Bullfrog

due to inflation you must answer my riddles five

due to budget cuts i will grant you two wishes

due to recent layoffs there is only one of me and I lie 50% of the time

kino's journey

Kinda wild that every time a trans athlete does well it’s all about “ooh wahh but biological advantages” as if the kind of person who is both “Good At And Interested In Winning Competitive Sports” and also “Willing To Risk Losing Their Safety And Everything They Love In Order To Seize Life By The Ass And Be Who They Are Out Loud And In Public In A Society Prepared To Shred Them Alive” isn’t the kind of supremely driven person who might be actually pretty well-suited to Work Hard Get Point

Shocking You Would Allow This Trans Athlete Compete Against Normal Children When They Obviously Have The Advantage Of (checks notes) Wanting To Accomplish Their Goals More Than They Fear Death

"male loneliness epidemic" is misleading because it implies that men are suffering because they can't get girls when I feel like the actual problem is that pretty much any online content that's aimed specifically at men conceptualizes the masculine ideal as what I call the Buff Scammer. there are only two things in this world that matter, says the Buff Scammer: being jacked and making money. how you get to either of those things doesn't matter, you just need to be as rich and as buff as possible or you have failed as a man. Get into drop shipping. Eat nothing but raw meat. Rugpull a memecoin. Remove seasonings from your diet. Sell an online course. Go to the gym daily. Starve yourself so your body will achieve ketosis and start burning fat. Attend a seminar on real estate investing. Work 80 hours a week. Take steroids but don't let anyone know about that part. Flip a YouTube channel after 10xing the subs. Sell AI art on Etsy and AI audiobooks on Amazon. What's that? You're trying to do this to get girls? Why would you care about women? Women are all stupid whores who don't help you get richer or buffer. The only people you should be paying attention to are other rich, buff men. If you do hang out with women you should be pimping them out on Chaturbate so you can at least get an ROI off your time spent not thinking about men. Male friends? You don't have time for friends. You should be hustling and grinding 24/7 365. And if you absolutely do need to spend time around other men you should only be spending time with other buff scammers so you can collaborate on entrepreneurial ventures. Like Jesus Christ even writing this is exhausting I feel like trying to be this dude would be fucking miserable like not only did you turn yourself into a friendless, materialist, misogynistic asshole who can only conceptualize the world in terms of value extracted but you're NOT EVEN HAVING FUN DOING IT!!!!!!

At some point in my transition, the "hate yourself, get an eating disorder, buy product" messaging I get switched from woman flavor to man flavor, and omfg. What the hell is this shit!

The "woman" version would often disguise itself as self care. There's this facade of softness and gentleness. ("indulge yourself: buy skincare! do what's right for YOU: starve yourself and smile emptily at zucchini noodles! this is empowering. your body is a temple, divine feminine chakra mother!!!") In the man version, no such thing. Self compassion is not allowed. You've got to brutally grind yourself into the shape of a Real Man or die trying, but you don't get to *enjoy* being the Real Man because comfort is for girrrrrrlllssss.

My dangerous trans gender ideology is that being a man should be enjoyable. If there's nothing fun about it, change your approach or stop being a man.

My journey thru my kid’s Paw Patrol phase via posts from my Bluesky account.

You know that post that was going around like a year ago. That said something like 'hey you don't need to wear any makeup' and people kept commenting shit like 'yeah just a little eyeliner is enough'. This is how this post feels to me

My great shame: I do use Deepseek (not gpt) for studying my math homework. I'm in Differential Equations. I have vague ideas what the steps and answers should look like, I can check integral-calculator to confirm a final answer, but unless I pay IC I can't see the individual steps. So I use Deepseek, to follow along with its steps. If it gets my answer, we're good. If it gets a different answer, I can go in and determine which of us had the correct step, and therefore where I screwed up. Its highly unlikely for us to both make the same mistake because human error and LLM hallucinations don't work in the same way. And if we both do, frankly I wasn't going to catch the mistake anyway.

Its the sort of situation where I would prefer a real human tutor, but nobody around me has taken DiffEQ in the last 10 years so this is my backup plan.

having a nickel allergy is actually so insidious because what you MEAN I need to pay attention to the nickel content in my food. what do you MEAN that it doesn’t even present like typical food allergy symptoms (no tingly mouth, no throat closing, no stomach pain etc) and it took until my mid-late 20s to realize that dietary nickel is probably why I’d sometimes get hives randomly on my arms with no apparent cause and have also now deal with chronic eczema. what do you MEAN that all the foods that I eat specifically because they are high in nutritional value consistently also contain nickel.

Here I was thinking my nickel allergy was pretty mild!! so many mysteries in my life were all probably caused by nickel. It was always nickel.

I can’t lie, that does help a little bit

hey yknow what food item has high levels of nickel? Oats.

yknow whats a common ingredient in eczema lotions that’s added specifically to treat eczema? yeah you guessed it fucking Oats

the more you know

with musk and trump gunning for social security, now seems like a good time to remind everyone that social security isn’t like government charity or something. it’s fully paid for. always has been. corporate media loves to parrot the conservative lie that social security is running out of money without ever mentioning why: congress stole the money. they literally robbed from peter to pay paul.

the whole idea of social security was always that you pay into it your whole life, and then when you retire the government gives you that money back. it’s your money. always has been. like sure technically the money being paid by working age people now is going to the people who are retired now. but social security was started in the 30’s, the people who are collecting benefits now paid into it their whole lives. the idea was to be a retirement savings account that the government keeps safe for you because it’s almost impossible for working class people to save for retirement under capitalism.

the problem is that congress looked at all that money just sitting there and decided to use it as a slush fund. and never paid it back. because it’s easier to steal that money than it is to raise taxes for new spending. so yeah, it’s a problem now that there are more old people retiring than there are young people working, but only because congress stole the money it was supposed to be saving for the people now retiring. all those savings could have actually earned money for the people who can’t pay in due to disability etc by being used as a massive investment fund. instead it’s the classic austerity misdirection: sabotage a useful functional government program, then claim that it doesn’t work and is too expensive. and the media never talks about it.

ive said it before and i'll say it again but carrying a weapon does not make you safer, it gives the person assaulting you a free weapon. i know we live in a time where fear is profitable and the cute pink stun guns make feminism sexy but they do not work like you think they do.

there is an extremely slim chance you will be able to deploy the pepper spray/taser/gun in a way that does not harm you at all. pepper spray blows back, guns miss, tasers slip. there is a much much larger chance things go poorly and you end up getting hurt worse than originally intended because now your assailant is pissed and more heavily armed.

im not talking out my ass here, i'm a case manager at a homeless shelter for addicts. we have a lot of violent behavior. none of our staff carry any sort of weapons. we are trained to de-escalate or remove ourselves from the situation. i have worked there over two years without being harmed despite intervening in many fights and having weapons pulled on me.

there is safety in numbers. there is safety in well lit streets and staying on your phone and knowing when to scream and run. there is no safety in "personal defense items".

weapons do not make you safe

guns do not make you safe

more people carrying weapons makes more violence

it's an illusion. it's a mental game. a weapon is a safety blanket that will sooner kill you than stop someone else from doing so.

we are also not in PVP grand theft auto. as scary as things seem, humans are not out there re-enacting the purge 24/7. there are lots of people who benefit from you being afraid of everyone you pass on the street. a lot of those people will try to sell you things to keep you safe. don't fall for it.

when i say i like hiking, i don’t mean “eight mile backpacking trip with special gear and an emergency beacon” sort of hiking, i mean a three mile loop to go look at pretty things and then a huge brunch after.

this is in no way a slam on hardcore hiking, it’s very fun, but i mostly just need to lower people’s expectations when i say hiking is a hobby of mine

"No no, that's ranger hiking. I like hobbit hiking."

#you gotta be more specific man#Hobbits are specifically famous for two Really Long Walks

Long Walks Georgs were outliers adn should not have been counted

I think that's a misunderstanding of the themes of A Wind Rises.

The *entire film* is about the tragedy of art being coopted by the military industrial complex, how it twists beauty to suit its own ends.

As the protagonist says about halfway through "we could get it to fly, if only we took out the guns".

And he does express remorse for Japanese Empire? He's been calling for reservations for the Korean "Comfort Women" for decades, among other things, and has been viciously opposed to efforts to try to conquer the Pacific again.

Okay I have an update on this, I was kind of half right half wrong, haha. Editorial says because of Dark Crisis, everything counts now, everything is potentially on the table, including Kara having Pre-Crisis memories AND memories from the New 52. So that means she did die in Crisis on Infinite Earths but my editor says how exactly she was resurrected hasn't been explored yet. @_@ My head is spinning!

The 7 stacking retcons that make up DC Continuity are by far the most convoluted things about them. There are a lot of characters that have blatantly contradictory backstory statements because it's combining two thoughts from two different universe 30 years apart, Kara is far from unique in that aspect.

My long time reading (and you are free to disregard if this strays too close to "author pitches") has been that, in this instance, while she died she never had a "resurrection" in a true sense. She just came back to life when Flashpoint pointed, and by the time people regained the proper memories to remember that she had once been dead she'd been back around again for so long that nobody ever felt the need to rejoice in her return. (And/Or Editorial-Level Multiverse-Shaking Meta-Retcons have a No Bummers button because if we actually brought up the fridge horror of everybody regaining those memories that would be the only story told for the following 2 years)