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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • It started because of school shootings, ironically enough. If you’re in a lockdown for hours while the cops take their sweet time, (coughUvaldecough), there’s a near 100% chance that at least one of the children in your class is going to need to use the restroom during that time.

    Luckily, camp toilets are a thing:

    They’re basically a 5 gallon bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You use a trash bag to line it, then sprinkle an alginate powder in, (the same powder used in diapers) and it turns into a gel when it gets wet. This helps avoid the smell and splashing, and a single small sachet of alginate powder is enough for the entire bucket.

    As an added bonus, you can use the bucket to store other things that might be needed in a shooting or extended lockdown. Tourniquets, gauze, protein bars, etc… It’s all there in a single grab-and-go location. Lockdown starts, you pull the bucket out of the closet, dump all the supplies out, and set it in the corner for kids to use if they need to pee.

    But this very quickly got flipped around, because conservatives didn’t want the left to start using “schools need toilets in the classrooms because school shootings are so frequent” campaigns. So they flipped it around, and said schools were providing litter boxes to furries. There’s also a heavy anti-trans lean on the litter boxes messaging, which just plays into the conservative fear mongering even more.






  • Yeah, the sad reality is that creatives often refuse to take their meds. They enjoy the creativity that goes along with their mania, and they feel like the meds kill their creative spark. I can almost guarantee he has been medicated in the past, but now refuses to take any meds because he enjoys being manic.

    And being manic isn’t simply being happy and elated… It’s in the same category as schizophrenia, because it causes delusions and breaks with reality. And good luck reasoning with someone when they’re delusional; You can’t reason people out of a mindset that they didn’t reason themselves into.

    The dude needs serious help, but he’s still a shit-licking Nazi. His decision to refuse meds is an active choice that he makes every day, and conflating his mental illness with naziism is an insult to everyone who does take their meds and is a well-adjusted member of society.


  • Babies cry on planes because their ears hurt. But there’s a maneuver you can do to manually pop your ears. If you show it to the parents, they can do it with the baby and the baby will shut the fuck up almost immediately.

    Put your thumb in the soft meaty spot behind your earlobe, right behind where your jaw meets your skull. Put your index finger in the Concha Cavum. Your goal is to essentially grab your ear right inside the Anti Tragus.

    Now gently grab, and lift upwards (towards 12 o clock on the above image) by pushing upwards with your thumb. Once you’re lifted, you’re going to slowly and gently roll backwards towards 11 and then 10 o clock. You’re not twisting, you’re just changing the direction that you’re pulling, like moving an analog stick on a game controller. As you continue to roll backwards, (it happens at around the 10 o’ clock position for me, but individual angles may vary from person to person,) your ear canal will suddenly open up (and your ear will pop if it needs to). And I said to go slowly and gently because it happens fairly quickly.

    Your skull has an opening (called the external acoustic meatus) that allows sound to enter your ear canal. You’re basically grabbing the fleshy and cartilaginous parts of your ear canal, and moving it around slightly to stretch the parts inside of the skull opening. This stretching allows trapped pressure to equalize. But that stretching is also why I said to go slowly and gently, as that part of the ear isn’t used to being stretched so you’ll feel it very suddenly.

    Have the parents practice it on themselves first, and then they can do it with the baby. It can be a little difficult for guys to do because baby’s ears are smaller, but usually mom’s fingers are thin enough if she doesn’t have super long nails.

    Source: Have had several flights with crying babies, where I was able to have a frank “hey I don’t want to intrude but you can pop baby’s ears to get them to stop crying” conversation. If you approach them with an attitude of “I just want to help baby feel better” instead of being pissed that the baby is crying, the parents are likely to be receptive; No parent wants to see that their child is in pain.





  • I mean, Japan depends on the US for defense too. Their constitution only allows them to maintain a small “Self Defense Force” and everything else is run by the US. It was one of the largest and most impactful changes to Japan’s constitution in the wake of World War 2. Basically, the Allies went “you fucked around in Korea and China so hard that we need to prevent you from ever building an invasion force again in the future.”

    That’s why Trump threatening to pull the military out of Japan was a monumentally stupid move. The US military is already wildly unpopular in Japan; The average Japanese person’s experience with them is “US military dudebro gets drunk off base, sexually harasses a Japanese girl on the street, drives drunk, causes damage/injury in a crash, and flees back to the base to avoid punishment.” Even if the solider is penalized by the military for it, Japanese people still see it as avoiding punishment… Because Japanese punishments tend to be much much harsher than US punishments. So since he’s not being punished by Japanese authorities, he’s getting off too easy.

    Trump made the threat at a time when conservative (bordering on jingoistic) rhetoric is at an all time high in Japan. Japan has always been an extremely conservative country, but there has been a new wave of nationalism and xenophobia recently. So when Trump made the threat, there was a non-zero chance that the average Japanese person would go “fucking good, we deserve to have our own military again anyways.”

    It’s also why people were talking about China, Korea, and Japan banding together to oppose the tariffs was such a big deal. The three countries hate each other due to blood grudges that go back centuries… And yet Trump was able to get them to agree on something.








    1. This hasn’t been a notable issue in a while. That’s why Plex’s https-by-default was such a big deal. With https, even your ISP can’t see what you’re streaming. They can see that something is being streamed, but not what specifically.

    Also, you totally glossed over the fact that Plex is simply easier for non-savvy people to set up. Plex provides a unified login experience similar to major streaming services, which Jellyfin simply can’t provide; If your mother-in-law can figure out how to log into Netflix on her TV, she can figure out how to log into Plex too.

    And the unfortunate truth is that Plex’s remote access is much easier for 90% of users to figure out. It doesn’t require VPNs or reverse proxies at all. You just forward a port and anyone with access can easily see your server. But my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have access to a Jellyfin app without sideloading. Not to mention the fact that I’d need to walk her through actually setting the app up once it is installed, because there is no unified system for logging in. And if I’m not using a reverse proxy for my Jellyfin server, then I also need to walk her through setting up Tailscale, assuming her TV is even capable of using it at all.

    Any single one of those hurdles would make Jellyfin a non-starter if I want to walk my MIL through the setup over the phone, and they’re all currently present. And some of them will never be fixed, by design. For instance, the lack of a unified login page is by design, because a unified login would require a centralized server for the app to phone home too. That centralization is exactly what Jellyfin was made to rebel against, so it’s a problem that will never be “solved”; It is seen by the devs and FOSS enthusiasts as a feature, not an issue.

    From a FOSS perspective, Jellyfin is a modern marvel. But it’s definitely not at the same level as Plex when you compare ease of setup or remote access. Jellyfin is fine if you’re just using it locally, or are willing to run Tailscale to connect back to your home network. But if you’re looking for true seamless remote access and need to consider the mother-in-law factor, then Plex is hard to beat.