Similar genre with a tiny setup difference: portal fantasy. Think Narnia or Inuyasha in which characters return from the other world

I’m guessing existing while brown.

Or grooming children at church.

I’m a fan of the shortest splitline algorithm.

I hounded my boss for a year when COVID hit to make it permanent. Worth every bit of annoying him.

As an American I also urge you guys to do that.

Makes one wonder how many could collectively shout back to fix this.

He’s not magic. He can’t actually wave a wand and do anything. He’s gotta get congress on board for anything meaningful that can’t be undone the second someone else sits in the chair. Incremental change sucks, but acting like he’s been doing nothing is dumb. That’s not to say he hasn’t done bad things (looks at Israel), but painting him as inept is disingenuous at best.

In full recognition that I am similarly guilty, bullet points would make that digestible. Just a consideration.

So lets both distill this down. I can kinda spot a few agreement points in there (taxes, don’t be a dick to LBGT folks) and a dissonance between the voter and the representative (see: the last time R’s got a big tax bill. More taxes for the poor, fewer taxes for the rich) which is similar for both parties (arguably more severe on one side, but I digress).

2A, immigration, taxes. These are all legit political discussion points and would be so much better to discuss than whatever culture war nonsense is going on. That don’t actually get addressed by legislature (see: R’s, this week, throttling their own border bill to make Biden look bad. They explicitly described it as such, so clearly they don’t actually care, but when did we expect them to).

There is no conspiracy to place Taylor Swift at the super bowl. Fauci did not do… whatever it was the crazies accused him of (D’s had a good number of crazies there to be fair). The border crisis is a nothing burger (not to say immigration reform isn’t a thing, just the hype). These are the talking points I hear from the R’s. How am I supposed to take them seriously. Especially when I, as a gay man, am expressly on the list of things they want to make illegal?

I watched January 6th. On their streams, it was right there. I imagine it was a big day for Twitch and others like it. There was no question what was happening, and many people have explicitly gone to jail for insurrection. This is not debatable. It has been adjudicated in court. And Trump told them he loves them and that they should “stand by”. I watched it live. Some number of them were rubes that were tricked* but there were people setting up a damned gallows and shouting for Pence’s neck. Even if the rubes didn’t like it, mob mentality is a well studied and powerful thing. It was an insurrection. A relatively pitiful one, but that’s what it was.

Trump has expressly stated he wants to be a dictator ‘just for a few days’ at the start of his term. Because that’s how that works… He wants to jail reporters and political opponents. There is no shortage of statements that are about as undemocratic as you can possibly be. Tell me how he isn’t a fascist?

Even if you don’t like Trump, the R’s have fallen in line behind him. I’m not talking average people, plenty of people are conservative and don’t support all that nonsense. But the legislature isn’t the people. And it’s full of people that are challenging each other to duels on the floor of congress and shit (I think it was a state congress, but still). MTG and Boebert eat up air time with their crazy. Gym Jordan is a crazy fucker who was an accessory to sexual assault. The current speaker sends notifications to his son every time his masturbates. This list goes on.

So yeah, in normal times, I’d agree that judging by R or D is a bad move and that generalizations are bad as a rule. Both sides are using their positions to enrich themselves so it’s not like there’s any high ground to go around. But damn me if I’m not voting for anyone that associates with the side that would rather my loving committed relationship to another man be illegal for… reasons?

Side note: neopronouns are a non-issue. I’m an active member of my LGBT community in a major city and I’ve never met one. And using someone’s new pronouns (on the subject of trans folks) is just a matter of being polite and is not onerous, most only get pissed if you purposefully use their pronouns incorrectly. Worst I’ve had is being corrected when the wrong word slipped.

At least here in the US, conservatism is associated with pretty much nothing good. Elimination of trans people (and then da gays after that), more guns, less healthcare, less education, less vaccines, less social responsibility, more taxes for the poor, less taxes for the rich, jailing people for getting abortions, furthering wars that we can feed our soldiers to for money, insurrection and fascism, fox news.

Distancing yourself from that dumpster fire is prudent.

Edit: The social responsibility thing was a dumb one. I was thinking of something else. Disregard that one point.

It functions better as a foot in the door. R’s love* veterans (*on paper). Get them benefits and work from there.

Incremental progress baby. It’s unsatisfying and miserable, and still better than the alternative.

GNU Terry Pratchett

I have a litany of different parasomniae. Sleep walking and talking. The occasional paralysis, regular night terrors, the very odd waking hallucination. And rarely remember my dreams. Here’s my experience:

Sleep talking: Never remember anything about the dream. I do respond incoherently apparently.

Sleep walking: Can remember the edges of the dream if woken up. Dream logic still holds for a good 10 seconds or so from waking up. I tend to hand my husband wads of clothes. He’s figured out if he just orders me back to sleep I’ll do it.

Night terrors: Never remember anything, and to my understanding occurs during nrem, so you shouldn’t be dreaming anyway. I startle my spouse often. My grandmother also had them all her life.

Hypnopompic (read: after waking up. Contrast hypnogogic) hallucination: Been a long time on this one. Kinda like a movie. You see and hear something then all the sudden it vanishes. Only ever happened a couple times ever.

Sleep paralysis: Terrifying. Keenly aware that I’m fully conscious and cannot compel anything to move. Not even my eyelids. Lasts for what feels like forever but is probably a few minutes. Worst one for me by far. Thankfully rare. Edit: It is my understanding that people hallucinate sometimes at the same time. Hence the origin of the sleep paralysis demon.

Because they only thing they value is money. Right now money, not future money. So long as the numbers go up, the sociopaths in the c suite couldn’t possibly give fewer shits.

Wrong on a human level. On a corporate level, they didn’t admit it was a layoff and so she can’t sue them or get any benefits. Fucking sociopaths are punishing new employees for being hired after they botched the numbers.

Yuuuup. Half the time you’re the expert* in the room and when heads turn to you you have to push the imposter syndrome down and know your shit and convey it well enough that people will listen.

And having the good sense to know when to say “I need to look that up, let me get back to you”.

Yeah. When a secretary of state positively asserts that there have been allegations that the sitting president of the United States has engaged in insurrection, making them answer “what did he do?” is the only next thing that should be asked and no deviations should be allowed.

And permit a human being to be smarter than him in any field, regardless of how little experience he has in it?! Heresy!

Well yeah, you have to pat dry. But you still get cleaner and use way less tp (this may vary on how much fiber you have in your diet).

Woof that slope is slippery. The trick is measuring what you can afford, and a lot of people aren’t great at measuring that.