southsamurai

You are a nice asshole! So am I!

Enough to get elected.

When you strip away the identity politics, and the people that voted based on platform, he swayed people to his side.

Was/is he a Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Hitler or Stalin? No, absolutely not. But pretending that he didn’t use his voice and appearance, along with calculated speech (by writers, but that’s secondary) to convince people to vote for him his, well, dumb.

Pretending that every election in the era of television and even radio before it wasn’t influenced by a candidate’s ability to sway people into trusting them is equally dumb. There’s room for argument that pre-radio, the ability of a candidate to sway votes by charisma was lower, it was still in place. It was just more labor intensive, which (imo) means that the barrier to entry for charismatics was higher. Biden wouldn’t have won against someone like Jefferson, but he might have had a chance against someone like Grant.

That’s what a charismatic is. They use their bodies and voices to shift thinking. If they have the backing of others in their party, it’s easier because they don’t have to rely only on their own skill at thinking and speaking. But go back and watch old debates. Not just Biden, all of them you can find. There’s patterns of speech, gestures, and there’s patterns of them across time, in every party.

Mind you, you aren’t going to see every candidate because some of them aren’t really allowed access to the public via the dominance of the duopoly here in the US. Even the bigger alternative parties don’t get the media coverage for whatever charismatic tricks they use to reach enough people to break through identity politics.

The ones that are picked to be candidates have either swayed minds in the parties’ respective power blocs, or have been chosen because they’re willing to play the role for those blocs, but they aren’t getting the pick if they can’t at least mimic the tricks a natural charismatic uses.

Even Walter Mondale, one of the lamest candidates ever, used the same tricks. Kerry tried. Dole tried (and did well to an extent). Gore tried, and partially succeeded.

And even Mondale, who was most definitely not a natural charismatic, did okay at faking it.

Biden had the advantage of over a century of people learning how to manipulate the media, and the populace, combined with an absolute batshit opponent that made even the non-identity voters turn out.

Democrats aren’t as good at rabble rousing, nor are they good at being willing to not pander to their base, so they miss opportunities.

But, yeah, Biden has charisma. He always has. It isn’t Obama levels of charisma, that guy is a master of it. Obama made you believe “yes we can”, even when you knew it was bullshit. He took the right messaging, the right advice and used his presence to drive it like a spike into anyone wavering at all.

Don’t buy into that whole “sleepy Joe” bullshit. He got old, he dropped the ball, but he has the ability to charm the fuck out of people. He’s just better at it in small groups than big ones. Little mistakes in timing that don’t read well to edge cases in camera, that he can avoid when he has feedback.

Ahhh, gotcha. It wasn’t evident without paying attention more than I would have considered necessary given the title. Thanks for the correction

That’s why I stopped shopping by listed price a long time ago. My punk ass was poor, as in below poverty line several times while still working. Had to learn that lesson quick lol.

Once I learned that the per weight pricing was a more useful metric, I carried a calculator any time I shopped. Ain’t no reason to pay more for products that are functionally the same.

Now, I’m not saying that any given brand is worth the savings per weight. Some store brands suck, and do so hard enough that even though they cost less, they’re a waste. The products do need to be in line with needs as a primary factor.

Peanut butter in specific, there’s a chain here that it is so thick and gritty, you’d think it was a stripper. You take a taste and the only way you’d want it again is if it were twerking on a pole. So, even though name brands cost more, if it comes down to having to eat that crap or do without, I’m doing without.

Horse shit. Charismatic leaders are what got us into our current mess

Are you dense?

That is indeed the problem.

Truth be told, it ain’t happening, but I get so sick of people shrugging it off and pretending that we don’t have a choice. We do

It’s just that the majority would rather watch the system get tighter and tighter because they think the noose isn’t going to be around their necks.

Why do you think anyone that’s already part of the system would be involved at all?

It has to be us, the people, not some charismatic, or good liar that’s stuck in the concept of making the system work. It has to come from people that are tired of the fact that the system does work, just not for us

You do know it isn’t mandatory to let it happen, right?

Seriously, we do not have to abandon our right to revolution

The beeping dildo

Oh yeah.

It isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it really is nice. It takes getting used to, but it cuts down on the need to move to the touchpad or mouse. If you’re working in tight quarters, or have mobility issues, or hand issues, it can end up being a major improvement. It’s a ymmv thing of course, but I end up using it more than I thought I would when writing.

Ummmm, who’s going to tell them?

My baphomet guards our salt & pepper

Okay, let’s be fucking real here. This is not a first amendment issue at all. Never has been, never will be.

There’s no constitutional lawyers making that claim that don’t work for someone paying them to.

Nobody’s speech is being limited. One specific platform is being removed. One of many. That’s it.

Yeah, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet, and with the difficulty being reported on models I haven’t tried, I’m not willing to jump into any of the current options.

Even the pine phone I got to play around with for a few days was prone to connection issues, and that’s a bit of a dealbreaker

Well, Anne Rice’s vamps were not viral at all. They were inhabited by a spirit.

My symbiotic vampires were built to allow for a wide range of vampire powers. Anything from old school Dracula to Lestat, to things like the red and white court of the Dresden files. The symbiote was a way (originally) to let my players have any kind of vampire they wanted without having to find a new explanation each time.

It turned into more than that over time though.

I’m with you on remembering some other mentions if it though. Can’t really pin down where, but there’s that niggling little itch in memory that says I’ve read it.

Shit, though. Write! Doesn’t have to be for anything but the fun of it.

Yup.

I talk to other writers. We discuss this kind of thing sometimes. Even the bigger names sometimes cross into amateur spaces.

Paranormal romance, as a genre, is driven by the same markets as traditional romance. The stuff that sells is marketed to straight women because they’re the ones that spend on it reliably.

Hell, good luck finding men that write paranormal romance at all, much less in traditional publishing. They exist, but it’s not the norm.

Now, you get into some of the dedicated fan fiction, the blog level publishing, and the non commercial self publishing, you find more that’s geared to other audiences. But those spaces exist because you aren’t going to reliably sell things that don’t interest straight women. You’ll run into what is written with gay or bi characters in the mainstream, but it’s still being written for the straight women to buy. It’s a woefully underrepresented segment, but the truth is that the markets are marginal to begin with, and writing for them simply isn’t going to make enough money to be something traditional publishing invests in.

Yeah, you can argue whether or not fan fiction, and non commercial self publishing is or isn’t part of the overall “writing” population. But even if you include that, you’re looking at a tiny fragment of any given genre. It’s also a tiny fragment of readership.

I have a novella based around magical transition that’s out there, under a pen name. Decent story, and I get the occasional email about it. But compare that to the volume I get from anything else, and it’s barely a trickle (mind you, the total volume of everything is a trickle to begin with, we’re talking maybe a dozen a month at most).

Go look up some of the bigger names in paranormal romance. There’s usually going to be footage of them doing talks at cons, that kind of thing. The audiences are going to be damn near all women. The writers are almost all women. It’s not a closed market, all sides of it except publishers are more than welcoming of men and non hetero fans for sure. There’s all kinds of LGBTQ folks scattered through the crowds. But they are scattered.

If you aren’t a writer, and one that has some degree of presence that’s vettable, you aren’t getting into the private groups where things get discussed about the inside aspects of trying to write. But inside them, anyone that’s actively seeking readers, free or paid, is going to have their intended audience because it’s just a fact that genres exist, and that they tend to have demographics. So you have to keep that in mind, or not get read.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Yes, I’m sure of what I said. It wasn’t an offhand comment.

Grass? Isn’t that what you people on the outside smoke?

Well, like others have said, Anne Rice specifically describes the process, which includes purging the digestive and excretory tracts entirely. Vomiting, urinating, and defecating.

Most authors don’t cover that stuff at all because it’s not really what most readers want. They want the stuff that’s fantastic, not gritty. Or, that’s what authors assume their readers want. Since Anne Rice’s success, vampires tend to be written less as horror, and I’d argue that the majority of vampire fiction is now in the paranormal romance category. Chances are that they’re right in that assumption.

Take what it is likely the most successful paranormal romance series, the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. She does a little of the gritty with it, but avoids the “nasty” parts. I would say that pretty much every fan of the series from before the show (true blood, for anyone not aware of the books and show) wouldn’t have been a fan if she’d written in any scenes with even the humans pooping “on screen”. Some of the fans from after the show might not have been bothered.

But, that kind of vampire story isn’t really a vampire story. They’re romance stories truth vampire characters. And, usually, they’re written with female protagonists for a cis-hetero adult woman audience in mind. Even when written with a vampire protagonist, it’s almost always going to be a female vampire, or if it’s a male vampire, they’ll be into men. I’m sure there’s exceptions, but that’s what the genre was built on.

If you get into urban fantasy, you’ll find grittier vampire stories and characters, but even there, you only find passing mentions of human digestive products because most people don’t want to read about something they experience regularly.

Now! Having written fantasy and urban fantasy books myself, as well as having done world building for my home brew ttrpg, I have addressed this in passing.

There’s multiple types of vampires between my various settings. But the most common one is formed by a magic based symbiotic virus. That kind of vampire doesn’t excrete anything during their rebirth because the virus is going to reshape the organs involved, and converts what would normally be waste into usable materials and/or energy.

Those vampires only defecate when they eat normal food. This is not something they do often because the virus rewires their brain and sensory organs in a way that vegetables are unpleasant, and cooked meat is as well. Even raw meat doesn’t smell like food to them, though when they choose or have to eat things other than blood, raw meat is the only thing that tastes like food to them. It just tastes very weak and unsatisfying. They’ll still be hungry if they shovel down as much meat as their reformed stomachs can hold.

But, when they do eat normal food, they excrete it eventually. The symbiote after transforming the body no longer inhabits the digestive tract, and it has killed off the gut biome. So, what comes out is what went in; chewed up food. The only time that changes is when there are living microbes on the food. The symbiote will attack those to kill them off, and that does result in some of the food being broken down as well, but it isn’t digested, it’s more that the cells in the food are damaged and leaking.

In other words, you don’t want to be around vampire poop in my universe lol.

You also don’t want to be around a vampire that needs to poop they get grumpy because you only are the remnants of their intestines now moving, they’re uncomfortable. There’s also the reaction of the symbiote when it needs to cleanse any food. It sends signals across the body that there’s something unwanted present, so the vampire feels slightly angry, and possibly nervous.

The only things a vampire can take in and use would be liquids, but except for plain water, and made up beverages created by the vampires, the process is the same. Water will get absorbed, and whatever is left over gets pooped out rather than being absorbed and filtered out into urine. The beverages they’ve made themselves, like blood wine, are grown specifically to make sure the symbiote will treat the non water components like blood. Which, there’s this whole thing about fields of grapes being grown in symbiote rich soil, etc that makes that possible, but I doubt anyone cares lol.

Back to the lore related to digestion. The point of all that is that I’m a tad strange regarding imaginary creatures. When, why, and how they poop is, to me, essential lore. Same with reproduction. So every fictional species/race in my stuff, I’ve thought it out for them. I’ve even got answers for creatures I didn’t build myself (and I say build because stuff like vampires can’t be claimed as a creation, but you can put them together. It’s like fictional legos).

Depends.

In metal general, if you’re making the coffee + milk, then adding ice, you have to make the coffee part “strong” in one way or another, because that ice is going to melt. It’ll melt fast, too, at the beginning, so not adjusting your process is going to lead to weak, watery iced lattes.

If you then reduce the ice, the problem goes in reverse where the concentration of coffee compounds is higher, so it doesn’t taste like it’s expected to taste.

Now, some places chill batches of the espresso, mix it with the milk chilled, and the ice is just there to extend the time it’s cold, with an expectation of less melt.

Afaik, dunkin doesn’t have a chilled container of the latte shipped in, or made in bulk. They could have changed from the last time I talked to anyone that worked there, but at the time it was in smaller batches and stored at the temp it came out in. So if they changed the amount of ice, it would change the finished drink.

If you make your own iced latte, you’ll likely just make it regular, then pour it over ice. It’ll be thinner, and it’s up to you how you like that or not. Stores tend to go for consistency between products as a priority, so they don’t have as much freedom.