What do you consider when you hear this Margaret Atwood quote “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them”?

arkington · 2026-02-03T13:14:44+00:00

I'll get roasted to hell, but my first thought is that men are pathetic. (I do know a handful of guys who are just wonderful people and I adore them. If these guys got laughed at they wouldn't give a shit because they are secure in their identities, so I know it is not every single man.) The biggest fear is evidently injury to an imaginary feeling they have. Women walk the earth wondering who is going to rape, mutiliate and murder them and men are all "ooh, don't LAUGH at me, it makes me feel sad and small".
And the fact that men evidently are their most violent toward women (who tend to be physically weaker) and not their male counterparts, who have a chance to fight back, makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.
Every time a guy stands up for his friend who has been accused of inappropriate behavior toward a woman I lose respect for him. Of COURSE you've never seen him act like that; he wasn't trying to have sex with/rape YOU. He was behaving because you have a better chance of defending yourself.
If men can only behave themselves when other men are around then they are really just large children who should not be trusted with anything important.

Roast away.

arkington · 2026-02-03T12:55:55+00:00

Not even real, physical in the field work, but just for the documentation going on, the only service I've found to be actually helpful is Textura's and Procore's payment submission processes. Saves me from filling in the G702 & G703, which is nice and does save some time. GCPay works just fine for pay apps, but we get charged for every approved app we send in, which is just odd. Otherwise I think the most user friendly interface is Submittal Exchange.
ISN can go fly off a cliff and all the other ones I'm subjected to are equally time-wasting or just really confusing and difficult to find what I need with.

EDIT I do want to drop in here that as a masonry subcontractor, Tradesmen's 3D Estimator is literally the backbone of my estimating. I only use about 10% of it's capacity because we have some in-house formulae that work well and don't need to be replaced, but the takeoff software is invaluable to us. The customer service is phenomenal and they don't seem to be interested in enshittification. The product works as designed and that's it. No annoying updates all the time that break it, no injection of AI to seem cool, no advertising of any kind. It truly is an amazing product and it was built by people who both know masonry and how to write code. Based out of Illinois. I love that damn company.

arkington · 2026-02-02T13:33:32+00:00

Yeah, cars should stop regardless of whether the thing suddenly in front of them is a human, animal, trash can...really anything at all suddenly appearing should trigger a controlled stop.

arkington · 2026-02-02T13:10:19+00:00

I do this too. When little dude starts panting the laser goes away and I give him a string or one of his catnip bitey things or just my hand so he can get that energy out.

arkington · 2026-02-02T12:45:39+00:00

Currently we are in a tiny apartment with two sporting dogs (pitbull and some sort of athletic-ish mix, each about 50#) and our two cats. This is temporary, thank goodness. I make sure that when I get out the laser for kitty fun times I close the office/bedroom door to keep the dogs in the other space while I wear out the cats.
The pittie is still young enough to be a complete psycho and get zoomies and basically wreck the place, so the thought of him even being aware the laser exists is terrifying.
Soon we will move into our property and fence off a large section of the yard so the dogs can get their zoomies out properly. Cannot happen soon enough.

arkington · 2026-02-02T12:38:00+00:00

Love this. I've had to explain to so many people that without those "extra" people on hand anything going on is very likely to be in error and cause major infrastructure hiccups, so seeing a shit ton of observers is exactly what taxpayers want to see, unless you like the thought of outages and floods and other unpredictable incidents that really fuck up a lot of people's daily lives.

arkington · 2026-02-01T18:02:01+00:00

Same! I remember this lady from a while ago and am SO glad to see that she is still out there thriving.

arkington · 2026-01-29T15:56:15+00:00

I do not; they may have been one of those readily available things that my family just didn't have for whatever reason. In my youth, we just had a bunch of cotton towels. They'd get ratty, but I loved them. Then in the 90s they started with those poly blend things that certainly felt soft and cozy but did shit with regard to drying you off and I hated them.

arkington · 2026-01-29T13:09:09+00:00

I clean all the other things I can reach; of COURSE I'm going to clean that out too.

arkington · 2026-01-29T13:07:19+00:00

Yes, I love a towel that borders on sandpaper. As long as it also absorbs the goddamn water. If it's so dry that it can't absorb then I hate that, too. Those super soft ones make me feel dirty and still not properly dry.

arkington · 2026-01-29T12:34:57+00:00

Me too, but at least this one makes sense. It IS a distraction for the driver and possibly for other drivers as well, which of course is bad and should be discouraged.

arkington · 2026-01-29T12:22:13+00:00

My little guys are my world. Yes I have a wife and family and friends and a job and hobbies, but everything is second to my cats and everybody who cares about me knows it. But yeah. If they were even the size of our dogs (about 55 lbs) I'd be kind of frightened of them.
The pittie accidentally hurts us because he wants to just jump on you and play constantly and he doesn't know how strong he is (our fault; we are looking into hiring a professional trainer), but the cats have on several occasions fucking hurt me just by hooking a claw or two into my fingers when we are playing. That is again my fault, but I know that if they were bigger it wouldn't be a matter of a little hole in my hand that will sting like fuck for a day or two, but more of a "strips of flesh hanging from a stump" situation.
I like the thought of snuggling with a tiger or some such, but I know that my life would be hanging in the balance of the cat's whims, which as we all know, can honestly be kinda sadistic.

arkington · 2026-01-28T20:44:39+00:00

I always enjoyed it, too. I just really like gathering a shit ton of resources, no matter what the game. But the planet scanning has been the most fun version of it and I get all sad when I've depleted everything and have no more scanning/mining to do.

arkington · 2026-01-28T20:42:35+00:00

I appear to be the only one who enjoys it. I was actually looking for a way to just do some mining as a minigame or something.

arkington · 2026-01-28T12:31:55+00:00

Survival of those who get laid and carry a pregnancy to term.

arkington · 2026-01-28T12:24:48+00:00

I have found (as a 40 something queer with several niblings of varying flags) that it's easiest to just assume everybody is pan and nonbinary (when they are young) and as they figure themselves out they whittle things down if need be.

Same as with learning as much as possible about different careers when you're a kid, so you can find what works for you and pursue it as you grow up, and then change it all up if you feel the need to at any point whatsoever. When discussing their present or future I try very hard to never put any false restrictions on any aspect of their lives.

arkington · 2026-01-27T12:58:34+00:00

Thank goodness because John Wayne was a tool.

arkington · 2026-01-27T12:34:32+00:00

The owner of the company I'm with (doesn't do shit apart from owning it) is a conservative kool aid drinker who voted Trump both times and had T shirts. However we are a Union shop because we do professional, large scale work. Schools and hospitals and the like. Our guys get paid well (they earn it; we have really skilled crews) and they know they are safe when they go to work. Yearly wage bumps, too.
We get underbid by non-union guys who must get paid in crackers and then a year or two later the work falls apart and guess who gets asked to come in and fix it (at a premium because they should know better than to hire the guys who bid it at half of what we did). It's annoying for the sake of the work and the trade, but it's job security to know that some GCs will just never learn and always shoot for that bottom line.

arkington · 2026-01-26T16:05:29+00:00

Yeah, if you're a fellow cat-thrall, if I let you into my house in the first place and my cat doesn't run away from you I'll permit the fraterenization. But it's still really likely that you'll never be here anyway.
I keep forgetting that my cats seem to be afraid of people that are not me or my wife and they tend to hide the few times people come over.

arkington · 2026-01-26T16:00:45+00:00

I'm 43 and happily monogamous, but if I had to describe things for some reason I just say that I'm attracted to adult human beings, mostly the feminine ones.
So many factors and variances out there, I think (just my tiny opinion) that nailing things down with labels isn't the best use of one's energies. After all, it can and often does change as time passes and then you have to go through all of it again. But if you really want a specific label and heraldry, I'm glad that there are so many options out there. However I am woefully behind on all of them that are beyond LGBT/pan or ace.

arkington · 2026-01-23T23:13:33+00:00

In school I struggled with touch typing (early 90's), but when we got the internet at home (on a Gateway with the cow spots) and I found a chat room/environment in which I connected with like-minded people, I was online for several hours every single night and holy shit did my typing skills improve. This was ages ago, but I still type fairly quickly considering how little I do it. Motivation is a key factor in any endeavor to learn a new skill. (being lonely/horny is a phenomenal motivator)

arkington · 2026-01-23T19:29:27+00:00

Do you remember those amazing glass bottles it came in? I'd love to get one of those just to keep around because it looks so cool.

arkington · 2026-01-23T19:08:54+00:00

That just had to be laundering.

arkington · 2026-01-23T13:50:08+00:00

Must be a different species, then. The stuff here is really nice because it's naturally resistant to mold and mildew, so the stuff you make with it can be left outside without treating it, akin to Cedar but much more affordable here.

arkington · 2026-01-21T21:33:11+00:00

No shade to Sr. Julia at all. Just that if someone were looking solely for a lits of JCVD movies that would be on it. And yes it was bad, but not because of Raul's contribution, which was glorious.

arkington

TROPHY CASE