Have you ever speculated as to why you get banned so often?

Right now, a little bit of Low Orbit.

I use so-called “eternal pencils” now. They come in various “hardness” ratings (like pencils: B, HB, H, 2H, etc.) but even my “softest” (read: darkest with broadest tip) has been in use now for a couple of years without noticeable wear on the tip. That one is guaranteed to be usable for a decade. My hardest will likely stop working when the sun dies in four billion years or so.

I’ve tried them. I still prefer the compressed ones, but they’re pretty good, yes.

I have lived in small towns (smallest: about 3000 population) and in big cities (largest: about 14,000,000 population). I have family who live so rustically that even a small town is an hour’s drive away.

I like all three situations for different reasons, albeit for the rustic life only in short bursts of two months or so.

Overall I’d say I’m a “city girl”, but if I have a decent Internet connection I probably would enjoy small town life more since I’m aging and slowing down. There would be some adjustment, of course, to not being near hot spots and good restaurants and such, but it would also give me the peace and quiet to actually catch up on reading the books I’ve accumulated over the years and getting practice time in on the instruments I want to learn.

So you’re only missing out if you really want those things. But don’t think that you’re going to have more time to do things in the city. As plenty of others have pointed out, the realities of traffic in most cities are such that you’ll face long transit times anyway, although if you live in a place that has actual public transit that gets mitigated quite a bit; I can cross the megacity I live in now from extreme ends in just over an hour; most of the places I want to go I can be at in under 15 minutes, the majority of these being even in walking distance.

Cousin. Did I typo that?

Yes. At work, for example, I make a cup in the morning about 10AM and then keep refilling and drinking until about an hour before quitting time.

I get it straight from a collective representing the farmers in Liubao. There are some Internet vendors who sell it, though, so you don’t have to move to China. I can’t vouch for any of them though since, well, I don’t use their services.

You don’t. You finish your cup, you put the leaves back in, you pour hot water over top.

I cycle among these four randomly:

I don’t know. This one looks a bit sticky!

Park Alpine Dry Gin

Converting $20 to local currency, I’d probably go with this:

This is so-called “Liubao Tea”, a kissing cousin to pu’er tea. I did a review of my first batch(es) and it has rapidly (literally with one round of brews) reached the top of my circulation in teas.

The depicted tea is one aged from 1991 (the one I reviewed was tea stems from 2003) and is of one of the higher grades. A 100g package will set you back about $15 or so at today’s exchange rate. 100g is about 15-20 servings, and each serving can be brewed multiple times (even my tea stems can be brewed four times without loss of flavour), so it’s quite the bargain.

Save it for a time when you really need something warm, rich, and comforting. It will last forever as long as you store it in a cool, dry, dark space. And personally I think it’s a bargain at 15 bucks.

Now imagine this:

I lived in Inuvik for three years (Dad was stationed there). For three consecutive winters I lived 30 days of night. You think you get SAD “down south”? You ain’t seen nothin’ 'til you’ve faced a whole month of nothing but twilight conditions or darker.

Which brings us to my first Sunrise Festival.

This is the most memorable sun-related event in my life, displacing even the total solar eclipse I experienced in Wuhan a few years back. For 30 days there was no sun. Further, for 15 days the “twilight” portions of the day got darker and darker until it was basically nothing but night. Then, for 15 days, in the depths of SAD you’ve never felt the like of, it got brighter and brighter at the high parts of the day.

Until the day of the Sunrise Festival.

This is the day that basically all work stops as close to noon we gathered out in the streets and playgrounds (in my case) and such to watch the sky. Watch the twilight get brighter and brighter and brighter. Until suddenly the sun peeks for a few minutes above the horizon, blood red, staining the sky, only to dip quickly back down.

Sure we’ve got another month of really, incredibly short days before we face something similar to normalcy, but it’s all good. It only gets lighter from here.

The sun is back in town.

Indeed the “ten commandments” are something that was grafted on afterward. There is no list of ten specific things in the Bible held out as more important than anything else. Indeed in Jewish thought (you know, the people Moses was a part of!), there are over 600 commandments in the Bible, all of which are applicable. There’s no ten specific ones that are somehow exceptionally important.

Even if you just want to ignore all Jewish tradition and scholarship, which “commandments” do you want? Those of Exodus 20:2-17 or those of Deuteronomy 5:6-21? You need both to make up all the “ten”, and there is overlap between the two lists, but there are also some significant differences and changes. So you can’t rely on just one of them to make up your “ten”. But nor can you really put them together without papering over the fact that they say different things.

And your second point has bugged me since I was a child. I knew some very good people who studiously studied the Bible in my youth. I also knew some very bad people who did the same.

But I also knew some very good and very bad Buddhists.

And Muslims.

And atheists. (But not Atheists. Those are all basically bad people.)

And …

You get the drift. I couldn’t reconcile the Bible being the source of all that is good with the bad Bible-readers or the good believers in other things. It’s why I’m an atheist (but not an Atheist).

This is called “no true Scotsman”.

I think the best response comes from the Bible itself.

These people are the fruit of Christianity’s seeds: “…Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Yeah, welcome to my world.

And it’s not just with the loud fundamentalists who hold these attitudes. I completely cut off a friend of almost 20 years who seemed to be one of those “sane” and “quiet” Christians when, in a period of mild intoxication, he let spill everything he actually believed.

He believed women should stay at home keeping house and raising children. Women should not have careers or aspirations beyond that. He believed that all of his friends were going to Hell to be tortured for eternity. (He was fine with this. Absolutely copacetic.) He believed that victims of natural disaster and of crime deserved it because obviously God was doing this to them for a reason.

And that’s when I realized that even the “quiet” and “non-extreme” Christians can have horrors concealed beneath their placid exteriors. So now I give very large side-eye when people think their Christianity is so important to their life that they have to bring it up at all in circles where it’s not relevant.

Oh, no muttering here. I go full-on announcer voiceover mode when I’m alone. And sometimes people show up while I’m doing it and I don’t notice so they get it full blast.

I narrate what I’m doing in a voiceover.

Huh. Interesting. This makes our family joke even funnier, IMO.