It’s neither beneficial nor an inherent detriment.

It doesn’t provide enough padding to matter for anything, and the dangers of it bring grabbed are vastly exaggerated (been doing martial arts and grappling in one form or another since jr high, if you count a little wresting then, so over thirty years with breaks here and there, and bearded the entire adult time).

At best, blows will slide more and cut less, but not enough to really matter. At worst, having it grabbed hurts, which can be a bad distraction, but it isn’t so sturdy as to not be easy to escape. It either pulls loose if their grip is bad, pulls out if their grip is good enough, or makes sure their hands are easy to reach, and allows you an easy access inside their reach.

Every little pro has a con, and vice versa, with none of it being a deciding factor.

A ponytail is worse, and a braid worse than that.

Besides, anyone with a beard that isn’t just full mountain man is going to be oiling or otherwise treating their beard. This makes bare handed grips next to useless on them. And if you’re in a full contact sparring session, you’ll have other options to keep it from being a horrible thing.

Seriously. I have never once been tapped out because of my beard. I’ve never had any idiot during my years as a bouncer be successful in using it against me. Now, I have had to trim or shave it back because of having wads of it snatched out, but that’s still a very minor issue compared to the other things that can happen in a fight.

If anything, the fact that people tend to have this weird reaction to a big, bearded guy compared to just a big guy, you get in less fights in my experience outside of training or a job. Going places with a full beard, even drunks wouldn’t fuck with me the way they would other big guys. There’s a bit of some kind of reaction where people think a beard = tough sometimes. No clue why, just that it’s often enough to have noticed.

Neither, and also all of the above, plus the list isn’t long enough.

Seriously, it’s not the only two options.

Sometimes cool people do drugs. So do people with mental problems. So do all kinds of other people. But, doing drugs can’t make you cool if you aren’t already. And you don’t necessarily have to have mental problems to use/enjoy any given drug, though some drugs may change that for you eventually.

Well, yeah. Me, my wife, and my kid live with my dad. I’m almost 50.

Mind you, I bought the house from him. But the whole “can’t have a family home” thing where you have to live separate from parents or grandparents to be an adult is utter bullshit. It is often easier to navigate the interpersonal stuff when it’s the classic nuclear family and the kids move out to start their own, just because relationships and the work of them is exponential based on the number of people and the number of relationships between them. If you’re the parent and the landlord to an adult offspring, that’s two complicating factors in making things work peacefully and (hopefully) happily. Add in another generation, especially when grandparents are part of the child rearing, and shit can get messy fast.

We make it work by the framework of: my house, our home, your room.

The house itself is mine, I have final say in structural changes, repairs, etc, because I’m the one on the hook for any legal issues that derive from such. But the running of the household is by consensus of the adults, and input from the kid, with agreed on boundaries. Within those boundaries, if you’re in your own room, you do what you want. The kid is aware of what the boundaries are, and that they won’t be changing when they become an adult, and they’ll have the freedom of choice to stay or head out, knowing there’s a safety net here they can rely on.

They ever have kids, those kids would have the same choice.

Yeah, a house can only hold so many people before it becomes a chaos that isn’t bearable. No matter how big the house, that remains true. But a family home is still a very valid and good choice where life makes it useful/necessary.

Shit, on my end, if the kid stays here until they’re in their fifties, I’m happy as hell, as long as they’re here because it works for them. They’ll be inheriting the place if I get it paid off before I die anyway.

I moved back here as a temporary thing in my late twenties. Left the city I had been working in and was looking for a place of my own. My best friend came with me, and when my mom finally moved out post divorce, it just kinda worked until I had to buy the place. After that, it still worked, and the people involved have changed a few times, but there’s this wonderful sense of connection and security knowing that we all have a place to be if we want it.

Ehhh, you’re dealing with an idiot kid (and all kids are idiots to some degree) and a supposedly trained professional.

I would place the weight of fault on the officer and/or whoever trained them.

Yeah, you should always teach your kids about firearm safety and drill into them to never, ever carry one at all until they’re adults. And that includes anything that can propel a projectile that isn’t obviously and visibly a toy.

But the truth is that a 13 year old was target that got shot. By an adult in body armor, with training. No shot had been fired because you can’t mistake a bb gun sound for even a 22 going off. So there was no active shooter here.

It’s another bad shooting that’s going to get swept under the rug.

Hmmm, I was looking for an excuse for a newer light lol.

The fc11 is the one I carry in my every day bag, and another at the back door for chicken checks. They really are great lights. But those improvements would sure be excellent to have :)

I feel that.

Back when I was a caregiver, pain assessment was a bit of a pain lol. I’d have patients with cancer, and they’d just not notice something like a sore forming because it just got drowned out by chemo, or whatever. I’d do the daily thing of asking about their pain levels, and how the hell can they answer? They’re at a constant 8 to 10 range, so it’s kinda pointless to try and rely on pain signals to find new pains that need help.

Mind you, I was doing other checks, so nothing got missed, but it could have.

And, like you said, the usual “script” for checking on pain breaks down with chronic pains. You have to really get detailed, focus on tiny changes in pain with them.

And, even knowing all that, I still have trouble communicating my own pain and issues because it’s just so overwhelming sometimes. I sometimes joke with a new doctor or nurse and tell them it would be faster to list what doesn’t hurt. Except it isn’t really a joke.

So I just keep compartmentalizing everything and try to be a good patient lol.

Yeah, might work if the starter he used was fully isolated, but I kinda doubt that was done.

But it always kinda trips me out how even experienced bakers think sourdough has to have some kind of magic seed to work as sourdough. It doesn’t matter what you start with, the flour you feed with, and the environment you’re in are going to have yeast already present, so you’ll eventually end up with whatever is in those being what’s doing the work, not what was in the inoculation.

Same with the lactobacilli, whatever strain is present locally is going to end up as the working strain.

nice

Yeah, good band overall. I’d say they’re a natural evolution of the kind of hard rock AC/DC founded. All the members are at least skilled on their instruments, the lyrics vary in quality, but never get bad. And when they’re at their best, they did the kind of balls out rock that gets butts into seats, and then jumping out of them to enjoy the show.

That’s kinda what rock n roll is about, imo. Yeah, rock can be deep, it can be emotional, it can be damn near anything. But it started as party music, and that’s something that doesn’t always get focused on the way nickelback does it. It’s music to get hyped to and cut loose with.

Nothing wrong with that, ever.

Yeah, they get formulaic, but there are a shit ton of bands that have succeeded doing exactly that. Aerosmith comes to mind, so does AC/DC for the most part. Nothing wrong with a formula that works.

Pretty far in the past now, the kid has gotten a lot more resistant to fear over the years.

But, back when they were about 7, ghosts were the big fear at night.

Solution: ghost incense. One of those things I pulled out of my ass in the moment that worked like magic.

The kid didn’t want to go to bed. Was asked why. The answer was that they didn’t want ghosts to come get them.

In a rare flash of genius, I said “Well, I can fix that. Ghosts can’t go anywhere when you burn a stick of a special incense. I keep a box of it around for emergencies.”

We lit some nice smelling stuff, and said the magic words, and that was that.

Now, the next day, we had a nice conversation about how ghosts aren’t real, and even if they were, they’re ghosts, they can’t hurt anything. The kid asked if we could burn the “ghost sticks” anyway, just in case we were wrong lol. So it became the bedtime thing. When the kid would get tired, they’d show up with a stick of incense and ask me to light it.

By the end of that summer, the kid had said they weren’t scared of ghosts any more, but can we use the incense anyway, it smells nice.

Sometimes, trying to convince someone that their fear isn’t based in reality is not only impossible, but counterproductive. For a kid, it’s all about helping them manage the fear, give them control of it.

“I give this orgy 5 stars!”

Where do bad folks go when they die? They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly, they go to a lake of fire and fry

Too bad the dress wasn’t macrame, then you’d also have macrame and cheese

Thank you :)

Not exactly what you described, but Battlefield Earth isn’t too far off in spirit. Close enough that it might scratch that itch for you

The system is still broken

Man, I truly appreciate the effort and passion you put out there. That’s some beautiful humanity inside you.

The only thing I can say that doesn’t insult what you put out is that, as wonderful as it would be for your hopes to come true, I simply don’t believe it is possible without tearing down the country built on slavery, oligarchy, and sheer hubris, and starting fresh. The system isn’t just broken, it was never whole.

Again, I am so glad to see someone put that much thought into a response to my sheer disgust at the world, and bring hope into the subject. I can’t debate the fine points of it without dishonoring the intent there. So I’ll just say thank you.

As better as it gets, thank you :)

I really thought my life was over. Now I’m married, have a kid, good friends, and find ways to enjoy even the bad days.

I mean, that’s part of pain tolerance. It isn’t just how much pain you feel, it’s how much you can take.

Chronic pain has taught me a lot about what is and isn’t bearable. Things that when they were new would leave me sobbing, I now don’t even show more than a frown and gritted teeth for on a good day.

Part of that is taking the pain, putting it in a little box cake “I will not fucking quit” and throwing that box into the depths of the mind where it can’t bother you for a while. Your body still hurts, you still know it hurts, but you keep going until you can’t, and the pain can just fuck right off.

Now, let me stub my fucking toe while doing all that and it cuts right through all of that and says “nah, dawg, you gonna feel this”. Different pain, and acute.

So, little shit like shocks and needles in muscles, and the like, you know they’re coming, and they go right in the box with the chronic, and into the oubliette of agony.

That kind of pain testing? That’s totally within mental techniques’ ability to ignore. Your pulse will still change, blood pressure too, but it’s still a distant thing that won’t reach you for a while.

But everyone is different. You can take two people with the same injury, and they’ll tolerate it differently, even if they’re siblings of the same gender.

Part of that is indeed built in, but there is always a psychological component to pain perception.

Now, please note that I’m not saying that walling pain off and ignoring it until you’ve injured yourself is a good thing, much less better than letting pain guide your actions so that it isn’t worse later. I’m just saying that the green text is realistic, and the person responding like that may not be bullshitting, they may just have worked on managing pain.

And people went the fuck home