Have you ever speculated as to why you get banned so often?

Right now, a little bit of Low Orbit.

I use so-called "eternal pencils" now. They come in various "hardness" ratings (like pencils: B, HB, H, 2H, etc.) but even my "softest" (read: darkest with broadest tip) has been in use now for a couple of years without noticeable wear on the tip. That one is guaranteed to be usable for a decade. My hardest will likely stop working when the sun dies in four billion years or so.

I've tried them. I still prefer the compressed ones, but they're pretty good, yes.

I have lived in small towns (smallest: about 3000 population) and in big cities (largest: about 14,000,000 population). I have family who live so rustically that even a small town is an hour's drive away.

I like all three situations for different reasons, albeit for the rustic life only in short bursts of two months or so.

Overall I'd say I'm a "city girl", but if I have a decent Internet connection I probably would enjoy small town life more since I'm aging and slowing down. There would be some adjustment, of course, to not being near hot spots and good restaurants and such, but it would also give me the peace and quiet to actually catch up on reading the books I've accumulated over the years and getting practice time in on the instruments I want to learn.

So you're only missing out if you really want those things. But don't think that you're going to have more time to do things in the city. As plenty of others have pointed out, the realities of traffic in most cities are such that you'll face long transit times anyway, although if you live in a place that has actual public transit that gets mitigated quite a bit; I can cross the megacity I live in now from extreme ends in just over an hour; most of the places I want to go I can be at in under 15 minutes, the majority of these being even in walking distance.

Cousin. Did I typo that?

Yes. At work, for example, I make a cup in the morning about 10AM and then keep refilling and drinking until about an hour before quitting time.

I get it straight from a collective representing the farmers in Liubao. There are some Internet vendors who sell it, though, so you don't have to move to China. I can't vouch for any of them though since, well, I don't use their services.

You don't. You finish your cup, you put the leaves back in, you pour hot water over top.

I cycle among these four randomly:

Converting $20 to local currency, I'd probably go with this:

This is so-called "Liubao Tea", a kissing cousin to pu'er tea. I did a review of my first batch(es) and it has rapidly (literally with one round of brews) reached the top of my circulation in teas.

The depicted tea is one aged from 1991 (the one I reviewed was tea stems from 2003) and is of one of the higher grades. A 100g package will set you back about $15 or so at today's exchange rate. 100g is about 15-20 servings, and each serving can be brewed multiple times (even my tea stems can be brewed four times without loss of flavour), so it's quite the bargain.

Save it for a time when you really need something warm, rich, and comforting. It will last forever as long as you store it in a cool, dry, dark space. And personally I think it's a bargain at 15 bucks.

Yeah, welcome to my world.

And it's not just with the loud fundamentalists who hold these attitudes. I completely cut off a friend of almost 20 years who seemed to be one of those "sane" and "quiet" Christians when, in a period of mild intoxication, he let spill everything he actually believed.

He believed women should stay at home keeping house and raising children. Women should not have careers or aspirations beyond that. He believed that all of his friends were going to Hell to be tortured for eternity. (He was fine with this. Absolutely copacetic.) He believed that victims of natural disaster and of crime deserved it because obviously God was doing this to them for a reason.

And that's when I realized that even the "quiet" and "non-extreme" Christians can have horrors concealed beneath their placid exteriors. So now I give very large side-eye when people think their Christianity is so important to their life that they have to bring it up at all in circles where it's not relevant.