it's like 20-21 at this point! i would say i also want mine to be reasonably coverable so i am making the sacrifices of the upper parts of limbs first because uhmmmm one of the reasons i get tattoos is to show them off so other people know i am badass, duh! so it's kind of not fun when they're all hidden.

with this positioning i can ostensibly hide my tattoos at work.

but also i have inner finger and ring and wrist tattoos

sooo

I just really, really love tattoos. And I love the way an Am trad rose looks on a hand. there are some tattoos i don't love and won't probably ever get, a throat tattoo is really not for me in any capacity. but i'm absolutely planning on finishing out the inner finger set at some point, kind of cuz once in i'm in you know? they haven't fired me yet and i've got 3 of them done. also theoretically only in imaginary land my dream 2nd career is a tattoo artist (i just don't know how much I'd actually enjoy...you know, customers) so like yup. that's how i feel about tattoos. i fuckin' love 'em.

The state formerly known as?

If anyone posts WAP I will...

...have to lower my head and admit that although I hate it, damn is it also catchy. The people who make pop know what they are doing. IT'S THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS.

I also still have basically all of Maggot Brain playing on repeat, so I'll give you

It's a good song to take on a run with you because by the time it finishes, you've probably done almost a mile (minimum).

hi i like your animals <3

Doin' the down-home cheap teach-yourself-don't-know-nuffin version of digitizing my cats.

For a future cat-themed sticker sheet.

Mostly just experimenting and learning more about making/drawing/coloring digital art and using a tablet and Clip Studio Pro. There's a crap ton to learn about coloring and layers, but I'm starting with what is familiar enough to be possible and we'll move on from there.

It annoys me so much to talk about feelings, and that means that right now, most of my feelings are generally negative.

My daily mood has been pretty good this week. I'm on a 7-day run streak. I feel like I have largely acclimated to the isolation, at least for right now. My sister essentially refuses to social distance. This is infuriating.

I am trying to use this time to really focus on myself, on eating clean and exercising and focusing. There is a lot of time available to everybody now and mostly I can use it productively. I have to gerry-rig the system to make myself do so successfully, but I know enough about the pulls and levers of the system that I can mostly make it so and I continue to try harder at it.

Work is work.

I have begun a search of local apartment complexes. I still expect to move out of here and living with my sister by late summer. I just don't think I'll be leaving the state.

One positive thing about this is how wonderfully clean my apartment is getting, which is really a sign of exactly how much time I'm here and covertly my level of tension. But at least it helps.

ok fine i will send u tshirt

Uhm. I’m gonna share this. It’s an email from an Italian citizen that has been making its way around my work emails so I sincerely hope none of my coworkers googles any specific phrases in the contents but even then, hey, they probably can’t specifically doxx me. It feels worthy of sharing here in a megathread. Again, this is an email from an Italian citizen that lives in Italy that, in a very circuitous roundabout way, ended up in my inbox. Frankly I thought that most of this had been covered on the ‘ski already and admittedly mostly by kleinbl00, but this thread makes me think it’s worth sharing.

>

Thank you for checking in. Around here we are mostly fine so far, but the overall situation is evolving rapidly and not in a reassuring way.

One of the main effects of this contagion is not necessarily about an individual person to be infected and develop life-threatening symptoms but that, considering the population as a whole, the number of people infected and in need of hospitalization and of intensive care (mainly because they need assisted ventilation) is increasing quickly, putting a heavy strain on the health care system.

We have come very fast, in a couple of weeks actually, from a scenario where nobody was taking this issue as a serious one (“it’s like the flu”) to the point today where the effects of the infection have mostly wiped out all the spare capacity in intensive care units in many areas of Nothern Italy (sudden higher-than-usual number with critical pneumonia conditions, mostly elderly people or people already weakened by other concurrent illnesses).

All of a sudden the number of people in need of ICU has started increasing well above both the seasonal and the long term standards used to determine how many ICU beds are needed for a given area. This created a dire scarcity of beds both for the infected people in critical conditions, and also for people who normally would have needed ICUs, putting everyone infected or not at higher risk of not being capable to get the proper care. Consider that Northern Italy's healthcare system is among the best of the world for standards, personnel, and equipment, so it’s not a local organizational or structural issue, but something that can easily happen in other western countries.

The big effort at a nation’s level right now is to try and slow down the contagion rate as much as possible. The target is to spread the number of critical cases as much as possible over time, to dilute over time the strain put on the ICUs. The idea is that, considering that as of now a widespread contagion is inevitable, if the critical cases don’t happen all at once but spread over the next months, the healthcare system can cope with them gradually without clogging the hospital ICUs.

For this reason, you are probably seeing stories talking of lockdown of the most affected areas and of a general effort to encourage and enforce so-called social distancing: schools, museums, universities, libraries, gyms, swimming pools are closed, all gatherings are either prohibited or discouraged, depending on the kind. Shops and restaurants are open but the general prescription is to avoid going out as much as possible. The authorities are trying to limit interactions between persons as much as possible to slow down the contagion, without at the same time grinding to a halt the country and the economy.

It may seem from the outside that these measures are excessive in some regards, I ensure you that they looked like that to many people here not earlier than ten days ago, but the situation in hospitals has deteriorated so quickly that, in retrospect, probably, harsher measures should have been put in place already starting from two-three weeks ago.

Sorry, I elaborated a bit on this, but looking at international news it seems that other countries are not grasping the issue, as we weren’t here until recently, so I thought that a bit of first-hand testimony from the “hot” zone would help to clarify the scenario.

Italy is probably just the first western country to be hit by this, but the situation is evolving quickly in other countries and the pattern everywhere is identical to ours, with a first moment of underestimation and then a quick realization of how critical the situation is.

Ciao,

Reg CC requires that banks make funds available from checks often before the check can actually clear from the institution it's written from. That's how.

Checks are completely archaic and should be abolished. Australia did it.

Also, I agree this is hilarious and good job done to you sir.

Another thing that I think is important to mention. The article talks about people using separate bathrooms or being in a room by themselves. (This will be relevant) My company is doing a stress test on Monday that requires anyone who can to work from home.

There's one bathroom in my shared apartment. Besides the bedrooms and bath, we have effectively two rooms in an open floor plan. There is no way one of us could use a separate bathroom if infected and that's a luxury of the upper class. How many apartment dwellers with roommates can afford to sequester a bathroom? The last several rental situations I had could not afford to do that, simply didn't have enough bathrooms for one to be used exclusively by one person. I don't even have the space for a separate office. If I want to work from home I do so from what is effectively our kitchen table, which oh by the way is in the dining/family/living room, because we only have one room for all those activities.

I truly don't believe that my small apartment is abnormal in the scheme of things.

I really dislike it but my plans for the weekend are to leave the apartment to go running, basically. Grocery shopping sunday, and that's about it.

I used to be really crazy about knitting for about 5-6 years in high school and right after. I loved knitting and watching TV. I got into spinning and dying my own yarn at that time as well.

After the great disruptions that came to my life with college I just pretty much totally stopped. Occasionally I make a scarf.

I don’t enjoy hobbies that require quite so much time investment or require quite so much sitting down. I guess now I do other art-things.

I would say that through my life it’s always accurate that I have some kind of creative hobby, I just swap types every now and again.

Yes! Still a bank. Trying NOT to talk all about it as I am only in very early stages. A recruiter reached out to me. It would require relocation, but the job would pay for it. This was appealing to me as I plan on relocating to my current work headquarters when my lease is up anyway, except my current work is not paying for it.

I thought, why not move somewhere totally cool and different, and get someone else to pay for it?

(There’s also a fair amount of instability at work these days driven by some recent re-orgs. No significant layoffs but a number of people leaving that indicated a lack of confident in our new direction.)

how i feel about democrats as a democrat :(

Goodbye, Bertha. It was a pleasure reading about your adventures while we could.

Well, I gave Elizabeth Warren $25 last night, so... ::mockseriousface::

I agree with the idea that empathy, in any given person, exists as a limited commodity.

I believe that a person is by nature a limited being; there are bounds to all dimensions of experience, feeling, etc. Once a person gets into the appearance of having unlimited any-quality-within-the-self, it seems to me like we are now talking about gods or fictions. Or narcissists, I suppose.

I have read that our daily ability to self-discipline is limited; that it shows a decline in performance over time when taxed. (Yes, I've also read articles that decry those same studies; seems like the jury is out on this topic. However, I've never seen a study demonstrating a human's unlimited quantity of -- well, anything.) I know for a fact that attributes of mine, such as patience or anger, certainly feel and appear limited as I engage in or with them. My general level of intelligence is limited by my brain and genes. My stamina and physical endurance are limited, as I begin to feel exhausted halfway through a 6 mile run. I can't even sleep forever; the body wakes me up when it's hit that particular limit, with no input from me on whether I agree.

I think the thankful antidote or defense to this limited experience and limited mental/brain-i-al resources that all persons experience is the ability to switch off: when I recognize my empathy has reached a limit, I can switch gears from empathizing, perhaps, to trying my best to listen, or learn. When I am out of patience, I can divert my attention to something less trying. When I am out of reason because, perhaps, my emotions are too high -- I can realize this, consciously decide to stop engaging analytically (or to stop allowing myself to turn to 'logic' or overthinking) and practice letting go, or accepting that not everything can be proven, defined, known -- can be mathematic in nature, I'd like to say.

There are limits to empathy, just like any other human trait or ability; knowing what our personal limits are allows us to recognize when we have reached them and to stop trying to wring a dry sponge, or get the car going by flooding the engine. It is useful to know when a given approach may no longer be viable due to resource constraints so that then, we can either admit this limit and step away from the task, or we can admit the limit and begin to try other, potentially also-valuable approaches.

Zombies. It means zombies

I got banned from a reddit!

Further question: do you conceal carry when you know you will be drinking? Research indicates to me that’s pretty heavily frowned upon to illegal in almost every state.

Dude had 5 beers in 2 hours, which like isn’t crazy... but you’re carrying a gun.

I say tell the person, because if they have a problem with you carrying, are you going to stop carrying because you’re dating them? If it’s a dealbreaker, and you really do conceal carry everywhere and this isn’t something you’d want to stop doing, then you should communicate up front because it sounds like it’d be a dealbreaker for you to stop just as much as it would be for them to date someone who’s typically packing.

I completely agree that how you communicate this information to someone is as important and impactful to how a person’s going to receive it, as just the fact that you communicate it.

because galen atted me

Report back to me when the company has been in existence for 5 years. The only report I am interested in is their ability to turn a profit over that time.

:)

Can we recruit him to Hubski? :)

This was a great article.

The problem with this happening at all in the US:

The main issue I see here is that cheap corn and cheap soy are driving the flood of ultra processed and calorie dense, designed-to-be-delectable food into the US market.

Cheap corn and cheap soy are cheap because they're subsidized by the gov't.

For the gov't to start taxing those products, it would be counterintuitive. For the gov't to stop subsidizing those products, farmers would revolt. Or at least get poorer than they already are (except for the factory farms). The factory farms exist because people realized they could grow mass products including corn and soybeans and snatched up all the land they could to mass produce and mass process monocultures. Like corn and soy.

If you're a small farmer in the farming cycle you're caught in the farming cycle which is pushed in no small part by gov't subsidy. You're broke, forced to buy seed that's expensive and can't be saved, forced to grow certain crops because that's what guarantees at least some money, and once the money finally comes in from sales and the gov't you have to buy a new round of seed again.

It's simply not logical for the gov't, with its left hand, to offer subsidies for crops which are used to fuel terrible food, then turn and with the right hand tax the products of those crops and drive down demand/attempt to limit consumers. Gov't needs us to eat as much corn and soy as possible. Every year US produces huge huge surpluses which is how we figured out how to make so much terrible stuff like HFCS in the first place.

The gov't is effectively already subsidizing terrible food and nutrition available en masse to make gen pop obese. They can't choose to make the population healthier with health taxes when they've already chosen to make the population engorged.

You get drink, and you motherfuckin dance, and because you're never going to see most of those people ever again you can do both with reckless impunity and it's pretty much the definition of a great time. Plus good food, and everybody's usually pretty happy. Enjoy yourself for sure.

I definitely think this post is more about lambasting fragile masculinity than absolute fact... But hey I have heard many positive reviews about the use of baby wipes :)

the other day i checked and i had badgers to spare. my literal thought was, "c'mon hubski, throw good content at me! i wanna badge it all!"

glad to do it, mate. i do think cgod's is the most perfect response in this thread, for many reasons, including its succinctness. there is much more that could be said. sometimes it is good to choose not to

Hello everyone. The fateful day dawns.

Plans are: meet up in the 6 o'clock hour at the Pinch. Some people know 6 might be early for them, and some people (your gracious author) are worried they might hit traffic as they have a 3 pm meeting in Richmond and can't leave the city til 3:30 as a result.

There is public-ish parking around the Pinch and there are garages, if you feel like it, nearby-ish as well. Google Maps can assist you.

I suspect the Pinch will be our mainstay for the evening. I know steve was looking at public transpo. blackbootz also has graciously offered to let me crash (admittedly, I kind of made an assumption on the phone call but he went along with it). I honestly think, depending on how hairy the evening gets, I may just drive home - if I'm good to drive the hour to bootz' place, I'm good to drive the next hour home, is my line of thought. steve either way if I am driving, Bethesda looks hella nearish to the Pinch so I can drop you back there.

Roll call for the remaining non-mentioned so we can get the level of HYPE some ELEVATION in this here THREAD:

arguewithatree

wasoxygen

Meriadoc

gotchu

So I mean, then what's the appropriate radius from an event within which the local news should be allowed to report on it? 25 miles, 50 miles, what? We could limit such news to the boundaries of the school district which is impacted?

Imagine being related to a child who goes to a school at which there was a school shooting and having absolutely no idea about it.

Imagine hearing about school shootings by quality-degraded word-of-mouth instead of on live broadcasts straight from the source or through reading vetted, accurate, news/journalism articles which meet a certain accepted (and removed) standard.

Refusing to run news about such events has easy parallels to outlawing abortion: you're not going to make it stop happening, you're just going to make people have to go about it in messier, more complicated, less convenient, less accurate ways.

A child whose reaction to hearing about another child's suicide is to attempt suicide is a child who needs help, not a child who would be perfectly fine if they hadn't heard about the other one. I assure you the feelings they have which make them think suicide might be a good choice do not suddenly pop up in their skull in response to hearing about someone else who committed it.

Really? Cuz laurel, all the way.