southsamurai

Gotcha :)

The biggest one is called epididymal hypertension. Aka the blue balls. It’s a real thing. While it can’t cause injury, and it isn’t the end of the world, it hurts lol.

The process of holding off ejaculation builds up the pressure that causes the pain. Given enough time, it’s not a matter of if, but when it will happen.

There’s the difficulty that part of arousal is mental. In theory, you can go indefinitely. In practice, you can run into limits because you’re losing interest. You just lose the erection entirely.

That, in turn, can lead to what I’ve heard called “sad cock syndrome”. Again, part of arousal and sex is mental. Your head game isn’t just about oral sex. If your mind isn’t present and engaged, the junk isn’t going to last. You can end up where not orgasming, or not ejaculating without intervention can become a mental block of sorts. Your subconscious gets the idea that sex or masturbation isn’t going to pay off soon enough, so it ends up just deciding to opt out.

In other words, it can end up where you accidentally convince part of your mind that getting an erection is a waste of time. Yeah, you’ll still get erections when asleep, and even orgasm then. But when awake, the sad cock refuses to crow.

Now, I’ve never had that happen myself. Nor have any of the guys I know that can do all this. But I have heard of it happening. In general, the process of learning to control your breathing and the related meditative skills gives you the inner balance that your subconscious won’t be that separate from your intent. But not everyone spends as much time on the inner growth as they do on the bare minimum to achieve their sexual goals.

Tangential to that, you run into issues with partners. Masturbation, you can go as long as your skin can take. But when you’re with another person, lasting too long is a thing. Not everyone enjoys hours of sex. Certainly not every single time. Some can’t handle even an hour of actual penis in body sex before they’re sore, or rubbed raw. When that’s the case, it’s wise to have also figured out how to accelerate orgasm (which is easy enough since you’ll array already know how if you paid attention to your arousal stages while learning to delay. It’s just using the muscles and breathing to generate the kind of spasms of orgasm under control and then letting them spread from there once the right phase of arousal is present).

There’s also a bit of a transitional phase sometimes. You’ll be coasting along, doing the muscle control parts, but because you aren’t used to it, you kind of wear them out. It’s like doing a bunch of bench presses and then your arms turn to rubber. The muscles just nope out until they recover. That means you’re there, hard and ready, but you can’t orgasm or ejaculate because the muscles down there are exhausted. That goes away as you develop stamina with them, but there were many times that happened to me lol.

Well, I’m going to approach this as friendly as possible. But you need to be aware that a lot of what you said in your post is just bad thinking, and there’s no way to answer it without making that point. It may feel like an attack because it’s essentially all saying that you’re wrong, but that’s not the intent. The intent is to guide you towards healthier thinking.

First, leagues are all in your head. They always have been and always will be, so long as where you live allows people to date/marry freely. Like, if you’re somewhere with a caste system of some kind where you literally aren’t allowed to be with someone of a different caste. I’m not talking about simple social pressures.

It is true that some people think in terms of leagues. They have their idea of what league they’re in, by whatever criteria they have, and they’ll make their decisions bases on that.

But that has nothing to do with you, or me, or anyone that chooses to ignore the fuck out of that kind of stupidity.

It is also true that attraction within your sexual orientation isn’t something you can choose. It is, however, something you can change. I’ll come back to that in a sec.

First though, our attraction to people within our orientation is not the same as orientation. Full stop, no bullshit, it isn’t something that is even remotely debatable at this point because there’s just too much evidence of it being the case. Being attracted to men, women, both, and (most likely, though there’s a lot less understanding of the whys and hows) neither is something that happens before you are born.

It cannot be changed, period. The most that can occur is someone realizing that their orientation isn’t as simple as they thought it was, then accepting that new awareness. Example: a gay dude may eventually realize there are very limited situations where he may be sexually attracted to a woman. This isn’t a change in his orientation, it’s simply a greater awareness of it.

So, please do absorb that and in the future avoid comparing your preferred looks/social status/whatever to sexual (or romantic) orientation. It’s just going to cause you problems, and in a way that will make it harder for you to find help with questions like this.

But, southsamurai, you say; how is it possible to change the rest? And, why did I have the attractions I have if it wasn’t a choice, but it’s changeable?

That’s a big hurdle to get past. Seriously, it’s hard.

Our ideas of what is and isn’t beautiful/attractive are formed before we even have the brain development to be attracted in any real way.

Now, there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to do in the way of explaining how I came across this all because it’s been in pieces over decades. I can’t link you to studies and publications because a lot of it came pre-internet on paper. So you’ll have to dig into it on your own if you want to connection or disprove any of this. I’m too damn old to do free reports, you dig?

Part of attraction is ingrained. We humans have a universal preference for two things) symmetry and adherence to the golden ratio. The Golden ratio is a little number that represents an ideal relationship between objects and their size. For example, if you look at someone’s ears, the ratio of them compared to their face width. The closer that ratio is to the golden ratio, the more attractive that face will be.

The symmetry is usually left/right, but it applies to other things too.

Now, you’re born with that level of preference. Even babies prefer looking at faces that are more symmetric, and closer to the golden ratio

But that says nothing at all about any of the other features.

So, what about things like hair and eye color? Where do our preferences for that kind of thing come from.

We learn it. Our exposure to other people when we’re very young influences it the most. We form our ideals of beauty by seeing our family, our neighbors, and eventually our teachers and peers. This all happens without conscious thought. It happens before we have the ability to even realize it’s happening.

It can even be formed inverted, where we reject some traits because of those early exposures. As an example, let’s say your aunt is mean as fuck. She’s blonde, so you end up not liking blondes. That’s over simplified, but that’s the idea of inverted beauty standards being formed. It doesn’t have to be that severe though.

There’s another aspect where familiarity is more likely to generate attraction. What you see most gets laid down as safe and constant. So you’re more likely to end up attracted to the familiar on average. It isn’t as universal as other aspects, and it can be inverted too, but it’s the norm. People tend to pick faces that resemble their early childhood exposure as being more attractive than otherwise.

Which means that if you’re surrounded by all blondes growing up, you’re more likely to find blondes attractive. Again, it can be inverted where you reject the familiar, and prefer everything else (which is supposedly about preventing inbreeding).

So, by the time you hit puberty, you’ve got this set of templates in your head that say “pretty”. Any person you meet gets placed against that template, and the closer they are to it, the prettier you think they are.

Okay, so how can we change that? If we start out only attracted to dwarf albino Basque women, we’re kinda SOL if we can’t change our standards of beauty. There just aren’t that many matches in the first place.

We change it the same way we formed it. We expose ourselves to variety. Given enough time, it will happen anyway. But you can speed it up by exposing yourself to images of other “types” in a controlled way. Get on the internet in a relaxed setting, with some comfort foods, or have a drink, or smoke a joint, or all of the above. The point is to set yourself up to be relaxed and feeling good. As you look at faces that don’t match your current preferences, you’ll be building up new layers of association.

This doesn’t apply just to faces. Works the same with bodies. Into super buff ladies? Do the same thing while looking at thicc ladies, super skinny ladies, or whatever, and you’ll eventually expand your tastes. Perhaps not to the degree that you’re as attracted to a skinny lady as you are to the gym goddess, but you’ll find that if you actually find a skinny lady and interact with her and it goes somewhere, that it will actually end up being your new preference, so long as you’re genuinely interacting with that person.

You can’t force attraction. But you can change your overall range. If you then act on that expanded range, and you get enough of those wonderful reinforcements like kisses and hugs and the holy grail of cuddles, your brain gets a massive dose of chemicals and positive experiences that rewrite everything.

But, how far does that go?

As far as you’re willing to take it. Truth is that even someone massively deformed, so that they aren’t anywhere close to the golden ratio or symmetry can be attractive to anyone. No bullshit, no being idealistic. Our brains are perfectly willing to ignore those facets so long as there are positives that counter them.

You ever see someone objectively unpleasant looking with someone that’s traditionally gorgeous? It happens. If you’re willing to abandon preconceptions, you can find anyone attractive. It’s all a matter of having those positive interactions that generate the right brain chemicals.

Leagues are imaginary. They’re lies we convince ourselves are true.

But, southsamurai you asshole, I’m ugly! How the fuck does that help me?

Well, you have to be able to interact with people in a way that generates those good feelings. The way to do that is to not treat people like a goal. You don’t think of them as something to gain or achieve. You don’t think of them as something at all. You discover who they are, while being a decent human being.

Part of that means abandoning entirely any concept of leagues. You have to eject and reject the concept that a person’s value is in their attractiveness at all. That means for yourself as well. If you’re thinking of things the way you are in your post, you have zero chance with anyone because you’ll only be capable of surface interactions. You could find the hottest model in the world, and get with her, but you’ll eventually lose her because you think of her as a hot model instead of “Jessica, this lady that is awesome”.

I promise you, if you abandon the concept of leagues, if you cut off the idea that “hotness”, beauty, sexual attraction, is important to long term happiness, you’ll be more attractive to everyone. You’ll have more friends. You’ll have partners. It may take longer to find a partner the more you diverge from symmetry and the golden ratio, because you have to encounter people that have gotten past the idea of looks being the center of attraction. But you will find them.

One of the great secrets of dating and sexual “success” is that the more you chase it, the less you’ll find it. The act of looking at other people as a goal to be achieved makes everything you say and do less likely to be attractive. At best, if you fake it well enough, you’ll fool people long enough to become someone they regret.

So, there you go my young homie. The collected knowledge of half a century of living, loving, and looking like a sasquatch while doing so.

When people say “work on yourself”, they rarely give useful advice beyond that. They’ll talk about maximizing your appearance, staying clean and dressing well, exercising, whatever.

But the stone cold truth is that none of that matters. Assuming we don’t get cancer or run over by am elephant, we all end up wrinkled, with saggy skin and aching joints. Ending up that way alone is horrible. You want another wrinkled, aching, saggy person with you as close to the end as possible. Looks ain’t shit. Looks don’t keep you warm at night.

I get what you mean.

But I meant that if they aren’t using Facebook to keep in contact, then they’re was no point in them being connected.

Lmao! Nice catch.

It’s is the same material

Afaik, the standard orings are exactly the same material as in standard orings. Obviously, you can get stuff made of other materials, but your average black rubber oring isn the same material, no matter where you buy it. And I know for a fact that in the early days of body modification, when people were making their own plugs, they used orings from a hardware store. There weren’t any specialty ones at all.

Now, over the years, there arose more decorative options, which often required a change in materials. Can’t make glowy orings out of the same rubber, you dig? But the typical ones you find on mass produced plugs are ordered from the same places that the hardware store ones get made.

I’m not saying that all plug makers order from the same places, just that when you’re churning out thousands of plugs, you either make your own orings, or you’re ordering them from somewhere. When that somewhere is also mass producing their orings, you are going to end up ordering what they make unless you’re ordering enough to merit them setting up another production line for your needs.

Again, afaik, there isn’t a piercing specific oring maker that’s selling to plug makers. It’s all coming from the same suppliers in China for the most part.

The caveat: been over a decade since I was hanging out with people that were serious about body mods enough to be making their own stuff and ordering supplies in bulk. Shit could have changed since then. I doubt it, but if anyone that’s currently making plugs on a large scale says otherwise, they’d know better than I do.

Eh, kind of.

Truth be told, it’s a lot of fun even when you’ve got maybe two lines (hence the kinda lol).

The program I tried out was very relaxed. The lady in charge kept everything focused on doing a good show, with the players that were there. So even noobs, an experimenter like me that just wanted to try it once, and the ones there just to avoid boredom after their kids went to college all got to be active parts of the play.

But I’ve got friends from that, and some of the stories I’ve heard made me realize how lucky it was she was in charge.

If you show up prepared, do the work, and don’t do it half-assed, you’ll be fine though. Worst case, they don’t have anything for you to do on stage, so you end up in the crew helping out.

For me, it was all about trying something I’d never done before. The director knew that, and gave me a role fitting for that level of interest, then took me up on my willingness to play gofer and move heavy things. I had a ton of fun, and the show ended up well attended.

That’s essentially how I used fiction Facebook back when I still used it at all.

Didn’t accept friend requests if it wasn’t someone I actually wanted to maintain contact with, and would remove anyone that wasn’t in contact. Too damn much bullshit to sort through otherwise.

Thanks :)

It’s genuinely nice to know someone gets something out of it

I’m not sure I can.

Reason being that you have to start paying attention to your arousal stages. I can’t see you, and am not willing to watch a stranger masturbate on cam, so the best I can do is to link to the Wikipedia on Arousal cycles and advise you to go very slowly.

See, a lot of what happens during the plateau segment of arousal is involuntary. Not all of it though. More importantly, you can kinda hijack some involuntary actions of the body by changing semi involuntary activity like breathing. You can’t underestimate how much you can do simply by using breath control

Controlling your breathing influences heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, digestion, all kinds of things that we can’t just change by thinking about it. But, because we can control our breathing, we can change things indirectly

Then, when you start paying attention to how evert part of the arousal cycles feels, rather than just enjoying it, or trying to get to orgasm as the goal, you start connecting to the things you can control directly as well as being able to apply breathing and meditative techniques to influence the involuntary parts.

Take as an example the spasms of the pelvis that occur during orgasm. Those muscles can be contracted voluntarily. That’s called a kegal exercise. Doing those exercises is one part of the process. As you learn to do that, you also learn what the precursor sensations are. When you’re approaching orgasm, you’ll feel those muscles start to “tingle”, for lack of a better term. It isn’t actual contractions, it’s the muscles getting increased blood flow, and the nervous system priming them.

That signal is just one that you have to not only learn to identify, but learn how to both stop and eventually put on hold. Stopping is easy enough, you just contract them voluntarily. That’s one of the ways people delay ejaculation in the first place. If you’re getting close but your partner isn’t, contracting those muscles and not relaxing them puts a stop to the incipient orgasm for a while. With enough practice, you can delay orgasm and ejaculation almost indefinitely (with caveats, which would be at least three paragraphs and nobody likes reading on screen like this, so I won’t add stress to my fingers doing it lol).

That single step allows you to eventually learn how to identify and control the triggering of the prostate and testicles that leads to ejaculation. Then, you can learn how to disconnect those triggers from the orgasm itself. They aren’t the same thing, but they’re linked via the nervous system.

That link is what allows you to use breath control and meditative techniques to isolate them and hold one or the other back.

Usually, what happens is that you’ll hold off ejaculation and enjoy the orgasm. Sometimes without ejaculating at all. But, you can do it the other way, where you’ll hold off the general orgasm but still have the release of semen. If you look up “ruined orgasm”, you can see that the two aren’t perfectly synced in the first place. Just by ceasing stimulation, it’s possible to ejaculate but miss the burst of pleasure that accompanies orgasm.

Doing it voluntarily, under control means that not only will you ejaculate without orgasm, but you’ll maintain arousal, keep your erection, and be able to keep going without the hypersensitivity that occurs post orgasm (insert when you nut but she ain’t stop meme here). The thing is that unless you’re one of those guys that cam ejaculate and do so again quickly, chances are that you won’t be able to also enjoy another ejaculation with orgasm later. Doing it the other way around, by delaying ejaculation but experiencing orgasm, you end up being able to have multiple orgasms and then still enjoy ejaculation with orgasm as a finale.

Some of the methodology of doing all that is part of tantric sex practices. Indeed, that’s where anyone interested should start looking. It’s the easiest path to learning the sex specific aspects of breath control and body awareness. That’s compared to learning it as a general meditative practice and then applying that to the sex part of things.

It is also much easier to learn all of it while masturbating rather than during sex. Even if you’re having sex with someone that’s practicing their own tantric goals, and is willing to work on yours, there’s a delay between you sensing an event, saying something, them hearing it and then altering their activities. It’s a split second between the sensation and them stopping, but that’s how long a trigger can take. You can go from on the edge of transition into orgasm to orgasm in maybe a quarter second.

Even if you’re receiving oral, and they pull off entirely, there’s still a good second or two before they’re off. With vaginal or anal stimulation, you/they may not be able to withdraw in time, and it is very difficult to stop that orgasm when you still have someone wrapped around your cock, no matter how still they are. It’s still stimulation. Until you get the process down, that stimulation is going to progress the arousal cycles. So masturbation gives your the most ability to totally stop external stimulation in a split second.

Another benefit of all of it, for some people, is what’s called a hands free orgasm. It’s possible to use nothing but muscle control, imagination, and practice to have an orgasm (almost always with ejaculating, it isn’t realistic to separate them when you’re using the same techniques and muscles to get there as you would to separate them) without your genitals being touched by anything but air. I’ve never been able to do that reliably though.

You see what I mean? This stuff isn’t friendly to forum comment communication. It’s not even book friendly because so much of it is internal, and even someone in person is going to struggle to guide you without also participating. Like, you can feel a lot of the events as they occur if you’re touching someone’s genitals. You can feel some of it internally if you’ve got a finger in contact with their prostate. Mind you, I’ve never taught another guy; that’s based on my partners wanting to understand the process when they don’t understand how I can have an orgasm but not ejaculate.

Tangentially, women are surprisingly resistant to the idea sometimes. Some entirely refuse to believe that not only can men separate the two, but that we can have multiple orgasms without ejaculating.

I guess three summary is that you’d have to find books about tantric sex to get started, and combine it with knowledge of the arousal cycle in yourself

Amen to that!

Oh, that goes in waves. You might notice an uptick in Nicole Kidman pics floating around too.

Pretty much any “sex symbol” that does a new movie brings them up in people’s minds. This leads to the “actress name nude” search queries, where people are either finding three scenes they used to jerk off to, or discovering that this now middle aged or older lady did nude scenes or photo shoots when she was younger.

Those get circulated and looks like a trend.

Right now, Curtis in particular is in the news for several things. The fires going on near her, and they most recent movie she was in are both being talked about in various outlets.

It’s nothing unusual to find upticks in nsfw posts about an actress’ older nude appearances on reddit for sure. I don’t doubt it happens elsewhere too, though I block the various nsfw communities that do images and gifs here on lemmy.

Did you know that you can orgasm without the associated spike in heart rate? Takes some practice, but you can even separate ejaculation and orgasm, and still have both.

It’s alllll about how much you’re willing to practice. It comes down to breath control combined with awareness of each stage of arousal and managing the two.

It’s a little bit of both, imo.

The original poem implies that in context.

And, in general usage, it’s done as both of them.

It’s also true that lies snowball and become harder to keep track of. It is also true that inexperienced liars tend to weave over complicated lies thinking that it makes them more believable. So an inexperienced liar is going to start out complicated, ending up with a series of lies that are impossible to keep straight.

You ever spend time around a kid that’s going through that phase of lying about everything, even stuff there’s no need or use in lying? It’s always convoluted and they’ll end up contradicting themselves, sometimes in the same lie.

The poem pretty much shows that idea perfectly. Well, iirc it does, I haven’t read in a long fucking time lol

Do you have any examples of “leaks” happening? I couldn’t find any reports of there being any kind of broad scale pics being found and released.

Jamie Lee Curtis is a difficult example in the first place, since she’s done plenty of nude scenes. So I can’t really search her name with the usual terms that would come back with new released images to find any articles pointing to any discovered media of that type.

Tbh, it’s an almost impossible subject to search on because unless you use “nudes” in the query, looking up photos of famous people is going to give unrelated hits, but if you do include nude, you end up getting nothing but the sites that host celebrity nudes. Which, I guess, is what most people search for. But I have no interest in seeing random famous people naked lol.

Well, it’s on my mind because I’m missing it lately. Haven’t had the stamina to do anything in weeks.

And, tbh, the degree to which I’m able to do it is way below what I used to, and what I wish I could.

But martial arts. I mostly miss the weapons based stuff nowadays, what with getting too old to hit the ground and get back up fast lol. But I miss that stuff too. Up until fucking covid, I had been back training as my body and that of my teacher’s allowed. Then, for while after covid, I was teaching a small group of kids. When that had to stop because of school needs (except my own kid), I switched to mostly solo stuff.

But between my body deteriorating, having extra stuff to do that’s higher priority, I just can’t do it like I want. Most weeks, if I get in a total of an hour fucking around with something, it’s a good week this last year.

Back before Christmas, I had some time where I could use my stamina for that almost exclusively, and it was fun. Just fucking around, doing knife and cane practice a few times a day, maybe twenty minutes at a go. Then I fucked my back up doing something unrelated lol. Mind you, it’s always fucked up, but I pulled a muscle on top of that.

And that’s the sucky part of passing fifty. Even ten years ago, I would be better at this point, and I was disabled then too.

Could be worse though!

Tbh, you’re better off long term working a variety of areas. If you just work (as an example) peds all your career, you’ll have missed out on a lot, as well as being subject to more limited opportunities if you leave a given hospital/facility.

You get enough time in across a few specialities, you have a better chance of finding an ideal work environment. Plus, lower risk of burnout.

You’re right, it isn’t fair. But if administration has failed to fix the issue, and you’re being treated poorly by coworkers in one unit, switching wards is the only real answer unless you want to leave the hospital entirely.

But, I gotta warn you. The kind of gossipy, drama loaded environment you’re leaving isn’t an exception to the field of nursing. That’s the default. There’s too many opportunities for boredom, and way too many stressors for a group of nurses and related staff to not engage in that kind of mindless bullshit. That’s how even the best end up coping with the realities of the job often enough that it’s often engrained into the culture of nursing no matter where you go.

You gotta make this about you improving your skills, experience, mental health, and keep your eyes on the long term. Forget the other people, forget politics. Do the job, become even better at it, and you’ll eventually find a place that’s right. Or, you’ll decide it isn’t worth it, and either leave nursing nursing entirely or leave facility work.

That was a bright idea

Well, for fucks’ sake, the last thing I pulled my chicken at costco, I got arrested.

I mean, salt and pepper go on everything. Butter too for most things.

But there’s flavor in there, that’s just the grits. And that’s true of both real grits, aka hominy grits, and cornmeal mush that some folks call grits.

Man, this is one of those times I wish I could cook online. I responded to another comment about what I taste in grits, and that it could be the kind of grits that is messing things up for folks. I’ve never had anyone turn down seconds of grits, and I do them up just with salt, pepper, and butter. And that includes damn yankees ;)

I just want everyone to be able to enjoy that flavor I taste because it’s just so fulfilling. All earthy and bready. I love me some potatoes too, but grits have way more taste for me.

You ever had hominy grits? Some people think that cornmeal is grits, and you’re dead right about them having a very flat taste. But hominy grits? There’s a bit more to them. Yeah, you gotta salt and pepper them, maybe some butter, but they have this earthy, kind of bread like taste.

The process that turns corn into hominy changes it a lot.

Mind you, cornmeal mush is pretty tasty by itself, but it’s a flat, one note taste.

I’ve always been a little befuddled by folks saying grits only taste like what you put in them. I mean, I know not everyone tastes things the same way because our tongues, noses, and brains process things differently. It just kinda amazes me how many people can’t taste the richness in grits. Makes me sad for them too, the way I’m sad cilantro tastes like soap for me lol.

Legit, if anyone comes across this, try picking up hominy grits, and not the instant kind. Cook them up with just salt and pepper, with butter at the end. Give that a try and see if it can taste that earthy depth or not. I know the instant grits aren’t as good for sure, and I’d hate to think of anyone missing out on that yummy goodness.

Fwiw, hominy itself is also worth trying at least once.