The first thing I’ll say is to consider putting it off until you’re older.

That being said, if you don’t know anyone who smokes, you might find it difficult to get some yourself. Your best bet would be to make friends who already have those connections. Many dealers won’t respond if you can’t name a customer that referred you. That might be the biggest hurdle to start with if you aren’t willing to start conversations. Ask classmates about the stoners around school if you can’t think of anyone.

If you manage to make those friends who connect you, though, the actual exchange with a dealer is usually pretty chill. You meet at an agreed upon spot (perhaps a park or something, maybe their house, etc.), and you hand over the money and they hand over the weed. Then you go home. You can show up with a friend if you want, but it’s best practice to let the dealer know that before you show up. A first text might go something like, “Hey, my name is ___. Would it be cool if I bought a dime ($10 worth, often 1 gram)/dub ($20)? I got your number from ___. Would you be down to meet sometime soon?” Some more advanced dealers will offer things like dab cartridges and edibles. Weed smells, and so does paraphernalia, so be sure to keep it in an air-tight container. Don’t front money for drugs, ever. Also, be sure not to let it become too much of a habit. Limit yourself to a couple times a month, or only the weekends, etc.

A marijuana high lasts about 2-3 hours, so if you know you’ll have much more time than that, you’ll be ok. You can also go out to meet up with a friend for awhile, then both go to smoke elsewhere if their house isn’t an option. Most high-schoolers find a nearby, secluded place in some forested area to smoke in, at least where I live. Walking there and back (even while baked) is usually no big deal, unless it’s super far or something. If you don’t have a place like that nearby, any other little hidden spots you can find will probably do if they aren’t too high-key. Just be sure to clean up after yourself. Pack it in, pack it out. You might be able to smoke outside your house after your parents go to bed if you can manage your coughing. If you’re worried about the smell after smoking, smoke outside, change your clothes/put on a top layer first, and brush your teeth.

As for how to smoke, you have some options. Probably the cheapest, easiest, most concealable option would be a small pipe (I’d recommend glass). You can find cheap ones online that can be delivered to your door on websites like dhgate, if you aren’t worried about your parents opening your mail for you. There’s also bongs, joints, and vapes, which each have their own pros and cons. I’m sure there’s a million youtube tutorials for each of those options. When smoking, I think the key is to inhale properly and deeply, which may be difficult starting out. You often hear that people can’t get high their first time smoking weed, but I think this is due to improper smoking technique. I know my first time I definitely wasn’t doing it right.

War of the Worlds was written by H.G. Wells, not Orson Welles. Orson did, however, do that famous radio performance of War of the Worlds in the 30s that ostensibly (but probably not actually according to more modern analysis) caused widespread panic among its listeners.

I always get these two and George Orwell confused. On top of the somewhat similar names, the fact that Orson Welles/H.G. Wells both have that War of the Worlds connection and H.G. Wells/George Orwell both being famous authors doesn’t help, either.

I also want to add that evolution is a species-wide phenomenon over hundreds or thousands of generations, it’s not done individually.

Wow, what a thorough answer, thank you! The summation was almost poetic, in a beautiful and somewhat horrifying way. The whole system laid out like that almost seems a bit dark and dystopian in kind of an indescribable way. It sounds like a sentient, Lovecraftian rat’s-nest of wires running the whole world.

Yeah, that seems to align nicely with the instincts I outlined in my comment. No need to apologize. Thanks!

From what I googled, it’s especially bad when you pair “man” and “female” together, which makes sense to me.

No stupid questions time: This kind of lurks in the back of my mind and I sometimes find myself hesitating to use the term “female” to refer to female figures in any context. I don’t have to do that, right? Like, would “woman lawyer” be better than “female lawyer” in contexts where specifying gender might be relevant? I would conversely prefer the term “male lawyer” in the same context and “man lawyer” sounds just as odd to me as “woman lawyer”. “Lawyer who is a woman” is a little verbose, too. Am I overthinking this?

It already exists as the intro to one of the maps in Nazi Zombies in COD: Black Ops

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zv61MWfg20&pp=ygUPamZrIGNvZCB6b21iaWVz

Not too far from the one I came up with:

Show me your feet, boys

And taste my soles

Treat my toes like a tootsie roll and lick away

Indeed, Chinese cops laid siege to various universities during the Hong Kong protests, which were strongholds of opposition and organization, just like American universities have also been under siege at times for the same reasons regarding their Palestine protests. Cops never change and they’ll always have the cop mindset, though I will say that American cops seem to be especially trigger-happy. From what I see, cops in most other countries are able to neutralize threats with non-lethal force most of the time. I never hear about German cops, who I believe also carry guns, shooting someone’s dog or unloading into a guy failing to follow conflicting instructions being shouted at him. I can’t claim to know much about German cops, though. Maybe someone with more knowledge could fill me in.

The Hong Kong protests, though… I’m not saying that’s worse than American police, but I have little reason to believe they’d be much better, either. Your experience may not reflect the whole truth.

Seth hasn’t been writing for Family Guy since like 2006

It’s true, but intelligence and counterintelligence is kind of their whole thing, isn’t it? They’ve certainly had a long list of laughable fuckups, like their many failed assassination attempts on Castro, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Iran-Contra, etc., but they’ve also successfully toppled governments in South/Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, etc. Apparently they’ve made at least 70 attempts at regime change since the end of the Cold War, according to Wikipedia. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the CIA as a non-threat, personally, especially if they’re going to be following the malevolent orders of a Trump loyalist. I fear the CIA will turn more inwardly to our own country and use their efforts against US citizens (more than usual, that is), specifically against those who would oppose a Trump regime.

We already saw FBI agents engaging in 60s-and-70s-style surveillance of BLM activists in 2020, where they and other feds went around in unmarked vans snatching random activists off the street and traded literal baseball cards they made about different individual activists for fun. Those feds were also sent in at the express direction of Trump. With that in mind, I have no doubts the CIA would do the same in heartbeat. I know they already conduct domestic surveillance operations, but I’d predict a substantial increase in that under the current administration, especially given the ways things have been going after only the first couple weeks with Trump demanding absolute fealty throughout the government and vilifying all opposition. It’s just frightening that Trump had a ready-made intelligence org that was so easily converted to his agenda and seems poised to be his personal secret police. I think that’s probably even scarier than the CIA of old. At least for right now, I might somehow prefer a CIA that says, “Sorry, Mr. President, but we don’t follow orders.”

CIA, too. I thought they sort of just did their own thing and aren’t really beholden to the president. People think the CIA is such a rogue organization that some people have suggested they killed JFK because he sought to shrink the org and make them more accountable. Seems unlikely, though, since apparently all it takes to completely take it over is just to change around some personnel.

Like, my head cannon is that the new leaders would be figureheads only and that there’d be someone secretly chosen to keep things running behind closed doors and pulling the real CIA strings to resist such changes (and maybe have an encore, pretty please?), but that’s based on nothing at all. I’m no fan of the CIA or anything, but I do fear what such a shadowy government org might do when wielded by Trump cronies even more than the stuff they usually get up to.

That’s true and part of me would love to see that, but some utilities (such as water and electric) going under would probably be a bad thing if there wasn’t a plan to swoop in and bring them under public control right away. Otherwise, things would get bad really quick in a lot of places if power and water stopped being available for everyone for an extended time. Things like hospitals, grocery stores, repair shops, etc. would all be working at greatly reduced capacity and capability. Barring a full-on revolution where the people could seize these utilities for public ownership and operate it themselves, I don’t see that happening because the government would be likely to simply bail out a lot of the companies, or they’d be bought up and probably end up being consolidated by an even fewer number of people.

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Forgetting how it works and having to relearn it again

I suppose it depends on how you’d define “solved”. If we’re talking about basically eliminating homelessness, Cuba has done immense work in that regard. Say what you will about the Cuban government, but Cuba has a near-zero homeless population because the government has built a ton of housing and caps rent at 10% of individual income in that state-owned housing. Cuba is also a country with a tradition of multi-generational extended family homes, so there’s a greater chance that you’d be able to move in with a family member if you fell on hard times. Home ownership rate is around 85% compared to 65% in the US. All of this is nothing new, though, so it’s hard to say if it’s the answer to current issues of housing that’s largely driven by corporate greed, but it certainly sounds like it couldn’t hurt. Granted, I’ve seen people give examples of homes that are rather small and spartan, where the walls are made of bare cinderblock and generally aren’t very pretty, but that’s way better than being homeless even if some of the housing isn’t as nice as others. I’ve also examples of state-owned housing lived in by the same kinds of people, but are really quite nice as well. Whether the US government would ever do this, though, seems unlikely. Not at the scale we’d need and not for so cheap, anyway, especially not with Trump coming to office. I can’t really speak for the governments of other countries, however, and I’m no expert on Cuba either, so I could have gotten some things wrong. The US embargo to Cuba since the 90s also means that Cuba has had a more difficult time procuring building materials for the low-cost housing that’s helped so many, which has led to an increase in size and number for those extended family homes over the years.

I’ve never noticed such a pattern myself and I’m not sure I’d agree that most kings are depicted as red-headed. It would be a little odd considering the relative rarity of red hair in people. What specific depictions are you talking about? Could you give us a list of examples? If you google “cartoon king”, you’ll find only a few redheads among dozens of brown or white-haired kings, which is what I’d expected to find. Maybe if this is a legit trend you see, it could be regional thing? Are there many red-headed people in your country?

The basic rule is that if you can drop the name and the sentence still makes sense, use a comma. It still applies to greetings, since a greeting is still a greeting whether or not you use a person’s name while doing so.

You wouldn’t use a comma if you said something like “Jack went to work.”