That was a fascinating read and thank you for sharing. If it is any good, I'll be thinking about this for a long time.

Does anyone know the context? Is the soup a metaphor?

I calculated that if I only drink coffee at home I spend about 1000€ a year on it.

Dude did you just reveal his identity and ruin his secret streak?

It's bizarre to me that harcore vegans want to own a pet to begin with. Keeping bees for honey is bad, but separating a kitten from its mother at an early age and castrating it for your convenience and deciding how they live (restricted to an apartment or not) is totally fine?

I understand that most pets live a good life, but man, I can't bring myself to make choices like these. I mean there are ways to circumvent it (get an older cat from an asylum for example) but it doesn't really remove the "pet dilemma" to me.

I was actually pretty good at drawing and art but that one time a teacher used my drawing of santa claus as an example of how not to draw and made me cry in front of the whole class still haunts me. She used my next assignment as a positive example in front of class but it didn't undo it. This was in 2nd or 3rd grade.

Well that's a great way to have a customer come exactly once to your place and order something small and cheap and then never return out of bad memories and embarrassment. It's also a great way to make a name as "that restaurant where you'll get ghosted" for yourself. For real, either the place would get a bad rep as a cursed place, or (more likely) they lose valuable potential customers because they will never go back to a place where they have been stood up.

I'm sorry but when I read "pride month is defeated" in the context of a heterosexual engagement my mind immediately assumes the dude is a closeted homosexual who chose her as his beard instead of coming out. And this is how he "defeated pride". By choosing a heteronormative lifestyle over his actual preferences.

The most optimistic scenario my head can come up with to make the sentence make sense would be that she's bisexual and because of him she chose to commit to a heteronormative relationship.

In any way, for a lack of a better term, putting your engagement in context of defeating pride makes you look quite gay.

Forgive my ignorance but what is a lesbian candle?

(Preface: I am team genocide. I also live in Germany. Germany's politics are a disgrace, but I digress.)

What annoys me about this is that this discussion gets so much media attention and focus, while it doesn't matter in this very moment. I understand that there are implications if it will be defined as a genocide. But right now people are being killed every day en masse and they frankly give a crap about whether they died in a mass murder or terrorist attack or a genocide.

It reminds me of the early days of the Ukraine war when everyone was so obsessed with comparing Putin to Hitler (Putler is still a popular term) and the discussion was high on whether Putins actions amount to fascism or not, with a lot of internet laymen but also experts on that subject chiming in. When I asked a half Russian, half Ukrainian what their opinion was, their reply was something like "who the fuck cares? Call it a chicken pea pie, nobody cares, people are being killed, I don't give a crap. Somewhen in the future people will be looking back and asking the same question, but it doesn't matter right now." And it stuck with me.

If I understand correctly, the ICJ will rule again on the case in a couple of years (?), which obviously isn't relevant right now. It seems like the ruling would have an aftermath in retrospect but even if they ruled it were a genocide today, nothing much would change directly - but please correct me if I am wrong here.

But what definitely doesn't matter is what we think. What matters is what is happening. And it doesn't need a name to be evil and detrimental.

When I was 16, I went to high school in California for half a year as an exchange student. I am from Germany and as a junior, I would have had something like my 4th or 5th year of chemistry in school, but out of necessity (or laziness) I took beginner's chemistry.

For exercises I had been paired with two girls who used to try to make fun of me (I think; I never really figured out what their deal was), and asked me stupid questions about myself or Germany. I remember they once asked laughingly whether I like oranges because I was wearing a t-shirt with an orange print.

Well, then one day, there we go. Converting exercises. You have students from 9th to 12th grade in groups of 3-4, trying to convert imperial measurements to metrics. And then metrics to metrics. Basically, for a couple of weeks, we just converted stuff like 14 cm to mm or dm. I forgot so much about my time abroad but the most vivid memory I have is of the girls looking at each other (after a couple of days and repeated explanations) and one says "the decimal system just makes no sense" and the other one quietly and slowly nods in agreement. I ask them how it makes no sense. "Well it just makes no sense." It's just base 10 everything and the rest is practice, it's not different from inches to feet. "No but you see this makes sense. There are 12 inches in a foot", continued by a list of how many shmekels make up a whoopsiedoodle and how many dingelings fit into a hybotron.

I understand how you first have to get accustomed to new units and how conversion might need practice when you aren't familiar with the prefixes, especially when you aren't too experienced in the stem field. But I am still flabbergasted by the statement that having a system where everything is just base 10 and then you shift the decimal point around makes no sense. We are talking about fellow juniors here. How do you make it to age 16/17 never having heard of a decimal point or having trouble with base 10 conversion? HOW CAN YOU SAY IT MAKES NO SENSE?! It's the simplest, most logic based system there is!

That’s why older porn is so jarring sometimes because of the weird habit of cutting to the guy’s moaning face in the middle of everything. Like, what the fuck was the thinking behind that “technique”?

So, I am pulling this out of my ass (no pun intended) but I got a theory here. I think the way porn is consumed and its intention have shifted along with our perception and experience of sex.

Older porn seems to be more like "a movie depicting people having sex". So it shows the woman and the man having sex, touching, kissing, enjoying. Both are crucial parts of the act. It also appears like the main function is to get you horny, not to get you off. I remember overhearing older people talking about watching porn together before having sex. I know this can still be a thing, but I'd argue that most modern porn is neither made for that purpose nor directed/designed in a way that would work for this.

Modern porn, in its insane abundance, is to be consumed alone for the purpose to jerk off to, to activate some dopamine receptors or whatnot, and its notorious addictiveness that makes you want more and more intense stimuli. You don't need people for that, you need bodies.

The other thing is that sex - maybe because of the oversexualization, social media, internet, being wired 24/7, or maybe because of hookups having become so common, anonymous and risk free - has become somewhat sterile. Almost like an out of body experience. I forgot who said it - something like "we fantasize about fucking our partner while we fuck our partner". We're not in touch with ourselves and don't experience the sex we have while we have it, we are almost disconnecting from the experience. It's absurd but common.

You find this "sterility" in modern porn too; perfect bodies with no hair, no shadows, no marks of any kind, almost no body contact except the genitals. Just because there is a cumshot somewhere doesn't make it less sterile or more intimate. You paraphrased this when you described the guy standing in for the viewer, being objectified even more than the woman, being this background thing doing repetitive motions.

(Disclaimer: I'm talking about a modern "we" and and older "they" in very broad terms here. Obviously people 30 years ago had disconnected sexual experiences and anonymous hookups and people nowadays also experience concentrated, fulfilling sex in which they are very much in touch with themselves. Definitely porn was used to be wanked to in the 70s just like some couples enjoy watching porn together today. And within its insane abundance you can most definitely find modern porn that is not sterile.)