Ironhold

That goes back to what I've noted before about how the "gifted" label was often a cursed gift. A great many of us who were called "gifted" back in the day were in fact high-functioning autistic. Parents were encouraged to hold us "gifted" kids to often impossibly high standards, with autistic tics, autistic tells, and signs of autistic burnout all being regarded as personal failings on the part of the "gifted" kid who was, clearly, slacking off and not living up to their potential. Cue a great many "gifted" kids burning out completely in their twenties and thirties, to the point that a few years ago one could find "Gifted Kid Burnout Bingo" cards floating around online as a way for people to retroactively recognize how much damage the label had done to them.

The stake supports a major US military base. Due in part to its influence, a number of the young men from my generation felt called to serve *in the military*, while others saw the military as a stepping stone towards bigger and better things in life (such as how the G.I. Bill could help them pay for college). However, the whole "All young men must serve missions, and all young women must regard all young men who didn't serve as unfit for marriage" mantra put these young men in a difficult spot. This is part of why so many of them either left the area or quit being active. But yeah, things were *bad* here, to the point that we actually once had a stake speaker go on a tangent about how as far as he was concerned anyone who didn't serve a mission was "of no worth" to the church... and he very much meant a witnessing mission. Things like this are why I am trying to caution people that they need to take the rhetoric down a notch and recognize that everyone is different and the whole "best two years" bit might not be the best option for them to serve. Edit - If it tells you anything about what I personally went through? My birthday is in November. One day, a member of the bishopric asked those of us who were priests where we expected to be on our 19th birthdays. Well, I figured that since I was going to graduate in May, I wasn't exactly going to be sitting around for several months twiddling my thumbs. Logically, I could squeeze in a semester or two of college and get that in place by the time my 19th birthday rolled around. *Then* I could put in my paperwork if going was still an option, as things were getting a bit hairy with my maternal grandmother and my parents were needing more effort on my part to help take care of her. So, I said "finishing my first semester of college". He matter-of-factly, zero emotion whatsoever, shot back with "Why are you putting the world before God?". It turns out that he was expecting all of us to automatically state that we would be spending our 19th birthday putting in our paperwork, and had forgotten that I was born late enough in the year for it to be a bit of a complication. It took him an entire week to remember this, at which point he fired off a quick apology the next time he saw me in church. That's how unthinking and knee-jerk everything was, that they just expected all of us to have our paperwork ready to go, no exceptions.

Pushed? People were being told "get the jab or lose your job". Large numbers of military service members were forcibly discharged from service for their refusal to get it... only for the Department of Defense to now beg these individuals to come back, with all sorts of ostensible promises that their careers will be reset back to where they were and their records expunged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen Alan Moore wrote it in the 1980s as a deconstruction of various "Golden Age" superheroes. He meant it to show how life would *really* be like if superheroes were real and actively involved in world drama. One of the heroes, Ozymandias, gets it in his head that the only way to stop World War III is to trick NATO and the USSR into thinking that there's an even bigger threat they have to unite in order to stop. To this end he uses his vast fortune to trick a group of disaffected, disgruntled, and / or distressed luminaries from the creative arts into believing that they're working on an elaborate alien invasion movie when in reality he's going to destroy New York City and make it look like a disastrous first contact. Problem is, another hero, The Comedian, inadvertently discovers a part of the plan and so Ozymandias decides to silence him. ...Never mind the fact that The Comedian was a slobbering drunk at this point due to decades of alcoholism and so everyone else would have ignored what he had to say *if* Ozymandias hadn't killed him. Now that he's dead, vigilante hero Rorschach tries his best to convince the other heroes to investigate. Cue Ozymandias having to pop smoke while also pretending to be "helping" the investigation. It was as pivotal to the history of comic books as it was massively shocking, but unfortunately far too many comic creators these days got it into their heads that "dark, edgy, and deconstructive" is how all comics are "supposed" to be.

In the original 1980s "Watchmen" graphic novel, it's revealed that a company has been selling an "all natural" cancer cure made using apricot pits. Rorschach discovers that one of his long-time villains has been taking it out of desperation after developing cancer, neither man realizing that Ozymandias deliberately exposed several people who had been around Doctor Manhattan with dangerous doses of radiation in order to trick Doctor Manhattan into thinking that he was a walking hazmat site & leaving the Earth. So even though you were likely meaning it as a joke, it actually has an odd place in pop culture history. As part of a tabletop role-playing game campaign I'm creating, I have it that a key NPC has ownership stake in a local TV station that operates in the "adventure city" the party will be based in. The station gives a few hours a week to public access programming, and a regular part of this is a conspiracy theorist who gets half an hour every Sunday evening right before the network switches to bartered content from a third-party shop-at-home service ("We'll pay you X per hour that you let us air plus Y percentage of whatever sales we make to addresses that are in your viewing area.") The twist is that the conspiracy theorist is actually "controlled opposition" in that they are deliberately working with that key NPC to push or bury various stories and theories.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-denmark-public-health-health-453163d8f93618fde90c06d3474921a0 Note the date on this article. While Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark were all putting various restrictions on the use of the Moderna vaccine so they could investigate reports of cardiovascular side effects, the US government was swearing on a stack of Communist Manifestos that the Moderna vaccine was 100% safe for people of all ages. So yes, there were investigations. They were just inconveniently timed, however.

In my personal case? At the end of February 2021, I got really sick for a few days. I'd just had to put my cat of 16+ years down due to cancer, I'd had to pet-sit the surviving family cat while my parents were out of state, we'd just survived three days without power due to the grid shutting down in Texas, et cetera. I didn't know what I was dealing with, just that it was knocking me for a loop. I was just fine and dandy on Wednesday when we got power back, and Thursday I was suddenly so sick that I had to call for help to finish handling the incoming newspapers that week. That's how rapidly it got me. I wasn't able to simply sit back and do nothing, however, as a day or so later dad got a far more wicked version of whatever I was dealing with, to the point that I had to crawl up off of the couch to give him a blessing. I have no idea what that was, just that for about a week after I was sensitive to the amount of salt that was in the food I was eating and my stomach was queasy. It could have been Covid, it could have been a consequence of smoke inhalation or something else relating to the blizzard and loss of power. Well, August 2021 was Bell County Comic-Con in Belton, Texas. A childhood hero was going to be one of the guests and I wanted more than anything to go. However, my car was already beginning to have mechanical issues of the kind that wouldn't have allowed me to make the trip on my own, and so I needed to use the family truck. Given how sick dad and I were in February, mom basically pressured dad into saying that I couldn't use it unless I got the jab. I go to the local Wal-Mart pharmacy. I tell them I have an arrythmia. They have to look it up to see if they can give me the Moderna vaccine. They find nothing to indicate that there are problems with giving the jab to someone who has arrythmia. I get the first shot. I'm almost immediately as low as I was back when I got sick that February. We go to Comic-Con, during which she goes into hysterics demanding that I wear a cloth mask for the entire duration minus celebrity photos despite knowing full well my sinuses are so screwed up from old injury that I need to breathe through my mouth. I stumble through everything, get back to the family truck, take that cloth mask off, and there's an instant shower of blood from my nose as the strain of trying to breath through those damaged sinuses was too much. It literally takes the sight of my shirt and the seatbelt covered in my own blood for mom to realize that she should have listened to me. A few weeks later I'm due for the booster. Well, dad didn't read the calendar. He's building a brick shed out back, just brought home a 400+ pound front door for the shed that he welded together from scrap iron at work, and I have to help him move it the same day I'm due for my booster because he scheduled a load of gravel (which you have to mix in with the concrete mix he bought) to be delivered and the door plus the truck it's in the bed of are in the driveway where the gravel needs to go. By the time everything is said and done I can feel my blood pressure throughout my entire body, and I'm low for even longer than that mystery sickness left me. I tell mom I'm not getting any more shots. That October, the Associated Press runs a story noting that the medical boards of Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have put various restrictions on the use of the Moderna vaccine while they investigate reports of cardiovascular side effects in patients who received it, this at the same time as the FDA here in the US is swearing on a stack of Communist Manifestos that the Moderna vaccine is perfectly safe for children. I make it very, very clear that there will be no more Covid vaccines, and that as far as I'm concerned I just got poison in my veins. It's four years later, I've had a slew of stress-induced cardiovascular health episodes to include what may or may not have been an actual heart attack, and mom is still trying to defend her decision to coerce me into getting the jab even though she's gone with me to several cardiology appointments. Yeah... Is it any wonder I'm one of the great many people who want a full investigation into the Covid vaccines and is taking the blanket pardons issued during the final days of the Biden regime as retroactive proof that the government did us all dirty?

...Except, now I'm wondering what the safety numbers are for other traditional vaccines...

When it comes to the anti-vax side of things, they got a significant boost from the controversies over the Covid vaccines. The rollout of the Covid vaccines quickly went from "we know they didn't have proper medical trials, but there's no time for that" to "get the shots or we'll destroy your life". As part of it, initial reports of side effects or adverse incidents were forcibly suppressed by various social media platforms; even licensed and credentialed medical doctors found themselves silenced when they tried to tell the public that something was wrong. But by then, the US government and several other governments had already passed legislation that shielded the pharma companies from legal consequences. It wasn't until 2021 / 2022 that anyone realized the Covid vaccines were far less safe than we were assured, that an untold number of people were looking at a lifetime of compromised health, and that the lives of people who refused the shots or tried to blow the whistle were destroyed for nothing. I've even seen ex-members cite the church's support of the vaccines as part of the reason why they left, feeling that the church leadership should have known that the vaccines were dangerous. This has so utterly, totally, and completely destroyed trust in *all* vaccines that the anti-vax movement seemed logical in hindsight, hence why we now have a measles epidemic in West Texas.

There's still a lot modern medicine doesn't know about autism, but what they do know is that it's comorbid with a *lot* of other mental, emotional, and physical health conditions. There are indeed anecdotal reports that people with autism / ADHD have had their tells & whatnot *eased* by dietary changes, suggesting that the dietary changes actually eased a comorbid health situation that was further bogging them down mentally & emotionally. It's like in my case, I've noticed that if I don't have at least one good serving of meat protein a day my body doesn't quite feel right and my energy levels wane. Protein shakes don't do the job, and in fact one time I tried to use protein shakes as a substitute for what I was eating on the run I had to stop because after a while I started having odd cravings for baked beans. I could never go vegetarian, let alone vegan, for any length of time. This is telling me "something is causing my body to burn through a higher than normal amount of protein as well as other nutrients that meat protein has in far larger quantities than supplements alone can compensate for", which is likely being caused by an as-yet undetermined physical or lifestyle situation. It could be that this increased protein intake requirement is somehow tied to a comorbid health issue, or it could just be that it's a fluke I'm dealing with both at once.

That might actually get you in trouble if you aren't careful. You might not want the fight, but the fight came to you. Keep that notebook, and start a paper trail so that you can protect yourself & if needs be alert the authorities.

That might actually get you in trouble if you aren't careful. You might not want the fight, but the fight came to you. Keep that notebook, and start a paper trail so that you can protect yourself & if needs be alert the authorities. edit - my wifi has been wonky lately; seems some sort of glitch caused the double post.

That's the kind of thing I've been seeing in the Bloggernacle since Conference: people going "See? It's mandatory to serve a mission, and you're a sinner if you don't!". These people then balk at any prospect of a person feeling called to serve in another fashion, having health issues that would make a formal mission an undue challenge, or even the idea that people can be missionaries in their daily lives. I still recall how the stake lost almost an entire generation of young men due to this drama the first time around, and worry for what will happen this time around.

I originally chose to stay back because it would have been a hardship; my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's right before I graduated high school, and with both brothers out on their own my parents needed my help taking care of her. I was also dealing with undiagnosed mental and physical health issues at the time, and it was when I got the various diagnosis and started attempting to get my life together that I realized I wouldn't have been able to handle the rigid formal structure of a mission; I needed the flexibility that came with being an early internet "missionary" so that I could disengage or break free as needed.

As I've noted before, my personal circumstances were such that when I was 18 going on a formal mission would have been a hardship for my family. Instead, I made the internet my mission and wound up being part of the generation that pioneered the Bloggernacle as we know now. Problem is, because local and stake leadership did not understand the internet at the time they feared it and so saw my efforts as a waste of time. In their eyes it was mandatory for all young men to serve formal missions, and I spent over a decade getting verbally shanked because of it by the very people who could have been critical in helping the work along. At the last Conference, one of the speakers basically declared that serving a mission was a requirement. Cue members of the church taking to social media to administer the kind of verbal shanking I once got, telling other members that unless they went out and got that name tag they were sinners and rebelling against God. Cue me - and a few others - trying to explain that not everyone is a good fit for formal service, and that there are ways to serve without that name tag. Has anyone else here encountered anything of the sort since Conference? I'm starting to get worried now, as I remember how what happened back then caused almost an entire generation of young men to either leave the area or leave the church because they, too, were getting blasted and wanted to get away from it.

Look at it this way. IRL, I'm an entertainment writer. I don't have any sort of training or education in the arts; I was actually training for a career in insurance when the 2008 recession happened and I had to remake myself a few times. However, I've been a big fan of movies & "escapist" entertainment all my life, to the point that even before I got started I'd consumed enough content to have a pretty fair reference pool of what was or wasn't worthwhile. I had also spent well over a decade teaching myself about the larger entertainment industry as I participated in internet forums and other sites dedicated to various forms of entertainment and specific franchises. I don't have a "perfect" knowledge in that sense, but I know more than the average person and can properly evaluate a given work on its merits.

I only needed three math classes in high school: Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry. I did well enough in Geometry, but struggled in Algebra. Because of this, I had no desire to take any more math courses. One of my brothers insisted that I take Pre-Calculus, this in spite of how I struggled in Algebra. I tried to explain that Pre-Calculus would likely be well beyond what I could do, and that if he was afraid of me getting out of practice I could take a math & money course that was being offered since I was already looking into possibly being a business major. He talked mom into putting in the paperwork for me to take that Pre-Calculus class, as it was what the parents put in for that counted rather than what the students themselves asked for. Each class was 90 minutes. Starting with the second class, the teacher would spend the first 30 going from desk to desk and grading our homework on the spot so that she didn't have to do it on her own time. She then utterly failed to understand why we never finished the day's lesson before class ended, but nevertheless we had to finish our homework assignments as listed on the board and have them ready by next class. Anyone who had questions could just, as far as she was concerned, go to the before-school or after-school tutoring periods, which were always so packed that it was difficult to even get in the room. She had zero sympathy for anyone who fell behind, and even put a note on one of my tests that basically invited me to leave the class. Cue my parents blaming *me* for having a poor grade in that class despite my efforts, leading to autistic burnout that negatively affected my performance in my other classes. Finally, at the end of the semester, there was a four-way conference involving myself, my dad, the teacher, and the vice principal. It was only during this conference that anyone believed me when I talked about how we never finished the day's lessons because she insisted on grading papers desk by desk, how my somehow not answering a question to her satisfaction got me an 80% on a homework assignment (showing how arbitrary her grading could be), and how I was basically invited to leave the class. I was transferred out of that class immediately, placed into an intro to psychology elective that was far more towards my skill set, but the damage had been done. I missed graduating in the top 10% of my class by 4 slots, a measly fraction of a fraction of a grade point. Here in Texas if you graduate in the top 10% of your class and you go to a public in-state college you can petition to have the state cover most or even all of your tuition costs. Yeah... I understand that most teachers are legitimately trying to teach and want to see kids succeed, but hard experience tells me that there are also people who have no business teaching and that these teachers can do hideous amounts of damage before anyone catches onto what they're doing.

Another issue is that there's considerable overlap in the behaviors demonstrated by both "kid with ADD/ADHD" and "kid who is legitimately bored because they either already know the material or the teaching style is not one they respond best to". Individuals who are high-functioning autistic might also have tics or issues getting along socially that can be mistaken for ADD / ADHD (et al) even when they don't have it. It takes time, effort, observation, and a skilled professional to diagnose which is which. The problem is that modern society tends more towards "any kid who doesn't sit neatly and quietly is inherently defective" and so the first instinct is to punish and medicate rather than evaluate.

Speaking as an entertainment writer? Production Budget x 2.5 = the approximate break-even point for a movie after all costs are factored in and the theaters & distributors take their cut. The expectation is that if a movie is a big enough spectacle people the world over will automatically turn out to see it. Certain countries, like China, have audiences that are especially receptive to big-budget Hollywood numbers. The problem is that the budgets are getting to be unsustainable, especially with China no longer a sure market and Covid having caused large numbers of people to get used to pay-per-view and streaming.

Bumping - Got to checking the church website for some older Conference talks, and found that they have video of individual Conference talks going back to 1971. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1971/04/love-of-the-right?lang=eng Curious now as to what audio or video recordings the church has managed to preserve in a state that they can be uploaded later on.

Or we have the situation that's unfolding here in Texas. Black teen stabs a white teen to death at a sports event. Crowdfunding campaign goes up so that the black teen can afford lawyers. His family instead uses it to purchase a Cadillac and a mansion, with the teen himself in public in a suit. Meanwhile, the family of the white teen has been SWAT'd *twice*. Folks are boiling, and not just in Texas.

It's also the whole "the powers that be say it must be done on this schedule, so it will be done on this schedule" mindset coupled with the often inferior quality of products they have access to and the lack of training & education that many of their laborers have. They can build massive highways and entire cities in short order, only for those places to either go unused because the powers-that-be misread the population movement trends or crumble around everyone because they were churned out too fast for the materials to properly set up.

To put it bluntly, the minute that Biden pardoned Fauci and several other individuals was the moment that the lab leak hypothesis and the truth about how dangerous the Covid vaccines were was functionally confirmed. I've been seeing people argue that Trump should end-run around those pardons and start holding hearings to determine who knew what when and if the government is guilty of both lying to & poisoning the public. As it is, the fact that the government basically lied to us about the Covid vaccines helped fuel the anti-vaccination paranoia that led to the measles outbreak here in Texas.

The big issue with much of modern entertainment, not just Trek, is that today's writers all too often don't have the deft touch that past generations of writers had. Look at TOS, TNG, and DS9. They understood when to make a point and when to just let the audience enjoy their space adventure. Same thing with the original Twilight Zone, classic Doctor Who, and so many other shows from back in the day. Now consider today's entertainment. Not only is the "message" front and center, it's about as subtle as a daisy cutter and typically delivered with far less precision. For example, this past Tuesday's episode of "FBI" ended with a female character boldly and disgustedly declaring that "incels" could simply choose to get over themselves & change, never mind the fact that a lot of people who that slur could be applied to are in fact dealing with mental health issues, social isolation, "othering", or other matters that are beyond their control to some degree and that their personal life is a mess despite their best efforts. Right now, audiences are voting with their wallets. This is how films like "Minecraft", "A Working Man", and "King of Kings" are making bank while Hollywood darlings like "Snow White" are roadkill, or why we have indie comic crowdfunding campaigns clearing $100K but mainstream comics helmed by brand-name characters are only clearing a fraction of that. People are sick of what's coming out, but the mainstream industry is absolutely refusing to learn why.

We get a new branch presidency / bishopric. They realize I haven't spoken in a while. I get assigned to speak. They remember *why* I haven't spoken in a while. They quietly decide not to call me again. We get a new branch presidency / bishopric. The ride continues.