I think it’s absolutely intentional. It feels like it’s written by and targetted towards people who are viscerally repulsed by pedophilia.

It’s creating a situation that feels like absolute horror, and using that revulsion to help sell the horror. This centuries old mind, trapped in a child’s body, unable to properly experience things like sexually and romance, continually on the outside of everything, treated like a child despite her age and abilities…

If I remember correctly, she ends up being this extremely bitter murdering monstrosity, out of rage and spite over her existence. Despite her angelic, innocent face, she’s the most evil of the lot. Partly because she doesn’t even have the option of interacting with humans properly, and even most vampires treat her poorly.

And all because a character had a moment of moral panic, of pity for a poor child. A desire to do the right thing.

It’s awful. And it’s supposed to be.

This is so wholesome, especially in contrast. I love it!

I’m now envisioning a car wrecking its way into a house, and then trying to make cat sounds with its engine and stuff (the meows would be kinda hard, but whining would be easy enough) at the door of the restroom, and then the tires just squeal as it zooms away as the person opens the restroom door. I’m envisioning the sheer, overwhelming perplexity on their face.

I’m completely cracking up over this image. It’s amazing.

The TumblrBot’s response to the “do you want to be human” question made me crack up.

It’s fantastic. A bit insulting, playful, charming - man, that’s amazing. I’m going to be randomly giggling about that answer. Coming from an AI… haha!

You think that the statement “what LGBTQ+ says about x” is a comment that is possible to make sense?

“LGBTQ+” is not an organization. It’s not a religion or a creed. It doesn’t “say” anything - and, in fact, isn’t even an “it” in the context you’re using!

It’s a term for a group of people that have nothing to do with each other, other than some shared traits. In your comment, replace “LGBTQ+” with another word for a group of unrelated humans. “Blondes,” maybe, or “women,” “men,” “dark skinned folk,” “humans,” etc. You can’t put something like “Americans” or “Christians” in that sentence, because those are too specific.

Can you see the problem now?

Is it fair to post a video of some random dude saying something stupid, and then say, “I have proof that men believe X”?

No, because “men” don’t share a creed.

LGBTQ folk also don’t share a creed. We’re just people.

And I absolutely believe you’d hear some folks joking around about “coming for their children.” A friend of mine jokes about the gay agenda all the time. Her gay agenda is “going to the grocery store to get milk.” But someone could get a clip of her saying that she’s got a gay agenda, easily.

And thing is, even if that video happened to be about some folks who weren’t joking - it doesn’t mean anything! Just because someone found some random assholes at pride doesn’t mean that everyone who’s LGBTQ+ has an agenda.

I’m probably wasting my time, I know, but I figured I’d put it out there just in case you are honestly misunderstanding the situation. Here’s hoping.

We once did something really amazing along these lines. Only once, it was a crap ton of work.

We were fighting this giant demon wall thing. We made it out of Graham crackers and chocolate decorations, which we attached with melted chocolate as glue, basically. It was super creepy - I made demon eyes, oozing blood stuff, it’s was great.

As we damaged the wall, we would rip parts of and eat it. It was like a solid 2-3 freaking pounds of chocolate and other assorted things. It was glorious to devour the enemy like that!

The way I think of it, there is no subtraction, and there is no division. Or square roots.

There is the singular layer of operations (the adding/subtracting layer which I think of as counting, multiplying/dividing layer which I think of as grouping, etc).

Everything within that layer is fundamentally the same thing. But we just have multiple ways of saying it.

Partly because teaching kids negative numbers is harder than subtraction, and thinking of fractions is hard enough without thinking of it as a representative process of relationships via multiplication.

Again, just how my brain does things. I’m not a mathematician or anything, but I’m pretty decent at regular math.

I love this one. It has a great cursing sort of feel, but nobody gets on your case about language.

Yes, omg! And the world building idiocy drove me absolutely insane.

Like, this one part where the were-something (might have been a werewolf?) was like, “only the first born of any pair of weres will also be a were” or something, and the immediate reaction… was to wonder why the were population wasn’t taking over the whole country or whatever. And the were took that seriously, saying the only reason their population wasn’t huge was a large number of stillbirths and such.

They try to backtrack that a few books later, and deal with the actual consequences of the fact that they literally can’t increase their population without polyamory - clearly someone informed the author of how stupid that was - but still, that initial response was some of the most obviously not-thought-out world building I’ve seen.

… okay, maybe that’s not true, but some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a book I continued to read, anyway.

Oh, no denying that at all. It is a problem, especially in aggregate.

When looking at the big picture, those rotten apples really do spoil the bunch and it can be depressing.

But also people can take that big picture awareness of problems and hate on people a little universally. Saying things like humanity is awful and a plague on the earth and maybe shouldn’t exist. There’s absolutely reason to see things that way.

But we are also a species that dolphins can approach for help when they’re injured. Or that will fight tooth and nail to help a wild creature. Or who will sacrifice their own well-being, not just for friends and family, but for strangers. Who will take other creatures, like dogs, into our homes and hearts and love them with all we have.

We can suck as a species, absolutely. We need to fix it. But it’s important to remember the joys of humanity, and not just the failures. Both are extreme, for we are a rather extreme species!

It really is a matter of perspective.

You’re saying that 10% of the population being awful means that a “huge number” are deeply broken.

So then 90% are being good! Mind, it doesn’t take too many assholes to wreck things for everyone, but it is nice that the majority of folks really are trying to do their best. A sizeable majority, even!

Thank you very much!

Yeah, I’ve run into that plenty myself. Hell, I’m a woman and I have a wife, and I was once accused of being homophobic… as I was trying to explain why I was happy about living thousands of kilometers from my family.

It really bugs me when people accuse people like my grandparents of being “hateful.” If my grandparents see that, they’ll just see more “proof” that left wingers have no idea what they’re talking about.

I can’t do anything to fix the issues on the conservative side of the fence - I really wish I could - but I can hopefully help on my side of the fence, with fostering better understanding and communication.

My break from conservative thinking was… uh… perhaps best described as a violent psychological event. I went from thinking we were the good guys, to maybe getting some things wrong, to suddenly realizing I’d been unknowingly on the side of evil my whole life. Meeting someone who was gay and hearing his story, about the abuse he took from people who acted exactly as I’d been taught to… Stars above, that ripped out my heart.

And if I hadn’t already had my beliefs cracking and under pressure, I’d have blown off his story as pure manipulation.

It’s a whole thing, for me. I can only hope for reconciliation of some kind. My family members aren’t really evil people - they mean well, even if they only consider people who are straight, white, and Christian to be fully people.

But calling them things they aren’t won’t ever get them to listen.

Not that I know what would get them to listen, beyond convincing their pastor of things…

I get where you’re coming from and why, I really do, but I think saying stuff like that is really unhelpful.

I’m about as left wing as they come, but I grew up in rural Florida. All the bullshit you see about the place? That’s my family. None of them specifically have shown up on the news, but still, it’s them - their beliefs, attitudes, etc.

The issue isn’t deception or manipulation from regular conservatives. When my grandparents / cousins spit out that sort of bullshit, that’s not what’s going on.

The issue, rather, is a complex one that is, among other things, a thing of trust.

They believe, honestly and truly, in Fox News. They believe in their preachers. They believe that homosexuality is a demon that possesses people, and by interacting with “the gays,” you “open the door” to demonic influence in your life.

That last bit is an example of something I was outright taught.

When my grandparents talk about how it’d be good for America to round up all the gays and put them in concentration camps, what they’re feeling is protectiveness. They want to protect people from Satan’s influence, and if someone has accepted the enemy to the point of being proudly gay, then why should people be sympathetic to them? Get rid of them all, obviously.

Yes, it’s insane and hurtful and stupid and so frustrating that I haven’t spoken to my extended family in a few years.

But they’re not trying to trick people. They don’t need to think about what they believed before, they don’t need to second guess what’s right, they know what’s right. What’s right is believing in the authority figures they’ve been trained to believe in. What is right is to listen, to obey, to fight as they are directed to fight, for the good of all.

It’s horrifying from the outside, but from the inside, it’s a safe little bubble where you don’t have to wonder and worry about what is the right thing to do. It’s easy - the only hard part is acting on it. Do what’s right, and everything else will fall into place. It’s simple and feels good.

To challenge that way of thinking, to suggest that they have to figure it out themselves - that’s a huge ask. Going against what they’ve been taught their whole lives, and for what? To have to deal with moral uncertainty and unsolvable moral dilemmas? That’s hardly a reason to change.

Mushroom, mushroom

That is an excellent point. Yeah, PSI would totally read as pounds times square inches which would be something else entirely. Adding in the extra P would fix it, too. PPSI. Suppose it’s another thing that people just have to get used to, haha.

Because in^2 is generally said “square inches.”

So it’s “pounds per square inch.”

Sometimes “per” will get its own letter, like in PPM - parts per million - and sometimes it’s left off, as in PSI.

I’ve explicitly taught this concept in my English classes, actually.

A run on sentence, for example, is a fantastic tool for expressing overly excited rambling from a character.

It only works for that purpose if the rest of the writing isn’t full of run on sentences.

You have to know the rules and follow them well in order to break them for effect. I told my kids that if they obviously broke a rule for effect in their writing, I wouldn’t hold it against them, but it’d only work if they were otherwise near perfect with that rule.

I had one take me up on it! It was cool. She also wrote a postscript explaining what she did and why, which was hilarious, because it was pretty obvious. She’d used sentence fragments to show incredulity. It was great.

This was really cool and honestly fascinating, but I am deeply confused by the music choice.

Why are they using this gentle music (His Theme / Memory) from the game Undertale as background for cutting apart a Lego fish?

It’s complicated. Short version, over a small amount of time.

In the case of water, how it kills you is by diluting your blood, basically. Your kidneys will be working extremely hard (and quickly) to empty out the excess water, so for the most part, you’ve got to drink much faster than your kidneys can work.

That said, it’s not just speed - other stuff gets cleaned out with your urine, like certain vitamins and such. Drinking excess water over a long time, but significantly more than what’s on the chart, will drain you of certain nutrients / electrolytes, and that’ll screw you, too.

Drinking sports drinks in that quantity could actually sidestep that particular problem, drastically raising the amount of water you can take in.

One way or another, though, while it’s possible to hurt or kill yourself from drinking too much water, you have to bring it to some serious extremes and your body should be vehemently complaining during this process.

If ever you think you’re doing something extreme and might possibly be slightly risky in this regard, just drink some electrolyte heavy stuff instead for a while - Gatorade, Powerade, etc. Then your only risk is basically outrunning your kidneys and your stomach should really be making you throw up if you try that.

In that case, yeah, you’ve got an admin problem. I’m sorry - that really sucks. The entire system desperately needs an overhaul. The education system in Canada is a dumpster fire, and the US is even worse. Dealing with behavioral issues is one of many major problems…