zil

Frozen Pony:

You mentioned this before, and I suggested a hooded nib (pen comes in shades other than black): But then you said you have this bad habit of leaving pens in your pockets when you throw stuff in the wash, and, well, that's a pretty bad idea with a liquid ink...

It's your "one weakness". At least do variations on Once in Royal David's City - we never hear that enough, and Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains - also not done enough and the only Christmas hymn in the book written by a member!

It is not my fault you can't use a fountain pen! And I'm pretty sure it's not NT's fault if you don't have your own My Little Pony figurine, complete with Pony-music.

First, I'm assuming you're talking about Gospel Library, not LDS Tools. If I'm wrong, please correct me. (There is no "LDS Library".) If you're on Android, and your version is older than 5.0, there's a chance it won't work. IMO, if you have a working version, leave it alone and disable automatic upgrades! If your version doesn't work at all, then you have nothing to lose, so go to your device's app store and see if there's an upgraded version available. I have found that Gospel Library 4.x and older will no longer download the scriptures (if you already have the scriptures, you can continue to read them, but if you don't have them, you can't download them). They have changed the actual content format and it's not compatible with versions older than 5.x. (This is all deduction based on the pains experienced with 3 Android devices each with a different version of Android.) The current version is 5.x and the original would not work well on older versions of Android (and could be buggy even on current-ish versions). They released a patch (I think 5.0.2) and that seems to work better. The current version is 5.0.3. If you upgrade from 4.x to 5.x you have to re-download any and all content (hooray - this is because they changed the format of the content), and on anything before 5.0.2, that's slower than imaginable. Even on later versions of 5, it's not as good as it was. Dunno if that helps any, but it's what I got. If you're on Apple, I'd still suggest you look in the app store for updates.

Hey! No picking on Pony-boy! @NeuroTypical: Colorverse Ham #65 in TWSBI Go, broad nib.

Ah, you live in the last free state in the union. Congratulations.

Hey! This is a family forum! I'm reporting you! That's because, by definition, everything exists, and anything is a subset of everything, therefore anything exists. The only way for anything to not exist would be if it were nothing, but then it wouldn't be anything anymore, it would be nothing, and for nothing to exist, everything would have to cease to exist. Thus, anything clearly exists. What it it were a refrigerator box? Would most of them fit in there? Or are they really that huge?

Ah, Russian has several verbs of motion. In English, you could say, "I went outside.", "I went to NYC.", "I went for a drive.", "I went swimming.", etc. But in Russian, there are many verbs for "went" - went by foot (one for with a destination in mind; one for wandering; and one that focuses more on the fact that you left, without specifying a destination), drove a car, flew a plane, etc. And while English lets you use either "went" (probably more common) or the specific verb, in Russian, you use the specific verb.

In the days of Moses, the priesthood was restricted to the Levites - thus, blacks could not have the priesthood. In the book of Abraham (esp 1:26), we learn that the descendants of Ham were restricted from the priesthood (whether this restricted blacks or not is irrelevant - it restricted someone - the fact is that the priesthood has always been restricted from someone - or, more accurately, limited by very specific criteria to only those meeting said criteria). Oh, and by the way, from the beginning, at the very least, the priesthood has been limited to males - that's a pretty large and clear delineation, and the only one that has ever had the appearance of permanent / eternal (I don't know that we're certain that it is, but it seems pretty certain). All the other limitations have had a more temporary appearance.

Hmm. I'm going back to this. I think we're mixing stress and intonation and they're not the same. I'm going to have to ponder this. While we might use rising intonation on the syllable which gets the stress, I don't think it's required in English. I think we can speak the stressed syllable mono-tonally. (Am at work, so I'm not going to attempt this aloud.) In Russian, a sentence is monotone until the last syllable, which is spoken with falling intonation. Clearly the words of a sentence can have multiple syllables and in each word, one of the syllables will be stressed, and yet the sentence is monotone. Thus stress and intonation can be separated. So, either Chinese is using stress to change the meaning of the word, or stress is the same thing as intonation (but I don't think so), or your example is erroneously conflates the two. More pondering required, but not right now, I need to go work!

This is very a very common difference between languages - where language A has 1 word with n uses, language B will have n words. It's also possible for there to be no such word (either it doesn't exist at all, or a phrase is required in one language to explain a single word from another language). For example, Russian doesn't have articles ("the", "a", "an"). They simply don't exist. If specificity is needed, you would have to use "this", "that", or description. And then there's usage. While Russian has verbs for possession and ownership, they just aren't used. In English, you could say "I own a car." The equivalent in Russian would literally translate back to English as "At me car." (Or, "At me there is a car." - the "there is a" is implied.) Isn't language fun!?

This has been discussed at length, numerous times. My thoughts can be found here (explaining the irrationality of same-sex union in eternity) and I don't have time to track down the other post I previously made - it was most emphatic. Simply put, the ban was not outside the historic norms for Priesthood and always included the understanding that it was temporary, it also never denied the reality of our species. Homosexual behavior, on the other hand, has always been flatly condemned with no mention of that condemnation being temporary, and it does indeed deny the reality of our species. Meanwhile, man + woman (+children) has always been taught, commanded even, as an eternal principle, with no deviation, variation, exception, or temporariness to it.

Good point, but it seems like this is more the exception in English but common in Chinese. Is that perception incorrect? (I've never tried to learn Chinese, so I'm just going by what I've heard.)

The problem is that we use tonality for totally different purposes - e.g. emphasis or to form a question. Chinese, as I understand it, uses tonality to actually change the word - instead of meaning "cat", the word now means "house" (not a real example, but realistic, or so I've been told). This makes the tonality utterly unnatural for an English speaker who now has to repress the desire to use tonality for emphasis / forming a question and use it instead to actually form a word. I took Russian in college, and one of the hardest things about that is that nouns change not just between singular and plural, but between singular, 2-4 plural, 5+ plural, and use in the sentence (subject, object, indirect object, etc.). Also, words have gender (3 possible genders). Thus, there are 3genders * 3pluralities * 6cases = 54 possible noun endings to memorize (not including abnormalities)! (And Finnish has 15 cases! But apparently only 2 genders. Not sure about plurality. A friend who was in my Russian class served a mission in Finland and said Finnish is considerably harder.) Interestingly, learning the rules is one of my favorite parts of language. Every now and then I feel like taking a class to remind me how to diagram sentences - I really liked that.

Two thoughts: It's been my experience, that a prayer for something sincerely desired, but which we ourselves don't know how to actualize, repeated for years, can bring about changes in us that are so subtle we do not notice them. Therefore, I think it entirely possible that your "couple of years" prayer brought about your ability "in the past month or so" to make "an effort to really connect with the Lord". I would recommend that anyone who sincerely wishes for something, but doesn't now how to bring it about, follow this pattern. Your first paragraph made me think of learning to pray as a child, which came from what amounted to public prayers - even family prayers are public in a way. It took me a long time to realize this was the public model and that the private model should be different. I don't recall my parents teaching me a private model. I think the best thing parents can do for a child is to teach them a more personal way to pray, to engage their Heavenly Father in conversation. Not having children (or experience with them, really), I don't know how difficult this might be, but it seems like something more that would be a gift for a child to learn early. OK, a third thought: thank you for your descriptions of charity - I find them far more useful than when folks use "charity" alone, or even the scriptural descriptors. Examples of "charity in action" give us specifics to both emulate and recognize.

The Caribbean is a sea. An island is not a sea. So if you're going to end up in the Caribbean, then you'll be all wet. But then you go on about how you're not sure which island, and now how the sea is full of islands (by which you mean, has several islands in it), as if you won't be in the sea but on an island. I was just suggesting you decide whether you'll be in the Caribbean or on an island. See?

Yes, it's a popular theme. I think that's why the bishop wanted us to read that talk.

I dunno, which came first, the government regulation, or the health insurance company restricting which providers it worked with? Regardless, as far as I'm concerned, they're both demonic.

Everything I have seen says this is caused by insurance and government regulation.

Wow! @Tyme, do this, and you won't have time to smoke!

I suspect insurance (detaching the cost from the consumer) and frivolous law suits (or at least absurdly high amounts awarded by juries) are more responsible for the high prices than the reverse. But yes, self-perpetuating, and all the "solutions" ignore these problems.

I read to that point and took the unread books back to the store for a refund. Lots of people try to justify continuing to read, but once the main character becomes a rapist, forget it, I'm out. The things people unnecessarily submit themselves to in the name of "realism" baffles me.

Quadruple like! This is why I despise the whole concept of insurance. (Or at least the modern implementations thereof. Catastrophic, maybe I could accept, but not the demonic variants we have now.)

Well, and this may sound insane, but get yourself a little calendar, or a card with the year printed on it. Mark each day you go without a cigarette. Watch the pattern change from few marked days to more marked days. It sounds absurd, but this actually helps in making habits, so I assume it will help in breaking one. (Otherwise known as making a habit of not smoking.)