BootmanLA

There's literally no way to know what the risk is. 1. The "top" could be lying about his viral load. He could even be lying about being poz. He could be lying about whether Atripla was tried. 2. PrEP is effective in the vast number of cases. If your friend is taking his medication consistently, then he likely has nothing to worry about. The idea of having found the magic poz top who will "slice right thru his PrEP" is kinda silly on its face. 3. You say your friend "loves idea of getting Pozzed" but he's on PrEP, which suggests he likes the idea of being negative even more. Based on his questions about "risk" it sounds like he's more of a thrill-seeker/risk-taker than someone who actually wants to be poz. Because if he did, he'd be off PrEP already. Look, your buddy is free to fantasize all he wants about risk and getting pozzed and thinking there's some magical change that will come over him when he finally does. Fantasies are one of the things that make life worth living. But let's at least acknowledge it for what it is.

You are making a common mistake. DoxyPEP - notice that there is no "R" there - is for Post Exposure Prophylaxis - treatment AFTER possible exposure. When used with "Doxy", it's referring not to HIV, but to other, bacteriological STI's like syphilis. The point of DoxyPEP is to prevent an exposure to one of those STIs in a sexual encounter from infecting you. When this is used for HIV exposure - for someone who just had unprotected sex and didn't intend to, or had a needle stick from an unknown source, or whatever, PEP is used to prevent HIV from taking hold AFTER the exposure. It consists of a double-dose of the same medication used in PREP, then a 30-day regimen to (hopefully) conclusively prevent HIV from taking hold in the body. PrEP - THERE'S that "r" - is for PRE-exposure prophylaxis. It's not normally used for antibiotics, etc. because we don't want to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of bugs that we normally can treat pretty readily. So there is NO SUCH THING as "DoxyPrEP". But because of the potential consequences of HIV infection, we DO use PrEP for HIV prevention.

That's certainly the approach of some members of our community, to their undying shame. But there are quite a few of us in the "LGB" part of the "LGBT" spectrum who want ALL of us protected. Because we know that these assholes target the least-supported members of the group, knowing that the rest won't be unified in protecting them. Then they move on to shear off the next group - say, HIV+ people, or whatever. Divide and conquer is an age-old strategy, and sadly, it works too often.

Vought is also a leading proponent of the absurd notion that if the executive branch decides it doesn't want to spend money that was appropriated by Congress, it can just.... not. And a thousand other bad ideas, many of which were in the Project 2025 book. You know, the one Trump swore he'd never heard of, and wasn't a blueprint for his administration, and no one associated with it would have any sort of power in his administration.

I think I've covered this before, but here's a kind of "dumbed down" version of how IP addresses work with internet providers. Each provider has licensed a batch of IP addresses that it can use to route content to its subscribers' devices. In layman's terms, that means "YourFavoriteISP" controls a bunch of IP addresses. When they license those addresses, they're registered with the giant servers that route the internet, so that if a website gets a request from a device at address 1.2.3.4, it can determine that said address is controlled by YourFavoriteISP, and that ISP's routing manager (called the "DHCP server") is located at, say, 1.2.3.240 - and that server is located in Bumfuck, Colorado. So let's say 1.2.3.4 (your phone) requests content from a website. The website says, OK, I need to send this page back to 1.2.3.4, but I don't know exactly where that device even is. But I know it's managed by YourFavoriteISP, at 1.2.3.240, in Colorado, so - hey, 1.2.3.240, send this to your homeboy that's at 1.2.3.4. Then the DHCP server at 1.2.3.240 gets the page, asks itself - who did I give 1.2.3.4 to, the last time I gave that out? - gets the answer, and sends the page on. This all happens in fractions of a second. The problem is when YourFavoriteISP also has routing servers in Shithole, Idaho and Dickwad, Montana. Most of the time, the Idaho server uses its own, separate pool of IP addresses from the Colorado one or the Montana one. But demand isn't static, and it's possible that Colorado's IP pool may get maxed out occasionally during tourist seasons. So YourFavoriteISP links the DHCP servers at all three locations so that, if any one of them is over capacity - it doesn't have any more addresses to give out - it can get an address from the others. So Colorado users may get an IP address that the internet authorities "think" is located in Idaho. Or Montana. And normally that wouldn't matter, but because state laws are now making it a criminal offense to offer certain content to their residents without verifying the age of the user, places like this have to figure out where the user is coming from - BEFORE any content is actually displayed to the user. The only feasible way, at this point, is to use the database that says THIS address is registered to an ISP at a server in X location. And if X location is one that the website needs to block, it's going to block, even though it's possible the user is not in that location at all. After all, that's what a VPN does: it tells all the internet sites you try to reach that you are, in fact, in whatever location you've specified - even though my device may be in Louisiana and it's using an IP address in Louisiana, the VPN service re-routes all my traffic to appear to be coming from Denver, Colorado, because the IP address belonging to the VPN is registered there. These problems people are reporting are kind of almost a "reverse VPN" - the location associated with the IP address is one you didn't select, and doesn't reflect reality, but it's not one you can control. It's flagging you as being in a state that this site has barred. The good news is that you can still use a VPN to mask your "apparent" location and specifically choose one that is not on the blocked list. In other words, the VPN doesn't care where you got your IP address from; it's going to take care of getting you the content you want, and what IP address you have underlying it doesn't matter at all.

Mostly because of deceptive marketing, not because their underlying products were defective.

Without pointing to the member to whom my quoted post was a reply, I will only note that no, it was not a personal shot at you. That member had given examples of using "woke" in sentences that disparaged those who might conventionally be called "woke", and I was simply pointing out that using it as an epithet the way he did was stupid.

@1hornyjohn is absolutely correct. Most importantly, you cannot just walk into a pharmacy (US), chemist (UK), or whatever the equivalent is in other places and say you'd like to order a month's supply of <whatever>. An HIV specialist needs to run substantial lab work on you, to determine what your viral load is, what your T-cell count is, how well your kidneys, liver, and other organs are functioning, whether or not you have pre-diabetes or diabetes, your heart and lung function, and so forth. With that data they can narrow down to the best choice of medication for you. For instance, if you already have impaired kidney function (you wouldn't realize it, necessarily, but the lab tests would show it), then the doctor would want to avoid certain treatments that are harsher on the kidneys.

Another example: "People who use 'woke' as an epithet are morons"

To clarify (I hope): What I believe @PozBearWI is saying is that when the very first treatments for AIDS came out (like AZT), an AIDS diagnosis was, in fact, pretty much a death sentence that was (all things considered) rapidly approaching. And thus, as he's noting, people with AIDS (and even some who were just positive, but not yet at that stage) jumped at the chance to try AZT and the other early experimental drugs, because at that time the choice was "experiment or likely die". As I understand @Poz50something, some gay men being reluctant to get an untested COVID vaccine are hypocritical because they'd have been among those lining up for AZT back in the late 1980's. But @PozBearWI has a point in that most people who rejected the COVID vaccine weren't facing certain death if they didn't try SOMETHING, the way men with AIDS were. I disagree with those who reject(ed) the COVID vacccine on that basis, but the AZT and COVID vaccine comparison is only slightly useful, if at all.

JFC: From the day the vaccines were announced, they were touted as a TWO shot regimen - it didn't "go" to a second vaccine. Were you just living under a rock for the entire pandemic unable to read, watch, or hear the news? Or did you just not understand the words they were using? I can't think of any other way to explain not understanding, FROM THE BEGINNING, that there would be a two-shot sequence. And like MOST vaccines given to adults, particularly for mutable viral agents (like flu), there's almost always a booster or annual shot. It's true we did not know, in December 2020 (which is when the vaccines were released - UNDER PRESIDENT FUCKHEAD TRUMP, mind you, so you can't blame Biden if you weren't told from day one) whether boosters would specifically be needed. But again, anyone who isn't suffering from cranio-rectal inversion would have heard, very early on, that the virus was, in fact, mutating and would probably require boosters to maintain efficacy against it.

More than one person died. Yes, one insurrectionist who refused repeated orders from the Capitol Police to not enter the building "fucked around and found out", as they say. I feel bad for her family's loss but not bad for her being so dumb as to disobey a police order with guns pointed at her head. And actually three other protesters died, one trampled to death by her fellow protesters, the other two by a stroke and a heart attack brought on by the melee. Five police officers died: one of complications of injuries received in the attack; the other four by suicide shortly afterward, with the circumstances of the riot almost certain a primary factor. I realize that some asswipes here don't consider police suicides to be actual problems, but here we are. As for accepting a presidential pardon, especially a pre-emptive one: It means, for someone like, say, Fauci or Cheney that they don't have to hire several high-powered lawyers that bill $1,500/hour to fight all the fucking bullshit that Trump promised to unleash on them. If you were looking at legal bills that could bankrupt your family and you were offered a pardon that meant those bills would never happen, you'd take it too, guaranteed. You said "When you accept a Pre emptive Presidential Pardon, you are admitting guilt even before charges have been laid against." That's untrue. I'm not going to say it's a lie because a lie is a deliberate falsehood, and I don't know whether you're deliberately saying something know is false, or you're just gullible enough to believe that this widely circulated piece of shit is actually good law. It's not. Accepting a pardon is NOT an admission of guilt. The fact that Trump is stupid enough to believe it doesn't make it true. But let's assume that's true: That means ALL those people who Trump pardoned in 2021 on his way out the door, including Mike Flynn, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, Bernard Kerik, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Stephen Bannon, and - oh, let's not forget - Charles Kushner, who hired a hooker to seduce his brother, and filmed it, then threatened to release the film to his brother's wife, to keep the brother from testifying against him in his massive fraud trial (where he was in fact found guilty). So, by your logic, all these people are admitting their guilt. Right?

That's a pretty silly take. When an incoming administration has publicly stated he wants not only prosecution (for people DOING THEIR FUCKING JOBS), but unspecified "consequences" (which his horde of violent supporters will correctly interpret as "take them out"), a pardon is about the only thing that makes sense. At least take the prosecution off the table. And yes, it is a vaccine. I'll take the words of the tens of thousands of medical professionals and researchers as to what it is over ... checking notes... some insatiable hole in Toronto. First, that last part is just not true. It's a gross misreading of the law promoted by simpletons and believed by the gullible. If you're equating the actions of insurrectionist rioters beating cops with flagpoles, driving stun guns into their necks and smashing their shields into their skulls, such that some of them died from their injuries (let's call them the J6 mob) with the actions of the US representatives, including two Republicans, who conducted investigations into what happened and to what extent the Trump administration was responsible for instigating those actions (let's call them the J6 Committee), then you don't understand what equivalences are. And as noted above, these people were DOING THEIR JOBS - serving on a legitimately constituted House Select Committee - and deserved none of the opprobrium and threats of prosecution from a vindictive, thin-skinned, petty, tyrannical tinpot emperor wannabe like Trump that they got. A pardon - to keep them out of the reach of a vendetta by Trump's DOJ - is again the LEAST any reasonable president could do.

For those who are interested, his cousin Caroline Kennedy (who was US Ambassador to Japan under President Obama and to Australia under President Biden, and who is the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy) wrote a letter to the members of the US Senate regarding her cousin's nomination to be DHHS secretary. Among a few choice bits: She is not surprised that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because he, like his birds, is a predator; he used to drop mice and baby chickens into a blender when they were teens to feed his birds; Growing up, his basement room was "the" place where all of his siblings and cousins could score drugs (several of whom died of overdoses); He's gotten rich off his crusade against vaccination, and he intends to continue being a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a vaccine (ie if he wins, he makes money) even if he's confirmed as DHHS Secretary; Even though he's a crusader against vaccines, all his own kids were vaccinated. Several Republican senators seem uneasy about voting to confirm him, and not just on what passes for the moderate wing of the party. Hard-right members are being pushed by outside forces claiming Jr. is still essentially a Democrat and will betray Trump. Infighting is wonderful.

He actually issued the executive order implementing this on Monday afternoon. See here: [think before following links] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ The order also revokes all efforts to apply Bostock (the gay/trans employment discrimination decision from SCOTUS from 2020) to any other circumstances, such as housing discrimination or educational discrimination. Not just the trans part, but the ENTIRE decision. What that means is that if a plaintiff sues, say, a landlord for discrimination against gay people, the federal government will now OPPOSE (via amicus briefs or even outright intervention) extending Bostock's reasoning that discrimination on the basis of sex includes gay and trans people - an opinion by Neil Gorsuch, at that, one that Chief Justice Roberts joined - should not apply to any other circumstances. Dollars to donuts that if an employment case goes against an employer - as it must, under Bostock - the federal government will be urging SCOTUS to overturn that precedent as misguided. And right in the crosshairs after that is same-sex marriage, then laws against sodomy. Everyone said "You're being hysterical!" when I said this was coming. Well, it's already well on the way. And all the gay Trumpanzees who voted for him because whatever reason are about to enter the "finding out" phase. "But I never dreamed the leopards would eat MY face," sobbed the gay man who voted for the Leopard Eating Faces Party.

For once in my life my view is close to the consensus (I voted 5). Like others have said, three is a threeway. Four is closer, but in my limited experience, it tends to devolve into two two-ways, even if the partners swap out periodically. Five means that if everyone is playing, there's always something going on besides regular pairings of two - either one guy is getting it at both ends, or one guy is getting sucked and fucked at the same time, or he's getting DP'ed, or... well, almost any combination of things. It's true that any even number of x players can devolve into x/2 pairings, but I think the more players, the less likely that is to happen. And as others have noted, there's got to be a mix (and at least two bottoms). If there's one bottom, it's a gang bang, and that's not an orgy.

In theory. Assuming the online pharmacy is a reputable one, that is. But Doxycycline should be cheap to get filled at any pharmacy in the US - it's a very old, long-established antibiotic that's been in commercial production since 1967 (so, generics have been available for 50+ years). If you have no access to a local physician who will prescribe it for you, I suppose an online "prescription/pharmacy" service, like the ones that prescribe and sell ED meds, is better than nothing. But realistically anyone who's sexually active really ought to have a physician who monitors them for infections of this sort, even if it's a local STD clinic.

You're not one of the few - you're one of the many. Probably nowhere near a majority, but a significant number of those who opposed Trump's re-election are very, very concerned about what an administration like his might do unfettered by any thoughts of being prosecuted after his term of office is up.

Oh, I'm sure there are many reasons porn might be shot in south Florida - good weather for outdoor work most of the year, for one thing. As for the specific payment methods, you're probably right about privately produced, one-on-one porn. But I think the original discussion was more about quasi-studio porn, where record keeping (as you've eloquently discussed before) is legally required and where I'm sure the "producer" in question is going to have financial records for payments to performers regardless of their preferences.

I did not yet listen to the entirety of the arguments from the Court, but I've seen reports from various legal scholars who did, and those reports lean both ways. On the one hand, there seems to be a pretty clear agreement among the justices that the lower court used the wrong standard by which to judge the constitutionality of the law. The Fifth Circuit had held that the law was subject only to rational basis review (that is, if the government has a rational basis for passing the law, it's constitutional). That's the standard used for most laws, such as (to use a basic example) jaywalking: the government has an interest in preventing traffic accidents with pedestrians, so it can inconvenience them by requiring them to cross at intersections rather than randomly on the street. While people have a general right to walk about freely in public, it's not such a significant right that minor burdens on it can't be made. But First Amendment issues, because they deal with a core right under the constitution, are generally subject to higher scrutiny, and when the right is spelled out - as the right to freedom of speech is - then strict scrutiny is required; that means the government interest being addressed must be compelling (ie extremely important), and the law must be the least restrictive way of accomplishing that interest. (There is another level, called intermediate scrutiny, where the rule is that the governmental interest being asserted must be "important" and the means by which it's being addressed must be "substantially" related to that interest.) And several justices seemed to think that the Fifth Circuit erred, from the start, by using rational basis review instead of strict scrutiny review. When that happens, the Court usually (but not invariably) will remand the case back to the appellate court with instructions to reexamine the law under the proper standard. (The other alternative would be for the Court to find that the trial record is complete enough for it to render a decision as to whether the law meets strict scrutiny, and make a decision now rather than wait for it to percolate back up to them after further lower court review.) Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Barrett seemed inclined Contra what @ellentonboy noted, if *anyone* is inclined to uphold the law as is, with no further discussion, it's Alito. He specifically cited back to the same cases the Fifth Circuit had cited in upholding the law, saying it was no different than the laws that prohibit stores from selling "girlie magazines" like Playboy to minors, which have been consistently upheld.

Regarding porn production in Florida: As some have noted, there are some in power who have opined that since you're paying the porn performers, and you're specifically paying them to have sex, that amounts to prostitution. Which is at least a defensible, if not entirely valid (in my view) position to take. So why is porn still being produced even in those jurisdictions? Most likely because it's a lot easier to prove "porn was produced" (which is not illegal on its face, especially if no money changes hands) than it is to prove prostitution (which generally requires either documentary evidence like financial records, or direct testimony from someone who witnessed someone being paid for sex. That witness would have to (a) witness the payment, or the agreement to accept payment, and (b) witness the agreement to have sex - that is, connecting the dots between the payment and the called-for activity. For street prostitution where an undercover cop solicits a prostitute, that's easily accomplished by the cop's testimony (leaving aside questions of the possibility of him lying). But for porn production you'd have to have someone on the inside willing to flip, or else you'd have to have, say, ledgers of payments that can be linked to bank payments (cashed checks, transfers, etc.) - and the authorities aren't likely to be able to get those without probable cause to seek them in the first place, and without someone on the inside, say, willing to testify, probable cause is going to be hard to meet. So even if porn is prostitution, proving it's a lot harder than street prostitution.

When polls are created, I *believe* that the creator specifies how long it's open for voting (and there's a default that kicks in otherwise). When a poll closes, it doesn't disappear (because people may wish to see the results, and they may wish to discuss those results).

The poster didn't say poz guys were "shit". He said that a cum dump was potentially a likely place to PICK UP shit like HIV. Not the same thing at all.

The bottom in question may well have been on PrEP. However, that's pointless in terms of protecting you if there's already cum (particularly substantial amounts of it) in the bottom when you fuck him. While topping is, as noted, much less risky than bottoming, that's referring *PRIMARILY* to the idea that a poz/detectable bottom might infect the top. The calculus changes - and we don't know by how much, but it's definitely significant - if there's poz/detectable cum in the ass when you fuck. (If all the tops before you were negative or undetectable, of course, AND the bottom was on PrEP, then the risk is zero. But you can't really know that.) More importantly, cum dump situations are ripe for picking up other STIs. If any of the tops had syphilis or gonorrhea, for instance, there's a good chance of picking it up.

The problem with age verification, as it is generally practiced, is that it mandates disclosure of the identity of the person accessing the material. In the United States, the courts have generally held that adults have a First Amendment right to read/view any legal material without providing identification. (Libraries can require a card to check out books, etc., but that's more to verify your eligibility to borrow, rather than your right to read - you can go into any public library here, even in places where you don't live and have no library borrowing privileges, and read whatever books you want within the library.) Coupled with this is the fact that you can rest assured once some age-verification service (whether run by the site directly, or, more likely, an outside service it utilizes under contract) has your identifying information, the service will undoubtedly cross-reference your identity not only with what you view on that site, but with any other "big data" it can match up. So you can imagine the data hacks that such services will absolutely bring about.