Allergies.

I’m allergic to bee venom, so I developed a phobia of them after my second sting at about 5 years old.

It took me until my thirties to start working on the phobia.

I reached a point where I was able to encounter bees, wasps, and hornets without fleeing or freaking out. I even caught a bumblebee that got into the house a few weeks ago and released it. Well, me and my kid did, it got into a weird corner and it took both of us to get it captured without hurting it.

But, back in my early twenties, I once ran away from a bumblebee that was doing absolutely nothing, leaving my patient standing there confused.

Those two events encapsulate my bee experience perfectly lol.

As it stands, as long as a nest of hornets or wasps isn’t in my yard, I’m okay with them. In my yard, if there’s nobody willing to relocate them, they ded.

Other bees and bee like critters are all good, though I would call the beekeeper that I know if a hive set up shop in the yard because he has promised he’d do so. And I know him because he was a total bro when I randomly called him and explained I was working through a phobia, and could he help with a few things. Dude went so far above and beeyond it was crazy.

Not only did he bring out single bees for visits in those little queen boxes, he did so with it taking a half hour each way, and turned turn gas money. Then, once I was chill with holding the box, he bought a freaking suit that would fit my sasquatch ass, just so I could visit his hives. Said that since he had started lifting, it was an investment in his success in getting beefed up, but dude is all of 5’7, and even though he does lift regularly is still way smaller than me, and always will be.

Anyway, point is that it eventually got to the point that I could visit his hives without the suit, though not up close. way closer than I ever thought possible, because it was close enough that bees were in the air around us. And I had my epipen in hand. But still.

That’s tangential to what you actually asked, but I do view flying, stinging insects with a different emotion than anything else. Bumblers are as close to zero reaction as it gets because they’re just so chill. As long as I see them instead of them buzzing me before I can track them, I can sit and watch them.

Honey bees, it’s number based. Once there’s more than a few, I can’t track them all, so I tend to get nervous and exit the vicinity calmly.

Wasps and hornets, I do not fuck with. That clenching in my guts when they’re nearby is not ever going away, I don’t think. But, I don’t run screaming like a child any more.

But other than that, my likes and dislikes are fairly broad. Like, I don’t even hate roaches and mosquitoes, I just don’t want them around because of health risks. I can see the beauty in them, I can appreciate them without an “ugh” factor. Compare that to seeing up close pictures of hornets where, as much as I recognize their beauty, it’s a horrifying beauty.

Now, how much I like something is pretty damn arbitrary. I love tigers, but lions are just cool. Why? No fucking idea. I like reptiles, but it’s not an emotional thing. It’s “oh, cool, a snake. So, what were we talking about?”

Dogs and cats, I don’t even factor into this kind of thing because we’ve coevolved with both for so long that they’re part of us.

But, chickens. Fucking chickens! We have some now, and I love the things. Growing up, the chickens I knew were all food production. Small scale, a dozen or so layers that could be used as meat in a pinch, plus some being raised for meat. So they weren’t exactly socialized with humans. If you weren’t bringing them food, and weren’t bothering them, they DNGAF about you.

But, our first one was taken in young, as a sorta rescue. So he got socialized part way. Then we got a hen that was hand raised, and very young, and she very much enjoys being with her people, so she’s much more personable with humans in general. And even the half feral hen that has joined us is a delight in her own way, despite not wanting contact directly. They’re all dumber than dammit, and messy and loud, but that’s part of what’s great about them too.

Two years ago, at this point in 2023, if you told me that the best part of my evenings would be cuddling on my couch with a chicken, I would have assumed you were tripping balls. And if you told me I’d be willing to die for a chicken, I’d have told you you were an idiot. But here I am, perfectly willing to run into the yard and take off after a coyote because it was fucking with my rooster. Which, I forgot the damn shotgun as far as that goes, which is also a good indicator of exactly how upset I was. Ran right past the thing, broke a hinge on the door and was as close to running as I get. Had to spend two days in bed recovering from screwing up my back during it, but I’d still do it again.

I fucking love my chickens, and that love has spread to other chickens. The one feral rooster that runs around used to annoy the shit out of me, but now I look forward to him, my rooster, and the little bantam rooster at another house serenading everyone. When the ferals pay a visit, or the flock from the other nearby house that keeps birds get loose and show up, I’m watching and smiling, even if I don’t go join them.

Ahhh, I made the error of forgetting to note that it does vary by location. Thank you :)

Aight, you seem to want to ignore the legal benefits, so I won’t mention that beyond saying that it is a hell of a lot easier to get married than to figure out all the paperwork needed to duplicate it, and not even have the exact same outcomes, just the majority. The tax thing, for example, you can’t file jointly if you aren’t married, no matter what else you set up (edit: in places where things like common law marriage aren’t recognized)

The biggest thing is the experience, imo. The memory.

Now, me and my wife went to the JoP, with our kid and required witnesses (my best friend and his husband).

No fancy reception, no major party, just went home and said to my dad “we’re back, no problems.” He said congratulations, and went back to watching TV.

Total spent was about a hundred bucks, including gas. And the memories of it are wonderful, we cherish it all, and we’re happy as hell we didn’t do anything else.

Wedding ceremonies, however, are expensive once you go beyond that bare minimum. That’s a cultural/sociological thing where the needs of the individual and the culture mesh into not only believing it necessary, but beneficial.

And, for the people that want it, it is beneficial. Ceremonies, rites, rituals, they serve a purpose beyond the legal or official status that comes with them. Weddings are as much about community as they are the couple. It’s the union being both recognized and celebrated at the same time, even when it’s a secular ceremony rather than religious.

Don’t get me wrong, the money spent on empty bullshit surrounding weddings is absurd. But the actual wedding, where the community stands around the couple is incredibly powerful in terms of validation, even when it’s the license that really matters legally. You can have ceremonies without the license; I performed several of them back before same sex marriage became legal. Those events were important, and doubly so because they had no legal standing.

I think that’s what you’re missing, that there’s a massive difference between two people shacking up and marriage. When the people involved swear an oath, and/or exchange symbols of union it means something, even if there’s no witnesses, not even someone to perform a ceremony. But as you move into witnesses and an officiant, it feels different because it is a public commitment. You can still divorce or whatever, but it happened, and you can never deny that. That moment, the vows, they exist in a way they don’t if you swear only to each other.

Yeah, two people can be just as committed, and honor their commitment perfectly without anything else. But it feels different.

Now, again, I’d argue that once you start shelling out for crazy dresses and cake and niche receptions, you hit diminishing returns very quick. That’s to satisfy other things, not the union itself. It may well make people happy, but it doesn’t add anything to the underlying point of there being a ceremony in the first place. That of saying to the world “where once there were two, now there are one”.

Not that anyone has to share the valuation, but it’s what underlies the whole thing, and it has value

Id say it’s the mindset of the experienced linux user that matters.

If you’re willing to tell a person, “if you run into trouble, call me”, and then follow up when they do, half the fight is over.

Most people, they try it and it’s fine, as long as the basics are there. You show them where the browser and email are, set up desktop shortcuts to important stuff, and answer questions, and they’ll eventually not even think about the fact that it isn’t windows.

But the first time they run into trouble, and you can’t give them an answer in a reasonable amount of time, they blame Linux, because they forgot how long it took them to figure out windows originally, and aren’t willing to look things up even if that’s what they did when they ran into a Windows problem.

So, you gotta play tech support for a while if you’re the one introducing them.

You aren’t going to change mindsets inside someone else in any realistic timeframe.

Ehhhh, I think you screwed up by over explaining. The point you’re endlessly actually asking about makes sense, and it’s a valid discussion to have, but it’s buried when you’re trying to ask something. There’s a limit in the human brain to how much information you can track in a question before you start losing parts. There’s one for raw information as well, but it’s bigger and easier to bypass. I hope, because this is going to be a long response.

The reason that “super straight” is offensive is because it implies that attraction to a trans person isn’t heterosexual when the expressed gender would make the attraction hetero. By the very fact that “super” is used as the modifier, it implies better as well. And that’s just bullshit, which I think you pretty much said despite it being buried.

If you have some need to draw a distinction between heterosexuality that includes trans partners, it’s inherently trans exclusionary. There’s nothing wrong with not being attracted to trans people, it’s when the implication is that there’s a difference between heterosexuals that do and haven’t experienced that attraction that you run into the wall.

However, for the purposes of discussing the matter, I think either cis-exclusive hetero or trans-exclusionary hetero would be the most effective terms cis-exclusive would mean that your attraction is limited to cis people, with no rejection of transness in that you would be expressing it as attraction first. Trans,exclusionary would be for those that reject transness ideologically or for reasons other than raw attraction.

Now, I think it important to note that a lack of attraction by itself doesn’t mean anything else. It isn’t some kind of glaring proof of bigotry. The way humans form attraction leads to the unfamiliar having a greater weight in what base attractions factor in. As an example, not being attracted to white people doesn’t mean you’re a bigot, it just means that the collective set of characteristics of white people doesn’t match your inner “template”.

Now, that template may well have been formed because of bigotry, be it internal or external, but it isn’t the proof of the pudding. Just by virtue of growing up with little or no exposure to other physical traits than your own ethnicity can cause your template to be limited to those that look most like what you’re used to. The unfamiliar is, on a primitive level, a questionable source for mates.

It’s how people handle their templates that matters, not that they have them. If I say “white women are ugly”, that’s shitty, and a form of bigotry. If I say “I’ve never met a white woman that I’ve been attracted to”, that’s a statement of fact (well, not for me personally, this is an example, not a statement of my own preferences). Now, I could be saying it politely and still be a bigot, but saying it isn’t proof of bigotry.

This applies to trans people too. Acknowledging that you’ve never felt attraction to a trans person is a statement. Saying that they’re ugly is shitty, and is probably bigotry, depending on the reasoning. Saying they aren’t women/men is bigotry.

So, the why matters more than actual terminology, which means that more options in terminology are helpful when discussing the matter in general. The two I suggested are already what I use in my head when thinking about the subject of attraction as a whole, and how transness factors into the individual “templates”.

Now, as a personal example, I don’t have many limits in terms of what kind of women I feel attraction to. Race has never factored in at all. The range of physical features I feel attraction to is very broad, and tends to be more about details than categories (like noses; size doesn’t factor in, proportions do). As such, I can’t ever say I wouldn’t be attracted to a trans woman. I can, however, say that I would never be attracted to a trans man because I’ve never been attracted to a man. Tbh, I’ve never experienced attraction to anyone that strongly presented as male, even when I knew they were women. My inner template has an edge in the androgynous range of features and traits, and once it crosses into a perception of a person being a man/male, attraction goes away.

I included that as a comparison, because what/who I personally feel attraction to isn’t the same as examples used. For the same reason, I specifically have experienced attraction to trans women, but never in a circumstance where it mattered. Thus, I don’t fit either the cis-exclusive or trans-exclusionary labels, to the best of my self awareness.

Now, I get it. Trans identity is only fairly recently in general awareness. It’s been in my lifetime that it went from being something even most bigots didn’t really know existed (and they look for people to hate because that’s their fetish, hate) to being something that’s a topic of common discussion. So there’s going to be people that just don’t know enough to matter still talking about the subject. Ignorance isn’t the same as hate, though they sometimes wear the same hat. That’s where some if the things you talked about (l.e. “secretly gay”) come from. They just don’t get it.

That’s why I agree that the term “super” straight/gay is bullshit and needs to go away. But there is room for terminology to indicate the layers of attraction in conversation, as long as people aren’t being dicks about it

Doesn’t have to be all at once, or even immediate. It’s a process. Reunions, alumni activities, that kind of thing are going to give you the start. You run into someone that knows someone, you ask if they’ll help you make contact.

Nah, to be a large nose, it has to be out of proportion to the rest of the head, and his isn’t.

Well, whether or not it makes you a bad person now is up to you.

Regret, shame, they’re a great start, but they’re not enough to make you a good person.

Number one is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, some of that is fixed by getting older and developing more. But not all of it. The proclivity to follow others alone is something you have to root out of yourself.

But a big factor is what you do with what already happened. Have you tried to make amends? Not everyone will want to deal with you again, and even those that will give you a chance might not accept any apologies. And you have to accept that, because an apology to make yourself feel better isn’t an apology, it’s a continuation of your abuse to others.

You fucked with people, now you gotta make it right.

It really varies too much between industries to give a single answer. Someone at an insurance company is going to be doing something vastly different than an accountant, and they’ll be different from an architect (though only part of what architects do is in the office).

That being said, office work for the average worker, as in a salaried or hourly worker with a fairly rigidly defined job description, is usually going to be paperwork, even though there’s not always paper involved.

It’s taking information and moving it around, in one way or another.

As an example, one of my exes worked for a company that handles employee benefits, investments, and other services to other companies. Lets say a worker has an IRA, gets a nice insurance policy, and there’s a pension fund.

Her job is to take data from the company that contracted with the company she worked for, enter that data into the system in an properly formatted way, run calculations, then trigger the appropriate funds being moved from one account to another. No meetings unless something goes wrong. It’s all day data entry and management.

Now, before that job, she worked at a tax service under a CPA. She would get actual paper back then. Receipts, forms, and look for deductions for the client, then print out the church correct tax form, have the client sign it, then send it off. She would finish one, then start the next, all day long during tax season. Off season, she would be receiving accounting records from clients and entering them into the system of the company she worked for, and process things like withholding.

Pretty much, neither of those jobs required leaving the desk her entire shift.

Now, my best friend runs a department at a community college. He leaves the actual desk frequently. There’s meeting with his superiors, meetings with his underlings, meetings with vendors, budgeting work, orders, policy decisions, disciplinary decisions, and the list keeps on going.

My best friend’s husband was a flunky at architectural firm. When he was on a project, his job was drafting designs per specifications given to him. It required doing some oh the work, meeting with the architect, then changing anything per their decisions, or finalizing those plans. From there, once plans were ready to be used by someone to build something, he would essentially coordinate between contractors and his office to troubleshoot any snags with things like permits, supply issues, etc. So it was usually a lot of desk with work over a few weeks or months, then weeks or months barely at a desk, but still mostly in office.

Myself, I never had a long term office job. But, during recovery from a work related injury, I was pulled into the office of the home health company I worked for. My injury precluded patient care, but I was okay for light duty.

I was placed in staffing. I would roll in early, about 6 AM, and check for any call-ins. That would be employees needing to have their case covered by someone else for whatever reason. I would call other caregivers based on availability, proximity to the patient, and hours already worked. The last one was to avoid overtime unless absolutely necessary.

The software used, I would type in the name, and their details would pop up with their address, phone number, and current schedule. Same with the patient.

The first step for me was always to check the patient’s location, because that let me filter out people on the list as available by proximity before anything else, since I would have to just go down the list. I’d enter a name, check the location, and decide who to short list. Once I had the short list, I’d verify they were not going into OT, and start calling, with priority given to employees that had requested more hours.

Most of the time, a call-in would take fifteen to twenty minutes to resolve.

Once the morning run was over, it would be time for a quick coffee and come back to handle any afternoon call-ins in the same way. Have lunch, then repeat for evening/night call-ins.

During the few months I was doing it, most of the time, that was handled by maybe 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Some days it was all handled before lunch, and very occasionally by the time the coffee break was available. Very variable because there are days when folks just didn’t call in as much. And there were days it was crazy, particularly when there’d be something like a bad flu run through local schools and the parents would either catch it, or need to take care of their kids.

But, usually, the afternoons were either straight up bullshitting with the ladies in the office (not flirting or messing with, just swapping healthcare war stories), or helping with sorting out patient intake and/or prioritizing staffing for new patients. A new patient means you either shuffle staff around, hire new caregivers, or break it to the bosslady that someone is going to need overtime until the other options could happen. Since I knew pretty much everyone, I was good at figuring out who would be a good pick for a patient’s needs.

A few times, I did some of the initial onboarding for new caregivers. Get them the employee handbook, introduce them around, talk about expectations, that kind of happy horseshit.

Tbh, I liked it most days, but not as much as patient care. Don’t think I could have done it for years or anything, but as a temporary thing, it was nice.

See? Totally different daily routines and work between industries.

Ahhhhh, my homie, delete this. Quickly. And never ask such a thing on an insecure service again.

I’m not saying I don’t understand, I do. But you gotta at least pretend to show basic caution.

Right this very second, my chicken preening herself next to me, occasionally pausing to make sure I see her preening herself so that I continue to sweetly praise her

Definitely an unpopular opinion!

I just ran into a mini discussion about this very subject.

My conclusion was, and is, that he was decent for a pope. Not the best human, not a great human, just a pope that was an improvement over previous popes. And I stand by that based on the improvements he did make. I suspect he maybe would have gone further if he thought he could do so and make it stick in practice.

But he never would have gone far enough to satisfy me into abandoning the ACAB theory of monotheism. You know, where individuals within the cop/Christian/Catholic group may be decent people, but they’re part of a broken, corrupt, hateful system and aren’t actively working to change that at full force, so they’re still bad anyway.

Which is a long winded way of saying that I disagree with your title, but agree with the contents of your text body, at least with the broad strokes.

But you gotta realize, if you or me are giving lip service on camera, it don’t mean shit. But if the pope pretends to be a nice guy, he can actually change minds in doing so. So I ain’t mad at a pope that’s willing to be on camera and encourage better behavior, even if he’s s dipshit behind the scenes. And he did speak for better treatment of people, and there are actual Catholics that took it to heart and started acting better, so again, I ain’t mad that he was a bit of a dick behind the scenes

You gotta understand something. It’s all speculation.

There’s no official rules stating a pope has to be a certain age. There’s no procedural factors that make it mandatory.

This means that unless the Cardinals over time state that age was a factor in their voting, the rest of us can only guess, and the Cardinals involved in the election are supposed to never reveal what goes on during the voting.

While it’s definitely possible to apply sound reasoning into why popes tend to be well past middle age overall, there have been popes under 50, and even a couple under 40. One was a pope multiple times, and was first elected at 12. That’s Benedict the 9th, and it was over a thousand years ago, but still.

The Cardinals are supposed to be picking the pope based on their worthiness to be pope, but there’s been plenty of times where it was politics and power mongering all the way.

Like any institution, the church has changed and shifted over its incredibly long history, with all the ups and downs of its influence, wealth, and power. So, obviously, selection of leadership isn’t always the same.

In our lifetimes, we’ve not had anyone under their 50s. And there seems to be a general trend towards popes with known and proven ranges of belief about the major issues that the church aristocracy deems important.

To me, that points to selection excluding younger candidates because it’s hard to have a reasonable certainty about a candidate’s specific beliefs on a given issue until they’ve had time to show their beliefs, or speak about them consistently. However, that assumes all the Cardinals are acting in good faith, with the pun being both intentional and relevant.

I think it can be safely argued that the popes of the last fifty years have been compromise picks. Fairly conservative in most things, but with outlying stances that move away from established practice. And I use conservative not in the standard political way, but with it being more about “conserving” established dogma and policies within the church. That those policies match other uses of conservative is true, but one doesn’t have to follow the other.

When a candidate is a compromise it tends to end up where the need for a body of reputation and history is even more important during negotiations and arguments about who to elect, so it would make sense that age would be a factor because of that.

But even all of those conclusions are speculation, it just includes the reasoning for that speculation.

I mean, I asked, I didn’t call, then I said if

There really is a difference

Legit question, but that’s a no for me.

While it’s partly that it’s not really useful, and makes other features a better priority, it’s also partly because it would make people that think influencer is a valid job title plague lemmy.

Neither of those is worth casual curiosity

Removed by mod

You aren’t going to get many genuine answers, I suspect. Not because of stupidity or it being obvious, because I don’t think it’s either.

It’s because lemmy isn’t secure forum. Too easy for things to be found and any responses are used to get rid of. So any stupidity would come from giving anything other than a fake “I follow all laws, but object to X laws”.

Which, I follow all relevant laws, even when I object to them.

However, I have my own moral code, and would adhere to that regardless of whether or not there were laws perfectly aligned with them. It does not match the majority, except in the broad issues, but it isn’t so far off as to be incompatible either.

Most of my personal code is derived eternally at the end, but some parts were discovered externally. In other words, when running into a moral or ethical rule, I examine it and internalize it if it fits my needs, reject it if it doesn’t. Some bits and pieces are purely internally derived in origin, as they stemmed from experience in childhood before I encountered external sources regarding those matters.

Thing is, my personal morals aren’t necessarily something I expect others to follow just because I believe something is morally right/wrong. That’s part of my code; that until someone else’s code interferes with mine, or someone else’s, life, IDGAF, it’s their business. When it isn’t my life being interfered with, my code doesn’t automatically decree that I need to do anything about it, but it does allow for intervening when the situation makes it useful, necessary, or just desirable.

I’ll use shoplifting as an example. If I see someone stealing from a chain store like walmart, I didn’t see them. If I see someone lifting from a small shop that’s locally owned, my code gives me options ranging from informing them they’ve been seen and need to leave, all the way up to beating their ass if I feel that is the appropriate response to the specific situation. However, it also allows me to ignore it if I feel that’s more appropriate.

See? Not like the majority, but it’s not so far off as to be unrecognizable.

Part of that is that I firmly believe that all ethics are situational (and they are), and that morals can be situational as well. There are very few things I believe in so strongly on a moral level that there’s no room for them to bend when unusual circumstances occur.

Pretty much the only thing I’m fully, 100% unbending on is bigotry. Won’t put up with it, won’t tolerate it. That being said, I’m still aware that what is and isn’t bigotry isn’t perfectly defined. There’s blurring at the edges, specific cases where what seems like bigotry may be a language barrier, or a cultural barrier. And that, unfortunately, some of those edge cases aren’t even universally decided on by the targets if various forms of bigotry. So I can only rely on my own sense of right and wrong when it isn’t clear cut.

That means that when I encounter an unusual situation, I’m more likely to seek clarification before jumping in, and that I’m more likely to jump in by explaining why what they’re saying/doing is a problem, even if they aren’t being a bigot intentionally.

You see alllll that rambling? That’s the kind of shit that I do in my head any time I run into a new moral dilemma, or discover a need to reevaluate an old belief. Which can be pretty fucking often. I don’t like to let my code sit unexamined for long, so I poke and prod at it when a specific subject comes up, even if it’s nothing I need to do anything about. You run into that a lot online.

No, extroverts and ambiverts have trouble with interrupters too.

In a work environment, I find it best just to say I’m having trouble keeping up, and could first person please continue. Most of the time, it’s gonna work fine

No worries, you aren’t required to have perfect English :)

I guarantee your English is better than anything else I speak.

Your question is pretty jumbled up, and it’s difficult to tell exactly what happened. So I’m going to ignore that and stay general

Ableism isn’t necessarily the same thing as disliking something. As an example, my crippled ass uses a cane. It isn’t if the sound of the cane on pavement bothers you. You may have sensory issues, or a headache, or just not like tapping sounds.

Ablism would be seeing me using the cane and making assumptions based on it.

Being an asshole would be making fun of me for using a cane, whether or not it was also because of ableism where you make assumptions and act with prejudice towards me.

Erratic behavior can be, and usually is disturbing. It draws the eyes, it makes you notice the person. It is perfectly okay to not like that feeling, or to avoid it, even when that behavior is from a disability. It is not okay to treat the person poorly in any way when it’s you that has a problem dealing with something someone can’t help.

That’s when it turns into ablism, when the way you treat the disabled person is different than how you would treat someone without that disability.

However, you are not obligated to stay around a person that is behaving erratically. Doesn’t matter why they are, you have every right to walk the fuck away, and it isn’t a bad thing to do so, as long as doing so doesn’t put then in danger. It is a bad thing to walk away while grumbling about the gods damn noisy cripple, or the crazy Tourette’s tics, or the stimming, or whatever might be making you nervous. You can’t tell why a person is erratic just by looking. But you don’t have to treat anyone poorly.

Also, when you’re the one that dislikes something like that, it’s on you to leave a public space so long as they aren’t being dangerous to themselves or others. Insisting that the person with cerebral palsy fuck off back home is ablist, and being an asshole.

In general, we are all free to like or dislike anything. It’s how we treat people that matters. You could be the biggest bigot in the world, but if you keep it to yourself and never treat anyone poorly, it doesn’t matter.

Now, what is and isn’t actually erratic is not something clearly defined. It just means that they’re behaving in a way that deviates from the norm rendering their behavior unpredictable; and the norm can be pretty fucking dumb sometimes. As an example, someone laughing is not always appropriate, but it isn’t erratic by default, but some people think laughter in public isn’t acceptable, and that they can’t trust people that would behave in such a way. So, that laughter may deviate from the norm, and seem erratic to some people, but seem perfectly normal and happy to others.

But you have to always remember that you don’t automatically have the baseline if what is and isn’t acceptable just because you don’t like it. There’s times you will, but it isn’t automatic, particularly when you’re in public or in shared spaces.