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US Politics (+++) 

This is Joshua Collins' campaign platform on Trans Rights. He's a socialist trucker running for our 2020 congress in Washington's 10th district (Olympia to south Tacoma), and I am in love with him.

(Transcript in link)
joshua2020.com/platform#comp-k

My father isn't exactly a fascist, but.... (uspol, end-of-life, ~430 words) 

My spouse and I visited my parents recently. After about two decades of health scares and general decline, Mom is now clearly in endgame, completely bedridden in the main room of their house. I won't get into medical details other than this example: Over the course of our three-day visit, she went into brief respiratory failure twice. Her time is nigh.

This is relevant because while Orrery and I wanted to be there to comfort Mom, there was a hell of an elephant in the room to work around. Dad spent slightly over twenty years in the US Air Force (it's a lot like the military), took a brief break to earn degrees in architecture and landscape engineering or whatever it's called, briefly attempted to brave the private sector, and now he's a civilian working under military contract. With this comes a devotion to the US military that the two of us find... distasteful at best, and chilling at worst.

I mean, he's got a large poster in his office of the Commander-in-Chief. (That's the POTUS' official military rank.) He voted for that motherfucker. He always votes straight-ticket Republican. They've got him convinced that they're the ones keeping his veteran's benefits from being yanked away. He was "terrified of what Hillary Clinton might do". (So were we, but for very different reasons.)

Mom laid down the law some time back. She emphatically did not want to be a captive audience for arguments about religion or politics. It's bad enough she has to put up with Dad; their politics differ widely. (She's a Mormon, but the sort to value Christ's message over church doctrine; this puts her politics a lot closer to ours!) For the duration, we did our best to dance around the burning issue of just how far Dad's loyalty to the current regime went.

It turns out that he's no fan of the current administration's march toward fascism. He explicitly stated that he's not voting for that guy again. Why is that poster up? Military indoctrination, of course – he doesn't agree with the guy, but he considers himself obligated to respect the office. Sure, he'll grudgingly acknowledge that so many people's lives are being ruined, but he's gotta respect the office.

So I guess Dad's technically not a fascist.

But it was only because Mom was there that I didn't inquire during dinner how he could taste anything over all that boot leather.

Minor software annoyance. 

I have no idea why, I cannot seem to convince Explorer to put Photoshop in the list of "Send to..." programs for GIF and JPG filename extensions. It works right for JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and frickin' AI files (!) so it's not like filetype associations are busted throughout Windows 10. The "Send to" list is populated with all the expected stuff other than Photoshop. As far as I can find, it's just these two that are resistant to every fix I've attempted.

It's not actually causing any real problem. I don't need anyone to find a solution for me (and I very much would rather not have speculation, but I appreciate the offer to help, thanks!) It's just one more unexpected behavior that I'll pick at here and there. One day I'll either feel mildly triumphant in sorting it out or it'll simply disappear and leave me baffled but relieved. Until then, it's just one more little itchy spot in the user experience and I don't care whose fault it is because I just want it to stop annoying me and I caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan't.

sigh

the evolution of language is a wonderful thing...

1864: "I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

2014: "wat."

[1.Ch.] Shit what Keet Says 

"Tim Horton's: Canada's Save Points."

Today's auditory treat, courtesy of hotel muzak:

"Boy from Ipanema", precisely the R63'd cover one would expect.

Seattle Area: Do you need a very cheap (manual transmission) car in good condition? :boost_ok: 

It's a 1995 Honda Accord DX, 5 speed manual. In amazing condition for 200,000 miles, just had its timing belt replaced.

This car has been worked hard but very lovingly cared for.

Its biggest issue: it was rear-ended and the trunk doesn't close properly (but doesn't seem to leak). Second worst: the windows squeak when you roll them down.

Clean title, has a solid 100k miles left in it.

Asking ~$800.

To bring you holiday cheer, here are some witches that went paddleboarding on the Willamette River.

When the moon hits your eye, 

You're a dog not a guy,
You're
A Werewolf

@pi yes!!

I also wish I could annotate my own actions towards other accounts: "followed because...", "turned off boosts because...", "blocked because...", and so on. The secondary benefit there would be that the action objects could be timestamped, ideally so that they could be displayed back to me in a log format of some kind.

now out from the kitchen Drac's voice did ring
seems he was worried by just one thing
opened the fridge and shook his fish and said
Vhatever heppened to my Transylvanian knish?
IT'S IN THE HASH
it's in the monster hash

GDQ Hotfix's Twitch moderation dislikes the word "cringeworthy". 

I'm very okay with the word "cringe" being a reason for a brief visit to the no-speaking penalty box, given its most recent connotation-become-definition.

But I gotta admit, as one of those folks who learned English in a different cultural context, it took me just a little time to figure out what was wrong with describing a videogame character's depicted grievous injury as "cringeworthy" because a cringe the word I know the face I make when I see grievous injury. (It's not like anyone who's ever seen a fast-food commercial can take the word "grimace" seriously.)

So I did a quick thesaurus check. Ah, I forgot about "wince". I should have said "winceworthy"! Got it now.

when a videogame crashes, there is a slim window of opportunity to achieve a state of zen

spouse: "It's not my fault this rock orbits a ball of nuclear fire. Whose idea was that, anyhow?"

me with a shrug: "Nobody's, it just sorta... fell together."

tired: iron is harmful to fae because of unspecified magic intrinsic properties
wired: iron is harmful to fae because of its chemical properties
inspired: iron is harmful to fae specifically because it is physically the stuff of the human Industrial Revolution, a social restructuring event with broadly devastating effects on human adherence to the core values of the fae. for this reason, iron is suffused with a palpable curse that arises from its position as a symbol of human callousness.

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