southsamurai

The mods do their job. I don’t know for sure which ones are and are not active, but reports get handled same day in every case where I’ve reported, or been reported. I’d have to check the mod log to see if there’s been recent activity in that regard, but don’t have interest in doing so when anyone can.

On my pen name account, I moderate two communities, and it would sometimes be months before I’d do anything on the account that would show up because those communities were very slow, and I’m subscribed to them on this account. No need to switch to that account when there’s no mod action needed, unless I want to post/comment on it, which is fairly infrequent.

Lemmy is way more forgiving of relaxed moderation.

Kingsize carries up to something like 8x, though not for every single thing they have.

Pretty much every bariatric patient I ever had ended up shopping with them. Hell, some of the guys that would steroid up buy from them. They tend to have designs that are made for men with atypical proportions. Just sizing up a pattern doesn’t take care of that for everyone, you have to adjust how things drape, where they stretch, where seams are, etc.

But, a patient of mine that had cortisol sensitivity was able to find stuff that fit him fairly well, and he had a similar build to what the image you provided shows. Almost all belly, with everything else being proportional.

But, even with king size, a 69 inch waist is going to be difficult to shop for stuff that’s also going to fit everything else well. Like, shirts as a perfect example, there has to be extra fabric across the shoulders and chest in order for the shirt to not ride up constantly. So your chest area is damn near guaranteed to be looser than is ideal visually. Even with stretchier fabrics, there’s a limit to how much difference you can factor in to mass produced clothing.

Since you’re under medical care, chances are that you’ll drop a good bit over the next two years or so, assuming that your body responds to treatment well. So, in general, I’d say focus your budgeting on work clothes, whatever that may mean for you. Pick up enough to get you through a week of work, find someone local that can alter them for a better fit, and then expand your wardrobe slowly after that, and have things taken in as the belly decreases.

That’s also assuming budget would be a concern. If you’ve got the resources to just throw a few thousand at the issue every six months or so, that’s a different issue. I only mention it because the patients I had that dealt with this issue (or similar ones) tended to be elderly or disabled, or very limited in the amount of time they could work. So they ended up very often spending most of their budget on “public” clothing, then just rotating through stuff like sweatpants and t-shirts at home.

Also, focus on natural fabrics. There’s long term “annoyances” that come with even this specific form of obesity. One of them is skin irritation where clothes bind, and it’s pretty much inevitable that some binding occurs. I’d say that with this specific example, it is inevitable. Natural fabrics tend to irritate less in that regard, and also help wick moisture away from places where skin touches skin. That wicking can be vital as we head into summer months. So, anywhere that your body touches your body, like the groin, underarms, and the bottom of the belly when you sit, cotton is the go-to with specialty fabrics the second best choice. There’s blended fabrics that wick better than cotton, but they also tend to chafe more, so they aren’t top pick.

It sucks, but nobody other than king size is likely to have decent button up shirts from what I’ve seen. And you’re still going to run into the fit not being perfect when you get the clothing, it’ll just be better than regular brands that aren’t designed right for big men at all. So, definitely start looking for a place that alters clothing. Expect to pay maybe twenty bucks at the absolute minimum per item. You might run into a tiny place that goes lower, but the last time I had to take anything to be altered at all, it was 20 bucks, and that was just hemming some jeans.

Custom tailored clothes are indeed an option. Maybe the only real option i hif you need a suit. Even Rochester big & tall wouldn’t have anything cut right without altering, and they used to have the best suits for unusual bodies (the roided out dudes shopped there for suits, so it isn’t just obesity). But Rochester, you’d need to have a local store anyway, even if they did have something cut right, just because their best options weren’t ready to wear, they needed fitting.

But, there’s some good news with the button up shirt requirement. Because your exact situation where body changes clash with that mandate happens a lot, you’ll be able to pick pretty much any color and style you like. Stuff like t-shirts and polos or henleys, you tend to have less options in that regard, even with king size.

Ngl, I’m kinda out of date with some of this. While I have sizing issues myself, they’re different, so I haven’t shopped for your body type in a decade. That being said, kingsize has a habit of carrying the same basic items essentially forever. The first patient I had that used them was back in the numerous nineties, and the last catalog I saw a couple of years ago had pretty much the exact same items available, so I doubt that part of things would be different now.

But, hey, even if it isn’t clothing, if you need advice about dealing with some of the other hassles of a body change like that, holla. There’s little things that I’ve picked up over the years, and don’t mind sharing.

I don’t remember. When was this?

Oh, heck yeah! Elotes en vaso especially. It still needs the cotija or parm, but the yeast bumps it up.

Grits are the same; still needs actual cheese, but the yeast amplifies it. Popcorn, it can just go straight on!

There’s multiple opinions on that. As in why using ai for this specific purpose is a negative. There’s also some for why it is a positive.

The two biggest negatives I’ve seen talked about are supporting the utterly horrible companies behind them, and that doing so removes the human from the process when any given protest movement is about humans.

On the positive side of things is the effectiveness of a given “poster” that a single individual can create with their skills and tools. In other words, not everyone can turn out a poster/meme/sign by hand that isn’t going to be ignored because it’s sloppy and badly executed. That argument tends to be bolstered by corollary that it democratizes production so that anyone, anywhere can take part with a cleaner message.

The other positive I’ve seen argued is that by using the tools of the oppressors, the downtrodden are using their own resources against them. Turning out memes and such would cost some degree of money, power, etc, and the result used to raise awareness against the oligarchy behind the theft of labor that trains the generative ai in the first place.

Which, that one is a damn good argument, imo. Those programs couldn’t do what they do without having human creativity to train from. So using it to attack the very establishment that stole from artists in the first place has a nice bit of irony to it.

I don’t have an emotional stance on the matter. Nor do I have a personal conclusion regarding whether or not AI is an acceptable tool for protest. I’m still thinking about the matter, since I have no pressures to form an opinion quickly.

Now, I have opinions about generative models; since I said they’re a form of theft, I think my opinion is obviously not on the side of the way they were trained. Also, it should be clear that in not in favor of corporate control of a tool like a generative model. However, I also hold the opinion that the existence of them isn’t inherently bad, and that they can be a very effective tool for self expression, even though they aren’t the same kind of tool as a pencil or brush or typewriter. That is tempered by an opinion that such tools should be required to indicate in the output that it was generated rather than created.

As long as you’re getting “favorited”, it’s working as intended. Retooting (sorry, I know that’s not what it’s called I just enjoy the term) is less a determinant of what kind of interest there is on your post, but if you’re getting any at all, you’re doing good.

Mastodon as a whole isn’t really about this kind of discussion. Just like Twitter was not going to have the same degree of interaction that reddit offered. Mastodon serves a different purpose, so it’s very difficult to make it work for threaded discussion, even though you can even use it to interact with lemmy (or other federated services).

If you don’t want to use Mastodon as just a place to send your thoughts into the world, you have to follow hashtags that are about discussion and engagement. They can be hard to find, and often aren’t great because most people use instances that limit character use. Hard to have a nuanced talk with under 500 characters.

I mean, you quoted the line and missed the last two words as umami. That’s absurd, it’s right there to see.

Up until the term umami spread outside of Japan, nobody called the flavor that. And it still took longer before people figured out that it was its own taste in the same wau sour, bitter, salty, and sweet are; that it has distinct receptors.

Before that, there wasn’t really a specific term in use. When people referred to what is now called umami, the vocabulary was different. Savory and meaty are the two I remember being most used, and they have other usages for food. Savory is very often just used as an antonym for sweet, and meaty just means “meat like” without drawing a distinction between the saltiness and slight metallic tang of meat from the part that is umami.

I don’t know how old you are, so you may or may not have been around during the spread of the term and its eventual discovery of having its own receptors. But it was “viral” in the way it initially crept in, then exploded as every cooking show started talking about it and familiarity with the term spread. There was a collective “ohhhhhh! That’s what I’ve been experiencing”, and the word got adopted. Now it’s a part of the collective lexicon.

Nutritional yeast, aka flake yeast.

Intense flavor, goes with damm near anything parmesan goes with, and things it doesn’t. It’s fairly cheap, lasts ages when stored decently, and it packs a nutritional punch.

People like to talk about how umami’s spread as a specific flavor into awareness in the west was a massive shift. But a lot of people got locked into the soy and fish sauce focus that was the first thing that western tastes became familiar with as umami. Even when folks are aware of other things, they still tend to think in terms of sauces and complex recipes for pastes and fermented products. But good old yeast is right there, cranking out a deep and rich flavor.

So it gets slept on pretty hard. It doesn’t help that it isn’t marketed well. A lot of people that have heard of it think it’s more along the lines of a vitamin you take on its own, or lump it in with woowoo nutrition in places where it’s called nutritional yeast.

One of my favourite things that really focus on it as a major flavor component is roasted cauliflower. You mix it with the spice blend, and toss it in a bowl, and it opens up with that rich, heady scent that yeast has. I don’t measure for it, it’s just dumping a bit of garlic and onion powders, salt & pepper, then some paprika. Then maybe two to three tablespoons of the yeast. It’s mouth watering, just the smell. Fuck, my mouth is watering thinking of it.

You get that amazing caramelized flavor from the roasting, that delicate floral note that some cauliflower has, the slightly sulfuric tang too. Then the spices lift those, and the yeast ties it all together and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Is it federated? It only works with its own protocol, so it can’t be part of the fediverse by definition.

A hundred?

Amateur.

They are not the smartest birds, that’s for sure. Pretty, and entertaining, but not too bright

Ngl, I would be happy if the cardinal that lives in our yard became pope. He’s a cool little dude, and much closer to the divine than any human.

Gotta get the wings spread.

Man, I’ve had tree limbs fall on my car, breaking every window, knocking body panels loose, and leaving a giant dent in the roof, and I still haven’t gotten a different car because of that bullshit.

Well, it’s about how you shove it back in, I guess

Critical thinking is a skill, not an inborn gift. You may end up better at it than someone else by virtue of some as-yet-unknown genetic or epigenetic factor, but only if you both learn the skills and practice them.

Worse, even with learning and practice everyone fucks up at least a little. Even if the only place they fuck up is thinking that because they have the skill and practice that they can’t fuck up.

We’re all fucking meat bags filled with hormones and chemicals. That shit will override every bit of common sense and critical thinking that’s ever existed. Not every time, but eventually, and more than once in your life.

Propaganda is only propaganda if you aren’t part of the institution generating it. If you’re a random asshole in fascistan, or whatever, chances are that the propaganda is just noise, the same way commercials or waves crashing are. There’s no need to think critically if all you want to do is coast and get by.

So they “believe” it in roughly the same way that people believe if they work hard, they can achieve anything they want. Even if they know better, what’s the alternative? Seeing reality and still being stuck in the same place? Nah, even the ones that have practiced thoroughly aren’t fucking around most of the time. Why would they bother if they apply that critical thinking and realize nobody really gives a fuck as long as they aren’t too hungry, and the worst stuff is happening in some letter town? They wouldn’t. It’s too fucking depressing.

Also, you assume that critical thinking can overcome a lack of information. The “news” is always the news. If you have no other sources of data, critical thinking doesn’t apply until something contradicts that news. If you control what people see and hear, you control the people. There won’t be enough opposition to matter, if you’ve set up your regime right.

No worries :)

Let’s see, I gotta think back to individual shows, and if I try to do that without writing it down as I go, I’ll fuck up, so bear with the jankiness of the comment please.

In terms of real metal, as in bands that lay claim to the genre, and back that claim up. Metallica for sure, and the multiple shows I’ve been to of theirs backs that up.

Maiden isn’t as popular with women, but I’d feel comfortable saying that have a strong fan base there, and I definitely experienced the women in the men’s room thing at their shows.

Type o neg is maybe not really metal, but they sure as hell had women alll over their shows, and they’re honorary metal imo, if not real metal.

While I wasn’t able to go to shows by the time they came around, jinjer has a massive female fan base. And I’ve seen footage of their shows that supports that. Which, it’s kinda cheating to point to female fronted bands, but they’re still not mostly women in the crowds, it’s still male dominated out there. Same with bands like spiritbox, or other woman fronted or all woman groups. Well, maybe The Warning is mostly a female fan base, but it isn’t a massive majority.

If you expand into hard rock, and other metal adjacent genres, it gets even broader. All of the hair bands had a ton of women or girls in their fan base. Poison in particular was batshit in that way. You could have trouble seeing other guys in their crowds lol. And they do still draw women to shows in numbers, as does Brett solo. Ratt, Cinderella, Great White, all those bands that got right to the edge of being metal sometimes, but didn’t quite abandon hard rock drew that audience in as well. Def Leppard was never even close to metal, and never claimed otherwise, but holy shit, were their shows estrogen heavy. Still are.

Now, the heavier you get, the less it becomes a thing. Even in melodic death metal, it’s a sausage fest. Amon Amarth can barely draw enough women to shows to crowd the ladies’ room supposedly, and they’re as accessible as melodeath gets. You get info stuff like dying fetus, and you won’t see many women at all, much less enough to crowd into the men’s room.

But, beyond those, I’ve been to metal shows for corrosion of conformity and seen women in the men’s room. Saw that happen with a7x, HIM, and whatever that one band was that has bullet in the name. It’s easier to run into smaller venues, so I’ve seen it with regional and local bands more often, but it was still a cubicle visible and obvious chunk in the audience, not just a handful that all had to pee at the same time.

Shit, I went to a Marilyn Manson show with my cousin once, and not only were there women lined up in the men’s room, they were lined up, peeing outside because there just weren’t enough stalls for the hundreds of women in line.

And I wanna say it was COC that was at a mid sized venue where the stalls had no doors in the men’s room, so a bunch of us ran the line for men about three feet in front, with everyone facing the other way so that the women could have the illusion of privacy. Might have been a different band, but it was one of the metal shows I saw with my cousin when I visited him. The guys that organized it stayed in the line the rest of the show, with a couple of us meatier dudes making sure everyone stayed eyes front and didn’t pull any bullshit. I know there were enough women at that show that the line kept moving in there for the last half of a set that was over an hour. There was a line of men like that too, but it was a lot of women.

Had to have been three hundred women total, and iirc, that venue only holds maybe 1500 seats, and there was also ladies room that was working.

Women are definitely a minority at metal and hard rock shows, but not as minor as people think.

Fuck! Side story!

I met a lady at a Metallica show back in the late nineties. Same deal there, women lined up in the men’s room.

One of the women was about 3 feet tall. She came out while I was zipping up, and ended up kinda catching the movement as she was walking by. Got super embarrassed, blushed and ran out.

I exit the lavatory, and she’s on the ground. Ran into someone, ended up busting her ass. Asked her if she was injured, and she wasn’t. Offered to play bulldozer for her, if she wanted. Kinda walk slow and make sure there was space behind me so she wouldn’t get slammed. She asked if I was hitting on her, and I said nah, but if she wanted to wait at the exit after the show, I would then.

She waited!

Nice lady. We hung out for a while.

Totally tangential, but it was a woman in the men’s room at a metal show.

Wait until you take in a metal show with a band that has a big following of women.

There’s going to be lines at both, but there’s also going to be a line of women in the men’s room waiting for stalls.

That’s the big benefit of urinals; you can cram more of them into the same space. Ngl, if I was a woman and going to shows, I’d carry one of those “porta jane” funnels and use the damn urinals instead of waiting for my bladder to pop

Sir, I’m afraid to inform you that your cat has swallowed a dog, and is trying to poop it out on your furniture.

Either that, or mating season got weird