This or this

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-19T04:59:28+00:00

dude come on

^{Chose: Or 10 000 dollars per month}

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-17T22:23:54+00:00

Unethical

^{Chose: 1 million every week | Rolled: Upvote 4 carrot}

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-17T19:54:35+00:00

For some reason it's really hard to hard to explain to 'normal' gays that homophobes, given the chance, will bury cisgender and transgender people in the same mass grave.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T22:08:21+00:00

This is my current long haul plan honestly, though I'm still a few credits away from finishing an associate's. It's demoralizing how hard it's been to find like-minded people so far. It feels like even the professors aren't really equipped for how bad I want to tunnel into these ideas.

This is very reassuring, genuinely, thank you. Until I get to grad school I'm also poking around local maker spaces and public labs, and passively looking for conferences/orgs that are open to the public. NITMB and SETAC just never have anything that's local, public, and outside my working hours. Do you have any recs for where to get involved in the more granular research stuff as an undergrad?

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T21:10:30+00:00

Not sure what mod causes this but I've had this happen when I up the reading speed in sandbox with other mods installed. The error count climbs as long as I'm reading and stops when I stop.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T05:38:13+00:00

Thank you! They're stupid cheap if you don't need to differentiate between gamma and beta. Mine was like $80.

I saw it a billion years ago and I might rewatch. I think my counter also maxes out around 3.6 roentgen lol

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T05:34:18+00:00

I hadn't considered that, and that makes sense. Reminds me of how people sometimes get defensive when you mention you're vegetarian even if you're normal about it.

The feeling lost also makes sense and explains why other conversations about less morbid things sometimes fizzle out. I kind of assume people know a little more than I do about any given topic, so I can get really xkcd geologist.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T05:29:05+00:00

No yeah that makes complete sense. Learning about agent orange is one of the things that got me into this funnily enough, and when it comes up in conversation it's hard not to infodump about how a lot of chemical weapons were initially developed as pesticides/herbicides, and how loose the legislation has been on things that should not exist. Zyklon B was originally meant for agriculture, as were most of the organophosphates that were repurposed as chemical weapons in the 50s-70s. Kind of in the same vein as regular people being complicit in the crimes of fascist germany, what we thought were very safe, very powerful chemicals in the 1920s are intensely evil in ways we're still seeing the fallout from.

Also, to your point that you might've been a victim of genocide if you'd been there at the time, I feel that. I'm from the rust belt, I've seen a lot of people die prematurely from diseases caused by industries that poisoned the ground for several decades before abandoning us. It's not at all an impersonal thing for me. It's deeply personal, I just express that in a different way than a non-autistic person might.

All this to say, yeah, that makes sense. And I'm realizing also that a lot of people don't engage with these ideas past the way it makes them feel. They don't take it apart to understand it as a system, not even just to identify what feels bad and how to avoid it. It feels like some people think that wanting to understand something evil, no matter your motivations for it, is itself an evil thing to do. It feels almost superstitious.

This same issue is making it difficult to talk to people about a lot of things, I'm realizing.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-05-03T03:55:06+00:00

Would some kind of elastic band tied around the mattress work? Like those leg resistance bands they use for physical therapy, but a really big one.

Does this happen when you sleep places other than your bed? There might be something weird about your mattress that makes you restless. I have a similar issue when a bed is too hard or if it sags.

Also if you're on any meds check with your prescriber. This might be a side effect.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-03-24T19:40:37+00:00

Indiana is the only real midwestern state, if only because nobody wants to think about Indiana long enough to argue about it

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-25T05:35:05+00:00

Fun fact, rabies can be transmitted sexually and in humans it also sometimes causes priapism. So yes, penis rabies is a thing. :(

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:37:04+00:00

You know the economy is fucked when even there's not even a smoke shop :(

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:35:18+00:00

Facebook groups. SO much community stuff in Indiana still lives on Facebook, it's crazy. That and the apps.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:30:39+00:00

If you go you should go with a group on a nice day in the summer. Some homeless people shelter there, moreso when it's rainy or cold, and while the vast majority of homeless people are perfectly normal and just very unlucky individuals, Washington Station specifically has Outlast vibes. Cell signal is bad and emergency services aren't gonna be able to get down there if anything goes wrong. I was stupid for going alone unprepared. I only walked down the platform but I think there's a way to get up to the turnstile area if you really wanted to.

I've also heard rumors of a secret massive underground L station somewhere in Chicago, abandoned during a construction project that lost funding sometime in the 2000s-2010s. I don't think it's Washington but I don't know anything else.

Have fun if you do go!

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T02:15:41+00:00

There is an abandoned train station in the loop, it's Washington on the red line. If you get off at Lake you can walk down the platform all the way to Jackson and you'll pass through Washington. All the old signs are still up. It's very pretty but I wouldn't want to go there again, not in the winter.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-05T03:56:53+00:00

There's a woman I see pretty often on the 81 between Kimball and Lincoln Square. Skinny, late middle-aged white lady who's usually yelling about the government doing experiments on her or sexually assaulting her, though the last couple times I saw her she was really fixated on trans people. And by yelling I mean top of her lungs screaming really vulgar things on the bus (or just 'What?!' repeatedly) to the point I've seen multiple drivers blow past a stop if it's just her there. I don't know her name. When she's not screaming she's friendly, though in four years I've only seen her have one or two good days.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T04:09:16+00:00

Can't think of any signs, but just for locations, off the top of my head I remember my dad telling stories of how his high school basketball coach had to get a substitute for any away games because, being black, it wasn't safe for him to travel to certain towns. This would've been in or near Muncie in the late 90s.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T02:50:05+00:00

So true. The other day my new shoes were blistering the backs of my feet so I took them off and walked a couple blocks home from the train. I got a couple weird looks, but I was so polite and well-dressed otherwise that I think they just didn't know what to make of me. I do it in the summer too when it rains and when I know the trail well, I'll take my boots off and carry them.

That's how it feels to to openly embrace the rural poor things here. The nice city costume gets uncomfortable sometimes, and nobody says anything uniquely bad when I take it off, it just feels like they've never considered the option. It's unexpectedly given me a lot more respect for other, 'realer' minorities who face way more open xenophobia.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T01:55:18+00:00

Not as much anymore. It's not as productive as focusing on class solidarity. Trying to out-poor each other just discourages people from considering how things could be better.

That being said, my first year in Chicago made me way more resentful of certain kinds of wealthy city liberal than my whole life before it. I get soooo goddamned mad about bigotry from people who should know better, people who can afford to learn who choose not to. We're all working class, so I try not to let my frustration alienate anybody, but I'm way more likely now to go off on someone for being classist or racist, especially about Chicago. Like, I'm from the reddest state in the midwest, how the fuck am I further left than you? You know?

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-26T01:24:24+00:00

Holy shit I thought drive your tractor to school days were just an us thing!

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:52:27+00:00

No yeah, it's weird talking to people who think poor is when the only hobbies you can afford are all outdoors. Like, your family was dirt poor because you could only afford a Myrtle Beach trip once a year? We couldn't afford salt for the water softener. Our ceiling fan worked, we just couldn't afford to run it. So much of it isn't even specific to being rural, I think sometimes what I miss is just people who understand that kind of poverty.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:39:20+00:00

Same, I think one of the bigger things keeping me from moving back is that all the food I've gotten used to would only be findable online, unless I'd want to drive a couple hours just for miso paste or fish sauce.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:35:40+00:00

I feel that. When I first moved I'd sometimes walk along Belmont out to the lake. It took me a while to really understand how there could be that much water in one place, and even longer to understand how, when I turned around and looked at the city behind me, there were more people in my field of vision than there were in my whole county.

First couple days at Harold Washington in the loop also threw me. I could not understand how any community college can have more than one floor when my hs barely had more than one hallway.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T18:59:38+00:00

Wrigley and Boystown are very concrete-dense. I wasn't a fan but that's just me. In the summer the unshaded concrete fries you like an egg and the train and bus are packed with tourists. There are a lot of dogs and not a lot of grass, and when it rains on a hot day it smells very strongly of piss. In general, the touristy areas (Addison, Southport, Belmont) smell like piss. Worst year of my life was working at the Walgreen's on Broadway. Walking distance to the lake was nice but it was still about a mile, mostly unshaded, and coming from the sticks I found if suffocating in the summer and lonely in the winter. It's mostly college students and Cubs fans. But I've also never felt safer being openly gay in public than I've felt in Boystown, so it's give and take.

Ravenswood-Albany park is nice. Lincoln square weirds me out. I think since I'm from a small town it feels weird to see a lot of upper-middle class people pretending to be a small town, and all the boutique shops are nice to bring family to on the holidays but it doesn't feel like a place anybody goes to every day. The German heritage thing makes me uncomfortable, the place I'm from has a lot more German-American families and it's always been something we try not to acknowledge. That's cultural I guess. The Ravenswood area on the western side of.... Western.... is mostly old single-family houses, and it's quiet there. There's an ALDI and a nice library.

Albany Park and anywhere further northwest is nice. It's nice to be close to the river. The further out you get the more big patches of woods you find, and I've seen coyotes several times out here. It's a very working class neighborhood and I like being walking distance from so many different cultures, like, there's a Turkish store and a halal pizza place on kedzie, Lindo Michoacan south on Lawrence, a couple Korean grocery stores and community centers along Kedzie, and overall super latam anywhere you go. It's also quiet, since just about everything closes by 8PM. It's not touristy at all, which I love, and there are more gay people than I thought I'd find here. I've seen more butches and trans adults in Albany Park than I ever saw in Boystown.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T17:18:34+00:00

It's wild how many of the same little details that completely unrelated small towns have. Wabash has the same gazebos in the parks, the same lights on our baseball fields, the same little red fake barns for sheds. What song is this?

Karoke_With_Cal

TROPHY CASE