GrabtharsHammer

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Lyndon LaRouche. I'd occasionally run across a few of his minions out leafletting and they oozed that culty wacko vibe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I couldn't tell you, TBH. I have only read the series of books.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 month ago (15 children)

Well it's a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn't be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.

Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.

It's been years and I'm still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A sign that reflects the eternal truth... You don't buy beer. You rent it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

You ever stand behind a couple of geezers in line somewhere and they start talking about some random stuff? They didn’t know each other. They were just bored.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

when "free water" counted as retail innovation

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Named after a man who went on to chair ANSI and be president of ISO. That's a dude all about measuring things.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

There isn't near the kind of cultural narrative about stepfathers that there is about stepmothers, especially in media for kids. Kids absorb ideas from the fairy tales they see and hear. Stepmoms have to deal with tropes from "Cinderella" to "My Stepmom is An Alien". Kids will then carry those notions, amorphous and unexamined, into their new relationship. Kids usually don't have the capacity to recognize those kind of prejudices in themselves. So now the new stepmom has to deal with the kid's indignance at a fictional character. But aside from the Dursleys in Harry Potter, I'm hard pressed to recall a wicked stepfather.

Then there's the puritanical thread, and I'm a dude so I don't even know what else is lurking in our culture that wants to take a piece out of a stepmom for being the second lady in the family.

Not to reduce what a genuinely good dad has to do, step or otherwise. But if a dad manages to use words to explain something calmly, that's enough to get kudos from strangers on the street. I don't think the ladies have the benefit of the same uncomplicated expectations, so they need specialized guidance.

What exactly are you looking for in advice? How to deal with the ex and their branch? How to deal with specific behaviors from the kids? You'll probably do better to search at the level of those topics than the role of stepdad in general.

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