Grindr has it so you can’t screenshot photos anymore. I can understand why, but I wish there was a way that you could turn it off. Sometimes I ask friends to take pictures of me and send them to me, I should be able to keep them!

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.”

I had a friend that was really involved in UU (now ordained), and one of the great things they do is sex education. Age appropriate and queer affirming, better than anything you get at public school.

The impression I get is some UU congregations lean more pagan, while some lean more Jesus, but in general they’re all willing to welcome everyone. My local one hosts atheist meetups even. The sermons are usually more focused on social justice and history than focusing on holy texts - I’ve attended just for some medieval history lectures.

Really, it seems the perfect space to get all the social connections of church without all the extra baggage. If I had kids I’d be 100% taking them every Sunday.

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

Smirnoff Ice is just kind of gross and unpalatable in general. Like to the point where “icing” someone is a frat-tier prank where you hide one and whoever finds it has to drink it.

As an “alchopop” I don’t think it has enough to mess with the stomach like that, although alcohol can be very variable in how it impacts you (my body just rejects straight liquor, I get drunk quicker on beer). Might have been the Smirnoff, might have just been your stomach getting upset for no reason (this will happen as you get older with or without alcohol, although obviously alcohol makes it much worse)

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!”

Oh that’s delightful.

I watched some videos on medieval math education recently, and I’ve been wanting to create a unit or something themed around what you’d learn as a medieval student.

I emphasize history a lot more than any math teacher I’ve known, but I think it can be effective. The Pythagorean theorem is absolutely critical to memorize and understand, and it can be very fun to go into all the Pythagoras cult stuff.

If anti abortion activists actually wanted anything other than publishing women, they’d be outraged by the state of maternal health care in prisons. They are okay with a woman miscarrying because she gets the shit beaten out of her in prison, they just don’t want anything to be her choice.

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.

I want to learn more about cars, specifically to try to reach this type of kid.

I had one car obsessed kid that I sorta won over with “let’s try to model car parts with geometric solids and think about volume as it pertains to things like gas tanks,” but I don’t know enough about cars to really make the kinds of deep connections I know could be there.

I have a good rapport with anime and gamer teens usually. Minecraft is a godsend, because almost everyone has played it and you can tie so much math and science shit into it. I’ve learned more from this YouTube channel than I did from my fossil fuel funded undergrad geology classes.

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.