Kaymyth

You're welcome. One of the hardest things for people to wrap their heads around is the idea that other people, even close family members, think in different ways than they do. The next hardest thing is understanding that neither way is wrong, just different. Once you can bridge that divide, the rest is just communication.

Hmm. It's meant as an acknowledgement that your brain doesn't necessarily work like your parents'. Play around with the phrasing; it ought to be your own words anyway. But logical vs emotional reactions doesn't mean that one is better than the other, it just means that not everybody's brains work alike. You do this thing, while your parents do this other thing, and the misunderstandings can create wacky sitcom hijinks. I have a dear friend who is autistic. High-functioning to the point where most people don't realize it until she tells them, but her thought processes are very, very different than the average neurotypical person. She cannot read or predict emotional reactions in general; she has to learn and memorize the general mindworkings of every individual she knows on an individual basis. Since she was our housemate for a while, I spent a good deal of time translating other peoples' reactions and words into formats that she could process. I got awfully good at taking emotional things and feeding them properly through her logic circuits in the right way for her to understand what the rusted tarnation was going on.

I speak from experience; writing a letter as a teenager to parental figures about an issue trying to explain things just backfires in the worst way. I think your best bet would be to phrase it as an apology. I know it sucks, but it becomes a matter of acknowledging and accepting the teen/parent power dynamic and your current level in the hierarchy. Something like, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you, and I genuinely wasn't trying to be disrespectful. It's just that I really get into a debate mode, and when that happens my brain gets replaced with Mr. Spock's. I go all logical and forget that other people have emotional reactions to arguments." So, apology, explanation, and admission of failing while specifying that said failing wasn't necessarily what they took it to be.

My advice? Don't give it to them. At all. It will not have the effect that you want it to; all it will do is make them more determined that you are being disrespectful. I know that you're trying to come at this from a rational point of view, but when you're a T dealing with an F, all you're going to do is make emotions run higher. This advice brought to you by your friendly neighborhood INFP who spends waaaaay too much time thinking about how other people think.

I'm one of the older guard - 37, married, no kids, but managing this whole adulting thing pretty well, all things considered. I mean, my life is kind of weird; I have an elementary education degree, and I work for a bank in merchant support. You'd be surprised how often training dedicated to helping you handle small children translates over to a customer service support role. (Or, if you've worked in customer service, you probably wouldn't be surprised at all.) I was pretty directionless when I was college-aged. I was still suffering from the bitter disappointment of my childhood, which was finally getting old enough to understand that Starfleet Academy wasn't real. I wanted to be a starship captain, and couldn't figure out what else would be as good. So I bounced around from physics to music and eventually to teaching, and wound up working in a completely different industry than any of it. That's the way life goes sometimes. Aheeheeheeheehee! Stop feeling old. I graduated high school a full decade before you did. AND I AM STILL YOUNG, DAGNABBIT

It does kind of make me wonder how they survived during the Final Empire era. TLR made those genetic changes so that humanity could live in the new conditions after he screwed up changed Scadrial's orbit to burn away the Deepness. Those folks down south must have been resourceful.

For the record, I totally feel like Rainbow Dash egging on Fluttershy here...

Well, this seems as good a time as any to introduce a pony avatar. Been meaning to do it for a while. Really, a lot of folks already said a lot of gloriously eloquent stuff. I'll simply append that in addition to all of that good stuff, I find MLP to be a surprisingly subtle show. Some older cartoons had the adult jokes sail straight over the kids' head and smack the parents right between the eyes. MLP takes more of a tack of sneaking them in on the sly. You can find them, but you have to be paying attention, and you'll often find that other people catch references that sneak right on by you the first time. I enjoy the goofy humor, I appreciate the pony ethics tack, and I really do like keeping an eye out for another incarnation of the Doctor snuck in as Doctor Whooves. We've had at least 1, 3, 4, and 10 so far. Eleven is right there with you:

Right! Being judged as awesome.

But solos? Why are solos "but"? Solos are the BEST. Why no oboe players aren't all natural divas, why do you ask? *innocent whistling*

Heh. It's not even a favorite. But I did watch it religiously as a child in the '80s. Honestly, mostly I'm bitter because the drek they're churning out with this thing is not worthy of cosplay. I had the perfect wig.....

I submit to the board a complaint. It is a rather superficial complaint, but one that I feel must be addressed. *ahem* I just watched the new Jem and the Holograms trailer. What...what is this? Where is the crazy sci-fi holographic technology? Where is the evil glam rock band that is rivals with the good glam rock band? Where are the crimefighting shenanigans that result from said rivalry? Where is the AI that projects the holograms? WHY ISN'T JEM'S HAIR PINK?! In short, what did I just watch? Because that sure as rust WASN'T Jem and the Holograms. why must they ruin my childhood why why why EDIT: Okay, it's sometimes pink. But it should be pinker. And always pink, with no blonde ever mixed in. Jem is supposed to be a secret superhero identity, people. Also, my husband is laughing at me now.

And speaking from a musicological point of view, sometimes the difference between Discord and Harmony is shifting a single note in the chord up or down a half-step. Taking that metaphor, it only took a small change in Sazed to shift from being discordant within himself to at peace.

You're quite right. It wouldn't have done us a lick of good while we were wrestling with the Stupidly Huge Box . But, A ) It's the (funny) principle of the thing. B ) My husband and I have a long-running joke that remembering to take an umbrella will, in fact, prevent it from raining. I believe that this might even be a corollary of Murphy's Law: if you forget an umbrella, it is guaranteed to rain. We have now updated that corollary to say that having an umbrella along only provides a rain prevention effect if you know it's there. And fortunately, while we were indeed thoroughly soaked to the skin, it wasn't actually that cold. I went inside, changed into dry clothes, and promptly had an ice cream bar.

Alright, children, gather 'round. Auntie Kaymyth is going to tell you a story! So, as a little bit of background, my husband and I just moved. Many of you know this already. We also live in the American Midwest, and for those of you not familiar with the region's weather, it is spring. Spring brings lots and lots of storms. Luckily, I love storms, and am not particularly bothered by living in Tornado Alley. (Hey, that's what basements are for.) I purchased a new shed structure from the Home Despot in order to house things like our lawnmower; I ordered online and got the Deliver to Store option. We had a few other things we needed to pick up for the new house, so we headed out to get dinner, some stuff for the dog, and make the Home Depot run. We currently have my parents-in-law's pickup truck, which is fortunate, because there was no way in the nine hells that the shed-thing was going to cram into either of our cars. So we note as we head out that it is looking quite cloudy. We get a little way down the road and go, "Oh, we didn't bring an umbrella! Haha, that means it's going to rain on us. Darnit." When we come out of dinner, it has indeed begun to rain. But hey, it's not raining that hard. It continues at light rain level as we go to the pet store and get food for the fluffy dachshund creature. So, not bad. Quite refreshing, really. And then we get to the Despot. I'm sure you think you can see where this is going. Trust me, it's worse. Or better, if you're looking at it from a storytelling perspective. So, we do our shopping, and then go to the counter to pick up the shed. The guy wheels it out on a dolly. Even disassembled and packaged, it's a rather impressively-sized box. Naturally, there is no employee offer to help us load it into our vehicle, so we push it on out there ourselves. The rain has, at this point, picked up in enthusiasm. Not a downpour, but definitely a steady rain. So we open up the pickup bed cover, and lo, we discover that we had forgotten to unload the stepping stones that we had transported from old house to new. Oops. Well, this makes things interesting. So we move them from being stacked and in the way to being flatter and still kind of in the way, but less so. A kind bystander happens by and offers to assist James (my aforementioned husband) in loading the giant box of sheddy doom into the pickup. (Whoever you are, kindly man, may whatever god(s) you follow shower blessings upon you.) This is muchly appreciated, and we thank him as he takes his leave, but now we have the shed box standing on its side in the bed blocking the driver's side rear window. I opine that perhaps it would be a good idea to try and lay it down on its side. James expresses doubt that it will fit. I point out that if we don't, it's liable to fall over anyway, so we rearrange the stepping stones some more, and after some false starts, manage to lean it over on its side. (For the record, no, it didn't fit widthwise. But it almost did, and that was close enough.) But then we discover a new problem; the shed box is actually a half inch too LONG for the truck bed, and we can't get the tailgate closed. We push, and we shove, and we push some more, but it just won't latch. Finally, I have James lift one side of the box up juuust enough that I can get one side of the tailgate clicked into place, and call it good. After all, home isn't far. So we close the truck bed cover as best we can, climb into the cab and out of the rain, and drive home. And it is upon our arrival home, my dears, that things get REALLY interesting. Our plan is to lug the thing around the house and to the back door, where we have a walk-out basement. We soon discover that I do not have sufficient upper body strength to help James lever the blasted thing out of the truck, let alone around help him carry it halfway around the house. So I get the bright idea of, hey, let's try using the wheelbarrow! So off we go, trundling the wheelbarrow through the (still steady) rain. We're both thoroughly bedraggled by now, and neither of us had the sense to change out of our work clothes. I hold the wheelbarrow at the end of the truck, and he starts trying to shove the box over the edge and into the barrow. It is soon very, very obvious that the box is both too big and too heavy for this plan to ever work in Earth gravity. We realize, downheartedly, that we cannot possibly get the box to the back door ourselves. The garage is too small to house it and our cars and still leave room for us to get into said cars. I helpfully suggest knocking on the next-door neighbor's door to beg for help. James, being the dear, stubborn soul that he is, wants no part of this plan. And the comes his stroke of genius: Just open the gorramed thing and carry the pieces downstairs. It's molded plastic and hardware. Easy peasy! My contribution of genius is to drag the thing just far enough into the garage that we can open it up out of the rain. This turns out to be an excellent plan, for just as we are about to shove it the final way into the garage, the sky opens up into full out DOWNPOUR. The box is fairly easy to open. It's true, they used that industrial glue that's actually stronger than the cardboard it holds together, but the entire box was weakened by getting thoroughly soaked. We open it up, haul the pieces downstairs, and proclaim Victory. I then go to get the rest of our stuff out of the backseat of the (extended cab) pickup. As I am gathering up the bags and picking up things that fell out, I happen to glance down. And there I see, in all of its glory... I then proceed to completely lose my ^$%# laughing hysterically.

Yep, the DS9 wormhole goes to the Gamma Quadrant. And yes, eventually they do reach a part of space where Neelix knows nothing. There's an entire episode of him angsting about becoming useless to the crew.

More than that, they've had multiple Doctor incarnations make appearances. One, Three, Five, and Eleven, at the very least.

We are moved. *flump* Okay, that's not so excited. I do love the new house, crazy sea of boxes that it is right now. But the BEST news is that we are never, ever doing this again. Never. Nope. Not gonna happen. KANSAS YOU ARE STUCK WITH US.

Just go outside at night in about a week-and-a-half. It'll be a new moon. don't hurt me

Yep. It's not 10000 x .9999, it's 10000 x .9999999999999999999999... forevers and evers.

It all kind of makes you wonder - what wound up happening to Susan? And, for that matter, Romana? If the New Adventures novels aren't canon, is she still trapped in E-Space?

Welcome to my brain. It's like Tahiti, only less magical and more insane. I was obsessed with Doctor Who when I was a teenager - and I was a teenager in the 90's. I yelled at the TV when Nine said he was 900, "You were 953 when you were Sylvester McCoy!" Since then, the writers have covered that miss with, "oh, he's so old, he's lost track," and I'm mostly okay with that. Mostly.

There's a lot that could be taken from a huge amount of Gallifrey's past. Pretty much every crazy gadget that they created could think for itself; the Hand of Omega, Nemesis, etc. Adonalsium didn't even necessarily have to be a weapon; it could have been a creation engine. Perhaps the entirety of the Cosmere galaxy was created by it before the Shattering, far enough into the future that humans were pretty much everywhere in Mutter's Spiral (the Milky Way to us) and easy enough to grab samples of. So it harvested DNA, wandered off to some distant part of the universe, and seeded its own galaxy with humans as one of the dominant sentient life-forms. And then it Shattered, and things got crazy.

I...might have a tiny headcanon going where Adonalsium is yet another sentient Time Lord megadevice that went and wandered off to do its own thing. And it broke. As one does.

Wow, that thing is redonkulous.