CritterKeeper

I love how "my cat" seems to be a part of her name!  Every reference is to "Explorer, my cat," or "My cat, Explorer," pretty much without fail.  Kind of like how my Patrick was never Pat.  After the fifth or sixth time one of our receptionists tried to call him "Saint Patrick" and ended up saying "Sir Patrick" instead, that became part of his name, too, his full title being "Sir Patrick the Fuzzy-Mouse Slayer" for his fondness for the little fake-fur cat-toy mice we carried then.  

That happens so often. One of my Burmese cats tended towards being fat, so the first time my wife saw him, she called him Fatso. I instantly turned it into Catso and the poor thing was stuck with that for the rest of his life.
Her current cat is even less fortunate. Her full name is by now Precious Princess Pretty Kitty Meow-Meow.

OK, now that makes sense.
However, there is another nuance, atheist seem to care about their atheist. I had a friend in high school who claimed to be agnostic, and he was fairly apathetic about the whole thing. Is that a thing?
Also, it's not a can of worms, it's the FSM, bless his noodly appendages.
 
 
 

I thought it wasn't until he saw poop. Dog poop.
The atheistic stance that rings closest to true for me is actually from Babylon Five. Marcus Cole.
"Wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

I love how "my cat" seems to be a part of her name!  Every reference is to "Explorer, my cat," or "My cat, Explorer," pretty much without fail.  Kind of like how my Patrick was never Pat.  After the fifth or sixth time one of our receptionists tried to call him "Saint Patrick" and ended up saying "Sir Patrick" instead, that became part of his name, too, his full title being "Sir Patrick the Fuzzy-Mouse Slayer" for his fondness for the little fake-fur cat-toy mice we carried then.  

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

There are so many reasons why this would not work, one of which is that the tests need not be applied in good faith. It would merely join gerrymandering as another tool in the toolbox of voter suppression. The only thing I personally see as working is better education for everybody.

More than 1/4 of the Union Army died at Gettysburg, more than 1/3 of the Confederate Army.
Edward Everett was the name of the featured speaker. Quoting history.com : " Everett, the former president of Harvard College, former U.S. senator and former secretary of state, was at the time one of the country’s leading orators." It is worth noting that a two hour speech was customary and expected at the time. "
Lincoln's speech was short because that was his role, akin to being the one to use the scissors to cut the ribbon at a building dedication. Of course in hindsight, it is easy to see that a two minutes speech of less than three hundred words can be memorable, less so a two hour oratory.
That the Gettysburg Address was crafted on the train ride is a myth. Witnesses place the writing the days prior to the event. Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward accompanied him, so there may have been further discussion and possibly some revision along the way.
It was a well crafted piece designed to hammer home a few key points, the most radical of which, (and honestly, this had escaped me, the referenced article laid it out), was that the Declaration of Independence was a foundational document of our government. I've understood the notion, even scratched my head at "why?"; it never occurred to me that this speech is the one that drove it home,  linking the intention of the Founding Fathers laid out in the Declaration to how we govern. "Oh, that makes sense now; this is way more foundational that it might appear at first glance. It's more than just a really good speech." He was cutting the legs out from under the argument that "The Constitution does not forbid slavery."
 

I love how "my cat" seems to be a part of her name!  Every reference is to "Explorer, my cat," or "My cat, Explorer," pretty much without fail.  Kind of like how my Patrick was never Pat.  After the fifth or sixth time one of our receptionists tried to call him "Saint Patrick" and ended up saying "Sir Patrick" instead, that became part of his name, too, his full title being "Sir Patrick the Fuzzy-Mouse Slayer" for his fondness for the little fake-fur cat-toy mice we carried then.  

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

René Murat Auberjonois
June 1, 1940 – December 8, 2019
Now who will keep Quark from causing trouble or prepare Les Poissons?
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Caroll Edwin Spinney
December 26, 1933 – December 8, 2019
Can you tell me how to get to a place where you can make a living by being six years old for fifty years?

Danish Bananas?
Can't the Danes let Iceland have anything as their own?
https://satwcomic.com/never-say-never

Cats are soft and warm and fluffy
Anything that is also soft and warm and fluffy but isn't a cat is obviously incomplete
so she is obligated to cover it with her scent and hair to make it as cat like as possible

Here is explorer hanging out on my overstuffed chair
.

I am.  My cat, on the other hand...

And here I thought you were a Linux man.

I have a new cat.  Her name is Explorer and she has already settled in and is hanging out with me in bed.   She is about 2 years old and was a part of a colony that a friend of mine's parents had.  She has spent some time inside, but was, when I picked her up, a barn cat.  

Obviously we must bring back municipal trolley/streetcar systems!

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
 

Well, I've heard three different amusing answers through the years, so maybe come back and read them when your funnybone is back online?
 
1) "The same color as the chameleon on the other side of the mirror."
2) "What chameleon?"
3) "Seems clear to me!"

I feel that a huge opportunity has been missed by not making magic dildos.
Two drums and a cymbal roll off a cliff.
Bah dumm tish.

I created a pirate who was imaginatively named "Jolly Roger" for my superhero game. One of his best and most successful superpowers was that he had a stuffed parrot with a built in radio transmitter sitting on his shoulder. But the radio wasn't the point. The point was to tempt any enemy he faced into spending an attack on it to knock it off his shoulder.
And it worked. Every time. EVERY. TIME.
That consarned parrot had one purpose and one purpose only. Ablative armor. And it didn't once fail him. My players didn't catch on to it until after the campaign ended and I actually told them. That resulted in a lot of laughs, facepalming and even kudos to the guy. He was really low powered in general but worked mainly on smarts, and the players applauded him for pulling such a simple yet irresistible trick on them.

Heh, that reminds me of one I read where the DM decided that his players were over-reliant on magic. So he created a monster who was immune to all forms of magic damage, both direct and indirect... and had ONE hit point. He nearly managed a TPK before someone hit the monster with something non-magical... accidentally.

Tedd was certainly pressured into admitting Diane to the party
The sequence of events leading up to the call from Susan left Tedd in a situation where there were valid reasons for giving either a "Yes" or "No" answer, and plenty of reasons why either answer would have been the wrong answer
Will every body spend the rest of the night attempting to behave in such a way that will avoid offending anybody and, at best, become a comedy of manners?
Or will this party expand on the original theme and welcome two new spellcasters into the wonderful world of magic?

The pirate would take out 99 of the ninja, but the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu tells us that the 100th ninja would be badass enough to take on a whole ship full of pirates.  (Unknown if pirates get to get better the fewer of them there are left or not, though....)