Gene Splicer PHD

Or just drink every other day or keep it to the weekends? Don't really know, I've been out of the drinking game for a while... But I always did like my weekends.

I know a polyamorous threesome. They're very committed to keeping it in the family. And I know a couple that has been together for 30 years or so, and they regularly go out on each other, and then swap stories. They are still very committed to the relationship. Sexual fidelity is one thing, relationship fidelity is another. As long as the ground rules are set and respected, it's all good, I think. Fidelity is important but can mean different things to different people. Since LGBT relationships are non-traditional anyway, why do old customs have to apply?

Brink, could you move a little to the left, and turn that down a bit...thanks. Sasha there's some kind of smear on the lens, you're a bit blurry. Also you shouldn't eat so much trail mix at once. <the cabal>

I'd apologize for being so late in wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving, but I'm afraid you'd all apologize back. So, yeah.

ITS AN INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD. NOT A LIFE OR DEATH STRUGGLE FOR THE TRUTH - and this board is not one that's generally argumentative and fighty. Please let's not do fighty. Mods here aren't happy when there's fighty. Peace in our time and all that. Also - genetic damage from incest is caused by continuous inbreeding. It builds over time. Like with this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain Now THIS is a family tree you can show to your unclecousingrandson:http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/wp-content/blogs.dir/474/files/2012/04/i-ad0e60b6ff8c7bd2e3ba38183a6177b7-SpanishHabsburgs.jpg Sibling incest can compound birth defects found in both partners and/or parents, where common traits can compound - and at a much higher rate than cousin incest. The chances of genetic damage from cousin incest is surprisingly very small. After all that: kissing your brother? Eww.

You don't have to wait, even a day. Start making changes. Get a move on. No time like the present, etc. The only thing holding you back is you.

I remember you. You wore taffeta, when all the others wore polyester. A class act, you are.

I'm a big fan of the white album. The whole thing.

*affected ::runs away::

I think that large universes tend to be unknowable in their entirety, because they change/expand all the time. I know a lot about Star Trek TV/movie canon as set forth by Gene R. and the original writers, but not a lot about the books or animated series that are considered part of ST canon. Those books/fanfics/other media have to be pretty much blessed by the creators of the canon, and in the case of ST, he dead now. However, you do see cases where a writer (like David Gerrold, who was involved in classic Trek, the animated series, and TNG) will write a story or book and it will be accepted as canon simply because he wrote it AND because he's so familiar with the existing canon that he can reliably add to it without breaking any rules. In the case of Star Wars, Abrams is onboard now, so I think we're going to see the same kind of rewrite of its canon as the Star Trek reboot. There'll either be a loophole or a total do-over of the universe to fit many thousands of lens flares and pointless explosions. Also, I think we will see some more planets blow up.

Also check out http://www.kenrockwell.com - cranky photographer who reviews cameras and covers lots of photography related topics.

Nikon dv7000 with an 18-105 (kit) lens. Does a great job in "auto-everything" mode, with lots and lots of flexibility in manual. I'm still learning it but it's been a great camera. I'm mostly using it for stills and for imaging books that can't be scanned.

Reddit. It's got a big, thriving gay community, is gay friendly, and some of them are smart enough to be able to read. Someone's going to have to dig deep into the site or be a redditor to understand why, but there are very good cross-promotional opportunities there. I lack the time to elaborate now, but the essence is that in the reddit.com/r/lgbt subreddit alone, there are 76,000 people who may want to read a good tale or two. The gay subreddits I subscribe to comprise another 100,000 or so users. Not all of them read a lot, but certainly some do. Think about: Submitting an IAMA post with "we write gay fiction. Ask us anything!" A place to cross-post story updates to people that want them A place to discuss (and push people to the forums here to discuss) gay fiction and writing gay fiction. The trajectory here would be for mods here to - spend a little time learning and understanding reddit: what it is, the fundamental concepts of subreddits, posts, comments, karma, and user interaction. I would start here: http://www.reddit.com/wiki/index - how to moderate a subreddit - how to cross-promote GA on its own subreddit, pushing users here to read and contribute in the forums - how to use reddit's subreddits themselves to promote the GA subreddit and by doing that, push people here. It's a big job, but other websites have found good success by using reddit to drive traffic. It's the "front page of the internet!" There are other such public blogs, such as Metafilter, that could conceivably spike traffic here, if it were done right.

If you're at the cash register, PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE. If the light turns green, PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE. FEEL FREE TO MERGE EARLY. If you're with friends at dinner and your phone rings, YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER IT. If you're at grandmas and you feel the need to text all your friends (and your cousin over there on the other couch in the same room) while people are talking all around you, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Having a good workout at the gym? Good, thats healthy. NOW WIPE OFF THAT WEIGHT MACHINE.

New Orleans should get annexed by Australia and New Zealand. New Australorleansland. More hobbitses and kangaroos, that's what's needed there, yep.

Oh absolutely. It really is a keystone of the story. It's really important that Brad has no clue about that door for a while yet, because it shows the disconnect between both of them. When Brad finds out The Beautiful Room Is Empty, it's going to bake his noodle.

That has not been my perception of the story vis a vis Will, and you have a closer hand than mine because you're on the team, so I could be wrong, but I don't see Brad as particularly advanced in Be Rad or The Land Whore. Brad is shown in those stories as being rather small and quite shy. He's nervous and closeted, very arrogant about his wee-wee, but I don't see a lot of advanced qualities there. Did he develop early? We don't know. And that's my point. We don't have the backstory to know that information. You have a premise: I don't. My perception of Will's development level is that he's physically mature, but not emotionally. That's where the tantrums come from, and the struggle he has between his physical appearance and what he wants as a kid of 14. Mostly, he wants the freedom he can have as a person of 17, at the physical (and I think emotional) age of 14. And he's gotten that. Mostly. And all over these threads you can find examples of "Give him a break, he's 14!" or "He's only 14!" when he's being harassed, and at the same time, the expectations that he will make mature, responsible decisions as an "adult" and lots of kudos when he stands up to "the man". Even IF Will were 17 emotionally, any parent seeing the patterns of behavior that Will exhibits should be freaking out a bit. I sure as hell would.

it never stopped me either I guess my point is that there are folks looking to find out where Brad gets off bitching at Will about all his terrible habits at the tender age of 14. Which is fine. What was Brad doing at 14? Was he at church? A choirboy? Could he have been a competitive eater? Or hanging around a D & D board in nerdy clothes? Maybe he was a complete Nifty style dickhound hanging around rest stops? Maybe he and JP and Stef sat on the patio at Escorial and did shrooms and got baked and screwed each other raw. Maybe JP bought Brad a boy to play with at a party. Maybe maybe maybe. We don't have any idea what the kid was doing at the same age as Will, and I think there's a bit of an age/maturity gap in any kid between the ages of 14 and 17. Is Brad projecting his past behavior on Will and wanting to derail him from those experiences? We don't know enough to say. Maybe that's not what he's doing, though. Maybe he's looking at Will and seeing a horrible future, and wants to fix it now, before it gets really bad. Looking at it from a parental perspective (and I am drawing on my life experience with my own father here), I can see where Brad's concerns are really valid, regardless of his own history. When I was 16, my dad and I got into a huge shouting match about drugs I'd been caught with, and my dad said (and I remember this really clearly) "JESUS "GENE", YOU'RE SIXTEEN. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO BE ON WHEN YOU'RE TWENTY?" And then we got into another shouting match where I, the pillar of mature thinking, said "People kick heroin all the time" No matter what the emancipation papers say, Brad IS Will's father. The papers say that Will is completely free to do whatever the hell he wants, apparently, but at the same time, I think that Brad feels a strong obligation to Will right now, and he is being "the dad" seeing his son going over the legal line, over and over again, and his entire family is aligned against him. He's handling it badly, and that needs to change, but you can't look at Brad's history and say that it matters. Can you? Really? He's the dad. And let's remember: Brad does not know Will like WE do. We're omniscient readers. We can see Will's locked door and know there's nothing in it. We can see a bar in his house and the booze, and know that Will's not drinking much of it. We can see the reasons Will bought a house in the first place. Brad can't see any of that. He sees: Lots of sex, a "sex dungeon" (and he's been told that's what it is), he sees a stocked bar in a minor's house, and a lot of partying. It's a totally different view from ours. Brad does not have a ringside seat. We do.

"The Land Whore" ended in 1974, right? "Be Rad" starts in 1980, when Brad was 17. We have no idea what Brad was up to when he was Will's age. Unless Brad talks about it in "Be Rad" it's unwritten backstory. Fill us in, Mark, tell us from where Brad is getting his moral outrage. Edit: I am re-reading Be Rad, just because...

HUMPHRIES BROKE THE SHIP? TO THE SCULLERY WITH YOU

Ima have to read all those stories again to pick favorites see you in a week or so

HOW DARE YOU BRING STATISTICS TO A...WHATEVER THIS DISCUSSION IS. Or put another way, statistically, I got more than Will. HA! TAKE THAT, ADOLESCENT INSECURITY

Yeah, to a degree, but always protecting ourselves first. I "pass" really easily for straight, so I never got any questions or rumors about me (that I know of). But there were people that knew I were gay, just as I knew they were gay, because we did talk among each other about other guys that were "friendly". But, some had reputations or had people talking about them in pretty rough/obvious ways. Sailors like to gossip, and "who was that way" was a topic, even (especially) among the rest of the crew. Anytime it was talked about, it was with a sly look and nothing was ever discussed in front of senior crew, like officers or chiefs (because they would have had to do something about it). But make no mistake - if some officer or division head or superior officer/enlisted got wind that I was "associating" with someone in a "detrimental" way, I'd have thrown them under the bus without a thought. And the others would have done the same to me. Truthfully, I don't think anyone one really cared enough to do anything about the "gay menace", because at the end of the day, you don't care who's doing who, you care about how well your shipmates know how to put out a fire or make the ship stop sinking, or who can stage the cargo for the next unrep without screwing it up and making more work for everyone else. But you still had to be really careful about who knew, and what you did, because it was against regulations and you could go to jail or get kicked out. So, if I were to go out on liberty or spend a lot of time with anyone that other people knew about, that could be a problem, so we'd meet off the ship rather than leave together, that sort of thing, and we'd help with cover stories and cover for each other ("I saw Anthony with a really hot chick at Mariposa's. Hey Anthony, did you get any? Har har") . But generally, we just didn't associate with each other very much, it was too risky. We were all very much in the closet until the time and place was absolutely safe. Some were better at this than others, obviously. This is pretty easy aboard ship and underway, because while you'd run into each other on the mess decks or elsewhere, there wasn't a whole lot of downtime to spend with other people. It was a working ship and we worked 16 hour days, we were always getting prepared for the next underway replenishment or organizing cargo, cleaning, etc. - there weren't many opportunities to socialize all that often. And when you did, you made sure your cover stories were tight and in place. Off the ship, it was easier but could still be dicey. We went to the Philippines quite a bit so we knew the bars there, and places to go where we could meet up without a lot of questions. We always met at places where we knew other sailors didn't hang out, and you never needed an ID to get a room, so that made things easier. And there's that "don't shit where you eat" rule that we followed - it just wasn't a good idea for shipmates to get together (for sex) because...what if one of us gossiped or we got found out or one cheated on the other or...? And you're getting underway tomorrow and not hitting a port for three weeks, so you can't get away from each other...that could be a big issue. We do like our drama. Also, my shipmates weren't sexy, really, especially ones that you worked with. You saw them all the time: At work, after work, getting ready for work, eating, being assholes to each other. There were 65 men in our berthing area (where we slept), and that's a lot of farting (I mean it. We ate well) and yelling and giving each other shit. But it wasn't sexy. Also, the environment aboard wasn't sexy. A ship is a machine, and it looks like one, inside and out. Piping and wiring everywhere, chipped up paint, worn out floor tile or a metal deck. It was clean (because we cleaned a lot), but it's a machine and it looks and acts like one. It's metal beams and walls, noisy as hell with all the fans and machines around you. And it's rocking around and bouncing and vibrating. And the smells. Everything from oil and fuel to footlockers and the deck cleaning solutions (like pine sol only stronger) and the tile wax. So, not that it stopped us when we really wanted to get together, but there's no romance in it. There's a longstanding tradition among military members - especially enlisted shipmates - that unless you actually need to report or do something about a situation in an official way, you just don't see some stuff. You look the other way. Some are more understanding of this than others, though, so we'd have "allies". As I said, many of the crew just didn't care as much as the media would like you to think. Once, when I was really new on the ship, I was on liberty in the Philippines, and I found a couple of guys from my ship's department at a bar who'd obviously been there longer than I had. At the end of the night, we three headed back to the ship. These two guys were really close friends (although I had no clue how close, apparently). When we got to the top of the brow (where you actually step onto the ship's quarterdeck), you have to show your ID to the officer of the deck, usually a junior officer or somewhat senior enlisted man. There are other crewmembers on duty on the quarterdeck and the group is called the "quarterdeck watch". These two were hanging on each other, like drunks do. One of them pulls his ID out of a front pocket in his jeans, and it's not his ID, it's his buddy's. So the other guy hunts around a little and gets his ID out, and it turns out that earlier in the night they'd had a little free time and hey, he's got the wrong ID, too. Then they had to make a little show of trading them ("hey bud, I musta grabbed your ID at the bar, blah blah blah"), and one of them was really red faced. It was pretty obvious that they hadn't swapped IDs, they were at some point both not wearing pants, and grabbed the wrong ones when they got dressed. At least one of the sailors on duty knew what was up, and I got a raised eyebrow (more like a big wink) because I was "with them". When I stayed clueless (because I was), he just snickered and waved us onto the ship. If any of the other quarterdeck watch were to get "official" about the situation, he'd have been obligated to find out why these two had the wrong IDs - it's technically an infraction to be without your proper ID at all times - or ask a lot of questions about their sobriety and their activities ashore, or even give them shit about being "out of uniform". But usually, it's a lot easier to just not notice some things. Which is why the rest of the watch found something to do - the runner went for coffee, the officer of the deck suddenly found the quarterdeck log to be very interesting, etc. So the culture is "if it's not hurting anyone or impacting the ship, well..." So, yes, you circled the wagons if you needed to, but generally, everyone kept a low profile and it wasn't that big of a deal for the most part.

So, when I was Will's age, I had a fair bit of gay sex, because for whatever reason, the neighborhood where I grew up had some pretty open minded guys. Had I been "hotter", or more social, I'm sure I would have had quite a few different partners. As it was, I had a couple/three friends who liked to play, although we were pretty bad at it. "Practicing", and all that. So since I had some FWBs, I got some fairly regularly. Looking at the number of times that Will's gotten some and comparing it to my own history at the time, I'd say Will's had more sex, but not much more. We were pretty busy. I guess what I'm saying is that while Will's had more partners, it's not a given that he's having more sex than others in his age group.