Okay kids buckle up for the INSANE story I just heard from my little brother
**As a disclaimer my brother is a cis straight dude who only dates the most basic white girls you can find. He’s very emotionally aware but doesn’t linger on his emotions, just processes them and moves on (this is wild to me)**
He calls me on my break just to say hi, that he’s driving back to Denver from visiting his girlfriend, to which I respond “didn’t you break up with your girlfriend (of like a month) last month” and to which he says “yeah I have a new girlfriend, we’ve been together four weeks but I went up to spend the weekend and meet her friends” and I’m like ok great this is already ridiculous
So we’re chatting and I’m teasing him about how he doesn’t sleep with people on first dates and he says that he’s changed his policy, it’s just that he won’t have sex with them if he’d rather be doing something else, so I joke that I’ve had that where I’d rather be watching the show Chernobyl (true) and he says “yeah or watching a movie with my housemate” and I say hey bud that’s kind of gay and he says yeah I actually had a weird gay moment last night
And I go oh???? And he goes yeah, I was at the bar with the girlfriend and some of her friends and one of them was a guy and we were hitting it off, doing a little flirting as you do with your bros at the bar~
And then my cis straight brother goes on to explain that sometimes when you’re out with the homies and you’re having a good time and the vibes are right you just give em a little kiss, like just a kiss on the mouth between bros, “no tongue or anything like that but just to express that you’re close and having a good time”
I’m like “My dude that’s not a thing” and he’s like “between confident straight men it is” and I’m like “NO IT’S NOT"
So there we’ve got my brother having casual queerplatonic relationships with his homies at the bar, and he’s telling me this and I’m obviously speechless, so he goes on and he’s like “so because this guy and I were hitting it off I go in for a little kiss and he fucking swerves me” and I’m like yes my guy but because my brother is actually very good with respecting boundaries he was like “ok man great communication, won’t do it again"
BUT
Apparently my brother and the dude and my brother’s GIRLFRIEND who has been there the WHOLE TIME go outside (I assume to have a cigarette but he didn’t tell me that part) and the guy turns to my brother and is like “man I should have kissed you when you offered it” and my brother is like “cool good shit man” like in the most bro way possible and then the guy grabs his face between his hands and just PLANTS a big one on his mouth
And THEN the guy panics and shoves him down on the ground!! And my brother has the normal reaction to being shoved on the ground unexpectedly which is to say “what the FUCK” and the girlfriend says “what the FUCK” and the guy goes “what the FUCK” and leaves
And my brother ended the story there and was musing on it like “this guy obviously has some complexes to work through about his sexuality, no confident straight man kisses another confident straight man and then panics and runs away”
Which took me out at the KNEES lol
And that, dear readers, is the batshit story my brother told me!
OH MY GOD AND
AND
I told my coworker this and they were like I’m actually shipping him and his roommate and I was like HUH because I hadn’t considered that and then later my brother sent me a photo of his housemate wearing sexy handcuffs
since this is going round again i really want to state how much i truly do not need hair loss prevention advice. this comic is not about that. this comic is about learning to be okay with maybe getting bald. this comic is about how balding can be sexy. its okay. kim is here to help
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
These are suggested for serving to recovering alcoholics, but I think they’re just fun and cool anyway? I like a fancy beverage, it doesn’t have to have booze. That cucumber Collins sounds refreshing AF
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
i have naturally acidic sweat. it’s a family thing
we have already. They don’t know exactly what is up with it, other than the sweat being slightly more acidic than normal and the acidic mantle being thicker and Way more acidic than normal, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with acidosis. As far as we have tested, our family has had this since at least my great grandpa, and the guy lived to be 93 years old.
What the fuck.
op is a xenomorph descendant from that one time ripley fucked the queen
embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I’m just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~“Gender Critical”~ thing and go “see!? mosquitoes get it!!”
OR
you could go “that’s interesting” and start asking more questions, like:
is this data self-reported? controlled?
were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?
did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between “being bitten more often” and “noticing bites more often”?
did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?
how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can’t tell the difference between studies that show:
mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels
mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons
every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don’t notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)
we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito’s favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops
mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons
etc etc etc
you’re just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can’t put “hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time” in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
Honestly this is a great way of presenting the kind of scientific literacy that is needed in an era of clickbait headlines and sound bites and facts that turn into memes; so much science “news” as reported by mass media distills nuanced studies into easily quotable and shocking one-liners that generally ignore the context behind the statistic.
