Sounds to me like the kid is also having some feelings surrounding the breakup and subsequent remarriage that aren’t being addressed. Why does he want you to come too? Is he hoping it might bring you and his mom back together? Does he feel uncomfortable around the new stepdad, and wants you around because he’s more comfortable when you’re around? I think if you have a conversation with him as to why he’s asking for you to come too, it might influence how you approach the situation, or at least give you a better way to explain why you can’t come due to your own reasons.

I know this is a difficult decision on your part for how it affects you, but your son is also in a very vulnerable position right now, and needs both of his parents paying attention to him and the feelings he’s having, even if he doesn’t know how to express them directly. My parents broke up suddenly due to cheating when I was around the same age, and it was a traumatic time in my life because my parents both assumed I was old enough to “get it.” I wasn’t. Family is one of the main sources of stability in a young person’s life, and to have it fall out from beneath you isn’t something you get over on your own very easily.

Which is why the people who decide what they think steer them toward worries about the nuclear family and abortion.

Stage 2 generally means that the cancer hasn’t yet spread, except maybe to very nearby lymph nodes, meaning treatment can be very successful so long as its somewhere accessible by surgery and you don’t wait too long. Stage 2 treatment is very different from stage 4 treatment, but if you wait, that’s where it’ll get to.

Dang, I just started playing a couple weeks ago. But I guess that means I made it just in time to be one of the people who stop playing in solidarity!

I always liked the name Woodrow, but I hate the nickname Woody, so it’s a bit of a wash.

Would you be arrested? Probably not, but you’re more likely to be than Trump. See, committing a crime isn’t the only factor that influences whether or not you get slapped with the punishment for that crime, even if it’s plainly obvious to everyone you committed it. Another major factor is whether or not someone is going to go through the effort of ensuring you get punished - if nobody does, or if they try, but can’t get to that finish line of getting a judge to declare you to be guilty in court, then you walk away scot-free.

So, the thing that’s keeping you from being arrested is your relative insignificance. You’re just some person, so it’s unlikely that anyone will go through the trouble of ensuring you receive the punishment for the crime you committed, even if it’s a relatively easy thing to do. Now, if you were to go on TV and say it, that would significantly increase your risk, since now more people are seeing you and someone who gives a shit might decide to go after you. That would be damning for you, since it would require very little effort to punish you - you clearly committed the crime, and you have no way to influence the court to make you harder to punish.

For Trump, his protection isn’t insignificance - there are plenty of people who would like to ensure he’s properly punished; instead, his protection comes from making it really difficult for someone who wants to punish him to be successful in that endeavor. He has a lot of money and influence, so he can hire good lawyers that can drag out the expensive legal process - something he can afford, but a lot of people who might try to go after him can’t. His lawyers are also good enough to find loopholes in the law to avoid punishment, so even if you can afford a cheap lawyer for a long time, he’ll likely still walk away unscathed. He’s also shown that he has the ability to influence what judge gets put on trials he’s a part of, which is another factor that influences whether or not he might get punished for the crime.

Ultimately, you’d have to have a rock-solid case presented by a team of very good lawyers working non-stop for months to years in order to bring Trump to justice, and the only people who reasonably have that power are almost exclusively on his side to begin with. Trump has knowingly committed multiple major crimes, and has shown that he has the ability to prevent them from hurting him, so he knows that he has virtually no chance to be punished for minor crimes, and commits them openly all the time.

Yeah, that’s the family history of inbreeding that I was talking about - if you continuously have children within the family for multiple generations then the risk continues to rise so long as the trend continues. It’s generally only the risk of getting 2 copies of some familial recessive condition or other issues that arise from getting identical copies of genetic information from both parents, though, so breaking the chain and having a kid with someone outside of the family removes that risk; even if someone has a family history of inbreeding, it doesn’t put their potential children at risk so long as their partner isn’t related to them.

Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.

The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.

Nah, it’s referring to the first space by grouping the first and second words, “Pig” and “And,” and then referring to the second space by grouping the second and third words, “And” and “Whistle.”

“Thank you I came in 30 seconds.”

Looks cool, but I worry that they’ve got so many different enemies pulling in different directions that they won’t really get into an interesting story for any of them. The reason I loved Origins was because it really focused on the darkspawn, both in terms of the lore surrounding them, and the effect their invasion has on society. Then the DLC came out and teased that the darkspawn are more than they appear to be, setting up for future games to delve into that even more. It was great, but then the next couple of games came out and didn’t seem to have that same feeling of depth, and I lost interest. If the game is just a checklist of different things to kill, I’m not really interested in playing it.

Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you’re in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.

But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it’s better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say “They don’t have the right!” before we’ve done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we’ll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.

Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what’s okay. They’re just following the rules as they’ve been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.

3, but yeah. I’d have them on while I was working since the pacing is pretty easy to follow. Plus I’d read the manga back in the early 2000’s, so I could remember the major plot points well enough without needing to devote my full attention.

This works out perfectly for me. I started watching the anime a few months ago, but I lost steam around halfway through, so this gives me some time to take a break before catching up!

I liked sneaking up on them and stabbing them before they even started getting up.

I make Special K bars for get-togethers every once in awhile, and I sometimes get people who ask me if they’re healthy. I always tell them that nothing in them is even the slightest bit healthy except the Special K itself, and even that’s debatable.

I think they’re talking about “justified” madness. Realistic madness is just seeing things that aren’t there, or reacting extremely to mundane stimuli, but if you had somehow been given comprehension of some higher truth about the world that nobody else would ever believe, the actions you take as a result of that knowledge might seem crazy to those around you, even if they’re perfectly logical from your enlightened perspective.