On trans, I divide it into 2 categories, transsexuals and transgender. Transsexuals just want to get the surgery and move on. Transgender tend to keep their original anatomy for life, and I consider them the most toxic and damaging to society.
In some cases, IMHO, one should hold trans-identified children (and spouses for that matter) to what they say they are. I mean, if you try to nag, counsel, forbid, etc., you only make them hate you and rebel against you. When it comes to emotions, they need to be dealt with experientially. So if a boy is insistent about being a girl, raise him as one, and construct it to where things are hard and realistic. “I don’t want to wear that dress, it’s ugly!” “You will, and if you keep on, I will give you something to cry about.” Or, “I want to play sports with the boys.” “Actually, I need you to help me in the kitchen. If we get things done soon enough, then you can go out and play. And don’t get your pretty dress dirty, or you’re going to have to clean it!” So the result would be forcing them to engage their mind and weigh out their options. Just don’t give them a fantasy version. So if they can’t take the pressure, they will rebel away from what they are doing. “Mom, I didn’t know it was so hard to be a girl. I’m not doing it anymore!”
A simpler version of the above is what a television repairman did. His son came home with an earring. That night, the dad kissed his son on the mouth and said, “Goodnight Princess!” The next day, the earring was gone. The last I heard was that his son was in the Navy, maybe working on a nuclear submarine.
And yes, I think gays tend to have a distorted sense of friendships and boundaries and confuse sex with friendship. I think they tend to have an underdeveloped/immature sense of relationships, as well as shallow personalities. So bossing people around or trying to get sex all the time is normal to them. A lot should have some therapy done around topics like excessive religiosity, self-esteem, and assertiveness. I mention excessive religiosity as that can be a sign of the opposite. So you do right because you are scared of God and don’t have a personal relationship, and that can paradoxically drive someone into depravity. The longer you repress things or hold onto this duality, the worse it becomes later, since the longer you hold things back like that, the harder the rebellion will be. It is kinda like the laws of physics and the part about equal and opposite reactions. Assertiveness is another contributor because so many gay guys have domineering and controlling mothers who have emasculated their husbands. So gay guys often need coaching on how to cut the apron strings and be their own person.
As for common concerns in ex-gays, here are a few. If they want to become ex-gay out of a fear of hell, they should deal with that concern first. If you have flashbacks and images, such as seeing female genitals every time you close your eyes, then you should do some trauma work. Lesbians may have some additional concerns such as codependency (a pattern of self-denial and an addiction to “helping” others) and emotional enmeshment and may need therapy for those. They may also need to do trauma work, since a common issue that fuels lesbianism is domestic violence. So they “rebel” inside at an early age when they notice their father is the aggressor and their mother is a doormat who just takes it. So they may reason that it is better to be a man, and over time, they become more like a man in their personality. Then it may become self-fulfilling since they won’t be able to find a man who would desire them.
To me, it’s not a matter of telling others what to do with their bodies, but my right to express that a certain behavior is wrong. I think we need to exercise and fight for the right to do that much. “My lifestyle isn’t affecting you,” yeah, and me condemning your (not you) foul, immoral behavior isn’t affecting you. If it is, that is not my problem, but the fault of those who think that. If my words make you want to end your life, then you should see a therapist for that or reconsider your behavior. How are my words condemning a lifestyle in the abstract any worse than what you (those using the argument) do in the bedroom?
Like most here, I do believe that what gays have is not a marriage, and that they are appropriating a straight-only term. At least in modern years, they have become more honest and use terms like “same-sex marriage” and not “gay marriage.” Gays could always marry someone of the opposite sex just like everyone else. Nobody really other than the bride or her father would really object to a gay man marrying a straight woman. So same-sex marriage is more specific.
And yes, keep gay and trans away from the kids. Now if a kid is truly unhappy in their gender, then raise them as a girl and keep your mouth shut about it, and make the kid not talk about it either. I make a distinction between transsexual and transgender that many don’t make. There’s a huge difference between feeling trapped in the wrong body and having a fetish or doing it for attention. So I believe there are transsexual kids, but not transgender kids under the age of 12.
Well, I oppose gay sex and how it harms society. The biggest problem I have is how it enters the media, how it is normalized, how it is shoved down our throats, etc. I’m almost to the point of saying the government needs to round up the advocates and activists and jail them. If the rest can keep it to themselves, they should.
I believe gay folks can change or at least develop a durable holding pattern. I’m not advocating repression, but full knowledge of oneself and choosing not to do what is wrong. It has nothing to do with “mah feelings.” Screw feelings. Even the Bible says, “…such were some of ye.” We have people harming their souls, personalities, and interpersonal relations and don’t even know it. They claim to be brave, strong, and proud, yet lack the strength of mind to confront their aberrant desires.
A problem is that when artists/creaters are gay, it colors their entire work, and appreciating and normalizing the work also validates the thought processes to make it. There will be subconscious inclusions in their work, even if they don’t see it and most don’t notice it. Take the song, Bohemian Rhapsody. A lot of it seems more metaphoric for something else. Supposedly, his inspiration was from the Old West (US) and the idea that a cowboy killed someone over a woman. But you get the part about spitting in someone’s eye and leaving them to die. Well, Freddy Mercury was Persian by birth and raised into Zoroastrianism. In the Middle East, humiliating someone by spitting on them as they are put to death is mostly reserved for sex offenders and homosexuals. Why do that for a murder that was spurred on by heterosexuality? So apparently, Freddy knew some things about himself and it came out in his music. Even the part about killing a man, I can’t help but wonder if Freddy suspected he was HIV+ himself at that point. I mean, I can’t help but think up alternate lyrics like, “Mama, I killed a man, put my junk inside of him, gave him AIDS, and now he’s dead.” And why did he say, “pulled my trigger” and not “pulled the trigger?” A trigger is part of a gun, not something personal.
A person’s work and the subtleties they add also give clues to the origins of their behaviors. Isn’t it interesting there are a lot of gay programmers and trans engineers (at least ones who don’t fully buy trans inclusion with the LGB)? Lynn Conway is a transsexual and made at least two major contributions to computer hardware.
30/30 means 30 Mb/s in both directions. So 500/500 is 500 Mb/s in both directions. So in the process of figuring out why I had an outage, they somehow also fixed whatever issue that prevented me from getting upgraded to 500/500 like the other customers.
And POE is Path of Exile, a game. It shouldn’t have a 30 Gb game resources file. That’s just bad coding.
I’ve been around. Nothing much has been happening in my communities. A few days back, I lost connection for a couple of days. That had a silver lining. When they came out to investigate, it turned out to be just corrupt settings on their end. They never came inside. The guy cleaned the IR transceiver piece, but other than that, it was on their end.
Sometime in the past, they did a complimentary upgrade for all their 30/30 customers and gave them 500/500. Well, I never got that. But after they reconfigured everything, I did. So not only did they get me back up and operating, I ended up with about 15 times the speed I had before. While Speedtest didn’t show 500/500, it showed 453/475 or something, which was still much faster. I could probably do some tweaking and show a little better. At least when POE or other games update, it won’t be as painful of a wait. A game’s resources should never be 30 Gb in size. Really, when programmers introduce that much bloat, a judge should sentence them to program on a 6502 or Z80 architecture for a year, or some other retro system.
This even harms actual transsexuals who work hard to assimilate into the other gender and who have a rugged identity of being the other gender from early in life.
Here is an example. Someone living as a woman was in court. They asked the judge to refer to them with female pronouns. A decade or 2 ago, that would have been seen as a reasonable request. But the judge said no, that it would set a bad precedent since then they’d have to refer to people with made-up pronouns by those too.
Another part of servicing pinball machines is the artwork and the playfield. You generally want to restore or stabilize that before doing too much in-game testing. And you certainly want to replace the ball if it needs it. A rusty ball can damage the playfield.
With cosmetic work, you often have brave decisions to make. One of the keys is to make it look like you haven’t done anything to it. If you must err on touching up the paint, you generally want to go darker. You can use clear coat paint to seal the paint. Working with water-soluble paints tends to be good, but you need to seal the paint.
Decals and mylar can be tricky. Deciding to remove mylar is brave and tricky. You can’t really paint on top of it, and removing it usually destroys the underlying paint. If you want to leave it, it kinda makes it hard to match nearby paint, since you are stuck trying to make the paint look dirty.
Now, decals on plastic parts like ball tubes are not as bad. You can likely find replicas of the decals. In that case, gently clean the plastic parts and apply new decals.