Well, it could be really bad, or it might only be a little bit bad.

Israel has nuclear weapons, Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapons and probably has them, and both sides believe God is on their side.

The hell is a USian?

The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.

Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”

Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).

Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.

I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.

To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.

You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.

I think I still have my google voice number.

It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?

All I’m hearing is that I can still be a sedentary lazybones for like another 10 years before I need to start exercising.

I’m not reducing anyone to anything. Conservativism is always exactly the same, which is why it’s called “conservativism.” If a conservative isn’t conservative, then they are something else.

It’s not a generalization, it’s the name for the phenomenon.

He’s a conservative. Conservatives cannot be held to any sort of philosophical or ideological consistency, because their positions on any issue are entirely negotiable. There are no fundamentally conservative values beyond “is this good for me?” That’s why it’s so appealing to conservatives to have a personal savior who fully accepts your apology and offers divine forgiveness for any transgressions.

First, you don’t owe anyone anything.

But consider that you are in a position of relative (heavy stress on relative) privilege. Most trans individuals don’t have the resources or support you had during your transition. Most don’t even have access to the medical care you received. The people seeking that same care you received as a child are being demonized and targeted by bigots, fascists, and Nazis.

We all live in our society together, and “activism” is usually just someone standing forward and saying “this is wrong.” Do you advocate for trans rights at all? Or are you worried that speaking out will clue the bigots in on your situation, and you will be targeted for harassment or worse? That’s a legitimate concern, and being outed would undeniably affect the course of your life. I’m not saying any of this to criticize your decisions. But you should recognize that the bigots are winning, and your fear is critical to their strategy.

You have a family to consider. I know I put my family above any other priorities, and you can ignore anyone trying to convince you do do different.

But what if your kids were trans? What if they grow up in a world where it’s encouraged that they hate trans people? What if they need the same care you received? Would you counsel them to hide? Would you encourage them to be proud of their whole, authentic self? Who would be their role model for living life on their terms, undeterred by small-minded dipshits or violent tyrants?

I’m not trans, so I have no frame of reference for what you’re dealing with. But as a parent, I always try to make moral decisions based not only on how it will affect my kids, but also on being the person I would want them to be.

Be safe. Trust in compassion. Have faith that the bad people are vastly outnumbered.

I’ve been using Etar for years. Can’t complain. Edit to add that it’s an open source calendar app available on F-Droid.

I graduated from college magna cum laud 20 years ago. This is the first time it has come up in any context since I graduated. I took it off my resume 15 years ago to make room for experiences.

no

Uber.

Scared because he was high? You shouldn’t drive while high.

This is the anwer. You could always homebrew your own game and try to balance it, and you’d start to find where the game breaks. Play 10,000 games like that, and patterns will emerge. Game developers spend a lot of time playtesting, and they still miss things. Just thinking of a new twist and asking why it doesn’t work is like asking why cars don’t have six wheels.