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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • In retrospect I think my comment sounds like I’m just excusing being sort of crappy if you’re humble about it.
    I wish I’d included the sentiment that we’re all trying the best we can — because being a good partner should be the goal for any relationship.

    Even though I’m currently only with my wife, I’m right there with you. I don’t want to add anyone to the mix unless their addition is very carefully considered.
    I speak better in metaphor sometimes: It’s kind of like physics, almost. Imagine that we’re touching everyone in our life. If we allow someone to connect to us, they are going to impart their own momentum and direction. That is going to ripple through every connection we have, even if we aren’t able to measure or observe it. So we better make sure they don’t hit us so hard that pieces break apart or get damaged in the process.


  • That sucks, man.

    I’ve been some stripe or other of non-monogamous for most of my adult life, and those types of relationships are often the ones that people experience first when they dip their toes in.
    It’s honestly kind of maddening, because beyond making it seem like everyone who is poly/nm/whatever are all horny sociopaths (because almost everyone has something like that as a first story), it’s harmful. It’s physically and emotionally unsafe for the person who gets shafted. It treats people like they’re disposable and frankly, it’s selfish, insecure, and sometimes malevolent bullshit dressed up as a hippy-dippy love-fest.

    It’s really fucking hard to be ethically nonmonogamous, and I wish people would stop pretending they knew what they were doing. No one knows, and it’s the faked confidence that gets so many people in trouble. People just trust someone to take care of them, and then the other person fails because they’re human, and humans fail. And yet… I can’t imagine not being this way, for some dumb fucking reason.


  • Toxic polyamory situation. A partner I lived with and was once very in love with fell away when she got interested in someone new. It was messy and shitty. I wound up dating someone new, who I had a great relationship with, and it was very physical. But I still lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with my ex.

    My ex was a bit weird. She sort of viewed relationships as whatever things with no boundaries. Folks just do whatever they want in the moment and there’s no fidelity according to her. (Things I learned after I fell in love with her. Woof.) She also had intoned a few times that my new partner was a slut, which was sort of funny, given that my new partner had a pretty strong moral code.

    My ex got a little less interested in her new guy, and tried to seduce me one night. And I rejected her. We had officially ended things, and I did not want to revisit that.
    My ex sneered at me. “Fine. I hope you’re happy with [New Partner], and I hope [NP] is happy with you and your… magical penis!

    She practically spat that out at me, and… yeah. It was as funny then as it is now.

    And for the record, it’s not magical. I just like to put top hats and little capes on it sometimes.







  • lol. While writing that out, I had that thought too, but decided that saying it was more of a feeling was vague enough that I could hide behind that when someone inevitably pointed out it could apply to some adults, too.

    I do feel it’s noticeable - an adult that has some sort of social struggle vs a kid. But it’s like… A kid seems to make statements that come from a place of naïveté, whereas an adult seems to make statements that come from a place of ignorance. Adults seem to couch their words in defensive language, while kids seem kind of blindly assertive. It truly is more of a feeling, I think.



  • I must confess - aside from knowing there was a difference, I didn’t really know what the difference was until a few online searches yesterday.

    The understanding I have is that winter/summer gas programs began in the late 1980’s.
    My supposition is that they have been handled seamlessly to the point that unless you are involved in regulation or the industry, it’s relatively inconsequential to most folks. I imagine knowledge of the program’s existence is probably one of those things that people sorta ignore unless it randomly becomes a topic of conversation. (Like any number of random regulations that impact our daily lives that we just don’t think about most of the time.)


  • There’s a difference between summer and winter fuel for gasoline engines in some areas. It’s usually to do with smog restrictions.

    The same octane can be reached with different blends of hydrocarbons. So instead of just ‘pure’ gasoline to hit a desired octane, refineries can mix together higher and lower octane fuels to reach the same overall octane rating. This increases the amount of refinery products that can be used to blend gasoline, so it can be made more cheaply. The trade off is that it’s less pure, and most importantly for this comment - that some components of of these cheaper blends may evaporate more readily, leading to smog.

    In summer, when it’s warmer, some areas mandate gasoline must meet certain standards for evaporation. In winter, those standards are decreased, because it’s cooler.

    Ethanol has a relatively low evaporation point. I don’t know the specifics of the commenter’s location, but I could see ‘summer gas’ having no ethanol to meet these standards.

    More info: The Vapor Rub: Summer versus Winter Gasoline Explained — Car and Driver


  • I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

    Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
    You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

    Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

    Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?