I'm still waiting for @Cheesegrater's D&D place where there will be RP between plots and an OOC room where you can say 'fuck' without someone fainting. But I'd love to see a Deadlands game. I miss Buffy, but that system is so unbalanced someone would have to do a homebrew to get it to really work on a MUSH environment.
@Taika we did this with my oldest when she was eleven weeks old to meet my mother-in-law who was basically only alive because of chemo. Take pictures if you can. In the end she was just holding on long enough to meet her first granddaughter and passed about a week after we had to go back home. But we absolutely treasure the moments we had with her and we named our second after her.
It's a really rough thing to go through and I'm sorry to hear you and your family are having to do it 
I've been the only woman in my department for a long time. That's now starting to change, but when I first started I didn't even clue in to the fact I was the only woman until a new hire asked me if being the only woman in IT was tough. I'd honestly never thought about it before. Then I moved into a position where my boss sexually and just straight up harassed me (and others) for years and was promoted out of trouble thee times!
Your best intentions here aren't helpful. You're already labeling this theoretical woman the "other" when you should probably just be more focused on building a team that's not full of assholes that would make someone who wasn't a techbro (and there are lots more designations in there than just 'omg woman') feel out of place. You know what makes a woman feel comfortable? Getting a cool job and not having to put up with bullshit day in and day out about lol a girl thinks she knows computers or having people second guess what she's doing just because she's lacking a penis or having people ask if she feels comfortable surrounded by men. We aren't these sensitive glass things that need a workplace to take great care with us. You want to build a great team? Someone else said it already but hire all women!
If someone in an interview ever asked me if I felt comfortable being the only woman in a department I'd nope out of there so fast because they'd be letting me know they expect it to be a problem.
Someone dropped another player's RL name in conversation with me the other day. I don't know the other player and it was a real "yikes" moment. Like I would not feel comfortable if someone did that to me. Thankfully I came up in the days of internet handles, so there's very few people in the mushing world that know my real name. And both of them are Facebook friends!
I am consistently surprised how often people give out their real names on games, though. Like, not even just the really young kids that didn't live through the "they could be an axe murderer!" good times of the early internet, older people that should know better giving out links to their real name gmail accounts. It's really easy to be lulled into a false sense of security when you're with a gaming group you like, but until you know people for a long, long, long time it's still really risky. Someone I know participated in a secret santa on an online forum and had a guy show up at her house. A lot. Restraining order time a lot. After that rules got changed and only the person running it and the person you were assigned to got your address. BUT STILL! It's so, so risky.
I pretty much only ate cheeseburgers before I was married and had kids. Now that I've got kids on solid food I find myself trying to make sure they have a LOT more healthy choices than I did as a latch-key kid that grew up on Kraft mac and cheese or just regular old pasta. Though there were plenty of nights raiding the snack drawer was as close to dinner as we got.
We've switched from white bread to wheat and try to buy things that only have that whole grain logo on it. The kids do not seem to mind in the least. We also try to eat more chicken than we do beef, but because one of my kids is slightly anemic we do try to do beef tacos along with some other iron supplemented foods every other week or so. We've utterly convinced them that soda is gross and they only get juice if they go to a birthday party to keep sugars down. And we do our best to get them to eat veggies and fruits. I never ever EVER ate fish and now we try to work in some salmon every week. Which they won't touch but someday I'll land a recipe they like. I'm looking forward to them being older and having steadier diets so that we can join a local meat share that I've heard good things about. But right now it's still such a crapshoot on whether or not they'll eat something that we do have a reserve of frozen chicken nuggets and hotdogs on hand. While my youngest will at least TRY food, my oldest has been known to go on hunger strikes if we try to feed her something horrible like, oh I don't know, cheese lasagna. The horror.
The biggest challenge to buying health things is that produce is so damn expensive. So, it can sometimes make me hesitant to spend the extra money on something I'm not sure they'll eat. I'm told this will get better in a couple of years but right now yeesh. I'm looking forward to Impossible Burger going more mainstream because I do think they'll like it. Right now we do a lot of shopping at Trader Joes and they have some amazing bean burgers that I am just in love with and we try to hit up the farmers markets in the spring and summer so we're shopping local. A lot of them do fish now too, which is awesome. But I do try to be aware of the environmental impact of things these days cause holy shit does that terrify me for my kids.
@Ganymede I don't have twins, but my two are almost exactly two years apart (two years, four days) so I feel your pain. We always have to fill out two classes worth of invitations. But yeah, I'd have a word with the daycare, that's what everyone does here and then the teachers make all the other parents feel bad about not RSVPing yet.
And still people who didn't reply will show up! Which is fun when you've booked a place that charges for x amount of kids and then more for every kid over it.
Thanks for the paint pen tip @surreality, but I am firmly in the "evite from now on" camp after the hand cramps this year.
@Ganymede it is pretty common practice around here for the teacher in the classroom to send out a reminder to parents if there's low RSVPs. I try to be pretty good about responding to them but sometimes they get thrown in with a million pictures of a cat I've pulled out of the cubby and I forget. But as someone who recently filled out 26 fucking hand written invitations how the fuck are you supposed to write on them because pens don't work due to the fucking wax covering or whatever they have on there, sharpies wipe off and oh my god, I'm so glad to hear it's not just me.
It could've been worse. All the remaining Stark children could've gone off to become lumberjacks.
Surprise! I was Gretchen too. It probably was not a surprise.
Adora always appreciated Raymesin because he wasn't chatty!
I'm a cisgender, straight woman and I find playing a guy pretty tricky unless I'm just going all out frat-boy stereotype as a one off NPC. I just can't get that into it and feel more comfortable playing women. I'm not sitting there constantly like "is this how guys scratch their balls? How much ball scratching should one pose have?" when I'm playing a woman. I know how many times I scratch my balls a day, people.
Like some others have said, while I like romantic roleplay usually the sexytimes isn't what I'm after, I like the lead-up and then what happens next and in all cases that's been my lady PC with a guy PC. I'm just not interested in chasing the ladies. Sorry, ladies.
The only people that have ever made me feel uncomfortable about any of that in the hobby have been male players playing lesbian/bisexual lady PCs that come after mine. I've only ever felt like someone was being really pushy about things like that a handful of times in the entire hobby, but in all those times that was the scenario and I noped right out of there quickly. Everything from "The PC is close minded if they don't go for this" to "You as a player are close minded if you don't go for this" and it's like you do you, but I am just not interested and neither is my PC. Sorry! Then they never RP with me again and that's fine by me.
The biggest squicky thing I ran into on a game about this was a great male PC that was playing being mostly in the closet (like a well-kept secret from NPCs although PCs knew), who fell into roleplaying with a female PC (and player) who was extremely clingy both IC and OOC. They set up this storyline that HE OOCly thought was very tragic, which was kind of his jam (she was in love with him, he was not in love with her but felt obligated to care for her and she was manipulating him into sex he didn't care for, woe etc.) but that SHE OOCly thought was the height of romance because her magical vagina was going to make him straight and it was a love story for the ages!
Obviously neither of them or us at home knew this huge disconnect existed at first, but it came out dramatically one day when someone made an offhand comment about what a sad story it was for the male PC. Huge drama. Huge revelations that the female player thought OOCly all a gay man needed was the right vagina. Epic drama/ragequit when everyone else smacked her down hard.
@kestrel How Jews Became White Folks by Karen Brodkin is a great read if you're interested in that subject.
Here ARE some historians with their hot take:
"This has little to do with remembering the brutality of indentured servitude and all to do with the minimisation of the scale, duration and legacy of the transatlantic and intercolonial slave trade. The racist contemporary application of such bad history can be observed spreading like a virus across social media on an hourly basis."
The NYT had a good article on this some years back too.
I mean. If you see a post about people being racist and your immediate response is "but white people" maybe just don't post.
I think a lot of people don't take tooth infections seriously and let me tell you IT IS SUPER SERIOUS! That is an infection NEAR YOUR BRAIN! You need to get on antibiotics ASAP even if your dentist can't see you. It's one of those things that I've even run into with my dentist (who I love) when I called about my implant failing (which is a thing that can happen)!
I happened to get one of the new receptionists on the phone who was like "I think he can see you in two days." To which I said, "So are you calling in a prescription for antibiotics right now so I can be on them until then? Because as I said, there's pus and that means that there is bone loss happening." There was a long silence and she said, "Right. Uh. Can you get here in twenty minutes?"
But it still freaked me out and I mentioned it to my dentist because if I hadn't known that things could've gone very badly. Even if the infection hadn't gone to 11, I still would've been looking at bone loss around the site. As it was, they ended up being able to save the implant (thank god because taking it out would've likely broken my jaw) and everything was fine.
Advocate for yourself though, as with anything! And I also brush after every meal and floss. My husband who has to be reminded to brush, eats more sugary things than I do and never flosses never has a fucking cavity ever. Fuck tooth genes, man.
Did I mention I'm one of those rare people that has a hard time with anesthetic working? So I got to have novocaine shots three times for the max amount I could possibly have.
And then still they had to avoid one area of my tooth.
Ask me about my first c-section and the doctors not believing me when I said "I can feel that!"