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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, I grew up in a small American town and my cousins were more like my siblings than my actual sister because they were the same age as me. We all fled that small town, so the next generation are all growing up not surrounded by extended family.

    I think there are good and bad sides to it. It was nice to grow up surrounded by family with a strong sense of belonging. But my cousins’ children are growing up knowing people from far more diverse backgrounds than I ever had access to, which is good for them in a different way.

    Overall, I think the effects are probably neutral








  • Yes, Massachusetts. I have a dual fuel heat pump with natural gas backup installed in 2020, so it’s a newer system. And I have one heat pump mini split in the least energy efficient, but most used room in my house (large, high ceilings, exterior walls on three sides, and a skylight).

    The first couple of years I noticed when it got just below freezing, the central heat pump seemed to struggle to keep up. Then this year I replaced my windows and got new wall insulation in both of the main bedrooms and bathrooms (previous insulation was original from the 1960s and shredded to bits with huge gaps.)

    After those improvements, I’ve been running my heat pump down to 20⁰F/-7⁰C so far without any issues at all. I’m excited to see how cold we can get and this system still keep up. I am still supplementing my one large room with the mini split, but that’s mostly because all my plants are in here, so I keep this room warmer than 68⁰F/20⁰C.








  • What you are seeing in public is a phenomenon of Evangelical Christianity being amplified for political gain. There are religious puritans who genuinely and sincerely believe that the mere exposure to the existence of non-cis hetero people will cause actual cis hetero people to “become sexual deviants.”

    Which, in their world, it probably looks like that. Oh your perfect totally-and-completely-straight child “suddenly became” gay after learning online that gay people exist? To these ignorant puritans, it really seems like a magic transformation when in reality it’s just standard-issue coming out of the closet. They have zero understanding that, if you wouldn’t repress people in the first place, this wouldn’t happen because there wouldn’t be a closet to come out of.

    But back in the 90s, they fully lost the crusade against cis gay people. Cis gay people are normalized to the point that my very evangelical aunt now happily accepts her lesbian daughter.

    The politicians who used to leverage this bigotry against gay people to drum up votes know this, so they moved on to the new bogeyman of the day: trans people. I see the exact same verbiage used now against trans people that was used against gay people (and especially gay men) in the 90s. “They’re really pedophiles, they’re a cult that’s recruiting and corrupting your children, they’ll turn cis people into something they’re not, it’s not safe for children to be exposed to this ideology.”

    Those exact same things were said about gay people in the 90s, literally word for word. Even the “trans agenda.” In 1992, it was the “gay agenda” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda

    This is why I have a patch on my bag that reads “Evil is boring.” Because these bigots can’t even come up with a new script. It’s the same old thing over and over and over, just with new targets.

    It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t completely terrified of sexuality that the existence of trans people is not a threat to anyone anywhere ever. What you’re seeing is nothing but bigotry being leveraged for political gain.