https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/21/europe/suspect-germany-christmas-market-attack/index.html

Relevant part of the article: “In a now deleted feed on X apparently belonging to Taleb A., he made anti-Islam statements and self-identified as a Saudi dissident. He spoke openly about renouncing his Islamic faith, expressed sympathy for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and accused Germany of promoting the Islamization of the country.”

No, a bigot who followed Afd, Elon Musk, and other racists and spouted a bunch of Islamophobic BS on Twitter and other social media, according to all reliable reporting.

Great! When can I get one installed?

Semi-serious here. I have the absolute worst sense of direction and would be thrilled if I could get an update to fix it lol.

My husband deals with that, and one thing that has helped him quite a bit is setting alarms. If he knows he is taking on an extended task, he will set an alarm on his phone for every hour or so. When it goes off, it distracts him from whatever he was doing and interrupts anything he is watching, so he is reminded to get back on task.

Another tool is accountability to another person. If he is having a bad focus day, he will sometimes ask me to bug him if I notice he is distracted for too long. Use this sparingly. I have been this person for a few people with ADHD, and using this too often has resulted in me being responded to like a parent asking their kid to stop playing games and eat their dinner. You don’t want to end up viewing your friends and partners as though they are an authority figure.

That’s amazing! Yeah, stuff like that varies by location. I am glad they have been able to help you with that.

Their pharmacy has been hit and miss for me, and I ultimately had to stop going there because they allowed their pharmacists to refuse to fill a script if they had a “moral objection”. This resulted in my usual location having their pharmacist refuse to fill my HRT script. That was years ago though, so they may have changed that?

At a local-ish chain called Tops, mostly. I live in Upstate New York if anyone wants to look them up. Pretty standard grocery with decent daily prices, and they still run weekly deals and coupons in the paper like most places used to do about 20 years ago. Even with my dietary restrictions, I can get most of my groceries there for a decent price.

Anything I don’t get there, I get at the other local brand called Wegmans. They are pricey, but have more specialty food, partnerships with local farms for really good seasonal produce, and some items that they have made for their own name-brand that are cheaper than the big name alternative.

I also make it a point to stop at farmers markets and the like throughout the year. Most of them have partnered with programs that allow you to use, and even double, your food stamps/EBT (I don’t use it but give rides to friends who do), and getting to connect with the local farmers is always nice.

As a trans man who is active in kink circles, this is one thing that I am constantly advocating for. The good news is that, as far as I can tell, men are more likely to listen and at least attempt to understand and embrace this than they have been in the past. Even compared to just a decade ago, more men are willing to investigate what they are attracted to in other people, regardless of gender, and much more appreciative of compliments from other men.

Thank you for sharing this. I will definitely be going through the other videos, and recommending this to others.

Thankfully it won’t, but I had to deal with more of their shenanigans.

Did you know that they refuse to transfer a prescription if they haven’t filled it at least once? I had to call the urgent care clinic back and have them transfer it instead.

Bless the retail pharmacy worker who walked me through how to get everything in order and got me discount coupons. It took them 30 minutes to fill and cost me a total of $15. So I will be okay, but in spite of Express Scripts, who gave me an ETA of the 17th, more than a week after the script was ordered.

I am sitting here, in incredible pain from a combined sinus and ear infection, waiting for the antibiotics I need to be shipped to me in 3-5 business days because my insurance will only provide prescription coverage through Express Scripts and not a retail pharmacy.

This same insurance company has also denied to cover a surgery they have prior auth for, denied coverage for routine lab work that is expressly covered, waited months to review disputed charges and gotten them sent to collections, and forced me into a lower tier of coverage twice due to premium increases.

The kicker? I work in the health insurance industry. But I’m not an exec, just a support worker.

They can try to stop the online support all they want, but they should know that the active censorship will only cause people to go elsewhere. This issue is uniting everyone who watches the evening news, and they can’t risk not covering the story because they are hoping to make an example of him.

This puts a lot of blame on trans men while simultaneously perpetuating the erasure we are constantly facing.

I am a trans masc enby, but I have been on full dose testosterone for a decade, have had top surgery and a full hysterectomy. I am still routinely misgendered because T did not lower my voice enough to pass and I do not have enough facial hair, so people assume I am a woman with a hormone difference. This misgendering happens in person and over the phone, and my experience in this is fairly common among trans men.

On top of that, any attempt we make to be more visible is often silenced because we are accused of taking space away from trans women. People will say ‘trans people’ and then talk about an experience that is pretty exclusive to trans women, and if we point it out, we are told to enjoy our male privilege and shut up. When we tried to put more focus on a trans man in sports who is being ostracized in a similar way (see Mack Briggs, who was forced to compete on the girls teams), then we are told that it “isn’t the same” as what trans women face, and that we should be grateful for the fact that his plight isn’t getting attention.

We face the exact same kinds of issues that trans women face, but with almost none of the support. We have to fight to even be seen in most trans friendly spaces, which usually end up being more akin to “women and femme” spaces where masculine trans people are told that we aren’t welcome because we make people uncomfortable. Then, when we try to make our own spaces, we are accused of excluding trans women and being misogynists.

All that to say: stop blaming trans men for the abuses that cis people perpetuate. We have our own struggles, and while we stand with the rest of the trans community, it is not our job to put ourself in more harm’s way to benefit others. We are here, we have always been here, and we would really appreciate people recognizing that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows for us, and that we face just as many issues with a fraction of the support.

Thank you! We are on the opposite coast, but we are working with ministers like yourself to make sure we have plenty of options for people to choose from. Best of luck over the next years, and here’s to many more happy weddings!

My husband and I did this after the Dobbs decision came down and cited ‘future reconsiderations’ for Casey and Obergefell. Called a handful of friends and family and told them to meet us at the courthouse in two weeks.

Now, we are bracing to help people who may have to travel to our blue state to get married, just like they had to 15-ish years ago. We may not be able to leave, but we have some means to help others, so we are doing what we can.

As a NY resident, her ‘political concerns’ are getting in the way of her doing anything useful and instead have her focusing on assetting her power over normal working people.

She pushed for an end to remote work and forcing return to office in 2021, ended the eviction moratorium in 2022, she agreed to a deal to let the taxpayers foot the bill for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills in 2022, significantly delayed signing the Digital Fair Repair Act and kneecapped it by adding an amendment that allowed manufacturers to supply repair services instead of being forced to sell replacement parts, appointed a conservative (LaSalle) to the NY Court of Appeals, vetoed legislation to ban non-compete agreements, said that Israel had a right to “destroy Gaza”, deployed the National Guard to crack down on “criminals” using the NYC subway, and proposed banning facemasks on the subway in response to protests.

Cuomo needed to go, but we need someone much better than her if we want someone to actually stand up against Trump.

I agree with the other poster, but wanted to share what I did in a similar situation.

I woke up one day with a rash on my hip. Over the next three days it spread to my whole body, I started getting swelling in my hands, feet, and face, and I was in an incredible amount of pain. This was in the middle of shutdown for Covid, so I couldn’t just go to my doctor. Eventually I went to an urgent care after my husband insisted and drove me to four different locations to find one that had room. They diagnosed me with an allergic reaction and gave me IV Benadryl and light pain meds.

After confirming I hadn’t eated anything new recently, the nurses there suggested I check my meds to see if I had any allergies there. I hadn’t technically been on any ‘new’ meds, so I looked them all up online to review the interactions and warnings myself. Turns out one of the meds I was on had a rare, but not unheard of, effect of a patient having a delayed allergic reaction. I made sure none of my other meds had the same thing and called my doctor to reference that specific section of the drug overview. They checked on their end and agreed and told me to stop the med immediately since it was safer to do than risking further reaction.

I would suggest doing a bit of research on those and, if you go with an elimination method, check which ones can cause dangerous complications if stopped immediately.

My parents had kicked me out for unrelated reasons (I was a nerd and my mom was a believer in borderline Satanic Panic BS) and my extended family had welcomed me back because my parents were generally assholes to everyone and had been told they were no longer welcome at family get-togethers. When I rejoined that extended family, they told me all about how they couldn’t imagine kicking anyone out a kid simply for being honest about how they want to live their life.

So when I came out to them a few years later, they realized that they couldn’t really say anything about it because it would make them the same as my parents. Most of my aunts have come around, and even my grandad was happy to call me his grandson before he passed away. The main holdouts are my uncles and the one aunt who is a strict Catholic despite being divorced herself. But if I weren’t to be invited, it would be a big issue with enough family members that they always ask.

Thankfully I am not entirely alone, as my one cousin got gay married last year as well, so now we joke about being the rainbow sheep of the family lol.

Because that way people have an excuse to attack trans people. They can cite ‘fear of assault’ and in many cases not even be arrested.

The concept of trans men being forced to use the ladies room isn’t a gotcha. It is a plot to enforce gender conformity. Ask any butch lesbian how they treat people who look too masculine if they enter the ladies room, and understand that they want that to happen to anyone who doesn’t conform.

The traditional way this was phrased was “bleeding heart liberal”. The implication being that they were so giving as to be gullible and not realistic.

Nowadays the preferred insults are “commie” or “woke”. I don’t hear it directed at me much, due to particular family circumstances that forced them to accept my gay-married trans ass, but boy do I hear it about Democrats every year.

(I know that Dems aren’t commie or even ‘woke’ most of the time, but to them it is a distinction without a difference. To them, those terms refer to anyone who thinks that people don’t deserve to die for the ‘crime’ of being homeless.)

Anything that was a major thing in your life, good or bad, can be missed in some way once it is gone. The trick is to remember that quite a bit of that feeling is missing the predictably of daily life, not necessarily missing the thing itself.

I was also kicked out, though it was during my college years, and there are still times I find myself missing my parents, even almost 10 years later. The feeling isn’t as strong, and it is mostly just me lamenting the fact that I will not have a lot of experiences most people consider universal, such as having family to visit for holidays, or having someone to talk to no matter what you have going on in your life.

It is a bit like grief. The parents you thought you had are gone, even if they are physically living, and you had no choice in the matter. The feeling will come and go, it will change over time. But it will get easier.