be around others. Some people can’t stand the thought of spending time alone at all. Everyone’s built differently. For me, it takes a special kind of person to make me want to socialize with them (almost always other neuro-divergent folks, where I can “remove the mask” so to speak.)

This is especially problematic when you have dietary restrictions. The best part is when the site doesn’t allow you to customize your meal. I don’t get to know what’s actually in it, and I can’t preemptively ask for certain ingredients to be omitted? So I guess you don’t actually want my money.

Oh hey, that’s literally me. Just barely staying afloat, with my studio apartment. A good month is one where I don’t have to withdraw from my meager savings to pay for groceries.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome is fascinating. Plenty of people with it grow up female and have no idea their genes are different, until they reached puberty and never get their period.

Born in the late 80s, making me a 90s kid.

My siblings, neighbors, and I would play in the woods behind our neighborhood. There were trails and a creek that flowed through it. My older brothers and their friends would build bridges over the water (which vandals would destroy, so they rebuilt several times.) My parents allowed me to go play there as long as I didn’t go alone. There was evidence of past generations playing in the same place, like platforms from old tree houses that had mostly fallen apart and strings along the tree line from old cup+string “phones” that kids in the past used to communicate. I’d also pick wild blueberries and climb trees. My siblings would fish and just chill.

We were among the last families to give their kids such freedom. One of our neighbor families had early “helicopter parents,” so the kids lived very different childhoods from us. I remember other parents talking about that family, almost always disparagingly about how the kids were always stuck at home and were being raised on video games. It was like most adults saw adventuring outdoors with other kids as a typical way to spend childhood. I learned to navigate on my own, walking and bike riding around town without any way to contact my parents for hours on end. It was normal, it was expected, it was even seen as important for a child’s budding independence.

Some kids would use payphones to make prank calls. There was one trail behind a park where somebody left a bunch of porn magazines, because it seems every town had a random “porn mag” patch somewhere. It was the first time I saw adult content, and I remember us kids treating it like it was funny.

I spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. My first kiss was on a nature trail in my home town. There was even a tire swing that the boy pushed me on, before we walked to the edge of the inlet for that first kiss moment.

When indoors, I played NES and SNES games. My family also played board games and my siblings and I made up our own creative games to play together. Car rides were great, too, with plenty of time to stare out the window and let my mind wander. At one point my mom bought a van and it came with a heavy-ass TV for the back, but my parents got rid of it. It only played VHS tapes and although at first I thought it would’ve been so cool to have a TV in the vehicle, I look back on it now and am glad that we didn’t keep it. Even when we drove for 25 hours to get to Florida, I didn’t miss having a screen. I brought books, a portable CD player, and toys, then spent most of the time gazing outside anyway. I remember seeing the full moon in the sky and thinking about how cool it was that it was always there, no matter where I went…

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I often think about the shitty parts of my childhood, so it’s nice to remember the parts that didn’t suck. I’m really glad I got to enjoy the outdoors as much as I did, without being treated like a delinquent for having a childhood that mirrored all the generations of children that came before me.

It’s a combination of the water depth, suspended sediments, and the phytoplankton population in an area. The Bahamas are on shallow waters, where the light doesn’t penetrate as deeply as it does in the open ocean. In the open ocean, sunlight gets absorbed until it reaches a depth where no light remains. On shallow waters however, especially where the sea floor is built out of white sand such as in the Bahamas, more light gets reflected back to the surface, making the area appear brighter.

Sediments and phytoplankton also play a role. Less sediment around the islands leads to clearer waters. There’s also less phytoplankton in the area. Phytoplankton, much like plants, use chlorophyll to make their food. As a result, both phytoplankton and plants reflect a lot of green light. Without phytoplankton, the area looks more blue.

Yeah, I’m conflicted about oral. It can be a lot of fun at first, but at a certain point it just gets… too wet. Uncomfortably wet. Need-to-sit-on-a-towel-now wet.

I love this because I’m pretty sure it’s why I (female) was able to beat my (male) ex at certain mini-games. Gotta rub the stick button back and forth really quickly? Oh honey, you have no chance against me.

This is one of the biggest reasons I never got into makeup. I remember being a teen and hearing people ask women, “Are you okay?” when they didn’t do their full makeup routine. I thought, “Man, it’s got to hurt to feel like having a natural face means something’s wrong with you. I’d rather go into the world how I am and have that be accepted as normal.”

The damn things pick up on every tiny, insignificant noise in the background, too. You don’t have to say anything and sometimes it’ll go, “Sorry, I didn’t get that.” No shit, I didn’t say anything, someone simply slammed a car door shut outside.

Good luck to all the parents who try to navigate those menus while their kids are around…

Damn Florida. I got burned on the bottom of my foot when one of my sandals broke halfway through a beach walk in Florida. It absolutely sucked.

but girl horny feels so different

I’m so curious what feels different about “boy horny” vs “girl horny.” If you’re comfortable doing so, I’d be interested in hearing some elaboration on what ways the two experiences differ, in your perspective. (Other trans individuals feel free to chime in!)

I imagine they mean that it’s not something we have a choice in deciding. There’s no literal vote for it, those running health care facilities and making staffing decisions don’t care what we think. It’s not even like other decisions where we can do research and make ethical choices. If all the hospitals do the same thing and we need urgent medical care, it’s not like we can say, “Oh, I’m not going to that hospital because they won’t treat their staff right.”

When an image is hosted by someone using quokk.au, this happens to me. I don’t know what it is, but something about that instance just won’t load sometimes.

I remember when porn was a hard to a way that took off it did to it

Uhh…