Women/female bodies basically stop growing entirely about 2 years after menarche (first period), regardless when that hits. And once menarche hits they only grow another 1-3 inches, typically.

For some girls, myself included, menarche was around 9 years old (the historical normal age of menarche was around 15 years, as far as we can tell, and that age has been going down in modern history) meaning I didn’t really get a chance to grow before my body stopped being able to do so. I have not grown since I was 12. Had I been able to delay puberty by a few years, I may have ended up average instead of 2 standard deviations below average. On the plus side I can wear kids stuff sometimes.

Male puberty doesn’t work that way quite as dramatically, since puberty includes growth spurts through the early-mid 20s, but eventual adult height for men is still based on the height they are when the growth spurts start.

Here’s a really surface level resource that explains further about female puberty if you are interested in learning more.

https://www.familyeducation.com/teens/puberty-sex/do-girls-stop-growing-when-they-get-their-period

Despite being cis myself, I wish I had the option to delay my puberty a couple years. I stopped growing at 12, and am very short. Even another 2 inches would have only put me in the “almost average” category.

It’s something that doesn’t harm anyone and allows kids to choose another aspect of who they want to be as adults. I’m here for it.

This is a big part of why I don’t nap anymore.

I was napping on the couch one time and I started having this lucid dream about meeting up with someone… idk it’s kinda fuzzy now, it’s been a long time. Anyway it was one of those super emotionally charged dreams, even tho I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually know the person.

So I started trying to wake myself up. What was happening is that I was waking up… only to find I was still asleep and get returned to that same scene. Dozens upon dozens of times. I could feel my actual body uncomfortably on the couch, unable to move, but my mind was stuck in this reoccurring dreamscape… I’d do things like intense exercise to check my pulse, breathe in water to see if I drowned, check clocks and text for consistency… anything to confirm I was still sleeping so I could try to wake up once more.

It gave me weird feelings for a while after, not just about sleep, but it made me feel weirdly about being awake. Being stuck like that, knowing I was asleep and not able to do anything about it… I still lucid dream sometimes, but I haven’t practiced in a while, and never naps.

Yeah fair. I don’t have many options here, unless I want to pay 2-3x as much as a normal grocery (and I think probably zero options that don’t donate to conservative shit, realistically). We only have piggly wiggly locally, and those are so freakin expensive for almost everything (probably because they know they have a truly captive market in the people who can’t go that far, and everyone else is pushed there by sheer distance to the next option - if you run out of sugar, you’ll pay the extra $2 to save an entire hour) The closest real grocery store is 20 min by highway, and it’s also not very good.

I’ll keep that window trick in mind, thanks! Won’t work for baked-in-situ, since that’s all timer based, but I’m thinking that’s the full source of the failures anyway (it rises, but it’s pretty dense and then collapses a bit. My slices no longer look like Batman, but they still fall a half inch or so during baking… I’ve had to tone down the yeast, which alters the flavor and texture I’m sure)

Anyway, it’s cheap enough that I don’t mind trying a thousand iterations to find the lazy method that works, even if that does include just using the dough setting and transferring to my silicone bread pans. It’s fully edible, great for croutons, it’s just dense and a bit overly sweet most of the time. I wish I had the brain for fully hand-made bread, but I’d never remember to do the next steps on time to have it turn out properly.

Most people actually get paid either weekly or every other week, rather than monthly. So it really still won’t match up properly.

Most people here just intuitively understand how our pay/bills system works, because we are so accustomed to it. I’m not saying this to be flippant or anything but we have basically two types of standard employment job. We have hourly workers, who typically can tell you their hourly rate, but won’t really know what their take-home for a given pay period will be, due to inconsistent scheduling, tips, whatever, so using the whole year’s income (a number you have to use for taxes anyway, so you definitely know it) makes sense. Then you have people who have fixed hours or who are paid salary, and they usually describe their compensation package annually, because the specific monthly amount doesn’t matter so much as having it consistently, and it’s presented to them by their employer as an annual number because big numbers feel better when all the numbers are pretty small overall.

It makes adequate sense (in an “it functions well enough” sort of way) when you live in it your whole life and are used to it and nothing else, but I can see it being mighty confusing from the outside.

Oh hey, bumfucksville is right down the way from me! I feel your pain. Everything got wicked expensive super quickly, and wages suuuuuck, especially if you aren’t in/around Madison or Milwaukee. Even kwik trip bread has gotten wildly overpriced. I think that’s currently sitting around $5 for 2 (just a few years ago, used to be $1/2) And their eggs, used to be $0.99/12, now almost $4!! (I haven’t even looked at a regular grocery for those things lately, can’t afford them.)

I’ve started making my own bread. I have a bread machine I got used decades back for $20. It’s not very good bread yet, and I’d probably be better off not baking it in the machine, but it’s nearly free and stupid simple, so whatever. And if I can get my city to permit me for chickens (which they do, thankfully, up to 6, as long as your neighboring houses are either more than 100 feet from the coop, or they agree that it’s fine). Due to a company warehouse sharing my lot lines, I only have one neighbor, and I think it’s maybe more then 100 ft from where the coop will be. I have a (quite large) compost pile that will be included in their run, for them to scratch in and eat bugs, scraps, and mushrooms from (I added some leftover blue oyster spawn to the pile this year to help with the breakdown, since it’s largely sawdust cat litter, and for future chickens to eat), so I think they will end up being great nutrition for fairly limited cost.

Never thought I’d be the type to keep town chickens (we had a dozen growing up in the country, so I know exactly what effort is involved), but with costs being out of control, here we are.

There’s a lan/vr arcade near me, has like 40 super high end gaming rigs… they only get busy when there’s a big event like a non-local tournament or something. We also have multiple pinball/arcade bars, and most of them also have some retro consoles set up. One of the 4-man arcade machines at one of the places even has something like a retropi installed in it and you can pick between hundreds of games up to GameCube era, but nobody really ever plays those either. (The pinball is the draw).

Can’t see this doing a lot better, at least not in places with options.

I have a greenworks push mower and I can clearly hear the birds while I’m mowing.

It’s not the most powerful thing, but it does the job really quietly.

My girl cat’s shortened name is bean, and I often call her black bean burrito (the other one’s food name is banana, because it rhymes with Rayla)

I just say the following every time:

“Your mother would be so disappointed in you if she really understood what you were doing, wouldn’t she?

Ruining the lives of little old ladies, just like mama. She’s probably not well off either, right Mr scammer? I feel for you. Really I do. I’ve lived in poverty my whole life too, and it’s been a huge struggle just to get by. But me? I wouldn’t shame my family by scamming people just like us out of what little they have. My mamma raised me better than that. I’m sure yours did, too.”

I always get a reply meaning it definitely strikes a nerve, usually get some sort of bravado about how mama is proud because they bring home the money, and I just respond “if you tell yourself that enough maybe you’ll believe it someday, too!”.

But I don’t want to be totally heartless because a lot of them don’t have meaningful options, and I get that, and I’m not the ragey sort generally. Or at least I try not to be.