Ironhold

Not many people know this, but prominent voice actor Ken Sansom was a member of the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Sansom

Editorial has made it clear that my material is subscriber-only because they're using it to drive readers. My flagship paper is the Cove Leader-Press from Copperas Cove, Texas. They publish weekly, with new editions on Fridays, and they do digital subscriptions as well as physical.

Autism is something that a person is born with. Yes, I'm high-functioning. Now, people who are autistic often have greater than usual difficulties in processing change and in handling stressful situations, so it's entirely possible that your grandson had an astoundingly hard time dealing with it. Also... what sort of quirks and "eating disorder" are we talking about? There's a lot that often goes hand-in-hand with autism, and so depending upon what we're looking at this could be how your grandson is wired.

Contrary to what a lot of "progressive" individuals wish to believe, a lot of people who identify as "conservative" do so because they believe that old and new need to be tested against each other in order to determine the best way forward, and that rejecting one or the other wholesale will only lead to misery. To put it bluntly, a lot of the problems we're seeing in society these days are a result of people rejecting the old norms, traditions, and standards wholesale, only to discover the hard way why things were done a certain way for so long. This includes the realization that rejecting older institutions without providing something that can replace what these institutions offered in the way of structure and guidance was a bad idea. It's tragic that your own family is seeing this for itself.

I write for a family of local-level newspapers here in Texas.

In addition to a somewhat religious Easter message, I'm going to re-run a column I did a bit back explaining the concept of "Easter Eggs" in media (that is, hidden items in entertainment media that are meant to amuse the audience).

Hello. Is there anything specific you'd like to learn more about, or do you simply wish to enjoy the experience here?

*bump* OK. The car I presently drive is third-hand. It was a government fleet vehicle, and whoever was assigned it badly mistreated it. A relative who works as a college professor bought it at a surplus auction, and trusted the auto shop students at the college he's with to maintain it... which they didn't do. He sold it to me when he upgraded to a minivan, and so for the past six years my dad (a master mechanic) and I have been troubleshooting and ferreting out problems as they arise. One persistent problem is a gremlin in the evaporation system. If my fuel tank goes below about 75% full or it's an unusually hot day, the gremlin will cause the check engine light to pop on. This of course means I have to stop what I'm doing, pull out my code reader, and get the error code so I can see if it's the gremlin or a more serious issue. To minimize these instances, then, I try to fill my car up once a week. I tanked up after church on Sunday since I needed to stop at that station for the Sunday edition of the Dallas newspaper and it's one of the few places in the area that still carries it. The car then sat Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as I carpooled with other people to do my errands. Thursday afternoon I go to take it to work and see a puddle on the ground. It's gasoline. I'm spooked as to what's happening, as whenever we have erratic weather of the kind we've had lately the car usually has a hose or seal crack. Well, dad put the car up on jacks today to check it out. The source of the gas was a vent that's set up so that the car can expel gas fumes (et al) if the tank is overfilled, so somehow I simply put a little too much gas in. To access the gas tank and everything else, however, you have to pull one of the rear tires even with the car jacked up. Since the tire was off, dad decided to check my brakes and discovered a frightening maintenance issue. Basically, the government peeps damaged the park brake, the auto shop students didn't notice the damage, and now six years of stop-and-go delivery driving has pushed the brakes to the point where failure is a real possibility. So if not for the car belching out a little bit of excess gas in a rather worrying display, we wouldn't have known that the park brake was going out.

There's nothing stopping you from posting about the current affairs of the UK.

It's based on an image of Joseph Smith standing as head of the Nauvoo Legion, an image that critics of the church love to present without the context of "Oh yeah, the city was allowed its own town militia, with the mayor as commander".

Long story short, I'm tinkering with a new tabletop role-playing game system. After a number of strange twists and turns, I've come up with a character that I might or might not just do fiction of if I don't use him as a non-player character. On one hand, the guy is a hardcore military commando who is most famous for his nigh unto superhuman ability to get inside enemy facilities and just grab at his leisure. The bad guys have a new anti-aircraft missile and you want him to gather information on it? He'll find an attack jeep armed with the missiles, the manual for the jeep, the manual for the missiles, the digital files for the above, the driver of the jeep, the mechanic who maintains the jeep, the armorer who works on the missiles, a sack of firing pins he pulled out of the rifles in their armory, a pair of hostages he discovered, a case of blueberry muffins, and a jukebox... and he'll make it all fit. High command has long since given up on trying to figure out how he does it and are just grateful he's on their side. On the other hand, he has a degree in theology & has been authorized by Salt Lake City to serve as serviceman's group leader, which is basically "if your unit takes the field, you can act as a bishop for the members if there's no designated chaplain who is a member of the church". How would you feel if this guy was your bishop?

Parodies exist, but are sporadic and hard to come by. I once did a bit in which he emerged from his hiding to confront the Transformers directly, only to have his own words come back to bite him. I no longer have the file though, and I'm not sure the site I uploaded it to even still exists.

More like "If you don't hire our services, how can you be sure that you won't get canceled for doing something wrong?". It's basically an updated version of the "Nice place you've got here; shame if something happened to it" bit that protection rackets always say in the movies.

Well folks, we're looking at the prospect of Gamergate 2: Electric Boogaloo. Some people discovered that Sweet Baby Inc, a consulting firm that specializes in "helping" video game companies make their offerings more "progressive" and "diverse", had a hand in some recent high-profile flops, leading to word of mouth and ultimately some guy from Brazil going onto video game retail platform Steam and creating a list of games Sweet Baby was known to have been involved with. Cue employees of Sweet Baby using social media to organize a swarm to go after this person and have their account deleted as part of a larger effort to forcibly suppress knowledge that the company even exists, let alone what games they've had a hand in. For all intents and purposes this company works off of intimidation and bullying to coerce companies into "allowing" them to "help", and they don't want anyone investigating their practices. Since this has all come out, people have made claims that other companies are doing similar.

Same difference kinda. Yeah, long day already... 💀

Humans invent new and creative ways to kill. Cats just tear your throat out and are done with it unless they're bored. Yeah, cats are among nature's murder machines. People keep forgetting this and so don't respect cats as they should.

There's also the fact that Laban betrayed the brothers, offering to sell them the record then ordering them slain after getting their possessions. Even if we assume he was just that furious over them coming in the first time around and asking without any thought of compensation, what he did was inexcusable even by the standards of the day and could well have been the final sign that he was not worthy of the responsibility.

Trying to get caught upon the news, but apparently an appellate court ruled that something a bunch of judges were using to enhance the sentences of people being convicted over J6 was used improperly and so the sentences at least 100 people received were thus quite unjust. This means these individuals must be given new sentences, and it's possible that some of them might be able to go free considering time served. edit - Finally found a halfway mainstream source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/01/appeal-obstruction-trump-january-sixth/

Remember, the Obama administration was caught wire-tapping AP reporters, Nixon had his "plumbers" to try and prevent leaks, & so on. As someone in the mainstream media, I can say that there are times where media outlets have either fallen down on the job or went entirely too far. However, in this instance I'm not convinced the judge has laid out just why they feel so compelled to force a reporter to divulge their sources.

It's a matter of seeing things from the perspective of another and adjusting how we talk to them accordingly. For example, I once heard a speaker talk about how they had to be careful using the word "Father" because they were assigned to an inner city area that had alarmingly high rates of familial violence and abuse. Many of the people they tried to preach to had a *lot* of baggage associated with the word accordingly.

Well, the gentiles are in SLC in large numbers, and things have indeed taken quite the nosedive. It's so bad that when Rocky Anderson, an avowed atheist, was mayor, he actually worked with the church to place curbs on street preaching because they were doing that much damage to the town.

Not only has the church made giving convenient, people get a token representing their donation as a warm fuzzy afterword. That's likely helping a lot.

The solar eclipse here in Texas. Hotel rooms were being booked in the middle of last year.

Wouldn't recommend it. Even the "we rent rooms by the hour" types of hotels are fully booked up, pretty much every civic leader is warning that people need to visit the store and refuel their car well before the event as the crush of visitors is expected to cause a run on everything, and the county leaders in Bell County have preemptively declared a state of emergency because they fear that many people coming in will jam the telephone systems and make it difficult to call for emergency services.

A big part of why we're spending so much money on our military is because our ostensible allies spend so little on theirs.