Username checks out along with the math.

I’m sorry that was your experience. I’m sure it was hard, but I’m glad you made the choice that means you’re still here to tell your story.

And people don’t seem to notice that more people came out after they could live authentically and do other jobs.

All of this Boomer nonsense about “There were no trans people in my day.”

No, grandpa, they were just too afraid to let you know it, so they lived quietly miserable lives with a socially acceptable spouse and 2.5 kids.

Every time that a conservative equates the mere existence of trans people with sex, they’re just outing their own kink.

Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker shot a cop and survived. They threw him in jail, but ultimately the charges against him were dismissed and the city of Louisville settled with him for $2 million.

This is very much the exception and not the rule.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63953359

A properly darned sock doesn’t feel any different from a new sock. And if you match the color of the yarn, it can be nearly invisible.

I think visible mending is more fun – my husband’s socks have colorful little patches that make us both smile.

If the tunnel has decent structural integrity, Musk will be long dead before he would need to pay the piper on this one.

50 years from now, teenagers in Las Vegas will tell stories about the “secret tunnels under the city.” And at some point a very expensive building is going to collapse into a tunnel and the kids will be shocked that the urban legend was real.

And everyone will have basically forgotten that Elon Musk was responsible for, and later abandoned, this ill-conceived vanity project.

I’ve since left the church and I don’t disagree with you. It shouldn’t be necessary to involve religion in providing needed services to a community.

But I also haven’t seen a lot of non-religious organizations offering practical services directly to the people who need them the most.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of great nonprofit organizations that do amazing work. But they aren’t necessarily offering subsidized daycare or affordable housing on a scale that meets the needs of the communities where they operate. And very few of them are reaching out to people in rural areas. Churches still have something of a monopoly in those places.

I think this is largely due to the fact that faith communities have more cohesion than secular groups. All of the small secular groups I’ve been involved with have fallen apart after a year or two because the bonds that hold them together are simply not as strong as those in churches.

The whole bit about giving 10% of your income to the church as a duty to God is a fantastic racket. It means that the true believers think that God is keeping a ledger, and therefore they are more likely to support their church financially. So people in churches are literally more invested in their religious community, which gives their church the resources to provide services as social outreach.

And that’s not even getting into the power structures within the church and the role of a pastor as leader (that was missing from all of the secular groups I had experience with). Or the organizing power of a group of dedicated little old church ladies.

There are a lot of elements that churches are better at harnessing. And I haven’t encountered a good solution for creating a secular organization with the same kind of strength.

One of the best things my family church did to reach out to the community was running a low-cost daycare center in our tiny rural town. It helped local families, bolstered the church’s finances, and brought new families into the church.

Unfortunately, it was an Assembly of God church with toxic teachings that I’m still working through decades later. So … straights and roundabouts, I guess.

This sounds very similar to the Kentucky online portal for teacher certification. It looks like it was made in 1996, and it functions slightly less well than it looks like it should.

Men/women - nouns

Male/female - adjectives

I think the reason male and female get equated with biology is because biologists need to describe individuals in terms of characteristics within the species.

Like, “I live with a small, white, female felis catus and a tall, Caucasian, male homo sapiens” is a weird way to tell people that I live with my cat and my husband outside of a scientific context.

But if I had two wishes this Christmas …

I am old enough to appreciate that reference.

I don’t think they know about second assassination, Pip.

Are we definitely skipping the 2028 election, then?

I don’t see any recommendations for The Lost Boys yet. It’s super '80s in the “both Coreys” way. It’s dated, but still a lot of fun.

Prince of Darkness is a guilty pleasure for me. I love religious horror, so it’s my favorite John Carpenter movie. There are some fairly violent bits, but it’s not overly gory like a slasher flick. If you’re okay with The Thing, this one should be fine.

The Endless is also religious horror, but it’s more psychological. There’s not much violence, but it’s very tense.

Little Monsters (the 2019 one) is a heartwarming comedy about a teacher who has to protect her class from a zombie apocalypse during a field trip. It’s got a moderate amount of zombie-movie gore, but it’s treated in a humorous way. If you’re okay with Shaun of the Dead, it should be fine.

Hubs and I didn’t love the movie, but we totally adore the series.

I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, “I’m sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical,” and that really just about sums it up.

Every case of a random person hiring a “hitman” that I have heard of has, in fact, been someone hiring an undercover cop. And the people soliciting the services went to jail for a good long while.

There’s a big cake mix manufacturing plant near where I grew up, and I knew a lot of people who worked there. They all confirmed that the only difference between the name brand cake mix and the store brand they made was the box they put it into at the end of the process.