It’s absolutely gross. I literally think about it every time a Boomer socially pressures a handshake with me, and I try not to touch anything else until I can wash my hands or at least get some sanitizer. Idk if any individual is guilty of it, but enough strangers are that I’m not taking chances.

Public men’s restrooms make me not want to shake hands with anyone. The number of men who walk out straight past the sinks without stopping is alarming and disgusting.

Somehow everything the Democrats promise takes until very close to the cycle after they’re elected until they even talk about it. Then, of course, they need your votes again so they can do the thing they promised the first time. Then (Insert Needed # of Dems here) will have some problem with it so it falls through and Dems lose the next cycle because of some reason that is the voters’ fault.

The first suggestion is not a common thing at all. But the second is reasonable, I had a friend growing up born on Dec 26th so she celebrated her half-birthday instead.

TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm

I have a strong feeling I do too, inherited from my mom (both of us self-diagnosed). I also appreciate you calling it a syndrome and not a disorder. It’s only a “disorder” because society decided to only accommodate one type of circadian rhythm. Humans have needed people on night watch forever, my money is that this was an advantageous phenomenon.

This is me. I’ve built enough PCs both for myself and my siblings to recognize the value in hardware that’s been purpose-built and tested by people I trust more than myself. Plus ongoing software and firmware updates I don’t need to manage and a form factor I don’t think I could match.

I have a feeling the RAM shortages are going to fuck us all over on price, which might keep me from buying one right away. But it’s gonna be tempting for sure.

Agreed, taking on the responsibility of caring for a pet and giving them the best life you can is a situation that requires a firm yes from all parties. Especially with how expensive everything is these days, pets are not cheap.

If you’re calling a business and leaving a voicemail they may not always have easy access to the number that placed the call either. It’s stupid, but it happens. And even if they do, it’s confirmation for them that the number to return the call is the same.

My lone suspension in high school was exactly this. They even gave me a longer suspension than the bully who had been verbally harassing me for six months, progressed to threats of physical violence, and then acted on that physical violence. But because he didn’t leave any physical marks on me and my one punch in reaction gave him a massive black eye, I got punished more. He even started choking me afterwards. Great fun!

That bitch never bullied me again though.

Good home coffee doesn’t have to be expensive! Moka pot is the way to go, IMO. Been using the same one I bought like 8 years ago for $30 every day. I do replace the rubber gasket every once in a while, but it’s still very cheap on the whole.

How did I never know that 666 in Roman numerals was just descending letter values starting with D? That’s very cool, and makes me wonder if that is part of its origin.

This is the most damning evidence of all! When you become more aware of how your autism affects your perception, it’s easier to spot in others.

I have really high justice sensitivity, and your description of your perception changing as injustices were borne out from their actions feels a lot like how I would react. I don’t think you’re wrong at all, but I don’t think your wife is either. It’s a very hard situation. I don’t regret cutting or limiting contact with my far right family, but I would have a hard time doing that with my wife’s family for the same reasons you’ve laid out.

I promise I’m not trying to be dismissive, but do you think you might be autistic? I ask because I am and I struggle with very rigid thinking on how I should react to the consequences of people’s actions that I believe were blatantly foreseeable.

I struggle with this very same issue in my own family. I’ve already gone no contact with my older sister who went full Qanon during COVID, and I barely have a relationship with my Trump-loving grandparents anymore. That relationship is a little laden with religious trauma too, so might not be totally comparable to your situation (I still have to vaguely pretend to be Christian around them even though I’ve been staunchly atheist for twenty years).

I agree it’s not mentioned much, nevertheless it’s a dogma that’s used to oppress people both within and without the religious group. IIRC most of it is either Old Testament law or Pauline letters. If it’s important to you, I can try to find verses to back that up.

I find it odd that right after a comment talking about not shying away from contradictions in the bible, you deflect in this comment by focusing on what Jesus says and that an absence of mention in that is meaningful. That’s a very narrow section of the bible. It’s not even the majority of the New Testament. It’s also the only one supporting this:

overwhelming themes of love and acceptance, of not judging, of having grace, and conclude that this issue merits such insane and unacceptable behaviour

I cannot disagree more. Those are relatively minor themes of the Christian Bible. Again, really only coming through in the gospels. The Old Testament is filled to the brim with violence, oppression, sexual assault, slavery, child murder (especially by Yahweh), and loads more unsavory content. Very little love and acceptance. The New Testament has those themes in the gospels, then a lot of judgment, oppression, and dogma in the Pauline letters that informs much of modern Christian doctrine, and then some fever dreams at the end when someone got a little too into Kabbalah.

I would argue the way modern Christians use the bible is much more in the spirit of the text as a whole than what you describe for yourself. Your version is infinitely better, and we wouldn’t need to be having this argument if more people thought like you, but I think it’s just not true that the bible is a book of love and acceptance. By weight, it is much more a book of violence and hate. In line with the Canaanite war god that started the whole thing.

I’m someone who was raised Christian, learned a lot about the Christian Bible and its historical context, and is now very much not Christian because of that.

All of this comment feels like someone laying a lot of groundwork to justify cherry-picking opinions. It’s about as meaningful as the catch-all excuse “God works in mysterious ways” when people are confronted with the problematic parts of Christian theology.

If the Bible can’t be trusted, which it seems you agree about, then any use of it to justify hate and mistreatment is fundamentally flawed. Do you give this impassioned speech when you hear Christians use the book to justify their oppression of others? These days, particularly queer folk?

I, for one, am not particularly interested in deriving any part of my morality from the flawed “word” of a hateful murderous war god.

Everyone knows all celestial objects send a barrage of personality beams to greet each baby the moment they exit the womb.

This is exactly what my friend would say! Wikipedia is a genius example to use. That upper section is mostly nouns, not complete sentences, so it’s just kanji that are mostly readable to people to understand Traditional Chinese characters. The の character is a grammatical particle (written in hiragana) indicating that 最大 is modifying 都市, to give largest city.

And then all the “curvy” characters in the body of the text are the hiragana carrying the grammar of the sentence. You can understand the nouns and verbs since they’re written in kanji, but the grammar surrounding them is in hiragana. That’s why I thought it was odd for the other person to say you rarely encounter written hiragana. You really can’t write a complete sentence or much more than a single word without it.

I wouldn’t say you rarely encounter written hiragana. It’s in practically every sentence because, as you mentioned, it carries the grammar of a sentence. Particles, conjugations, auxiliary verbs are all written with hiragana.

As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with “those weird characters everywhere.”