I am not sure, but my oldest child was looking at an English brochure for a trip to France and a asked me "what the heck is a dis-coth-a-cue? Discotheque. A Disco, a dance club. And yes disco-tek is spelled Discotheque in English.

I left when he tried to choke me in bed (woke me up, not sex play), then realized what he was doing and stopped and freaked out.

When we first left my older kids said they wouldn't even go to his funeral if he died. They have since reconciled but certainly are not close - they and I appreciate that he's trying now, but I have to say that when I left and my life got so much better while his got so much worse I did feel a sort of happiness about it. A breakup is never one sided, I did also do and say things I regret, but time kinda proved he was the problem.

I guess everyone has a crazy ex but I honestly did not see that coming, we had over 15 good years before he lost it. And I absolutely blame the right wing fascist conversion machine.

White power nonsense. He ended up speaking a whole language I didn't understand. Was absolutely convinced he had some deep understanding of reality that I did not. I think he still holds on to some of it but quitting alcohol helped and getting a job helped, he sort of had to hit bottom to bounce back.

The library lends e-books, I have had good luck with their selections. I try not to buy books and still end up with more of them than I want. Mostly because I like graphic novels on paper.

Women do sometimes train rings just for strength, and the single bar for fun, but no, this really is one of those events where simply having a male body gives a ridiculous advantage, it's designed to show off what a top level male-bodied body can do with training.

Floor exercise, and vault, are the overlap events and the competitors do a lot of the same skills, but the men do lead the way here on tricks - it's funny though. The first double backflip, in my lifetime it went from being considered impossible to being something coaches train 8-9 year old girls to do! So I don't know how much of the limitation is physical but I do know that the center of balance in a super fit woman is different from the center of balance in a super fit man, and that rings and Pommel horse are designed to exploit this difference.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

I think you are asking what women's sports are for? It's a reasonable question. I think of it like age grouping, it puts competitors together into groups where they are competitive.

For school sports, sure. Mixed teams and less focus on winning, more on playing.

But if you are trying to determine who is best in a particular category? So like Ironman triathlon, everyone runs together, they start pro men then pro women then age groups, technically if my time was fastest I win, but if my time is fastest among women my age, that is also a win. A pro woman would win if she beat all the female participants, and in the off chance all the top men ran off a cliff or got sick halfway through, the top man would also win in his class even if he didn't beat top woman.

Personally I love the way gymnastics handles it. Men compete in events no woman could beat them in (rings! Oh my God!) and women compete different feats of athleticism and precision geared to their bodies, the strength to weight ratio not pure power.

My ex got radicalized on Stormfront and accused me of "muddying his bloodline".

And yes he did eventually realize that some of that was bullshit, he is not like he was before he got propagandized but not as bad as he was in the thick of it.

Lan Chi chili paste.

Well, let's see.

I was alive for the bicentennial of the USA, don't remember that but do remember rotary phones. The population of the world doubled between my birth and when I was age 42.

Not sure Lemmy skews older than "the rest of the internet" though, have you ever seen Facebook?

What do you mean by normal? The lemmyNSFW instance has plenty of smut, especially if you are a guy you will probably enjoy it. Not as much discussion though, I agree with you on that, I too like the talk about sex and it's not fast moving, no.

If you just mean reasonable people, I have been lucky I guess. Haven't run into too many crazy in any direction.

I think the early adopters of online forums are always going to be sort of geeky, otherwise we wouldn't find or enjoy them. I remember the early Usenet text forums, was on a belly dancing group and like 75% of us were in tech as day jobs. Reddit wasn't always like it is now, either. Probably even Facebook started with the more geeky crowd. I am sort of an outlier in this way, older and I guess a "normie" by most definitions but not tolerant of most social media so do jump earlier.

The !cocktails@lemmy.world is my baby here and slow and steady growth is more manageable, I have had close to zero need to moderate it at all, it has been great. So maybe follow more lifestyle stuff like that, if you want less tech focused discussion.

It all depends on your definition of normie I think. Growth for the sake of growth, no, but we are not quite at the critical mass that keeps it moving fast.

I don't have this problem, but lettuce wraps are shockingly good too. A good sturdy lettuce, sliced turkey, smoked cheddar and some chipotle mayo (canned chipotle en adobo, pureed, just mix some of it into mayonnaise to make a spread.) Onion if you have it. I don't understand why it's good, it sounds like nonsense but I do this when I don't have time to make bread, but do have good lettuce or homegrown lettuce in the garden. It is delicious and feels good to eat.

I can absolutely believe that, but I don't think I had any Target executives over, and it was before social media. And that's really why I think it's a useless skill, someone else could have looked at it and thought "huh, that would sell" but all I was thinking was that it would look unusual and cool and not sellable.

Gardening in the last few years, sourdough and home fermentation I've done for 15 years or so. I don't really think those will catch on generally because most people don't cook but I will say a few people have asked for some of my starter lately so who knows? Tepache I've been making for years and I just saw some being sold in whole foods, so maybe. But more likely that happened as an offshoot of the Kombucha craze, which I was not a part of. Have been using henna to color my hair for years too, that hasn't exploded in popularity.

I have been late to the party on things too - mobile phones I held out as long as I could, Pokemon Go, late adopter. Electric bike. Fontaines DC.

On the really spooky side though - I had this dining room set from the 1940s, the upholstery tore so I went to the local commercial upholstery shop and found sparkly red vinyl from the state fair rides, reupholstered them (badly) with silver trim.

Couple years later was at Target and they had a reproduction set exactly like my old one - exactly the same chairs, covered in the exact same sparkly red vinyl I'd used. It was precisely like my kitchen table set just better execution. What the actual fuck?

As a person with a car who has used the bus instead in certain situations:

Bus gets you there with no effort, you can read instead of driving, it's safer, and you don't have to pay for parking. When in college here it's also free, and at every house I've lived in, there has been one bus that goes from said neighborhood (within a couple of blocks) directly to the college, so I never drove there because the bus was way more convenient.

Bus is an extra mode of transportation in a household with more drivers than cars. So I've taken the bus to work, sometimes for years, so that someone else in my household could use the car to go to their job, farther away in the other direction.

Some people should not or cannot drive. At every place I've worked there has been at least one guy (yes always a guy) whose license was revoked for DUI. So they had a car but couldn't use it.

Cars also sometimes break down! Living near bus lines has saved me on occasion when my car was out of commission.

Car insurance here is crazy expensive, partly because everybody and their grandma is driving even if they ought not be. The world is not getting younger. You want to be on the road with a bunch of people who are not clear minded? Or you want them to have other options for getting around? One day that will be you, too.

Apparently you mistake rain for something different from what I mean by rain. An umbrella would not avail, and would be a lightning rod. A raincoat does not work either. My glasses get all rained on too then I can't see. It's a big rain with wind and lightning, goes in all directions, not a gentle rain shower in a downward direction. I'm sure there is specialized gear that would work, I just am not that committed.

A Florida rain, not a London rain.

I have an uncanny ability to do things that are unpopular, that later become popular, but I can never imagine them becoming popular when I do them.

Saw Nirvana in a crowd of 30 people before they got famous, certainly never thought they would, it was so different from what was on the radio then. Bought a shirt from them, out of their little van parked in the alley behind the bar!

Used to wear vintage dresses from the thrift store in the 1980s, nobody around me was dressed anything like that, but later all of them got bought up by flippers.

Had tattoos when it was remarkably unusual for a woman, like if another woman with tattoos saw me they would stop and talk to me, I never ever ever would have thought they'd be mainstream.

Lots of stuff like that, like I'm out of synch with time but I can never capitalize on it because I don't have the vision to understand that it will catch on!

The buses that run (surprisingly direct routes) to my kids' workplaces and the one that runs by the youngest's school here run ONCE per HOUR. I would be thrilled to have service every 15 minutes. They used to run every 15 and it worked for me when I was their age, so it's gotten worse here not better, even as the population has doubled.

Nah, it's true. My walk to work is only possible because my oldest drops her sibling off at their school on the way to her school. If I had to make that loop it gets a lot more complicated, and even so it's the least complicated it's been since I had kids. There is a city bus to both schools, but the one that goes by the high school runs once an hour, the one to the college twice an hour but takes 2 hours, vs 15 minute drive. High school is an hour walk, not impossible and sometimes faster than waiting for the bus to arrive, but pretty bad with backpack and musical instrument, school bus system takes 1.5 hours.

The only reasonable answer here is car, until/unless the buses run on a reasonable frequency.

I do walk to work when I can, but right now I'm sitting here stuck because it's pouring (like it does every afternoon/evening in the summer here). If I could have brought my car, it would be waiting for me in the covered parking garage!

Getting an electric bike this month and that will let me arrive not sweaty, but it won't solve the getting home in the rain. There are actually THREE separate bus routes I can take from my house to work with about a block of walk on each end but whenever I could bus or bike I could walk, once I leave the house I never feel like spending the fare, it's only a mile.

In the other half of the year it's easy to get here without a car but only because I refuse to work anywhere that is not on a bus line and close by.

Here, the city tries but unfortunately transit is run by the county not the city.