I have dogs. (And a cat that hisses at the mailman, so - a dog.)

We all sleep naked. Not under the same blanket.

Tell us when you figure it out, because we’re all equally fucked.

My finger hurts and I spent the last of my gumption posting this comment.

Go on without me. Text my wife. Tell her I’ll be

It’s weird that 4 people are in there for rape.

Like - I’m excited about sensors that uses higher frequency versions of this for health monitoring. I think that’s a perfectly valid use. But also, in my use, I’d be installing it as an IoT device on a network I control, feeding data to services I own.

This use - where it’s opt in for now, until they figure out how to monetize selling how much time you spend in front of the TV, in the kitchen, bedroom, or bathroom (paired with ‘anonymized’ data about what you’re looking at online in each space) is creepy as fuck.

Why this is unneeded

Citizenship is already required to vote in state and federal elections. Every state currently maintains its own voter rolls. These voter rolls are administered at the state level and how citizenship is proved occurs according to state laws.

Why this is bad

This database represents a breach of state autonomy to administer their elections.
Some localities do not require citizenship to vote. This database could disenfranchise voters in those localities.
This represents a huge target for hackers, and given that every municipality will have access to it, there are a lot of potential ways in which it could be compromised or manipulated. The federal government is rife with inaccurate information, and is often understaffed to address the issue. These issues can and will disenfranchise voters. States and municipalities are better equipped to handle their voter rolls.

How this will be abused

This database will be used to both verify citizenship, and for election officials to upload who is registered to vote in a given electoral area. This will lead to its usage to disqualify people who are registered in multiple areas. If - 31 days before an election, someone uploads a list of conservative or liberal voters from a purple area such as Florida or Ohio to the rolls of another state using hacked credentials, then it’s very possible those people will be disqualified from voting and may not know until they try to cast their ballot - shifting the balance of the election.
With the Supreme Court recently discarding birthright citizenship without clarifying who qualifies for citizenship, a sufficiently malicious actor could ensnarl the electoral and legal system with arbitrary claims that people’s parents were not U.S. citizens.
Invariably, the data from this will be used to stalk hapless people — either by electoral workers, or by anyone, once it has been hacked.
And, speculatively - what happens if the scope of this morphs to a ‘voter eligibility’ database, where it tries to ascertain if someone is eligible to vote on additional criterion, such as criminal history? Will it be plagued with errors, such as not registering expunged records, or applying one state’s laws to another?

Honestly, all the childhood trauma has given me an incredible sense of humor. Practice makes perfect!

100%

The administrative state may not give a shirt about you or the crimes that have been committed against you, but they care about your capacity to make life challenging for them. Police won’t investigate, but they will take a report. A report is a legal document. It implies the threat of real consequences if they don’t get their ship together.

I just got done reading the original post.

I don’t know if this is the right advice, or if this advice will help anyone, but if you have the delivery driver on camera mis-delivering the product, then stealing the product, I would have first contacted the delivery service/Best Buy with a photo of the front of your house with the house numbers clearly visible to say that the product was not delivered to your home. Full stop. The package was not delivered correctly. If BB/DD insist on that the package was delivered to me, I’d file a police report. Police report in hand, I’d respond to BB/DD with the police report and video of the incident and request to either be refunded or to receive the product you paid for.

Basically, give them as little wiggle room as possible before you invoke professionals into the mix who can advocate for you.

I have nothing of value to add, but this is slightly amusing. I promise I’m not all 51 of your votes for this comment.

Not quite yesterday, but yeah.

Not the 80’s, but the early-mid 90’s were rife with evidence of the U.S.’s decline.

Rodney King beatings, the highway of death in Iraq, the rise to prominence of Fox News, the mass destruction of the ‘93 floods, all those communities destroyed by the shift to zero tolerance policies, and the deevoludtion of national political debate into contentious identity politics by 24-hour news channels.

In the 80’s you had Bhopal and 3-mile island, too. And the savings and loan crisis, I think.

I’m genuinely confused. Do furries who style themselves after dragons, lizards, and snakes not refer to themselves as scalies?

Did I get taken by a meme like a decade ago and just decided that was canon?

First consensual experience. My usage of the word molested earlier downplays things a bit – we had full penetrative sex, but I was 6 years old. It’s something that occurred dozens of times. It’s not the only time I was sexually abused as a kid by someone older, but it’s the one I’ll mention.
Not very much later than that very first experience, I had a rather thorough introduction to pornography. My parents split up, my mom moved far away, taking us with her. After she kicked her drug habit, she became a workaholic and put in 80-hour workweeks. Another kid at our apartment complex had a “cool mom” who figured that her preteen was going to get his hands on porn, so she had some available that I guess was okay by her. He then showed it to everyone - including my then 8-or 9-year-old self.

Honestly - I think I did alright in this first consensual encounter. We had several multi-hour long trysts, usually one to two a weekend for at least a month (probably more like 2 months) until she moved in/we got caught. I don’t know if I knew what I was doing, skill wise, but she did, and I’m able to have multiple orgasms/erections, so like if one pops off (and they did with way less control back then), it wasn’t a mood killer. Plus, I think I lead off that initial encounter by trying to eat her out. I’m sure we talked and found stuff that worked for her. But maybe not? I don’t know. She kept coming back and wanted more. I assumed that was satisfaction - although it could have been whatever her emotional damage was.

A lot of it for both of us may have been the completely open embrace of each other without any kind of guile or awareness that we were, you know, being gigantic emotionally destructive idiots. As well as being fairly risky on contraception. Woof. Rhythm method most of the time. I’m sure she grew up to be a lovely person, but man, what a mess we could have made of our lives.

No, you’re good. I think I was reading too much into your comment/crotchity first thing in the morning.

It was weird times. I mean, great. But weird and great to my half-cooked, traumatized, and hormone-addled teenage brain.

She was my sister’s best friend at the time and, well, physically she was like the girl who’d molested me as a child, which definitely had (and still has) an impact on my physical preferences.
I don’t exactly know what her deal was, but I think it was that any male attention just short-circuited her. I recall her telling me she loved me after a few weekends of sneaking around, and after about a month, spinning a yarn as pretext to try to move in with us.

It’s probably a good thing we got caught a day or so after she moved in. Stupid football game. It pushed some TV show back, and my mom/sisters stayed up late to watch it. My sister (her best friend) came downstairs to check in on her and caught us in bed.

As for the how - I don’t know. I was an awkward gangly teenager, and she was honestly a pretty attractive girl. She had some self-confidence issues, I think.
It was like the first day she’d come over for a sleepover. I had never met her - my sister befriended her when we were in foster care, so this was not unusual - and I was instantly into her. I have no idea if she picked up on that or not. We were watching movies (me, 2 of my sisters, and her). The couches were occupied, and so I had a pallet on the floor. So did she. Our feet were under the big couch, hidden by the little skirt that all couches had back then, heads pointing toward the TV. I thought I felt her foot touch mine (but it was probably wishful thinking). I edged my foot over, discovering the distance between us was way too far for her to have accidentally touched me, and sort of bonked her foot with mine while awkwardly exploring. I pulled back just slightly and she immediately pressed her foot against mine. Footsie lead some sneaky suggestive glances, then surreptitiously bridging our blankets together and doing our best to conceal our roving hands. At one point during a bathroom break everyone had left the room, she told me her intentions, and I was very okay with them. We made a plan - I was going to go to bed, and she was going to find me after everyone was asleep. (She was sleeping in a guest room that was conveniently located - my bedroom was in the basement.) And that was that.

She used to page me with “143” (code for I love you - which I don’t think either of us could know what that actually meant) and I used to page her back with same. We were so dumb and teenager-y. It was fun, but unhealthy. I didn’t get enough positive attention, and this sort of reinforced a belief that I could only be of service to someone sexually. If I wasn’t serving someone sexually, I wasn’t of value emotionally - another formative belief that was maybe not the best and is still hard to shake.

I’m not sure how to respond here. Obviously it’s a reference to the leg lamp. That was never in question.

I was responding to the alt text of the image that called it a furry rendition, saying it was a probably better akin to a scaly rendition.

Editing this to be less confrontational: It’s not really important to establish exactly what fantasy creating the lamp depicts. It’s stylized, either way, so we’re not going to be able to say it’s one thing or the other. It’s got four toes like cats, non-retractable claws like t-rex’s, and an implied rear claw, similar to a t-rex first toe.

That is fishnet tights — I meant that t-rex’s are scaly in general.

Seems less furry and more scaly. Also. I love it. I want a t-Rex leg lamp.

Am I a grown adult that wakes up in a foster care home and the child that was there previously is gone?
Do I have to spend the rest of my life without an identity, or clinging to the “delusion” that I was this child that mysteriously disappeared?

Am I a child with 40 years of life experience?
Not long after, When I was 14, my first consensual sexual experience involved an 18-year-old. We got caught, and folks widely regard/regarded her as being inappropriate/in the wrong. Huh. First girlfriend, high school dances/romances. College. Jesus - every relationship basically forever.
If I proceed down the same path, does that mean I’m the creep now?