Disorganized list b/c I can’t be assed to format:

1. The follicles on your face will grow at different rates. Even if you’re going for length, trimming your beard to let the slower hairs catch up can give you a fuller and thicker beard. I will sometimes take some electric clippers and just trim back the faster growing hairs to give my beard a more defined shape.

2. Trim the sides & mustache occasionally. Imagine a line starting a half inch or so away from your face, starting where your hair ends & sideburns begin and going straight down to the ground. Trim the sides of your beard following that line, and trim your mustache to stop the hairs from getting in your mouth. A santa-esque beard is longer than it is wide, so you’ll probably need to shape it that way.

3. Your facial hair will probably wick moisture away from your skin. You’re already out ahead of this with the beard oil, which is great. I personally prefer using a beard butter, but anything that keeps the skin underneath moisturized is important. One time I shaved & it almost looked like my cheeks had been sunburned.

4. This one is personal preference, but I keep my neck mostly shaved. I draw a line starting two fingers above my Adam’s apple, and bring it up to the corners of my jaw. Everything below gets either shaved or at least hit with the clippers on the lowest guard. I also take my wife’s eyebrow razor and clean up the top of my cheeks, to straighten out the top of my beard. Totally optional, but makes it look cleaner IMO.

TL;DR Growing a beard =/= not shaving. Trim it to give it shape, shave neck & the top of your cheeks to give it lines, continue to moisturize / oil it.

I don’t know about you nerds but that skeleton is definitely part of me. I don’t live in it: I AM it.

You may also want to check the extruder arm. The stock plastic one on the ender 3 is prone to cracking.

Nice shooting!

Hard disagree. Randomly murdering fascists does not a revolution make, to say nothing of the odds of winning that fight.

Go to the gym. Be able to do cardio without dying. Work on your fitness and health. Then buy a gun. Train with it. A lot. Organize with like-minded people. Invest in community defense, look out for LGBT / immigrant / marginalized friends and family. Be prepared for violence, but keep it a last resort. When / if bullets start flying, lives with be ruined on both sides of the gun.

Hear, hear! If anything, this election has proven that we need to work on class consciousness and the Overton window. Mutual aid, direct action, protest & strike support, salting, and civil disobedience are all ways we can produce the conditions needed for positive change.

I wonder what kind of person calls themselves a “world class expert” in astrology.

The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

I second this. OP, you say you’re mistrustful of doctors. That impulse isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Doctors are people, and sometimes people ain’t shit. If you meet one that sucks & just tells you some variation of “deal with it”, you are well within your rights to tell them to pound sand & find a different doctor. It can be discouraging when the first / first few you see suck ass, but the right doctor can make a huge difference.

I am fascinated by the apparent Mountain Dew mural in this office.

Been thru most of these. Lived with chronic pain. Wife and I lost our jobs this year within a few months of each other. Had someone credibly threaten to sue me for more than I could afford. Dealt with depression & suicidality. Worked from home with a gun on my desk because the cops wouldn’t do anything about my batshit insane neighbor.

The list of problems I have proven to myself I can survive grows longer every day. I have the contact info for a good psychiatrist, lawyer, and physical therapist. I know who my support network is, and exactly how far I can stretch a dollar. Yes, bad things happen now that are worse than when I was younger. But I am stronger and more in control of my life. Problems that would have broken me down when I was just starting out are things I can now handle without so much as elevating my heart rate.

And, there are new joys that have only become accessible to me through the benefit of experience! Fears I have conquered, hangups I have gotten over, people I have warmed up to.

Getting older doesn’t just suck. I think it just seems that way because people (on the internet at least) find it really easy and relatable to complain.

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

This woman changed all my opinions while pouring milk on herself.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.