Shambling Shapes

I didn’t sign for a weird thing.

I was going to go on a first date when the guy asked me to sign an NDA. He was attempting to be a content creator on YouTube, tiktok, etc., and thought he needed to start “protecting his reputation”. I declined the date.

I was raised Catholic so was used to some amount of men wearing robes, chanting in dead languages, drawing sigils in the air, and ringing bells to signal the presence of a spirit. Then in high school I went to a service with some charismatic renewal Catholics and learned just how vanilla mainstream Catholics are.

I previously thought those 1940s Southern Revivalist churches you see on TV were an exaggeration. Now I think they might actually underestimate how intense those sorts of people can get.

People have recognized that species changed over time since the BC era. There are records of such from the Latin/Greek area and the Islamic area and Chinese area. Two dudes didn’t magically come up with evolution from scratch at the same time.

New people who don’t know wtf they are doing because we don’t have structured training and our written documentation is piss poor and we’re overall bad at helping them. Some random new college grad botched a multi-million dollar program and come to find out, they weren’t getting any meaningful mentoring or guidance.

The thought is we will be better at seeing these sorts of gaps earlier if we’re having real conversations, not just the routine PowerPoint presentations sanitized to show all is good.

Could a team train and mentor via virtual interaction only? Sure. Can this particular team? Nope.

Taylor Swift started out around the same time as the Hannah Montana show, so not that one.

Taylor Swift and her team have too much business savvy to follow a 00s Disney show as a template, so not number two.

Trying to cram real life people and things into “jungian archetypes” is reductionist and the online, self-taught philosophist bro’s version of astrology.

I was issued a monitor in the early days of COVID when they were sending us home to work. We already had laptops. They had literally pallettes of monitors, people were just grabbing one or two. Tracking was through the honor system, writing name and number taken on a piece of paper.

Now they’re having us go back into the office ~3 days a week and want us to return the monitors. Lol, no.

Lol, jail time. You’re funny. It was called a low-level misdemeanor. $500 fine and he went about his merry way.

A man went on a misogynistic tirade and punched me.

He wanted some thing we were out of stock of. Then he wanted some other thing for free because we were out of stock of the first and I told him I could give a discount but not free. He got increasingly mad. I offered to have the store call him when we got the thing in stock, referred him to another store where they did have it in stock, offered coupons, nothing deescalated him. Lots of screaming, calling me bitch, cunt, whore, etc. He reached over the counter to punch me, which fortunately took a lot of power out of the punch and gave me enough time to shift so he hit my arms instead of my face (mostly).

I hit the panic button early on but the response was a couple min too late.

He was arrested and pled guilty without me having to talk in court, so that was nice.

That’s too much cool for a buddy cop movie. You need a prime and a sidekick, a The Rock and a Kevin Hart.

A movie with Rihanna and Nyong’o would just be two impossibly beautiful people being perfect.

Yee, I drink it because I like the taste and the routine of making it. I drink more coffee than I do tea, but tea still has it’s place.

A stylized topographic map and some rainmeter visualizers.

I find YouTube is less attractive than a year ago. Ads are more invasive and more difficult to remove. Recommendations skew heavily to the rage-inducing, e.g., I watched one late night comedy sketch making fun of Jordan Peterson and then my feed was full of clips of him spewing his hot trash for weeks.

I gave up on reddit earlier in the year when all the API / sub blackout / forced mod removal stuff was going on.

Freemium apps seem to be pushing ads more and more, which makes me more resistant to using them.

If what I read online is true, the days of investors throwing money at anything tech related are slowing down. Which means some companies that have never had to be profitable before now must find a way to do so. Which means tightening up subscriptions and/or more ads.

You mean Max Steel?

Edit: ty for the upvotes, kind strangers. This was the lowest rated film I could find that looked like something I would watch if I were high enough.

The only thing that kept me from trying to claw it out of my head was the fear of the roach tunneling harder as it died. Oof, not sure I would be able to pour alcohol in, worrying death would be any less than instantaneous. And I hope I never have to figure it out.

“The fifth” is American. They have the same or similar concept in other countries, they just have different names for it than “the fifth amendment”.

Plead “the fifth” in NZ and they’ll tell you that you watch too much American television.

I’m sorry, I’m going to one up you. Look away now if squeamish.

I woke up with one climbing into my ear. I ran to the bathroom, bashing into furniture and walls because feeling it wriggle around in my ear threw my sense of balance off so badly. And also, you know, panic. I jumped into the bathtub fully clothed, dropped to hands and knees to put my head under the faucet, and turned the water on full force to flush it out.

This was during college years, during a gap between semesters and I didn’t have an apartment. I was couch surfing at a friends. After that night, I left and lived in my car for a couple of days instead. There was no way I would be able to fall asleep again in that place.

Yes. I rent and my state requires that my landlord have so many based on the number of rooms and square footage.

Glad it worked out for you. For future reference, there are additional steps for grease/oil fires in the kitchen:

Turn off stove

Cover with lid

Then smother with the extinguisher, or baking soda or salt if you don’t have an extinguisher handy. Never water.

The first two steps cutoff energy and oxygen, and will minimize the splatter that the extinguisher causes.

Drinking alcohol does not always equal problematic drinking. I consider beer a hobby. I keep tasting notes on beers I try, I read books on brewing techniques and history, I search out beers with specific ingredients and of specific styles. All while staying within recommended limits for people of my age, weight, and gender.

How is that not a hobby?

Digital microscopes are very affordable. Basic models up to 1000x can be found for 50 USD.

Break one up and look at the different layers under magnification.

1. your written English is great

2. conversation does not need to be debate. What these people really want is to talk. Ask questions, like “what evidence did you find most convincing?” Odds are they won’t even notice you didn’t agree with them, they just want to be heard.

3. there doesn’t need to be a conversation at all. Drift out of these sorts of conversations or change the topic. I can’t imagine a scenario in which debating the existence of aliens with a coworker would be worth my energy.