I had both .22LR rifle and revolver and that revolver was louder than a 9mm (Uzi) so gun design makes a massive difference.

I think it’s possible that a recording on surround sound might get close to the noise of a smaller caliber gun, but I just doubt that it would be an easy mistake to make. Particularly if that person doesn’t play a lot of loud movies and games and it’s just a sudden burst or something.

I bet you had tinnitus for awhile.

That makes me think of something I never put together. I did everything I can in life to protect my hearing. Never shot without protection, never even operated heavy machinery or went to concerts without some kind of hearing protection, I was so infatuated with preserving my senses that I was made fun of for always having PPE. Now later in life I have constant tinnitus and no idea why. Come to think of it, maybe that one single shotgun blast at point-blank range is what knocked something loose in there and I’m only just now feeling the long-term effects.

My father, who was just really bad at like, everything, and was always inebriated… was checking something on the 12-gauge he kept in the house, he decided to sit next to me on my bed to fiddle with the thing and of course, he pulls the trigger and it goes off.

Fortunately it was pointed away from me, and fortunately there was nobody else in the house at the time, so it just took a large chunk out of the wall and not a family member, but it was startling on a level that shook me for life, and whether he meant to teach the lesson or not, I sure as shit learned the rules of firearms from that incident.

It also makes me call BS on at least the “saving private ryan” part of the 4chan post. There’s no way you will mistake an actual firearm going off for any kind of media or recording.

Paintball guns can easily remove an eyeball, yet the way people handle them at open games should make us all terrified for how unaware and and careless people are around dangerous devices. We need far more training and preparation on a nationalized, standardized level for preparing people for the real world.

Advanced tactic for people who aren’t afraid of dumb people and are social enough to make friends: get to know your right-leaning or centrist neighbors anyway, make them like you even if you’re a different race or culture. It’s far easier than most people think. Run to them for help. Make them confront the situation they would normally feel removed from. It’s amazing how often these people flip when they’re in the middle of it.

climate change is a reality

In fact, this is why we changed the term from “global warming” to “climate change” because over long periods of time, the globe will warm up more and more, but as the climate changes we will see extremes in both heat and cold and precipitation and other weather events as time goes. We’re likely going to see ice-fishing in places that never had snow before and winter wildflower blooms in northern countries.

the trick is getting all those people moving in the right direction.

Turns out only a handful of things in all of history have pushed people out of social boundaries and into a realm of discomfort and possible consequence:

1. Fear and hate. Always number one here, if you get enough people scared together, they can be driven anywhere. Most people don’t think, they feel. Feelings drive the motions and actions.

2. A greater discomfort than breaking social norms and potentially going to jail- IE: starvation, homelessness, genocide, etc.

3. Extremely charismatic people who capture enough political capital that they’re given the opportunity to gather large numbers of people for a cause. These are usually politicians who are well trained in how to influence people, and typically use item #1 to enforce their goals.

Right now we don’t have any of these things. We also don’t have political capital or organized power such as uniting behind nationalism or guns to demonstrate our ability to actually disrupt the system. This makes us a target by the state, and the state protects capital right here, right now.

We can still fix this through political action and organization, and if we do, we can actually create systems that protect the world from more lich-kings rising up and swallowing all of our work and money. It just takes more social involvement than we’re doing now… and since just that seems too much for most progressive-minded people, I don’t have a lot of hope that we’re going to do any of the other, more forceful things that require a LOT more cohesion.

Reality sucks. I know. But we can influence it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of forward time-travel, it’s that the future is consistent about only one thing: that there’s more of everything.

Our future is going to have great hardships and weird politics and disasters and suffering, but it will also have more wonders, miracles and everyday concepts that would seem utterly alien to us presently. People in many places will die of easily preventable diseases because of income inequality, that’s a norm. But those easily-preventable or treatable diseases will be things like cancer or heart disease.

You will have a an ocean of cheaply made “AAA” game titles being pushed out by the EA/Trump/Saudi conglomerate, sure. But you will also have totally new experiences being experimented with as AI matures and creates new ways to generate worlds on the fly, things like video cards will slowly start becoming obsolete as new ways of creating virtual environments are experimented with.

It’s going to get harder and harder to keep up with changes too. Trust me on this, there’s no avoiding it. Just find a niche in life you enjoy, make some friends, have some close connections with others, care about yourself and your community and ride it out.

People have stopped socializing, at least not in a real, meaningful way. Discord groups of other shut-ins feeding off each other’s insecurity doesn’t count.

The lack of socialization means a lack of social validation so to feel any value at all, we all have to figure out how to carve out new identities in a much more lonely and dark world. Self-diagnosis of conditions and syndromes can give you insulation from criticism and give you a sense of community and belonging, so less effort is placed on managing or treating the condition and more effort is placed on affirming and defending your condition.

I’m not saying the conditions aren’t real, they exist on a large spectrum that almost everyone falls on to some degree, but what’s changed is the view of the conditions or syndromes as an obstacle to life that needs to be managed or beat. Instead it’s a badge of identity that people work to justify and preserve, often without realizing it.

I’ve been in and out of the mental health system for years, I’ve done it to beat depression, PTSD and anxiety and have made great strides by accepting the hard truths of the things I need to do to make it easier to live with problems outside my control. But these are tools I embraced because I wanted to go outside, meet people, be more social and have more opportunities.

Not a lot of young people want any of that, they’ve been disillusioned by the promise of the future because the internet just feeds them the bleakest picture of the world that it can, and people don’t generally seek out balancing perspectives on their own, and even resist any attempt to tell them that there’s a lot of important reasons you might want to stretch your mental and social muscles.

Nearly everyone I talk to under the age of 25 or so says they can’t imagine living past 40, with many saying that they actively have plans to not live past 40, which blows my goddamn mind.

Every single one of you whiny, nihilistic shits out there is going to hit age 40 and say “Oh fuck, what have I done with my life?”

I know that building community is not only an answer to violence, but broadly speaking the answer to a lot of social problems. I am curious though if you’re referencing a source or study, if the neighborhood beautification projects lead to people becoming more involved in their communities, or if it’s communities already coming together to beautify their neighborhoods.

It depends a lot on your local laws. Not every state even makes the distinction, so to err on the side of caution, I always treated ammo the same as a gun, and never separated them.

Some laws let you transport guns anywhere in your car if it’s in a locked box, some laws are written in a way where that could mean your glove compartment, other states have wording that excludes a glove compartment, just as an example of the ambiguity involved in gun laws.

Also, your proximity to schools or other public services can override all the other laws. It was when I was drawing kilometer radiuses from local schools that I started to feel such stress from planning my trips outside that I decided to stop taking the damn thing out all the time, and eventually just stopped entirely.

A good CCW class will give you the most basic stuff you need to know for your area, but it does change frequently so you would need to refresh on the laws frequently.

I did self-defense training, both learning and teaching for close to 15 years or so, I did the CCW thing, took classes in firearms as well as martial arts and the whole nine-yards for many years.

I will often reiterate what you cited there, that if you’re in a dangerous situation that you already expect to be dangerous, your first priority is changing your situation. Not going to that place, working towards moving, etc. Kind of like step-one of any fight is to not get into a fight.

I eventually also stopped carrying my gun, because all it did was add extra stress to my life. Always making sure you know where it is, if you’re somewhere that legally prohibits you having it, then if you do have to leave it outside of a store or business, you are always thinking about it inside your car. My greatest worry was someone breaking into my vehicle and using the gun to commit a crime, which statistically is much, much more likely than actually being in a situation where you need to use it.

I still own guns but keep them locked up. But I don’t enjoy guns broadly because I’ve had too much time think about it. I’ve had to learn the law, I’ve had to take responsibility for teaching others how to defend themselves, I’ve spent too much time playing out situations and the post-event situations that most gun-chuds NEVER spend a moment thinking about.

I feel strongly now that a lot of the gun violence in the US can be connected to the general lack of respect and knowledge about firearms. The only “training” most owners get is action movies. I think if more people were required to actually study the law and play out scenarios they might be far less likely to reach for a gun to solve all their problems.

The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

If you actually read the book, it makes so little sense you will weep for humanity.

People will compete for those negative awards to get famous.

Source: look at the fucking internet.

So how do you “feel” gender?

As a cishet man, I don’t. I recognize it, I know my social expectations, I know what the unwritten “rules” are and I am just “comfortable” with it. In that it doesn’t bother me enough that I want to change anything.

That doesn’t mean I “feel like a man.” I don’t know if there’s such a feeling. It’s words we use to describe having comfort with your life and situation, and I bet there are very few men or women or anyone else who feel that sensation all the time. Even though I feel comfortable being a man, there are so, so many things I don’t understand, but cannot change.

I would say the way I feel my gender the most is physically and sexually. Without delving too deep into the horny-pool, all I can say is I feel like a man in sexuality. I feel very “male” urges tickling the back of my mind which are very pleasant to indulge in the right circumstances. I have attractions and desires that line up with being heterosexual male and that’s probably the only place where I enjoy maleness.

Everything else? It just feels like wallpaper, and I don’t care. I wear a beard because I know there are people who like beards and have decided I look better displaying facial hair, but I don’t stroke it and say “damn, that’s nice man-hair.” I would feel better smooth shaved but it makes me look like gumby.

I am the first downstairs with a gun when someone hears glass breaking, not because I like being first in line for danger, but because I know I am larger and well-trained and can probably survive an injury better than smaller humans around me that I care about.

I am the one who does the “guy things” because I am the guy. When I (rarely) get support or reward for specifically male things, it feels good but I don’t connect it with my gender. I don’t even know what that means. I feel more like I happen to be in this body in this culture and need to do the best I can with it, and feel no strong urge to change that dynamic. No glaring discomfort, but also no real sense of “identity” about my gender.

Honestly, maybe it’s because I keep the company of people with a few more brain-cells than the stereotypes you see in media, but my male friends are usually the same. We don’t “talk like guys” together, if anyone tried that they would get stared at. Most of our conversations are about healthcare and problems with our homes or backs or family members, real-world, material issues with life more than our gender roles. Most men I know are just “people inhabiting male bodies and roles” and I don’t think that’s rare, I think it’s largely what most people feel.

There are things I recognize that are deeply painful about my gender role, as well as things that give me benefits. If I let myself feel anything at all, it would be a level of despair that no matter what else happens, there is an expectation on me that I will have to work, solve problems and do the hard things in my family/social circle that people who do not identify or “feel” like men don’t have to do. I don’t get that part on a broad, social level. But lingering on what’s fair or not, no matter what the situation, is useless. It’s rumination. It’s the thief of life and joy. You will never be free of injustice or unfairness. That’s not how our world works.

Nah fam you should probably wait until Trump dies, which won’t be much longer.

My point was only that a lot of the news is a little hyperbolic, you should check other sources to see exactly what people in your situation are facing, I ain’t passing out financial or travel advice, just providing perspective.

A couple points that media routinely skips right past because the current drama is great for clicks and views.

1. The current “escalation” of immigration hostility is only slightly more aggressive than it’s always been. Not counting the performative stunts ICE is doing in cities and neighborhoods, those are also just isolated cases that most people will never see in person, even ones who live in areas that have news reports showing fires and riots and standoffs… these kinds of things are happening in areas like, one square block at the most. Not downplaying it, but I do want people to have an accurate perspective.

2. And that percentage of bad cases and horror stories against tourists is very, very small to begin with. At least compared to the HUGE number of people flowing in and out of the country every hour. This is why the whole spectacle being played out by this administration is so ludicrous and pointless. More people were still deported under Biden. More people still stay in the country illegally just by overstaying their permits or travel visas. Most will never be caught or prosecuted.

The beach is a nesting ground of vast biomes of creatures, singled-celled, through to vast arrays of worms, some parasitic, all the way up to burrowing arthropods like sand fleas and their many, many cousins. We don’t usually have problems with any of this stuff when we swim or hang out on the sand because… and I cannot stress this enough, we do not eat raw produce we find in the sand.

Please do not eat raw produce you find in the sand.

Laughs softly in spreading American corporate virus

No but they will have an entirely squirrel themed Magic deck.