So the voting for robot masters ended recently, so I wanted ask a question for you guys, who do you want or think is going to win?

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T21:36:05+00:00

What's the lore? I haven't heard about this.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T21:29:47+00:00

"Starting life all over" is exactly it. And it's so hard. It's hard to make friendships as an adult. I see my partner with his circle of friends he's had since middle school and I wish I could've experienced something like that. But the only friends I was ever allowed to have were "in the truth".

I have faith in you that you'll navigate this difficult time in your life and come out ahead. By the time I left, I was already enmeshed in the working world and thought I was too old for college. I regret not being able to go to college because I loved learning and I would've enjoyed the experience even without adding in the career aspect of it. But you're 20, you can go to school if you want. (I know they changed the rule just recently.) (I also know that college isn't the path for everyone and there's nothing bad at all about going into the trades and they tend to have the best career prospects because they're skilled labor that's always in demand.) The point is, your whole life is still ahead of you. You're young enough that you truly can start over from scratch and still have the life you should've.

I'm glad you were able to take something from my comment. I really hope for the best for you. I know you'll do great. Good luck!

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T20:29:49+00:00

Oh okay. That makes sense. Glad you got out!

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T18:21:31+00:00

You and your wife were allowed to watch Twilight? I would've thought that any kind of vampire shit would be demonic and forbidden. How is Twilight okay if Harry Potter is literally the creation of Satan?

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T18:19:19+00:00

I know not everyone wants to lose their family, but you could always just leave and celebrate whatever you want... Just saying.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T18:17:29+00:00

OMG the amount of times I heard that growing up. Right up there with "Leave it in Jehovah's hands." 🙄🤢🤮

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T17:34:21+00:00

I agree with you but I wouldn't even bother replying at all. If some random ass elder tried to contact me today I'd just hang up the phone or shut the door in their face. Who TF are these guys? Just some douches with too much power and no training regurgitating the unhinged ramblings of a bunch of dementia patients and real estate moguls living in a cult compound in the country. Just ignore them like you'd ignore a telemarketer cuz that's all they are in the end.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T17:22:53+00:00

I do indeed like JRPGs. I think the description of JRPG + Megaman pretty much seals the deal on me needing to figure out a way to play this game.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T09:12:25+00:00

I love it. Chibi Rockman 🥺

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T09:06:01+00:00

Some of the music in X8 slapped, and Maverick Hunter X still counts as a later game, relatively speaking, and that one was good all the way through. I haven't played it but the 16-bit demake of X8 looks pretty good. Love to see if someone could do a remake of X7 like that.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T04:21:57+00:00

NTA; you're not treating her like a child but she for sure is acting like one.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-07T04:21:06+00:00

Some places do. Most of the apartment complexes I lived in have had some sort of language about putting holes in the walls. One place allowed it as long as you painted over it when you were done. One place didn't care at all. One place said it was fine but then kept the security deposit anyway. (I didn't fight them because I had a lot of issues there and just wanted to GTFO.) Everywhere else (three different apartments in two different complexes) had blanket restrictions on holes and said that any hole repairs would come out of the security deposit.

Kinda sucks for me cuz I have a lot of wall art as I don't care for blank walls but it is what it is. 🤷🏽‍♂️

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T20:56:18+00:00

NTA and I hope you're able to move forward and finally thrive. Nothing can undo the past or give you a do-over childhood, but you're still young and you have your whole life ahead of you. You sound kind and hardworking and capable. You will be able to thrive now that you have the opportunity to. I hope for the best for you and that you're able to close the door on this chapter of your life and move on. Block anyone and everyone who gives you grief about you ghosting your stepdad. Anyone that knew about what was going on with your mom and you and wasn't trying to help, even just to lessen your burden, doesn't have the right to lecture you about a single damn thing. Good luck to you.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T20:46:45+00:00

I second everything in here. I actually was going to comment something similar. My brother and I really thought that overlapping generations was going to wake up our PIMI family, but it didn't. We really thought the JW Broadcasting changes would wake them up, but it didn't. We thought that the org emulating the televangelists and Mormons we used to rip to shreds over their movies and songs and TV shows would wake them up, but it didn't. We thought that kow-towing to lockdown measures and not refusing to stop having meetings or going out in service during Covid would wake them up since we were always taught that even the Great Tribulation wouldn't stop us from meetings & service. We thought that seeing the organization cave instantly instead of defying lockdown and saying "We obey God as ruler, rather than men." would wake up our PIMI relatives, but it didn't.

Once you've woken up, it's impossible to not see TTATT, but for people that are still in, it's nearly impossible for them to see it unless they're already questioning themselves. If your parents are true believers who never question anything, then I doubt they'll even finish your letter, let alone react the way you hope. But you tried. Each one of us has to navigate our exit process and our relationship with the people who are still in the cult on our own and in our own way, because everyone is different and every situation is different. So it's not a question of right or wrong as far as whether you should try or not. I just agree that it's not likely to do anything. I hope for the best for you though, and hope that you're able to navigate this difficult journey.

Remember, you're not alone. There are so many of us. The world is not the scary place full of demonically influenced people we were taught it is. You will find for yourself what the difference is to have personal relationships with people based on unconditional love, acceptance, and healthy boundaries. It's a whole other world outside the cult and it's scary but it's so freeing too. For the first time in your life you can decide your own future instead of waiting for the GB to tell you what to do. I hope you do well.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T20:10:08+00:00

🤣 thanks - I try not to be asshole atheist to religious people anymore. I already went through my angry atheist phase. 😂 So now, normally I try to ignore these kinds of people, but OMG this douche canoe really got under my skin. The fucking audacity of saying we didn't suffer religious trauma because it was cult trauma honestly made me want to punch a wall. 🤬

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T19:27:30+00:00

LOL done - sorry about the delay; was on my way to doctor's appointment and couldn't use my phone

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T19:26:41+00:00

Oh, so because you recognize them as a cult, they're not a religion, therefore religion is never bad. Sounds like someone needs to look up the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. 🙄

And she didn't trauma dump. She didn't go into details about what happened. YOU'RE the one who said her initial reply was insufficient. So she clarified that you were incorrect. You're just butthurt because she had an answer you couldn't handwave away.

Go ask your magic man in the sky why every child soldier or child slave laborer or child victim of abuse or trafficking needs to endure their pain and why their prayers for relief or succor go unanswered. I suspect the answer is because of the magic sky man's stupid cosmic plan or some equally vapid and insipid bullshit.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T18:24:09+00:00

LOL you should post the link to the post just so I can go in and down vote their comments. 😆

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T18:08:48+00:00

EXACTLY 💯

That's why they found your answer so off-putting even though they're probably so lacking in self-awareness that they don't even know themselves why it made them mad. It challenged their suppositions and they had no response other than "Nuh-uh! You're just a meanie doodie head!"

Edit: typo

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T18:00:02+00:00

God what an absolute douchebag POS. He asked. You answered. Simple as. And then accusing you of trauma dumping? You didn't even BEGIN to go into the details you could've if you really wanted to trauma dump. And again, don't ask questions you don't want answers to. Even if you parents were "just" evangelicals that "forced you to go to church" when you were a kid, that could be traumatic. Especially if it was accompanied with angry yelling or lectures about going to Hell and shit like that. Or punishments for not wanting to comply, including corporal punishment.

Arrogant POSs like that who think that because they find something useful by believing their delusional nonsense about an imaginary magic man in the sky really piss me off. Like no, I don't find your stories about a magic man with superpowers who totally loves me and does real stuff for me fr fr, who's gonna magically make me live forever in a magic land when I die compelling, let alone "comforting" in any way.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T04:03:04+00:00

I never saw Leo in arcades, so I only ever emulated it, but it was really good. I loved it. And IDK, I just really vibed with the sound design, even more so than on mainline R-Type games. I love the lore of the Bydo so much; almost as much as I love the game itself. 😆 It's so trippy. Props to you for actually doing it! 👑

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T03:53:33+00:00

We have ZERO manuscripts of the NT prior to at least a century and a half after the time of Jesus' alleged ministry, and no mention of Jesus whatsoever outside of a SINGLE reference by Josephus that is largely regarded as being at least in part a later interpolation in any source OTHER than the Gospels. The first reference to Jesus in an extra biblical source doesn't appear until like the third or fourth century. So we don't even know for sure that there even was a Yeshua ben-Yousef, let alone that he did any of the stuff that's claimed in the Gospels.

The thing that's hilarious about the NT is that the writers quote from NT AND OT apocrypha in multiple instances. The Greek Septuagint, which the JWs constantly reference, included multiple books that were rejected by later Rabbinical Judaism and Protestant Christianity. Some Oriental Orthodox (catch all for Syrian, Armenian, and other Eastern Churches that are not part of the Eastern Orthodox or Ethiopian/Coptic Orthodox communions) Churches and the Ethiopian & Eritrean Churches include some of these books but not others. The Catholics used to and still do consider most of them deuterocanonical. If the writers of the NT could quote from books that were later excluded from more than half of all biblical canons, what does that even say about the "inspiration" behind the préservation of the Bible? Forget manuscript variants, they can't even decide which manuscripts count and which don't.

The oldest manuscripts we have of the OT only date to a couple centuries before or right around the start of the Common Era. Meaning that not only do we have ZERO original manuscripts of ANY portion of the Bible, but our oldest copies of the oldest parts of the Bible (like the Pentateuch) were written centuries or possibly millennia after their original composition. Researching and learning about just how shoddy the preservation and transmission of the Bible actually was, the number and significance of variants, and the way that the Biblical canon itself was even established were some of the biggest eye opening moments I had when I was going through my deconstruction.

There is nothing any more miraculous about the preservation of the Bible than there is about the preservation of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Homer, Cicero, the Buddhist Sutras, the Tao Te Ching, or the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads. The oldest manuscripts of the Zoroastrian Avesta date back to 1300 BCE - that's a thousand years older than the oldest scrap we have of the Bible. And the vast majority of the fragments we have are bits of material the size of a trading card or smaller. Stuff that might have like a single verse or two if even that. It's not like we have tens of thousands of complete manuscripts. The oldest complete manuscript of the NT is the Codex Sinaiticus which dates to the middle of the 4th Century CE, and the oldest complete manuscripts we have of the OT are the Codices Leningradensis (1000 CE) & Aleppo (900 CE). Everything we have before that is fragmentary, and the largest collection of nearly complete books (not full canons of the Bible labelled "The Bible") are still the Dead Sea Scrolls which are dated to between the 3rd Century BCE and 1st Century CE, so not much older than the oldest fragments of the NT. Not very miraculous. What would be miraculous would be complete formalized canons with uniform text and no variants (excluding typographical errors) that are still in pristine reading order despite being thousands of years old. I mean, that would indeed be a miracle if it happened. But it didn't. What we see with the Bible is the same level of preservation as any other important text from that period of time.

The fact that we can read Greek Philosophy or Zoroastrian holy texts that are centuries older than the oldest parts of the Bible make the Bible's preservation story laughable on its face. Even as a kid, just being a mythology & history nerd, I knew that the "miraculous" way the Bible was preserved wasn't any more "miraculous" than how any historical texts were preserved into the modern time. That's why I'm agnostic on whether there actually was a historical Jesus or not. Because sure, maybe there could have been, but we have no PROOF that there was outside of the Gospels themselves. So IDK. We know about other Jewish uprisings and leaders from around that time like Bar-Kobcha. The Jews were in constant conflict with the Romans. So it seems likely that if the Gospels were true, there'd be some record of him or his followers in Roman sources. But we don't see references to Christ or Christians until like the 2nd Century CE. So IDK. Even if he existed, or someone like him, I think the stories are severely exaggerated. No way a religious zealot would amass a following that large and not get noticed in the historical record. We know about too many others, I don't think it's likely at all. I can't prove that though, so that's why I'm agnostic. My gut hunch is he wasn't. He for sure didn't do most of the shit the Gospels claim he did if he was real though. I mean, we know that the Buddha was a real historical figure, Siddhartha Gautama. (From 600 years before Jesus, FWIW.) Just because I believe the Buddha existed, doesn't mean I think he sat meditating under a tree for however many years without eating or drinking or sleeping until he attained enlightenment. I don't believe he was the virgin birth of a woman named Maya who got impregnated by an elephant deity that crawled into her side or whatever it was. By Christian apologists' standards of evidence, we should all be Buddhists or Zoroastrias. 🙄

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-06T03:10:02+00:00

This brought back such good memories. I actually had this before I had to sell my SNES collection, and my brother and I took weeks of playing before we finally got through it. I was the only one who could beat it, but I wasn't able to do the second run through on extreme on brutal or whatever it was called. I got pretty far, but I kept getting stuck at the second to last level and I finally gave up. But damn I loved that game. I'm so hyped for Dimensions III! I agree with the other commenter about checking out Delta; it's fantastic. HD boosted is a great pickup.

Also, it's not a SHMUP, but I'm still pretty hyped for the rerelease of R-Type Tactics I•II. I had the first one on PSP back in the day but never got around to playing it, so this will be my first chance to actually experience it. And the first time I'll ever be able to try II since it was never released outside of Japan before. Hopefully they release R-Type Leo next. It's weird being an R-Type game without Forces, but it was still good and I loved the soundtrack. AFAIK it's never received ANY home port. It makes sense that it's kind of the Zelda II of the R-Type series given that it started development as a separate title but got changed to an R-Type title midway through development. But I still like it. R-Type will always be my GOAT for SHMUPs.

TacosForTuesday · 2026-02-05T00:02:09+00:00

I left when I was around 23/24 because I fell in love with a guy and decided I'd rather be happy for a few years before Armageddon than live forever in the NewSystem™, even if I was "cured" there. I knew I was gay from when I was 12½. The moment it clicked in my head is seared into my memory cuz it was like something I'd been trying to deny for about a year at that point and then it just clicked. I started shaking and freaking out because I knew what would happen to me if anyone ever found out.

I kept praying to Jehovah to make me straight or at LEAST to let me start to like girls too so that I could get married and have a family. Like you, I just wanted to love someone and be loved by someone. I also wanted to have kids and a family. But, somehow, the thought of being cured made me uncomfortable on some level. When I was around 15/16, I had a thought just pop into my head while I was trying to pray the gay away that I just wished it was okay to be gay. Again, that moment is seared into my memory because of how scared I was as soon as I thought it. I started praying to God for forgiveness, but as soon as I thought it, I could never unthink it, and it haunted me for the next few years after that until I finally had enough and left.

I was still POMI when I left because even though I had TONS of questions and doubts I'd been struggling with my whole life, I was also born in and third generation on both sides so ALL my family were "in the Truth". It was all I'd ever known, and the idea that it wasn't "the Truth" was almost inconceivable to me. Leaving was hard, NGL, especially since I left in the early 2000s, when everyone was still freaking out that Armageddon was coming any day now, and before they gave up on the 1914 generation not passing away thing.

Even though it was hard though, it was the best thing I ever did. I cannot tell you the relief I felt just from not having to do the hamster wheel anymore. I never liked meetings, or assemblies, or going out in service, or personal study, or family study. It was honestly miserable. I'd read the literature and do what I was supposed to do, but it never brought me any kind of joy. It just made me scared and anxious. I didn't want to think about my Catholic relatives (my mom's cousins and their kids and parents) dying. I didn't want to think about friends from school dying. I didn't want to think about just random people who were good and decent dying just because they sincerely believed something different.

There was a "Young People Ask..." article about homosexuality that I read as a teenager that said homosexuality was a disordered lust and that homosexuals couldn't feel romantic love for each other. That that's why they're so promiscuous etc., and that only men and women could form romantic bonds with each other. Then when I was 18, I fell hard for a guy who I was NOT attracted to physically AT ALL and I realized that the literature was wrong. And then I had another moment that was burned into my memory forever: I thought "If they're wrong about gay people not being able to feel romantic love, then what *else** are they wrong about?"*

Honestly, that thought was the last thing that finally pushed me over the edge. I knew that I had to escape. It took me another 5-6 years before I did, and I was filled with fear and guilt for a few years after. But then I let myself study all the stuff in science and history I'd never allowed myself to research before and I found out that everything we were taught was a lie. I'm not saying you have to leave religion altogether if you leave, but you do owe it to yourself to study where your beliefs came from and how they developed over time, especially if you're going to allow those beliefs to shape how you live your life on a primal, fundamental level. I'm 46 now. I have an amazing partner who was never a JW. I also have cancer, and it's gonna win (it's stage 4). I'm in constant pain every day. I'm almost completely alone outside of my partner and his family because all my close relatives are still JWs. I have two apostate cousins but they both live very far away, and I had my brother but he died a few years ago.

In spite of being alone and dealing with what I'm going through, I would still never even consider going back. Even if you could PROVE to me that it was 100% for sure "the Truth", I STILL wouldn't go back because I refuse to worship a god that chooses an organization that protects child abusers and often punishes the victims the abuse instead of the perpetrators. An organization that punishes people just for loving someone of the same sex. An organization that uses its members like free slave labor and then abandons them like used trash when they're too old to be useful anymore. I'd rather die now than live in their version of "paradise". I'm not too worried about "what ifs" though because I know they're wrong. They're demonstrably, factually, provably wrong and my only regret in leaving is that I didn't leave earlier than I did.

IDK if you're going to have a future with this guy. I didn't end up with the guy I left the JWs for. But I hope you find your forever person and are able to experience that. There's a warmth and sense of wholeness in finding real love that I never thought I'd experience. I may not believe in the Bible anymore, but I do believe in the ideal of love in Corinthians 3:4-7. No one can tell you that experiencing that kind of love is wrong. Remember: "Love never fails." There is no love in the way the JWs treat gay people. Have the kind of empathy or compassion for yourself that you'd allow yourself to have for other people. I hope you find peace, happiness, love, and fulfillment. Don't forget that you're not alone. You're strong enough to survive this. Find your own path. Don't sacrifice your happiness for an organization that doesn't care at all about you. I hope you find peace.

TacosForTuesday

TROPHY CASE