BootmanLA

And as someone who manages a system that also uses email notifications: there are multiple points at which this could be failing, some within the control of the site management and some not, so it's not always easy to diagnose. Typically, what happens is that someone does something on this site, and the end result is an email notification. But it could be the forum software isn't properly registering the initial "trigger" in the first place. It could be that the forum software is not able to communicate with the host operating system where the email "dispatching" program resides - possibly due to a configuration change on one end or the other. It could be that the host's email dispatch program has locked up and isn't accepting messages. It could be that the email program was configured to use a particular mail server for sending, and that server's got issues. It could be that the company that contracted with the email server company has switched email service but forgot about this program using the old service. And so on. I get the frustration, but I'm not sure that not getting notifications that a thread here has been updated is crisis-level stuff.

Looking down at my keyboard, I see that portions of the letters on the D, L, V and N keys are worn away, along with the entirety of the C key's letter. It's not lube as I don't use that at the computer, but it's from fingers that are sticky from snacking, etc. while I type. I only replace a keyboard when keys start not working. As someone who learned to touch type in the 1970's, I don't look at my fingers when I'm typing so I don't need to know what key is what, generally; and virtually every keyboard has little ridges on the F and J keys to help us touch-typists find the "home row" position even if we're blindfolded.

Not just "Just before test". If you only get tested quarterly (and I'm not knocking that, just saying), then you could be infected one hour after the blood is drawn for a test and until your next test you have three months you could be carrying and transmitting something. I'd hope that most people who realize they may "have something" would have it checked out earlier than their next quarterly test, but there are certainly some who won't. I agree that this guy's ignorance is staggering (but sadly all too common), and that it's on him to protect himself. But I still think it's a shit thing to do to lie and tell someone you're "clean" (thus giving in to his archaic and insulting language, and reinforcing his stupid ideas about safety). I'd opt for directness and education (and if he didn't want to fuck after that, well, I doubt seriously he's a good enough fuck to put up with that kind of bullshit.

"Majority muslim" and "Islamic" are two different things. The US is majority Christian (for now) but we are not a Christianist nation (yet). A country that is "Islamic" is one where the government is based on the principles of Islam (as interpreted by a particular group, of course, but that's a separate issue). Bosnia is not such a country.

Probably. But absent proof of what, specifically, he means, I'm going to take him literally. Which is more fun, really, because aside from Turkey (which straddles Europe and Asia and thus is really a "Eurasian" country rather than European), there's no nation I know of that is anywhere close to becoming "officially Islamic". Especially considering that a lot of Islamic immigrants to Europe are ESCAPING Islamic states, and while they want to be free to worship in accordance with their religious beliefs, they're not particularly likely to want the kind of merged church-state situation we see in many (but not all) Islamic countries. So the whole idea of "if a European country becomes officially Islamic" is roughly akin to "if Vatican City exiles the Pope" or "if America renounces capitalism and guns". Ain't gonna happen.

AGAIN: To quote Viking8x6:

I think there's a huge difference between Reagan and Trump, though (well, actually, many huge differences, but...). Especially with respect to Europe. Quite a few liberal Europeans probably fretted that Reagan was going to end up provoking a nuclear war with the USSR, but at least they knew on whose side he stood (with them, against the USSR and eastern bloc). Trump, by contrast, has made it clear he's fully prepared to hang western Europe out to dry, NATO be damned. I wouldn't be shocked in the slightest if European sentiment (outside the authoritarian bloc) is strongly for Biden, at least as opposed to Trump, because they can watch what's happening in Ukraine and realize that very little (other than the US helping Europe) is keeping Russia from just taking whatever parts of whatever countries on its border that it wants. Yes, the Princess of Wales was a huge deal in all of Europe in the mid-80's, much more so than any US president. But again - I suspect the reason nobody had much to say about Reagan was that they knew he was on their side (as indeed all US presidents since WW2 had been). Europeans no longer have the luxury of ignoring which party's in power in the US, and by and large, they know it.

One can, of course, believe in anything, including little green men from Mars, a flat earth, or a moon made of green cheese. That doesn't render the belief reasonable in terms of the available evidence. A $35 contribution from four years ago to a group like ActBlue (or WinRed, on the other side) is not grounds for recusal, especially given the overall record. As multiple legal commentators have pointed out, any other defendant would have been jailed, at least temporarily, during the trial for contempt of court for the many, many violations of the gag order as well as his behavior in court in general. Trumpanzees may wail and moan about the indignity of trying him in the first place, but the evidence was pretty much overwhelming. I am pretty confident the verdict will be upheld.

Considering that Hair Furor, Jr. is a widely acknowledged gun nut who's so coked up during half his podcasts you wonder if he personally is causing shortages in the white powder supply in the eastern US, I'd say there are plenty of people like him.

He gave three contributions totaling thirty-five dollars to ActBlue, which is not "anti-Trump" per se but more specifically pro-Democrat. If you think $35 is a significant sum that merits disqualification to hear cases, I would like to introduce you to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose take from right-wing individuals and groups in the form of gifts, donations, vacations, and the like currently sits somewhere north of $4 million dollars. If Thomas can hear ANY cases at all, given that background, Merchan's $35 donation is by comparison invisible. As for his daughter: again, I would like to introduce you to Ginni Thomas, who conspired with the J6 folks to attempt to overturn the election while her husband was hearing election challenges (and he will vote on Trump's immunity claims as well). Let's deal with the structural rot before we deal with things like a daughter who has her own career in another state.

Lots of side effects of medication are temporary. I'd give it additional time, if I were you - but if the 1-1-1-1 you're proposing seems to work, I'd strongly urge you to shift to daily use instead. Having a regular dose in your system is likely less impactful on your digestive system AND is documented to work. And it's likely, although not guaranteed, that if you keep taking the medication, your system will adjust to be able to handle it without disrupting your digestion & excretion functions. I don't know of any studies that have tested a 1-1-1-1 on-demand routine, but I suspect that the reason the 2-1-1 dosing was chosen as effective is that big influx of anti-retroviral medication hitting your system and being available at the point when you might get infected. The general recommendation is to take the double-dose before sex as close to, but at least 2 hours before, actually having sex, precisely because the drug will be most heavily concentrated in your system, providing the most protection. A single dose, especially one taken several hours before sex, may just not have sufficient "ooomph" by the time you might get infected.

"left-wing authoritarian social bent"? What a stupid fucking phrase. You're on a website devoted to male-male sex - something that's only legal, in much of the world, because of that "left-wing authoritarian social bent" you decry. Homosexual acts weren't decriminalized in Britain (where I take it you're from) because conservatives did it; you owe your ability to participate on this very board to that "left-wing" blah blah you're moaning and bitching about. So please clarify: what, exactly, are you opposed to that the "left-wing authoritarian social bent" has imposed on you? I have a pretty good idea, but I'll give you the opportunity to explain yourself in case I'm wrong.

Hunter Biden is charged with (a) buying a gun while being an active drug user, and (b) paying some of his taxes late (though they have been paid, with penalties and interest). I, for one, consider trying to skirt election laws in order to seize the highest office in the country a tad more problematic than a gun charge that even US attorneys admit is almost never prosecuted, or a tax violation that has already been corrected and is far, far less than the amounts the Trump company was found to have defrauded. Your mileage, as a non-American, may vary. Bullshit. The only world leaders who respected Trump are the other authoritarians, and even they considered him second-tier and easily manipulated. Regardless, we know him much better in this country than you do, just as I'm sure you know your own local pols better than I do. He's a serial fraudster found liable for sexual assault and is about to stand trial in the coming months on a bunch of other serious charges. If you choose to "respect" that kind of man it says more about you than you may realize.

Do you have any source for that insane notion that Stalin "legalized gay marriage" or that he "made straight marriage illegal"? Under the tsars, homosexual conduct was illegal (though certainly it was unevenly enforced). When the revolutionaries seized power, they abolished the entire criminal code (including the prohibitions against homosexual conduct) but that was not out of any enlightenment OR "elevating gays when it was convenient". Rather, it was a wholesale repudiation of the legal system that preceded the revolution. Even while homosexual activity was technically not illegal, it was still strongly discouraged, and by 1934 it was illegal again. Likewise: marriage as a legal institution was swept out as part of the legal purge of the tsarist regime, but that did not "legalize" gay marriage - it simply got rid of recognized marriage, period. That, too, was reinstated before too long, and it did NOT include same-sex couples.

The rectum does, in fact, absorb fluids - not as much as the colon does, but yes, it does.

Perhaps the survivors might have developed a herd immunity - but as we know, this virus keeps mutating, and even those who survived an earlier bout of COVID sometimes die from a later infection from a different variant. There are some diseases that, once you get it, you can almost certainly not get it a second time; COVID is NOT one of these. And how many hundreds of thousands - or millions, worldwide - would have died while we developed this (far less than perfect) "herd immunity"? Is that number higher or lower than the infinitesimally small number of people who've had serious bad reactions (including death) to the vaccine?

Trump *claims* he raised $200 million. I'll believe that when AUDITED financial statements for the campaign come out. Based on his civil fraud trial, this would hardly be the first time he's dramatically overstated the value of something.

I would cheerfully suggest that anyone who thinks politics has nothing to do with being gay, and who doesn't want to discuss politics, stay the fuck out of a clearly labeled political discussion area. I think snorting/injecting/smoking drugs has zero to do with being gay, for example. Shove whatever you want up your nose, light whatever chemicals you choose in a pipe and inhale to destroy your lungs and brain all day, if you want. Slip that needle full of whatever kind of poison you fancy and press that plunger - hell, hook yourself up to an IV and mainline the stuff 24/7, if that's what floats your boat. I don't care - I just don't want to be around it. So that's why I don't go into the ChemSex forums. Maybe, just maybe, you anti-political people could do us the same favor here.

A lot of members share that view. But it's important to remember: this is NOT primarily a "chat live" kind of place - it's a discussion board, where the views expressed and the stories told and the experiences shared remain as part of the system, for everyone to see - not just the handful of members who happened to be "in the chat room" when something is mentioned. It's also important to understand: this forum software (the boards where all these messages are posted) and the chat software are two different pieces of software from different vendors, never really intended to work with each other in the first place. The site developer was able to make them work together for a while, but as each software package has evolved, unfortunately new incompatibilities get introduced, making "keeping them working together" almost impossible.

To answer the first question: new members, when they first join, do not have the ability to "react" (like/upvote/downvote/etc.) to postings. That's an ability you gain, after making a certain number of posts/responses (that number is not disclosed to avoid people gaming the system to get there). And at first, you only have the ability to "react" to a small number of posts each day. Over time, with participation, all of the things you can do on here grow - you can make more replies, you can react to more posts, etc. - but you get there by participating and demonstrating your good faith. As for the second: I see a blue jock strap as your avatar - if that was your intent, you got it!

It's always difficult letting fantasies go - they're a part of us.

And to follow this up: a jury of Trump's peers agrees, convicting him on all 34 felony counts today. They heard the evidence and they heard his defenses, and they decided.

I make typos occasionally, just like almost anyone. I try to correct them as I go, but some undoubtedly slip through. The only thing I think "covfefe" could possibly have been intended to be was "coffee" and the fact that he didn't see that glaring an error before he hit send is pretty strong evidence to me he was high when he made it. Trump for years has displayed symptoms of addiction to something - most like Adderall or something like that. But I'll grant it was a typo - just not one that someone with his supposed massive intellect, the best intellect, no one has a better intellect than he has, people come up to him with tears in their eyes and say "Sir, that intellect, it's amazing, I've never known anyone with an intellect like that" could possibly make. Nowadays, of course, he's just becoming senile. Every one of his "rallies" is a long rant barely elevated above "Get off my lawn!" by his invoking whoever he's currently got the reds over.

I'm well aware that the world is not a neat and tidy place, and that yes, nefarious foreign entities (like Russia) are gleefully interfering in our elections - not by hacking voting machines or anything like that, but by spreading disinformation and misinformation designed to discourage voting for Trump's opponent (who, I have conceded MANY times, had her own flaws and contributed to her loss). The Mueller investigation that Hair Furor loves to tout as "exonerating" him (which did no such thing) actually DID find that Russian interference, and actually indicted multiple Russian agents for their crimes. I guess it's Schrodinger's Mueller Report, where it's both completely exonerating and a complete fraud at the same time. Having sex with a porn star is not what made Trump a sleazeball. He was a sleazeball back when he and his father were illegally discriminating against minority tenants in the family apartment building empire; he was a sleazeball when he cheated on wife #1 with the woman he knocked up and had a baby with out of wedlock before he married the second time; he was a sleazeball when he routinely stiffed contractors and subcontractors on his vanity building projects, putting more than one out of business by refusing to pay for work done; he was a sleazeball when he bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and when he questioned whether America would accept if "a n----r" won the first season of The Apprentice; he was a sleazeball when he and his brother and sisters formed a fake company that did nothing but drain cash from his father's company so they could avoid inheritance taxes on the millions they kited. And on any number of other occasions. I don't give a crap whether he has sex with a porn star or not. But his primary defense of trying to cover up the Stormy Daniels story was that his wife would be hurt if she learned what he'd done - which (if true) pretty much says "I admit I was a sleazeball". Only that's not the reason he tried to cover it up - he kept trying to get the payment delayed until after the election so that he could stiff her on the payment, as he'd done thousands of times to other contractors; and he knew that all he had to do was make it through the election unscathed - which meant making the payoff was clearly intended to boost his electoral chances.

To be blunt (and in line with your original post's call for a "harsh reality check"): fraternity culture is notoriously conservative, and the more "hard-core" the fraternity is, the more conservative it's likely to be. The likelihood of a whole fraternity, or even a significant portion of one, being willing to risk their brothers seeing them enjoy having sex with a man, even (or especially) one dressed as a woman, is somewhere between "not gonna happen" and "really, really not gonna happen." That doesn't mean there aren't individual fraternity men out there who wouldn't enjoy that kind of sex. There almost certainly are, just as there are frat boys who secretly want to do their frat brothers. But they are, at best, few and far between, and virtually all are so down-low about it that they'd not only publicly deny any such interest, but likely cause serious physical harm to anyone who suggested otherwise.