I think Count_Zero_Interrupt about covers it.

My aunt, a nurse, told me as a teenager about her friend who had 2 earrings made in the shape of IUDs. Each in honor of a child she got pregnant with while fitted with her IUD.

That's a good point. Hollywood rarely does well by its source material. If it chose something good, it'd probably just take out most of the interesting stuff and make it like every other movie.

Agreed. There is nothing new under the sun and drawing inspiration from other works is reasonable. However, when you borrow you need the creativity and talent create gestalt, a new work that becomes more than the sum of its parts. But her work is basically insipid.

I did hear a rumor about the 5th or 6th? (Don't remember which is the last in TMI) That she does do some actual fighting and such. But that in itself is an example. Why would it take that long for her to acquire some actually useful skills!

The subsequent books do get less saccharine-tweeny-superficial. But not to the point where the girls are gearing up, kicking ass, taking names and having strategy sessions together about it. They're still talking about the guys.

Put her on my Goodreads to-read list. Need more gothic fantasy anyway.

I think the most flattering word I could use would be resilient. To be fair, she does take a lot of crazy stuff pretty much in stride and has some principles she sticks to.

No fucking kidding. I agree 9000%.

That's what I recall all through book 4. It's easily proven, I'm sure, my memory is not perfect. However, there's a difference between passing on a technicality and really being praise-worthy.

And Clary's clothes. Like that scene where Isabelle gives Clary her shirt to wear as a dress. I seem to recall it was shiny, the shirt?

That's surprising to me, because if you ask me what the girls talked to each other about, I'd have thought it was mostly the boys.

I've experienced both ends of that. From age 0 - 21 I ate a crap ton, of anything I wanted, which included junk. For years running, sometimes I ate healthy and exercised, sometimes I ate junk and laid around. But it didn't really matter. My weight only fluctuated a few pounds at most. I was about a size 4.

The weird thing to me about it is that if you ask many of those kids, within the limits of their exposure to actual gayness, if being gay is the same as being bad or stupid, they mostly won't think so. The two things are not related for them.

White person here. I actually used to be kind of "ehh" about affirmative action. Simply because I heard so many white people complain about it. I didn't agree with most of their complaints, but I thought it was bad PR.

I'm not gonna argue that having an external locus of control isn't a problem, it absolutely is. Nor that having an external locus of control couldn't impact how much willpower you have — it could. However, there's no proof of correlation and I see it as kind of a chicken or egg scenario. If someone has clinical…

That's precisely the point. Will is a resource impacted by and used for almost everything. Just like people have a certain amount of money to spend, they have a certain amount of will to spend. This is one of several intersecting factors that is a potential contributor to weight.

It's not a social construct. A social construct varies across groups, it's learned. While ego depletion can be affected by social constructs, it is not itself a social construct.

Everyone.

Of course it is. But also to varying degrees at those times. I don't see why it's fine regard groups of strangers with scorn and disdain even then, though.