Even if I believed the girls were the aggressors (which I don’t), that doesn’t make anything permissible. Kids can’t consent, and it’s the job of adults to be adults. “Kids want” a million things. They want to drive when they are 8, they want to skip school, they want to eat candy for every meal, they want to play…

Yeah, my doctor’s “treatment plan” after being diagnosed with ovarian cysts at 24 was “they’ll go away when you hit menopause”.

In some ways it seems the more things change, the more things stay the same. When my father moved to Japan as a kid, he and his sisters went to school with all foreign students. Apparently it was just not done for students to go to public school. They ended up having lots of friends and speaking the language, but…

Enh, Japan is not some innocent naif blinking widely, lost in the woods. It has a mutli-century history of some really shitty things, and it’s a very right wing, conformist society with a history of sacrificing the individual to the corporate or nationalistic whims.

Well, just look how many of those kids have been convinced that ‘they wanted it’, or ‘they were in charge’ or they weren’t held down so it wasn’t rape. The fact is, sex with a minor is a crime, and it’s a crime because kids are generally incapable of the larger understanding of the consequences. But so many of these…

Childcare. Simple enough to justify paying an 11 year old $2 an hour to look after your kids for 8 hours. Too difficult for a grown man to understand.

The last time I went to the yuki matsuri in Hokkaido, I did end up in the middle of an attempted murder, so this scans. ;)

Does it also look like they shortened his tie slightly, and raised his crotch?

Hey, I’m a woman who spent much of my formative years getting the shit kicked out of me by dudes at my school. Thanks for sticking up for their right to harm me!

So if she hasn’t seen a thing, they’re not sharing their love of anything. She doesn’t have anything to share here. He just wants to talk about it, he’s decided she needs to listen, and he wants permissions to ignore her wishes and do what he wants.

Counterpoint, harder to share or lend DRM locked electronic documents with friends.  Can’t resell them, donate them, or gift them.  I’ve loaned out over 50 books in the last year.  I built much of my collection from used books.  Great if you want to pay hardcover prices for a PDF, but not so great for some.

When I lived in the Yukon, my friend and I would ride the horse trails around the town.  The ranch where we normally got the horses was, at that time, rehabilitating one of their horses who had gotten loose and lived over a year in the wild.  Yukon winters are bitingly cold, but he made it on his own.  At that time,…

Yeah, I love books. But I also moved a lot. The first time I moved, I pared down my collection by about 750 books. The next time I moved, I got rid of a couple hundred more. The next time I moved, 100 more. The next time, 300 more. Over time, I realized that as the last in a family line of readers, I was inheriting a…

I cleared out a lot of stuff with a local junk hauler.  They claim to have 30+ donating orgs working with them, so if you differentiate your stuff, they say they can donate it.  Nice because they came over and just took it all away.

Unless junior develops a medical condition and wants some DNA testing. Unless junior wants to find out who bio-dad is and hunts him down. Unless something goes wrong with the couple’s marriage and the donor somehow gets dragged into custody. What if the first, second, or third round don’t take and they want more…

OMG, I picked it up and I want so badly to run a MtG DnD campaign.  I’ve gotten really into the MtG lore, and the Ravnica guide sealed my fate.

I hear you on the gallbladder issues. It took three years of problems with my gallbladder before it was diagnosed. I finally ended up in the hospital after about 5 days of vomiting, I had burst all the blood vessels in my eyes, and all I could do was sit and pant lightly. They had to double dose me with pain killers…

It’s a disputed thing, all I can say is I’ve seen the northern lights hundreds of times, but on one clear night miles away from anything, on the open tundra, I heard a low electric hum. I’ve been in remote places since, but never heard anything again.

There’s a great moment in a pure science degree where you realize your degree is really only good for getting another degree, and you have to make a choice whether to make money or spend money. ;)

:) I spent summers in snowstorms surveying arctic coastlines, lived for over a year in the arctic itself, and went to places so remote I could hear the northern lights. Arctic environments rock.