Quote by Buz
******

On a positive note, an enormous deposit of rare earth materials have been discovered in Wyoming, so we can soon corner that world market, and shove it up China's ass.

Rare earth minerals & material is what technology depends on. So, unless you are willing to give up your cell phones, computers, smart hdtv's, computerized autos, etc., don't complain about mining for it.

This is not a positive note, it’s another horror story to the Indigenous tribes living on that land and who worship that mountain.

Mining is an incredibly toxic and destructive act that seeps billions of gallons of poisonous slurry back into the water tables, this one in particular being near the mouth of the largest source of fresh water in the US.

Much like the oil pipelines they punch through Indigenous lands while ignoring treaties and protests, that’s the plan here. And the boogeyman of China is propped back up so a private company can wreak havoc on our land and make a profit.

We need to wean our dependence on rare materials, recycle it, and find alternatives. Not this steady march into oblivion we’re on. The only bright side I see here is Wyoming has the greatest concentration of water protectors ready to act. They’ve been fighting the destructive pipelines through their lands for decades.

The continued genocide of the indigenous people and their culture can’t continue. This can’t be another treaty torn to shreds at the US’ earliest convenience. This is the water that grows your food and quenches your thirst. Are you ready to let another corporation take it from you?

Had a family favorite tamale pie, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the SB.

What’s your favorite bar food?

Loud please. After smell, hearing my favorite sense during sex.

Which do you prefer during sex from your partner. Unscented, fresh out of the shower or natural personal aroma at the end of the day?

I may reach out to some people for some online play, normally I’ll take care of business myself.

Does the Super Bowl have any relevance to your interests?

Quote by DanielleX

My Gran makes amazing bread pudding. I wonder if it's something else in the USA? Layers of thick bread and butter with currants and sultanas in-between soaked in eggs and milk and baked till it's all gooey and caramelised. Then served with custard.

Bread puddings aren’t incredibly popular, but that is what we call it. I love a good one. Tell your gran to send me one!

This was after he attacked Haley for not having her spouse attend her campaign events. For context his wife has not been attending campaign events either and her husband is in the military and deployed overseas.

The projection…

Quote by Buz

Parking illegally and getting booted irks me. But, you can buy a tool that releases the boot.

I have one. 😊 If l get my wheel booted, l take the fucking wheel boot with me and toss it in a dumpster somewhere. I fucking hate companies that boot cars. Fuck them!

Read an article about this group of women who go around and remove boots for like $50,and dispose of the boots. Since the whole business of towing and booting is done on the knifes edge of legality there’s legal discourse if they did anything illegal. They arrive masked and keep their identities concealed for fear of legal blowback from the tow companies.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176175801/boot-girls-atlanta-private-parking-enforcement

Oh, no mind game, Your formatting was just baffling. You know you could just edit the original post, you don’t have to repost it in different locations hoping I’ll see it.

Quote by Magical_felix

It’s “milquetoast”.

How come all these MAGAs are so stupid?

In Trump’s case I’m pretty sure it’s a degenerative case of syphilis.

That being said I don’t mind being compared to milk toast. It’s absolutely delicious. Condensed milk bread thick sliced and toasted. I like to top it with Nutella and sliced strawberries.

Eh, I haven’t seen you post anything worth the effort. Just weak trolling in a political forum thread. Not even interesting. I don’t go at a fly with a machete.

If you actually want to make a post about something specific to talk about create the thread. If you want to non specifically do some right wing whining I’m certainly not going to engage more than a zinger.

Speaking of going senile, are you aware you’ve posted the exact same thing multiple times in different threads? You can join Biden in the retirement home.

Hotel room.

Have you ever been so horny it was physically painful?

What’s with the use of parentheses? Are you filling out a form? And who writes out lol?

Prime boomer Facebook energy.

If their looking for comedy advice they could speak with your mum. She obviously knows how to make a joke.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see...""You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?""No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.""Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy.""I did," said Ford. "It is.""So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?""It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.""You mean they actually vote for the lizards?""Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course.""But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?""Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?""What?""I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?""I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."Ford shrugged again."Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it.""But that's terrible," said Arthur."Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin."

-Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah, Biden’s angry old man rant really drove home the whole point of the matter. The Democrats had spent the primary season quashing and burying any opposition to Biden’s re-election rather than finding a suitable substitute.

Imagine how much better the optics would be politically if he had announced he will step down due to his older age. He could head into the sunset with a decent economic track record (so long as your the small % of wealthy Americans who benefit from things like inflated stock prices or an out of control housing market). The republicans are in chaos looking bad as hell killing their own bills and unable to pass shit with a majority.

It would have been a really nice set up for a new candidate. Instead he’s proving all the rhetoric about his age and mental fitness. He’s heading in with a scandal. He’ll drag the whole ticket and hand Trump an easy victory. It was a self indulgent move for the Dems to push forward with their senile meat puppet and it is going to lead to absolute chaos.

Oh, it was never about the best candidates. Both were selected by the richest Americans and funded to be president.

The election system isn’t designed to give people what they want, it’s to give you the illusion of choice while only giving you the options that benefit the richest and most powerful.

That being said, Trump is an anomaly because he’s the monster that got too big to control. They no longer want him, Haley was pushed as they could. But their full support in the past and pushing false rhetorics have made Trumpism more of a religion than a political candidate.

Ok Biden’s side the media quashed any stories about people running against him. It was a non-primary. There was never a true choice…

Unless y’all realize you don’t have to vote for either. Until you accept that you eat what you’re given.

The ideal length of backstory is like the ideal length of a book. Write it till there’s enough and then stop.

More specifically, the length of time you spend on last events should be fairly relative to the story. If it’s a 4 page story and 2 of those pages are catching the reader up than likely it’s unbalanced (exemptions available in special cases). Sometimes they are completely unneeded. The ‘fap piece’ genre of erotica that focuses on the sexual acts at the primary chunk of the text often need little to none.

Presentation of the backstory is also something to consider. A lot of times opening with it is weak, especially in longer pieces. Many times it’s better to sprinkle it throughout the story.

For my longer pieces I actually have tons of fleshed out story that helps me as a writer understand my character and write for them, but often chunks of it are not included in the work as they aren’t needed or give too much away.

A couple examples of some extreme but well done backstories: I recently read Enterprise of Death, a historic piece of fiction about a necromancer woman and a soldier who saves her from burning. The characters full backstory is somewhere between 1/3 to 3/8th if the book. However the story alternates between the present story with the soldier alternates every chapter with her backstory. It was brilliantly done with the backstory chapters giving context to her actions in the present.

The Hobbit is to the other extreme where the backstory is a very pleasant few pages entitled ‘concerning hobbits’ and two pages telling us about Bilbo. After that we’re into the meat of the story and never turn back.

So there is no way to have a definitive answer other than the general advice for most writing, give them just enough of what they need and no more.

Probably not. I may want to out of curiosity, but not to engage in swinging. My partner definitely is not up for conversations about sex with strangers.

What uniform is the sexiest?

Inadvisable, but certainly possible.

Have you ever known someone very intimately (not in a sexual way) online?

I think you have your terminology mixed up.

Demisexuals are defined by not experiencing primary sexual attraction. Examples of this should be being turned on visually by a person’s body. It’s part of the asexual spectrum.

They can experience sexual excitement from emotional connections. They are unable to feel sexual attraction if they aren’t emotionally close to someone.

I think want you are describing seems more like a fetish. Uniform fetishes are real and it’s sort of a broad terminology for being attracted to certain clothing types. This can be an aesthetic attraction (which the goth scene does for me) or a psychological attraction (like finding a military uniform sexy because you like the power and discipline it infers on the wearer).

For some of your corporate crimes listed above; The dollar amount the company earned through illegal activity is often hard to peg down. However having fines based on the company’s worth based on their latest share holder fillings (not their tax filings) would be a good way to assess these.

Going slightly off topic we also need to start holding corporate players accountable with jail time for their crimes. Guy steals $200 from the till, he goes to jail. Corporation shorts employees $2,000,000 in wages over the year? Small fine.

Especially on a corporate level, these fines should be called into question. Make a million doing something illegal, fined 500k. That’s 500k profits. It’s an incentive to engage I. Illegal activity, not a deterrent.

In America almost all fines are set by a specific fixed range. To keep things simple let’s look at $150.00 parking ticket. No matter the vehicle or circumstance, anyone illegally parking in this specific spot is fined the same equal $150. Do you feel this is fair?

In some countries, fines are based on the violators income. So based off someone’s income that $150 may be a back breaking charge because they live paycheck to paycheck. Alternatively someone obscenely wealthy may find $150 to mean nothing and finds no deterrent to the fine. So the same parking ticket would instead be $25 for an extremely poor person and $50,000 for a rich person so that they both experience similar economic impacts to the ticket. This is considered an equitable fine as opposed to the equal fine.

Would you support an equitable system of financial punishment over equal?

I don’t think there was any part of their romantic entanglements that would interfere with the case.

That being said with all the attention and all the scrutiny it was a tremendously poor decision for them. People were going to pick this prosecution apart for any reason they could. It was fuel they should never have lit.

We hope for the best despite expecting the worst. Especially now that our resident multi boxer is out, things got a lot more civil. I’m hoping it stays that way.

Can we just eliminate any existing one that’s based on opinion? Don’t get me wrong, I like watching gymnastic floor routines or ice skaters. I just don’t think quantifying things like, “this artistic dance was better than the other” means a damned thing.

So on that note; ‘National Leader Dick Measuring.’ Give it a healthy outlet and avoid bombing civilians.

As we get into the meat of a new election cycle we can expect a fresh interest in the Think Tank forum. In an age of rampant information I would like to implore you to follow a few guidelines when posting.

1. Source your information: This is the most important information you can give to support your arguments or opinions. If you are inspired to post or respond with facts, figures, quotes, ect… Provide your receipts. I also encourage you to follow the source back to it’s origin.

2. Don’t post blind articles as responses to other people: If you are posting something related to the topic, summarize it’s importance. Still post link.

3. Avoid team politics and making assumptions about other’s beliefs. If someone agrees with a Republican on one issue, it does not make them a Republican. Most issues are far too complicated to have only two points of view, but in American politics especially we push the ‘with us or with them’ ideology.

4. Argue the issue, not the person. Avoid personal attacks to your fellow posters. Sensationalism and name calling may be more common than not from our politicians, but we can do better and be civil.

5. Don’t occupy an echo chamber: Explore other’s beliefs, read their articles, follow their sources. If you don’t consider your counterpoints you’ve never truly considered your belief. Dismissive statements like ‘I don’t read Democrat Propaganda’ or ‘You can’t trust any article by a Republican’ isn’t a debate, it’s the lack of one.

6. It’s OK to be wrong and to change your opinion. You should do this often as you get new information. Feeling right is less important than being correct.

Just some things I hope we all keep in mind. I expect better from y’all then out politicians because I have have very low expectations of politicians. Now grab your ankles and get ready for a rough year.

We have a new podcast up at BlackThorn Theater. For those who enjoyed The Wizard's Dark Whims, it's now performed by my partner and up for free! Please enjoy!

https://www.subversionarystudios.com/podcast/episode/7da108d6/the-wizards-dark-whims

Here's a link to the story on Lush: https://www.lushstories.com/stories/fantasy-sci-fi/the-wizards-dark-whims

Quote by WellMadeMale

I don't bother to read the drivel spewed from Republicans, GQP or Libertarians. Didn't your parents teach you not to wallow in sewage ditches, in your youth? At this rate, next you'll be quoting Jesse Watters.

Well that really lowers your ability to assess anything, doesn’t it? If you’ll only enter echo chambers than functionally you’re politics and ways of thinking are as stagnant and rigid as any member of the far right.

I linked an article that puts out the timeline of IS involvement in Ukraine and how America bears much of the responsibility for the political situation of the area. You could either argue those points or present a counter narrative. Doing neither is simply sticking your fingers in your ears.

I read articles and publications that don’t align with my beliefs. It allows me to counter those arguments by finding the fault in the thinking, fact check claims, and possibly change my view if the evidence suggests I was wrong in my beliefs.

The world isn’t black and white. Your political enemies might make valid points and concerns even if you don’t agree with what they do with that information. Admitting America’s role in Ukraine over the past few decades might align with Putin’s account, but it’s not an endorsement of his war.