I found out my mom had spent three decades of my life lying about who my biological father was.

She has always spun some romantic bullshit story about a specific guy. Like I’m talking there was a whole ass story of her life leading up to my conception that she liked to tell me. A pretty fucked up story - she was a teenager, this guy was in his early twenties. But still, a mostly normal and consensual story barring the statuary aspect, not at all shocking where we live. He knocks her up, chickens out immediately, dumps her, etc. There was even a cathartic story about her being a then abandoned pregnant Sonic carhop, discovering the guy as a customer and throwing fries at his face. She describes my eyes and hair as his.

I reach out to the guy as a teenager with help from family, who keep track of this guy throughout the years in case I’d want to ever make connection. I reach out, he denies that he’s my father. Well, sucks, but nothing too unexpected.

As a lark, I get genetics testing kit one year. It’s on Amazon prime (back when that was a good deal and back before I realized how problematic that giving my DNA to a random company.)

I take the test. A woman reaches out. My aunt. And she’s not the sister of my “father.”

My biological father was a different adult man (mid twenties) who raped a teenager he met at a party. Even told me to my face that he hadn’t been interested in her, but more in her older sister.

When I confronted her with this. It was a non reaction. It was “oh.” She’s told so many lies throughout her life, but this was finally the one she couldn’t bullshit her way out of. She lied to me for thirty years, and unlike any other lie she’s told, there‘s no “oh you’re just remembering it differently” or “I didn’t really mean that.”

The most difficult thing is that maybe it was traumatic for her. Maybe it was violent. I’ve met him twice, and neither experience was really pleasant. He has a history. Maybe she did block it out, repress it in that Freudian way and did convince herself that some guy she had a crush on and her had some secret little tryst. Realizing maybe the hell of my childhood had an explanation - that she was trying to punish me, that she hated me as a symbol of rape. Can I forgive her for that?

It’s just such a complicated and difficult thing to wrap my head around. Nothing about her as a person has ever made any sense.

How do you make the cheaper brown ones not super bitter?

I see the same quote in other articles

Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense.

Gay marriage is legal in every state since 2015. Supreme Court ordered it with Obergefell v Hodges

They changed their genre classification tags behind the scenes in 2023, around the time they fired the guy who ran “Every Noise at Once” and ruined almost all value the service had.

The documentary Marjoe is a really good exploration of this. Former child preacher who stopped believing, and invites a documentary crew as he does a tour.

It’s in the public domain - they forget to register it, so you should be able to find the full movie online.

Conservatives saw how successful the Disney boycott was, and want to have an equivalent threat.

So is him running for a third term, but his office is filled with “Trump 2028” hats.

Forcing those military generals to sit through a campaign speech showed that the Hatch Act is basically dead.

“Ledasha” is an urban legend. (with a nasty snack of racism)

Why choose that stuff to follow but ignore the mixed cloth and tattoo parts?

The mixed cloth and tattoo parts are from the Old Testament, which many Christians believe was superseded by the sacrifice of Christ. A new covenant - Abraham didn’t sacrifice Isaac, but God sacrificed his son. No longer a need to sacrifice in the temple, no longer a need to follow dietary laws.

There’s nothing in the text of the Bible that justifies a “pro life” position. The only part that mentions abortion is an Old Testament verse about forcing a woman who is suspected of cheating to drink something that will cause an abortion.

The language used by Paul in the New Testament about gay men is ambiguous and could easily be interpreted to only prohibit pedophilic sex.

Several of “Paul’s” letters in the New Testament are known forgeries. It’s very easy to “pick and choose” to reject those. One could even reject Paul entirely.

It’s a text written in multiple different ancient languages. It’s not cut and dry always that “the Bible says this.” (Same with other ancient texts - most translations of the I Ching are absolutely bonkers in how they look nothing alike.)

Even if someone would want to call themselves a “literalist,” there’s clearly poetry and figurative language. I don’t think anyone has baby dear for mammaries.

You cannot flatten Christianity like this. The fundamentalist interpretation/“Biblical literalist” interpretation is really a product of the 19th century (as is fundamentalist Islam - these are both tied to more widespread literacy in the world). It’s not one coherent ideology you can throw r/atheism logical “gotchas!” at.

A lot of shit that is part of mainstream Christianity isn’t even biblical. The Satan and hell most imagine is more from Milton and Dante than it is from the text of the Bible.

Religions aren’t their texts - even the ones that purport to be. They’re centuries of folk traditions and interpretations stacked on those ambiguous texts.

If you hold a single text to be the very word of your god

Which not all Christians do. There are many who believe to be the words of human beings, just divinely inspired or significant.

A 2018 report from the Indiana Maurer University School of Law, along with a subsequent report in the UCLA Journal of Gender and Law, found that, based on accounts of former inmates, it was common for trans women placed in men’s prisons to be assigned to cells with aggressive cisgender male cellmates to maintain social control and to, as one inmate described it, “keep the violence rate down”. Trans women used in this manner are often raped daily. This process is known as “V-coding”, and has been described as so common that it is effectively “a central part of a trans woman’s sentence”.

Med schools should accept more than 2% of applicants.

The problem is a lack of residencies, and there’s been lobbying to keep the number of residencies low, to keep doctor wages high.

(The yellow stitches are basting stitches, meant to hold the hexagons to the paper and will eventually be removed)

I paid about $2 for this stack of 10 t-shirts. (Avoid goodwill, go to the mom and pop places). None of these shirts were ever going to be used again. No one wants the t-shirt of a random church or police department, or a stained white t-shirt, or a high school football team.

Instead of buying fabric - buying something new which would encourage a retailer to buy something to replace it - I am repurposing these shirts into yarn (which I knit into rugs), patches for other clothing (which would otherwise need to be thrown away), reusable bags, or scrap quilts (which will mean that I can keep my thermostat lower in the winter).

These shirts are the kinds of things that would otherwise end up as textile waste, a pile of useless clothing in Ghana. “Reuse” in the second R in importance in “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

I think also that the ability to repair clothes instead of throwing them away is a huge part of the equation. I had an ex that would throw clothes away for missing a button. That is not particularly uncommon.

You can cut decals out of t-shirts and use them for appliqué!

There are, but if you get the little plastic thing of assorted needles you’ll be fine. Maybe $1 from Walmart.

I’d grab black cotton thread to start out with (“mercerized” is going to be the better stuff). For mending, it’s usually either about hiding your stitches so they aren’t seen at all, and it doesn’t matter, or picking something that matches what you’re fixing.

The thread that comes with kits is usually crappy polyester that will break if you look at it funny - it’s only really useful for “basting” (sewing something together temporarily to hold it in place while you do the more permanent sewing.) The other things in kits (pins, seam rippers, tiny scissors) are usually okay though.

Fixing buttons is a good project to practice on IMHO. Lots of clothes hide an extra button somewhere on a tag inside, but you can also get a nice plastic jar of mixed buttons at the dollar store usually.

Really, don’t overthink it. Even ugly stitches will hold stuff together if you put enough of them on.

Turning the gusset is actual witchcraft. I’ve made a cardigan, but never a sock.

A good trick is to thrift “by touch” - feeling for cotton or heavier materials. There are a lot of quality cotton XXL blood drive/college or work event t-shirts that no one will ever want. I’ve volunteered doing some sorting through donations for a homeless shelter before, and they weren’t lacking for those at all. It was more a lack of dress pants for job interviews that were needed.

Resellers are usually going for names and not necessarily quality from what I’ve noticed.

988 = 911