I found out my mom had spent three decades of my life lying about who my biological father was.

She has always spun some romantic bullshit story about a specific guy. Like I’m talking there was a whole ass story of her life leading up to my conception that she liked to tell me. A pretty fucked up story - she was a teenager, this guy was in his early twenties. But still, a mostly normal and consensual story barring the statuary aspect, not at all shocking where we live. He knocks her up, chickens out immediately, dumps her, etc. There was even a cathartic story about her being a then abandoned pregnant Sonic carhop, discovering the guy as a customer and throwing fries at his face. She describes my eyes and hair as his.

I reach out to the guy as a teenager with help from family, who keep track of this guy throughout the years in case I’d want to ever make connection. I reach out, he denies that he’s my father. Well, sucks, but nothing too unexpected.

As a lark, I get genetics testing kit one year. It’s on Amazon prime (back when that was a good deal and back before I realized how problematic that giving my DNA to a random company.)

I take the test. A woman reaches out. My aunt. And she’s not the sister of my “father.”

My biological father was a different adult man (mid twenties) who raped a teenager he met at a party. Even told me to my face that he hadn’t been interested in her, but more in her older sister.

When I confronted her with this. It was a non reaction. It was “oh.” She’s told so many lies throughout her life, but this was finally the one she couldn’t bullshit her way out of. She lied to me for thirty years, and unlike any other lie she’s told, there‘s no “oh you’re just remembering it differently” or “I didn’t really mean that.”

The most difficult thing is that maybe it was traumatic for her. Maybe it was violent. I’ve met him twice, and neither experience was really pleasant. He has a history. Maybe she did block it out, repress it in that Freudian way and did convince herself that some guy she had a crush on and her had some secret little tryst. Realizing maybe the hell of my childhood had an explanation - that she was trying to punish me, that she hated me as a symbol of rape. Can I forgive her for that?

It’s just such a complicated and difficult thing to wrap my head around. Nothing about her as a person has ever made any sense.

But using them interchangeably is accurate to Old English.

Eth and thorn were interchangeable. (go to timestamp 8:06, for some reason lemmy keeps eating my attempt to link directly to that time.)

See Bill Ackerman and Herbalife.

Federal regulators should have shut that shit down ages ago, but the grifter party loves MLMs (look at how the DeVos family made their money…)

ETS2 + Lee Hazlewood’s Cowboy in Sweden is just maximum aura.

There’s also the childish desire for an “I told you so” as they watch anyone they don’t like being sent to hell.

How do you make the cheaper brown ones not super bitter?

Don’t forget controlling and terrorizing women. A big aspect would be to punish women who take Tylenol during their pregnancy - possibly charge them with crimes, or use it as an excuse to take children away…

Tyler Childers gets it. You just gotta stay away from the shit that airs on the radio.

The documentary Marjoe is a really good exploration of this. Former child preacher who stopped believing, and invites a documentary crew as he does a tour.

It’s in the public domain - they forget to register it, so you should be able to find the full movie online.

Sneak is basically useless with the code patch though. Even with max sneak, iirc the max chances of pickpocketing even like a spoon is ~30%.

“Ledasha” is an urban legend. (with a nasty snack of racism)

Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.

In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.

Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.

There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?

So when the AI bubble burst, will there be coding jobs available to clean up the mess?

The only part of the religion that matters is the part that lets them treat women as sex slaves anyways.

It’s really about knowing how to navigate the system. Need a family rich enough so that you don’t have to work to support yourself so you can scribe and volunteer, need to know what classes count for medical school admission, start prepping for MCAT and gaming that…

Islamic socialism is a huge thing. Why do you think the US backed the Shah in Iran? Who was the Shah imprisoning?

The Koran absolutely forbids charging interest (which is why there is an entire alternate Islamic banking system) and one of the five pillars of Islam is zakat - giving money to the needy. Shariah explicitly demands forms of land redistribution and mandates zakat.

If you read Qutb (literally wrote a book called Social Justice in Islam), you realize that there’s actually a substantial group of people who are very heavily inspired by Marx and Lenin, and also believe that apostates should be killed.

Conservatives love playing the victim.

Trans women existing = an attack on all women existing

Not being allowed to pressure children into praying at school = being denied religious freedom

I feel like Disney has internal stuff? I listened to a podcast where an ex employee changed the fonts on a bunch of stuff to be wingdings, etc, and made everything unusable.