The CW is getting MORE shows. Looks like it's going to be my go-to TV network continuing going forward.
@Roz said in RL things I love:
@Auspice GIT IT GUD. Apartment hunts are awful, I'm crossing my fingers for you!
It's been a mess. I had to give a 'I can't do this.' letter to the first girl I was hunting with. She was way too picky, needy, and lazy (refused to do any of the contacts or tours herself).
The new person has been GREAT. I wish this place wasn't $50 over my 'max monthly,' but I'm telling myself I'd be paying more for a gym membership w/pool ANYWAY.
Bra company CEO makes his male workers wear weights around their necks one day a year so they can know what it's like to have E cup breasts.
@Insomnia said in RL things I love:
Bra company CEO makes his male workers wear weights around their necks one day a year so they can know what it's like to have E cup breasts.
As a bearer of HH-cups, I highly approve.
Got the apartment.
...now I just gotta find someone who can lend me some money for just-shy of a month. 'Cause the move date is right before I get paid. Derp.
@Cupcake said in RL things I love:
Where men dealing with women's biology is concerned, perhaps they should take their cue from Jensen Ackles.
But hey, if he doesn't do it fo you, gents, here's Key & Peele's menstruation orientation.
I fondly remember this scene from Mr. Mom.
@Insomnia said in RL things I love:
I just love that this is happening. NSFW, maybe? 3D printed clitoris to teach girls about sexuality in France.
Really? I mean it's not like giving a smart phone to a cave woman. Woman have had this equipment for thousands of years and billions of them have figured out how to use it without the 3d models or classes.
@HorrorHound said in RL things I love:
@Tyche. You. I like you. Except for golf.
I just remembered roller coasters. I'm going to have to bump vaginas down again.
@Tyche said in RL things I love:
@Insomnia said in RL things I love:
I just love that this is happening. NSFW, maybe? 3D printed clitoris to teach girls about sexuality in France.
Really? I mean it's not like giving a smart phone to a cave woman. Woman have had this equipment for thousands of years and billions of them have figured out how to use it without the 3d models or classes.
Like any tool, you can always become better at its use.
@Tyche said in RL things I love:
@Insomnia said in RL things I love:
I just love that this is happening. NSFW, maybe? 3D printed clitoris to teach girls about sexuality in France.
Really? I mean it's not like giving a smart phone to a cave woman. Woman have had this equipment for thousands of years and billions of them have figured out how to use it without the 3d models or classes.
And for hundreds of years, women have been taught to be ashamed of their own sexuality, that their pleasure is dirty, etc., etc. Like, the number of women who go through their teen years and parts of adulthood without having an orgasm is way higher than you clearly think.
I blame biological evolution.
So I work in arts marketing. Over the past year, we've gone through a full website redesign for one of my company's projects -- a performing arts venue -- and I project managed from the client end. Our web developer is fantastic. Like, legit, he's awesome. He's passionate about his work, patient, communicative, everything great. The experience was so positive on both ends that, kind of on a whim, I emailed him a few months ago to say, "Hey, I've been looking for new opportunities. Let me know if you're ever looking for project managers?" And he came back with, "Actually, I've kind of been looking for something on the level of a COO...
Fast forward to now, when he's actually in town for the conference of our ticketing platform. We talk about what he's looking for, what I really like doing, and find a whole lot of overlaps. My former department head has drinks with us, because she was there for the big chunk of the process and also loves him. She straight up acts like my mom (despite being a year younger than me) and goes WOW ROZ WOULD BE GREAT AT THOSE THINGS YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT NEEDING SOMEONE TO DO.
He's really careful about spelling out all the ways the work would be different for me. (It's remote, the team is all across the country, etc.) He thinks I'm great, but only wants me to consider talking about it seriously if I know all the pros and cons. I come back the next day and go, you know what, I think it's all exciting. So now I have to consider what my price tag would be and we can figure out if it's something that makes sense for both of us.
I'm kind of terrified?
@Roz That is twenty kinds of awesome! Congrats! 
Congrats @Roz, that's supremely awesome.
My win today...
I taught an Excel class yesterday to people who, while intelligent and capable, are not computer literate. I've been there since March, and I've been steadily working at getting this group in general more comfortable with their computers, what they can do and what they shouldn't do, that sort of thing. So one of the guys was finally brave enough to take my Excel class. It was an exercise in patience for me, as much as I love doing it.
So as part of the 'steadily working at getting them more comfortable', I work Thursday afternoons in their building. So they know when to expect me to be there, and stop saving questions for weeks at a time until they corner one of the IS folks (because a lot of them feel that the questions are too stupid to e-mail, or not important enough to come to our building, and they don't want to bother us by calling...so they wait until they see someone and then get their lists out)...anyway. I work over there Thursday afternoons.
So I show up today and get settled, and the guy came RUNNING when he realized what time it was. 'I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING!!!' I followed him back to his office and he showed me the chart that he'd built -- all by himself -- in Excel. Then he asked me a million...hmm. Educated novice questions. Like, he took the time to read up on it and learn a bit more himself, and saved the parts that confused him to ask me about. I showed him how to find the Microsoft tutorials and he was GLEEFUL that he could go read more about it.
It was one of the most rewarding moments I've had at the job so far, and I've had some pretty good moments. 
@Sunny This happened about... 11 years ago? At the time as a young PHP developer trying to save some money I was also teaching computer classes to novices as an extra income after work (the company I was working for also had a school in the same building so they tossed me extra hours as a 'benefit').
Anyway, this class was full of professional people. Electrical engineers, doctors... we're not talking kids barely out of highschool or uneducated folks here, right? So this was the very first session in which we were supposed to start with the very basics just in case, and I was just naive enough back then to think that hilariously unnecessary; stuff like 'this is the monitor, this is where you turn it off, but this is the computer and they're separate things', etc.
After demonstrating a couple of things I then took the mouse and waved it in the air as I explained how when you move it around, the lil' arrow of the cursor on the screen does as well. "Okay guys, now you try it and see."
And doesn't this goddamn doctor in his thirties pick his mouse up and wave it in the air as well.
I still facepalm about that one years later. The hell dude, you've never watched a movie or been to a store where someone used one of them things?
@Arkandel said in RL things I love:
I still facepalm about that one years later. The hell dude, you've never watched a movie or been to a store where someone used one of them things?
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
@Ganymede That look on Bones' face. You gotta know that was like the 15th take and the only one they could keep it somewhat together for.
So, in the "what do you collect" thread I mentioned "Chinese board wargames". My latest acquisition arrived on Thursday. The best part of said acquisition is that it was free! The designer and publisher sent me a free copy. Just because I'm me.[1]
You can get the details of the game in the linked album, but the overview is here:
[1]OK, that and maybe because I kind of promised I'd translate the rules to English for him. But mostly because it's me and I'm the kind of guy people send free games to.
I decided that I should show the other games I've made photo-essays of.
While the first game I showed was of naval engagements in the First Sino-Japanese War (which, given what a humilation that was for China, makes this a very unusual topic for a wargame published in China), and while it is the first game by this particular person that was professionally published (by a publication company he co-founded specifically to publish it), it was not the first game he ever produced. Before this (very nice) one he self-published two other games with equally interesting and oddball topics.
The first of these two earlier games is Nanchang Uprising, a game of the titular battle that marked the first engagement of the Chinese Civil War in 1927.
Very unusually for a board wargame, the playing pieces are cut out of sheet magnet and the board is metal-backed (and yet not much heavier than a traditional cardboard playing surface). This is something I wish more wargames did.
The second of these earlier self-published works is the far more ambitious Four Crossings of Chishui. This is a major engagement that is bizarrely unheard of outside of China despite the fact that it has quite literally changed the course of world history in an earth-shattering (albeit slow-motion) way. Even the Wikipedia article on the Long March manages to overlook it.
Brief synopsis: after the Long March, the Red Army performed a grueling set of maneuvers that involved crossing a treacherous stretch of one of the Yangtze's tributaries four times in a brilliant set of battles that effectively slices and dices the Republican Army into ratshit, thus giving the Red Army their first major victory and turning the tide of the Civil War. Without this battle, the Reds would not have won China and we'd be looking at a drastically different world today.
(If you want to know more, listen to the first track of this album. You'll have to learn Mandarin first, mind…)
As with the previous game, the pieces are magnetic and one of the game boards is metallic. This metallic board is a small version of the much larger paper (sadly not card stock) map. The reason for this is that the communist forces do their movements on the smaller, magnetic map for purposes of hidden movements. They're transferred to the open map that both sides can see only once detected (usually when they attack something). It's an interesting mechanism I'd like to try out in actual play sometime.
The final game I've got a photo-essay done for is a completely different style in many dimensions than the previous three. This one is about The Chu-Hand Contention, which is an ancient war that was in its own way a historic game-changer.
See the Chu are one of the odder, and yet highly influential, cultures of ancient China. And this game is of interest to me because I live in the heart of what was once the Kingdom of Chu. The people here are … different. The Chu have always been the vaguely artistic, vaguely decadent cultural engine that influenced all of the rest of China over the ages. When they were their own kingdom they were the mildly corrupt, very wealthy, highly decadent aesthetes to the warrior kingdoms around them. They only survived as long as they did because they were rich enough to hire the best soldiers.
After the Qin escapade made the first actual quasi-unified nation in the space that is now called China (after said Qin), in its ensuing collapse two major contenders showed up to take the Qin's place. One was an offset of the Chu peoples, the other the Han. The Han won and went on to create what is effectively the basis of all subsequent Chinese culture.
As with the "four crossings" battle, the Chu-Han Contention would have made for a dramatically different world had the opposing side won. It is thus a very good subject for a decent wargame—which this one seems to be.
(As an oddity, although published in the mainland by a Beijing designer and publisher, it's printed in traditional characters. This is killing me in translating the rules.)
And now the other thing I collect that I forgot to mention in the "things I collect" thread: weird-ass card decks. I'm not talking modern CCGs or the like here. I'm talking traditional cards … just traditional cards from other places.
Today I got another shipment in of weird-ass cards. The full photo essay has all the explanations and commentary. Here I'm just going to drop the photos (roughly in order from the mostly familiar to the WTF!?).
@Roz said in RL things I love:
@Auspice GIT IT GUD. Apartment hunts are awful, I'm crossing my fingers for you!
It's been a mess. I had to give a 'I can't do this.' letter to the first girl I was hunting with. She was way too picky, needy, and lazy (refused to do any of the contacts or tours herself).
The new person has been GREAT. I wish this place wasn't $50 over my 'max monthly,' but I'm telling myself I'd be paying more for a gym membership w/pool ANYWAY.
