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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Absolutely the hardest part was the shrinking. Most of the damage, I had access to both sides of the panel. Which means you can use a hammer and a block thing called a dolly. But you have to hold the dolly on one side and hammer on the other. Which is awkward as hell. It’s slow work, or was for me; I suppose a pro can go faster. And you have to be careful because if you overdo it, you can end up hardening the metal and end up with cracks.

    All the videos and tutorials say to practice on some scrap sheet metal, but I didn’t have any, so it was trial by fire.

    This was back in the summer, but my left shoulder is still being pissy about the positions I was in to reach the dolly to the middle of the roof and still see what I was hitting with the hammer.

    Tbh though, it was much simpler than I thought. There’s plenty of good tutorials out there,and the concepts aren’t complicated at all, it’s the skill that’s fiddly and detailed.


  • Yup, you pronounce a plural or possessive of a word that ends in S with the es or 's like Travises.

    However, you don’t usually pronounce an 's after a plural. A single Travis that owns something would be pronounced Travises. If you are referring to a family with the surname Travis, as a group, it’s the Travises. However, if the Travises own something, it will be the Travises property, not the Traviseses property.

    Whether or not you write the possessive plural as Travises’ or not seems to be a matter of debate. I do. Some rules dictate that you would write the singular possessive as Travis’ and say it Travises, others would have it written as Travis’s


  • Body work on my car.

    I’m poor as fuck and had tree branches fuck me up. Decided I’m not willing to deal with the bullshit of finding a new one, especially with all the bullshit privacy invasion on top of buying the damn thing.

    So, I borrowed tools, looked shit up, and while the car isn’t fully dent free or anything, it was good enough to replace windows and you have to get close to see the warping that’s left.

    Took my crippled ass damn near two weeks because I could only work maybe a half hour, 45 minutes at a go once or twice a day. And I wasn’t working fast.

    While it was much simpler than I thought it would be, those auto body pros deserve their damn pay. Shit is hard physically. Just replacing the side mirror had my back cramping and spasming for hours after, even with meds. And that was the easiest job involved.

    Dunno that I learned enough to exactly say it’s a true skill, since it really only applies to my car, and the kind of damage done, but the parts of the frame that were bent are back in line, and the dents that needed shrinking are damn near invisible, which I’m proud as fuck of.

    The painting sucks though lol. Couldn’t get a good sprayer on loan, and the one I could get was a bitch about not giving an even coat. The blending is not great. Visible from even a dozen feet away. A few drips too. But I ain’t worried about that with a car that’s damn near twenty years old.

    Dunno what the hell I would have done without good neighbors and friends loaning me the gear. No way could I have afforded rental for the air compressor after the supplies cost, parts, and glass. Came out to a few hundred all told, but the estimate was damn near 1.2k




  • Ehhh, it’s not entirely off, more of a mischaracterization.

    Most of poop is water, even when someone is constipated.

    The non water part is a mix of food waste, dead bacteria, live bacteria, and undigestible matter (like microplastics).

    The exact percentages of all that varies. Water, for example, ranges from about 60-75% in healthy feces. But with extreme constipation or diarrhea, it can go higher or lower.

    The remaining matter is going to be roughly 25% bacterial, viral, or fungal. Of which, roughly half is going to be alive still.

    The rest is stuff that we swallowed, and either can’t be digested, or wasn’t completely digested. Carbohydrates tend to be the lowest presence, as they digest the easiest. Then proteins, then fats. Fats are the hardest to digest of the three, and tend to be the majority of partially digested substances.

    Fiber makes up the majority of the indigestible matter, with various man-made substances making up the rest of that category.

    No two poops are the exact same though. Our gut is a living, active biome. Our digestive enzymes and acids break down food into component parts very effectively, but microbes, bacteria in particular, help along the way, breaking things down more, and that makes the components we need better able to be taken up by the intestines.

    Research into the gut biome and how it can affect the rest of the body is in its infancy, even compared to research on the brain, which is a big mystery despite much longer efforts to understand it. Gut flora really wasn’t considered as a factor in overall health until widely until the last twenty years or so. But, it turns out to have influence on everything about our bodies. So, poop science is strangely cutting edge work right now.


  • Sorry mate, there is no current way to eat without eventually needing to poop and remain healthy.

    Best case scenario, you can figure out an IV nutrition regimen and end up not pooping poop, while your intestines are damaged through non use. You’ll likely suffer immensely if you ever decide to eat again.

    Even then, things will still come out of you. Patients with extreme starvation, regardless of cause, still produce some intestinal mucosa. That stuff can and will eventually come out in small amounts.

    See, the gut atrophies when it isn’t being used. It takes a while to reach that point, but it’s inevitable, no matter how well you keep up with IV feeding

    In terms of smoothies, there’s ways to feed people through a tube when they can no longer eat. The products that are used for that minimize waste, but there’s still poop of some kind. So any smoothie you make yourself is also going to contain enough content that’s indigestible that you’ll poop eventually unless you take care to balance the soluble and insoluble fiber in the smoothie, you’ll end up with smoothie poop. In other words, it comes out in a very similar state of fluidity as it went in. It takes some effort to build a smoothie recipe that doesn’t have skewed proportions of fiber.

    And if you want to have a healthy body, you can’t just let the intestines atrophy at all. The inflammation and other secondary issues that come with gut atrophy can’t be called healthy by any stretching of the term. So even IV feeding isn’t healthy, no matter how well done it is.

    I’m trying to remember exactly how far into IV feeding you run into atrophy issues though. There was a fairly famous case of a man that was on an IV feeding plan to lose weight, but with the recent discovery of wegovy and related drugs for weight loss, there’s too damn many hits to sort through to find any of that info. But his case did include intake of low/no calorie intake orally to prevent that atrophy, I just can’t remember the details of what did happen to his gut health. I know he had at least a few months where he had trouble after resuming eating, but I’m damned if I can remember any details.

    I’m fairly certain you could minimize pooping with oral nutrition that lacks any products that would form waste in the digestive tract though. It wouldn’t be a smoothie, since that’s pureed food; and it wouldn’t be healthy long term for all of the above reasons regarding the gut. But you might be able to work with specialists and figure out how to keep things from becoming so detrimental as to be inherently harmful. You’d definitely need a team though, I don’t think any single specialty in medicine would cover all of the knowledge necessary to make it work long term.


  • Nipples are definitely high on the touch scale. A little lower regarding motion, but very pressure sensitivity, and only slightly than pressure with temperature. That’s pulling from memory, but I’m fairly confident about my memory on the subject because it hasn’t been long since I had to refresh on things.

    As to why someone might or might not enjoy nipple play, that’s complex. All of our perception via skin senses is a mix of the various nerve ending types, the thickness of the skin at any given spot, the brain’s filters, psychological filters/associations, and mind frame in the moment.

    Even if you ignore sexual arousal and sexual intent, we tend to think of nipples as something “special” in comparison to, say, the knee. So our minds set us up to some degree or another to process the sensations at the nipple in a fairly unique way. Since they’re “bigger” than their actual size, everything from them is going to take up more room in the brain, the same way lips and such do.

    That, btw, is about how much of the brain is dedicated to processing the signals from an area. I can’t find one right now, but there’s images of what our bodies would look like if they were sized in proportion to how much the brain devotes to the area. I’m running on empty right now, but I’ll try to find one once I’ve had some sleep.

    Back to the nipples though. Because of the job they do, high sensitivity is necessary. Remember, even the nipples on men are still the same basic equipment, so they follow the same resource devotion as women’s do. They’re all evolved with baby feeding as being a survival trait.

    But the system isn’t perfect. Sometimes, some aspect of the link between the nipples and the brain skew too far into sensitivity, and you run across the folks where just having soft fabric rub them can be outright painful. But the exact reason can vary based on any of the factors I mentioned earlier. It can be an unusually high proportion of pain receptors, it could be the brain filtering the signals weird, it could even be psychological rather than neurological or anatomical. But it comes down to the signals being individualized.

    As an example, I deal with chronic pain. I’ve learned how to ignore some sensations that were enough to have me contemplating suicide when it all started. So, for me, it takes a higher level of intensity for my nipples to be perceived as painful, even when someone is practically chewing on them (or literally is, the lady I dated before I met my wife was intense lol). But, back before the chronic pain stuff, I had a much lower threshold where pulling and biting would become unpleasant. Learning how to compartmentalize pain in general, which is a combination of meditative and psychological practice, means that even though the signals of my nipple being bitten is exactly the same as before, the way my brain prioritizes and filters those signals changed.

    I wish there was a simpler, more direct answer than it being a dozen individual factors, but that’s what it is.

    As far as why the perception is weird compared to other parts of the body, it is the nerve density and the thinness of the tissue of the areolae and nipples. They’re set up so that feeding babies isn’t overwhelming (as a baseline, because that can be way overwhelming for some people), but there’s acute sensitivity for the process of feeding. They’re also linked into the same involuntary nervous system that governs arousal (and orgasm!), so we tend to place a different weight on them when it comes to the brain and the mind. Nipples and areolae really are pretty unique compared to the majority of our skin surface. The lips are the most similar iirc, with parts of the genitals being close as well.

    I’d have to go digging to find the rough proportions for the various sections of the body because it wasn’t a factor in what I was looking for when I first ran across the subject as a whole. But every section does have a different proportion of the various nerve ending types, and different densities of them. But they also link to other sections of the nervous system differently, which means the link to the brain for a given section is going to vary wildly across the body.

    We are marvels of evolution. Our reduced hair presence gives us a lot of extra sensory data, and we’ve got brains matched to be able to process the millions of signals from all of that every split second. With nothing but the little nerve endings connected to the short and thin (relative to other mammals), we can detect a breeze so faint as to not visibly move hairs. How fucking cool is that? We can pick up differences in temperature down to a few degrees. We can accurately detect pressure down to about a half PSI on our fingertips, sometimes even less.

    A lot of what we learn about how we compare to other animals glosses over exactly how sensitive our skin can be. And, more importantly, how powerful our brains are to be able to process all of it.

    The nipples are a perfect example of that. Did you know that some people can read Braille with their nipples? No bullshit, I used to date a blind lady that would do it as a party trick. She said she knew a guy that could do it with the tip of his penis too, though she may have been trolling me. Which is way tangential to what you asked, but I think it illustrates exactly how unique the configuration of the nipples is compared to other parts of the body.


  • Yup, there’s multiple sensory nerve endings.

    Iirc, the nose is high in pain/injury receptors, motion, and temperature, but low on pressure. Mind you, that’s relative. It’s still one of the more sensitive spots on the entire body, even regarding pressure.

    My top TP is charmin. A lifetime of IBS has proven the brand’s (regardless of which version) ability to clean up with the least amount of friction, and less of the roll being used, and it is the least irritating to my skin there overall.

    Scott comfort plus is right behind charmin.

    They comes cottonelle, which is pretty similar across their product line. Not a lot of variation in comfort levels there.

    Anything else, I just can’t handle for long. Like, here and there, I can make do, but my parts won’t be happy about it.

    I’m with you, bidet all the way at home.


  • You know, I never post much of anything. But even if I did, I couldn’t post most of my actual shower thoughts without calls for banning, psychiatric intervention, or exorcism. Maybe all at once.

    I get too relaxed in the shower, and my weird shit comes to the surface.

    As an example, a few nights ago I had a doozy. I had had a conversation with a friend via text where they yet again tried to talk me into running for mayor. A joke w as made on his part about electing me as dictator for life.

    By the time I got in the shower, my brain w as scrambling coming up with ways I could get out of such a situation. One of the first things I thought up was doing something so atrocious that I would get thrown into jail for life, because someone would have to decide I couldn’t be allowed to roam free if I went hard enough.

    What proceeded was a shower filled with my brain going through horrible things leaders have done in the past and concluding that there’s never any guarantee a madman will be taken down while not being killed because there are so many people that will support the kind of batshit crazy that commits atrocities.

    Mind you, it isn’t always that fucking batshit, but whatever is in my brain when I get under warm, running water is going to keep percolating until it goes off the rails. I’ve learned to never shower after watching “true” crime shows, political ads, or visiting anything that deals with botched surgeries. Why? Because my brain can’t be trusted to not turn it into a game of “what if?” It will inevitably go to the darkest, ugliest possible places.




  • Well, barring some form of medical issue, chances are that you’ve run into the mind-body connection.

    It’s entirely possible to override the filtering the brain does. You can decide to pay attention to the signals from your finger more, and your brain will usually obey.

    And it is possible that either your fingers are extra sensitive, or that the places you’re touching are atypically low in comparison to your fingers.

    Generally, the two most sensitive spots on the body are the lips and the genitals. But there’s stuff that can interfere with that isn’t abnormal or a problem, but still shift the way the brain processes the signals coming in.

    I’d try dimming lights, or even cutting them off, and very gently, with only enough pressure to make contact, move a fingertip, usually the index finger, across your lips. You can also try treating your finger like a lollipop, and wrap your lips around the tip to gently kiss. That gives greater area of contact, which will help if the issue is something like thicker skin on the lips.

    And, at the risk of seeming weird, gently touching the glans penis (the head) or clitoris almost always works as the nerve density there is as high as it gets.

    For me, my entire face feels the finger, but once I get past the chin or into the scalp, it shifts. Some people only have the lips, nose and sometimes eyes that are more sensitive than the fingers.






  • Dammit, yet another question that I spent too much of my life on.

    It comes down to nerves and tissue (cell, not paper) types.

    The outside of your nose and the tissues of the anus are not the exact same. There’s a different concentration of “nerve endings”, and different types in different concentrations.

    I doubt you want the full Monty of it, but if you look up the term “sensory receptors”, you can do the deep dive very easily.

    The short version is that we have specific types of “nerve endings” (that’s what they’re called colloquially, hence the quote marks, but I’ll stop using those at this point). They detect pressure, temperature, pain/injury, etc.

    The concentrations of them (as in how many per square inch), and the assortment of them (as in how many of each type in that square inch) varies across the entire body. The easiest way to demonstrate the relative principle is to touch your fingertip to your nose, your lips, your genitals (seriously), and your leg.

    You’ll find that your brain interprets the signals in an interesting way. It’ll filter the less intense signals. You touch your finger to your lip, what your brain “says” is that your lips are being touched by something, and the signal from your finger takes the back seat. You touch the same fingertip to your thigh your brain says the finger is the primary sensation, and you feel the thigh via the finger rather than the finger via the thigh the way the lips worked.

    Give it a try on whatever parts of your body you want. There’s going to be a shifting perception of whether it’s your finger touching something ( where emphasis is placed on the signals from the finger), or it’ll be the section of the body being touched by the finger (signal from the touched location being emphasized).

    The anus and the nose have different jobs. The anus, mostly, needs to detect pressure, injury, and some degree of chemical contact the nose needs less pressure sensitivity, but more motion sensitivity. So you’ll get a different overall sensation with any given substance that’s pushed against either, and when the same substance is moved across either. The difference may end up being minor. But both are sensitive enough that most people can tell a difference between paper tissue products blindfolded.

    Back in the day, I wiped asses for pay. The only patients I had that couldn’t tell the difference between brands of TP had medical issues that interfered with nerve signals. Do a test for yourself. Find a buddy to hand you tp or facial tissues and keep a log (heh, he said log while talking about butts). There’s a very good chance that every single one will feel different. You’ll probably be able to tell which brand is which if you’ve used that brand before.

    You can probably even tell the difference with your fingers tbh. But you wouldn’t likely be able to if the same products were placed or rubbed on your back

    You’d also notice that different objects will feel different when just placed on an area and pressed gently into the skin vs when you wipe the area with it.

    Skin is an amazing thing. It’s armor, a sensor array, a biological filter, sunscreen, and a temperature regulator all in one! Plus other functions tbh, but shit like that gets overwhelming to read for a lot of people

    You’d be amazed what you can discover with just an hour sitting around and touching things to parts of your body.


  • Well, tbh, we don’t bother with it at all now. There’s not enough kids doing it to merit the expense or effort involved (and it ain’t like either are high enough to matter, which shows how bad Halloween has gotten).

    But, yeah, back when kids still did it, who cares about costumes? Halloween isn’t dressupday. There’s other traditions involved, including kids running around and having fun just for the sake of the fun itself.

    Besides, who am I to determine whether or not someone needs a costume? They might not be able to afford one. They might have some weird religious thing about masks or whatever. They might have some medical issue that prevents a costume. They might have had a costume, but something happened to it. I don’t know why they’re not wearing one. But if they show up at my door, they’re celebrating Halloween. They’re taking part in not only a community activity, but a very human activity. That’s worth some candy by itself.

    Shit, I’ve given candy to adults that rolled up and said trick or treat because it isn’t only about kids. I’ve handed extra candy to adults and kids that asked with the explanation there was someone that couldn’t make it. IDGAF if it’s true or not, it isn’t about me.

    I fucking miss Halloween the way it used to be. You’d think in this bumfuck nowhere semi rural town, we’d still have people out and about. But no, we haven’t had a single visitor on Halloween since covid. Even before that, it was two or three the entire night and had been for years.

    There was so much fun in putting on a Halloween playlist, or movies, or whatever and waiting to see or hear someone coming. Even if I didn’t dress up myself, it was fun to see everyone out and enjoying the night. Hell, back when I was still in physical therapy, on a bloody walker, I was in the living room ready to go. Hopped up on pain meds, but still.

    I’m envious that you live somewhere it’s still a big thing, costumes or not.