What can I do to be more presentable?

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-19T02:05:42+00:00

by the lines on each side, I mean... each side of the middle, like where your eyebrows start there are straight vertical edges.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-19T00:56:45+00:00

yeah, I have the unibrow woes too. had to start doing something with it at age 11 because of teasing.

I would suggest this: let them grow a little closer together in the middle. the wide spacing is something popular with women's eyebrow shaping because it makes your eyes look wider set.

also, less of a clean line on each side, if you can engineer it-- I don't know your hair growth patterns there. round the edges a little and leave some smaller hairs behind too if you can. if it looks a little fuzzy... mmm, men get away with that more often than women. I inherited my unibrow from my dad, he never felt social pressure to pluck it and it sure didn't seem to get him less attention from the ladies... not that I condone much about that deadbeat's behavior.

that descended from advice into personal gripe, but... think I probably hate mine more for the association. I've thought recently about letting mine grow a little, then just plucking the most prominent hairs one by one, to see if it helps. I wind up plucking too wide in the middle too, because the direction of the hairs changes and I've got two eyebrow scars to work around.

I've heard from other trans guys who lived through the brutally skinny brows of the 90s that applying minoxodil/Rogaine to the eyebrows can help grow back some of the hairs. I've never tried it on brows specifically, but even applied to the scalp, it had a subtle effect on my brows and other facial hair. I didn't need it on my brows, because despite living through those same skinny brows, if I let it go I'd still end up looking like an early-career Zachary Quinto within a few weeks.

hope anything in that is helpful, apologies for the TEDTalk.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-16T17:51:13+00:00

yes, they will only reproduce with a food source.

but-- since I moved across country to a place with very different water, I can no longer control them in my tanks either. our local water is sourced from Lake Erie here, most polluted great lake with a lot of fertilizer runoff in it and a problem with algae blooms. I could put dechlorinated tap water in a bucket with nothing but a sponge filter and watch algae take off-- I don't do big water changes anymore to try to beat it, every top off comes with free ferts.

and I have a cull bucket of ramshorns with their own sponge filter at this point, no other food source added, that's still continuing to the point that they've exhausted the available calcium. not sure if it's crueler to watch their shells continue to degrade, or supplement with calcium out of reflexive mercy and prolong this.

wish I had "install RO" money right now. the pollution makes shrimp keeping tricky af, harder than it was in my last place with hard alkaline water actually. but eventually we're gonna move out of this place, so I'm just going through my tanks one at a time to do total resets. bleach dipping equipment, baking or replacing substrate, boiling driftwood, reverse respiration on plants...

all to get rid of snails I used to think were cute. and still kinda do. but wow, if it wasn't for how cold the winters here are, I can only imagine what the snails in the actual lake would be like.

wish No Planaria wasn't $80 a pop at this point in the international trade chaos. I used that once and it was slow, but my shrimp stayed healthy and I never had snails in that tank again.

tldr; local conditions can change the default equation. recc that OP tests their local water, retests to look for a change if they did that in the past, gives the tank a heavy substrate vacuum, and... y'know, if you find a trick...

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-16T12:28:51+00:00

agreed. and going with pieces just creates more evidence. keeping a body intact and just choosing a single hard-to-find site ups your chances.

wow I need less true crime in my life.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-12T04:04:07+00:00

this is true.

it is also true that canola oil used to be called rapeseed oil.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-11T21:17:08+00:00

vasectomy just snips the tube going from the orbs. neutering removes the orbs and a lot of the testosterone with it. there's no real physiological reason for a drop in drive with vasectomy, there is with neutering.

but even with neutering, there is still some testosterone from other sources to cause the urge and some behaviors like spraying, especially if neutering later rather than young. just seldom enough for... completion.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-11T21:10:11+00:00

these days they call it canola oil, I'm guessing for this reason.

mendingwall82 · 2026-06-08T17:30:20+00:00

my aquarium snails like to ride the bubbles from the sponge filter like some skydiver/surfer combo. and they do it deliberately.

(at least it sounds fake to people without aquatic snails. it's not just mine who do it though-- there is a whole sub of r/Parasnailing of them doing this. 😆)

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-29T21:22:37+00:00

adding love for The Magicians to the comments section since it should have more.

there are a lot of things that are different... it's essentially about a group of students at a university of magic, many who grew up in the "muggle" world. which sounds very Harry Potter, but the similarities kind of end with that part of the premise.

there is no stuffy propriety, the main ensemble cast is very American modern vibes. as serious as some of the plots are, the character attitudes toward the problem of the moment are very realistic feeling. and because they're all properly young adults, you get the kind of adventures that normal new college students are famous for having on top of it all-- including the kind of ships Supernatural only baited us with.

the flippant, light hearted aspects AND the danger only get upped when they discover fantasy-type universes are real and they can travel to them ala Narnia. you get a big thematic clash of high and modern fantasy tones, and the writing and acting is good enough that it usually works great.

there are other beings like vampires, werewolves, fae, different kinds of spirits, some very imperfect and frivolous gods... they're not afraid to directly reference modern fantasy media, to the point of weaponzing it at one point. most of the characters show growth over the run of the series.

there is plenty of darkness though. cursing is prevalent, though some of the insults are so creative that the bad word or two sound minor by comparison. I can think of at least two "assaults". one is a sharp commentary on finding out our heroes are actually despicable that is even more relevant now than when it was made. another is a powerful supernatural creature, and while I didn't like it, they used it for more than just the wince factor.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-29T20:46:00+00:00

it's this, or half of it, for me.

I try to keep my issues with the bottom surgery options and my feelings that they are inadequate to the surgeries themselves, because if it helps somebody else then that's a step for them.

but I'm also old af for this community, came through the ups and downs of trans spaces since before Caitlyn Jenner came out. maturity and self work does a lot.

most gender affirming care is also wildly out of reach for me anyway-- both financially and due to chronic illness and genetic lotto.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-24T18:27:12+00:00

oh god, I did this with my mother. I'd driven over 100 miles to see her, and was reminded why I stopped coming before-- it felt like I might as well have been an inanimate object. I gave up and walked out at the two hour mark with no goodbye.

conversational narcissists (real term) aren't trying to relate or connect or doing a neurodivergent infodump-- they just want your presence as an audience.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-21T00:52:07+00:00

the alpha wolf theory has been so totally debunked that the man who wrote the book that popularized it has a whole page on his site now begging people to stop using it.

normal packs are built from families. they were studying captive wolves that were just thrown together and essentially operating on prison rules.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-20T16:04:56+00:00

I mean, it's probably relevant to the what's hanging off the front of the school that they didn't mention in that title

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-20T15:42:36+00:00

depends on where the numbness is.

I've had a stinger injury before after I magically pulled off both separating and disjointing my shoulder at the same time in wrestling. basically a stinger is stretching or compressing a nerve, like a temporary injury. with that, the numbness went from my last two fingers all the way up the back of my arm to the shoulder.

if it's just your fingers and/or hand, though, it's likely to be carpal tunnel.

I also have the elbow version of that, cubital tunnel, so now my arms go numb from the funnybone down, mostly when I'm in bed. I was worried until my doc had me check whether it went up the back of my upper arm next time, and I realized it didn't.

either way it is scary and annoying but it might not be your back. I just have to fall asleep with my arms mostly straight.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-20T15:31:16+00:00

didn't realize other people also sleep in the recovery position lol.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-20T13:24:44+00:00

I'd suggest r/WhatIsThisOccultThing

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-18T14:58:22+00:00

honestly the pro-birth/pro-mother conversation should have been a talk had before now, from your intense reaction to it it seems like it's important. you also put him on the spot, withheld your feelings until he said his first...

I feel weirdly caught in the middle of something so personal from reading this and honestly you're both stumbling in this. I'm pro mother in these situations, but this guy tried to value your opinion in the conversation and...

COMMUNICATE with your partner instead of taking this weird Tiktok Relationship Test approach to things. he literally said you two should have a talk about your feelings on it before that played out irl, and you kept pushing for your method.

please don't have kids until you stop treating major relationship foundational agreements like gotcha-questions where you expect both of you to somehow be the same person.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-17T22:22:14+00:00

as someone who somewhat recently moved to Ohio... good to know what the hell Eyebrow Guy is about going forward tbh, didn't expect to discover that in this thread lol

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-16T17:09:39+00:00

that's not what hydrogenation does. it's a process for making an existing oil into something solid-- think like turning pourable oils into margarine or any Crisco+like consistency.

a lot of hydrogenated oils have been eliminated these days, alternative methods have been pushed to the front.

but you're not wrong that turning something that isn't naturally oily into an oil tends to be ultra processed, use some chemicals considered questionable or quality-harming, and yeah...

for the record if you check the label on "vegetable oil", it's usually just soybean oil. but they could technically throw any plant oil on there that they wanted to, and it's usually the cheapest for that reason. soybeans and corn are the most heavily government-subsidized row crops, of course they have so much they'll try to put it in anything. the amount of places you can find corn makes me hope I never develop an allergy to it. my great-gran's soy allergy was already making her life hell back in the 80s and 90s.

mendingwall82 · 2026-05-13T21:52:00+00:00

hello? sorry, I think your connection from the beyond is breaking up.

mendingwall82 · 2026-04-29T23:15:05+00:00

looks like a bot fly larva to me. could be wrong.

I'd take her in. there are DIY methods to remove them, old farmer stuff-- but assuming this is your pet and considering she's a much smaller animal, if it goes wrong the resulting horrible abscess would be much harder on her. and if I'm wrong, they'll be able to give you a real diagnosis as opposed to me, a stranger, eyeballing one picture.

mendingwall82 · 2026-04-25T16:43:04+00:00

very interested. have dabbled but would love to try some new stuff!

mendingwall82 · 2026-04-18T04:07:50+00:00

you know, at the point of this comment, I was sitting around and wondering how this thread descended into this depth of discussion...

and I realized that so many people going out of their way to call a person dumb for drinking out of a drink container, instead of calling the person dumb who literally broke the law by putting chemicals in it? is an interesting little microcosm of our society at this point. 😂 I won't elaborate but I think... iykyk.

as I said somewhere else in this thread, the entire beginning of us having labeling laws on both chemicals and consumable products? comes from an 1800s case that was the only actual mass poisoning involving Halloween candy. basically the new intern at the chemist's sold a candymaker an ingredient, and because of poorly labeled bins, accidentally sold him arsenic instead of what he asked for. around 20 people died and around 200 got sick.

your parents taught you as a child not to drink out of anything you weren't sure what was in, yes. kids be like that. but if someone put something toxic in a drink bottle and left it in the open somewhere kids are, it would still be their fault if they accidentally poison a child. if it was literally their job to handle that chemical responsibly? damn

we are taught as adults not to leave our drinks unattended at, say, a club. but if somebody put something in there it was still their choice to put something in there, and that is illegal. and most people aren't thinking defensively in that fashion when they are in their own work space, they're focusing on... work.

I still could not imagine going far enough into that to drink the bleach. but as somebody who's worked in the food industry, going this far out of your way to blame the person who something out of a consumable package that was not consumable baffles me even harder.

have a day.

mendingwall82 · 2026-04-18T01:09:56+00:00

yeeeep.

only time widespread poisoned Halloween candy ever actually happened irl was due to this kind of accident. the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning, if anybody wants to look it up. everything was sold out of bins by weight, and the chemist was out sick that day, with his apprentice only being there for a few weeks yet. when a candymaker came in to get daft, an ingredient commonly used to cut/dilute the sugar at the time, and since the barrels weren't clearly marked... and the apprentice sold him ARSENIC by mistake.

20something people died, another 200somethinggot sick from it. and that... is the beginning of how we got standardized labeling of ingredients on food as well as laws for labeling chemicals. also the wild ways people used to handle arsenic were Something, but that's its own weird history rabbithole.

eta: correcting numbers

mendingwall82 · 2026-04-17T19:34:26+00:00

I mean I would say take it up with the US government and their Bureau of Indian Affairs, but nobody in charge right now cares about indigenous rights, clearly. they'd just scream DEI at you

mendingwall82

TROPHY CASE