You shut your mouth …

He is human and he needs to be loved, just like everybody else does.

Yes, but the price of that temporary earthly magic is your immortal soul!

So, theoretically, it’s not worth it.

According to the story, if your character dies in-game, by that point you’re so addicted to the black magic that you ultimately can’t go on living without it.

Definitely still do.

This is fair.

It’s exhausting to try to have a conversation with someone who isn’t engaging in good faith.

It’s perfectly understandable if you don’t want to spend your time and energy in that way. And (as I argued at length here) it isn’t your responsibility.

I call bullshit on this. Education does not, in fact, “go both ways.”

Generally, in western society, we accept the idea that adults should be responsible for themselves, with exceptions for those who are physically or mentally unable to do so. We value principles of autonomy and personal responsibility, so we’re generally expected to do the work of educating ourselves (or paying someone for their help) in adulthood.

When a person has a child, they make a choice to be a parent and to take on the responsibility to raise that child. Of course, we know that not everyone follows through on that responsibility.

That person’s child has not been given any choice. They should not be required to take responsibility for their parent(s) just because of the accident of their birth. Many children choose to care for their parents in their old age for various reasons, usually for love or money.

As a society, we agree that we owe protection, education, and the fulfillment of needs to our children … because we choose to bring those children into the world and because we need them to perpetuate the social order we rely on.

Those children do not, when they become adults, automatically owe the same things back to the full-grown adults who raised them. Generally, we expect them to provide stability for their elders by contributing to the social and economic order, mostly by paying taxes and keeping infrastructure functional.

Parents are able to control aspects of their children’s lives in order to raise them in what they deem to be appropriate ways. Children don’t get “a turn” to control all of the same aspects of their parents’ lives. My mother kept me from playing video games and watching MTV as a teen because she thought it would “rot your brain.” But as much as I’d love to, I can’t keep her from watching Fox (or NewsMax, or OAN, or TBN, or whatever she’s on this week).

Some people might choose to try to reverse the effects of 20+ years of a 24-hour propaganda machine brainwashing their parents out of love or a sense of familial duty, or whatever. And that’s admirable.

But I absolutely reject the idea that it’s somehow “my turn” to “educate” 20+ years of Fox News programming out of my aging conservative parents.

Miles originated in Britain, so talk to them about their made-up nonsense.

At least they were eventually willing to give up the imperial system. I still don’t understand why Americans never got on board with metric; it’s so much easier.

Honestly, this is probably it. Look at who has bankrolled Trump’s campaign and (nonexistent) presidential library.

This is why my previous employer moved to “unlimited” vacation.

They originally had a PTO-with-rollover plan until one day the CTO went to the president and said, “I have enough vacation days banked to take off October 1 to December 31.”

They removed the rollover first, but then everyone wanted the last two weeks of the year off. There was never “a good time” to use one’s PTO in other parts of the year and nobody wanted to lose their vacation days. And of course management look like jerks if they “steal” everyone’s time off.

Now, it’s “unlimited” (pending management approval), so nobody is “losing” anything when management says no to those two weeks as well. You might get a couple of days here and there, but it’s difficult to get a whole week and nearly impossible to get two consecutive weeks.

Just one of the many reasons why I no longer work there.

“Hard work” is one of the cultural norms that the Puritans instilled in our society. Our ancestors fought hard to form labor unions and to guarantee that we wouldn’t have to work 80-hour weeks, and yet here we are.

Not to say that people in other countries don’t work hard. They do. Many work harder than their counterparts in the US. But their governments have (very reasonable) limits on the amount of time their employers can expect them to work. (As well as minimums for time off, sick leave, etc.)

It’s a weird holdover of American culture that spending too much time at work and putting the company’s needs before your own is somehow virtuous.

25 years ago, my aunt said we don’t have to recycle or care for the planet “because Jesus is coming back soon.”

It was at that point I realized that people who don’t believe the world will still exist in 10 years probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

We all know that’s because Trump insists on the DOJ following his orders even though he doesn’t understand the law, right?

Under qualified Presidents, the DOJ was expected to maintain high standards of ethics and follow the law. That meant bringing indictments with enough evidence to win cases and not prosecuting cases when the evidence didn’t support them.

Under the current clown-shoes administration, the DOJ is expected to bring indictments against anyone who hurt Little Donny’s feelings, regardless of the evidence. And (at least for now) the rest of the judicial system is still following the law, which means that those cases get no traction.

That’s really a question for your doctor, but there are other types of pain relievers than NSAIDs or acetaminophen.

My response is usually, “If the only thing that keeps you from doing those things is your belief in God, then that says a lot about you as a person.”

This is basically what I got too.

I would be surprised if Texas doesn’t have a very specific law about sex ed in schools and what can be taught at specific grade levels.

Any state that is christofascist enough to require a display of the Ten Commandments in schools is probably also prudish enough to punish teachers for honest discussions of human sexuality.

They do, but the white pages are nearly nonexistent now that almost everyone has a cell instead of a landline.

I haven’t lived in the US for 4 years now, but when I did, we had phone books dropped on our front porch every six months. I’d see one, pick it up, carry it through the house, and deposit it directly in the recycling bin.

I live near a volcano, and I’d say most of the “dust” in our home is actually very fine volcanic ash.

There’s definitely some skin cells and pet dander in there. There’s just no way that those things are a majority of what we sweep up every few days, because our collective mass cannot possibly be dwindling that quickly.

A quick search suggests that one square inch of skin has 19 million skin cells. At a rate of 1000 per hour, it would take 19,000 hours (791.6 days) for one person to shed enough cells to equal one square inch of skin. Two humans live in my household, so we’ll say for us together it would take roughly a year.

I’m sweeping up multiple cubic inches of dust multiple times a week. If dust were “mostly” skin cells, we should only need to dust a little bit once a year.

I would venture to say it never is. I worked in a toxic environment for five years, and it literally made me ill.

My hair started falling out in big handfuls and I had constant digestive problems. I went to a series of doctors and ended up with an endocrinologist who said my thyroid was overactive and might need to be irradiated to stop the problems. Then at my next appointment, it was under-active. It didn’t make sense.

I had already been looking for a new job, and I changed jobs after that second appointment. A month later, all of my problems had gone away. It turned out all the havoc in my body was just due to stress.

They could have quadrupled my pay and it still wouldn’t have been worth the effects on my health.

It’s called “Mar-a-Lago face” and I’m pretty sure it’s what tacky people think beautiful women look like.