ChronosCat

"Hooray for Incompetence!"
Cute
But as a mantra for life, I still prefer "Dare to be Stupid"

Somewhat less risky (though far from risk free) but equally important are those responsible for making vital supplies.
My sister and father work in a factory (my sister as a member of the Quality Control team, and my father as a mechanic) that makes swabs, including the type used in the corona-virus test kits. They're both working overtime these days as the company tries to get as many swabs as it can out the door as quickly as possible. I have to admit that I never realized before how important their work could be; I'm now quite proud of them.

Somewhat less risky (though far from risk free) but equally important are those responsible for making vital supplies.
My sister and father work in a factory (my sister as a member of the Quality Control team, and my father as a mechanic) that makes swabs, including the type used in the corona-virus test kits. They're both working overtime these days as the company tries to get as many swabs as it can out the door as quickly as possible. I have to admit that I never realized before how important their work could be; I'm now quite proud of them.

I am now playing through a playlist of ALL TEN SONGS off my Derivations album. You read that right - I've finished writing them! I put the last tweaks in on the last unfinished track yesterday. Now, I'm checking for relative volume levels, mastering differences, appropriate track placements, and other details. I've also put out a call for help in getting the album cover designed.
If it weren't for my knee and my infected toe, I would be a happy camper indeed.

I'll put $Q 25 on April... of 2021.

I'll put $Q 25 on April... of 2021.

*nod* That concerns me too and, as far as I can tell, I'm very much like Dan in many ways relevant to what I like to read and write about.
I suspect the difference is that Dan feels the pressure to keep a schedule while I'm much more willing to delay producing something in order to meet a certain standard.  After all, everyone productive agrees that "perfection is no good if it means you never get it done" but where to draw the line is a fuzzy thing.
(For my story ideas, I'm taking the "plan out the whole novel/fanfic first, then fill it in like a progressive JPEG, then only share it with strangers after it's more or less done," approach... something that keeps getting me dopamine hits from a trickle of insights I never could have had from writing in linear order, which cause me to make significant but proportionately worthwhile changes to the character bio charts, backstory, etc.)
Heck, once I clear out some more urgent projects, I have a Scrivener competitor in a very early stage of development where the ability to pull up note cards which share a certain tag (eg. character bios) in a cross-comparison display is on the TODO list specifically because I'm finding it's starting to get laborious to double-check that my characters aren't evolving toward too much similarity as I continue to develop my conceptions of them.

On the one hand I enjoy seeing people embrace the fun of transformation. On the other hand, every once and a while I get concerned that Dan is making his characters more and more similar over time to a level that is unrealistic (and potentially could lead to them no longer feeling like distinct characters); I'm feeling that concern again. (Other examples: Both Tedd and Elliot are nonbinary/gender-fluid. All of the main 10 except Justin and Nanase (and arguably male!Tedd) are some form of bisexual. ...Though at least those examples are of things which don't get enough representation elsewhere. Having most of the cast being interested in transformation just feels indulgent.)
At any rate, yay for blurry-sunburst-with-bubbles background in panel three! Yay for diagonal-lines-and-bubbles background in panel four!  

Are you?
Look again at the story. The ultimate proof it's not real is that Susan got away with it.
And, actually, she tried multiple times to NOT be rude just to find out it's not working.
Also, note that even if this is not real and we are all in a video game, you still shouldn't be rude to other players. It's only allowed to be rude to NPCs.
(However, I doubt that. I mean, seriously, noone would try story as improbable as real life.)

Thank you! I thought I saw your name roll through on a Bandcamp receipt the other night. Much obliged!

This is, of course, the anniversary of one of the most important events in the history of EGS
28 January, 2003
https://egscomics.com/comic/2003-01-28

Here is explorer hanging out on my overstuffed chair
.

Or possibly that people were doing the same thing about her.

Which is in-character and hasn't killed you (yet).

This does not keep them from either proselytising or from being assholes.
Yes, Richard Dawkins, James Cameron, I am looking at both of you.
I have encountered atheists who reacted with such complete and reflexive rejection of religious thoughts that it in turn made them irrational. I made the simple statement that modern Western culture is largely based on Christian thought and they rejected it unthinkingly. They could not wrap their minds around the idea that we live in a culture that has been steeped in Christianity for centuries and that it has shaped the thought of our parents and their forebears in all that time -- and that this inevitably has affected even those of us who have rejected Christianity as well. All they did was scream that the Bible was invalid nonsense, too fearful to realise that Christianity represents far, far more than the simple idea "I believe in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit."

Actually it was Electric Light Orchestra's 'Roll Over Beethoven.'

My cat Suzan just died.  She was ill for quite a while before this.

When I came to the realization I was non-binary (or rather, like Tedd, discovered there was a name for how I'd always felt) I was in a phase of trying not to think about the unpleasant parts of my childhood, so I never really examined my past in light of this knowledge. A lot of what you've said sounds quite familiar to me though, Old Hack, and it's making me contemplate how much of my difficulties fitting in as a child might have been the result of my gender. Thank you for the food for thought.

When I came to the realization I was non-binary (or rather, like Tedd, discovered there was a name for how I'd always felt) I was in a phase of trying not to think about the unpleasant parts of my childhood, so I never really examined my past in light of this knowledge. A lot of what you've said sounds quite familiar to me though, Old Hack, and it's making me contemplate how much of my difficulties fitting in as a child might have been the result of my gender. Thank you for the food for thought.

Gentle forumgoers,
a little while ago I had a discussion with our esteemed fellow poster @Darth Fluffy. In it I offered to share some of my and my family's experiences with him. I have decided to post a brief essay I have written on the topic publicly here in the hope that others might benefit from reading it, too. Darth, if you feel it may be helpful, I suggest you show this to your daughter. It might conceivably open some pathway of discussion between you that I hope you may both benefit from.
Please note that I am issuing a general content warning for what may be somewhat personal emotions and experiences. It might trouble some readers and be of no interest to others. Also please note and respect that I am not open to unsolicited advice nor to opinions about my state of mental well-being. I leave that in the hands of the health professionals I trust and have no interest in armchair psychology peddled by people who have no direct personal knowledge of me.
With that said, let me begin.

 
My name is Monika, and I am a trans woman. I am writing this document at the urgings of my father, who believes that explaining my identity in my own words may be a good way to make myself understood to my friends and family. I also dedicate it to my online friends and acquaintances, many of whom have trans relatives or are themselves genderqueer. It is my hope that my own experiences may be helpful to those who wish to better understand. Please note that I am writing on my own behalf and that I do not speak for anyone else, though it is my hope that other trans and genderqueer people upon reading this will nod and recognise at least some of what I have experienced.

Now, right out of the gate I wish to deal with a potential source of confusion. It is common trans terminology to say “I identify as <gender identity>.” Many assume that ‘identify’ here functions as an active verb and that it is a choice I have made. Nothing could be further from the truth, which I will attempt to explain in this document. Whether my identity was already biologically determined at birth or it formed in the following years is not relevant for these purposes; what matters is that it formed and that I at no point ever possessed determination in coming into it. As far back as I can remember, I was a girl even in childhood. I was simply assigned male gender at birth based on my physical attributes and was obviously never even consulted on the matter.
 
Why didn’t I ever object to it back then? Perhaps I did and was gently or not so gently corrected by respectively my family and society at large. Children were not allowed agency in expressing their gender back then and it is still rare today. We are heavily socially conditioned to express our assigned gender as soon as we are old enough to be subject to conditioning. Whether it fits us at all does not matter. We are simply told to conform, and if we do not, we suffer the consequences. And in fact I lived in such fear of these consequences that as time passed, I could not bear the thought of not presenting myself as a boy. I would be considered abnormal, strange, weird. I would be ostracized by my agemates and seen as an aberration by people older than me. And finally that fear grew so strong that I entirely repressed my female identity and pretended to be a boy. Which I was not very good at, so I got ostracized by my agemates and seen as an aberration by people older than me. Ah well.
 
Having arrived at the point where I am at last able to acknowledge being a woman to myself has transformed my perception of my life. So many things that made no sense to me in my childhood and teen years have suddenly become comprehensible to me. And in the process, repressed memories of mine resurface -- at times with startling lucidity -- and I marvel at how they suddenly make sense to me from my new perspective.
 
Throughout my childhood I was the odd one out, among the last ever picked for any team, the misfit no-one quite knew what to do with. My agemates called me the ‘girly boy’, I did not properly engage in the ‘boy games’, I pretended but never convinced anyone. Not even myself. I was just too afraid to even consider the alternative. It led to some moments I consider very telling in retrospect. An example: I loved singing in the school choir. Then one year the woman in charge of the choir decided to perform the March of Saint Lucia, an old and well-loved midwinter celebration welcoming the return of daylight. But because the performers wear long white robes that are basically dresses, the boys in the choir shied away from the idea in horror. A mere week or two after the decision they had all left. I stayed behind, not even understanding why there would be a problem. And as a result got more flak for being the ‘girly boy’ than ever.
 
I could provide more examples, but I’d rather go on in a more general way so this will not grow overlong and repetitive. Suffice it to say that I again and again encountered situations where my actions were judged on the basis of me performing as a boy, and again and again I fell short of expectations. Failure became so common to me that I started to take it for granted. As I entered puberty I fit less and less well in among the boys around me. I felt uncomfortable in situations where we got divided into ‘boys and girls’. And when the other boys discussed girls, I frequently found myself biting down on wanting to interrupt them and say that they were not being fair, or mean, or just didn’t understand. Eventually I just couldn’t relate to my agemates at all and ended up entirely sidelined. I even accepted it. This was, after all, the only normal I knew. Unfortunately acceptance did not enable me to endure it and eventually I failed out of high school with a resounding crash. (I have since learned that this is not an unknown phenomenon for trans teens of either gender.)
 
At this point I would like to address the elephant in the room: a general and common perception of trans people as ‘mentally ill.’ While this is no longer the accepted view of the DSM, it was only addressed back in 2013 and many still believe that trans people are delusional. For now I shall sidestep Foccault and his ideas that ‘insanity’ is a view of society rather than necessarily a medical condition, though I do wish to nod to him in passing. But as a matter of fact: Yes, I suffer from mental illness. To be precise, clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. But I posit that naming them the reason for my identity not matching my assigned gender is placing the cart squarely in front of the horse. Rather, I suggest this possibility: that being forced to spend my entire childhood and adult life pretending to be a gender not my own resulted in me experiencing constant anxiety and eventually severe depression. I daresay that there are professional psychiatrists and psychologists that are at least amenable to discussing the idea.
 
(By the way, two common arguments employed against the concept of transgender identity are respectively 1] that trans individuals are delusional and insane, and 2] that it is not possible to just ‘choose’ to be the other gender. Precisely how and why one might ‘choose’ to become delusional and insane is for some reason never satisfactorily explained.)
 
All this, by the way, is why I am violently opposed to the notion that I have ‘become’ a woman, or even more ludicrously that I have ‘chosen’ to be a woman. I have always been a woman. I was merely forced to repress my actual identity out of powerlessness to resist the one imposed on me and fear of the consequences if I should object to it. I was a girl from childhood on. I was just never allowed to express it. Along these lines, trans people in general tend to object to the conception that they either 'become' or 'choose to be' a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. I hope this helps to make it more explicable why.
 
I may have more on this topic later, but I think I am done for now. If you have gotten this far, I thank you for reading.
 
Monika
 

Also of some importance, it is impossible to establish at this remote in time precisely what happened. I can only speculate based on historical examples of what happens when two populations meet in this way. It is my hypothesis that some of these relationships involved consent for reasons of either passion, love or convenience, and that some... did not.
To which proportion either happened I have no idea. I am sufficiently of a romantic to hope that it was as much as was possible of the former and as little of the latter. But I do not have high hopes, I am afraid.
*scratches head* According to prevailing anthropological and genetic knowledge, the only 100% racially pure Homo sapiens sapiens left on the planet are certain peoples in Africa who have yet to have children with people from other parts of the world. The humans who migrated north and east through Europe and Asia Minor encountered Homo neanderthalensis there and interbred with them. Also, both of these are now believed to have interbred with another subspecies of Homo commonly referred to as the Denisovans and tentatively named Homo denisova, Homo altaiensis, or Homo sapiens denisova. No scientific consensus of precisely what to call them has been arrived at yet, at least as far as I know.
I do admire the irony. Hitler, white supremacists and similar buffoons notwithstanding, it seems that the purest of human beings still alive are Black and largely live in Africa.

From what I remember of those days, you were just the sort of moderator we needed back then. Someone less aggressive might have let too much slide (I'm pretty sure I would have).
As a moderator you might be a less ideal match for the current more sedate forums, but I still think you're a good moderator. You may pull out the moderator red a little fast at times, but  you always give people warnings before taking any more drastic action (in fact, I don't think I've even seen you do anything more drastic than lock a thread since I returned).
...This has gotten me thinking of the work you do for this forum, and have done for years, and while it's on my mind I'd like to say "thank you" for that work.

From what I remember of those days, you were just the sort of moderator we needed back then. Someone less aggressive might have let too much slide (I'm pretty sure I would have).
As a moderator you might be a less ideal match for the current more sedate forums, but I still think you're a good moderator. You may pull out the moderator red a little fast at times, but  you always give people warnings before taking any more drastic action (in fact, I don't think I've even seen you do anything more drastic than lock a thread since I returned).
...This has gotten me thinking of the work you do for this forum, and have done for years, and while it's on my mind I'd like to say "thank you" for that work.

From what I remember of those days, you were just the sort of moderator we needed back then. Someone less aggressive might have let too much slide (I'm pretty sure I would have).
As a moderator you might be a less ideal match for the current more sedate forums, but I still think you're a good moderator. You may pull out the moderator red a little fast at times, but  you always give people warnings before taking any more drastic action (in fact, I don't think I've even seen you do anything more drastic than lock a thread since I returned).
...This has gotten me thinking of the work you do for this forum, and have done for years, and while it's on my mind I'd like to say "thank you" for that work.

As far as Challenger goes, I was only in Kindergarten at the time, so the memory is a bit fuzzy and uncertain, but I want to say that they had brought a TV into the classroom so my class could watch the launch. I remember thinking something looked wrong (but not being familiar enough with shuttle launches to be sure) before the TV announcer said anything, which would support the idea that I saw it live.
At any rate, I was really into space related stuff at the time, so it was a huge deal to me. I was shocked, and a rather sad about the lost astronauts and the teacher who was on board. I was also really disappointed when the shuttles were all grounded for close to three years afterwards, as I had enjoyed reading about the things astronauts did and that was a really long time to wait as a kid.