Ironhold

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Everything posted by Ironhold

  1. I live in Coryell County, which is by Fort Hood / Fort Cavazos in what is known as the "Heart" of Texas. There's not a single publicly-accessible charging station in the entire county. The nearest station I'm aware of is at a car dealership in Temple, in neighboring Bell County. A grocery store chain is in talks to come to Killeen, which is just on the other side of Hood from us, and they'll have charging stations in their parking lot. But no immediate plans for anything closer at this time.
  2. Many Japanese works translated into English feature translator's notes, and in the 1990s & 2000s these could be quite lengthy as the translator explained at length why they did what they did.
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornmeal The native inhabitants of Central America learned to dry and grind corn, with the resulting product being used in making a type of flatbread. Old World settlers would adapt this ground corn - known as corn meal - into bread products.
  4. If you'll recall, one of the three people who Kyle Rittenhouse shot was pretending to surrender in the hopes that Rittenhouse would let his guard down. When it looked like this was happening, the person went for a weapon. Rittenhouse then very nearly blew their arm off. Under international law, "pretending to surrender" is illegal. It can encourage attackers to assume all people attempting to surrender are running a gambit and so refuse to take prisoners.
  5. The problem with electric vehicles is that once you get outside of the densely-packed major metropolitan areas it's hard to find publicly-accessible charging stations. Go out far enough, and the only way an EV is traveling from A to B is on the back of a truck.
  6. So this weekend's episode of "Sammy Hagar's Top Rock Countdown" is him playing spooky songs from various artists because it's Halloween next week. He was rolling through such classics as "Werewolves of London" and "Welcome To My Nightmare", but I had to change the channel for a few minutes when a certain infamous Rolling Stones number came on. I've had enough go wrong today, and don't want to invite anything else to happen.
  7. I think it's a glitch of some kind. I hit "submit reply", got up to go get something from the kitchen, and saw that my post hadn't gone up. Thinking I might not have actually pressed the button (not a single mouse I've plugged into this new computer has worked quite right for some reason) I pressed it again. When *that* didn't seem to post I refreshed the page and found that both attempts had in fact posted but the page had failed to refresh accordingly.
  8. Just as one should never ask Heavenly Father for patience, one should never ask for the veil to be made thin.
  9. A few years ago I was part of a tabletop RPG group with my usual crew and a few new players. One of the new players decided to pull out a dog whistle in the middle of the game one night and start playing around with it. Myself and another rather big dude in the group made it clear that we could actually hear it and were getting quite annoyed. Thus, it would be best for everyone if he put it away and didn't bring it back to the table. Never saw that whistle again.
  10. There is a limit to the upper and lower levels that most people can hear. A lot of animals, however, can hear at levels that exceed what most humans are able to do. For example, your hypothetical dog whistle is meant to sound at a pitch that is beyond what the average human can hear but within what most dogs can hear. My high-end and low-end are past what is normal for humans and into at least the lower portion of what many animals can hear. Yes, I can literally hear dog whistles, as can a few other people I know.
  11. In addition to being high-functioning autistic, my high-end and low-end hearing are both better than normal, to the point that I'm into the range of hearing generally associated with canines. It's true that my mid-range has been damaged by loud noises over my lifetime, but my high-end and low-end are so sharp that once upon a time I could tell when one of my flip phones was done charging because the electrical current passing through would make a different noise the second the battery hit 100%. Total silence can leave me scrambling to figure out if I actually heard something or not, and if so just what I heard. This is one of the many reasons why I made it a point to sync my iPhone to my iTunes account and download some radio apps, as being able to listen to music keeps me from hyper-fixating on what I might or might not have heard while also giving me a bit of a mental boost.
  12. If you have a Wal-Mart nearby, check it out. Mine just got a large quantity of Emerson brand electronic products that include pocket AM/FM transistor radios (handy for obtaining news & alerts without draining your devices) and weather radios, all at a discount compared to the name-brand equivalents.
  13. Nope. A lot of news outlets these days prioritize "being first" over "being correct". The reality of the situation now appears to be that the rocket landed in the parking lot of the hospital, that the actual death toll is 1/10th of the original claim, and that the rocket which hit the parking lot may have been fired from Gaza and either aimed improperly or knocked off course by a defensive system.
  14. To keep from clogging the forum - At the end of the month we're going to have a movie adaptation of the "Five Nights At Freddy's" multimedia horror franchise. The bulk of the story takes place in and around the city of Hurricane, Utah, so expect people to possibly be asking questions about Utah and maybe the church depending upon what the movie brings up. (nutshell: a mad scientist got a job as a security guard at a Chuck E. Cheese - type pizzeria so that he had a ready supply of test subjects, and his victims have possessed the animatronics in the hope of having their revenge... but since they only know him as a guard at the building, they're attacking anyone in a guard's uniform.)
  15. IRL? As I've mentioned before, my going anywhere was never much of an option. My maternal grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's during my senior year of high school, and with my dad still adjusting to retirement from the military, one brother just getting started in the military, and another about to enter graduate school I realized it would be a hardship on my parents if I left as well. I had gotten mailings from colleges as prestigious as BYU and Rutgers, but instead went to a series of local schools. Because I was the one who remained at home, I bore the brunt of everything that happened as we took care of her during those final two years and then the 2 - 3 years after as we tried to get her estate settled. Essentially, I gave up my future so that my brothers could have theirs. And I've paid a very, very dear price for it in terms of missed opportunities, including the prospect of my various mental and physical health diagnosis being made much sooner so I could have gotten treatment when I needed it. I think you can understand why some days I'm so very frustrated at the world and why a portion of me keeps going back to "what-if" scenarios despite my efforts not to. And yes, as my brothers succeeded they were cheered, while I *might* see my parents post their praise of me on social media whenever it was my birthday or I achieved what they regarded as a proper milestone.
  16. The industry was still going pretty strong in the late 2000s and early 2010s, such that Martha Beck's book was pushed by Oprah until involved parties starting pushing back on her claims to the point that an op/ed in "Writer's Digest" referenced it when discussing then-recent literary hoaxes. If anything, the 2000s was a transitory period where members of the church were turning the tables. As more and more members took to the internet and found resources like FARMS and SHIELDS to supplement their own studies, they found themselves confronting more and more critics of the church in public forums where dozens or even hundreds of people were watching. Ministers and ministries alike, religious and secular, were made to look foolish as their outdated arguments and pure hatred were exposed. There is still hatred against the church, and various mainstream outlets are involved in perpetuating it. But the situation is unsustainable, not in this day and age of options for content.
  17. During the Reconstruction era, missionaries operating in the American South were often targeted by the KKK and other hate groups. The story goes that one night J. Golden Kimball, who would later be a senior leader in the church, was meeting with a group of fellow missionaries out in the woods because it wasn't safe for them to assemble together in any of the local towns. Somehow, the KKK found out, parked themselves on the opposite bank of a river, and made a big spectacle of setting up a boiling pot of pitch. In response, Kimball bluffed the KKK members, claiming that we all had horns that came out in the moonlight. Anyone who tried it would be gored to death. Not only did the KKK members believe him, nearly 200 years later there are people who *still* believe him as well.
  18. That's about how tall I likely would have been if not for the scoliosis. As it is, I appear to be losing height due to the spinal damage.
  19. Due to the scoliosis and busted vertebrae I have, I'm going to need a Tacoma or similar vehicle. The sedan I have is just too low to the ground, making it hard some days for me to get in and out.
  20. There was also a massively extensive anti-Mormon campaign based on "othering" Romney and members of the faith, with everyone from Obama's re-election team to television network ABC working together to bury Romney and the church. In their eyes, they did nothing wrong.
  21. Toyota, as a company, is officially a Japanese automobile company. But they have a truck factory here in Texas, one of several factories they have outside of Japan. If I was to talk about how Toyota brought jobs to the United States and how certain Toyota vehicles were in fact "all-American", most people would have no idea what I was talking about. If I was to tell them that Toyota Tacoma trucks are perhaps even more common in my part of Texas than anything Ford or Chevy, they'd likely be convinced I was lying. That's because they don't know about the plant down in San Antonio, and likely haven't also factored in the various people employed by the various Toyota dealers across the nation. To them, Toyota is, indeed, a Japanese company because that's where the headquarters facility is and where the company was founded. They wouldn't understand unless I explained it to them, assuming of course they hadn't actually taken offense and decided to ignore me. That's the situation we're in. Most people believe things to be just so, and as Orwell warned this includes assigning definitions to words that may not be the definitions that other people use. (Seriously. All vehicles made after a certain period are required to indicate where certain parts were made and where final assembly took place. Check your vehicle and the official paperwork.) edit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tacoma#Third_generation_(N300;_2015) The third generation Tacoma vehicles were assembled in San Antonio as well as two factories in Mexico. It's been confirmed that the fourth generation will be made in Mexico, but no word yet on if production will continue in San Antonio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Tundra The Tundra, however, is indeed exclusively made in San Antonio.
  22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language As author George Orwell notes, people will attach meanings to words that the words themselves don't actually have and make judgements based on this. By saying that we're not a "Christian" church, critics are expecting their audiences to believe that we don't worship Christ.
  23. OK. YouTube just changed their terms of service so that ad-blockers are now no longer allowed, this despite the fact that the Chrome browser, which is owned by the same company that owns YouTube, has built-in ad blocking. Right now if it detects that you have an ad blocker you're restricted to only three videos at a pop. Not sure if this is daily or three final videos period. But for those who were watching church videos (et al) on YouTube, you're either going to have to make a hard choice or going to have to find another outlet.
  24. The video was leaked to Rufo within days of it being recorded, and quickly spread across the internet from there. She and her defenders tried to walk it back as a joke on her part, but by then people had already taken it lethally seriously. It's given partial blame for the Lightyear movie being such a catastrophic failure and may have been why Strange World was set up to fail, as both had LGBT elements and people were not in the mood for it.