Kaymyth

Closing on the old house is COMPLETE! Gone are the days when we must spend our weekends doing work upon a house we no longer live in! Over is the time in which we must handle yard maintenance for two places! It is over! We are done! WE JUST HAVE ONE HOUSE NOW THIS IS WONDERFUL

Thus triggering my lactose intolerance. And fast food in general often disagrees with my lack of a gallbladder. And don't even get me started on my joints. (I'd make a complaint about aging, but many of the things wrong with me have nothing to do with age. )

In my case, at least, that would qualify as a Poor Life Decision. Jalapeno hurts.

Eldest Niece's 9th birthday party was last night. My BIL and SIL have always been really, really good about making her birthday separate from Christmas and keeping her from getting shortchanged over the deal. She got some good stuff. She liked the R2-D2 watch we got her, as well as the unicorn skeleton leggings. But the Canned Unicorn Meat brought peals of laughter to the entire room, and when she opened the tin and the little pieces of dismembered plush unicorn came tumbling out... Yeah, she carried that thing around, opened it up, arranged the unicorn into a reassembly pattern, put it back in again. Several times. It was her favorite gift. We won Birthday.

Except that I don't think this entirely tracks. I mean, you had Saw (yeah, I finally found the correct spelling of that guy's name) died pretty early on, and he was arguably someone who could have been a main character. Except that he died early in the movie, so he didn't become one. A couple of the other mains became main characters specifically by surviving long enough to connect up with the two leads. Plus, at least one of those characters was Force-sensitive; that does tend to stack the deck in favor of you when you're facing overwhelming odds. And some minor characters did survive. Did you notice that the Red and Gold Leader cameos were footage straight out of A New Hope? So definitely some of the X-Wing and Y-Wing pilots made it out. I think a bunch of the capital ships did, too, or else there wouldn't have been a fleet to take on the Death Star in Episode IV, whose showdown battle takes place literally days after this one. Vader swooped in and targeted the Rebel flagship because it was the one that had the plans; Leia squeaked out of there by the skin of her teeth only because she had a secondary ship. But with Vader focused on the flagship, many of the others should have been able to implement a hyperspace jump. I really think it depends on how your brain processes faces. I could see the differences because the microexpressions didn't move right. They were too fluid; you couldn't see the muscles working in the appropriate places. But I am, admittedly, extremely face-oriented, to the point where heavy facial hair is enough to obscure someone's identity to me. In contrast, my husband has some mild face-blindness and didn't notice anything off about Tarkin at all noticed something was off about Tarkin, but couldn't really tell what it was.. There's going to be a very large range of people with differing opinions on this simply because we don't all process facial features the same way.

Yeah, he was kind of an idiot. (He works for a company that specifically does training seminars for people, so this is basically all he does. Travel around and tell people things.) I mean, he was a dynamic instructor, which was good for keeping people engaged, but he had some really screwball tangents he went off on. I'm like, dude, storm you, I'm an introvert and am a highly valued person at my workplace. (I mean, presumably they wouldn't have promoted me into management if they didn't value my work.)

Guys, I got it! It's so pretty!

Ah, OK. I don't know that we have a definitive answer to that question, but I wouldn't think so. We're looking at raw Investiture here, and Forging one type of Misting to another simply changes the pathway that Investiture travels through, not the amount of Investiture itself. It wouldn't work for creating a full Mistborn, though, because that requires so much more Investiture than a Misting does.

No, because you're still dealing with the Laws of Thermodynamics, here. You can't create Investiture from nothing, and if Forgery is capable of adding Investiture to its target, it's not enough to create entirely new powers out of nothing. I know we've seen a WoB about this flat-out stating that Forgery can't do this, but I'm at work and not really able to search for it right now.

Myers-Briggs is useful, but only to a certain point. It's extremely useful in understanding how different people interact with the world and communicate, but there are limits. For example, in a work environment, it could be a very good tool for sorting out group dynamics and facilitating conflict resolution between very different personality types within a team. Once you've pinpointed the trouble spots, it's helpful in developing strategies to solve those problems. However, it is generally not useful in base hiring decisions. If someone says, "I want to hire someone who is part of <subset of MBPT>, and nobody else will do!" they are then limiting themselves without considering each candidate on their individual merits. They wind up limiting their pool and hobbling the potential for diverse solutions on their team. I've actually been to seminars where the instructor advocated for using Myers-Briggs as a hiring tool, with a pretty strong undertone of, "I mean, you don't want to hire introverts, do you?" Gee, thanks, Guy Whose Background is Aggressive Sales. Watch out, your personal bias is showing. (This is the same guy who also stood up there and told us that participation in team sports is a more important item on a resume than actual qualifications and job experience. I was not impressed.)

It's a Disney cartoon series from the 90s.

It's too late for me. Save yourself! Don't click the volume on the video I shared on FB! ETA: Noooooo you clicked Like you're dooooooooomed!

Oh, no. Someone on Facebook rewrote the Duck Tales theme to be about Doctor Who. I'M DOOMED

I'm old enough that I can hear the old Duck Tales theme song playing in my head right now. Actually, does somebody know how to make that stop? We had our secret santa gift exchange at work. The person I drew absolutely adores the scarf I knitted for her. I has a happy.

Not to be confused with Scrooge McDuck. (Who is apparently going to be voiced soon by David Tennant and I might be giggling a little.)

You're near DC! (Hey, Virginia is big.) I am going to be visiting the city in a month.

This would probably require that the target actually have access to Stormlight in order to work. So you might be able to Forge a KR into a koloss, but not just an ordinary Rosharan. By the same token, you might be able to Forge, say, a Misting into another Misting, but you cannot Forge a Misting into a Mistborn, because they just don't have the requisite amount of Investiture.

INFP as well. If you dig far enough, there's an entire thread in here about Myers-Briggs personality types. Meh, I get INFP consistently every time I take it, and the type is reasonably accurate for me. I am getting more extroverted as I get older for various reasons, but my inner core still leans heavily towards the introvert side. I'm just really good at short bursts of extrovert.

If Team Rocket were 30% more evil, 100% less self-aware, and 5,000% more competent.

You will be fine. Just remember to do the things I taught you last week, and it should insulate you from your mother's trained attack brain weasels.

Warning: philosophical wool-gathering and Opinions below! Read at your own risk! Here's the thing - humans are, evolutionarily speaking, still at a tribal cavepeople level. Most of our brain wiring is still set to a time when we lived in small groups of people, hunting and gathering, and depending on our tribe for survival. People from other groups were possibly allies, possibly enemies, and we had to treat them with caution until we knew for sure. So it was very beneficial for people to automatically separate people into "Us" and "Them". "Us" were the safe people. Friends, family, allies. Maybe Cousin Ogg was kind of a jerk, but we knew that when the chips were down, he'd pick up a club and fight for the tribe alongside us. "Them" were the the outsiders. Others. We might have to fight them for resources, though if we're lucky maybe they're willing to trade peacefully instead. But it still served us to think of them as Them, just in case conflict someday brewed. These days, the world has a lot more people in it. And we can talk to those people in ways that weren't possible even just a few decades ago. Suddenly Us is huge, and Them is even bigger, and maybe even harder to separate out. But our brains are only wired to put a hundred or so people into the Us category, which is a problem when even our city of origin can contain millions. So our brains try to compensate by narrowing down the Us. Racism, sexism, classism, nationalism - these are all side effects of our minds trying to whittle down to a relatable Us to care about and pare out the Them who are relegated to a place of less importance. Putting people in boxes is a natural human behavior. It's not necessarily a good behavior, or a desirable one, but it's an understandable one. And particularly for marginalized people, it's important for them to be able to find others like them so that they are not alone. We are a social species. Individuals need to have an Us, or they flounder. But the species as a whole needs stop demonizing all of the Thems, or we're eventually going to self-destruct. Our social, cultural, and technological development is accelerating at blinding speed, and our biological evolution doesn't have a chance of keeping up. Worse, enough people still don't even believe in evolution that addressing the issue is extremely difficult. How do you convince someone that they are reacting to globalization based on instinctive behavior when accepting that instinctive behavior even exists undermines their very worldview? How can you even begin to fix society's problems when a significant portion of that society has a vested interest in disbelieving in the source of those problems?

We've got some local people who do really fancy teas that are held up by aficionados as the Best Tea (tm). I still only taste hot, slightly bitter water. Add sugar or honey and it just makes it sweet enough to be palatable, but it doesn't bring out any other flavors for me. I think my taste buds are just out of calibration from human standard.

I...I can't taste tea. People hand me tea, and say, "Oh, you should try this, it's really good! It tastes like this and this, with a hint of this, and a bit of spice, and and and!" And then I sip. What I taste: Hot, slightly bitter water. It's tragic.

Your friend is by far not the only genderfluid person out there. Knowing that zie's not alone is a big thing. Really, the best thing to do is to ask your friend what they want you to do. Use gender-neutral pronouns? (zie/zir or their) Just listen when they need to vent? Let the person guide you, and do your best to support them in the way that they ask. Regarding the sidetrack: The thing is that society demands boxes. It isn't that non-conforming folks have an innate need to design new boxes, it's that attempting to exist outside the already-established ones is met with extreme resistance. Our culture as a whole insists that we belong in one box or another. So non-conforming people are told, "You HAVE to be in a box! I can't stand it if you're not in a box! Pick a box!" the natural psychological reaction is to say, "Fine, I'm making my OWN box!" And then they turn it into their personal blanket fort of safety against all of the chullheads out there who keep trying to shove them into the wrong box.

Oh, heck, I'm 39 years old and still do this to my coworkers. They have flat-out told me before, "Rosemary, normal people in their 30s don't remember things they learned in high school." Second paragraph, also me. Except that I can often go wallflower if I don't have someone to anchor myself to; this is a lot of the reason that I costume. It gives me a "hook" to get people to talk to me.