volvoxvsmarla

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  • 71 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I once read a quote that said meal prepping is the perfect method to ensure that you always have food that is cold, old, and not what you’re in the mood for. And although my love goes out to everyone who does meal prep (it’s great!) this quote put into words a feeling that I always failed to grasp.

    I love cooking and I have tried meal prepping in different forms so often. But 90% of the evenings I end up cooking something from scratch that I am actually in the mood for. It feels - whatever the opposite of empowering is. My spouse is happy to eat the same meal 5 times in a row, I have a hard time even with 2 different meals in between. My freezer is full of “prepared” food that we could just dethaw and eat and it ends up being eaten by my spouse or trashed after months of me not unfreezing it.

    Like, pumpkin soup the other day! So easy to make a big batch! Efficient and fun! I make enough for 6 portions and we have delicious soup and I am so proud that I made enough to last for a couple of meals but I hate to see that soup in the fridge the next day.








  • Not gonna lie, no matter how gross the age difference is, I keep thinking about the couples from my high school (in Germany, where the age of consent is 14) where there were 12 and 13 year olds involved with 17-19 year olds. It was rare but it happened and the relationships often lasted quite a while, so it was kind of… consensual, for lack of a better term. And since I don’t know the girl or Van De Velde personally and I haven’t been there, I wanted to abstain from judging this other than on the legal basis.

    But when I read that he gave her alcohol - a 12 year old - no way. Sorry but no matter how iN lOvE anyone was or whatever, you do not give a 12 year old alcohol, unless it’s a sip of your beer and she’s your kid (saying this as someone raised in Bavaria). But other than that, no alcohol. And when you end up fucking a 12 year old - which is awful to begin with, worse since they only met - and first intoxicating her, that is just the point at which you cannot argue any kind of maturity, love, attraction, age of consent crap or whatever anymore. You intoxicated and fucked a minor. Period.

    The more details from the case are revealed the more I have to say fuck that guy. But at the same time - fuck the judges double and triple.


  • It’s 14 in Germany? Yuck.

    Why tough. It’s not like you are a child mentally by age 17 years 11 months 29 days and then BOOM birthday happens and your mind becomes mature all of the sudden.

    We assume that kids grow to adults in their teenage years. And we grant them our trust and support them to make decisions for themselves, more and more so.

    To me, trying to criminalize sex for teenagers has about the same effect as outlawing abortion. It will still happen, it will just be much less safe.

    I want my daughter to be able to come to me about questions and if she decides she’s ready to engage on sexual acts, and be able to do it at home where she’s safe and comfortable and not in a car or outside or a public toilet. I don’t want her to risk getting an STI because she is afraid of buying condoms or asking questions. Her feeling that she is “committing a crime” will not make her safe.

    I also want to point out: rape, incest etc are obviously still illegal. And let’s be clear here - sexual assault in minors is awful, but/because it is assault. There is explicitly no consent there. These cases very often happen by grown ass adults that the children know - family members or close family friends. I doubt that a 14 year old will willingly agree to have sex with her dad or uncle - no matter whether this is legal or illegal.


  • That’s what I assumed. Probably the 12 year old “agreed” to everything.

    I’ll be frank here, I remember being a teen in Germany. And let me tell you these were some horny times for some classmates. But at no point, also not looking back, would I have said any of these girls or boys who were sexually active at 14, 13 or even 12, have done so out of pressure or against their will. And judging from what I know of them today, all of them are in secure, healthy relationships and live happy, successful, and fulfilling lives. I’ll also point out that we have sex ed from early on (I remember in elementary), so at the age of consent everyone of us has put a condom on a banana in class at least once. Everyone knows where babies come from, we learn how cycles work, what different kinds of contraceptives there are. Also, just because the age of consent is 14 doesn’t mean you are required to lose your virginity at or by age 14.

    Now, you still have to draw the line somewhere. I personally don’t think it should be 18 because it’s just unrealistic to assume that teenagers won’t have sex. Or that they will only have sex with other teenagers. “Gap laws” seem sensible to me. But that’s just my opinion, and it is very influenced by the open culture and a societal distinction between kids and youngsters.

    And in this case, he is from a country where the age of consent was set to 16. In Britain it is also 16. So even if I can somehow imagine that it was “mutual”, 19 and 12 is in no way even close to legal in neither country. I don’t really know how this case has made it to court. As I said, I know quite a bunch of people who had sex before the age of consent, but they usually kept that, well, out of the courtroom.


  • I actually wholeheartedly believe in reintegration of convicted criminals in society. I also, maybe even more wholeheartedly, believe that pedophiles need to be open about it so that they can get the help to cope with their urges, and we should not be judgemental about it and stigmatize them ahead of time - the majority of SA offenders who attack minors are not pedophiles. You won’t prevent a pedophile from assaulting a minor by yelling at him for his preferences alone.

    Now, that being said, fuck this guy. A misstep? If this happened in 2016 he should still be serving his sentence and definitely not be back on the Olympic team.

    Ok, I looked it up: it happened in 2014, so he was 20 then. The age of consent in the Netherlands is surprisingly high (16), so you cannot even claim due diligence or anything. (I am from Germany and over here it is 14, and I have known a couple of 14-18+ relationships, and I could have seen a case where a German 18 year old guy has sexual relations with a British 15 year old and gets in trouble because of this.) He was sentenced to 4 years and served 1. One year for raping a 12 year old girl when he was 20. Wtf? The judges should be ashamed. And as for the Olympic team, shame on them too. This guy should not be representing your country.




  • So essentially while trying to build an anti-green house I ended up building a normal green house. But that’s actually exactly the answer I was looking for, thank you a lot! It was not so much about the practicality or whether there are better solutions but about whether I am missing something. (My other guess was that this light reflection would only work in the stratosphere to begin with.)

    I’m a millennial living in a rented apartment so I cannot/could not implement anything. But we do indeed have trees in front of our windows, we have heat exchangers in two out of three rooms, PV on the rooftop and the house (built in 1900) is painted white (apart from the roof). Needless to say AC isn’t a thing in my country. Currently we have slightly under 26°C in our apartment. And my parents have a (very white) house with what you call a living roof, that’s a great name for that which I wasn’t familiar with before. Again, thanks!


  • I speak perfect German, in fact my German is better than my Russian (which my parents taught me). I cannot say one word or read a sentence in German to my parents without the heaviest Russian accent. It’s insanely hard to turn off and I have to concentrate on every word if I want to pronounce it normally. But the default is the most heavy and cliched Russian accent.






  • No it was Japan. (I’m from Germany.)

    I was 17 and it was before smartphones and I somehow imagined people in Tokyo and Kyoto would know English but they didn’t. And then I tried to explain what I wanted or where I wanted to go with gestures and they tried to explain back with gestures but it was a catastrophe. None of us understood each other.

    I am so sorry because at some point a cook in a soba restaurant kept asking me “Soba?” and I didn’t know what soba was and it was day 10 out of 14 and I was at my nerve’s end so I yelled back in German “I don’t know what you want I don’t know what your soba is just give me that soup that I am pointing at!”

    It’s been 15 years and this still keeps me up at night 😭 I’'m so sorry soba guy. Yelling at you legit is in the top 5 things I would do differently if I could relive my life.

    (I was also still processing my first break up and it was hot af and my boobs had grown humongous which earned me a lot of stares abroad and all of this added to me feeling lost and frustrated.)