Ignoring a road rage incident, it was a crash.

Me, my sister, and a friend were heading home with my mom driving back in my early high school days.

The route went through a country highway; basically just an extra wide two lane road. It was at night, and either my mom didn’t see the lights on the car, or they were off. I didn’t see lights, and right before the car hit the van immediately behind me, I did see the car, but not lights. Blinking yellow light at the intersection

Anyway, the car was doing well over the speed limit. Rough estimate at the time of collision was around 60, with the car not having braked until absurdly close.

The van roatated at least three times, then rolled on the second or third and kept rolling while rotating. We ended up on the side of the van maybe fifty or sixty yards down the road.

Everyone in the van was cut to some degree or another. Glass went everywhere, and even safety glass will do that. We were also all bruised up pretty heavily.

But that was it in terms of injury. Some sore and achy necks and backs, and everything hurt bad enough the next day none of us really got out of bed except to pee. But nothing broken, no major damage beyond bruising where seat belts dug in hard. Those bruises were still there maybe two or three weeks later.

The van was demolished. The side that got hit was crushed in a good third of the width of the van. Part of the roof was peeled back and it was crushed down a little as well.

Every now and then I drive past where it happened, and I’m amazed nobody was hurt worse. Even the people in the car were fine beyond bruises and general impact pain.

Like, that van had to have looked like something out of a movie spinning and rolling down the road. The crash woke up the couple that lived roughly at the point where our van stopped. It was maybe three feet from the rear bumper to their mailbox. But their house was set back a decent ways from the road, so that shit had to be loud.

Lmao! If only it could be improved.

I always hated doing them, not because of the nature of the job but because even when I was younger, my hands (and therefore fingers) were on the large side. Large hands means large fingers. I guess you can see where that would be a detrimental trait for impaction removal lol.

At one point, I wore a size 15 ring and my company had to special order gloves for me. And that was roughly around the same time as that patient. So the fingers I had to use were bigger than 15 by a good bit. Plus, I was still lifting some, but had taken up a casual practice of what’s called iron palm training. That’s where you repeatedly slam your hands into things to make them tougher. That’s an exaggeration, it isn’t all that harsh, but still.

So I ended up telling the one company I worked for that I really needed to not be doing them. The supervisor at the time was a pretty great lady, but she didn’t quite get the issue. I took a risk and just slapped my hand down on the desk with my index and middle fingers out and asked her if she’d like me to help her clear her bowels. It worked! I cleared her bowels and got a raise.

Nah, that last part is obviously a joke, but I did get her cooperation lol

I don’t think Vonnegut will ever be irrelevant to a given time. Maybe not everything he wrote, or said, but there’s a lot of his stuff that’s applicable to the human condition.

Well, since the lady herself has expressed a desire to end its use for that purpose, I consider that a good thing on top of the practical reasons.

Not that I really know a damn thing about it beyond what I found in the linked article, but still

I have nothing useful to contribute, but holy crap I wish I had the household to do this because I’d love to try it.

But if I tried this, either the teenager or the old man (well, other old man) would fiddle with it every time they opened the fridge and I suspect that would interfere with the process.

Aren’t all anons?

Of course. Comes with a free skin though

I’m not seeing the problem here…

I’ve been on the opposite side of that, with a human patient.

Was providing some care that required me to support the patient with one hand while doing some less than comfortable work (impaction removal). The patient’s daughter was rubbing his shoulder, only my hand was there, so she was actually rubbing my wrist.

She didn’t realize it until I had to shift my position with that hand and warned her I was going to be moving. Like you, she got embarrassed and apologized. I just shrugged and said it was no biggie, I would have said something but I was concentrating and needed the moral support. Which turned it into a mutually humorous thing, so we had a good laugh.

Yup, you’re misguided.

Be yourself, all the time, unless you’re a bigot.

Out of the three examples you gave, Rowling was the only one that had anyone fooled, and that was largely because she didn’t show overt bigotry, and didn’t have the influence to rattle on in public. Plus, her direct form of bigotry wasn’t something that was as hot button back then, so I kinda doubt she had gone full psycho even in her private life

Gervais, as well as Chappell, were both largely punching up back in their popular days. But they both were fairly well known to be assholes. In the Chappell show, he did this whole bit where a white girl was singing his opinions and half of it was saying gays were weird to him.

Gervais was notorious for being a smug prick, but he pandered to other smug pricks so his fan base was essentially never going to complain. But other people did. Back in my days when I was working and running around, a lot of people that were left leaning to outright socialist were saying that he was as bad or worse than your usual redneck asshole and that the only reason he got away with it was that he targeted the right wing idiots more than anything else. I agree with that sentiment. Then again, I’ve always hated his ass, so I’m biased.

Now, Chappell, he got a pass because he abused everyone and did so roughly equally. Also, he was actually funny when he wasn’t just being a dick. He made as much fun of black people as he did whites, gays, latinos, asians, etc. So assuming you didn’t mind the basis of the comedy being “B people be like X, Z people be like Y”, it really wasn’t bigoted since he did skewer everyone. Looking back, it’s easy to see the differences in how he skewered gay people then, but it really wasn’t obvious at the time (and I watched the show with gay people, none of whom did anything but laugh). The whole singing white girl sketch was the only one that stood out at the time.

But you’re making an error in your assumptions. Several, actually. First that people aren’t just as gullible now. They are.

Second, that it took all those steps of on screen kisses being fought for to push the cis-hetero normative standards being enforced from the top down to get to the point where bigger changes like Obergefel could happen. That shit was revolutionary. Billy Crystal playing a fairly stereotyped gay man on a popular TV show was a huge win, even though the character itself was not at all where representation needed to be. He was still an ally at the time, and remained so, despite the role being flawed

Gervais, for as smarmy and smug an asshole as he was did at least pander the talking points that helped mock homophobia. That can’t just be dismissed no matter how shitty he is otherwise.

The populace has changed. Maybe it depends on location, but back as recently as ten years ago there were highly vocal opponents to trans people and issues being part of the general fight for gay specific issues. Going back to the eighties, trans people were not well received in all lgb spaces. The nineties were when that started changing, despite the overwhelming intersection of those rights issues being pretty damn obvious as far back as the sixties and seventies.

The shifting of the general populace is always a slog. It was for the first pioneers of women’s rights struggling just to vote. It was (and is) for the rights and acceptance of black people, and the pioneers of that movement were working long before the marches and bus boycotts.

When things start shifting, you’re going to see early adopters like gervais that don’t really care, but want to both feel progressive and profit from performative behaviors.

All of which comes back to there not being gullibility at all. What it was was relief to see pop culture finally catching up. When you get the Gervaises of the world seeing an ability to have success pandering to an audience, that means there is an audience. There are now people that are either pretending to be allies well enough to amount to it in where they spend their money, or are genuine allies now supporting ideas with wallets.

But nobody was fooled. Not that had been fighting already. They knew damn good and well that the kind of performative displays that started happening would disappear as quickly as corporate sponsorship of pride parades as soon as the tide shifted. But you still don’t tear down poseurs when they serve a purpose, and people like gervais did serve a purpose.

The general populace doesn’t give a fuck. They think they believe whatever it is that allows them to fit into the crowd. Some of them may develop a genuine belief, but it won’t be the majority. So the folks trying to sustain change are going to shrug and let the fakes serve their purpose. That isn’t gullibility, it’s pragmatism.

Don’t forget the Tick and that one BPRD agent in the Hellboy movie

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

No, the usual cycle most people run is changing their sheets weekly, assuming nothing makes it necessary sooner. It does vary some, I’ve seen households that change sheets monthly or less often, but damn.

Making the bed is a daily task, and that’s the assumption I was working on in the comment

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

See, that’s why you build a therapist in a box inside your head, so it can mediate between the other aspects of your inner processes

Fuck yeah! Huzzah indeed.

Yeah, that’s more or less where I stand too, though the exact amount of effort a mod needs to put into contacting the user may be lower in my stance than in yours.

But I went further back and edited in a revised take. I think you’re right that OP’s account that the ban was issued on made a news post in a news community, and didn’t engage in any fuckery in comments that merit the ban for that reason.

Edit: I went back further. Based solely on this account, your @[email protected] account, I lean PTB on this specific preemptive ban. I don’t have the level of patience required to dig up your main account and see if anything there would justify you the user behind the accounts being banned based on a pattern of behavior. I will say that using the ban reason as given is what pushes it back over the PTB line. Your Pro account didn’t make comments or posts that indicate intentionally breaking a rule regarding the israel situation, nor making comments that did so. And I went back 3 weeks.

So, I’m leaving the previous comment made here instead of deleting or overwriting it, since this edit wouldn’t make sense without the original context.

Eh, it’s generally a divisive issue when preemptive bans occur, and I didn’t see recent posts on that community, only elsewhere. Same with comments over the last two days. So I suspect this is a preemptive ban rather than one for immediate cause.

Keep that in mind during the rest of this.

I’m not certain this is power tripping, but I can’t say for sure that your account that you posted this with fully deserved a ban purely on the reason given. There are reasons based on behavior in other ways, but that comes back to whether or not any given individual believes preemptive bans are a useful and acceptable tool, and every time it comes up, the community tends to devolve into arguing about that rather than whatever an OP did.

Now, I’m in the camp that believes preemptive bans can be a useful tool. I just believe they need to be used rarely and surgically.

In this case, it comes down not to the post that started the whole thing, but how you handled everything after that.

The removal reason shown in this post doesn’t match what you did. Again, I only went back a little through the user history of this account, not any others you may use or have used in the past.

From this side of the screen, your comments are on the borderline of justifying a preemptive ban. I wouldn’t have done one, not without more than what’s visible in the last two days. If I had, I wouldn’t have used that reason at all.

That’s why I think this specific ban from the gaming community is really on the knife edge. Unless there was more to see that I didn’t scroll back far enough to see, or there are factors I’m unaware of, it does lean a little closer to PTB, but you really gotta recognize that you were either crossing civility line, or walking right up to them and spitting on the other side of it. Yeah, some of what you were responding to did as well, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

That’s my take on it. I suspect there’s more going on with the decision to ban you like that, or I’d lean heavier to the PTB side, but there’s a limit to how far back I’m willing to scroll looking for a specific comment that may or may not be relevant. That’s another personal peeve for me with the mod log; there should be more than an accusation in it when it’s a preemptive ban, and that’s not a one click process to make happen. So it doesn’t happen often.

Makes guesstimating for this community a slog.