Luckily, I’m not. But I did find Huntsville to be surprising—both for the beautiful landscape and clear uptick in IQ points compared to the rest of the state. Great German food—bet you can’t guess why.

As the story goes, the ex-nazi scientists that the US brought in to work on rockets were first stationed in Houston, but they all hated the heat. They requested a transfer to Huntsville because the landscape was similar to the German countryside.

And that is how the US government allowed nazis to decide the primary location for NASA rocket research, which also happened to be in the same state as the headquarters for the KKK. Clearly, nothing could go wrong.

Trans folks are such a small sliver of the population, it’s very difficult for most people to know a trans person.

On top of this, many trans people try to live “stealth” so they’re not harassed for simply existing.

It’s sad, because this is a known phenomenon. It’s the “why” of why LGB acceptance has grown in the last several decades, it turns out when friends and loved ones are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, it becomes something people are more willing to accept.

LGB is about 3.5% of the population while T is about 0.3%.

It’s so much harder for people to meet a trans person to begin with, just based on numbers.

Now this is where I put on my tinfoil fucking hat.

I feel like conservatives chose trans people as a target because they know this, too. They know the small numbers mean acceptance will be an even slower and harder road than for the LGB part of the community. They’re fucking banking on it, so they can continue to sew division and hate.

No, it’s a bad thing because without no-fault divorce laws someone could very easily be trapped in an abusive relationship with no recourse.

A rhythm game with supply chain management would be bomb. Different rhythms at different parts of the line generate different products, and accuracy can control the purity of the final product. The levels could end up making a whole song, and eventually you can get steam engines and digital things to add different sounds. Ooo, and make the savegames MIDI files.

Guess I'm a six foot tall dwarf. Well, I do have over 1600 hours on Factorio, which is pretty dwarfish

Cynicism, i.e. the view that everyone else has base motivations, is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’re cynical? Well, soon everyone around you will be too, and where will we be then? All the politicians are crooks and phonies? Well, they sure will be soon if everyone voting for them thinks that. In fact, as far as I can see, cynicism is the rule across the world, and look at the state most countries are in. For comparison (there aren’t many), check out the world’s least cynical countries - i.e., those with the highest social trust, where people believe that “others are basically good”, where they trust their politicians. I won’t name them (you can guess them) but those countries just happen to have the best indicators on pretty much every measure of success - not just economic wealth but also all the social indicators and indeed happiness. To me at least, the connection is plain obvious. Being a cynic is a choice, and a completely counterproductive one if you want to see good things in the world.

Skepticism, on the other hand? I’m all in on that.