Grew up in a sizeable metropolitan area, in a residential enclave surrounded by commercial areas. The “inner” streets in our area are a bit too narrow for car traffic, but was often used as a shortcut by pedestrians.

We mostly played games on the residential streets, pausing to the occasional pedestrian, or the rare car to pass by. If we do play hide and seek, we can play it through the narrow alleyways of our area or even the nearby commercial buildings (we always agree on the bounds beforehand though). Sometimes, we hang out in the nearby arcade. Rarely, we go to the nearby seaside (as the city is next to the coast) just to hang out, but crossing the really wide eight-lane roads cutting off the seaside makes it kinda rare.

I’ve often found myself in places I shouldn’t be, like off-limits areas in the nearby commercial buildings, even managed to sneak inside one of the rooms of the nearby motel that one time. There’s a lot of things to get lost in around our area and I took it for granted that most things are just a short walk away.

The place I hung out the most, however, is a bookstore that was just across the road from the end of our street. And since this bookstore is also near the arcade, I’d choose one or the other depending on my mood, and remaining allowance.

I thought the term sounded familiar, and it is!

It came into our language via the Spanish, and came to mean some sort of an ogre who tends to hang out on trees, smoking cigars. Yikes!

The alien impersonator was me all along!‌ HAHAHA!!!

I mean, seriously, I am not a native English speaker, but even with my weird English accent, it only became weirder if I try to speak fast while keeping the emphasis on that ‘t’ at the end of “hot”. My native accent also probably lends to that glottal stop taking over the ‘t’ and merging it with the upcoming ‘p’ sound. It also helps that the two sounds (glottal stop and the bilabial ‘p’) are on opposite sides of my mouth, so I‌ can quickly sound them in succession. The end result sounded to me like an exaggerated “posh British” rendition, as if the alien watched way too much‌ BBC before invading Earth.

It just sounded way weirder than I otherwise would be. I can’t really describe it.

I didn’t get it until I started trying to say “hot potato” in the middle of a sentence, like “Look out! Hot potato incoming!”

The ‘t’ in “hot” became more and more like a glottal stop as my tongue started to touch the gums of my top front teeth less and less.

Investigators also spoke to the priest, who said the woman had been told at an earlier Mass on Sunday that she had not fulfilled all the requirements for receiving communion and could not participate, officials said.

When she returned for a later service, the priest says she “attacked” him and “grabbed” a tray of communion wafers from his hands, the affidavit says.

“She informed the priest she did in fact do the steps necessary and is now accepted by God, thus, granting her the ability to participate,” an affidavit reports.

That’s when the priest “became upset and tried to ram the ‘cookie’ in her mouth,” she told police.

“In response … she attempted to grab another communion bread which (the priest) was holding. However, (he) grabbed her and bit her arm,” the affidavit says.

AFAIK, the priest does have the power to refuse communion to someone. But then again, a quick online search to confirm this gave me the following:

Can. 912 Any baptized person not prohibited by law can and must be admitted to holy communion.

Can. 915 Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

Can. 916 A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession unless there is a grave reason and there is no opportunity to confess; in this case the person is to remember the obligation to make an act of perfect contrition which includes the resolution of confessing as soon as possible.

(Taken from https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann879-958_en.html#TITLE_III)

Not a Roman Catholic priest, let alone a Roman Catholic canon lawyer, but I think any baptized Catholic can take communion unless:

1. They are excommunicated.
2. Explicitly declared to be barred from participating in the sacrament of communion.
3. Obviously manifesting grave sin.

And then, Catholics are enjoined to refrain from participating from mass or receiving communion if they’re aware of committing a grave sin and haven’t yet done the sacrament of confession.

The only way I can justify the priest’s prior actions given all this is if the woman has been explicitly (visible to all the people in the church) committing grave sin. Or is known by the congregation that the woman is committing grave sin.

However, from the other places, it seems that the advice is to privately convince the person to refrain from participating in communion. Assuming the priest has done this in that previous mass, and the woman escalated the situation by reaching for the communion wafers, I could understand the priest going wild. Afterall, the priest has a duty to ensure the sanctity of the communion wafers.

That the priest’s first impulse in this situation is to bite the woman still is funny to me though. Was his hands and arms already otherwise occupied?

Of course, all I’ve said above (TL;DR: the priest can possibly bar someone from participating in the holy communion, that the priest has a duty of keeping the sanctity of the consecrated hosts) still doesn’t excuse the priest from being charged with assault and battery. I feel this part needs to be said out loud.

And since I’m already quoting the Roman Catholic Canon law, I think this one’s most apropos:

Can. 909 A priest is not to neglect to prepare himself properly through prayer for the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and to offer thanks to God at its completion.

Oh, yeah! It can vary from place to place and even from school to school even in the same place! There were even people saying that they can guess from which school someone graduated from based on how they do cursive. I think that’s just nuts.

My cursive nowadays is just reserved for when I‌ really need to write fast, and would tend towards some kind of a personal shorthand than any sort of legibility. 😅

What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.

Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there’s no shame in sucking at it.

Oh, yeah! Sometimes context helps, but if you can’t even read a single word, you’re just out of luck!

I remember coming across a similar comment chain, and someone brought out cursive Hanzi, and everyone lost their minds.

IIRC, cursive capital Q is supposed to start way down, so that it’d look like an O with a broken infinity symbol in its butt, like this:

The direction of the strokes in the image is not how I learned it, though. Stroke 1 for the capital starts where stroke 2 starts, but going clockwise until just past where it starts, then smoothly start the second stroke (same direction as shown in the image).

However, I can see how it can look like a more flowy 2 and how people can say “yeah, that’s a capital Q.” Heck, cursive lowercase r barely looks like an r but people kinda get it.

Lol~‌ Thanks.

I grew up at a time when cursive is a requirement–not just for one class, but for all classes in primary school. I remember our teachers checking our notebooks and making comments on our handwriting. All our compositions and essays were required to be in cursive, and they check for penmanship, keeping margins and all that. It was a whole lot of effort for something that I rarely get to use in higher levels. I switched to print in HS, when cursive is no longer required.

I tried writing them so that I can post this. I might have failed in making them both cursive and legible, lol!

That very last line is my attempt at writing at speed. 😅

You got me writing ‘vacuum’ and ‘anniversary’ in cursive, and got so conscious about how I write it that my speed crawled to a stop and my handwriting got even worse than what I started with, lol!

In casual writing, I separate out v, w and other letters that are trickier to write in full cursive. Same goes with t, i, j so that I can do the crosses and dots before moving on.

All those seems to have done the job of making my cursive a bit easier to read. All hell breaks loose when I need to write really fast though.

EDIT: stupid formatting, lol!

Yep. Plus how it’s rendered depends on which frontend you’re using. I’m using Alexandrite, and I swear, the way it shows the name of the community makes you think that the tagline or whatever it is is indeed part of the community name (it’s not). So, yeah, it’s not really your fault, as far as I see it.

Of course, however, learning how Lemmy works is pretty helpful in situations like this, but we all kinda learn it as we go.

Hahahaha~! Well, glad to have helped you then!

It’s kinda screwy anyways, I would have also thought it’s part of the URL myself had I not checked the community on its home instance before.

That’s not the one you’re looking for, huh? Best of luck! I hope someone remembers what community that one is.

I think you’re referring to !tenforward@lemmy.world

In Alexandrite, it’s shown like this:

Sure, sure. Whatever you say.

I suppose that the vitriol surrounding this topic is tied to the innate biological pressures towards procreation. Life is supposed to the ultimate good. People like us who have doubted this assertion are not only fighting against long-held societal norms, but also biological instincts. It also doesn’t help that having a child (or not) is one of the most impactful personal decisions one can ever make. Having a child not only affects your life, your partner, but most especially, the child themself! It’s something that will permanently change one’s life, and those around them for better or for worse.

I’m not even against people who choose to have children (the so-called “breeders” in antinatalist communities). If their lives are enriched by having children and forming a family, more power to them! Even more so if they can provide the child with what they would need to thrive, or at least survive in this world.

Perhaps this trend of growing sentiment towards childfree lifestyles is yet one of those bio-sociological mechanisms driving us to having more quality children instead of just having more children. Children that would be able to live better, more fulfilling lives than I can ever hope for, and can thrive in the shitty world we’ve left for them.

I tried to give you an overview of how someone might be sympathetic to their views, but I should have known that you’re not receptive to such.

And yeah, if you give me money for the expenses needed for that all-curing therapy, sure, why not? However, you might need that for yourself.