I wanted to share all the mushroom parties I came across in October on some local hiking trails I visit regularly. No idea what any of them are but are located in Southern Ontario.
It brings me some comfort seeing how clear and easy to understand language is being used against these angry people.
They are being forced to explain their behaviour instead of arguing the specifics of words. It's subtle but effective in my opion.
I am really enjoying this.
I watched a documentary about racoons. It mainly focused on raccoons that live in the city and how they adapted to city life. City raccoons adapted so well that city racoons and country raccoons would not be able to survive in each other's world.
If I recall correctly, cities helped the spread of racoons throughout North America. Any animal that has is able to adapt so easily is far more clever than we give them credit for.
And since they aren't bound by human laws, I fully support them in vandalising and trashing these Cyber Truck monstrosities. I'm eternally jealous that they can look so cute while accidentally rebelling against Musk.
This feels like satire? A site called real men, real style with an article about penises?
A nice little surprise :)
I'm a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.
My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up "white." My voice, appearance and behaviour are "white." I was born and raised Canadian. I'm far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.
I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.
The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I'm not "Indian."
West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I've never visited any West Indian country. Then I'll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.
Then there are the white people... No matter how white I act, I will never be "white" enough. I'll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.
In fact, I have a "friend" who is a cop. He's not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I've known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I'd be a perfect "UC." Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I'm just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.
I've never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.
Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means "House Master." You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.
Many people get annoyed that I often give vague answers. If I over explain myself, they'll twist my words into a new meaning. I'm confused :D
Some men are so desparate for love from their male friends but can't handle the idea of showing any form of sincerity towards another man.
Instead of calling it love between male friends, respect becomes a currency for love and takes on some pretty toxic and abusive traits. Name calling, belittlement, insults, questionably aggressive forms of physical touch and more just to avoid giving a compliment or a hug.
That underlying love never gets expressed in a healthy way and you get the strange, hypocritical and mind breakingly confusing behaviour. Why do they hate everything about me but want me to go out for drinks after work tonight?
I think all this unaddressed love disguised as respect is more gay than the time I walked into the bathroom at a gay club and saw two guys giving another guy a blowjob.
Go give your buddy a hug, it ain't as gay as the 50th dick joke of the day that you have to say. Hell, it's not even lunch time yet, my dude.
For a little background, I worked in the field for about 5-6 years, half the time as a contractor/helper, and the other half as an apprentice (which I never completed). The company built automation lines which primarily did metal welding. High voltage spot welding, Automated MIG welding and Laser welding/braising.
As for wastefulness, I don't even know where to start and I am sure I will miss a bunch of things. In no particular order of importance:
Automation requires A LOT of materials. Pipes, cables, trays, robots, supports, safety, devices, fasteners and the list goes on. Keep in mind that All these materials need to be extracted, transported, refined and remade into what we need to build an automation line.
Automation is Heavily dependent on fossil fuels. We need machines to extract raw materials. We need machines to transport raw materials. We need machines and heat to refine raw materials. We need machines and heat to create a final product. We need to transport those final products and then we can finally work with that final product to install into an automation line. Some materials that we work with such as cables, hosing and tubing will create some sort of waste during the installation process. Maybe not as much as the other steps but it all adds up in the end.
I worked in electrical and all of our cables would have some sort of plastic/rubber/silicone sheathing. I honestly don't know how we can expect to keep up with the growing electrical demand AND cut down on crude oil extraction. We need insulators to safely use electricity and plastics do that job very well.
I don't know how resource extensive it is to make a microprocessor, but I imagine it still takes a lot of machinery and heat to create them. Microprocessors are in a lot of devices used in automation.
Wear and tear on mechanical parts. Robots are great for doing repetitive tasks. Robots and anything that moves (conveyors or clamps, for example) will involve moving parts. Anything with moving parts will wear down eventually. Those parts are generally trashed and replaced with a functioning part.
Electronic Devices. Computers, PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers), Sensors, power supplies, transformers, lights, and HMI (Human-Machine Interface) are some of the devices used in automation. Lots of plastics, metals and microprocessors. Since these are electronic devices, they need to be shipped in plastic to ensure the devices are free from moisture or shock damage. The plastic wrapping and plastic shock foam pads that have no purpose after the device has been removed from the packaging get thrown out.
Shipping. Everything coming in or leaving has to be shipped. For smaller items, they may be bundled up on a transport skid which may mean it is wrapped in layers and layers of shipping plastic wrap in order to secure the load. Larger items may require plastic or metal tie-down straps. All of which are disposed of after use. Robots, tooling, fencing, piping, cables, power disconnects and so on are VERY heavy. All this weight requires so much fuel to transport from place to place before reaching the final installation site.
Reusing vs. replacing. Depending on the request, we may reuse old robots or tools but in many cases, A LOT of old, still usable material just gets chucked into the trash. Companies care less about waste and more about downtime. It's far quicker to tear out the old, bring in new cables/piping/tray, slap it in and get that power running as soon as possible.
Weight. Things are getting heavier. Heavier stuff means bigger robots. Bigger robots require more power. You can probably look back at some previous points to understand why the extra weight is not good.
Energy consumption. As we push further into automation, we require more electrical power. Before I left my company, the power demand was increasing at a mind blowing rate. Towards the end of my time there, I spent months with a couple other people prepping high voltage power main disconnects. When I first started there, there was only one person prepping disconnects when the demand required it.
Oils and fumes. Moving parts generally require lubrication. Greases and oils are generally not so nice to the environment considering the actions required to handle, dispose of, or clean up oil. Lots of fumes are created from welding metal together and it's pretty nasty stuff. My patience with that company disappeared after they started welding aluminum without filtering the aluminum welding fumes.
Management are prideful idiots. The dingleberries that run the place have no idea what they are doing and have no idea what it takes to build an automation line. Some of their mistakes cost millions of dollars in wasted materials and all that shit just gets chucked. It's fucking mind blowing.
I'm sure there's more but my brains done with this for now. Automation is super cool and fun to watch when all is done and it's running. It can definitely push out higher production numbers compared to humans. It is definitely not as green or sustainable as any tech company would want you to believe. I believe, from my perspective and experiences in that field, it's an unsustainable disaster. If it seems like a green alternative, it's because we aren't talking about the resource requirements to build, maintain and upgrade automation systems and only focusing on the production output.
Personally, I believe our green alternatives shouldn't depend on green technology but rather draw heavy inspiration from nature itself. The hard part about that is imagining a life that isn't intertwined with capitalism, money and hierarchy. Once we shrug off those evils, we can start to observe and listen to nature again.
I had to leave the automation industry because othe reckless waste of resources the automation industry requires. It was becoming an unbearable burden on my mind.
I thought I was being smart by using this company as a way to quickly get my electrical apprenticeship completed. Get in, get out then find somewhere quiet to live. Instead, I got used up and discarded while the entire time being treated like the dirt under a pile of shit. My prize for attempting to game capitalism, even in the smallest of ways.
Since my youth, I had been lectured in school about the dangers of climate change. The only news I ever gave any attention to was environmental news. When I was in my early/mid 20's, I made many changes to my lifestyle and future plans based on the fact that my elder years would be on a planet ruined by industrialization.
But everything is happening faster than expected. When COVID entered the global scene in 2020 and I saw the disorganized and uncooperative response from governments and corporations, I entered a state of existential dread. Once again, my future plans were cut short. Very short. By emotionally stunted children in positions of power. And the near future these very same people are creating is just depressing.
I don't do much these days. I keep it simple. I don't feel bad about how little I do. Small as it seems, doing less makes me feel less disgusted by my impacts on this planet. The way I look at it, if capitalism always demands positive accumulation of productivity and resources then the opposite, doing less, is a radical act of defiance against capitalism itself. I don't need this justification, it just amuses me. I'm much happier now by doing less because doing less makes me content. On top of that, my mind is plagued with a lot less guilt knowing I'm not actively working against the environment for the sake of making a paycheck.
I'm a guy. Over the past couple years I've become quite close with two women online who are both younger than me. One is 15 years younger than me while the other is 6 years younger.
I actually met the younger one through a former male work friend who met her first through a Minecraft server he used to host. He bought her a game that was on sale and the 3 of us played together. After my work friend went to bed, she and I talked a bit afterwords.
It was quite clear to me that she liked getting to know people and I entertained her conversation. At some point in the conversation, she casually brought up her current mental health state and it was at that point I knew she was someone I wanted to continue talking with.
At that time, I was struggling hard with my own mental health and my attempts at finding a support group that suited me wasn't working. In that short time, she proved to be brutally self aware, honest and empathetic. She treated me as a person and allowed me to express myself honestly without judgement. At the time, I was working in the trades surrounded by men and I was only treated with judgement as a failure as a man. Even my close relationships with other women at the time was the same, I was a failure of a man.
Having this one person in the world treat me like a person meant so much to me. She allowed me to talk without judgement, allowed me to approach my problems my own way without judgement or unsolicited advice, and allowed me to be me without criticism or judgement. These are all things I craved at the time so returned all these actions to her as well. I learned a lot about mental health through her and and how she spoke of her friends.
Over the next year, we sort of became our own mental health support group and made ourselves available to each other because we wanted to and as a result became close friends.
A year later she approached me with a situation that made me incredibly angry and upset me for a couple weeks. She revealed to me that my work friend had been trying to sext with her and was making her feel uncomfortable. A man who was 15 years older than her, who met her when she was approximately 13 years old when she joined that minecraft server who she used to think of him as a mentor. A man who is married and has two adorable little girls himself in an amazing house with a huge chunk of property. I confronted him and then stopped talking to him. He sickens me. While she may have been of legal age at the time he tried to sext with her, he absolutely destroyed any trust she had in him. I have good reason to believe he's made attempts with other women behind his amazing wife's back and I can no longer stand to look or talk to him.
Even with all that her and I had been through, it still felt super strange to me being close friends with someone 15 years younger than me. But she provided me with fresh takes on mental health and I was able to provide a perspective based on experience that can only be understood through that additional 15 years of being alive.
I did go and meet her in her home country. As a thank you to her, I bought us matching tattoos. We were able to talk face to face and it was a very comfortable and easy going experience. By the end of my trip, I told her that she is my new sister (my actual sister barely remembers I exist) and she was quite happy with that.
The feeling of strangeness from this particular relationship has faded significantly now but still sort of lingers in the back of my mind. I think that's more of result of the north American mindset. There is a lack of intergenerational community in modern north American life that negatively affects how people treat and view relationships with older/younger people. Learning goes both ways and I absolutely value the perspectives and views coming from younger people.
In a more just world, intergenerational relationships would be normal and boring. In it's current form (from a north American perspective) it's open to abuse through a power imbalance and that seems to inadvertently bring up feelings of guilt or shame in those who stumble across such relations.
For me, letting time pass and allowing those feelings of guilt and shame to dissipate leaving a normal, boring and safe friendship with someone who is younger than me.
Unfortunately, I'm still cautious talking about her to other people who I feel are judgemental. Especially men. The overwhelming majority of men in my life would assume our relationship is sexual. It's easier to simply not talk about her so I can avoid fending off those gross accusations. Fortunately, my other friend who is 6 years younger is super understanding and awesome. I can talk about my younger friend with her and not feel uncomfortable about it. In that sense, I feel quite lucky to know both these people.
I've been to Gay pride parades, gay bars and gay clubs. The gayest experience I've had in my life was working in the trades with straight men doing everything they can to prove their masculinity at all costs.
These men will use women as mere possessive objects in order to prove to their masculinity towards other men. By oversexualizing all women while at the same time belittling all that their partner does. As if women were merely currency for respect among men.
They hated gays and trans people so much that they would spend an extremely uncomfortable amount of time telling you how much they were "disgusted" by these people.
They hated on any man who who did not possess physical masculine traits. Those traits that they hated? Not being muscular. Not being tall. Not being fat (what???). Having longer hair.
But the gayest thing these guys refused to do was stand up for themselves against unjust authority. They would spend the most all their free time explicitly telling you how much they hate their boss. How stupid their boss is. How much of an asshole their boss is. How they would kick their bosses ass. Just talk an absolute big game.
Then the boss would come around the corner and you'd never see a bunch of grown ass men tuck their dicks between their legs faster than these guys. Their voices raise up a couple pitches and suddenly they are acting as subservient as how they believe their wives should be.
It's in this unspoken idea of respect for Men in Authority that you see the "gayest" trait in these toxic men. But not in a good gay way. A toxic gay trait that comes from a deep place built on oppression and repression of ones self. Where respect from your fellow man at all costs is the most valuable thing they crave. Where respect from your boss holds even higher value. Where respect from men in higher positions is held at even higher value.
All they care about is to be noticed by other men. That's kinda gay dude.
The cost of all this effort to gain respect from exclusively other men is their dignity. And they are more than willing to give up their dignity to be noticed by men in positions of authority.
To these guys, questioning or standing up to authority is gay. Standing up for yourself is gay. Demanding to be treated with dignity is gay. They will be the first ones to kick you down for disrespecting authority.
I've walked into a club bathroom and saw two guys giving another guy a blowjob. That's still not as gay as watching "straight" acting men grovel at the feet of boss in any trades.
Ick...
I have the ability to make others feel safe and comfortable to be their themselves. It's always a shock to me how comfortable some people get around me. I'm still waiting for someone to make me feel the same way.