It honestly seems like Discord administrators themselves (and I’m talking the global ones here) don’t seem to care about the rules that they have, because when I reported someone for being under the age that you are supposed to be to legally use the chat service, they didn’t actually do anything about it when I gave them concrete proof that the user was beneath the age of thirteen. This user decided to come back to the channel that I participate in on Discord and begin chatting again, which, as of the time that I saw him on it, effectively killed the entire conversation at the time that he attempted to participate. Even though this rule is in place due to COPPA, why even bother having the rule that you have to be thirteen years of age or older to use Discord if you’re not actually going to enforce the rule that… well, you have to be thirteen years of age or older to use Discord? It makes no sense. Make it make sense, Discord. Really now. The rule is fairly useless.

I was going to write about something else here, but then I wanted to bring this up before I actually forgot to.

Normally, it’s supposed to be a bannable offense when a user too young attempts to use Discord to chat.

We’ve been having to wear our coats around here. This isn’t… normally something that has to happen too often, at least comparatively and statistically speaking compared to some of the other colder states. However, it has been just cold enough that Bub and I haven’t been walking to the nearby park as much as I’m sure he might otherwise like, simply because… well, it’s actually been that cold, and the park is just close enough to where we live for us to be able to walk to it, so by the time we got there we’d already have exposed ourselves to the winds that this kind of weather tends to bring, and then there’s the walk back.

And these walks are supposed to be enjoyable, so I’m just waiting for it to warm up a bit before we resume.

When I was a young child, every adult that lived in my household smoked cigarettes.

I distinctly remember being bullied, and made fun of, because my clothes smelled like cigarette smoke no matter how thoroughly they were washed. Peers of mine that I wanted to be friends with were actually told by their parents that they were not allowed to play with me, or befriend me, because of how… thoroughly I smelled like cigarette smoke. They made sure to let me know this. I knew that I smelled like cigarette smoke because I could smell it on my clothes even after they had been washed. This continued to persist well into high school, although I did manage to make some friends who would associate with me during lunch and while we were on campus together. (I think by that point, people just assumed that I was the one smoking and that was why I smelled like cigarette smoke, rather than the smell being secondhand as a result of the adults that I was living with smoking in the house. I didn’t realize that, or even think about it, until well after I had graduated high school, but it would not surprise me if a large swath of the student body had just begun to assume that I was the one smoking at that point or speculated that I had just picked up the habit myself.)

One of the memories that stands out in my mind was me, as a young child, asking my mother — who was one of the household members that smoked the most — if she would “stop smoking so (that) I could have friends”. It pains me to think about that, let alone the fact that as a young child I felt like I had to ask her this one small thing, something that was, comparatively speaking, reasonable. It wasn’t as though I was asking her for extravagant material possessions. I was just asking her if she would stop smoking so that I could stop going to school smelling like cigarette smoke. Unsurprisingly, her response to me was to refuse, and then to tell me that she too was bullied at school, and to try to console me about being bullied… when she could have helped mitigate the fact I was being bullied, and that students were being told by their parents not to associate with me or to be my friend, because my clothes reeked of the stench of cigarette smoke.

My mother was diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor at the age of fifty-nine stemming from lung cancer, likely brought about from decades of smoking. She died at the age of sixty, a year out from initial diagnosis.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/27/health/us-tobacco-age-21-trnd/index.html

For those of you who don’t already know, the federal “smoking age” was raised to twenty-one years of age in the United States in December. To be able to buy any product containing tobacco (or to legally be able to use it), you need to be twenty-one years of age, which is a deviation from the prior age of eighteen. This is a change that I welcome, although I wish that cigarettes would not be sold at all due to the fact that they are a known carcinogen and contribute greatly to the incidences of lung cancer that we see, particularly in later life. As I’ve said in previous posts, if people insist on wanting to… consume, or imbibe, nicotine, there have to be safer ways to bring it into their bodies than smoking cigarettes given the comparatively astronomically high rates of lung cancer that occur as an almost direct result of years, or even decades, worth of smoking.

Humorously, given my experience with smokers, I have never thought that marijuana has been the “gateway drug”. In individuals who have been susceptible to it, I have thought that cigarettes have been. But I understand the pathophysiology behind addiction better than at least many other people out there, and I’ve seen how addictive nicotine can be and has been in at least three people that I have known in person so far.

Although this might put addicted smokers in a bind who are over the age of eighteen but under the age of twenty-one given that they will no longer legally be allowed to smoke, I see this change in law being nothing but for the best(, as do I look forward to a day when cigarettes are no longer manufactured to begin with).