He gave a lecture series last year (put on by a crazy Christian nationalist group) about how the antichrist is actually anyone opposed to AI.

My UU ordained friend is a nonbinary activist who was in Minneapolis during the ICE shit.

The first time I went to a UU service, I was invited to a rationalist group that meets there.

It’s all of the good things about religion (ie - community. People who will meal train for you when you are in trouble, people who will teach your kids good shit) without much of the baggage.

I’m personally going to start attending either a UU or a really loosely Methodist group just for the social aspect. I think one of the failures of atheism is the lack of acknowledgment of the benefits of community and ritual. There’s not enough “third places” in the world, and churches can fill that roll quite well. Perhaps this is just my own recent near death experience speaking, but it’s good to have a community that cares about you.

Was married to someone from a billionaire family:

They had so many tricks to get out of paying taxes. There’s an amount of money you can give as “gifts” to your family tax free, there’s ways of playing real estate where you never get taxed, and they always would donate a specific amount right before taxes were due to a specific charity that aligned with their right wing wants.

They can afford lawyers to do whatever they want. I had it in writing that my ex husband and I would split our $200,000 that they had given us evenly, but then that somehow got turned into an “inheritance” for him that I had no access to (despite being there when we set up the account, and having my name on it.) My ex also maxed out my credit cards before he kicked me out (with the help of the police, who apparently have no report of helping kick me out.)

So despite having worked full time to support my ex husband while he attending college free on his family’s dime, I will spend the rest of my life in poverty and debt. (He made sure to marry me after I graduated, so of course my student loans are also all my own)

Money gives people too much power.

They do this to trans guys too. Recent hospitalization was 50/50 “she” versus “he” from the nurses and docs of course.

They refused to put me out and barely gave me pain meds while I was screaming as they stabbed and dug around to drain an abscess. Worst pain I have ever experienced was “anxiety.”

No one has mentioned special 2, 两! It’s only for counting certain things.

Do you have sources for these claims?

A well timed “ctrl w” is also very useful. Say goodbye to your ELO…

As a teacher, I love control-shift-T.

“No Mr, I wasn’t playing Geometry Dash!”

I agree with your complaints about Skyrim - it’s a lazily made game and the romance is pathetic. It’s possible to have well written romance in the series with the present game mechanics - see companion Vilja and the spectacular Ruined Tail’s Tale mod series (for Oblivion).

But there’s gotta be something notable in that since 1992, if you wanted to play a black female character, any mainline Elder Scrolls game has had that option, and it’s always been no big deal. Heck, one of the few games that forces you to play a set character, Redguard, despite being mechanically shit has some of the best character writing in the series and fully fleshed Cyrus out!

I’m not arguing it’s perfect. Morrowind’s bisexual character was originally only intended to harass female characters, but when they discovered they had messed up during play testing, they left it in because they thought it was fun.

The kinds of representation you are wanting are things I’ve only really seen in the Sims or indie games (as a trans guy, I think I cried on the character selection in Dream Daddy).

You are right in that it’s nice to have more representation of different bodies, but the games have always been able to adjust to that with mods. Not that Bethesda should get credit for modders work - they do tend to rest on unpaid volunteers fixing their games for them - but there has always been a community of people making those games represent and include them.

I think the Elder Scrolls and Sims series both have some of the most diverse fandoms of any game series for a lot of these reasons. A lot of my initial exploration of my gender identity personally was in those games - allowing myself to play as a male protagonist in Morrowind was my first time that I allowed myself to think of myself that way.

I’m okay with a mechanical tax on furries. /s

Admittedly, one of my favorite ways to play Morrowind is to use a combination of slavery and farming mods to create an agricultural plantation empire, dozens of farms with hundreds of slaves.

The worlds might be racist, but the game doesn’t really punish the player for being any race. Thematically the racism is always shown to be wrong.

I’m sure there’s more.

You’d be surprised. I think there is like one fighting game character and that’s it. I invite anyone to share if they know more for sure. I think there’s also clearly something special about being able to play a black character as a protagonist in a first person roleplaying game versus a random game show tie in game.

You’ve never been that poor?

I mean, there’s quite a few calculus problems that you can do without calculus. Pretty much 80% of the optimization problems/max’s and minimums in a typical Calc 1 class can be done if you remember that -b/2a is the vertex of a quadratic.

Which you’d think would need some sort of permit or approval process? But it looks like you can just do whatever you want if you have the $$$

I’m absolutely sick of them. I get home from work at dick o’clock and always have to make sure there’s not one lying down in the middle of my parking spot.

My mother has somehow never held down an actual full time job, but has a house.

I have routinely worked 60, 80, 100 hour weeks much of my life. I sleep on the floor in a studio apartment.

Well yeah, of course, his friend Jerry Trivers told him that because their mutual friend Jeffrey Epstein paid him to.

All the jobs are in the field of education.

Somehow, I’ve mastered the art of doing calculus on 5 hours of sleep!kk

Really it’s like 3.5 with the side gigs too.

I’d probably be ripping my hair out and back inpatient if it weren’t for one job ending in a couple of weeks and another slowing down substantially around the same time.

I don’t sleep much until I get sick and have to take off from one of the jobs for a “catch up” day. I drink three or four Red Bulls a day, plus some Diet Coke to top off.

I was hoping to have enough to move states by the end of the summer, but it turns out I’ll probably still not have enough. Very difficult to rebuild when you get divorced from a vindictive billionaire.

Eh? My Honda Civic just had to have its struts replaced, and that was a $1000 expense which was difficult to cope with and would have been impossible were I not working three different jobs. If I wanted working AC, which I have never had in the vehicle, I’d need to spend like ~2k every year because the model has a defective condenser (and in Trump’s America, warranties are suggestions)

At some point you have to recognize that many Americans cannot afford any vehicle. Unfortunately the U.S. is not designed for people who don’t have vehicles.

While my car was in the shop yesterday, I looked at my options for getting to work, which is about seven miles from my house. There was a bus route, which would have taken at least a full hour compared to my usual 15 minute drive, and there was Uber/lyft, which would have cost me about a third of the money I’d make at work.

If god forbid, something happened to my car, I’d have to take a loan out for something I could not afford, because I have to be able to get to work to survive and pay for the damn car!

You can buy tisanes/tea with marshmallow root in it that’s good for sore throats!