And where am I ruling that out? I never said that this resistance would always be peaceful. But the sooner you start coordinating with the people around you, the better prepared for that violence we will be, and the better our chances are to prevent a lot of deaths. You can claim otherwise, but sitting alone while my neighbors and friends die is unconscionable to me.

But what am I deluding myself about? I have literally admitted that what we do may not be able to fix things entirely, but we doom ourselves more if we don't take action. You obviously know that already, given your statement about your footprint, so why are you arguing against another person calling for direct action?

Even if that is true, why take out your frustration like this, by raging against those of us who are willing to do all the good we can?

I am not promising that we will be able to fix everything. Heck, I don't even know if we can fully fix anything. But until every last living being is dead, there is something here that deserves every chance we can give or get.

You don't have to participate, but to argue against this kind of work is like denying pain medication to someone who is dying and justifying it by saying 'meds will not save you'. If we can't save the life, we can at least save them from as much suffering as we can manage.

It is going to get worse, but that doesn't mean we have to accept the full worst-case scenario.

Right now, a lot of people are hurt and scared, and the fascists know that. That is why they are making big waves right now, to try to capitalize on that feeling of dread and despair.

But they had to put in a LOT of work to suppress the will of the people. This is not the result of a single election season, this is the result of a coordinated effort spanning decades. The actions they are taking now are designed to make you think that it is hopeless, that nobody cares, and that the battle is lost.

In reality, the battle is never over. This is the moment that needs to push us to actually working together against them, instead of talking about what the right thing to do is. Talk won't help, but local action will.

Join a mutual aid group and help safeguard your friends and neighbors from the economic hardship they are promising. Start talking your friends and family into attending boycotts, marches, and, above all, your local government and board meetings. Connect to the people around you, put up flyers, coordinate phone campaigns, and get people into these meetings to demand protections and change at the local level where it is most important.

Resistance doesn't come from nowhere. It has to be grown, it has to be planted as a small seed and then watered and weeded and trellised and brought inside from the cold. You may even have to watch it die and then pick yourself up and start from a seed again.

But if we each dedicate ourselves, full time, to a single plant, then we will do far more good than running around frantically worrying about the forest dying. Because yes, the forest is dying, and it is up to us to determine what grows in its place.

We may not be able to save what we have now. But only we can set the stage, as best we can, for those who will come after us. And the more work we do now, the better they will be able to build off of that work, and the better things will be.

Ironically, this is how I found out.

I had four different people with ASD, including one person I met for the first time, tell me that I should get myself checked. One was after I had a several hour long convo with someone who could only normally talk with neurotypical people for about 30 minutes before it became a strain. He was shocked that I wasn't diagnosed and recommended I get checked.

Now the only reason I don't have a diagnosis is because the evaluator didn't understand how the criteria worked. Still debating whether to try again for a diagnosis or not.

Fellow former conservative christian here, and I share that pain. I eventually came around thanks to a LOT of patience from friends who understood my background.

I try to pay it forward by putting myself out there and extending a hand to anyone looking to understand and accept others. I have had decent success with anyone who asks in good faith.

When I was about 12 and searching the local paper to learn local rent costs. I was looking with the plan that I would move out at 16 and take my sister with me so we could escape the abuse we were suffering from our mom.

The Ninth Doctor kissed Captain Jack on the lips in his season, so wouldn't this be the second?

Bonus points: if someone asks about it, say that the bark is worse than their bite!

Obviously this is a joke, but there used to be an important reason we kept the flags wrinkled like that: it meant that you never knew who had bought a flag at a Pride event and who brought one they owned.

This meant that people who were 'caught' at an event by friends or family they weren't out to, they could say they just bought the flag to support the cause. It also meant there was no way to tell who had been there longer than others.

This is correct, and it isn't just associated with acids. It's because of an effect called 'freezing point depression', which is the same reason salt lowers the freezing point of water while raising its boiling point.

There are a few explanations as to why this happens, with the easiest being this: if you add something that can't freeze to something that can, then the whole thing will need to lose more energy to allow the whole mass to solidify because the un-freezing stuff physically interferes with the attempts of the freezing stuff to bind together.

However, there is also the additional aspect of vapor pressure, which comes into play when adding things that can freeze to another thing that also freezes, but at a different temperature. I don't really understand that at all, so I will pull from the Wikipedia article on it:

The freezing point is the temperature at which the liquid solvent and solid solvent are at equilibrium, so that their vapor pressures are equal. When a non-volatile solute is added to a volatile liquid solvent, the solution vapour pressure will be lower than that of the pure solvent. As a result, the solid will reach equilibrium with the solution at a lower temperature than with the pure solvent. This explanation in terms of vapor pressure is equivalent to the argument based on chemical potential, since the chemical potential of a vapor is logarithmically related to pressure. All of the colligative properties result from a lowering of the chemical potential of the solvent in the presence of a solute. This lowering is an entropy effect. The greater randomness of the solution (as compared to the pure solvent) acts in opposition to freezing, so that a lower temperature must be reached, over a broader range, before equilibrium between the liquid solution and solid solution phases is achieved. Melting point determinations are commonly exploited in organic chemistry to aid in identifying substances and to ascertain their purity.

So, TL;DR is that chemistry is weird, things react weird at the molecular level because of energy states, and that is what allows us to make ice cream!

According to my husband and all my friends, the weirdest thing about me is my name for a sandwich.

Apparently, everyone else calls it a 'grilled cheese'. I have always called it by it's proper name, a 'toasted cheese'.

If you make it in a panini press, then it is a grilled cheese. But if you make a sandwich by buttering each side and toasting it in a pan on the stove until the cheese melts, then it is a toasted cheese. But every time I say 'toasted cheese', people look at me as though I have grown another head.

They are protesting because it is sponsored by an oil company (Shell), and because the cyclists don't cycle to the event. Many of them flew or drove in, and events like this also generate an immense amount of pollution and plastic waste. Read any article where there are quotes from the protestors and they specifically say the reasons they are protesting.