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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Last prescription I got was antibiotics and steroids for an ear infection. The doctor indeed did give me dosage and schedule. Then the pharmacy also gave me instructions, and they were different. Seeing how each Doctor hopefully keeps up with their field and most likely can’t really with others, I’d say the pharmacy instructions are usually safer unless the patient has specific circumstances only the prescribing doctor is aware of.


  • America has been on the path for a while though, with the John Birch Society and the like working from the background. They’ve been around since the 1958, and lots of their literature and networks fostered the turn. Others like Bill Cooper, Alex Jones, etc, were active in the 90s and affected by JBS. Waco also had already ocurred.

    OKC has some influences from Cooper, and the JBS and other right wing people initially thought OKC was a huge setback for inroads with general audiences, and kept working to change how people feel. Tea party was a huge comeback for them, as people who knew of the JBS warned the Tea Party was just a resurgence.

    I don’t know if Lucas or other writers knew at the time, so you might be right. However, there were people warning about it back then, just not really heard or paid much attention to.






  • As someone who escaped, “God is love” as well as knowing gay people always was something a bit hard to reconcile, but not as much as you think. See, if you take all the sins in the Bible, or even just the ones in 1 Cor 6:9-11, then almost everyone in the world is a sinner. It works better on a sect that is small and consider most mainstream religions wrong, along with enough isolationism.

    I neve4 had a blinding hatred for gay people, and had friends etc. To past me, a gay person was just as sinful as anyone who had sex outside of marriage. The passage above lists fornication, adultery, drunkards, revelers and such with what some translate as homosexuality(iirc there’s some who believe it meant pederasty instead.) A reviler isn’t really that bad in the grand scheme of things, and almost everyone I knew outside the religion had sex before marrriage.

    Combined with little articles explaining homosexual feelings weren’t sinful, but acting on them were(same article pointing out straight people had to avoid sin in similar ways) I was fooled into thinking a weird “Well, I don’t agree with it, but it’s God’s rule and it’s his house…”

    I think part of it also was that I definitely did not consider myself “better”, as I hated myself for “breaking God’s law” by masturbating to porn. I didn’t even do it that much, but if I got tempted enough I would hate myself for months on end, considering 6 months not doing so to be not quite adequate, and considering myself not worthy of romantic relationships due to my “problem.”

    In a religion where everyone falls short of God’s glory, I didn’t really rank the sins, and tended to push to the back of my mind the things that didn’t feel right.

    Religion strongly discourages thinking for yourself, even if you think something is OK. It tells you that you’re not good enough to make those decisions yourself, because see what happened when Adam and Eve did that? Cognitive Disonance is a feature.





  • Cosmere books have an interesting spin on it. First an important caveat: all powers require some sort of fuel in the cosmere universe, or some sort or store/release mechanism. Therefore while poor and rich alike can gain powers, being able to afford to use those powers can vary. Some individual series deets(all of these exist in the same galaxy, but across different planets and sometimes different levels of tech)

    Mistborn starts out looking like it fits the comic, with main characters being halfbloods with noble parents. However, some of the supporting super-powered people don’t have that background, and as you go down the series some things start revealing what people believe about the powers isn’t quite true.

    Stormlight doesn’t follow the bloodline thing at all, and various people of all classes and bloodlines develop superpowers, and inheriting it isn’t the mechanism at all. Money can be a limiting factor, but isn’t strictly one.

    Warbeaker is somewhat more mixed. There is a power system anyone in the whole population can use, but the logistics of using it means people in power have a much easier time getting the needed resources to use it at higher levels. The resource is kinda tricky, so it isn’t something that can be regulated or even stolen, but can be gained by anyone who can convince, coerce, or pay someone for their resource(everyone is born with 1, but you need lots to be powerful).

    In addition, of the 4 main protags, 2 are princesses of a minor tribelike country, one is mysterious and too much spoilers to discuss, while the 4th is treated as a minor God, but is treated that way due to a more unique power system, but also one that isn’t class based. A bit complicated but a concept explained early in the book: Returned are people who come back to life, and people worship them because of two features they have: they might dream about the near future, but won’t understand it themselves, and they can sacrifice their second life to perfectly heal any one person. They have limits I won’t go into here though.

    Summary: powers in their true form do not discriminate, but situations and societal structure allows some of them to be manipulated that way.







  • As in the amount who can successfully pursue jobs in that field that pay enough to live off of. Even education jobs are having a hard time with pay.

    Some types of art appear to look great because of those in the field who are hugely successful, but for every successful pop star or diva, how many people keep trying to make music, make something decent but don’t get off the ground? Indie music has its place, but a lot of really successful artists are connected to the industry by family or friends etc, same with a lot of acting talent nowadays.

    You could argue other jobs have similar limits but they’re usually much more dense.