LT

and then, two months later....

This is completly false. Rabbit shut down because they had no business model, were making no money whatsoever, and went bankrupt. What Rabbit did (host and stream remote-control virtual machines) is not inherently illegal by any means.

Hyperbeam is the exact same thing and I've been using it for years for perfectly legal activities -- you can display maps for d&d games, have youtube watch parties, play tag-team neopets, whatever you like. It has full access to the internet, so could someone do illegal things? Probably. But you could also do illegal things with your normal web browser. Not my problem.

Unlike Rabbit, Hyperbeam has a side-hustle (main-hustle?) offering more advanced virtual machines to businesses and schools, so they do actually make money and should stick around longer.

You know what else is confusing? Being told my entire life that I would be exclusively attracted to men when in fact I am a raging queer. And you’re not giving kids enough credit, if they can handle topics like ‘you have a set of earthly parents and a set of Heavenly Parents and both are real parents to you’ then they should understand the concept of being trans.

(He got called to be a mission President a year after that - when he got home it was the first time I'd attended church in since he left. I still call him my Bishop. He was, and remains, a great man.)

Anyway, it was the BoM year, so the number of lessons I skipped was non-trivial. I think I repeated the 3rd Nephi, Chapter 17 lesson alone at least six times to avoid some of the dumber ones. Sometimes the kids just wanted to play outside so we’d sneak some of the teaching aids out of the library (mostly fake crowns and other costume gear) and go to the grass. I’d tell them we were reenacting BoM scenes, but it was always just silliness. The boys loved it when I joined their stick battles and they could all gang up on me and chase me around the lawn, and the girls liked when I joined their dramas. Especially murder mysteries. They’d present me with some sort of weird 8 year old parking lot jungle juice in a paper cup, and I’d take a small sip and then spend a minute or two “dying” from poison. Sometimes I barely had to fake it. I'm pretty sure they gave me straight gasoline once.

There was a set of fraternal twins in that group, a brother and a sister, and one day the boy asked why I wasn't on a mission yet. I told him I didn't know how to answer that, and he apologized, and I told him you have nothing to apologize for. His sister looked appalled as soon as he brought it up (mission stuff is a huge Mormon taboo) but when the day was ending, she stayed behind to help me fold chairs. And when that was done she asked if she'd see me in heaven.

And it struck me how much it must have been worrying her, for her to stay late and to overcome the taboo of asking. So I told her I would do my best, and she said that had to be enough, and I gave her a hug and walked her to parents, then got behind the wheel of my ridiculous half-spackle car and bawled like a little kid. I cried so hard my shoulders hurt. Then I went to the gas station and got a hotdog.

The people making these policies aren't afraid that the kids are going to be confused. They're afraid that they won't be. That they'll look up at you, and love you, and tell you that whatever you're doing has to be enough. They're afraid that if you helped their kids be happy and live a good life, those kids would love you, and then they would have to love you too. And so to keep their hatred safe, they throw you and what you could offer their kids away. It is cowardly, and selfish, and so sickening that it is hard to look at.

And in the end, all I could do was stop looking.

“I’ve heard they can raise the temperature of the whole room by exercising.”

“Quick, think up an excuse!”

***