Nope, but I did grow up around people who would hear that in a meeting and then absolutely want to use their new linguistic toy every chance they got, despite not at all analyzing even the half-layer deep that would be required to understand what using it implies about who you think you are (or your boss is).
You forgot the additional $3000 and five years to do enough projects to gain the skills to make a table your loved ones will allow in the house. 🤣
I haven’t “been Mormon” in decades, and the internet was likely a game changer, but there is a reason they get called a cult from time to time.
There is a powerful taboo against even reading, much less investigating, secular sources of history about the early church. If your friends seem to be true believing, then they likely do believe that Josiah Smith was a prophet, the same way mainstream Christians (and Mormons too, lol) believe a Judean rabble rouser came back to life after he got executed because he was divine.
If they’re intellectually honest, they would probably acknowledge that the “facts” exist but would say they’re incomplete or intentionally shaded, and that their faith is not dependent on contemporary non-Mormon accounts. They will roll out quotes from the leadership among the lines of “doubt your doubts” or that faith does not require perfect knowledge.
Then, factor in that the social aspects of church life are pretty all encompassing and that church discipline is very real within the top-down organization they have, and there are powerful psychological motivations not to dig too deeply.
They do, or at least they are very much supposed to. It’s the interplay between their 7th and 9th articles of faith. To follow on that, they (are supposed to) believe that literally every president of the LDS church is/was a prophet.
The direct line to God is super helpful when, for instance, the whole operation is gonna be shut down due to the feds finally having enough presence in the region to enforce polygamy laws, or when they’re going to exclude your flagship university from the student loan program because you said that black men couldn’t hold any leadership positions due to being descended from the wrong dudes in Old Testament times.
It’s close, though. IIRC, you can’t say the same thing about Miami.
Even moreso this time:
Batra, who has spent nearly half her life working in immigration courts, stopped working for the government’s side in immigration proceedings—instead helping only the immigrants seeking status—after seeing the conditions in detention facilities and how detained people were treated.
Probably? Maybe? Just thought it was worth rolling out the adjective since it was comparing to the before-times. :-)
Also make it 2005 again so people can’t get a 50" widescreen TV for two hundred bucks.
I’m not even all that picky. Two or three trailers and a couple of ads, I get it. The butts are in the seat and it’s pollyannaish to assume the suits won’t leverage that. Sometimes I even see a trailer for an interesting-looking movie that I didn’t know was in the pipeline. It’s just such a beatdown the longer it goes, and by that I mean the literal time commitment, yes, but also the sense of the social contract being violated, the tonal whiplash, and the clear diminishing returns on picking their audience demographics.
Now the real questions are how long did it take, and which direction did you go? What if you did all this and it turns out you only ran 2.499 km?!?!?!?! Eratosthenes is looking at you disapprovingly.
I saw Project Hail Mary recently, and while I leveraged my assigned seat to show up at the listed time – even though as a kid I developed the instinct that you need to be at a movie early – I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust the conventional wisdom as to how long the previews and ads would go on after that.
I need to get over it. It was something like 28 minutes, and made the entire experience less fun than it should have been. I’m seeing Dune in the theaters, and maybe the Mandolorian movie if the reviews are decent (I’m still a sucker for Star Wars. Is what it is.). If I get to three in a single year, that will actually be a new high for me in the last 10-20 years.
Everything else is fine at home. We have a pretty big TV and a sound bar, and for all but about 1-3 visual and communal experiences per year, that is all I need. I remember when we were living large with a 32" CRT and stereo speakers that faced forward, so I still feel special watching on a “bigscreen,” and the kids these days (LOL… I’m old) all spend most of their time staring at screens from 5-11", so a movie on the big old TV is already a special treat.
My comment history is littered with this idea, but cinemas are settling into their best use case when they can’t benefit from a captive audience. They are there for big events and film devotees, but everyone who went to the theater because it’s the only place where you could see a movie on a half-decent setup will find other options. It’s not entirely unlike live theater before it, and all the grousing from auteurs will not change it. I’m not even saying they’re wrong, just that they benefited from the fact that they the artform they love had built-in technical and economic advantages that gave them a false idea about how invested the broader audience was in the nuances of their work.
“I was in an extraordinary personal crisis because I didn’t want to be vaccinated. At the same time I certainly didn’t want to let my team down at the Olympic Games.”
Barely one layer deep, there’s an almost impressive level of IDGAF energy here: “You see, the thing is, somebody wanted me to do a thing I didn’t want to do, but I had this other thing that I did want to do, so being the type of person that I am, I lied about the first thing and it all worked out for me.”
Having attended several red state universities, I chose to take it as a statement that alongside the ubiquitous plaza preachers, who are never affiliated with the school and are generally no one’s favorite campus characters, there’s also plenty of standard college silliness and shenanigans. Apart from the big blue cities, the college towns of the south are generally the most educated and forward thinking enclaves of their red states, hence the huge pressure campaigns from their governors to being the schools themselves to heel.
In addition to FecEx and Dominos, there’s other restaurants, Amazon, UPS, newer Chinese-owned final-mile carriers, Uber including Eats/Pets/Courier/etc., Lyft, Doordash, medical couriers, legal couriers, etc. etc. It’s tougher outside the cities, and it’s all kind of a neo-Victorian dystopia of poor wages and no support, but if what’s you actually want to do, “driving places cuz other people can’t or won’t” is a very doable job-description in the US. Just make sure you’re factoring in car expenses if you do the gig-based ones.
Well, spam, egg, sausage, and spam – that’s not got much spam in it.
There was some fun to this in the early going, but eventually it’s just a yawn-fest of money-whipping the lower leagues and cross-promoting whatever else Ryan is invested in.
That’s interesting. I guess this game really lends itself to a personal play-style. I take it as a challenge to see what I can do with no searches at all, but I can also easily see how I’m missing out on some other skills and the educational potential of the game that way.
#WhenTaken #772 (09.04.2026)
I scored 775/1000🏅
1️⃣📍2.2 km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥇197/200
2️⃣📍1.7K km - 🗓️5 yrs - 🥈152/200
3️⃣📍3.1K km - 🗓️9 yrs - 🥈126/200
4️⃣📍2.2K km - 🗓️8 yrs - 🥈137/200
5️⃣📍1.3K km - 🗓️1 yrs - 🥈163/200
https://whentaken.com/
Not my best, but no incorrect hemispheres or centuries!
Generally yes, but what are called mainline Episcopalians are “in communion” with the Church of England, so they’re kinda sorta Anglican. If an observant Anglican were to want to attend church in the US, that’s who they would look up.
Some red-state suburban churches broke off a few years back and are in communion with one of the churches in Africa that also broke off because they didn’t like the ladies and the gays and whatnot. Very classy of them all.
This is a charter school, nominally public education. They recently got the State Board of Education to let them convert from a religious private school to a charter, but barely took a single word of the religious mission off of their “about us” page. Clearly, Jesus and the state of Texas wanted those boys to get rhabdo.