Kaymyth

Vote Havelock Vetinari!

I do believe that this is the first time ever someone has managed to unfairly insult Nickelback.

Like the Farscape Drinking Game: "Take a drink every time John Crichton makes a pop culture reference." It is literally impossible to get through more than one episode without dying. And don't even think about trying to play it while watching the Peacekeeper War miniseries.

Heh. Well, you are definitely living up to your username. You need a Sonic Bomb alarm clock. It's insanely loud and has an attachment that you put under your mattress and it shakes the bed. Or you need Clocky. Once you hit the snooze button, it rolls off the desk and goes and hides somewhere random in the room. When it goes off again, you have to actually get up and search for it.

She needs a belt with metal vials.

But...but...but...SCIENCE! (Just promise me that Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson would be proud of you.)

EXACTLY Am I really the only person who doesn't read abbreviations as just the letters? When I type stuff like that, in my head it's still said as "omigod" not "oh em gee". Does anybody ACTUALLY say it like oh em gee? Because that would be really weird.

See, now you're really trying to make me feel old. Just wait, you little whippersnapper! You're going to graduate from high school and suddenly twenty years is going to pass in the blink of an eye and then one day you will wake up one morning and exclaim, "OMG! I understand Kaymyth now! WHEN DID I GET OLD?!"

I paid attention in school. (I've actually had conversations with coworkers where I'll pop out some bit of knowledge, and they'll ask me how I know that. I'll say well, duh, this was basic high school civics/geography/history/math/etc. And they'll say, "Rosemary, normal people in their 30s don't remember what they learned in high school." And I'll go ) But in all seriously, I've been around for a few election cycles. I voted in the 2000 election and lived through the public outcry about the popular/electoral split. This stuff isn't history for me, it's living memory.

That's correct. It's aggravating that they left out the presidential vote, but in truth it's the downticket that makes more of a difference anyway. Besides, as I've been saying the entire election season, third party presidential candidates are never going to be taken seriously until those third parties hold offices on the local, state, and national Congressional levels, and hold enough of them that it's no longer considered to be a statistical anomaly. You cannot build a viable, functioning political party from the top down. This, unfortunately, is not at all helpful. 1) Pushing to change the way a system works after the results are already in carries a very strong "sore loser" connotation. The time to change the Electoral College was anytime in the last sixteen years - you know, after the last time this happened with Gore. 2000 should have been a wake-up call. Instead the Democratic Party decided that it was a one-off occurrence and sat on their thumbs for a decade-and-a-half. 2) Most states have "Faithless Elector" clauses in their state constitutions that prevent this from happening legally. Now, it is true that there are enough red states without Faithless Elector clauses that it could swing the vote. There is an outside chance it could happen (though I'd put those odds approximately on a par with 'third party candidate winning the Presidency') - but I find the idea of putting public pressure on Electors to do it to be extremely distasteful. Their identities are a matter of public record, and changing their vote carries very real potential consequences for them and their families.

Maine just passed ranked voting in the general election. It's the first step.

It was amazeballs. James and I are actually considering going back to watch it again, this time in 3D. I normally detest 3D because it's dumb and gimmicky, but I am not caught wondering how awe-inspiring the effects scenes in this movie are going to look, because HOLY CARP.

cramps No, wait. That doesn't quite get my point across accurately. CRAMPS

Maaaybe? Or that's just what they want us to think.

Thundersnow is rare, but it does happen. It usually has to be a pretty intense storm, often in the blizzard range, and would happen on the warmer range of snowstorms (which again, is where blizzards usually fall).

I have terrifying skills when it comes to taking an existing song and making up new lyrics. So strong is this power that I fear to use it often, lest I unwittingly wreak havoc upon the land.

Heh. I'm now imagining you doing karaoke without the lyric box, just making up what sounds good. It's nine o'clock on a Tuesday The elephants all shuffle in There's an old man sitting on the floor Dodging footfalls as panic sets in Well, I don't know what the curriculum is like at your school, but you could try picking up an English class that focuses on poetry. That might help you start working on the skills you need.

I can do it either way, though the story flows better if I have at least a vague outline of what's going to happen in my head. I completely pantsed the first draft of Swift as Steel, which is probably why it's taking me so rusting long to clean it up and fix all of its problems. And then there are the times when I'm writing and fully intend to go one direction, and suddenly the character(s) are saying, "Haha, nope!" and run off in a different direction entirely. Bah, it's just poetry. Poetry and song lyrics are exactly the same thing.

Cause we need SOMETHING, gorram it: We accepted an offer on the house today! It's just a first step, there's still inspections and paperwork and all that rigamarole, but we are finally on our way to selling the house we moved out of last year!

No. She called into question their perspective on the subject by calling out their privilege. And yes, @aeromancer, I watched the video. I read the article. They were both disgusting. And if anyone wants to call me out on not playing nice, that was the nice version. There are so many things I want to say right now that I know I shouldn't. The Shard isn't the right venue for that. I will say this much - There are a lot of women on the Shard. There are people of color. There are a lot of LGBT people. There are some religious minorities (I'm one of those). YES, we're scared. Not because we believe that every Trump supporter is a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, but because ENOUGH of them are who are making themselves more visible. The KKK was out in full regalia on an overpass bridge in North Carolina this morning. LGBT suicide crisis hotlines are getting record numbers of incoming calls. People are afraid, and I honestly don't care anymore if our fear hurts anyone's feelings. These are people's LIVES we are talking about, not just idealogical arguments.

Economics have also changed a great deal since those times, though. States are no longer so economically independent from each other. And in the city/country divide, I live in a city. (In fact, it's a city that happens to be divided in half between two states, which makes it even more complex.) My priorities are not the same as those of the rural voters in my state, and as such, my voice is drowned out by theirs. Kansas just doesn't have that much urban area, so my voice is drowned out. In the current setup, I essentially have no voice, and this is not acceptable to me. I did not say this. I said that as the election stands, Hillary won the popular vote. This is true. I said that I dislike the Electoral College system. I do not like seeing one candidate win the popular vote while the other takes the Electoral College. I have a problem with this system in general. You are correct in saying that were the Electoral College not in place, it would have changed the number of people voting and the results would be unpredictable. Regardless, a straight popular vote would be a more fair system than what we have. I would like to see the Electoral college if not abolished, then changed across the board to a more proportional allocation. The winner-take-all system we have now disenfranchises me, personally, as a voter. Please stop implying that I have no right to be upset at the design of the system and the results of the election. My feelings are valid. My fears are valid. My concern that an actual friend of mine is going to wind up dying because the repeal of the ACA could strip away her health insurance is valid.

This isn't so much blaming the refs as blaming the insistence on sticking to antiquated rules, the reasons for which have mostly been eliminated in modern society. It doesn't take a week to cross the country anymore; it takes hours. People in Maine can pop onto the internet and see the ballot initiatives that are up for vote in Arizona. There's no more information lag and our populace is far better educated now than it was 200+ years ago. Even if we didn't outright abolish the Electoral College, but instead did away with the winner-take-all system and had every state allocate votes proportionally, it would be a vast improvement and better representative of the people in this country.

I'm not mad. But...yeah, there's just no good here.

The craziest part about all this is that thanks to the archaic madness that is the Electoral College, Clinton won the popular vote but not the election. Do we have to deal with a future where Trump is the president for the next four years? Absolutely. But I am under no obligation to be happy about it. I have both the right and the reason to worry. LGBT rights are going to be rolled back. The ACA is going to be repealed, and people are going to die because of it. I have a right to be upset about these things.