The United Church of Christ traces its history in a straightline back to the congregationalist Puritans. People like Jonathan Edwards who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Today, I doubt the majority of UCC members or pastors would even acknowledge the concept of sin.
It and the UU (Unitarian Universalists) are pretty much the official churches of woke SJWism.
"Open and affirming" is UCC code language for churches that have gone all in on the LGTBAIQAWTFBBQ schism. My childhood UCC church, bleh, hasn't had a male pastor in maybe 20 years. All the pastors for the last ~10 years have been gay.
The last time I set foot in that building was for a Christmas service some years ago. The pastor did not say the word "God" or "Jesus" the ENTIRE service. The (lesbian) co-pastor actually did, so, there's that..
The UCC is a church primarily for wealthy, highly educated, useless white people. The majority of the members are in the mid-Atlantic and northeast. I believe the majority of members have masters or PhD degrees.
They have been hemorrhaging membership, but finances are actually pretty good (again, wealthy members).
I hate the UCC and everything it stands for.
Yes.
Side note, I think long COVID is mostly bunk. The statistics seem to show long covid sufferers are almost entirely women, so yeah, it's the new chronic fatigue, as you said.
I was vaxed and got covid this year. Really mild case, can't complain. I wouldn't say I have concentration problems, brain fog, etc., but I honestly do feel like my memory is fucked. I'm struggling to pull names or words on a regular basis. I can't prove that it was covid that caused it (I am getting to be middle aged-ish), but I am suspicious.
Lol, I've watched exactly 12 hours of twitch in the last months for exactly that reason. I just put it on mute.
I watched a YouTube review of the Starship Trooper game (mostly it inspired me to go watch the movie again--awesome movie). Looked fun.
Some books I would recommend, pretty much anything by Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn is a good starting point. (Fantasy)
Guy Gavriel Kay. Tigana. Lions of al-Rassan. Fictional fantasy pseudo-history.
C.S. Friedman, In Conquest Born. (Science Fiction)
Just started a re-read for the first time in years of The Lord of the Rings. I'm taking it very slow.
Not u/simian, and I'll be curious for the answer, but, for me...
Depends a lot on your musical taste. I'm not super into musicals, and I don't know anything particularly new.
Les Miserables
Andrew Lloyd Weber -- Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Man of La Mancha
Camelot
Mary Poppins?
I got a little into Gilbert & Sullivan after seeing the Sideshow Bob episode of The Simpsons where he sings something from the H.M.S. Pinafore.
TD Ameritrade is owned by Schwab now, and they're going to be going away--all TDA will be transferred to Schwab accounts. I'm not sure if there's any connection between TD Bank Canada and TD Ameritrade anymore (TD Ameritrade was a spinoff from the Canadian).
Interactive Broker is a more hardcore trader / day trader platform.
I have a TD Ameritrade account that I haven't made any decisions on, yet.
As he arrives, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' - from The Nutcracker ballet - begins to play.
Ironic, as Tchaikovsky was gay.
I have noticed that too. My city had a mask mandate until early in 2022. Up till that point, if the business asked me to mask, I did. I haven't worn a mask since then, and I don't intend to.
Full disclosure, I DID wear a mask on an airplane, but that was because the dude I was sitting next to smelled like dog shit.
I'm not very good at it. To get great results you have to have good keywords (both positive and negative), run a lot of iterations, get a good base image, refine with inpainting, etc.
I downloaded some of the training sets and tried out stable diffusion on my local PC. Played with it for a couple of hours. I came up with some pretty cool stuff. It's awesome tech.
I used the Voldy guide someone else linked too: https://rentry.org/voldy
Remember kids, have a MERRY Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, A Kwaaaazy Kwanza, a tip top Tet, ... and a solemn and dignified Ramadan.
Simpsons, back when they were funny.
I've heard of people converting productive farmland to solar facilities, where they enter a long term lease with a solar generating company for like 30 or 40 years, as they make more from the lease than from farming. When the government money starts flowing, corruption follows soon after.
Maybe in some parts of the world you need to do maintenance, but I don't. Rain keeps them clean. That's it. I've had the panels around 3.5 years now and I have not done a thing in that time.
California mandates solar on new residential construction:
I installed solar panels on my house. About a 8-9 year break even. I've generated between 70-85% of my annual energy consumption every year since I installed them. If I had a battery system, I could be pretty damn close to completely independent of the grid.
EDIT: panels should have a 20-25+ year life, and effectively zero maintenance. Strongly positive after year 10-15.
Name checks out :-)
I like my archaeologist friends. Even the lefties are pretty normal. Archaeologists tend to be nerdy dorks who like digging shit up. Most people who want to spend all day deciphering 3000 year old writing and painstakingly figuring out the biographies of a kings and queens who have been dead for centuries don't tend to get swept away in the fads of currentyear.
Daily kos is still around?
Hey, watch it, some of my best friends are Egyptologists!
(Seriously, actually!)
In the end, the English ended the game the same way they began it, by getting on their knees for black men.
Ouch.
I'm donating blood and plasma on the regular to get rid of forever chemicals like PFAS and microplastics from my system.
Fascinating, I hadn't heard that.
He certainly admitted to parts of it (let's see if the child pron allegations actually pan out). From the transcript:
A (the man): That was - that was her idea. And that was total, like, role play stuff. ... A: So we'd talk at night and she used to wrote stories...should would write one and say "You take this role, I'll take that role and..."
So he doesn't seem to deny "roleplaying" about his wife fucking three school kids, he just claims that his wife started it.
Maybe I'm an old-fashioned prude, but if my wife started dirty talking and wanting to "role play" about fucking kids the same age as our children, that would be the end of the relationship. Like, immediately.
Also if Imp shows up here and starts defending that freak because it's his wife testifying against him I swear to fucking God.
Is there any doubt that that's going to happen? Something about how women are selfish and want to kill men and abuse boys, and the wife controlled him, and women lie, blah blah blah.
My childhood UCC church was like that. A small congregation that naturally swelled around Easter and Christmas. My grandparents were involved in moving the church to its current building, designing the sanctuary, picking out the organ, etc. It was a special place to me.
It was only as I grew older that I realized how weird UCC-ism was, and it went through an an acceleration into deviant Christianity in the early 2000s. That’s the time when the UCC church went all out into LGBTQ ministry etc.
I haven’t been back in many years, but I check up on things there every now and then.
Naturally as a group that is EXTREMELY Covid scared, they went remote for a long time.
I watched one Zoom sermon, and they had a section where the youth pastor (who appeared possibly non-binary) was putting on a puppet show of some Bible story. Naturally they had same sex couples, etc.
Regarding the big churches, some neighbors of mine kept trying to get my family to go to a megachurch—one of those that has multiple campuses, the contemporary music, people rocking out with guitars and lightning effects that would put most event venues to shame. Don’t see the appeal.
So, I consider myself a Christian, but I haven’t even set foot in a church building in maybe 4-5 years now. Pretty shallow Christian I guess.