don’t lie - ever

That can be dangerous advice in some contexts. Like if you’re an immigrant being confronted by an ICE agent, say whatever you need to say to get the fuck out of there.

Basically if a Nazi asks if you’re a Jew, the answer is ALWAYS ‘no’ regardless of whether or not that’s true.

I won’t criticize others for something I’m guilty of myself

Often it takes seeing other people engaging in a habit that you share to realize or accept it’s a bad one: criticism can still be warranted and constructive, but in that case I’d own the complicity openly and direct the criticism to ‘we’. Introspection is good!

Pushing 4 decades, and the older I get the more I try to live by a philosophy of: be the person you wish you had when you were in their shoes.

Biggest thing is school right now: I did the college thing a bit a long time ago, struggled academically and financially, joined the military instead, separated, and now I’m back for round 2 using the GI Bill. I try to generate as many resources for my classmates as possible, run study groups, host group chats, send out reminders… The VA gives me a stipend for supplies each semester, which I’ll use in it’s entirety and give those supplies to the class. At clinicals (on-the-job education - nursing school) I’ve noticed a few students don’t eat cuz weren’t able to pack a lunch and hospital cafeteria food is WAY expensive for the average broke-ass college student, so I’ll cover the odd meal and tell em to just pay it forward once they get their RN. Shit like that. Kinda feels like I have 50 sons and daughters lol. But I remember my first attempt at college and how overwhelming everything felt… idk if having a ‘me’ would have made any difference in the outcome of round 1 - can’t make the horse drink and all - but if I can hook these kids up with an easier ride, then fuck yeah I’ll do what I can!

I try to apply that kind of approach to pretty much any context - be it school, work, or just random encounters with people.

Feels good to be helpful.

Oh. So they did. Well shit.

Edit-

Revising my answer to the Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftens.

Pixar’s “Buy n’ Large” and “Allinol” are pretty clever.

ICE aside, ain’t nobody got money for dat.

Ciao?

louder

Wear a mask / gloves, wipe your fingerprints off the bottles, leave your cellphone at home, avoid tollways or anywhere with cameras aimed at your license plate, park way off site.

Y’know, for noise reduction.

I’m torn between something familiar - english speaking, mostly western culture, just for the sake of an easy transition; or somewhere like Thailand where it’s just a completely different world. Like, if I’m going to pack up and move halfway across the globe, might be a good time to dive into something that’ll give me a ton of brand new experiences.

Idk if I’m adventurous enough to actually commit, but the temptation is definitely there.

language

That is definitely an intimidating step. I speak a little Spanish, but was never particularly good at it, and that’s hailed as one of the ‘easy’ languages. …'course, the stakes are a tad higher now than when I was studying that stuff in highschool…

No - that strikes me as an end game move. It’ll enable me to cross the border, and if shit hits the fan that’ll be good enough to then figure out the next steps.

I would need to do WAY more research on prospective point-B’s before diving into dual citizenship.

That said, I don’t really know shit about expatriating, so if anything I just said stands out as glaringly wrong, please do school me!

At least I got chicken!

Freeman’s Mind

Honorable mention to Charlie the unicorn.

I got a passport, and am wrapping up a degree in nursing.

It’s not necessarily my intention to jump ship as soon as I graduate, but knowing that it’s an option will be a great comfort.

Other than that, I stopped eating eggs.

Neither A nor I, in fact!

There are definitely risks, hence the infection warning at the end there. Mechanically speaking, it’s pretty simple… think of like a pump action squirt gun ‘super soaker’ or w/e from when you were a kid, except the end of the gun loops back into the tank it pulls from: so you push the mechanism to build up pressure, then pull the trigger to release that pressure.

Instead of pump it’s a button over a one way valve that’s on the reservoir that hangs out in your scrotum like a 3rd testicle. That’s filled with a few mL’s of saline, and when you press the button it squirts the saline into prosthetic balloons that match the shape of your corpora cavernosa - the two chambers that run the length of your shaft that normally fill with blood to enable fun times. Anyway, push the button until it’s hard, engage in fun times, then push another button that’s basically just another one way valve to release all the saline back into the reservoir. Everything is internal - you feel the buttons through the skin of your scrotum.

There are pictures (animated - nothing gory or anything… it does depict a penis and this is a sfw thread, so I won’t direct-post it here, but it’s about as sfw as a picture of a penis can be… high-school health class textbook type of image) in the link I posted down toward the bottom of the page if you’re curious.

I always thought it was kinda cool - we can restore a pretty significant part of someone’s life with just a couple balloons, tubes, and some saline, and it’s not like most prosthetics where we’re replacing something (i.e., total knee replacement uses a prosthetic femoral head and tibial plateau, but before we can place those, we break out a powered saw, and things like a hammer and chisel to cut out the original femoral head and tibial plateau… it’s gory as fuck). The penile prosthesis just kinda sits in space that the body already provides.

So, if your doc hasn’t already discussed stuff like this with you, you’ve got a shitty doc. But, 100% there are treatments for that.

I’m a surgical tech, so my brain always jumps straight to the surgical option - there are probably things to try first, but just in case nothing else works and your vasculature really insists on being a… well, dick; there are still options:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/penile-implants/about/pac-20384916

I’ve been in a few of those surgeries, and it’s literally just putting a balloon in the chambers that usually fill with blood to produce an erection. You fill the balloon manually from an internal reservoir when to get it up; then release the pressure back into the reservoir when you’re all done.

In any case, sexual health is part of health: don’t let social anxiety or fear of awkward or anything like that get in the way.

And if you go the surgical route, FOLLOW YOU PRE AND POST OP INSTRUCTIONS TO THE T!!! I’ve also done a revision of one of those implants cuz our patient didn’t keep himself clean during the immediate post op period, and got an infection that is the stuff of nightmares. Definitely don’t be that guy.

What about the pilots tho

In unrelated news, the graphics for the Switch 2 are fucking incredible - look at this shit! This is wild!

Yeah, some employers are really stupid about it. They treat it like a crystal ball. I’m not an expert in psychology, so the best I got is second-hand insight, but one of the perks of working in a hospital is I get to routinely pick brains that are a lot smarter than mine, to include a couple of psych PhD’s: ask them about the Myers Briggs and they immediately start ranting about how it’s pseodo-science bullshit. And some doctors do rant about shit outside their scope of expertise, which pretty well puts them at the same level of idiocy as the rest of us (i.e., if your ortho doc starts raving about how vaccines cause autism, the MD on his badge carries literally zero weight: he knows the fuck out of bones, but until proven otherwise it’s best to assume he got his education on vaccines from Fox news). But when experts in psych bitch about psych stuff, I take that at face value.

In more ways than one!

Surgical tech, here. :D