Event Overview

June 1st marks the beginning of Pride Month for many countries around the world, and we're going to have our own little celebration here on Tildes!

I have come up with ten different discussion topics centered on sharing, celebrating, and understanding queer life and experiences. I will post one every four days throughout the month of June.

Everyone is welcome to participate. This includes allies! You do not need to identify as LGBT in order to join in the topics. Also, I will use "queer" and "LGBT" interchangeably as umbrella terms to refer to all minority sexualities and gender identities. These are intended to be explicitly inclusive.

Schedule

I won't reveal everything upfront, but with each post I will give a teaser for what's next:

June 1st: Introductions and Playlist
June 4th: (teaser: you might have to look back in time a little bit)
June 7th:
June 10th:
June 13th:
June 16th:
June 19th:
June 22nd:
June 25th:
June 28th:

#1 - Introductions and Playlist

This is the inaugural post -- the beginning of our little month-long discussion topic Pride Parade!

There are two tasks for this post:

1. Introduce yourself to everyone and share any information about yourself that you feel comfortable sharing. Who are you? How do you identify? What’s important for people to know about you? Are you excited about anything? Are you doing anything for Pride Month IRL?

2. A good Pride Month needs a good Pride Playlist! Link to some of your favorite queer-themed songs or tracks from LGBT artists so that we can crowdsource an awesome collection of music to listen to throughout the month.

If for whatever reason you would not like to see these topics in your feed, add pride month at tildes to your personal tag filters.

Not sure if this is a "home improvement" topic, but I didn't see anywhere else relevant this would fit so I am going to drop it here.

I've lived in the same place for around 12 years now. Before I moved in, the place was owned by one other person for around 10 years. The place is probably ~20 years old. I have two toilets in the house. About 5 years after I moved in, the flushing mechanisms on one of the toilets stopped working and I inspected it and it looked like the bobber/float switch was busted to the point where when it got to max height, the water flow wouldn't shut off.

I pulled up a couple articles on the internet and it seemed like the parts were pretty straight forward to replace. So I went to Lowes, got the replacement parts needed and a few hours later, toilet was fixed. No big deal. About a year later the other toilet started acting up in the same manner so I just did the same thing. Both toilets had the original parts in them. They were all metal parts. The replacement parts were a brand called "FluidMaster" and I didn't really think much of it at the time. The replacement parts were almost entirely plastic.

So fast forward to today, and I have replaced the innards of the toilets on a fairly routine basis. It seems like every 18 months or so, I am having to replace the innards of the toilets because the float switch starts to fail. I came home from a day vacation on Saturday evening to find that one of the toilets was running and for god knows how long. I open the lid and sure enough, bobber is at the top, but the float switch hadn't disabled the water flow so the toilet just keeps running. I turned off the water to it and made a note that I'll have to go back to Lowes and pick up more parts. This will be the fourth or fifth replacement I've had to do on it.

What's going on here? Why are these float switches in these kits breaking so frequently? Does anyone else have this problem? Am I just buying the wrong parts continuously? Is there a better set of parts that I can buy to correct this issue?

Thanks to an emergency that resulted in an unexpected surgery, I have reached my health insurance maximum out-of-pocket expense. For those with sane healthcare systems, it basically means that I will not be charged for any additional healthcare I receive for the rest of the year as long as it's covered (i.e. no cosmetics or "just for funsies"). I'm expecting a $6,000 bill in the mail, so I'm looking to take as much advantage of this as I possibly can, starting with some minor issues that I've been sitting on for a while.

I'll have to ask my doctor for their referral for anything, but I was wondering if there were any preventative healthcare services I should specifically ask for? I'm already going to be making an appointment for a regular physical - something I'm ashamed to say that I don't regularly do. I'm going to ask the doctor this same question but I figured I'd come up with a checklist just to make sure I don't miss out on anything.