southsamurai

It really is magical.

I read to my wife sometimes, since she enjoys it and it seems to help her migraines for some reason.

But it doesn’t have to be a partner even.

Back when my body betrayed me and I had to quit working, i was depressed as fuck. My best friend would sometimes just sit and read to me. We got through the entire narnia series eventually. Ngl, it was part of what kept me alive through the early stages of it all

Read to your homies, folks

There’s a problem in answering this. We don’t know what the actual cause is, and we don’t know if it’s acne, a reaction to products, ingrown hairs, or just irritated skin that mimics one or multiple of those. So, be aware that you’re going to see responses that may not address the real problem but is still good in general, even if it doesn’t lead to a fix.

So, I used to be a nurse’s assistant. Shaving people is part of that job sometimes. Back in the day, one of my teachers was even the crazy type that pulls the whole “shave a balloon” thing. Which, while entertaining and slightly useful, doesn’t actually teach what it takes to shave a person.

Anyway, shaving is always a skin irritant. It’s a matter of degrees. Most of the time, if you follow the core principles, that irritation is going to be below the threshold where it’s noticeable for more than a few minutes at most.

Number one rule is that sharp razors cause the least irritation, and are less likely to result in nicks. Doesn’t matter what kind of razor you use, it has a limited range of uses before it needs sharpening or replacement. A straight razor, you strop every time you use it. Safety razors and most of the disposable head razors (no matter how many blades) expect to get three shaves at most before you start feeling the difference.

Yeah, that’s less than what most guides will say. That’s because you can definitely get more shaves in before it turns into a problem. But you’ll feel a change before it gets to the point where you’re losing the ability to slice smoothly and it turns into damaged skin. Most safety razors, assuming your facial hair isn’t absurdly thick and dense, expect to change the razor after five or six uses. Some of the multiblade heads can stretch a little more up to maybe ten shaves total, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to shave myself or anyone else with something for that long.

See, sharpness is only the first factor. Cleanliness is another. As you build up soap residue, microscopic cells, etc; the razor not only cuts more poorly, it’s likely growing bacteria for you. There’s ways to prevent that. Make sure the razor is as clean after use as possible, then dry it thoroughly. Some folks recommend rinsing them in something like barbicide, but I tend to see that as causing extra work for diminishing returns, so I don’t recommend it when this comes up.

If your razor is sharp and clean, you’ll minimize irritation as well as minimize and bacterial growth afterwards, which is what pimples are, and why ingrown hairs look like pimples. It’s bacteria that’s gotten part way into the skin and is being walled off and killed. The pus is dead microbes and your own immune cells (basically, this is the quick and dirty version because this is about shaving, not skin infections).

Next, you do your prep. The skin itself is going to respond best, overall, when it has been exfoliated gently, and is both warm and as hydrated as is reasonable. So wash your face first, with warm water. Not cold, that’s going to cause issues.

So, back to prep. You don’t need to scrub, just a warm washcloth gently washing. If you want, use a gentle facial cleanser like cetaphil. But the key is that freshly moisturized skin is less prone to irritation than dry, and it kinda plumps up the skin temporarily, making it less likely to pile up ahead of the razor, which increases irritation and the chance of nicks. There’s a reason you see barbers wrap the face in a hot towel sometimes before a shave.

I forgot to mention it before, but if you’re shaving sporadically, and the hairs are more than stubble, it is usually worth it to trim before shaving. Razors do better with shorter hairs, even straight razors.

From there, you apply your lubricant of choice. Some things are better than others. However, any soap will do in a pinch, and some lotions can as well. Even hair conditioner or shampoo will work okay.

My personal choice is aveeno shave gel. My skin is hyper sensitive to chemicals, and it’s one of the rare ones that doesn’t irritate me just by contact. I don’t shave any more, but it’s what I would use for myself, and when I had a choice for my patients, it was my number one pick.

If you’re feeling frisky though, picking up a shaving brush and using it to apply whatever you decide to use helps a tiny bit. It kinda lifts the hairs and gets the product of choice well lathered. Totally optional though, the difference really is tiny as long as you’re working the shave product onto the face (or other parts) well.

So you’re set up. You’ve got either running water or a basin with enough water to rinse the blade as you go. You’re lathered up, your blade is clean and no more than five or six uses deep.

Technique.

The first tip is to never start with a down stroke. By this, I mean coming into contact with the skin while moving the razor in the direction of the cutting edge (unless you’re using a straight razor, where you can do that). You place the razor against the skin with the head moving away from the direction of the edge. This reduces nicks, and partially lifts the hairs for the down stroke.

You move in small sections, smoothly. No back and forth scrubbing. Go at a steady, slow pace. You want to clear maybe an inch to an inch and a half with each stroke, then gently either restart as already described, or move the razor backwards slightly above the next section.

The key is that you don’t want to shave a given section more than absolutely necessary. Each pass over the same section is going to increase irritation. The reason you limit the size of each patch is that as you move the razor, your elbow, shoulder, and wrist are constantly shifting. Even with an adjustable/swivel head on a razor, this shifts the angle of attack, and where the most pressure is focused. You want the pressure even as possible, so doing smallish patches lets your body “reset” and keep the positioning right

So, that’s how you get started.

As you progress, the razor is going to load up. The shaved hairs and whatever lubricant you’re using will be pushed into the blade housing, or be building up on a straight razor. So you rinse the razor off every three to four strokes with safety or disposable head razors, and every stroke or every other with a straight razor.

The more clogged up razors get, the more likely they are to kinda skip over the hairs and skin. This increases nicks and irritation more significantly than we tend to realize. Thing is, you can’t rinse too much. So if you want to rinse every stroke, feel free. When I still shaved, I usually did it in the shower and rinsed the razor every stroke since running water does it easier and faster.

As you progress, keep an eye out for signs of irritation. If they start showing, reduce the pressure you’re using, and slow down. Let the razor do the work, not your arm.

We now look at hair orientation. You’ll hear about shaving with or against the grain. Hair can grow at an angle. Indeed, if you ever grow a beard, you’ll find that the angle your hair grows in may change according to where it gets “pulled”. The cheeks and neck tend to start out growing straight from the skin when we’re young, but the pressure on the skin as we sleep or move shifts them into angles, with the cheeks usually growing towards the neck, the throat growing variably as it nears the chin.

If you shave with the direction of growth, you minimize irritation, nick risk, and ingrown hairs or “shaving bumps”. But it won’t be as perfectly smooth, every time for every person you absolutely can get baby butt smooth going with the hair (almost universally, though there are exceptions), it just takes patience and control.

Against the hair gets a closer shave faster. And, because it tends to lift the hairs slightly, tugging them out from the skin, you can actually end up with the hair not sticking out at all. But, that’s how you get ingrown hairs. When the end of the hair is beneath the surface of the skin, you up the chances of the hair “burrowing”, and you give bacteria a chance to get beneath the surface as well. So I tend to advise not shaving against the grain at all. Maybe if you’ve got a job that is highly appearance dependent and requires being perfectly clean shaven. But you’ll have to invest in more products to control the inevitable bumps.

Post shave, never, ever use alcohol based aftershave. Yeah, they smell amazing usually. Yeah, it feels painfully good. But alcohol dries out the skin, and dry skin is prone to tiny little crevices and cracks where bacteria love to set up shop. So use good products that are hypoallergenic and designed for facial use. Moisturizers, in other words. You moisturize, the skin stays plumper. It also can serve to shift the way sebum accumulates in pores, which can increase pimples, bumps, acne, and other types of infection on irritated and abraded skin.

I don’t have any current recommendations in that regard. I used to use nivea products designed for shave care, but I’m damned if I can find the exact products beyond that. But that’s the basic thing to look for, shave care products. The big name companies that make acne friendly products are usually going to do a good job with shave care stuff too.

In the case of nicks, a styptic pencil is better than swatches of toilet paper. The TP isn’t really faster, and it has chemicals in it that make it break down when wet. So, not a great choice where you’re bleeding. Styptic pencils can be surprisingly hard to locate on the shelf, but pretty much every drug store carries them somewhere, often on the bottom shelf.

I’m out of character space here, and it’s essentially done anyway, but I’m open to questions if anyone has them :)

@countrypunk@slrpnk.net @spykee@lemm.ee

I haven’t seen only fans ads tbh.

But there was a point when an average woman could make some spare cash doing it. Not enough to make a serious income out of, but to supplement, sure.

But that’s been over for years. So if they’re advertising that, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to keep their brand relevant. And I doubt it will work for long, because even the really desperate folks out there have figured out that those days are long gone. Yeah, you still run into people that haven’t, but it’s getting less and less.

Like your post said, nowadays you have to bring something in the way of a following just to get started there. It has to serve as a secondary income flow to other similar sex work, or you have to be famous for something else entirely if you want to even hope for non nude content to be worth it.

I used to know a couple of women that did okay at it, and one guy. But by “okay” I mean that they pulled a few thousand in a year.

Some of the bigger name cam models did well there, but from what I’ve heard, it’s no longer reliable for them.

Well, the comment they’re referring to is phrased weird as hell. It reads like something a hack writer would come up with for a blurb on the back of a cheap romance novel or a soft core porn movie.

Top international high-end escort. It’s just a strange way to lead off.

While I’ve heard people irl talk like that, and have seen people online do so in writing, it stood out to me too. If I was going to make an assumption based on it, I would have guessed someone trying to set up for a series of fictional posts for fun and entertainment, not shilling for something, though. But it could just be the way you think, and there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s the case. I’m prone to some pretty purple prose myself, even in my own head.

But I can’t see how this post could be turned into some kind of shilling expedition. Not successfully. That would take a sock puppet account or three to come along just begging for a link to the escort friend’s page, which would be so absurdly obvious on lemmy that it would turn into a running joke in a hot minute.

There once was a man from Nantucket
Whose dick was so long he could suck it
He said with a grin
As he wiped off his chin
If my ear was a cunt, I would fuck it

Well, I would give you the answer, but since I snapped back as soon as I read the post, I’m now responding what has been 650 years later for me, and I’m too fucking old for this shit a second time. I bypassed getting snapped back this time by just not reading the post and coming straight in to comment.

Now, what will happen if I read the

Allergies.

I’m allergic to bee venom, so I developed a phobia of them after my second sting at about 5 years old.

It took me until my thirties to start working on the phobia.

I reached a point where I was able to encounter bees, wasps, and hornets without fleeing or freaking out. I even caught a bumblebee that got into the house a few weeks ago and released it. Well, me and my kid did, it got into a weird corner and it took both of us to get it captured without hurting it.

But, back in my early twenties, I once ran away from a bumblebee that was doing absolutely nothing, leaving my patient standing there confused.

Those two events encapsulate my bee experience perfectly lol.

As it stands, as long as a nest of hornets or wasps isn’t in my yard, I’m okay with them. In my yard, if there’s nobody willing to relocate them, they ded.

Other bees and bee like critters are all good, though I would call the beekeeper that I know if a hive set up shop in the yard because he has promised he’d do so. And I know him because he was a total bro when I randomly called him and explained I was working through a phobia, and could he help with a few things. Dude went so far above and beeyond it was crazy.

Not only did he bring out single bees for visits in those little queen boxes, he did so with it taking a half hour each way, and turned turn gas money. Then, once I was chill with holding the box, he bought a freaking suit that would fit my sasquatch ass, just so I could visit his hives. Said that since he had started lifting, it was an investment in his success in getting beefed up, but dude is all of 5’7, and even though he does lift regularly is still way smaller than me, and always will be.

Anyway, point is that it eventually got to the point that I could visit his hives without the suit, though not up close. way closer than I ever thought possible, because it was close enough that bees were in the air around us. And I had my epipen in hand. But still.

That’s tangential to what you actually asked, but I do view flying, stinging insects with a different emotion than anything else. Bumblers are as close to zero reaction as it gets because they’re just so chill. As long as I see them instead of them buzzing me before I can track them, I can sit and watch them.

Honey bees, it’s number based. Once there’s more than a few, I can’t track them all, so I tend to get nervous and exit the vicinity calmly.

Wasps and hornets, I do not fuck with. That clenching in my guts when they’re nearby is not ever going away, I don’t think. But, I don’t run screaming like a child any more.

But other than that, my likes and dislikes are fairly broad. Like, I don’t even hate roaches and mosquitoes, I just don’t want them around because of health risks. I can see the beauty in them, I can appreciate them without an “ugh” factor. Compare that to seeing up close pictures of hornets where, as much as I recognize their beauty, it’s a horrifying beauty.

Now, how much I like something is pretty damn arbitrary. I love tigers, but lions are just cool. Why? No fucking idea. I like reptiles, but it’s not an emotional thing. It’s “oh, cool, a snake. So, what were we talking about?”

Dogs and cats, I don’t even factor into this kind of thing because we’ve coevolved with both for so long that they’re part of us.

But, chickens. Fucking chickens! We have some now, and I love the things. Growing up, the chickens I knew were all food production. Small scale, a dozen or so layers that could be used as meat in a pinch, plus some being raised for meat. So they weren’t exactly socialized with humans. If you weren’t bringing them food, and weren’t bothering them, they DNGAF about you.

But, our first one was taken in young, as a sorta rescue. So he got socialized part way. Then we got a hen that was hand raised, and very young, and she very much enjoys being with her people, so she’s much more personable with humans in general. And even the half feral hen that has joined us is a delight in her own way, despite not wanting contact directly. They’re all dumber than dammit, and messy and loud, but that’s part of what’s great about them too.

Two years ago, at this point in 2023, if you told me that the best part of my evenings would be cuddling on my couch with a chicken, I would have assumed you were tripping balls. And if you told me I’d be willing to die for a chicken, I’d have told you you were an idiot. But here I am, perfectly willing to run into the yard and take off after a coyote because it was fucking with my rooster. Which, I forgot the damn shotgun as far as that goes, which is also a good indicator of exactly how upset I was. Ran right past the thing, broke a hinge on the door and was as close to running as I get. Had to spend two days in bed recovering from screwing up my back during it, but I’d still do it again.

I fucking love my chickens, and that love has spread to other chickens. The one feral rooster that runs around used to annoy the shit out of me, but now I look forward to him, my rooster, and the little bantam rooster at another house serenading everyone. When the ferals pay a visit, or the flock from the other nearby house that keeps birds get loose and show up, I’m watching and smiling, even if I don’t go join them.

Ahhh, I made the error of forgetting to note that it does vary by location. Thank you :)

Aight, you seem to want to ignore the legal benefits, so I won’t mention that beyond saying that it is a hell of a lot easier to get married than to figure out all the paperwork needed to duplicate it, and not even have the exact same outcomes, just the majority. The tax thing, for example, you can’t file jointly if you aren’t married, no matter what else you set up (edit: in places where things like common law marriage aren’t recognized)

The biggest thing is the experience, imo. The memory.

Now, me and my wife went to the JoP, with our kid and required witnesses (my best friend and his husband).

No fancy reception, no major party, just went home and said to my dad “we’re back, no problems.” He said congratulations, and went back to watching TV.

Total spent was about a hundred bucks, including gas. And the memories of it are wonderful, we cherish it all, and we’re happy as hell we didn’t do anything else.

Wedding ceremonies, however, are expensive once you go beyond that bare minimum. That’s a cultural/sociological thing where the needs of the individual and the culture mesh into not only believing it necessary, but beneficial.

And, for the people that want it, it is beneficial. Ceremonies, rites, rituals, they serve a purpose beyond the legal or official status that comes with them. Weddings are as much about community as they are the couple. It’s the union being both recognized and celebrated at the same time, even when it’s a secular ceremony rather than religious.

Don’t get me wrong, the money spent on empty bullshit surrounding weddings is absurd. But the actual wedding, where the community stands around the couple is incredibly powerful in terms of validation, even when it’s the license that really matters legally. You can have ceremonies without the license; I performed several of them back before same sex marriage became legal. Those events were important, and doubly so because they had no legal standing.

I think that’s what you’re missing, that there’s a massive difference between two people shacking up and marriage. When the people involved swear an oath, and/or exchange symbols of union it means something, even if there’s no witnesses, not even someone to perform a ceremony. But as you move into witnesses and an officiant, it feels different because it is a public commitment. You can still divorce or whatever, but it happened, and you can never deny that. That moment, the vows, they exist in a way they don’t if you swear only to each other.

Yeah, two people can be just as committed, and honor their commitment perfectly without anything else. But it feels different.

Now, again, I’d argue that once you start shelling out for crazy dresses and cake and niche receptions, you hit diminishing returns very quick. That’s to satisfy other things, not the union itself. It may well make people happy, but it doesn’t add anything to the underlying point of there being a ceremony in the first place. That of saying to the world “where once there were two, now there are one”.

Not that anyone has to share the valuation, but it’s what underlies the whole thing, and it has value

Aight, ima weigh in because I want to, not because I need to.

But I didn’t write my first piece of fiction for myself until I was in my thirties.

I didn’t write the first the public to read until I was almost 40.

The first two kinda sold, but didn’t. Like, I had a publisher, and it flopped because zero marketing, and mid tier writing. I never said it was good, just that I did it.

Since then, I’ve finished another novel, am partway into the sequel, have a short story collection I’m editing for self publication, and I still haven’t made more than twenty bucks on anything published.

However, like Tolkien, that first story I wrote for the public was after years of writing stuff in general. Custom fiction, little stories for individuals in my life, that kind of thing that wasn’t for me.

So, if you expect to crank your first story out at 45 and have a hit, keep dreaming because you’d need a shit ton of luck and connections. But from 45 to 50 (my age), you can get a fuck ton better, and have fans, if you choose to share your work.

It’s never too late to start. It might be too late to get good, and even if you do there’s no guarantee it’ll sell, but don’t let that stop you

Well, yeah, but you’re a DUMBASS, so what do you expect?

!it’s their user name, don’t give me shit!<

Yeah, but I’m offing myself when I hit 70, so the clock is ticking

Id say it’s the mindset of the experienced linux user that matters.

If you’re willing to tell a person, “if you run into trouble, call me”, and then follow up when they do, half the fight is over.

Most people, they try it and it’s fine, as long as the basics are there. You show them where the browser and email are, set up desktop shortcuts to important stuff, and answer questions, and they’ll eventually not even think about the fact that it isn’t windows.

But the first time they run into trouble, and you can’t give them an answer in a reasonable amount of time, they blame Linux, because they forgot how long it took them to figure out windows originally, and aren’t willing to look things up even if that’s what they did when they ran into a Windows problem.

So, you gotta play tech support for a while if you’re the one introducing them.

You aren’t going to change mindsets inside someone else in any realistic timeframe.

Yup, que

I love the typo because it covers so many things at once

Queue as in they’re lining up to do it; cue, as in that’s their cue to be stupid; and que (spanish for what) as in what the fuck are they thinking?

It really varies too much between industries to give a single answer. Someone at an insurance company is going to be doing something vastly different than an accountant, and they’ll be different from an architect (though only part of what architects do is in the office).

That being said, office work for the average worker, as in a salaried or hourly worker with a fairly rigidly defined job description, is usually going to be paperwork, even though there’s not always paper involved.

It’s taking information and moving it around, in one way or another.

As an example, one of my exes worked for a company that handles employee benefits, investments, and other services to other companies. Lets say a worker has an IRA, gets a nice insurance policy, and there’s a pension fund.

Her job is to take data from the company that contracted with the company she worked for, enter that data into the system in an properly formatted way, run calculations, then trigger the appropriate funds being moved from one account to another. No meetings unless something goes wrong. It’s all day data entry and management.

Now, before that job, she worked at a tax service under a CPA. She would get actual paper back then. Receipts, forms, and look for deductions for the client, then print out the church correct tax form, have the client sign it, then send it off. She would finish one, then start the next, all day long during tax season. Off season, she would be receiving accounting records from clients and entering them into the system of the company she worked for, and process things like withholding.

Pretty much, neither of those jobs required leaving the desk her entire shift.

Now, my best friend runs a department at a community college. He leaves the actual desk frequently. There’s meeting with his superiors, meetings with his underlings, meetings with vendors, budgeting work, orders, policy decisions, disciplinary decisions, and the list keeps on going.

My best friend’s husband was a flunky at architectural firm. When he was on a project, his job was drafting designs per specifications given to him. It required doing some oh the work, meeting with the architect, then changing anything per their decisions, or finalizing those plans. From there, once plans were ready to be used by someone to build something, he would essentially coordinate between contractors and his office to troubleshoot any snags with things like permits, supply issues, etc. So it was usually a lot of desk with work over a few weeks or months, then weeks or months barely at a desk, but still mostly in office.

Myself, I never had a long term office job. But, during recovery from a work related injury, I was pulled into the office of the home health company I worked for. My injury precluded patient care, but I was okay for light duty.

I was placed in staffing. I would roll in early, about 6 AM, and check for any call-ins. That would be employees needing to have their case covered by someone else for whatever reason. I would call other caregivers based on availability, proximity to the patient, and hours already worked. The last one was to avoid overtime unless absolutely necessary.

The software used, I would type in the name, and their details would pop up with their address, phone number, and current schedule. Same with the patient.

The first step for me was always to check the patient’s location, because that let me filter out people on the list as available by proximity before anything else, since I would have to just go down the list. I’d enter a name, check the location, and decide who to short list. Once I had the short list, I’d verify they were not going into OT, and start calling, with priority given to employees that had requested more hours.

Most of the time, a call-in would take fifteen to twenty minutes to resolve.

Once the morning run was over, it would be time for a quick coffee and come back to handle any afternoon call-ins in the same way. Have lunch, then repeat for evening/night call-ins.

During the few months I was doing it, most of the time, that was handled by maybe 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Some days it was all handled before lunch, and very occasionally by the time the coffee break was available. Very variable because there are days when folks just didn’t call in as much. And there were days it was crazy, particularly when there’d be something like a bad flu run through local schools and the parents would either catch it, or need to take care of their kids.

But, usually, the afternoons were either straight up bullshitting with the ladies in the office (not flirting or messing with, just swapping healthcare war stories), or helping with sorting out patient intake and/or prioritizing staffing for new patients. A new patient means you either shuffle staff around, hire new caregivers, or break it to the bosslady that someone is going to need overtime until the other options could happen. Since I knew pretty much everyone, I was good at figuring out who would be a good pick for a patient’s needs.

A few times, I did some of the initial onboarding for new caregivers. Get them the employee handbook, introduce them around, talk about expectations, that kind of happy horseshit.

Tbh, I liked it most days, but not as much as patient care. Don’t think I could have done it for years or anything, but as a temporary thing, it was nice.

See? Totally different daily routines and work between industries.

Yeah, there’s always a lot of flex in social movement. The harder you push, the further you get; but unless the system resilient enough to most adapt, it snaps, or it rebounds. Neither of which is a reliable form of change.

To me, once lives are no longer on the line on the big scale, it’s better to ease up and push for change gently from the bottom up rather than forcefully from the top down.

It doesn’t fix problems as fast, but once they get fixed, the populace’s inertia will serve up keep the changes as the status quo. Since the kind of changes that Francis was making were the kind that work from the bottom up, despite him being a power, I look at his changes as the result of the work already done, rather than something that was supposed to be the vanguard of change.

But, like you said, moving slow means that there’s going to be people getting ground down by the system as it exists. Even once you get past the point where people are dying frequently by way of violence or gaps in the system, there’s still going to be death, and suffering, until things change completely. But if you don’t slow down once that goal is met, the serious enemies of humane change will fight harder and nastier.

You end up with a worse situation overall by pushing until a system breaks. You get the crazies making desperate moves instead of being gradually worn away.

Are you Armstrong?

Because that’s a streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetch

Ahhhhh, my homie, delete this. Quickly. And never ask such a thing on an insecure service again.

I’m not saying I don’t understand, I do. But you gotta at least pretend to show basic caution.

Definitely an unpopular opinion!

I just ran into a mini discussion about this very subject.

My conclusion was, and is, that he was decent for a pope. Not the best human, not a great human, just a pope that was an improvement over previous popes. And I stand by that based on the improvements he did make. I suspect he maybe would have gone further if he thought he could do so and make it stick in practice.

But he never would have gone far enough to satisfy me into abandoning the ACAB theory of monotheism. You know, where individuals within the cop/Christian/Catholic group may be decent people, but they’re part of a broken, corrupt, hateful system and aren’t actively working to change that at full force, so they’re still bad anyway.

Which is a long winded way of saying that I disagree with your title, but agree with the contents of your text body, at least with the broad strokes.

But you gotta realize, if you or me are giving lip service on camera, it don’t mean shit. But if the pope pretends to be a nice guy, he can actually change minds in doing so. So I ain’t mad at a pope that’s willing to be on camera and encourage better behavior, even if he’s s dipshit behind the scenes. And he did speak for better treatment of people, and there are actual Catholics that took it to heart and started acting better, so again, I ain’t mad that he was a bit of a dick behind the scenes