Ironhold

I started growing a mustache at the tail end of junior high because teachers kept confusing me with two other students who had glasses and similar builds. By the time I graduated high school, it had become part of my signature appearance. I went for a type of beard known as a "Van Dyke" (mustache and goatee combo, like Evil Spock) to further stand out from various individuals I kept getting confused with, and started growing out mutton chops because the skin near my ears is so thin that any nicks would just keep bleeding.

Sometimes, just being of good character and encouraging others to be of good character is enough to rebuke a corrupt system, hence all of the screaming you'll hear when modern "progressive" types see people who live with classical mores.

It just debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100; the latest chart came out earlier today. I keep trying to tell people that the chart is now vulnerable to gaming because it factors in digital these days, and Streisand Effect tends to drive people to digital to see if something is as bad as the hype says it is.

Back around 2008, Hasbro signed a deal with IDW Publishing in which IDW would license Hasbro's IPs to make comic books. Around 2015, IDW put a writer named Aubrey Sitterson on one of the two G. I. Joe comics that they were publishing. At the time, the bulk of the remaining Joe fandom were legacy fans, lifelong fans, and people who had ties to the US, Canadian, or British militaries. Sitterson, however, was an avowed socialist who had no love of or respect for the military, and by extension had no love or respect for the G. I. Joe franchise. Thus, he made it his mission to wrench the franchise to fit his personal sensibilities for how a comic should be. This included having long-time fan favorite character Conrad "Duke" Hauser be racist towards a character of Middle Eastern descent that Sitterson created because he objected to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed dude of German descent being the main hero (this was Sitterson's excuse to write the character out), putting two characters into a homosexual relationship even though one of them was canonically straight, and turning a buff, bald, muscular white guy that Hasbro created back in 1990 into an obese Polynesian woman. For obvious reasons, the fans were not happy, and online sparring began. On September 11th, 2017, Sitterson took to Twitter to declare that as far as he was concerned, only those individuals who were in Midtown Manhattan during the attacks had any right to mark the occasion, and that everyone else was just being selfish by making the day about them. This led to such nuclear-level fallout that Hasbro itself would get involved, but Sitterson still wouldn't keep his mouth shut, and that November would fire off a 26-part Twitter rant that was an apologia for his creative decisions. Hasbro would ultimately order IDW to fire him and cancel that particular Joe comic outright in order to protect what was left of the Joe brand's brand value, and about 14 months later the entire "Hasbro Shared Universe" the book was a part of was brought to a screeching halt ahead of the scheduled license negotiations. Hasbro would permit IDW a renewal of the license, but soon made it clear that they hadn't learned a thing because they went right back to having their licensed books be full of controversial material. This led to Hasbro cancelling their Joe and Transformers licenses effective January of this year, and it's now believed that all other Hasbro licenses barring My Little Pony were cancelled as well. A new publisher, Skybound, has been slowly working Joe and Transformers material into their own in-house content, but I'm not holding my breath.

For example? Events in September 2017 saw a consumer revolt start wherein people began to criticize and eventually forsake the mainstream US comic book industry for its increasing lack of professionalism and the overall decline in the quality of product as prices rose. By Summer 2018, the consumer revolt - known as Comicsgate - had transitioned into "support indie creators as an alternative to the mainstream, and if you're feeling brave use crowd-funding to launch your own book". This led to a surge in indie creators on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and elsewhere. A few weeks back, Tate decided to launch his own graphic novel... at $95 a pop. Pretty much the entire indie comics scene responded by mocking him and calling him out for such an obvious cash grab, especially given how terrible the artwork was. I myself noted that for that price you could get multiple subscriptions to newspapers.

Where I live, if Disney does make their Bambi movie about half of the audience where I live will be cheering for the hunters.

Tate is actually rather widely mocked, even by people who themselves are opposed to the culture coming out of Hollywood and elsewhere. He's regarded as representing the other side of the pendulum.

That raises the prospect of signature forgery.

Oh, the map of Woodward has been changed. The church downtown *isn't* a chapel, but the church north of the college is. Either the congregation moved locations and the map didn't initially update it, or something else caused both structures to be labeled as chapels when only one was.

More urban exploration, this time to the town of Mineral Wells, Texas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_Wells,_Texas The good news is that the chapel is across the street from the public library, both on South 22nd. The bad news is that *both* structures are across the street (MLK) from an industrial complex. Looking at Google Maps, it seems that a green space was placed as a buffer between the complex and a residential area, and so the open space was deemed a prime location for both facilities as they're able to serve the residential area *and* they aren't far from the main east / west highway. They do have a small cinema in the back of a large shopping center, but I'm not seeing any comic book shops aside from whatever the local Wal-Mart and Dollar Tree would have.

As MatPat notes, Disney's constantly mining and re-mining their IPs for more content is destroying these IPs just like a kid destroys their toys through rough play. He believes that Disney could stand to learn from YouTube channels like his own when it comes to advanced planning, forming release schedules, and so forth in order to deal with a number of what he sees as easily preventable problems.

Here in Texas, we have the situation where third parties often forcibly graft the Bryan / College Station metropolitan area onto the Waco / Temple / Killeen metropolitan area despite the two areas being far enough apart that they have their own local NBC affiliate (both owned by Tegna). A few TV stations from the two metropolitan areas are a part of each area's cable package to round things out, but otherwise they're quite different. In particular, WTC is flavored by Interstate 35 and Fort Hood / Fort Cavazos, while BCS is flavored by the flagship campus of the Texas A&M system.

The issue is that for decades now American society has pushed "college is for winners, everything else means you failed" on a large scale. As a result, we have a dire shortage of many skilled trades, including heavy vehicle operators. It takes time and money to train someone to operate a school bus or similar vehicle as you have to have certain permits to operate them, and since school boards often don't have the money to train they have to dip into the scarce pool of people who do already have these licenses... people who have probably already been courted by trucking companies and metro bus groups.

That's due in large part to Disney rapidly increasing prices at the parks, including food (smaller portions, higher prices) and other services.

A big part of it is to ensure that the people seeking aid actually *do* need assistance. Sadly, there are people who try to take advantage of charitable systems. Additionally, it allows the bishop to help determine *what* specifically you need. Financial management classes? One or two bills paid? A basket of food and household goods to get you through the next month? Et cetra. The bishop may counsel that one or more expenses be given up or some excess personal assets sold to help make ends meet, especially if the person is in financial trouble due to excess spending. As far as the Bishop's Storehouse goes, it's a mix of items that are available. Some of the items are produced by the church at its various farms and ranches. Some of the items are actually produced by the Seventh-Day Adventists, who provide us with the material as part of a deal in which we help handle logistics for their humanitarian aid systems. Some of the items are "private label" materials produced by reputable third parties under the church's name. And some items are name brand items that the church negotiates with the manufacturers over to get at a discount. The products available aren't "luxury" brands or big-name items, but they will get you through, especially when supplemented with various other aid programs that may be available locally. For example, here in the United States we have WIC, the "Women, Infants, Children" program in which women who have children and are earning less than a designated financial amount can receive state aid in purchasing *very* select groceries for themselves and their families. This is the official website for the State of Texas' WIC program: https://texaswic.org/ WIC allows people to purchase select staple items like milk, oats, beans, rice, yogurt, and so forth, at a free or reduced rate. The website will have a list of what items are or aren't covered under the WIC program here in Texas. Grocery stores are obligated to mark eligible items with a special pink-colored price tag or other pink-colored marker to make these items easier to find.

When systematic evidence reviews were conducted in the U.K., Sweden, Finland, Norway, and France, the result in all those countries was to urge more caution with medical interventions, noting there simply wasn't enough evidence to support the notion that benefits outweigh the risks. The US became an outlier with it's policy to "provide medical, even surgical, support to whatever the minor says about themselves". I'm cautiously optimistic that a systematic review of available evidence will result in better, more soundly evidence-based, guidelines. And as I wander around the internet, I'm offering to bet ten bucks that they end up revising their policies in a "use more caution before supporting medically or surgically" direction. Because helping a 16 yr old girl chop off her own breasts, without any preconditions like psychotherapy or an awful lot of diagnostic rigor, just because she feels like a boy, is one of the most idiotic things the human race has ever run with since they awarded the Nobel Peace prize to the guy who invented the frontal lobotomy. A big part of what's going on is that people are noticing the overlap between "autism spectrum" and "gender dysphoria". It's now suspected, especially after some controversial studies coming out of places like Canada, that a considerable number of individuals who are being steered towards gender reassignment are in fact individuals who actually need counseling to either deal with autism-related issues causing them to not feel comfortable in their own skin, an inability to process same-sex attraction, or both.

If memory serves, the same week that the US government said that the Covid vaccines were perfectly safe for minors, five European countries ordered that the Moderna vaccine *not* be given to minors until they were able to fully investigate claims that the vaccine was causing cardiovascular complications in teenage boys. Cue people wondering which set of experts to trust on this one. Making matters worse is that when all of this was going on, a rather controversial TV show was airing in Japan that was premised on the aftermath of man-hating female scientists unleashing a disease that was genetically engineered to wipe out men as a gender. Given that this was on peoples' radar at the time, you had a few folks noting how it was only teenage boys who were suffering complications and not teenage girls and thus going into "conspiracy theory" mode.

As someone who is himself on the spectrum? It would come down to how high-functioning he was and his ability to think in a looser fashion.

From what I understand, the PAC 12 is having trouble getting consistent TV deals, and so that's why people are looking to leave.

The "Reformed Egyptian" as we call it was somewhat analogous in nature to secretarial shorthand because it was a condensed way of transmitting large quantities of information. Contrary to popular belief, the processes of translating text and condensing text via shorthand aren't exactly scientific processes. There is room for nuance, and Mormon knew that future readers and translators wouldn't have a perfect time of it because they'd have to translate condensed text.

Perhaps I can add a bit of perspective. In addition to my newspaper writing, I also try my hand at fiction. Due to what is basically autism-fueled OCD, I'm currently in the process of world-building a project to the point of spending months coming up with individual brand names and companies on the off-chance they might be needed in any of the stories I should happen to set in there. Essentially, I've built this world to enough of an extent that if something should happen to where I get transported from this plane of existence to the world I'm creating, I could get by. Think about that. I have, in essence, created not just a world, but functionally created a universe. I haven't filled in every single crack, dotted every I, or crossed every T, but it's a world. It's livable. I am functionally the deity in charge of this little bit of imagination. It "began" when I first pulled up a new Excel spreadsheet, and I am continuing to shape things from there. From the perspective of my characters, the universe exists because I willed it to exist, and I'm the guy in charge, so...

The chapel's not safe, either. It's been the target of vandalism, break-ins, and even actual desecration. Yes, someone decided to paint a pentagram on the front lawn and then pin a dead deer to it. It was found by the seminary kids the next morning. When my dad was building manager, he had to have all of the cleaning supplies and other materials shipped to the house because it wasn't safe to have it shipped to the chapel directly. And yes, we had to block off entire days to make sure that someone was at the house accordingly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Adventures At least as far back as 1991, we had groups trying to use video games to preach the gospel. Sadly, this entry here, "Bible Adventures", is remembered for being generally awful due to how repetitive and boring the mini-games were. Or we had groups like Realbuzz Studios that tried to produce manga-style comic books and graphic novels that were intended to convey Christian themes. More gets done when people try to use what's out there to encourage and energize. I mean, I'm an 80s child, and I learned a *lot* of morals and character from shows like G. I. Joe. So no, the material doesn't even need to be religious.

...Except for the porch pirates, that is. As I've noted before, ordering anything is dicey because we have them in the neighborhood. The local Amazon and FedEx drivers don't always ring the doorbell or otherwise signal us that they've made a delivery, leading to more than a few instances where I've literally tripped over items that were left sitting unattended on my front porch for hours on end (including a case of military rations that may have literally been out there overnight). My regular USPS driver is pretty good about putting packages out of sight, but substitutes are an unknown quantity. If I try to order garments online, there's no guarantee I'll get to them before porch pirates do, and in my area there are plenty of people who would like garments for nefarious purposes. If I have to order them online, I'd have to clear the entire ETA period and just stay home.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/alma/17?lang=eng Every so often, some right-leaning culture warrior will use Twitter or another social media platform to go off on a tirade about how some form of popular entertainment they don't understand, like video games or anime, is something that only children should be engaged with and that if anyone who isn't a child is engaging with it then it's a sign that the person is somehow defective or even a "failure" at life. People will come out in numbers - myself included - to try and explain that such blanket generalizations only drive people away and are a big part of *why* the older generation is in danger of "losing" the culture war. Instead, it's better to find ways to embrace these things and use them to encourage learning and model better behaviors. For example, in the early 1980s, Pat Robertson understood that anime was huge in Japan, and so got with prominent animation studio Tatsunoko Pro to produce Superbook, an anime series that was meant to teach the Bible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbook_(1981_TV_series) . Superbook became so popular in Japan that it started to filter out to the rest of the world along with many late 1970s / early 1980s titles, eventually coming back to the United States. Yet another round of hand-wringing and whatnot happened on Twitter this past weekend, which brought to mind Alma chapter 17. In it, Ammon, a missionary, decides to earn the trust of the people by living and working among them instead of the usual method of fire & brimstone ministry. He finds work tending the flocks that belong to a local ruling figure, and after defeating a group of rustlers he's earned so much respect that people are now willing to listen to him when he speaks.