Best part about doing births for Slavic families is Grandma has been baking up a storm so that everyone can keep her out of the way and fuckin' hell my wife comes home with like a grocery bag full of stuff she can't eat 'cuz she's allergic to gluten and ZOMG home-made meatbread is TheBEST

Given some research, I think I could make a gluten-free version. Maybe even vegan-compatible if I'll get creative with bean-based filling. Those are too good to miss out on. Thanks for the badge by the way.

You know what they say, stomach is just inches away from vena cava. :P

She asked me if it has a name

I heard people call it, very imaginatively, meatbread.

you just bunched the dough up top to close it, right?

Yes, just pinch it alongside the seam. Kinda like with pierogi.

No problem. And, yeah, it's probably for the best to keep calm while they deal with what's certainly more than their usual problems. What's your paper about, if you don't me prying?

BTW, I recently found this utility, and it's been proving itself invaluable.

My conference paper did get accepted! I handed in the camera-ready copy last week and posted it to arxiv.org, but it's 'on hold' and I'm not sure how long to wait before talking to them given waves hands the general state of things. A week? Two weeks?

IIRC, their policy was two weeks even before covid started.

I logged in on the old tutor-student matching service to vouch for friend's account, which apparently was enough to reactivate my profile. What followed was a flood of old and new clients that took a major chunk of Monday to deal with. A whole bunch of people thought it's just a matter of price, ones who were too pushy had their numbers blocked. Another market going bananas.

Otherwise, it was a remarkably productive week. Finally bought an all-in-one office machine to help with work-related stuff, got into a good feedback loop with adviser, and this remote TAing seems to work well. I actually get unprompted questions from students instead of having to call them to the boards and collapse that don't-fully-understand wave function.

In theory, the lab reports were supposed to be writing training. In practice, I learned more co-authoring papers with more experienced folks than all of those could conceivably teach me. In writing, I think #9 leads to #6 when we're talking English. Often miss the ball writing descriptions under graphs, too.

There's much more emphasis and dedicated effort on teaching us presentation, though. You can't defend a diploma without giving one, and we had proseminar and seminar on both levels training us in basics of stuff like voice projection, fighting stage fright, winning/keeping audience's engagement, making slides etc. And it was a lot of fun, too! To balance it, Patent/IP law was hell.

I've pretty much given up even lightly probing to see if there's curiosity.

Don't probe, take the initiative and introduce a simplified version (without talking down to them) of what excites you while being visibly excited about it, and you'll usually get a response. Think of it as a pitch.

Here's a game I sometimes do: take an abstract from your field, and denerdify it until you'll get the most quintessential idea in as few words as possible. Bonus points if you can think of an everyday analogy to at least approximate the point you're trying to get across. Use something like Flesch–Kincaid readability tests to help yourself gauge your own progress.

I painted it myself, though from a memorised reference of unknown origin. The way my brain works, it could come from literally anything/anywhere, but I'm certain it's not my own creation.

Awesome timing!

Should snap a pic tomorrow, when it'll be an entire day after I cleaned the room.