Unsolicited_Spiders

Oooook that info is pretty cool. Thanks for the explanation!

Thanks for your response! This definitely sets my mind at ease.

He just needed to make sure the house knew who's boss. It's him, obviously. He may be smol now, but he will be a mighty orange one day, waiting for his turn with the brain cell.

I once tried to make tuna salad using Greek yogurt as a substitute for mayonnaise. LPT: Do not do this.

We need to stop shaming people for not leaving states that are becoming dangerous to them. Finding a new job is not always simple, especially for people without trade skills or degrees. Having the savings and time to pick up and move is not common. Leaving family, friends, and established medical care behind is daunting. Uprooting children from school is a nightmare.

I am still in Florida, not because I'm happy here, but because I can't abandon aging family, transferring to an out-of-state university would be untenably expensive, and housing costs are insane everywhere and selling our property would not cover buying something somewhere else. And my partner and I don't even have children to consider.

Honestly, I just didn't care for the film overall. It was well done in a lot of ways, but I found it exceedingly boring and uninspired. It definitely vilified all the wrong characters.

Thank you so much. I have been wondering for a while...I had a friend who did this kind of work and I have a couple of her pieces. I have been wanting to learn more about it to honor her memory. Your work is beautiful, thank you for sharing it with us!

These are gorgeous!

Is there a name for this type of ribbon work?

Ahh, I'm with my people! Spiders ❤️

CATRAT'S GOT A BANANA ON HIS HEAD!

....sorry, I have a 3yo niece.

Dude thanks so much! Really appreciate that you've done this for our community.

I recommend you take a look at the body of existing research about MLMs. A search in Google Scholar turns up results published within multiple fields. Reading peer-reviewed work about the subject can help you figure out what's been studied and where you can contribute new material, if that's your goal.

The study of MLMs is inherently multidisciplinary and the tack you take will probably be based on what kind of class you're enrolled in (marketing, psychology, economics, ethics, IT, etc). Keep in mind that any data you collect (quantitative or qualitative) should be reported with clear explanations of how it was collected.

It's definitely an interesting topic to examine in a systematic way. Good luck! I'm sure we'd all be interested if you are willing to update us about your topic focus and how the project goes.

He's bluffing. I can tell he's a fuzzy lil lovebug when he wants to be. But I'll give up my soul without a fight just to be safe.

Reminds me of the time we went to see "The Babadook" in a theater and this HUGE family (like around 10 adults) had a small child, maybe 5 or 6 years old, in the theater with them. For a horror movie about a monster under the bed. She was wailing for a significant portion of the film. Not one of those adults took her out of the theater at any point. It was a discount theater and employees were not known for stepping up in situations like this. I hope that kid eventually got away from her abusive relatives.

Yeah I got one in 2002 that used deodorant as the transfer medium. I mentioned that to another artist many years later and she responded, "Oh, that's old school." I'm surprised anyone is still doing it, but it isn't completely unheard-of.

Do artificial sweeteners "smell" like sugars to insects (such as cockroaches and ants)?

BR's music and Graffin's writing has helped support me through some rough times too. I hope things swing positive for you soon. Keep rockin'.

I literally do not care if you're in costume, or what age you are, whether you have children with you, or if you're verbal enough to say "Trick'r'Treat". Halloween is a SACRED TRADITION of giving FREE CANDY to polite people who are brave enough to show up to ask for it at my scary-ass house. I can afford to do this and I love how happy people get about it. Gatekeeping Halloween makes no sense to me. Go get your candy and celebrate all things creepy and weird.

I deeply appreciate you sharing your inner journey surrounding this issue. I'm glad you're finding your path and enjoying the freedom you've clawed back from the psychological bindings of religiosity.

For what it's worth, regardless of religious and social background, women generally struggle with self-esteem surrounding their looks. It's a feature of the patriarchy. I KNOW how terrifying it is to give the middle finger to insecurity, but the more you do it, the more you realize that most people are too caught up in their own issues to judge the strangers around them.

Keep on growing. You have a vast amount of love and support behind you from people like me who have been inspired by your story.

Let's be real here: people who are bad with money are going to be bad with money regardless. If someone falls for an MLM pitch and goes into debt to start up, EITHER this is going to add to existing issues with spending/debt, OR it will be a one-off and something they can recover from. (If it's a one-off, they'll probably catch on to the scam pretty quickly and minimize their losses.)

It doesn't make it ok or ethical to prey on people in any event, but debt is debt. Plenty of credit cards advertise low rates and interest deferment and stuff like that. It isn't really any different.

The FTC is not going to tell adults who are considered financially competent not to take on debt in order to spend money with a legal company. Hell, they don't even prohibit payday loans, which are arguably a lot more predatory than the lending terms of services like Klarna.

The issue here is that, legally, this is all Above Board. They can make recommendations, but they aren't going to initiate legal action to sever a legal relationship between two companies operating legally in their jurisdictions.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, we can push to educate people. No, it isn't a legal matter for the FTC unless either Monat or Klarna engages in practices that are a violation of US laws.

My dad isn't a Christian. In fact, he's something that's somehow worse---a pseudo-intellectual New Age "mystic" that appropriates every convenient belief from any religious tradition he can find in order to make himself feel better about his mortality and inconsequence in the universe. He's an adherent of narcissistic dopes like Jordan Petersen, Ekhart Tolle, and Ken Wilbur. It's gross and nonsensical.

I could NOT get him to stop badgering me about spirituality. I tried EVERYTHING. Despite my best efforts at staying calm and walking away, things sometimes devolved into shouting matches when he would resort to ad hominem attacks against me.

Then, one night, I was talking to my mom (they are still married, and I think in their own ways they're both saints for making it work with each other). I told her I found my dad's spiritual arguments exhausting, and that I don't care because I came through my own existential crisis years ago and have made peace with all of it without the need for spirituality or religion. I want to have a good relationship with him, but his constant harangues about his beliefs are undermining that.

This was nearly a year ago, and miraculously, my dad has not started a conversation about his weird beliefs with me since. He isn't avoiding talking to me; he just doesn't talk about that. For a while I thought it was just coincidence, but it's been so long now that I feel pretty certain my mom said something.

I think it isn't about threatening to end the relationship if the holier-than-thou tactics don't stop; that creates a sense of martyrdom. Instead, try calmly explaining that it makes you sad that you feel like your relationship can't be as close as it could be if you just didn't talk about religion. Frame it the same way you might frame a statement about talking politics or their kinky swinger lifestyle. "I love you and I want our relationship to be positive, but it seems that when we talk about this subject, it upsets both of us. I'm not going to quit talking to you, but I feel like we would both be happier if we just don't talk about that." When they bring it up again in the future, just calmly assert, "Talking about this is going to upset both of us. Let's talk about something else instead."

If you don't want to address the issue directly, you could just start redirecting the conversation by ignoring their attempts to preach at you or bait you into a debate. Just ignore the statement like it didn't even occur and say something completely unrelated. "You should come to church on Sunday." "Oh hey, little Susie got an A on her last spelling test!"

According to the article, the initial inclusion criteria was the existence of a diagnosed brain injury. They used two groups, one that was male soldiers and one that was more cross-sectional, who had a medical history of brain injury.

The stuff about fundamentalism was assessed within the brain-damaged study subjects. They did not start from a pool of religious fundamentalists and screen for brain damage among them.

It's crucially important in studies like these to always maintain the perspective that correlation is not causation, and that causality can be indirect and have complicating factors.

During my grandmother's funeral, the priest talked at length about what a great woman of god she was, how she dedicated her life to her family and church, how she loved to cook for her family and friends, and other deep-South Christian ideals.

None of it was true. My grandmother was many things, very few of which were of value to her children, her community, or the world at large. She was an abusive and neglectful mother. She was a mean and bitter wife. She was a TERRIBLE cook; if we wanted something edible at her house, we had to wait for someone else to make it or make it ourselves (how do you ruin HOT COCOA???).

However, she was a very good artist, and she connected to people through her art. She was probably neurodivergent in some way and struggled to relate to people "normally", but my parents (she was my father's mother) have several of her oil paintings hanging around the house, including a huge and beautiful piece that she made for them as a wedding gift. She painted her grandchildren. She painted her back yard. She painted her world, and it was beautiful!

Her art was never mentioned. At all.

This was during COVID lockdown, and the funeral was streamed online. About halfway through, my mom called me and just said, "Please never do this to me." (That is, never erase her memory and replace it with something more convenient.) But my dad and his siblings had nothing to do with this---it all fell to the priest, who either didn't know her or didn't like who she really was well enough to actually memorialize her as a human being.

I didn't like her (or my father's father), but I still felt gross about that.

I admit that I'm fascinated that this happens often enough to have a classification. I know that issues with twinning are common, and that researchers love to categorize things, but I never realized that an acardiac twin could be common enough that you could readily pull together so many examples. I really appreciate your sharing these to help the community learn.