Food related patterns would be pretty strong indicators for me as well, I think.

I only eat after 4pm (sometimes only from 6-10 or so) and people comment when I actually eat earlier than that, especially breakfast. I almost never use condiments or salt (I’m on a very low sodium diet and have been most of my life; I don’t use salt outside of baking, and that’s half salt). Give my dopple unsalted fries and you’ll know right away.

Drinks would work well for me as well - coffee made a very specific way, or room temp water, mostly (I actively dislike cold and hot water).

That’s like one of the super grindy JRPG titles I have (100 hours or so to get through the story). To get all the achievements, you’d have to play through an absolute minimum of 9 times, because you need to kill the end boss without taking damage on each difficulty level, and they unlock as you go. But you’d actually be grinding bosses for ages trying to get them without taking damage…

The game was ok, but I honestly can’t see wanting to play it twice let alone 9 times… there’s definitely a reason almost nobody has those achievements…

Men do sometimes have boobs, and women tend not to find them attractive (some do ofc) because they are a sign of a poorly maintained body.

If they were a normal feature both sexes had regardless of health, like women sort of do (tho it is still absolutely based on health and hormone levels so this is kinda disingenuous) it would probably be like nice legs or nice butts; one can appreciate nice ones but it wouldn’t be a secondary sex characteristic anymore, so neither sex would be likely to have the present level of obsession with them.

I don’t think women would be particularly concerned with breasts if men had them, too… for one thing even lesbian women don’t tend to get super giddy about breasts now because they are exposed to them a lot more readily and less sexually than men are, so they just aren’t special in any way, even if they are a lesbian’s preferred physical characteristic. This would become true for men as well re:female breasts, but more than that, I can’t really think of any male physical trait that similar numbers of women like the way men like breasts. And I doubt breasts would end up being it for women.

It’s kinda amusing if you think about it but men are absolutely obsessed with genitalia and sex in a way women just aren’t, usually, and that translates to being absolutely obsessed with one’s own penis, such that it -is- a big chunk of the male personality (for the record I’m not saying this disparagingly, I find the differences to be fascinating as a fellow ace, and just listened to a book about erectile dysfunction where this exact tendency is mentioned many time for its usefulness as a diagnostic tool to determine if ED is caused by physical or hormonal issues). And along with that obsession with their own genitalia being the obvious appendage of all their musings, comes a twin obsession with a single highly obvious female body trait, breasts.

Women just don’t operate like that at all. Maybe it’s socializing, maybe it’s inherent, but either way, I don’t think breasts on men for women (or any other trait, frankly) would or even could be like breasts on women for men. I think the problem is that male secondary sex characteristics are basically optional. Men basically get body hair, bad smells, a lump on the throat, and the ability to put on muscle more easily. Other than the Adam’s apple, which isn’t particularly prominent, none of those things are necessarily permanent. You can shave and shower and if you don’t use your muscles they fade, so men don’t have “one major trait”, like breasts, and women are thus more varied about the trait they find most attractive.

For the other questions - women shirtless normal? I mean that’s just a socializing thing. There have been cultures where women are topless just as readily as men and it’s nbd. This is entirely puritanical nonsense.

For breast cancer color - did you know pink used to be a boys color and blue girls? I see no reason the color couldn’t stay pink. But if it was a big deal for both sexes I don’t think it would ever have risen to the sort of prominance it has in society now. Breast cancer as a big deal is because of women making it a big deal because it disproportionately impacts women and men don’t tend to advocate for women’s issues. But if both sexes were impacted it would be more like lung cancer or something, just sort of non-gendered PSAs about your boobs trying to kill you.

Here’s a fun thought experiment in similar spirits.

If complex intelligent life evolved an an encrusted ocean moon (like Europa, which has liquid ocean topped by miles of ice crust, preventing any light or anything from penetrating to the depths), what would their technology look like, and what would their view of the universe be like?

There was some legit talk among the wealthy a while back about how to control their slaves servants… and the idea of bomb collars was floated…

I can’t find the article at the moment (I’ll edit when I do because I’m still looking but my app tends to crash if I wait), but this is all totally on the up and up and it’s really fucking depressing that there are so many articles now about doomsday bunkers for the ultra wealthy… like they could have just pumped that money into fixing things but they don’t want to… sociopaths.

Edit- found it faster than I thought!

https://archive.ph/l3Djh

I don’t have a minds eye for something to fade from, so that question doesn’t really make sense to me. I have my eyes and then when I close my eyes it’s either black or eyelid colored, nothing else, and I’m super unclear what seeing things in your mind is supposed to be like. Tho I do have super-vivid visual dreams these days (which did not happen until my late 20s, but aren’t at all uncommon for people with aphantasia) and because I only have open-eye sight and these dreams that seem totally real, I frequently have to ask people if things actually happened. It’s very disconcerting, but my understanding is that dreams are not really the same as waking minds eye anyway.

Rather than a visual representation, I’ll have a verbal description ready as soon as I see an item. So for the ball example, I’d know the ball is “small, about the size of a plum, solid pink somewhere between neon and intense salmon, smooth matte texture, looks like it might be foam”. It probably serves the same function as a visual representation, although perhaps with a bit more required specificity. I don’t really describe things to myself unless I need to, though, so I guess my thinking is sort of abstract. I know the traits something has, and can recall them, but typically don’t explicitly list them unless I’m describing for someone else.

One perk of this is I’m great at describing things I’ve seen or made up, a downside is I’m terrible when people describe things to me. Since I’ve never seen the thing being described, it is a super arbitrary list of usually non-specific features and I don’t care at all. I skip clothing descriptions in books, for example. Don’t care. But when I describe things, even made up things, I’ll run through a list of the features it needs as a minimum to be the object for my mind, which is usually vivid detail for others, as the ball example above.

Idk if I see things differently eyes-open, I don’t really think so, but that’s always been a curiosity of mine since there’s literally no way to know what other people see. I have mild impairments as a result of not being able to visualize, like I’m largely face blind - I have to pick out specific features and traits and use the combination as identifiers. I get a ton of false positives, and almost everyone “feels familiar”. Beyond that, I’m pretty sensitive to colors and patterns. Idk.

But the -way- you ask that first question makes me curious; If you close your eyes and intentionally picture something other than the ball, would you then be unable to tell me what color it was in your example? Do you, personally, require the visual representation to “know” the object?

Not really, but typically if I can see someone else do a motion I can self-insert the movements I’d need to make to duplicate it, so that might just be a disused function for me.

Although that’s a good question, because I do have special memory that I use for a lot of things, and it involves movement, but maybe not in the same way someone else would (eg I can count the windows in my place by simulating a walk through my house and “opening windows” like I do on nice mornings, but I often forget about out-of-the-way non-opening windows because they aren’t part of my muscle memory)

I’m aphantasic. You can say “picture this” followed by whatever you like. It’s not possible for me in any way. Growing up I honestly thought “picture this” or “close your eyes and see” was just metaphor. I legitimately didn’t understand other people can see things.

My mind has a verbal descriptive stream, and I’m good with muscle-based or proprioceptive spacial memory, and the two combine to handle most things, but nothing visual. So like I can easily describe things from memory or from an idea, and it’ll be fully consistent, but not something I see.

If you have aphantasia, and not just hypophantasia, it makes no difference how much detail is provided, there’s a total, fundamental, inability to visualize things.

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As a kid I would hear “save big money” and would often show a person next to oversized money (like cartoon people next to giant dollars and coins).

I was absolutely under the impression it meant large scale money and found it confusing anyone would want that. It would be so inconvenient!

I’m not sure when I figured it out but it wasn’t an “a-ha!” moment, it just sort of gradually fell out of my brainmeat.

Skindred cd, case of strongbow, few bottles of liquor, promotional pack of jeagermeister swag (metal bar sign, bombshot glasses, thongs, t-shirts), and various other little things.

Customer appreciation golf outing then party night, everyone at the golf outing got raffle tickets (I didn’t go to that), but then got too drunk to keep track of them, so I ended up with like 12 of the winning tickets at the end of the night when everyone was clearing out.

One of my friends brings homemade hot sauce to the bar and gives little tester bottles to people tho.

If I end up with cancer that grows so fast that a mammogram every few years is the only way to catch it in time, then I frankly wouldn’t have great odds anyway.

But to more directly answer your question, I’m actually pretty unlikely to be willing to go through chemo and radiation treatments regardless if it’s a real threat to my life or not. If it can be excised via surgery, maybe, or if some of the new treatments (like the mRNA vax or the preventative vax) would handle it with minimal side effects, I would do that, but otherwise, nope. But surgery is pretty invasive so yes, I do think over-treatment for me specifically would be more harmful than just waiting to see if it gets worse, and then still doing the surgery.

I had parents in the medical field, and most of my deceased family has been taken down by cancers, so I know what I’m getting myself into, treated or not. My mom didn’t even bother with treatment (hospice only), because she spent enough time in oncology and hospice to know the outcomes. I took care of her throughout, and we had a lot of conversations about treatment and the reasoning behind not going that route, but ultimately people who work with cancer patients tend not to seek treatment themselves for a reason. And I tend to agree with their logic, given the current treatment options.

I’ve had gene screening for all known cancer genes and came up clean (tho I still get updates on my unknown mutations every few years). I was and still am fully prepared for a double mastectomy or whatever other surgical interventions if it ever becomes prudent. I do regular bloodwork, regular professional exams, plus I do fairly frequent self-screens (full body), so I’m not doing nothing, I’m just not doing mammograms.

To each their own, and by no means do I think nobody should be screened or go through treatment, it’s just not something I’m personally interested in doing.

Yep, inherited membership from my mother :)

I’ve wondered about that myself, actually, as a card carrying member of the itty bitty titty committee.

I can’t speak for mammography specifically, as I have absolutely zero intention of ever getting one (I take personal issue with how sensitive they are these days, as they frequently find tumors that never would have actually caused a problem because they are very slow-growing, leading to over-treatment) but for self-exams, do be aware that certain breasts can have more or less cystic tissue, which can change the feel of the breast. It’s not related to size, afaik, just your own composition, tho larger breasts have a lot more tissue to spread cysts and tumors through, so they might be more or less obvious.

Thus, self exams (for all Humans) are most valuable when you do them regularly, so you know what your own tissue normally feels like, and you can pick out new lumps and monitor them.

I have a lot of cystic tissue, so my breasts are normally a bit on the firm and lumpy side. Nothing to worry about, but if I didn’t know that was normal for me, I might think it was cancerous.

It’s part of the militarization of everything, and acts as patriotism propaganda.

Not only the anthem, but they usually have armed forces people, equipment, sponsorship, etc. and why it’s such a big deal with athletes don’t fawn enough over it (eg. the take a knee “scandal”)

Sports are a strong recruitment tool, being popular with men throughout their lives, and have been wildly taken over with military propaganda as a result.

Can you drop me there first, please?

I promise to be suitably wowed. Also, I’ll film them for you. Sacrifices for the greater good or whatever.

Of varying usefulness, yes.

If they melt too much, or the resulting melt is too thin, like straight coconut oil, they won’t stay in place long enough to do much.

The best fats for balms are solid or semi-solid at human skin temp, often blends of wax and whatever lipid. Or petroleum jelly. I’m not sure how that’s classified…

I wonder what insurance would look like for those people, tho. Like if you live in a city where this sort of thing happens even once every few years, nobody is going to insure the area. Maybe they have some sort of government program like FEMA, but like… even that would probably be very limited.

So he may not be killing people outright, but he is very likely still absolutely destroying their lives at roughly the scale of a tornado.

I’m familiar with thither from the phrase “hither and thither”, which is a stupid-sounding phrase I read as a kid, and why I remember it. (Similar to knowing what “yon” means from “hither and yon(der)”)

I wouldn’t ever use either word, because I don’t see a need for pretentious pomposity, but perhaps he does. :)

I did used to have a friend who would use words correctly, but obscurely, and while he was smart and just enjoyed flexing his vocab, it was obnoxious af for everyone around him because even someone on the same intellectual level is going to go “what…??” Like, a lot… (basically, it is literally impossible for two people to know all the same things, so it’s just a “look I’m smart!” Flex). It’s just a bad way to communicate. Good way to be a poet, though.

I said the exact same thing months ago when I saw that video. I don’t even use a toaster.

I wish more games had playable demos. Even after the game comes out, just rip part of it out and let me play it. It’s one thing to watch a gameplay video, it’s another thing entirely to try it out for yourself.

I get that in this case, the demo showed too much (giving the impression there would be more growth), and that was a disappointing experience, but I’d argue that’s an issue with the demo/game combo itself - it’s for a game that only takes a couple hours total, so it’s very limited in what it can do with a demo. It would be like a demo of stray (2 hours to get through the story) or tinykin (under 10 hours for 100%) both also very short games with very limited abilities. You can do a short teaser, but then people would complain it’s too short and whatever… it’s a no-win there, I think, because the author even says there’s a good story missed in the demo.

But if you have a demo of, for example, dysmantle, it doesn’t matter that the gameplay is exactly the same for 100 hours, and the only thing that changes is -what- you can smash… there’s some progression involved, but not much… it’s basically just smashing and exploring, and that’s all the demo would be. And that’s ok too, because holy SHIT is that repetition fun!