Posts made by surreality

@Thenomain I really feel sorry for the NRA phonebot that called here with a survey once.

They are really not going to enjoy listening to the fact that their scaremongering 'the libruls are comin fer our guns in mobs to kill us!' soundbytes from their dear leader were not enough to get me to drop support for responsible gun ownership, but that I sure as shit would never find them a credible source of information after that bag o' bullshit, and would gladly repeat what I heard on that call while urging others who feel as I do to find a less egregiously-unhinged organization through which to pursue those goals.

@WTFE You have to register to vote so you are on record as a warm body in X location that is of age and meets the other requirements to vote.

You do not have to note a party.

Indicating 'Independent' covers this ground. It's a broad umbrella here, comprising lots of third parties and 'undecided's and so on.

@Coin Blood Drive is sort of like... Dudes of Legend on bath salts. I really can't sum it up better than that.

@Ganymede My mom's in the 'every day' club, too. Sometimes more than once a day, since she serves at mass and sings in both choirs, which often play at different masses.

Around Xmas, she just stays there from about noon on the 24th through 2am since she's either attending, performing at, or serving, or doing a reading.

The current pope is, indeed, awesome. I like him; he strikes me as a genuinely good man, who approaches the world from a position of hope and compassion.

I would like to see more people like him. That he's in such a prominent position gives me hope that people will see him, and be inspired to emulate the hope and compassion part, no matter who the heck they are.

This. For all the fellow drinking game participants on the board... this. There is not a goddamned thing about pirate-themed vodka from one of my favorite small towns made by quirky people out of sweet potatoes that does not somehow make me smile inwardly, particularly since it is very tasty in coffee. (Well, as much as I can about anything.)

@Rook Someone could probably set up a sandbox for this, with building allowed. Let people build their own random sprawl in whatever direction they wanted off some main hub or another, and just do more or less whatever.

Normally I'd volunteer, but I'm still all the meh.

@Cupcake There is a show my family watched when I was a little kid -- early 80s I think -- called 'Tales of the Brass Monkey'. (Gold? I don't remember.)

I recently found it somewhere, and I have never been more horrified by anything, oh my god.

They had a tribe of people native to some island or another literally called 'the mud people' who were clearly white actors in blackface and covered in caked on mud. It was wow holy shit, really?!

V the series pulled this one on us about a decade ago. It is like all the 80s US cultural propaganda so brazenly distilled it's worthy of a thesis paper or twelve.

The great whopping 'fuck you' with two birds flying re: ideological purity tests that are so gallingly common in political life in the US right now are one of the reasons I'm registered Independent and am very comfortable there.

<insert 'stereotypical libra' joke that functions on multiple levels here>

@Lithium Weirdly, after hearing about some of the village conditions in parts of the world, I can understand some local sects still adhering to the pork thing. If it's real third world conditions, this is a problem -- just one we haven't had to worry about much or think about in years in first world nations.

@Lain No, definitely not -- but if someone doesn't believe in what they're doing, 'it's just what you do when you're 15' is the worst of all possible reasons to use to try to convince someone.

@Lain Confirmation, the ritual, is a statement of full belief in the dogma and a life-long promise to follow the tenets of the faith.

Content of said rite of passage is relevant. If that rite of passage essentially means 'I agree to be a lying pretender for the rest of my life' if you go through with it, well, no. Not doing that.

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

I was raised Catholic to the point of Confirmation, but then dispersed from the Catholic church for personal reasons mostly stemming towards the philosophical. I believe that people need to live up to their facades and the concept that if you do something you claim to not believe in, then you cannot claim to not believe in it.

Shit, dude. Exactly the same here.

I got the "It's just what you do at that age," rationale, and I full-stop noped that right there.

I wasn't going to make a lifelong promise I had no idea if I could or would ever want to keep.

I didn't know if there was or wasn't a God who would give a shit what I did.

What I did know is that there were people, real feeling human beings, in that place, some of whom may just be there because 'that's what you do at that age' and some because they really believed. And if there was even one person in that church who kept those promises and believed sincerely, my presence as someone who 'just did what you do at that age' was grossly disrespectful to them, and I knew I could not do that.

While I was growing up, the anti-D&D fervor was enormous. All of my friends played, but for years I wasn't allowed.

Many years later, I found the book she had read, full of insane propaganda. It insisted that a few pages into the introduction of the book, there was a recitation for all players that must be read aloud before every game, that was a pledge of allegiance to Satan directly.

She could have seen, at any time, for herself, that this was anything but true. She didn't, because these voices 'spoke for her faith', and therefore they were not to be questioned. Even when she finally permitted me to play, this tormented her. She would look at me and start crying, because she genuinely believed in her heart that I had sworn a vow to Satan and was thus going to hell.

This went on for years.

I can forgive my mother for being, essentially, stupid.

I cannot forgive the hate-mongering liar that wrote that book to exploit my mother's faith and fear for a quick buck, because no matter how stupid, that led her and I to suffer in ways that were completely fucking needless.

My issue with Christianity is much of what @Ghost describes, re: forcing the rest of the world to conform to Christianity's tenets.

Your religion, whatever it is, has rules. They are extra rules you chose when you chose your religion, or chose to remain with the religion you were raised with. They are extra, they are yours, they are your responsibility to adhere to. They are not the obligation of the remainder of society to adhere to along with you if they have made different choices; they have their own extra rules to worry about.

I can empathize with wanting society to make that easier by not providing for or allowing things that are not permitted by (generic) your religion, but that is not society's responsibility: it is (generic) yours as a practitioner of that faith.

@Ominous That is absolutely the actual point of what it does. It's meant to be a modern, snarky take on a grindhouse flick. It succeeds. It's dark as hell but it's got a lot of humor in it. Dark humor... but humor.

@Arkandel FWIW, I was betting on the ice spears being able to do exactly what the ice spear did (she said vaguely, so as not to spoiler too brutally) as something of a parallel/foil to the dragonglass and/or valerian steel.

Even put in a bet with my father on which ep we'd see it shown in (second or third to last), who insisted this was stupid.

My dad now owes me $5, but the smug factor? Priceless.

@Lithium I second this, if it can have some grittier, dingier aspects as well -- like the hitman club in Deadpool. Because.

@WTFE You are too much of a gentleman to bitchslap her for having such a glaring double-standard, but I will cheerfully volunteer to bitchslap her on your behalf.

This kind of shit is my current biggest peeve across all aspects of life.

There's also the possibility that if the staff haven't seen anything budge for ages -- and some places stay up for years after they've 'died' so this can be quite some time -- the people running the joint will not really be checking in to approve anyone in the first place, provide any needed assist, etc. and may actually resent people dredging it out of the mothballs because the time they once spent administrating the game has long since been dedicated to something new. It's a bit shitty, but it's a thing to bear in mind.