... Is this thing still on?

To start off, some facts:

-White wine is made from sweet pulp inside of the grape (minus the seeds).

-Red wine is made from both the skin and the grape (and the seeds and stems…sometimes? Can’t remember).

-Tannin is the substance found in red wines, coffee, dark chocolate. Tannins are responsible for the bitter taste in those foods.

-Tannins are found in the skin of the grape, as well as the seeds and the stems. Therefore, most red wines will have tannins, versus most whites will not have tannins.

-Red wines vary in level of tannins, depending on variety of grape, climate, and fermentation process. Pinot noir tends to be very low tannin. Shiraz/Syrah, choice of poison for our beloved brunette surgeon, is very heavy on the tannins.

-Some white wines (most commonly Chardonnay) are aged in oak barrels instead of metal containers. Oak barrels have tannins, which seeps into the wine during the fermentation process. That’s why Chardonnays tend to be “drier” aka it has tannins.

-White wines like Sauvingnon Blancs are usually fermented in steel barrels (aka no tannins. Aka usually very fruity and light and sweet).

Your ability to taste tannins is genetic.

There is a genetic marker determining whether your taste cells are sensitive to tannins.

Basically two people can drink the exact same wine and have wildly different reactions because: 1. Person A can’t taste tannins, so they taste the actual wine flavor. 2. Person B can taste tannins, and that tends to overpower ALL the other flavors in the wine. Basically all they taste is tannins and none of the wine.

I am super tannin sensitive, so if I drink a wine like Cabernet Sauvignon (very tannin heavy, aka “very dry”, it tastes like bitter ethanol alcohol to me, whereas my best friend can’t taste tannins so the same wine is maybe a little bitter but they can actually taste the grape and different flavors. To her, a wine like Sauv Blanc is too sweet, tastes like sugar water. But to me it tastes good.

So unless it’s the taste of the alcohol or all wines you hate, chances are you might hate the taste of red wine, especially the heavier red wines, because taste the tannin overpowers everything else. And all you taste is bitter bitter ethanol bitter more ethanol. 

More tannin info: -Tannins bind to fat.

-This is why tannin heavy wines are recommended with fatty foods (Shiraz and steak). Whenever you eat food with high fat content, the fat builds up on your tongue. A sip of red wine will bind with the fat on your tongue and clear it away. That’s why the sip of wine between bites of fat heavy foods is considered a palate cleanser.

-By that logic, this is why white wines are recommended with low fat foods, like fish. Salmon is fattier than most fish, which is why Chardonnay (tannin heavy white wine) or Pinot Noir (low tannin red wine) is recommended with salmon.

-People who are sensitive to tannins can drink tannin heavy red wines with fatty food and generally the wine won’t taste gross. The fat on your tongue (from that steak) will bind with the tannin and neutralize the tannin taste. Aka the only time I ever drink Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz is with a steak or heavy, creamy pasta. Aka never bc I don’t often eat either.

-The reason dairy helps coffee taste better is because the fat in milk/creams binds with the tannins in coffee and neutralizes the bitter taste. This is why people who can’t taste tannins can generally drink coffee black without milk (sugar is a different story). It’s also why almond milk in coffee is the worst idea (almond milk is already bitter and has no fat).

More wine facts: -90% of the “aromas” of wine are marketing BS

-You know the labels that say like “cherry with a hint of blackberry?” There’s no real way to infuse cherry or blackberry into grape wine without screwing with the fermentation process. It’s all created by the wine marketing industry to sell you win. Sometimes if you smell cherry before you drink the wine, you might taste it in the wine (because majority of flavor comes from smell). Or if you think there is cherry flavor in the wine, your brain can trick your taste buds into tasting it.

-The only true flavors found in real grape wine are grapes (obviously), oak/earthy flavor (the barrels), vanilla (barrels, oak sticks), tannins. (There are a few others but can’t remember. I think maybe cinnamon?).

-People’s perception of wine often affect how good it tastes to them. Social psychology studies show that people will rate the exact same wine differently if they’re told the wines are different in price. (They rated the more expensive wine as tastier).

This is important because if you keep using these terms eventually you are going to run up against someone who knows their actual origins and actual meanings and they will use them correctly and you are going to have to be normal about people using the actual meanings of words and not accuse a middle age trans woman of being anti feminist because she knows what words mean and isn't plugged into internet discourse among people who have never been to an orgy in their life.

Ok, I get why you are saying this, but you are wrong. Specifically because these terms are not historial, they are practical. As in they are terms to describe the sex people are actually having in practical ways.

Lets start with a fact: Topping does not mean penetrating, bottoming does not mean penetrated. I know you have seen this a thousand times, but it is dead wrong. That is not what these words mean. The reason why you have been told wrong is because topping and bottoming are complex ideas that are not easily defined. There are a lot of conditional intricacies to how they are used that are very intuitive when you are actually having and experimenting with sex a lot, but are hard to define in a simple, easy way.

So why is it so often said that top = penetrating and bottom = penetrated? Well, clinical sources rarely want to write a 4 paragraph explanation of what a term means, so they give a technically correct partial definition.

I want you to imagine two men having penetrative anal sex while laying in a bed (in an abstract sense, if that makes you more comfortable). One of them is going to be penetrating, the other is going to be penetrated. The fact of the matter is that your body is not designed to easily bounce your ass on a dick. Your body is just not set up properly to move easily like that. So mechanically speaking it is much easier for the person penetrating to move, and it is much easier for the person penetrating to be physically on top of the other person. This is why "penetrating" is often conflated with "topping". But that is not what topping actually means.

In the above example, you will notice that one of the men, specifically the one physically on top of the other, is going to be the one moving more and therefore controlling the scene in a physical sense. Because the person on top can move easily, while the person on bottom is pinned down and can't move nearly as well.

With that in mind, top vs bottom is a matter of a sexual situation in which there is unequal control. The partner who acts is topping and the partner who is acted upon is bottoming.

This is why bottom and top are used so often in situations where no penetrative sex is happening. Or even in some cases, the top is the one being penetrated. For example, a rope bottom is called that because the person being tied up *can't move*, and therefore is being acted on more than acting, and is therefore the bottom. A woman riding a man cowgirl style is topping because she is the one acting and the man is being acted on regardless of what kind of penetration is happening.

This is why you can say "top" instead of "dominant" - because the dominant is controlling the scene and is therefore topping. The dominant acts on the submissive no matter what physical position they are in due to the power exchange at play. That is basically the literal definition of dominant vs submissive in the most general terms. Dominating is not the same thing as topping, because it is the subset of topping in which power exchange is occurring. Therefore in any situation in which power exchange is implied or assumed, top and dominant are interchangeable. As are bottom and submissive.

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

In just the past two months, Sony has:

Said the PS6 will be more than $1000 at launch

Announced the end of all physical PS game releases

While simultaneously announcing the end of two of their console game stores — ensuring multiple games will die forever

Declared that they are wholly dedicated to (A) leveraging A.I. when making games and (B) creating live-service games above all other game types

Announced that if you bought any movies through their PlayStation Store, over 550 of them will soon be deleted from all users' libraries — with no restitution offered of any kind

Gamers, it is time — to paraphrase Robert Vann — to turn Sony's picture to the wall. Any one of these insults would be bad, and taken alone? Maybe it could be swallowed. But this is an ongoing campaign of disdain towards customers, with each declaration worse than the last.

Free the Nipple: A History of a Hidden Movement, via Hyperallergic, October 5, 2021

Plus, actually, Free the Nipple activists have literally won court cases and shit.

Technically, afaik/until the Supreme Court gets another opportunity to rule on this shit:

"The decision not to fight the ban effectively makes it legal for women to go topless in the six states that fall under the 10th Circuit: Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma." -via NBC News, Sept. 19, 2019

...But under this fucking administration, I really wouldn't recommend pushing it

Ah, free the nipple. Some day, she will return stronger than ever.

FreeTheNipple: Quit telling everyone I'm dead!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.