It's neither beneficial nor an inherent detriment.
It doesn't provide enough padding to matter for anything, and the dangers of it bring grabbed are vastly exaggerated (been doing martial arts and grappling in one form or another since jr high, if you count a little wresting then, so over thirty years with breaks here and there, and bearded the entire adult time).
At best, blows will slide more and cut less, but not enough to really matter. At worst, having it grabbed hurts, which can be a bad distraction, but it isn't so sturdy as to not be easy to escape. It either pulls loose if their grip is bad, pulls out if their grip is good enough, or makes sure their hands are easy to reach, and allows you an easy access inside their reach.
Every little pro has a con, and vice versa, with none of it being a deciding factor.
A ponytail is worse, and a braid worse than that.
Besides, anyone with a beard that isn't just full mountain man is going to be oiling or otherwise treating their beard. This makes bare handed grips next to useless on them. And if you're in a full contact sparring session, you'll have other options to keep it from being a horrible thing.
Seriously. I have never once been tapped out because of my beard. I've never had any idiot during my years as a bouncer be successful in using it against me. Now, I have had to trim or shave it back because of having wads of it snatched out, but that's still a very minor issue compared to the other things that can happen in a fight.
If anything, the fact that people tend to have this weird reaction to a big, bearded guy compared to just a big guy, you get in less fights in my experience outside of training or a job. Going places with a full beard, even drunks wouldn't fuck with me the way they would other big guys. There's a bit of some kind of reaction where people think a beard = tough sometimes. No clue why, just that it's often enough to have noticed.
Neither, and also all of the above, plus the list isn't long enough.
Seriously, it's not the only two options.
Sometimes cool people do drugs. So do people with mental problems. So do all kinds of other people. But, doing drugs can't make you cool if you aren't already. And you don't necessarily have to have mental problems to use/enjoy any given drug, though some drugs may change that for you eventually.
Well, yeah. Me, my wife, and my kid live with my dad. I'm almost 50.
Mind you, I bought the house from him. But the whole "can't have a family home" thing where you have to live separate from parents or grandparents to be an adult is utter bullshit. It is often easier to navigate the interpersonal stuff when it's the classic nuclear family and the kids move out to start their own, just because relationships and the work of them is exponential based on the number of people and the number of relationships between them. If you're the parent and the landlord to an adult offspring, that's two complicating factors in making things work peacefully and (hopefully) happily. Add in another generation, especially when grandparents are part of the child rearing, and shit can get messy fast.
We make it work by the framework of: my house, our home, your room.
The house itself is mine, I have final say in structural changes, repairs, etc, because I'm the one on the hook for any legal issues that derive from such. But the running of the household is by consensus of the adults, and input from the kid, with agreed on boundaries. Within those boundaries, if you're in your own room, you do what you want. The kid is aware of what the boundaries are, and that they won't be changing when they become an adult, and they'll have the freedom of choice to stay or head out, knowing there's a safety net here they can rely on.
They ever have kids, those kids would have the same choice.
Yeah, a house can only hold so many people before it becomes a chaos that isn't bearable. No matter how big the house, that remains true. But a family home is still a very valid and good choice where life makes it useful/necessary.
Shit, on my end, if the kid stays here until they're in their fifties, I'm happy as hell, as long as they're here because it works for them. They'll be inheriting the place if I get it paid off before I die anyway.
I moved back here as a temporary thing in my late twenties. Left the city I had been working in and was looking for a place of my own. My best friend came with me, and when my mom finally moved out post divorce, it just kinda worked until I had to buy the place. After that, it still worked, and the people involved have changed a few times, but there's this wonderful sense of connection and security knowing that we all have a place to be if we want it.
Man, I truly appreciate the effort and passion you put out there. That's some beautiful humanity inside you.
The only thing I can say that doesn't insult what you put out is that, as wonderful as it would be for your hopes to come true, I simply don't believe it is possible without tearing down the country built on slavery, oligarchy, and sheer hubris, and starting fresh. The system isn't just broken, it was never whole.
Again, I am so glad to see someone put that much thought into a response to my sheer disgust at the world, and bring hope into the subject. I can't debate the fine points of it without dishonoring the intent there. So I'll just say thank you.
I would say that any time a group is targeted, deprived of freedom and moved into brutal conditions, comparisons about exactly how bad a given version of a concentration camp is kinda ignores the point that they're fucking wrong by nature. They are a stain on humanity, period.
And I actually include prisons in the United States as morally equivalent since there's a disproportionate amount of minorities targeted the be put in there. But at least they had the pretence of due process, so it isn't the same thing.
And make no mistake, the "holding" facilities were indeed intended to treat humans like filth. And they're designed in a way that has led to rampant death.
The only reason that deaths haven't reached genocide levels is no active killing, it's all passive so that people can ignore or and pretend they aren't responsible for each and every death that does occur. Any citizen of the United States bears the onus of what w.e did to the Japanese citizens in ww2, and we bear the onus of what has happened, and is still happening to our fellow human beings in this hellholes currently.
What I'm doing here is expressing my disgust with so-called activists and militants that claim to want serious change, but will not risk anything to do it. And yes, it is impossible to do alone, it takes feet on the ground, willing to take any action necessary, and that's risky. Every attempt to organize a serious effort that I could find failed because nobody was willing to take action. They wanted to fuck around, have a little circle jerk about how bad it was, and go home.
We, as a population, have stood by while our fellow man have been treated worse than we treat animals. Which is pretty bad, if you've ever seen industrial farming.
One million, one thousand, one hundred, even one is too many.
Man, you can't even get people to do anything about actual concentration camps. Like, some people tried to organize raids on the places where humans were being held because they dared to cross a border, in horrible conditions, including children. Nobody did a gods damned thing. A lot of fucking noise about how "somebody" should do something, but they couldn't.
Yet another black man was murdered by police a few years ago, and people did rise up a little, but didn't have the will or stamina to do the job all the way to the finish.
Truth? The people that think they're all progressive and good are fucking complacent. They really think that they can fix the system from the inside without any sacrifice.
Fuck, you can't even get far left radicals to actually do something concrete.
Meanwhile, the far right has ridden on the coat tails of racism and hate until they've been taken over completely by the racists and fascists, but they're united enough via identity politics that they'll never, ever let go of what they've gained without an actual, real fight.
Eh, it is kinda watering down the original punk, as a term for what the original punk movements represented. But that's language. No matter what a word starts out meaning, people can use it for something else. If that new use takes off, there's nothing that can stop it other than people as a group ceasing that usage. Isn't that cool? See what I did there?
Tbh though, once a word gets used a new way, and it spreads, it's just as likely that the original usage fades away. Don't forget that words like idiot and moron had a more clinical jargon usage originally.
Living languages love shifting. Humans are sort of like birds with words. We collect shiny ones and play with them.
The various _punks and _cores are just a current example of playing with words.
As far as disliking or resisting that kind of appropriation, it can be frustrating. Anyone that was a punk back in the day would likely sneer at some of the _punk iterations, possibly calling anyone using them a fascist (and if you've never seen the show The Young Ones, you really should just so you can see an early version of the caricatures of what punks, hippies, and such were. Real life punks and hippies were a much more diverse and interesting thing, but less funny).
My advice as a fellow old dude that knew some of the old school punks? Just shrug and smile. Change is inevitable, might as well just roll with it.
It does get stuck in there. Just don't make the mistake of going out in public until it fades lol.
I had an NPC during a table top rpg session that was my excuse to do my foghorn leghorn voice. Spent all afternoon doing that voice, and couldn't stop when I made a beverage and snack run.
I already have a southern accent (technically a mountain accent, but that's quibbling), so hamming it up can get absurd lol
Hell, be an rpg hero and make it a lending library to your actively playing associates.
The only parts of my collection that I don't lend out are the absurdly difficult to replace box kits. Even then, I'll make copies of the material. My kid's d&d group plays 5e, but the DM has borrowed some of my 3.x books for ideas, and has (with full supervision because I'm a little protective) had access to my spelljammer box (before they redid it).
Besides, I may end up running a game again. Most of my regular players have expressed interest, and it's only scheduling that keeps it from happening. Shit, I might even do a game with the original rule materials some day, the way I used to do ad&d short games (a few months of a story, or breaking out a module) when we were playing 3.x
