You know how lots of women on their online dating profiles have something like "oh, and those guys sending stuff like 'hey babe, wanna ride me tonight' can forget it, im not going to respond"
@Jez I think they work on the same principle - they do work on some women, so the principle of "tried and true" is exercised regardless of how many failures.
@Cerberus I read "established" as "built", like for a building, and then it makes sense. Sort of. One would only establish one's sex so many times in one's physical incarnation. (Not that Grace in any way resembles a building, unless you consider built like a brick one to be a compliment.)
@Kitḫ ok, true story time. Here where I work, the entire dev team is sorting user-submitted photos for a gay dating site, trying to remove the penises from the headshots. And my coworker is doing this while listening to the 10-hour loop of the what is love song. I think he will be insane when it's over.
Let me tell you. gay people, at least the ones who use gay dating websites, send in some odd photos sometimes. Odder, it seems, than straight people. (can't speak for lesbians, there don't seem to be all that many represented in my sample of thousands of photos)
ok, like I just saw a pic of this skinny guy standing in front of his tv, wearing nothing but ultra-small, ultra-tight blue superman underwear, while striking this "reach for the sky" pose
@GraceNote honestly? a closeup of breasts, with nothing else visible in the shot at all? not much. It's a bit boring IMO. Maybe if you're 12 and you've never seen breasts before.
@GraceNote If they're good breasts, at least those are desirable objects in themselves. They arouse people. Penises don't seem to be endowed as much with this capability.
@MrShinyandNew安宇 My estimate would be that covered ones are on par with breasts, be they covered or uncovered, whereas uncovered ones would be on par with ehm a single ball?
@Cerberus I dunno. anyway, one thing I've learned from all of this, is that I'm certainly not gay, because none of these images are doing it for me. I was pretty certain before, but this confirms it :)
@Cerberus Peeks in underwear My property sheet reads sex=female, gender=androgynous/feminine, sexual identity=queer, status=married/unintentionally passing for straight.
so I just saw a pic of some large, hairy man in the shower, with like, soap in his eyes or something, cuz he's all squinty and rubbing his face. And THAT gets posted to a dating site. ( rolls eyes )
Suggesting the weekend is good. You want to make it sound like you are totally sure you're capable of fscking her brains out but at the same time not overeager.
@Kitḫ Yeah, but, for example, I said "not sure you can manage that ;)" to a friend I normally joke or flirt with, I'd be expecting a simple challenge back like "oh yeah? you haven't seen what I can do".
@Cerberus Heheh I can appreciate it, sure, and I can understand why some of these pictures might work for people, but like, some of these pictures are closeups that are approaching medical-endoscopy proportions
Then a matinee, followed by cheesecake or something sweet like that. Doesn't matter. First, ask her for Sunday. Something like "How about Sunday afternoon?" or something.
Alright folks. It's been an entertaining day. But I must be off. Good luck, everyone, navigating the minefields of Canadian Human Rights, dating, and gay porn.
@GraceNote We can't really link to the pay area. It's clearly OK to use it and refer to it. Also to quote it in answer is probably OK too, as long as it isn't the whole answer.
I mean you could argue it should all be free! But I just wondered if this has been discussed. It would be a shame for the site to become more successful and then suddenly be blindsided by this.
Could anyone let me know how the word came into English with these two variants?
The 'ts' spelling is a transliteration of the Russian 'царь', but the 'cz' spelling is what interests me more. To me it looks Polish, where 'cz' is common, but is pronounced as English 'ch'. Does anyone know where th...
@z7sgѪ I think we could further encourage quoting only necessary bits and including one's own interpretation. I agree that I don't think it's helpful if a quote gets too gigantic or it is essentially the whole answer.
On Programmers, they've been trying to rally huge clean up efforts to take care of dangerously off-topic junk and all that which has just been accumulating. They aren't getting a lot of support on that, though, they can barely get anyone interested.
That's why I'm hesitant about the lighter "OED fixins" kind of clean up effort here, even if I think it's a lighter effort, we currently have a track record of failure.
@Mitch I agree. However, the OED is so good that even someone who hardly understands the question can quote an OED entry containing the desired information.
It's like a gnome that looks things up in the OED for you: not very original, but quite useful.
@Cerberus As great as the OED is, its existence points out two things: 1) there are many people out there who have already thought about the particular problem a lot, enough too condense to the small print that is in the OED, and 2) they are not here. If they were here they'd be able to give a non-condensed version or the version that would actually answer the OPs question directly rather than what the OED entry is trying to answer.
@Mitch Well, I don't disagree with that at all. But for me, as a question asker, that blind quote from the OED that actually answers a different question will still make me happy if it contains the information I seek. So the answer is actually helping. Moreover, because the OED has probably done its work well, noöne else can probably come up with better information. The main fault would seem to be that the answerer hasn't pruned the unnecessary bits off the OED entry and that ...
@Jez There's no telling what's preventing her from a quick reply. She might be on the phone with a friend. She might have put her phone in the other room. She might be in bed.
@Jez I don't know about other people, but it takes a really steamy conversation or the possibility of an imminent in-person meetup to get me to reply to my text messages quickly.
@Cerberus At one point you linked some clips and I was sure I wouldn't get hooked, then one weekend I watched a whole bunch of episodes on Netflix or Hulu or one of those things.
How come the beetle needs to kill the frog? It seems to eat large part of its body, but how can all that frog meat/blood fit into the beetle? Its abdomen swells a bit, but still.
Normally, it is more advantageous for smaller parasites to keep their host alive as take only as much as it can eat.
Oh, and have you seen the video of the frog that eats larva, then gets killed by it??
The quality of that video is slightly worse, but, oh! The story is magnificent.
@Cerberus No I still haven't seen that one! I never got some of the videos to work here and didn't remember to watch the other videos when at home, where I can install and fiddle with my video players.
@Cerberus I'm emailing myself a note about it now so hopefully I remember...
They say you can see blood stains on the larva after it is regurgitated, as evidence that it chewed on the frog's inside parts. But I couldn't see them.
In the case of the beetle, that big frog lasts for a while.
I don't recall if they clarify it specifically since it's been a while since I read that paper, but I don't think the beetle larva can digest the entire frog.
Just eats the parts it finds edible after taking it down.
@Cerberus I guess it stops the beetle from getting killed, so it's a bit of a kill-or-be-killed strategy. Nature doesn't care if you waste some food if you survive.
Note that I'm neither a biologist nor an entomologist - I'm operating purely by logical conjecture, not actual field knowledge. I love bugs, I don't study them though
@aediaλ Well, I don't think the beetle is ever in any danger. Cf. leeches, ticks, lice, etc. etc. And nature does sort of care: if the frog gets killed, it pays off to come up with some kind of defence mechanism that is bad for the beetle. If it is merely a nuisance, like ticks, the bigger animals will usually let it happen, evolutionarily speaking.
@Cerberus My thought pattern, and hence the earlier note, is that the volume of what you consume is not entirely reflected in the volume of what you store.
@GraceNote I see no evidence at all of a back-and-forth. In any case, the back-and-forth is less advantageous to the beetle than just letting it have its way and leave (if the frog survives).
@GraceNote I don't know. There could be something in that; but then why do nearly all smaller parasites keep their host alive, albeit sometimes under worse conditions?
@GraceNote I don't know. You need to swallow it first, before you can absorb the nutrients, right?
Prey learns how to avoid predator, predator learns how to overcome prey's special methods or adapts to a different target, the resultant prey learns how to avoid predator, cycle continues... that's my understanding of natural selection.
@Cerberus They need to grow rapidly so they need to get many times their body size worth of food, I think. If you're like, a plant-eating beetle, for example, you don't have time for frog-fighting.
@GraceNote Sure. But killing prey incites more adaptations than just sucking some blood out of it. And less it adapts, the less energy you need to invest in counter-adaptation yourself.
@aediaλ Okay, so you're saying they can digest many times their own size in such a small time (an hour or what is it)?
@GraceNote I suppose it depends on comparative sizes. I grouped the beetles among the smaller parasites.
@Cerberus I really don't know how fast they eat. It definitely looks like the ones in the experiment left a lot of frog leftovers, but that wasn't that long... perhaps in the wild they would stick around for a day and eat the whole thing. It's more like they need to eat many times their body weight during their larval stage, but I have no memory of exactly how much. Some caterpillars, it's like thousands of times or something, but I think those are a bit different from beetle larvae.
@aediaλ Yeah OK, but the adult beetles didn't eat less than the larvae.
@GraceNote I think there might be something in either 1.) this synergy of feeding on the frog and protecting oneself against it (not exactly sure whether that would be enough), and 2.) the beetle has enough time to digest several times its own weight in the period displayed in the video.
@aediaλ Yeah OK, but if they stick around for a long time, I'd not expect them to eat so much in an hour.
@aediaλ Mind you, I squeal in delight in seeing a giant centipede nomming and eating a mouse. It's quite a bloody spectacle and yet I still find it soooo cute
@GraceNote The actual luring and eating is so cool, but at some point, mama beetle's gonna come over and ask "are you done with your nice crunchy frog or you just gonna sit there picking at your plate all day?"
I saw many questions which have been answered by copying whole sections from e.g. NOAD.
I wonder whether there is a limit regarding the comprehension.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…