Moon+

Best ebook app out there. Stable, smooth scrolling, damn near infinite visual arrangements, broad range of settings in general, option for either folder of bookshelf based browsing (matters a lot if you don’t have all your files’ tags perfectly arranged), works well on any kind of screen, and even old devices don’t lag with it under most circumstances.

Ummmmm, we have a perfect example in the news right now

Librera.

It’s the second best e-book reader across the board, and the best open source one

glad to :)

Tbh here, I don’t doubt that diddy is a fucked up piece of shit.

But the lawyer spearheading most of these suits is a bit of an opportunistic shark.

No, no, there’s a difference. You went after someone for no good reason. You could have said the same thing a different way without being a dick. You chose to be a dick

Welllll, American cuisine is a hugely varied thing that includes direct copies of external cuisines as well as internal ones.

That being said, ain’t nothing better than a big-ass plate of collards, black eyed peas, and whichever meat you wanna throw on the side of that.

And yes, when you’re having collards and peas, the meat is the side dish. Hell, forget the meat, throw me a piece of corn bread or a southern style buttermilk biscuit so I can sop up some of the pot likker and bean juice.

But, fried chicken won’t get sneered at on that plate. Neither would some baked ham, a pork chop, or some fried catfish. Hell, almost anything will go with collards and beans.

No kidding here, you get a mess of collards. Chop it up. Throw out in your pot with choice of fats that aren’t butter (rendered pork fats via bacon, fatback or a hamhock are common, but plain oils are just fine), get it nicely wilted. Put in some stock, then a half cup of apple cider vinegar. Cut the heat down, cover, and let that shit braise for a few hours. Optionally, you can dice some onion and/or garlic and get them sweaty in the oil before the greens go in. Splash a little ACV on top before eating.

Once that’s done, go see your mama. Slap her for not cooking that for you, assuming she hasn’t. If she did, you hug her neck and say thank you.

Now, the beans, that’s easy, you just soak them overnight, boil them for safety if the type of bean needs it, then simmer that pot until tender. Most beans, you don’t need to add anything but salt during cooking, but if you want it, a chunk of bacon, salt pork, fatback, or a hamhock are acceptable.

Whilst the beans are cooking, chop up some onion nice and neat. I prefer a diced onion, but some like it sliced into rings. Or, get/make some chowchow. If you don’t know what that is, I’m sorry you’re a yankee. These are toppings you can apply to your beans, if you like. A blob of mustard ain’t a problem. Toppings for beans isn’t mandatory, but having something a bit tangy on top is nice.

Fwiw, I don’t usually add any meat to my collards these days. I use a bit of smoked paprika. Had to reduce salt in the diet for my dad, and all the meats you’d cook in the collards are salty as hell. But you miss the smokiness of the bacon or hamhock if that’s what you’re used to. The smoked paprika brings that back without the nastiness of liquid smoke.

Eh, it isn’t bullshit except for the “capital” part. There’s no capitals you a cultural zone because it’s not something that can have a capital.

As an example, I’m in the southern Appalachian zone. And there’s a distinct subculture here that’s different from its surrounding regions. But Asheville? Not even close to being the center of the overall culture at all. The city and its immediate surroundings don’t even match the rest of the region it’s , in a lot of ways. You go from somewhere like mars hill nc, or mountain city Tennessee to Asheville, and it’s a different world almost.

Same with Boone tbh.

There’s differences across the mountains. Nc vs Tennessee, you find some things that are different, and both of those are different from the actual hill people, the ones way to in the mountains. And even that differs once you get up into west Virginia

So, Asheville being randomly picked as the capital for the region makes all the other picks questionable at best, bullshit at worst.

But the region is overall accurate. The edges are blurrier than the image shows, as there’s shifts as you go from full on mountain folk, to those adjacent, to the actual foothills. You still keep a fairly distinctive sense of culture for sure, but there’s a ton of bleed.

The other areas I’ve visited I can buy the general regions the map has, with the same caveat that without a major barrier, you’ll get bleeding well into each distinct “border” on the map, with those border areas having a different vibe from their opposite side.

No need to be a dick about it

Gee, I wonder why someone who has devoted themselves to fucking with a group of people might end up with a lot of people willing to do them harm?

Depends on the bone

James puts out some damn fine coffee content, that’s for sure. Won’t find any leola root fakes on his channel

Storage, temperature control, and airflow.

The storage part is the big one, imo. You keep animals in a barn, you don’t want to fuck around going to another building for their food, cleaning supplies, etc. It’s also more efficient land space wise. Building one or two levels up uses less land, which can then hold pastures, a different barn, whatever.

But it really depends on the type of barn. There’s multiple types that gained popularity in the states over time. The oldest styles were English, with simple construction, lots of space for animals, with the storage above, but with usually only two levels. Here in the Appalachians, you see a lot of crib barns, which tend to be shorter on average, and are more for grain storage than animals. There’s tobacco barns all over the south that are one or two stories, but the stories are shorter than the ones meant to hold animals and hay.

There’s a kind of barn that’s specifically built on hills so they have a basement/cellar.

The kind of barns for different types of livestock vary from the ones solely for crop storage as well as each other.

But the reality tall ones are almost always animal barns because you need the height more. You can store grain or whatever on a single level, and just add a little extra height for whatever airflow you need without having an entire extra story.

But when you’ve got livestock, especially cattle, the storage in the same building becomes mandatory, as does having a lot of extra height for good airflow. You get manure with livestock, and if you don’t have good air moving around you end up with sick animals, no matter how well you clean up. There’s modern methods that can sorta bypass the manure issues, but they have their own problems.

Even smaller animals like chickens, where you won’t necessarily have a second story in full, you’ll have a higher roof just for air to move. That’s also why the old style longhouse barns work so well. You get a long building with doors at each end, high peaked roofs, with hay storage above. The air moves freely, which cuts down spoilage of fodder, eliminates mildew from built up moisture, keeps the animals healthy (it even reduces disease spread in some cases), and you get the ability to drop hay down instead of having to haul it around.

A three story barn isn’t common afaik. It’s usually two stories, with a high peaked roof. It ends up being three stories high, but there’s only two levels. Some do have an attic built into them, but it’s pretty rare since it reduces the benefits. But even that depends on where you are and the type of farm you’re on.

That’s not even power tripping, that’s pure stupidity

Being real, it kinda sucked for me. Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard or anything, but definitely not GNR the way they had been doing music. It was essentially the end of the band for me.

Not bagging on anyone that enjoyed it, just saying it failed in every way on my end.

Oooh! I was just talking to someone with a serious hot take.

So, back during covid, I had cause to interact with the sheriff of our county. We became friends. Maybe not bosom buddies sharing the contents of our hearts or anything, but I can talk to the man about what ACAB really means and he listens instead of being a dick.

So, the subject came up earlier today when I stopped in his office after a dental appointment.

His hot take was that if it had happened here, he would have done his job; arrested the man, processed him, and posted guards on him 24/7 until he was shipped back to NYC. But he said he also wild have personally been present at any questioning or handoffs to make “plain fucking sure nobody did anything stupid”.

He also said that he agrees with why the man is angry, but that murder is too far. Then he said he’s worried about the man because he wouldn’t know who to trust with him. A fairly conservative country county sheriff outright admitted that he wouldn’t trust most cops to keep the man safe.

He even expressed concern about the safety of the people that called in the report in Altoona.

That’s probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard from him. He’s normally a fairly unbending sort when it comes to violent crime. Never let them out of jail again type of unbending. But for his thought to be worry about the killer? That’s fucking wild.

Anyway, beyond that, it’s kinda mixed. A ton of my friends are left leaning to full on leftist. So i expected some support. What surprised me among friends is that nobody is arguing that the guy needs the book thrown at him, even among my more moderate friends, and the smattering of conservative ones that aren’t so conservative I can’t be friends with them.

Relative wise, my family is politically mixed. And it’s still new enough that I haven’t talked to everyone because how the fuck do you have a conversation with that many people in a week without a gathering? But the usual group chats are leaning more on the side of the guy than on the CEO. The older family tends to be more about him needing to be in jail, with a few calls for the death penalty, but the “in jail” folks aren’t exactly ranting and raving.

The most extreme of the families, of which I’m not the most extreme, but I ain’t exactly not extreme at all, they want the guy out of jail. Some are calling him a hero, others more of a victim of the system, but the main group chat of us lefties is devoid of any hate for the man at all.

In other words, it’s not a consensus at all. It’s about what you’d expect over any situation where a regular guy does something illegal as a move against the status quo.

You know, I’ve used the idea in one of my fictional universes.

Which is, unfortunately, where it needs to stay.

See, a temple prostitute is just a prostitute with a big organization pimping them out, which leads to the same kind of abuse prostitutes already face.

Any pimp, no matter how wonderful they might be, is taking money out of the pocket of the person opening their body up for others for money. When that’s a thing, abuse is inevitable (and I’d encourage anyone doubting that to go look into the actual reality of temple prostitutes). Prostitutes already exist. Any of those rapists that would actually rape for sexual satisfaction only can already access a sex worker with minimum effort. So why would they be any less likely to rape just because the sex worker is in a temple?

Which, btw, my town is kinda mid sized, but rural. So not exactly a place with a stroll to pick up street level hos. But if I wanted to pay for sex, I know of three women that will gladly take the money and the cock. We have prostitutes even out here in the hills. So availability is not the problem.

You also forget that we don’t have any religions that are devoted to a deity or principle that venerates sex in that way. Even the closest ones aren’t going to be setting up brothels of faith.

So, how would you staff the temple brothel? If the faithful don’t exist in enough numbers to fill the jobs, then the people sucking off johns for the temple are just regular prostitutes. So you’d essentially need to create or revive a religion, then convert sex workers to it, or recruit non sex workers and convince them to fuck and suck for god. You know what a church that does that gets called nowadays? A cult.

The only way it would work and actually be an improvement would be in an ideal world, which is impossible.

We’d be better off legalizing prostitution, regulating it with safeguards to reduce harm (and it would be reduce, nor eliminate, even in places with legal hos, there’s abuse and sex trafficking and disease) and making sure that the sex workers have full access to whatever they need to protect themselves and be able to opt out with zero consequences.

Because if the sex worker can’t quit at will, they aren’t a sex worker, they’re a victim. And yeah, legal sex workers aren’t being held against their will for the most part, but do they have unemployment if they quit suddenly? Can they easily access public services to retrain? How about housing, do they have access to stable housing while they’re between professions?

It isn’t that the rest of us have all those things, it’s that we aren’t being literally fucked involuntarily out of fear of poverty and homelessness. It’s just a figurative fucking.

As it is, people that genuinely believe sex is sacred, and will perform sex acts with strangers exist. They’re just incredibly rare. You likely couldn’t staff a single temple from just those in a given city. And I’ve known some people that genuinely believe that way, that will have sex damn near at will with anyone willing to condom up and be nice during the sex. But I’m fifty, and have met four. Four in all that time. I don’t see that being very successful as a world changing thing lol, they’d never be able to sleep and still wouldn’t be able to drain the poison from a tenth of a percentage of incels.

It’s an interesting shower thought, but you aren’t the first to explore the idea. And it simply doesn’t stand up on its own outside the shower.

It’s the way he treats people. Not in public generally necessarily, he keeps a good facade up afaik. But word gets around behind the scenes.

Back stage workers at venues, local security (which is how I ended up hearing about it, working with guys that were contracted by a specific venue he performed at multiple times), hotel staff, that kind of thing.

We’re not talking about diddy level assholery, let me be clear about that. If he’s ever pulled that kind of thing, it’s news to me.

But insulting and harassing staff, going out of his way to cause extra problems for people, making unexpected and absurd demands, insisting on last minute changes to lineups at festivals, just generally being a smug, condescending dick with zero cause, that he does.

Now, I never worked anywhere he performed at, but the stories came from multiple people that didn’t know each other. Often enough that it stood out.

One time when I was part of a crowd at a local multi-act street concert, he delayed his show so long that one act had to leave to make their next show, and another got cut off in the middle of her set because of local ordinances about lights and sound. The delay didn’t get explained to the crowd beyond “unexpected technical difficulties”. But later on, talking to people behind the scenes, it was prima donna bullshit. Arguing about not being the closer (despite not having been on the slate in that slot when he agreed to perform), arguing about wanting to wait two hours so that his lightning was better, but not wanting anyone to go on before him because his gear was already set up

Just throwing a little hissy fit about everything until he ended up screwing over the crowd, leaving us with nothing for hours, and missing two acts (one entirely, the other partly) in the middle of a hot southern summer.

So, a lot of the crowd just left. Which meant the concession workers lost money, and it screwed up traffic in and out because the flow wasn’t timed as expected.

Then, when his punk ass did get on stage, he only did three songs, when he was supposed to be doing a half hour of music. The extra time was just him hyping his next shows.

Complete douchebaggery.

Vanilla Ice

One song worth a damn. Sucked as a rapper, sucks as a human being.

But ice, ice baby is still a fucking great track.

Well, there’s not much to go on. We don’t know you, we don’t have any access to your friends, and you didn’t tell any story that might help us guesstimate what’s going on.

That being said, a lot of the time someone gets pegged as the “kid” of the group, it comes down to either their relative age, or their behavior.

Some people are just naturally more childlike. Not childish, though there can be overlap. The kind of folks that are bubbly, or energetically happy, or tend to have a certain naivete, that kind of thing. It comes off as younger to some people, so they’ll start treating that person as younger than they are.

But the other part is that sometimes even a year of age difference changes things when it comes to perceptions and group dynamics. You’re 21, so if they’re 22-25, it really can be enough of a gap to set you up in their heads as the “young” one.

That’s the stuff that tends to be common enough to fit without knowing more, or assuming anything about motivations.