Personally, I like a treadmill.

For years I planned to get one, and all the runners in my family would talk about how awful they are, how no one ever uses it once they have it, and getting outside is so much better.

I finally got the treadmill a couple months ago, and I use it several times per week. Some weeks I use it every day. It’s convenient, I can control the temperature in the room, I can watch something on my phone while I run, and I like being able to set a consistent pace.

In the very first book Hagrid says:

There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin.

Never once mentioning any of these “good” Slytherin was a creative choice, and we have to assume it was intentional.

Was he? He wasn’t outright evil, but he had to be cajoled into helping Harry. He went out of his way to not help Harry.

But the books completely fail to present racism as something that needs to be stopped.

I mean, why is Slytherin still a House? They’re explicitly evil and bigoted, and everyone is like, oh well, that’s just how they are.

Rowling could have made it make sense. She could have said that because Slytherin’s trait is ambition, and people often take that too far, dark wizards tend to be Slytherin, but they can come from anywhere. And also, most Slytherins are actually good, even though that’s where the bad wizards tend to come from.

But no, every dark wizard is Slytherin, and every Slytherin is bad.

Snape isn’t an example of a heroic Slytherin so much as he’s an unbalanced stalker who sides with Dumbledore while still being a terrible person. I could overlook that if even one other Slytherin was good, but they’re just not.

Draco Malfoy’s redemption arc was the opportunity to redeem Slytherin. Instead it ends without him ever actually doing anything right. His evil plan fails because he sucks, then he gets saved by Harry and everyone’s just cool with it.

After all the death and destruction, everyone just goes back to school alongside the wizard Nazis. Because the bigotry and all the things that led to Voldemort just aren’t a big deal as long as they stop short of full-on war.

To be fair, the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer, who definitely did use it to describe dying from poverty.

His actual opinion was a little more nuanced than that, but Social Darwinism was kind of his whole thing, and that’s where the phrase “survival of the fittest” comes from. Darwin himself took it from Spencer and added it to later editions of On the Origin of Species.

“Pull my finger.”

Even with this information, it’s fine if it’s a small part of your diet. My kids aren’t going to die because they eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day.

Always having it available and the fact that they’ll eat it mean it’s the healthier choice.

You have to make tradeoffs. That’s just how food works and how it has always worked.

Exactly!

Although now this got me thinking, as a man in my forties who shares a Minecraft Realm with his childhood best friend, how I could go about getting 80+ cows into my friend’s base. We’re working on stuff a few maps away, so I’ve got time before he goes back there, but it’s a long trip and he’d notice I’m gone. I might have to hollow out a space and breed the cows over time.

Not really a tangent. This stuff is important.

I think every generation just tries to do better than the previous one. I don’t know if I really got in trouble for my “big feelings” growing up, but I was often made to feel like my emotions were silly or too strong for a given situation. It got to the point where when something genuinely bad happens I almost revel in it, like I crave authenticity so much that I look forward to “legitimate” pain.

So I try to keep that in mind. When one of my kids cries about something silly, we have a discussion about whether it’s a big thing or a little thing. Sometimes I’m strategically dismissive, because they need to have a little thick skin, but if that doesn’t work then we go into feeling sharing mode.

Then we make a distinction between what we’re feeling (which is always legitimate, no matter what), and what we do about it. They can still get in trouble for bad behavior, but then we try to give them the language to express their emotions in a healthy way.

And if it’s just a genuine emotional breakdown, whatever the cause, I remember back to when I did that as a kid and was met with a cold response, and I stop what I’m doing and hold them until they feel better.

“Issues” in this context means “problems”, and problems are bad.

You didn’t read the second line?

“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”

I don’t see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.

I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn’t the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn’t try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.

So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I’m not the only one who took issue with it.

So if you value independence over community and you’re an asshole, then that’s a problem.

On the other hand, if you value community over independence and you’re an asshole: also a problem.

We can extrapolate further and say that if you drink water and are an asshole: also not good. I don’t think drinking water is the problem in that case.

Children get upset about all kinds of things, and it’s important to help them understand and resolve their emotions, no matter how silly it is.

Eighty cows is a minor inconvenience at worst and like four stacks of steak at best.

So I feel like the confusion here isn’t just coming from how to handle the griefer child or how to get the cows out of the house. I think it’s more to do with the novelty of the situation.

Why is the child upset by this? Does he not like to kill cows in the game? Is there something preventing him from luring the cows out of the house? Was he just unpleasantly surprised by it and hadn’t thought through whether or not it was a big deal? There’s a lot of layers to this.

Or maybe this guy just never played Minecraft.

Isn’t anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?

I’d like more public transportation in America, but I’m not really interested in anything else they have to say.

YES. Even just waiting for my flight, there’s this pleasant mix of tension and purpose. And I’m not relaxed, per se, but it’s one of the few times in my life when I don’t have a nagging feeling that there’s something else I should be doing.

I’ve just got everything I need, and I’m waiting for something amazing. It’s perfect.

I never understand when people complain about work travel, because hotels are so enjoyable to me. Like I get wanting to stay home because you’ve got things going on there that make you happy. But if you have to be away, why not go to a magical place that has none of your stuff. What color will the walls be? What will be the pattern on the bedspread? What will it smell like?

All of these answers will be surprises, and none of them will be unpleasant. You were consulted on none of this. It’s all new. I love it.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of comments coming from that instance that are indistinguishable from the ones I see from .ml.

He’d be disappointed that he doesn’t end up doing anything epic and world-changing, but then he’d immediately be relieved that he’s mostly got shit figured out. Wife, home, job, driving, cooking, all the basic stuff.

Then he’d realize he only thought he needed to do something epic because he couldn’t picture himself having those basic things figured out. This would take him a few minutes to process, so he wouldn’t say anything.

I can do this. I’m also good at trying food at a restaurant, then recreating the flavors at home.

Well that’s an ominous name. Brand New Day #1 was the last issue of Spider-Man I ever bought. Because it sucked.