There are limits in many places, sometimes in response to that time the artist Prince changed his name to a symbol, in some cases all special characters are banned too, so good luck to anyone with a non-English name. But outside of that? In most states you could probably name your kid Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, much worse names have happened.

I think there’s been a couple of times where states have tried to stop individuals who have tried to name their kid Adolph Hitler or just some racist slogan, but I don’t remember how those went, it was a genuine legal question if those names could be blocked.

Name changes, however, are a different thing - often requiring a judge to approve them, they can be rejected simply due to the misfortune of being a trans person in Texas, for example. Unless it’s a name change due to marriage, those are significantly easier for some reason.

Stuff is built differently in places where hurricanes are common. Building standards are more strict, especially after Andrew, and adverse weather is a consideration when things are built (for instance, chain link fences are incredibly common rather than wood fences). Same with the landscaping - branches break, trees completely falling is rare because generally sturdier trees with deeper roots are chosen, and are planted well away from the house. A lot of power lines are buried - it’s more resilient to bad weather (even the afternoon thunderstorms in Florida can occasionally be just as nasty as the thunderstorms that caused so much damage at your place) and long term it’s cheaper than replacing the power lines every summer. And you kinda get used to being without power for a few hours (or even a few days to a week) after really bad hurricanes or thunderstorms. I’ve done homework by kerosene lamp more than once as a kid, and I’m in my 30s. My family played a lot of board games during the long power outages. Eventually my family, and a lot of others, invested in a generator, they’re fairly common now. My dad had a chainsaw and mostly dealt with the fallen trees himself.

But I’ve never learned how to tow a car out out the ditch, but many of my friends here in Minnesota do know how - different places require different skill sets. Learning how to deal with a furnace and radiator has been interesting.

Also, in hindsight, a direct eyewall hit or worse of a category 3+ hurricane is so pants shittingly terrifying that nobody sane continues living there after experiencing one.

I wasn’t able to find one. Which, if anyone saw my shitpost, is the real reason I installed it on my crapbook. I found out that the installer is pretty great, it just worked out of the box (at least on that computer, my gaming machine has an Nvidia graphics card…), and that GMOME isn’t really for me.

A vape shop I get my weed from (I’m in a legal state and it’s locally sourced, so somewhat less sketchy than your average vape shop weed) got something similar to chocolate shroom bars and I’ve certainly considered it, but, again, vape shop. Don’t buy weird shit from a vape shop.

Is that really a bad thing, though? Generic Democrat polls really well against Trump. The people who know of Walz really like him, even the more reasonable rural Republicans here grudgingly admit that while they don’t agree with him politically he clearly cares about Minnesotans. Newsom doesn’t have that. The past couple of years have seen some semi-viral quotes from him poking at politicians in red states, mostly along the lines of “we fed children, what have you done?”, and I’ve seen them posted here. The people who know him like him. For the people who don’t, he’s Generic Democrat. He’s well spoken enough to handle the discussions around the George Floyd protests (which already came up in the first debate but Biden didn’t address directly). He’s well spoken, smart, kind, and down to earth - everything Trump isn’t.

Also, I hadn’t heard of Obama before he ran for president. For a sufficiently likable candidate, it’s not a deal breaker.

COSMIC looks awesome in screenshots though.

Tim Walz. Minnesota has been kicking ass with progressive legislation these past few years, and here in Minnesota we’ve been wondering if he’s been quietly trying to get his name out there to run for President. (And the general consensus is that we don’t want to lose him as governor, but I guess we’ll give him up to save US democracy, lol.) On paper he’s fairly moderate too.

How’d you get this picture of my Grindr DMs?

This just unlocked one of my weirdest childhood memories. I played fastpitch softball as a kid, and at one away game the school’s softball field was next to a pasture. During warmups and the first several innings, we watched a guy dig a hole in the pasture. In the second inning or so, we hear a gunshot off in the distance, and the third has a truck dragging a horse corpse to the big hole. The man shoved the horse corpse into the grave, and takes three innings to bury the horse.

At the team huddle after the game, one of my teammates said an eulogy for the horse.

What instructions are you following? Last time I used Rufus on Windows, it had a graphical interface with reasonable default settings and zero messing around on the command line. (I mean, I sometimes did once I was booted into Linux, but I was using distros where that’s not unexpected.)

I’m in Minnesota, we do land acknowledgements here, and the longer initialism I often see is LGBTQIA2S+, but I’ve never seen the 2S getting the top billing. That said, I think I can speak for all (reasonable) Minnesotans when I say that we’re willing to do that when we become Canada’s newest province.

In the early 2000s my mother’s bank got hands free headsets. She was horrified at how many of her coworkers would answer the phone in the bathroom.

I know that sometimes they are, but I don’t have much more info than that. I saw the Broadway version of Cats on PBS when I was a kid, weird show.

Try [email protected], official announcements shouldn’t be paired with jokes in questionable taste.

I’m never sure if the 3am zoomies are my roommate or the cat.

Wait, what? I can eat Jell-O again?

Oh. Wait. It’s Jell-O. Meh.

It’s because Texas is trying to ban books with the words butt and fart.

Because there’s several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn’t quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.

The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It’s narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I’m glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.

Look at all the lurkers, lol.

I’ve always been curious about who is downvoting my stuff, I know on Reddit I’d occasionally get someone butthurt about my existing on the internet and they’d just go downvote all of my recent posts and comments.

Wasn’t the first indication of JK Rowling being a TERF a Tweet she liked?