I’m almost always an earl grey drinker. For that, Harney & sons is pretty much my favorite, with Taylor’s being almost the same for my preferences, depending on which is fresher. The key difference that makes Harney better is the bergamot rather than the tea itself. It’s just a tad more aromatic and that matters a lot. However, if it isn’t fresh, Taylor’s matches the flavor profile very closely for me.

Choice organics is a close third place. The tea is just a tad less aromatic, and the bergamot is flatter. Still miles better than the stuff at the grocery store, even if you ignore freshness.

For breakfast teas, the only other hot tea I really drink, it’s Taylor’s mostly. I have some Harney’s on the shelf, but I like how the Taylor’s tastes with lemon better, and that’s how I like breakfast teas.

Iced tea, it’s tetley’s or GTFO if I have a choice. My wife is kinda swinging around to that now that she’s drinking southern style iced tea. She’s a Lipton’s fan, but tetley holds up better at the strength we make iced tea. Lipton gets bitter in an unpleasant way with the strength we brew at. Tetley also holds up better sweetened to the degree that southern style iced tea tends to have. I make mine way less sweet than anybody I know, but it’s still sweeter than my wife or her family ever did it.

Kinda funny. Hot tea, I barely add sugar, just a level teaspoon for a double cup. Coffee I go a little higher, but not much; a heaping teaspoon. But iced tea? It would work out to about 4 teaspoons per cup the way it’s usually made around here, with mine being a tad under 3. You grow up with that thick, strong, syrupy tea, and iced just doesn’t work without high sugar levels lol. Hell, I know some folks that add 3 cups of sugar to a gallon of tea and that’s just barely sweet enough for them.

Hence, we don’t have iced tea often because damn, you can’t drink like that regularly. It’s a rare treat.

But I’m an earl grey guy for the most part now. And I’ve tried something like twenty brands? I used to have a file with my notes in it, but deleted it by accident. I never drank hot tea until my wife moved in before we got married. She’s a tea drinker all day, but isn’t picky. I tried her bigelow stuff and was meh about it. Then I had some at her mom’s house during a visit I yankee land that was Taylor’s, and the experience was totally different.

When we got home, I used some savings to order a bunch of brands, and tried them all over a few weeks, taking notes and all that crazy crap. It just blew my mind that there was that much difference in brands, even knowing that it could be somewhat different in iced tea.

But, yeah, I found a few favourites and stick with them. One sugar, splash of milk and that’s my earl grey. One sugar, splash of lemon for English and Irish breakfast teas.

My homie, you can be an ally the same way us cishetero folks can. You just support trans folks however and whenever you can. How you choose to self label is 100% independent of that, even when that self label is no label at all.

Just don’t use the pronoun labeling at all, you’ll be fine. I don’t think I’ve run across anything where you’re required to have it. There might be, but I haven’t run across it.

Your self, your sense of identity is just as valid as anyone else’s.

This is why my plan to put wings and a rocket on a cow actually made sense!

Take that, you luddite aspca goons! That cow would have revolutionized human travel!

I think I’m a little hyped tbh. Not a lot, I don’t really get hyped for movies often, nor to a high degree unless it’s something that’s a real passion. But this is based on my favorite Hellboy story, so I’m a little hyped lol

However, I hope they don’t cheese the accents. Holy hell, nobody ever does Appalachian accents right

Man, you be illin’

Fuck that noise, grow it out and rock a skullet like a beast

Yup, it’s kinda the inverse of the usual shtick for the comic, where he attacks people doing things “he” thinks are socially unacceptable.

That are mine? Only one, and only decaf. Caffeine messes with my anxiety/ptsd

That is cold!

Yeah, if I could tolerate thc, I wouldn’t mind the occasional toke myself. But almost every time I’ve tried anything with thc in it, it has been anywhere from bad to horrible. Only times I’ve ever managed a pleasant high was with my cousin helping me along, and there were still bad moments here and there. So it isn’t something I can relax with, sadly.

I have discovered that CBD doesn’t do it, so I’ve gotten lucky in that regard, and I pick up a little when I can afford it for pain relief. It isn’t a total relief, but it helps more than any of the pills I ever had prescribed.

Never been a drinker with any regularity, and I hate being drunk lol. It’s a silly thing, but my wife actually remembers every time I’ve had more than a single finger of bourbon or scotch. And in the almost twelve years we’ve been married, it hasn’t hit double digits.

That’s me, Mr fucking sober buddy lol. I’ve done more designated driver runs and trip sitting than I can recall, but I’m not a user of even the light drugs now that I quit tobacco.

Damn, I’m busted!

Take a puff for those of us that can’t/don’t :)

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.

I always love telling people about the butt load. The looks I get are gold

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.