This is interesting because, while I make a point of making and engaging with apolitical content, I am a lesbian.

Calling Planned Parenthood a political group is just telling on yourself. You hate women’s bodily autonomy and/or trans people enough to overlook the fact that they offer free and income cost adjusted birth control and vasectomies and hysterectomies and fertility treatments. They are a non-profit organization offering every type of sexual and reproductive health care. They, in fact, do not engage in politically driven discrimination against certain types of sexual health issues. They treat those trying to get pregnant with the same level of evidence based care as those seeking abortion or hrt or to be made infertile, without concern for public opinion or political discourse. I assume all of the above can be said of the children’s hospital mentioned, but I don’t have an ongoing relationship with them to base my comments on…

I hope we don’t get seasonal playlists. They were playing the KLF in here the other day. We have a pretty good selection at the moment.

Buying illegal shit is important. I never would have accomplished the truama recovery I have in the care access desert we lived in without being able to buy psychedelics online. I’m thriving personally because of a few high quality darkweb dealers. I’m great at my job in part because they sent me accurately labeled and carefully grown cannabis when it was illegal, so I was gaining strain knowledge and experience when most of my coworkers were getting the best generic weed they could find in town. If the fascists succeed in making trans care illegal, I’ll use it buy my hormones. It pains me to see the intense turn against crypto, because, used for actual commerce rather than as an investment, it kinda saved me. We never used bitcoin unless we couldn’t help it. I’ve always been angry that using the least energy efficient coin as an investment became the norm. The value of crypto, in my opinion, lies entirely in its prompt and regular use as currency. Hodlers ruined things for everyone.

which feels like it might be easier if companies are already complying with this

This is part of the California regulation strategy: California is the largest market in the country for many products. It’s often cheaper to make things to California standards for everyone than to run two different production lines or facilities or give up California altogether, so we get California approved and labeled things all across the US. It’s a nifty feature of the state.

There is so much good country music right now. You just can’t wait for the radio to bring it to you. You gotta get it for yourself.

There’s lots of good old fashioned country out there. You just gotta leave the mainstream behind. You’ll find men in touch with their emotions. You’ll find women who won’t settle down. You’ll find fine American classics. You’ll find new classics waiting to be known. And Mckain Lakey!

The country music community may be problematic, but country music itself is wonderful. And many country musicians are fantastic, unexpected people. If you want country like it used to be, dive into Melissa Carper’s catalogue. She’s the master of the brand new old time song.

Yeeeesss! Her voice makes me feel something every time.

It’s something I’m actively pursuing. I really had to transition first before it was a realistic option. Now it feels almost inevitable. I rock a manic pixie moon child look and vibe working at a busy dispensary. I just have to let RNGesus do her terrible work and stay vigilant.

I wouldn’t say that I’m discreet, but I don’t make a point of telling people about it or anything. It eventually comes up in conversation naturally as I’m getting to know people. If I talk to you about my personal life, it’s gonna come up.

My wife has has a boyfriend for more than five years. I’m not attracted to him like she is, but nobody is unhappy in or about our arrangement. We met each other really young, and it stuck. But neither of us wants to have only one great romance in our lives. It really is what works for us.

Tbh, my wife and I have been together for so long and through so much that is has become easy. We’ve been together more than fifteen years, and both of us consider our childhoods of abuse to be the hardest periods of our lives. We know and trust each other deeply and implicitly. She’s had an increasingly serious second partner for more than five years now, and it’s become pretty easy. I’m casually looking for a boyfriend, and she’s excited for me. It’s the foundational strength of our relationship that makes this lifestyle possible. We’ve built a big, full life together, and we have enough love and space in our lives to share <3

Probably the Gateless Gate, the Eiichi Shimomissé translation. I’m actually a Discordian, but I find the Principia best for introduction. It devotes a lot of space to silly rules you’re supposed to violate and other introductory concepts and practices. And Illuminatus! is plagued by a masculine confidence and aggression that both the writers and Hagbard were aware of and tried to minimize. The Gateless Gate is, to me, much better for staying deep in the untethered state of pure Discordian existence. It talks a little much of patriarchs, but it’s not thematically essential. And it isn’t rooted in and doesn’t reference modern western theology and philosophy like the Principia because it was never intended to stand in contrast to or lead people out of modern western theology. Both the Principia and Illuminatus! reference it in some way because secular zen is important to the development of Discordianism. Maybe no book has ever changed my life as much as Illuminatus! but the Mumonkan is one of my primary tools for staying rooted in this way of being. It’s with me all the time. One of the first things I do when I get a new phone is make sure my Mumonkan made it over or go download it again. I read it whenever I’m feeling lost or confused and uncertain about a decision or life change. It always leads me back to me.

See, this is what gives scalpers the moral edge over landlords to me. Scalpers are largely working class people using money they earned to do something arguably unethical. Is it kinda lame? Are they losers? Yeah, and again it’s arguably unethical. But are they complicit enforcers of generational wealth and power divides? Are they, as a group, one of the primary forces siphoning wealth and power from the poor and working class to those who already have wealth and power? Nah. They’re just uncreative opportunists. Scalpers create a gulf of immorality between you and recreation to their own benefit, not between you and necessity to the detriment of society at large. So yeah, scalpers>landlords in my estimation.

Seeing someone imply that older users want their news and information parsed by YouTube personalities is wild. That’s quite an assertion.

They’re oldies, but both of the Soul Reaver games and the Raziel parts of LoK: Defiance have a two tiered death system. (Minor spoilers going forward, but I’m talking spoilers for the opening cutscene from Soul Reaver, so I’d argue not real spoilers.) See, after having his physical vampire form thrown into the well of souls and falling through an endless abyss for several hundred years, Raziel exists first as a structurally sound spirit in a world where most things don’t maintain any resemblance to their corporeal forms after death. After being salvaged from the well of souls and set on a quest, he gains the power to create a corporeal form that resembles wretched wraith he has become in spirit. But that new corpse isn’t him, and destroying it doesn’t kill him. It just releases him back to the spirit realm, where he can regain his strength and manifest a new corporeal form. You can be killed in the spirit realm and sent back to a checkpoint, but the spirit realm is by and large far less dangerous than the physical. Very few threats can follow you, and the soul scavengers who populate most the spirit realm are little more than fodder for a creature like Raziel to slay and eat at his leisure. So you regain your strength, find a nexus between the worlds, and manifest a new body. It’s probably my favorite unconventional handling of death or failure in a game because of its comprehensive and essential connections to the story and lore of the series. Raziel is the beating black heart of the mythos of the series.

No? They’re hardly the first tarot cards we’ve owned. We have several sets. They were bizarrely left with some lingerie (which I declined) the aforementioned ring light, and the absolute motherlode of gel pens. There were enough gel pens for multiple employees to take home a set and to leave some around the motel office and lobby. I still have some more than six months after I left that job.

When I worked at a motel, I got first pick of a bunch of leftover shit by taking the initiative to sort out and organize and purge of trash several months of backlogged lost crap. I don’t think anybody else actually wanted all the tarot and oracle cards, but the ring light would have been wanted.

That’s not right and I’ll tell you why.

This could be the tagline for the entire internet.

I’m deep in Earth Defense Force 5. It’s way more fun than it has any right to be. There’s no way I’m going to finish all the content. There is a ludicrous amount, over a hundred stages in a minimum of three difficulties with four characters who all have health and equipment that can be gathered and upgraded. It’s hard to make it sound fun, because it’s really just using crazy guns to shoot giant bugs and aliens and shit. It’s very simple, but the formula is so good. Flying around like a maniac as a Wing Glider feels so bad ass. I gotta figure out how to talk someone into playing it with me >_>