Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Oh damn! Wet leg and tiny desk! This is gonna be great :)

Thank you for sharing

Edit, after having watched it then scrolled all the way through lemmy. It was great! If you’ve never seen or heard wet leg, this is a solid point to get introduced to them. Their unique sound is well showcased here.

If you’re an established fan, they were on point, and obviously excited to be doing that kind of performance, so the energy is really high and satisfying.

Into a pool? Yeah, it really isn’t that hard. Plenty of people manage to get in their first time after verbal instructions and make it short distances.

You won’t have great form, and you’ll probably wear yourself out fast because of it, but as long s you know ahead of time that there’s some basics that even a dummy can do to stay afloat while you rest, you’d be fine.

Wouldn’t even take six months. If there was a book written with basic techniques, described well, you could absorb that in however long it takes you to read.

Panic would be the barrier, not knowledge. But knowledge can sometimes prevent panic, so it’s totally doable.

I mean, fuck, I know people that have started out with way more complex movements with nothing but reading up and done well for a first timer. If there’s illustrations, it’s even easier.

Majestic as fuck!

It really was a great era for CG.

The problem is that to get the look of chalk, you have to use something that applies at least close to the same, and nothing that would be waterfast or similarly durable is going to apply the same. Like pastels, they’re basically in between chalk and crayon in the way they transfer to a surface, but you can tell at a glance that it isn’t the same effect. The livers lines look more structured, fill in the valleys of something like cement or concrete more than chalk. And asphalt isn’t much different.

So you have a few choices. First is to go with chalk and a fixative. If you’re going for something artistic, that’s your best choice. It won’t last forever, but it’ll look like chalk while it lasts.

Second is to use grease markers. They’ll still smear, but should last through rain at least. It won’t look like chalk, but it’ll still have a similar enough vibe to maybe carry it off. You’ll have a limited palette unless you make your own, but you can get similar effects with something like cray-pas. It’ll be expensive as fuck though with pastels and such, that stuff isn’t meant for big projects.

Then there’s temporary marking paints. Like the guys that mark power lines use. Won’t last forever, but it’ll take some wear before flaking off the surface. They won’t look like chalk at all, but if you’re doing something more like hopscotch lines, it’d be a better pick imo.

It really comes down to your project. Like, I used to do fairly frequent sidewalk art on my own sidewalks with neighborhood kids. They’d do their thing, I’d do something a bit more complex. There’s sidewalk chalks that will hold up being walked on lightly for a few days as long as it doesn’t rain. Better than your typical chalk you’d use on paper or a chalkboard at least. Crayola was actually pretty reliable in that regard, but the colors were all primary or pastel; so you’d have to pick up anything else as regular artist’s chalk, which is a thing at most hobby and art supply stores.

But if I wanted a section to last longer for some reason, I’d usually make my own parafin or beeswax blocks. A little cheap pigment (like tempera powder as one example), some heat and molds, you have a slightly crumbly chunk of color that won’t get rinsed away in the first rain. It’ll melt and make a mess in the summer though, so you won’t want it where you’ll walk on it much.

Tempera paint actually does decent for very temporary but more wear resistant sidewalk art. Once dry, people can walk over it a little without it being wrecked. Rain makes it run though.

Damn, I just realized I miss the fuck out of those days. Come home from work, and there’s a gang of kids waiting. Break out the boxes of chalk, and everyone is just making happy pictures all over the porch, the sidewalk, even the street if there were other adults to run interference with traffic. There usually were, but not always. Rule was that if there weren’t two adults that could manage traffic, the street was off limits.

Since it kinda turned into a thing, there were days when not only my house, but houses all up and down the street would have suns and houses and stick figures under trees all over the driveways and such.

Anyway, old man memories aside, it depends on what you’re doing.

Damn, I don’t have an answer, but that’s a fucking great question. I had just assumed it would be the case, but never thought to ask about it.

Understand that most meals requiring this kind of etiquette tend to not have finger foods on the same plate as loose veggies or rice. So you’re talking about a really niche thing.

I was taught that, other than bread, no food should be held in the hand while eating other food, and bread should only be used in that way with specific dishes, not as a general thing.

So, first option should be another utensil. That’s what they’re there for. It’s unusual that you would have only one.

If that isn’t present, then you would use another piece of food. You would ideally use a dry food, like toast or bread, but a breaded piece of meat served as a finger food would be acceptable if the dish is served without other utensils. It would be weird, but not unheard of.

However, you shouldn’t finger the food at all. If the food isn’t a finger food itself, and you’ve been provided a utensil, you would normally expect to just leave what can’t be scooped up with said utensil.

All of that said, the best etiquette advice possible is: when in doubt, slow down and watch your host. There’s really no situation outside in common etiquette where eating slowly is a bad thing. And, doing as one’s host is doing is equally universally acceptable. So chew well, placing your utensils down on the plate and engage with the other people. Dinner parties of any significant scope are not about eating as the primary goal. The dinner is the setting for social interactions. So, unless the host or most of the table are just shoveling it in, you have time to estimate the accepted behavior. And, if they’re shoveling it in, there’s your answer.

Aight, just a bit of background first.

Back in that era, there was a hip-hop subgenre called miami bass. There was an offshoot of that called booty bass. The difference is largely in the degree of rap over the beats, and the nature of the beats. This only matters because Miami at that time was pumping out some serious club bangers. Shit you could really dance to, but would also rattle windows blocks away when played loud.

Da dip was booty bass and a dance song. Like the twist, the macarena, the watusi, the tootsie roll, and other dance fads, the songs were meant to be danced to by the very dance the song was about.

Da dip is basically a modified grind. I put my hand upon your hip (literally), then I dip, you dip, we dip. Dipping in this context is better shown than described.

It’s a dance simple enough even drunks, and white kids, can do it; but it’s able to be elaborated on by more advanced dancers. Taken to an extreme, it runs fairly close to dirty dancing ala the movie of the same name. It’s all hips and grinding of groins. In it’s simplest version, it’s a couples oriented version of a line dance.

And yes, you would indeed see people doing da dip. Not as popular as just straight up grinding on someone, but it definitely showed up when the song played, and when similar booty bass tracks would. It required less coordination than the tootsie roll or the butterfly for sure, so it saw a short degree of popularity.

You pluck the hair. That’s it.

If the hair was still in place after whatever injury caused the scab, then you pluck it, and the root comes out, it means the follicle was intact.

That in turn means that, assuming the motion doesn’t remove pieces of the scab, that it’s just like plucking any other hair.

That’s not uncommon at the edges of scabs. People will pull away a scab, and the hair gets pulled out because it was partially buried in the scab. But you’ll also see hairs poking through scabs at times.

That’s it. Hair comes out, end of story.

I’d take it!

Not too bad.

But I was fucking around while trying to learn to ride a bike. Went too fast, hit a bump on a dirt road. Went over the handlebars, slid face first a few feet into a ditch.

Now, like I said, I wasn’t badly injured. It was all just scrapes and bruises. But they were deep scrapes from my forehead all the way down one side of my face, then my chest and belly, plus along the inner side of my right arm from trying to stop myself.

Every scrape was filled with dirt and gravel, which had to be picked out. Then it all needed flushing out. So by the time it was all done I was high from endorphins and crying and screaming, looked like a shredder had beaten the shit out of me, and was both throbbing and burning along the entire scraped section.

Then I had to go to school like that lol.

Gotta be possum. That shit is musky

Look everyone has tried it, ain’t so shame in the self suck game

I dunno, Beatles in either the white album or Sgt pepper era would be amazing.

Specific performance, the nirvana mtv unplugged might be a better option.

Then again, there’s a dozen performances at Woodstock that were nuts. Hendrix at that show? Fuck me, that’s a peak music experience.

I dunno man, this one is hard.

Fuck! Robert Johnson! Any performance ever. The recordings from back then are not the best possible audio, and you know that man could tear up a room. That’s my final answer.

It’s both, and the ratio between them. Or that’s what I ran across back ages ago when I looked into it.

The fuck are you smoking? Russian grown weed, I guess

Not all of them, no.

Most of them don’t do those nice, sturdy bubbles at all, but they’ll get close. Iirc, almond milk comes closest…

It matters in some recipes whether or not the milk substitute will have the right properties. Say, something like a mushroom cream sauce, none of the substitutes work because there’s just not duty enough fats. Milk gravy is hit or miss, with almond being the least bad choice iirc. American style biscuits, soy and almond do okay, but need extra acid to get a good rise like you can with buttermilk. But they sub in fine for regular milk in terms of texture and taste.

Stuff like that. Blowing bubbles is a quick way to test a fake milk. Or even types of cow milk, or milk from other animals. Goat milk, as an example, is so close to cow milk in terms of structure it’s an easy substitution if flavor isn’t a factor. The powdered milk you can get for long term storage or baking is no better than the usual non dairy stuff when reconstituted, and not even as good as skim milk despite being the dry parts of skim milk.

For good bubbles, you need fats. And they need to be similar enough to milk fats, so there’s a high degree of parity between a bubble test and cooking outcomes

Little homie needs to lay off the 'nip if he’s going to pursue a modeling career

If you’re wanting to do stuff like festivals, you’d probably want to find a clown school.

But doing it as a volunteer, all you really need is a suit, a face, and skills. Juggling, balloon making, card tricks, etc. Then you reach out to facilities and work out the arrangements for a performance. Hospitals can be a tad restrictive about who gets to do shows for pediatric wards, so you’ll likely want to try nursing homes first and build up a local rep.

You can also try to hook up with local sideshow type troupes. Clowns aren’t always welcome, but you can usually pick up some skills if you’re honest about it. The fire performers won’t teach you, but jugglers and magicians will usually share some basics as long as you aren’t trying to shaft them with it.