That’s a pole. Polio is a porridge-like dish made from maize. Not grits, the other one.

He’s our little chonk. Was on “the list” at a city shelter when a rescue got him. He’d been a stray for quite a while, to judge by scars, weight, and polished footpads. Now his heeler stubborness comes out in determinedly refusing to do anything that isn’t relaxing. Our lifestyle is compatible, so he mostly only has to leave when he goes to the vet. To see him come out of shell and start feeling entitled to simply being loved has been very gratifying, though.

LOL, y’all are makin’ me sad. Stetson is alive and well, and still the same delightful curmudgeon he’s always been. If anything, the farther he gets from being a stray on city-shelter death row, the more relaxed and puppyish he gets.

Hmm, very possible, though I didn’t notice it the last time I was moving the print head by hand. I’ll let it sit and try again. The room also gets a bit dusty and the printer sits for a while between jobs, so I’ll make a point of cleaning the belt and rails before the next print.

Gonna have to upgrade one of these days to something enclosed and lower-maintenance, but I’m cheap with broad-ranging interests. I enjoy tinkering enough that, up to certain limits, working with less expensive “time-sink” hobby gear doesn’t bother me if it means I get to try something new.

Or rather, I’ve convinced myself that I do. :-)

My printer shares my home office with our bird (PLA printing only, and that not particularly often), and while I have an air cleaner that keeps it from being FULLY bird-dander central, dust is an issue for objects that sit. I’ll brush off the rail and belt particularly well for my next print.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

I like this. The arrangement is on point, the greenscreen is fun, and even the vocals are close. Well done.

I’m sorry, the self-governing Dominion of Newfoundland is unclear as to what you mean by “off the coast of Canada.”

I think the Pitch Meeting may be enough for me. Left to their own devices, Sony’s Spider-IP movies seem to be mostly pretty dreadful.

While ABA is not without its criticisms, especially for cases where the kids are already better able to function day-to-day and ABA is used to strongly encourage masking (back in the day they’d literally just beat kids down with both carrot and stick to get them to pretend to be “normal”), getting severely affected kids to engage and talk is basically what it’s best at, and yeah, you don’t just get “better” from ASD.

Fucking horrific by UHC, as usual, and you know ABA is not the only care getting this kind of “analysis.”

Okay, I think at some point we’re talking past each other more than to each other. You are clearly much more invested than I am in the relative truth claims, categorization, and internal consistency of various bronze-age mythologies and their propagandized descendants.

You’re drawing bright lines in places that I don’t find particularly interesting as a non-believer more interested in secular history than apologetic theology. Still, I suspect the bright lines are very important in that context. If you would like to claim this one as a win, please feel free. Have a lovely weekend!

Thanks. It seems like it’s fairly new, and the next print I did was similar in size and shape and with the same roll of PLA, but it has a less pronounced effect, though I can still feel it. I’ll check and see if any similar sized prints from farther back exhibit it, but I could very easily imagine something getting knocked a bit when I was last messing around with it. I had a roll of “Eco” filament that was giving me no end of trouble and eventually required a hot pull and new nozzle, and I changed out the plastic extruder for an aluminum one while I was doing stuff.

I think it’s fairer to describe Mormons as nontrinitarian Christians, sort of a “neo-Arian heresy”. They specifically believe Christ to be part of a uniquely divine trinity with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and that Christ died to redeem humanity and was resurrected (at which point he floated home for the weekend then stopped in on all the Jewish folks living in the Americas, of course).

They also believe he was created as a “first among equals” son of God and, once you tug on a couple of uniquely Mormon threads, that God the Father probably had actual relations with Mary to conceive Jesus’s body, which after resurrection was “perfected” and divine, just like his dad’s.

So anyway, Jesus holds a centrality to Mormon religion in a way he simply doesn’t for Islam, even with the large number of roles Muslims believe Jesus played and will play in the future. While his nature is different for Mormons, his role in their faith is much more analogous to “vanilla” Nicene Christianity. He is part of a tripartite Godhead and is their Savior, and faith in that is necessary for an individual’s salvation.

Thomas Aquinas would roll his eyes at the unexplored repercussions of it all, but Mormons have thirteen “articles of faith” that we were supposed to learn as kids. A lot of the nonsense follows from a half-educated conman in WAY over his head trying to keep it all going and expand his own authority (including the authority to sleep with whomever he wanted) but specifically NOT to move beyond something his adherents would identify as Christian.

Even if he failed at that, and you can argue he did, I would argue that the specifics of the theological niceties only tell part of the story, and the Mormon movement has to be viewed in its cultural context, and Mormons have always self-identified as Christians in a way that was not merely semantic.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised anymore but the film is over fifty years old. A new modern version could capture a whole new audience.

Yeah, this particular type of remake has been done for almost a hundred years. Nothing to get too worked up about, though even as a kid I wasn’t interested in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Even for the rest of it, I’m at a point where I will just take these things on their own merits. Sometimes the creative hijackers who do their own story under cover of an existing property make something watchable (e.g. Foundation), and for most of the rest they were working with a property unlikely to inspire anything brilliant in the first place (e.g. Halo, which as a non-player still isn’t that bad… just “meh” with too big a budget).

People want to tell stories. I’ll watch as many of the good stories as I can make time for.

This feels more like tone-deaf snobbery, like in an Armando Iannucci project, rather than “traditional” corruption.

“If his majesty’s government cannot be counted upon to support the great British tradition of bespoke luxury stationery, then who can?!”

While there are certainly some bonkers deviations at the level of theology (Mormonism theology tends to be childishly literal where it departs from Nicene Christianity, as it is at its heart an anti-intellectual and inherently out-group long-con), and of course there are the extra sacred texts and culty tendencies, Mormons view themselves as firmly within the Christian tradition, and they are culturally more in line than not with Christians than other Abrahamic adherents. I think it’s stretching to count them as an entirely different religion.

So I guess this would this also take into account a difference between an “Empire” and a “kingdom” or other proto-nation-state-ish polity.

In 2013, Gelsinger co-founded Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC), a coalition of business leaders, venture capitalists, non-profit leaders and pastors that aims to convert one million people over the next decade. He helped establish the Sacramento-area Christian institution William Jessup University from which he also received an honorary doctorate.

Sweet zombie jesus… 🙄

I’m gonna level with y’all. I have a certain number of areas where my tastes are reasonably sophisticated and bougie (a nice dry artisanal cider… perfection), but in many ways I have the palate of a latchkey kid in 1993. I love a dozen kinds of fast food, sugary breakfast cereals, and yeah, while I prefer other recipes over it, I’m quite fond of regular Kraft Mac & Cheese/Kraft Dinner.

All of which is to tell you that I’m not sneering down from some Michelin-starred ivory tower when I say that Microwave bowls of Mac & Cheese are FUCKING DISGUSTING. Whatever combination of powdered milk and thickeners and Satan-snot they have to put into the bowls to make the process work at all is just nasty.

It’s an abomination before the Lord. That fork was just desperately trying to avoid being shoved into that slime bucket.

I understand that the trail divides here and one can either float the river or take the Barlow Toll Road.