Well, there’s no single, best way. Communities like this are good for crowd sourcing info, but you have to take it with a grain of salt since everyone has some degree of difference of opinion.

A local shooting club is usually going to work well because you can see the options in use, and have the possibility of someone letting you try a specific firearm.

There’s a ton of websites offering product reviews, but you run into bias and the possibility of reviews being paid.

YouTube is decent enough since there’s so many people doing demonstrations along with explanations for their opinions. As an example, if you don’t mind long winded explanations, there’s a channel called hickok45 that’s this old dude shooting guns and talking about them in a realistic way. The problem with YouTube is that it’s YouTube, and that means you don’t know who you’re monetizing. That isn’t a big deal overall, good info is good info, but there’s a good degree of overlap between the right wing and firearm information, so if that’s an issue, it takes a lot of work to avoid individual channels that are jerks.

Ideally, a gun shop would be able to guide your purchase as well, and some do a great job of it. But they’re selling a product, so they have an incentive to lean to profit over good info to a degree, so that grain of salt is needed.

I personally prefer a mix when I’m thinking about buying something new/different. I have a range I go to that “rents” guns, and the three shooting clubs I’m in are great for in person discussion. But online resources like this community are also great, and you’ll have access to more opinions, and might get niche bits of advice that you won’t find unless you have hundreds of people involved.

Good to know that they’re that effective!

That doctor lied.

It may not be every person every second of every day, but it is way too common to pretend that “doesn’t everyone” isn’t accurate enough

Tbh, it’s a little exaggerated though.

Yeah, taurus has a habit of poor quality control, and hipoint is essentially a gamble on whether or not any given trigger pull will do more than exercise your finger, but it’s still better than nothing at all. Not better than other more reliable options, but still.

The 22lr bit refers to a very common caliber round. It is, however, a fairly low powered round, and isn’t a big bullet at all. Despite that, if you are using a firearm that shoots it reliably, I would argue that it has a place as a defensive round (it definitely has a place in hunting and target shooting).

A lot of what matters if you’re shooting under pressure is your ability to hit your target reliably. A 22 isn’t going to be a one-hit drop unless you either get lucky or are calm enough to be very precise in your aim (unlikely even if you’ve trained under pressure, even at the distances that would matter for the statement in the post). But it is still better than many other options that aren’t firearms, and it’s still better in specific cases where the person may not be able to handle anything with more power.

Firearms are like cameras. The best one is the one you have with you. Should you pick a more capable brand, or caliber? Yeah. But if you’re unable to afford or reliably hit a target with other firearm options, and you need a potentially lethal weapon, then you use what you can, and just practice enough with it to maximize its potential.

If anyone passing by has one of those brands, and it’s giving you trouble, try different ammo until you hit on one that’s reliable in it. Even hipoint cycles some ammo reliably, so you go for what will feed correctly for a full mag.

If you’re shopping still, and one of those brands is your only affordable option, try a revolver from taurus. Revolvers are pretty much dummy proof as far as brands go, so the usual issues aren’t going to apply.

Don’t expect either brand to last for decades of regular shooting, but they’ll get the job done short term.

Yo, IDGAF what you’re doing, if you don’t stop to pet a dog that wants petting, you aren’t worthy of the term human.

Ah, dammit.

If people had any idea how often being even the least little bit kind to someone in that situation can give them the hope they need, they’d be a lot kinder.

I bounced at a few gay bars. You lose track of how many kids are finding the first moment of acceptance they’ve ever had. Or the ones that linger as long as they can because they don’t have anywhere to go home to. Or the ones that are at the end of their rope, out at a bar because they need something resembling human kindness to make it one more day.

It’s better than it used to be, but there’s still plenty of people out there afraid, ashamed, or alone with no idea of how to keep going. Not just the kids, but adults, even old farts like me. There’s people my age that still haven’t come out at all, and more that don’t feel safe or ready to come out more publicly. There’s people older than me that have stayed in the closet longer than I’ve been alive.

Your get into this kind of situation, you do what you can. That’s all you can do.

If it swims, it’s a fish

Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

Yup, best keyboard I’ve ever used. They made slightly different versions over the years that fit my hands as well, but none that lasted the way those do; mine is still fully functional.

Some of us write books too :)

Fwiw, and I don’t know if it was intentional or not, it’s embarrassed and wielder, not imbarrest or wilder.

The vibrator of slicing.

This is a knife with two saw-like blades that move back and forth, allowing enhanced slicing of cooked or raw meats.

It gives advantage on all intimidate checks, with a +2 if wearing fishnets and/or high heels

It’s kinda weird to wait until the last minute to ask if someone else can come along on a planned outing.

But the rest? I dunno. Looks like a pretty standard mixup.

Dude, I am happy as hell for you that it took this long to experience one.

Considering how rare it is for anyone to pay enough attention to the complex and difficult processing needed to feed an obligate carnivore a vegan diet without fucking it up, I’m going to call bullshit on a vegan being allowed to have a cat. If you believe that strongly in whatever it is, just don’t have a cat instead of screwing them up.

Even a dog is dubious, because again, most people can’t be trusted to make their own dog food with meat and not screw the animal up. The extra steps to make it a vegetarian diet is beyond most people, and a vegan diet is harder to manage. So, you know, pick a companion animal that doesn’t eat meat at all, you’ll all be happier.

It isn’t the diet itself that’s the problem. It’s humans being fucking morons and thinking they can handle the job when they can barely handle picking their nose. It’s like the idiots that feed their dog grapes, raisins, and chocolate because “it hasn’t hurt him any”. Yet is the word they forget to add.

And, as shitty as it will seem, vegans aren’t smarter or more reliable than anyone else. If anything, the kind of zealot that’s going to try and feed a cat vegan instead of just picking good foods that are sourced well are less capable of using their brain properly because blind faith is a sign of stupidity.

Instrumental metal is what you’d search to get where you want to be. There’s plenty of bands that don’t have vocals at all, and even more that do instrumental tracks here and there.

Thing is, you’ll run into a pretty broad range of styles under that heading since a lot of sub genres are defined by vocals and/or lyrical content. But instrumental is a sub genre of its own. It just gets defined by the lack of vocals rather than any distinct sound like the way thrash is going to have that “thrashy” vibe.

Edit: Animals as Leaders is pretty much the go to recommendation for instrumental metal. They run closer to prog than death, but so do most instrument only bands.

It’s about methodology and motivation, really.

Narcissistic abusers tend to things like gaslighting more than insults, or pushing the victim’s buttons to make them seem unstable to get sympathy/attention. It tends to be about manipulation over direct abuse, though there is direct abuse sometimes.

An example would be a parent that constantly criticizes their child indirectly, by comparing them to “bad” kids, and then saying how good their child has it because some parents wouldn’t put up with whatever imagined flaw is present.

Not that a narcissistic abuser never does direct abuse, they can and do. It’s just that they tend to worry about appearances, so they reserve it for limited use. Like, the kid that makes a mistake in public and then gets beat at home because they made the parent look bad.

Nothing new to add, but since crowd sourcing answers is more reliable when you have more of them, I figure it’s worth it.

As everyone before this said, it isn’t a perfect compatibility, so you can’t just grab any random kit and be certain it’ll be 100% right. But, there’s a decent chance it will be, or that you can improvise things enough to get it to work long enough to get the exact right bits.

Biggest problem I’ve run into over the years is flappers not making a good seal, and the pipe not fitting well. The flapper is harder to deal with, but the pipe can usually be made to work with a gasket cut to size, long enough to get a better one at convenience rather than having to run right back out.

Joke question: jeez man, why you gotta make the post all about you?

Serious question: have you engaged in narcissistic abuse of anyone?

Jfc, that’s where I got mine!