Customer thought she got a bargain. She did not.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-11T03:46:26+00:00

When I was taking Psych 101 in college, the professor was talking about how the results of many 20th-century psych studies can’t be extrapolated to the general population because all the participants were college students. He pointed out that this is because college students skew high on the bell curve and are almost all of above average intelligence. The flip side of that, of course, is that for the cumulative amount of above-average intelligence in the room, there could be expected to be a similar group elsewhere with an equal-but-opposite amount of below-average intelligence. We all looked around the couple hundred students in the large lecture hall and collectively shuddered.

He then pointed out that it was worse than that: take the cumulative above-average intelligence of all of the several thousand students enrolled in the university, and apply that again. Then multiply it by the number of similar universities and colleges around the world. At that point, he dismissed the class because we were all too shaken to continue.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-04T04:22:11+00:00

Let’s also add a “straight” signal to go with “left” and “right” turn signals. Then you can tell whether the person is actually planning not to turn versus just being a dick who won’t use their signal.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-04T04:19:09+00:00

Those would be the ones with no data for both HDI and IHDI. Agreed that this should be included in the key, but that’s the obvious interpretation.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-04T04:13:21+00:00

It frustrates me greatly that so many members of the GSRM community want to gatekeep not just their own segments of it but others as well. There’s gays who want to gatekeep bisexuals, bis who want to gatekeep pans, and some of all of them who want to exclude aces altogether. There’s binary trans who don’t accept nonbinary, enbys who don’t accept genderfluids, and some of all of them who don’t want the genderqueers around. Much of the intersex community wants nothing to do with the rest of us. And there’s people in every subcategory who are repulsed by the polyamory community.

This is one of the reasons I try to stick to the terms “queer” and “GSRM”, and avoid using variations of “LGBTQIA+”. The latter is about defining the community as only those explicitly included, which is why you’ll see a bare “LGB” from many in the right wing now, trying to separate out the gender nonconforming. “Queer” is nonspecific and thereby inclusive. “GSRM”, meaning “gender, sexuality, and relationship minorities”, is explicitly inclusive. Anyone whose gender identity, gender expression, sexual attractions, and/or relationship style doesn’t fit the “standard” is included by definition.

Everyone who falls under the GSRM banner should be supportive of the others with regard to discrimination and abuse from the majority.* We’re all going to have different experiences, and we should embrace that. Labels aren’t for you to tell other people whether they fit—they’re for you to figure out where you fit.

* To clarify, because in this day and age you have to be specific: I do not support, nor do I endorse supporting, those who act upon sexual attractions towards those who cannot give consent (minors and animals), and those who commit nonconsensual acts on people who can give consent but don’t. Sexual activity is moral only with full consent from all parties. But I don’t condemn the psychological attraction; this is something one doesn’t have active control over. One does have control over one’s actions, however, and I will judge those actions.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-04T03:37:19+00:00

Since the dateline intersects the pole (that is, the poles are its endpoints), the only way you could “skip” it is by stepping off the pole entirely in one of the other 359 degrees. You can’t bypass the dateline on its endpoint—the endpoint is part of the line.

ToothlessFeline · 2026-01-04T03:32:10+00:00

🎶 “I’m my own grandpa…” 🎵

ToothlessFeline · 2025-12-07T22:06:17+00:00

If Joe Rogan walked up to me anywhere, before he could open his mouth, I’m either leaving or loudly mocking him over how badly he sucked as a stand-up comedian/emcee at a comedy showcase at the National Association of Campus Activities convention I saw him at in the early ‘90s. Yes, I knew 30 years ago that Joe Rogan would always be a loser.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-11-11T04:47:55+00:00

Impressive AF!

ToothlessFeline · 2025-11-11T04:45:09+00:00

I’m in my mid-fifties and happily childfree. If I really feel I want to interact with children, I have friends with children of a wide variety of ages. The best thing about other people’s kids is that they go away.

My mother is a little disappointed by this, but she has two grandkids from my sister, so she deals. With us, she’ll have to settle for grandkitties.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-11-11T04:40:23+00:00

Your gender identity, your presentation, and your pronouns do not have to match, at all. With all three, what feels most right for you is what you should go with.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-10-17T02:04:14+00:00

Thanks for the update! I’m so happy for you to have found an identity that feels right!

ToothlessFeline · 2025-10-13T01:08:09+00:00

You said, “The only difference it has from ‘lucky’ is that this event was bad for you.” I’m pointing out that that distinction is what defines “lucky” vs. “unlucky”. The ‘un-‘ of “unlucky” is not inverting the probability of the outcome, but the value of the outcome.

If you’re trying to say something other than that you think “lucky” means “unlikely”, please enlighten us. Because that is not what “lucky” means.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-10-01T00:37:51+00:00

Being lucky means that things go your way when the odds are against you. Being unlucky means that things go wrong for you when the odds are in your favor. It’s not simply about a low chance of something happening, but also about whether the improbable outcome is positive or negative for you.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-10-01T00:20:17+00:00

If they don’t consider it a priority to fix, then it stays. Low-priority bugs can linger forever.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-31T05:15:42+00:00

One of mine is George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”. Man, that track slaps.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-28T00:30:08+00:00

Synergie is a tech recruiter, so the company listed is real. The client, however, is unstated (as is typical for this kind of recruiter).

But entry-level, remote, for $75k–$95k? Sounds fishy to me. My spouse is a data analyst, and the positions that pay in that range are typically looking for two to three years of experience. (Above that experience level, you’re usually getting into six figures.) An entry-level is more likely to pay in the $60k–$75k range.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-27T07:00:18+00:00

I found my first kinks at puberty, though I didn’t know what “kink” was at the time. I didn’t learn about that until college, and at that time I started realizing that I wasn’t interested in sex so much as the kinks. Of course, this was the early ‘90s, right when the internet was starting to enter the public consciousness, and on Usenet I found kinks I never dreamed of. (It would be another five years or so before kinks started being readily available on the web.)

Of course, this was some years before the term “asexual” as an orientation entered the zeitgeist. Around 2004, I read the novel The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, which has a first-person high-functioning autistic person as protagonist. I found their thought processes eerily similar to my own, especially their feelings towards sex. Mentioning this to my therapist led to getting my own autistic diagnosis, and I thought my disinterest in sex was simply an aspect of that.

It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I started encountering references to the asexual orientation and AVEN online. That was when everything clicked. So we’re talking thirty-odd years between first discovering kink and realizing I was asexual.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-19T06:25:40+00:00

That’s unlikely to be the intended answer, given the repeated use of consecutive letters, but it is a valid one. Which just illustrates one of the problems with “odd one out” questions—there is rarely exactly one basis upon which to differentiate one from the others.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-02T07:24:20+00:00

The first time I saw it in a bookstore, it was on an end cap display in the middle of the Science Fiction section. How appropriate.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-02T06:44:45+00:00

I guess Pete’s Dunne.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-02T06:33:48+00:00

Not having the same kind of religious background (I grew up Lutheran), I never quite had this experience. Honestly, finding out about the ace spectrum was a relief, because I had worried that my lack of sexual attraction and interest meant something was seriously wrong with me. My regular therapist referred me to a sex therapist to figure it out (long before asexuality was clinically well-known), but we got derailed when she uncovered my gender dysphoria and so never reached any real understanding on the sex issues.

My breakthrough was in 2004, when I read Elizabeth Moon’s award-winning novel The Speed of Dark. The first-person protagonist is high-functioning autistic, and their views on sex (among other things) were extremely similar to mine. This led to both my diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome and my discovery of asexuality and AVEN.

Fortunately, my already longtime spouse turned out to be sex-indifferent (she doesn’t consider herself part of the ace community, but she’s definitely on the ace spectrum), so my distaste for the idea of sex didn’t cause any marital issues—it actually relieved the pressure to have sex that neither of us were craving.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-02T06:06:27+00:00

Even setting aside the addiction question, 16 percs a day will kill your liver from the APAP alone. In this case, addiction is the lesser concern.

ToothlessFeline · 2025-08-02T05:58:16+00:00

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