A large percentage of those forests are monocultures grown for the paper, pulp, timber and cellulose industry. According to Global Forest Watch, in 2020 9% of land cover on Germany was natural forests but 15% was non-natural. It’s basically not very different from planting a field of corn.

Sadly a bunch of trees does not a forest make, especially if they’re not native. Most of the local wildlife will not be able to benefit from those trees for food, and there needs to be diversity in types of plants beyond just trees.

I never knew laundry could be so threatening.

This seems to imply that death is the only way we’ll ever escape that pile of clean laundry you have yet to put away.

Congrats on coming out and being your true self, that was a very brave thing to do.

Your mother, like many parents, had hopes and dreams about who you would become as a person. She’s now being faced with the prospect that those hopes and dreams are dead, that the person she thought you would become is gone. She’s going to need to grieve and from what you’ve written here it seems that process has started. Shock, denial, bargaining, some level of acceptance. I expect anger and depression might show up at some point. It doesn’t necessarily happen in sequence and can cycle too. She’s going to need some time to process, but what’s positive is she’s not outright rejecting who you are, there’s room for her to grow.

My parents weren’t hostile when I came out as gay, but I heard similar things - it’s just a phase. Are you sure? Was it something we did? Where did we go wrong? What will your life become? Over time they came to accept it and told my extended family (including my very religious Pentecostal grandmother). Everyone is now very welcoming of my wife and my parents are delighted to be grandparents to our kids. I know it’s not the same, but there is hope for things to get better, just keep being authentically you.

Gorak the Destroyer

I don’t hate on the developers, I hate on the companies that so severely understaff and burn out their teams that no one is doing proper testing anymore.

I did actually read the article shortly after commenting, but had good reason to believe they would be talking about infants anyway as I’ve some knowledge on the topic. However, the article isn’t very clear that it’s the parents making the decision on behalf of their infant, and reads a bit like the doctors are going ahead and mutilating babies without anyone’s consent. Not that I find it’s any better that parents are consenting on behalf of their children for non-medically necessary surgery.

I’m assuming this refers to surgery on infants, in which case it’s the parents who consent, not the child.

Enjoy!!

I recommend getting a heated blanket, then taking up residence under said blanket for the rest of winter.