Not exactly fantasy, but Great Expectations by Dickens has a boy who grows up totally normal and then has his life transformed by a mysterious benefactor. It doesn’t go the way the kid expects.
Also, Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive & Tress and the Emerald Sea feature kinds of magic that can be accessible by anyone if they engage with it right. So perhaps give those a go. SA is a long series, but Tress is pretty approachable.
A lot of them are raised to be that way though. One of the big pushes in a lot of Christian circles, for example, is the push to raise kids believing in complementarianism instead of egalitarianism–simply put, that god created men and women to have different roles, and that men just so happen to be in the role of leadership. Combine that with extreme purity culture (at times involving courtship instead of dating, for example) and a fervor to push for big families, and you get a bunch of grown ups looking up after 5, 10 years in a marriage going, “wait, I was promised happiness, why am I so miserable?” Divorce is a huge tool to help. We need to give people, especially women and children, a safe exit from high control spaces.
My small city is getting a new Christan Nationalism school next year. The neighbors aren’t thrilled that the adults will all be in armed to the teeth at this school in the middle of a decent neighborhood. One of my kid’s friends is going there next year, and told the class that her dad is draining her bank account for the tuition. For an elementary school year education.
Another fun fact: private schools don’t have to take all applicants, so they regularly turn away students with disabilities or special learning needs.
I pointed that out to friends of a friend visiting from Ohio, after they told me how their state did a great thing, making vouchers available to all families in the state. I pointed out how the public schools need the ‘regular’ kids to help subsidize the special services needed by other kids. When the non-special needs kids aren’t there, funding for the specialists gets too expensive for public schools to be able to maintain. The lady clearly didn’t know what to say to that, and after a minute she just said how their children’s private school was too small to be able to have specialists like that. Not sure how that invalidates my point about accessibility of education for all students… It was too sensitive an event to voice that I don’t think public money should be going to institutions that are tax exempt churches. If churches don’t want to pay taxes, their organizations shouldn’t have their hands out for the public coffers. Simple.
I tried buying a plug in mower like that around that era. But the electric at the house we rented at the time was awful, so every time I plugged in the mower, the breakers would flip. Had to return the thing unused and bummed an old gas mower instead.
My college has red as one of its colors, and so my red college cap now mostly collects dust. It’s not worth the hassle.
Mine has a lot of services offered, ie massages, pedicures, barbers, tattoo parlor. Selling stuff isn’t enough.
Maybe that’s what pope Franky was talking about when he said surrogacy was a threat to human dignity.
“A lot of guys are worried that in five years, seven years, you’re only gonna have a Bowlero,” Big Mike says. “And when that happens, what happens?”>
Well, in my smaller town, our only new bookstore was part of a large chain. When the owner sold the company, the idiot who bought it drove the chain into the ground. Then that guy sold to an investment type group to be shuttered and liquidated. So now we don’t have a new bookstore, roughly 8 years out.
Bowling seems to occupy the same type of niche that bookstores do. It appeals to a small dedicated following who really rely on that space. Watching so many big companies go out of business over the last couple decades makes me really not want local businesses sold to bug conglomerates, especially, for example, the way it played out for Toys-R-Us.
Oh friend, what a ride you’ve been on. I grew up LCMS, and so lemme just say thanks for not doing that to your kids. I noticed what you said about immigrants trying to assimilate in LCMS as well. Particularly when I would visit family in the Midwest, there was a Chinese buffet that we would always visit, and my anti-immigrant (in general) family would proudly say how he went to their church, that the church wrote on his behalf to help get him citizenship, etc. I saw that less in my own community, but LCMS is not the biggest fish in that pond. Baptist is. I’m sorry you had that experience. Bad theology hurts people, and I’m glad you’re making it out on the other side.
Wait till they demand contractor rates!
Yeah, black kids don’t need the help of white kids to succeed. They need their schools funded as if rich white children went to them though.
Also, school isn’t just about success, it’s about learning to live in a society, one which isn’t just a monoculture. Hard to learn to live together (for all kinds of races & identities) spending entire childhoods separated.
I can appreciate that approach. But the biggest problems I have are when they nest in the railing of my little wooden deck. Every year it’s the same fight. So I’m a little leery of using fire.
Lol, not while I’m holding the bottle.
But seriously, where are the drones made specifically to spray stuff on wasp nests? I wouldn’t feel the need to use the foaming, bad stuff that hurts the bees if I could try a robot applying something like this. Or at least if it sprayed foam, it could be in significantly smaller amounts, much closer the the nest of trouble.
Yup, accelerationists.
Men in real life (in my experience) are mostly lovely folks. Men in places like Lemmy and Reddit can be pretty decent too, depending on the thread. But honestly, at what point has it been ‘safe’ to self identify as a woman on the wider Internet? Like to have a female voice in a game chat? Or in a random chat room? Between a lot of online harassment (which only needs a small slice of men participating in to be felt much more broadly) and the political and cultural attempts to strip women of power, I get this kind of outlook happening. It just really fucking sucks.
Our Albertson’s (including most Safeway brands) in my region want to merge with the Kroger brand stores. They say it’ll be good for customers. 🙄
And I’m sittin here on Capitol Hill
Yeah, Utah has Arches, Canyonlands, Zion; Wyoming has Yellowstone and Devil’s Tower, Montana has Glacier… And I know I’m leaving out a ton. I hate Utah’s theocracy, but the landscapes are mesmerizing. Everyone should get to see those wonders without fearing a lynching.
That social unrest though… It’s lumped in with crime, but it’s so real.