No one really cares about all those states in the middle of the country, right? And Republicans love anything defense-related? I propose ambitious nuclear testing in the midwest and southwest. Throw in the South too, I'll happily accept getting bombed for the greater good.

I'm a full blown alcoholic. Some days I just wake up and it's like "Fuck it, I feel like shit immediately upon opening my eyes, drinking is all that's going to happen today." And I don't even get hangovers so it's not like I wake up and need some hair of the dog, I just don't care so much that being drunk all day is preferable to being depressed all day. Note that first sentence next time you hear "Admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery."

Finding out why you drink is a big part of recovery. You don't understand it and neither do a lot of people who do it. For me, it was a lot of just growing up around a father who drank every night, insomnia, boredom, genetics, lack of a close social circle and alcohol just being an easily accessible high. Even knowing all that, I don't know why I keep doing it. I actually just fell off the wagon after being pretty certain I'd never drink again.

They say alcoholism is a disease but it's not. Using the model of disease for treatment is effective in helping people so it's a disease instead of a moral failing which is what it was seen as until about a hundred years ago. It's really more of a symptom that you're not alright and I've heard that too from psychiatrists I've seen. It's a disease in that it requires medical help and when people want to play the semantic game without understanding the nuances of why pouring Johnny Walker down your throat is on par with schizophrenia it pisses me off even if I'm willing to concede that it's a disease from some kind of medical philosophy perspective.

I kinda lost focus at the end but that doesn't mean what I said isn't true

I agree with you. I wish there was more content too. I try to post all I can but I have a problem with posting things I don't find like..super awesome interesting.

I think there just needs to be generally more people (and I'd love more diversity—I feel like we have a lot of writers and musicians but not a lot of designers...or brain surgeons...or veterinarians....)

It's sort of a catch-22. If we had more people there would be more content (even though it might be shittier?) But, if we don't have awesome content, we don't get people. We don't market or advertise (besides STICKERS!) because every time we've even thought about it, we've realized it may be detrimental to the community. I mean, if all of fatpeoplehate came here, I think it might be a bad thing.

All I can say is keep posting, keep commenting, invite people who you think would be awesome, mention Hubski around town, and we'll get there. That's what I do (and try to do better everyday) anyways.

I feel like something strange happened some time before I was born that goes beyond drugs/psychedelia. I look at pictures of Iran from the 60's and 70's, an iconic video taken at like 2am in a 7/11 in Orlando in 1987 of just people going about their random inebriated business, and how relaxed everyone seemed, how casually friendly they were. I look at all of this and I can't help but feel like as a species we missed something. Like we accidentally retarded our development at a key moment, and the past few decades have been playing catch up to where we were supposed to be. It might just be that I don't yet have kb levels of relevant geopolitical history, but I feel like the world stage that we inhabit now is somehow lesser than it was, lesser than it 'should be.' Maybe that's nonsense, but it's a fairly keen feeling I get from time to time.

I'm cyclothymic, and some of the things Amy says sounds things I'd say when Hypomanic. So I kind of don't like it because it feels like it is fetishistic destructive behaviors I could see myself partake in.

(I have seen a therapist about it, she thought I was bipolar until she realized that my weird going from being extremely happy to extremely apathetic doesn't affect my life negatively.)

Although I'm so socially awkward that the worst I get is just staying up all night and thinking which is hardly healthy ( I haven't slept more than a couple of hours here and there that feel more like blacking out) but it's manageable.

Okay, that kind of turned into over sharing but whatever.

Bother Robert Summerlin is preaching to the choir in my case. Listen up and let him pull the veil from your eyes. I've never been able to focus on more than 30 seconds of a boring ass Foo Fighters song. Groany ass unoriginal white boy music.

I can't understand some of the music you post Green. Pearl Jam is JUST FUCKING TERRIBLE. They can't hold a candle to the stuff you make yourself. The structures you use in your music have about 50 times more originality, your subject matter is way less indulgent and repetitive and I'd could listen to just about anybody more happily than what ever his names vocals (for real Brittney, Kati Perry, Yoko Ono, fucking anyone else please). Can they rip a rocking riff? Sure, so can many others and in a way that is intensely more alive. They are zombies for a certain rock feeling that was bequeathed by our forefathers. Kids want that classic rockin feeling but they don't want to listen to their parents shit so they glommed onto this dead ass simulacrum of real original rock and roll to try and match that feeling while being "original" (see manipulated).

Foo Fighters are just trying to ride the same Pearl Jam money train. Makes me sad to see guys like Mike Watt climb up on that pony and stop playing anything worth listening to again.

The minute he started talking about Buddy Guy it make me think of a vid I saw of him last week, Buddy is fucking alive in this shit.

Also made me think of Neil Young "Ohio". I'm not a big Neil Young fan, can't say Ohio is big up on my list of songs I want to hear but just chanced to hear and pick it apart the other day. Not a song I especially give a shit about but it's a great song, lyrically, structurally and giving that classic rock feeling. Song means something more than the White guy experience and kicks butt. Mostly it's not a murky pile of self indulgent, groany, unoriginal crap.

If Foo Fighters never wrote a song that could hold Ohio's jock strap I don't know about it.

Fun story time:

I moved to DC a few years ago. When I did so, I had no house and no job. I was absolutely, insanely lucky to get both within three days. Even more incredibly, the housing situation I got was... free.

The deal I got from her daughter-- who was running this whole operation-- was that I live in the English basement of a very nice, very expensive house of a woman that came from old, old Pullman money. She was 82 and her mental health was failing, and she recently crashed her car because of her lack of mental faculties. My job was to help her out for 15 hours a week, mostly by driving her whenever she needed. I worked nearby, so if she ever needed me to come back to drive her, it wouldn't be a problem. Of course, this became insanely frustrating because she was determined to be independent and drive herself. I ended up having to play a coy game with her daughter of intentionally "losing" the key so she wouldn't drive, deal with her resentment for it, and do more and more basic things for her as her health declined. At a certain point, I was making or driving her to nearly every meal she had because she simply could not cook anymore. She'd leave the stove running for hours, or, more often, would try to eat raw meat because she forget that you have to cook things, and then would argue that's she's been doing it for decades and I'm trying to take away her freedom.

My point is, it was stressful. It became almost a much more time consuming ordeal, and I was keeping logs of everything I was doing for her daughter as well as keeping tabs of her disease's progression (a mix of things, really, but Alzheimer's early stages with rapidly progressing dementia were among them. Other things I'm not sure of, but the Alzheimer's clearly wasn't the primary issue at the time I was there.)

After some time, she started taking longer vacations to her farm up in Vermont. Getting out of the city was good, and the DC weather was becoming more unbearable for her. When this happened, her daughter decided I was would need to continue to 'earn my rent' somehow, and I was asked to do some physical labor around the house. I had no problem with that at first, but it eventually became a "please do all the yardwork that hasn't been done in a year or more around the sides and back of the house." This was a problem for two reasons for me:

1.) It was the dead of DC summer, so really fucking hot, and really fucking humid.

2.) The yards were formed entirely of ivy, kudzu, and bamboo. If you don't know what those three plants are like, they grow fast. The bamboo at this point was near 20 feet fall and the kudzu hid an entire alcove I didn't even know existed. The ivy covered paths and went halfway up the side of the house.

Regardless, I still felt I should do it because, hey, free rent. However, the daughter (or at least her husband), felt I wasn't do it fast enough. One week after asking me to do all of this, while I'm still working full time at two jobs on campus, they emailed me that I wasn't earning my keep. I apologized, worked harder on it (about three hours an evening or more at this point), and completed everything else they added to my list.

As I was cutting out the last of the bamboo and kudzu and whatever else was in there in a particularly productive feeling evening, I went back in, showered, and sat down to realize I had spent seven straight hours clearing everything away. I had 36 mosquito bites, 12 open cuts on my arms, and my muscles were killing me, but it felt great to complete it. Even better knowing that I had completed three days before, finally, after three years of fighting with terribly ruin bureaucracies at universities, I'd be taking classes for real, with good financial aid, and making just enough to be able to pay the remainder off.

I then checked my phone to see an email from the daughter saying that, with her mother traveling so much more lately, and they're trips to see her, they would need to start charging me $1500 a month because it was just very expensive to not do so. They knew full well I couldn't afford it, they knew full well that I was finally starting school, and worse, they framed it as a benefit for her mother, that they would be getting her a nurse (which, I happened to know was a lie, and here, years later, speaking to her neighbor I still know who is close with the mother, know was a lie because they have another student paying them and no nurse has ever visited), and claiming the cost was an insult to me personally as every single person in that family was making a half million a year, not to mention the amounts of money the woman had in the first place.

I had 30 days to find a new place, move out, move into the new place, while starting school, and a full time job, and having no vehicle to speak of. They burned me bad. The worst I've ever been burned.

I'm still reeling from the financial consequences of the entire ordeal because I ended up four miles from work, school, and home from any point. This was around the time I was having my massive, literally paralyzing headaches I was telling some people about at the hubski meetup, and I had to be biking everywhere. This stopped when I had to eventually go to the emergency room for the headaches, and drop out of my classes because I could not physically make it anymore, and pay way more money than I had between transportation, money owed to the university (which ended up being double the original amount monthly because-- surprise! clerical errors), and my insane fucking rent for a tyrant, bourgeois landlord, and the sky high utilities. No food. I didn't have money to buy food. My bosses, the saints that they are, bought all my food, outside my occasional things simply to remain sane.

So anyway, rambling aside, fuck bourgeois shits. Fuck kicking people out of the place they live to make more money. Fuck capitalism.

Hey, sorry to hear about this man. Frustrating shit. Looks like you just gotta bear with it and get over this bump, but if you ever mention your new place when you move, you can bet you'll have to rent the place next door as well to store all the house-warming presents I'm gonna send your way. Take care man, and let Hubski know if we can help.

A friend of mine has wanted to join the military since he was seven years old. He doesn't want to go to college first, he doesn't want to join the ROTC, he wants to go straight in.

It horrifies me.

When I was little, my family went to San Antonio to attend my Uncle's rather short-lived marriage. One night, we left the hotel to go to the IMAX theatre to see, what else? The Alamo.

On our way back, I saw a frail man, who must have been in his late sixties. He was curled up in a ball on the stoop of this building, tucked into the shallow walls so the wind wouldn't hit him. He had a threadbare once-green-now-brown blanket that barely covered him, and he had a US Marines tattoo on his arm. He was asleep.

Aside from my mom's extreme drunk-ness during that trip, that's about all I remember from San Antonio.

As anti-war as I am, and I really wasn't caring until my friend told me he wanted to join the military, soldiers shouldn't be treated like second class citizens.

A few weeks ago I posted to the "notebooks" subreddit asking for advice on stationary (waterproof, really hard to tear up) or something to buy my friend. Old fashioned, I know, but I want to hear from him and I don't really know what sort of communication abilities they have (both while in Basic Training and after deployment), and my Marine cousin suggested letters.

One of the comments was:

Why would you give a gift to someone who plans on joining an organization which kills innocent people?

Maybe it's how helpful the other comments were that stopped me. I've never been particularly patriotic, but the remark just filled me with rage. I don't know how I resisted the urge to reach though the screen and try to kill him with words. I could never see my friend killing someone, he's too nice. I've never even seen him truly angry.

Soldiers are the people that protect the homeland. I know that it's almost universally for "bad" reasons for the last fifty or so years, and that likely it shouldn't happen. I don't support any of the wars or occupations we're in, really. But these are volunteers. They're volunteering to die. "The last full measure of devotion," Lincoln called it. It drives me crazy that there are people who don't treat them with the full respect they deserve.

I'm a coward. I could never go over there and do what they're doing. When they get home, they should have the top educational opportunities, top medical coverage and insurance, career and employment assistance, and vouchers for housing. There is no reason a soldier should be hungry, homeless, or damaged, in this country.

I've never asked my friend what I think is an important question: "What happens when your legs get blown off?" The VA is a mess. PTSD is still barely treated. Soldiers are treated like roaches by the government at the same time that they parade around their support of the military.

It makes me sick. I fear for my friend's life, both knowing that he'll eventually be in a combat situation, and knowing that if he survives, a just as unforgiving environment awaits him when he returns home. His dreams fill me with fear and dread, but I support him anyway because that's what he wants to do. I think if anything bad happens to him, I'll simply turn inside out and be dead.

This is somewhat of a regrettable confession, but I wore the same pair of jeans to work every day for TWO YEARS without ever washing them. It gradually became a social experiment.

No one ever said anything. The jeans never reeked of ass or piss, and indeed I also heard talk of lil's quoted text that claims bacterial saturation occurs within two weeks of continual wear. I don't know about you, but if I washed my jeans every two weeks, the style/wash of them would have been long gone many months ago.

I feel pretty unhygienic at times, but I look like I just bought a pair of new jeans.

P.S. If you try to sniff my ass at a Hubski meetup, I'll morph into a dog and do the same to you.

Middle-school me would have loved the shit out of those.

Luckily middle-school me is dead, dead, triple dead and buried deep deep within my unconsciousness.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.

We are hurtling through space at 67,000 miles an hour, four times faster than cracks propagate through glass. And that's only as referenced to the sun. We trace an intricate path through the universe, complimentary ellipses locked in a tidal struggle that we don't even acknowledge.

But I think everybody should. At least once.

Wait for a sunny day, preferably with some fluffy clouds blowing by high overhead. Find a nice, wide field with few obstructions around it. Ideally, it has tall grass. Lie down in it. Spread out your arms. Take off your shoes if you feel like it. Now look up.

Above you are tall mountains of water vapor. they tower into the stratosphere miles above you. But listen: gravity is an attractive force. It sucks you in much like a magnet. You do not have a giant force pressing you down - that presumes the force is above you. It isn't.

or is it?

From a physics standpoint, we experience the world upside down. We don't walk with our feet below us gravity pushes down, we walk with our feet above us, with the ground preventing us from being sucked into the center of the earth. And it is only that gravity that keeps us from flying off into the void at 67,000 miles an hour.

Because the void is the norm. The void is prevalent. The void is what will win in the end.

You aren't lying down looking up, you are being sucked back from the void by the greedy greedy earth as miles below you billowing clouds roil and beyond that, the infinite plummet.

You are held up at the very top of the world, forever upside down like a spider, by a force we barely understand. You are kept from spiraling down into the Deep Empty only by the jealous grip of dust assembled so gigantic that it clutches at you with an acceleration of 29 feet per second per second. The force of a pull-up keeps you sucked to the roof of the world and if it didn't, you would fall forever.

For me, at least, experiencing the world "right side up" clarified a lot. It made me understand just how much this planet wanted to keep me here. It made me understand the sheer magnitude of physics so mundane to me that I had to will myself to see it. And it made me recognize that perspective is such a powerful thing that I could give myself vertigo while lying flat in a field of grass.

So long as we're talking about Earth, I mean. My place in society? different matter. But I am held dangling from an infinite precipice 24/7/365 and that relationship isn't going to go away any time soon. Best make the most of it because the alternative is terrifying.

Source

I don't think this is a good idea. The structure of the site means that every new user is already globally ignored, because they have no followers. A primary way for new users to get noticed and to get followers is through the global feed. I think the costs of allowing people to block them during those crucial first few days of membership sends the wrong message, and encourages an insulated culture that seems very antithetical to how I envision hubski.

I see what you're saying that simply having the feature available does not mean that everyone will use it. The problem is, if the feature is available, it's likely that there will be less work done on substantial and effective strategies to integrate new users and prevent junk posts (like ButterflyEffect's suggestion in your other thread). If it happens that this feature becomes popular, especially among the influential users with many followers, it will affect the initial impression users have when they come to the site.

If I'm reading you right, your main complaint is that global is full of junk posts right now. Well, I think my response is 'deal with it.' The natural consequence of a global feed is that it will show the good with the bad. There's a reason they were called "The knights of /new" on reddit. Browsing a global feed is not always pretty, especially when there's an influx of new users. But letting people block all new users entirely throws out the baby with the bathwater in my opinion. We only have a couple days to keep new users interested, and if they feel like their contributions are not being noticed or appreciated, they will not stick around, with good reason.