Posts made by Arkandel

@bluebird May that remain the worst thing autocorrect does for you.

I don't know if this belongs here or in the RL peeves thread!

On my birthday my college roommate made a post in FB tagging me about 'mentoring him in Magic: the Gathering' back in the day and reminding me MtG Arena is a thing.

Fuck you Nick! I love Arena now. It had been well over a decade since I had played my last duel, and now I've found myself doing dailies, trying to resist the urge to spend money on the damn thing. It's so much fun! Argh.

@bluebird Although I'm only technically an admin these days, if you do need help recovering your old account please let me know!

Else welcome back, BlueBird.

I'm a terrible person who shouldn't have dogs.

When I call the girls in from the yard they get a liver treat each (so they come in when called ). That's all great, but today there were no more treats in there! Ohnoes.

So I reached into their regular dry food container, took a few nuggets of their regular dry food, and excitedly put them in their regular dry food dish, on top of the regular dry food already in there.

The young one went for it anyway because she's got like 100 grams worth of brains at the best of times. The oldest just gave me this look.

@aria Hahahah! The world is a small place. I guess though it depends on how big or small a city you live in.

I have one more for the losers' club.

In my second job (so I was still in my twenties) I was coworkers with this guy for three years. At some point we starter chatting and realized we went to highschool together... and we were in the same class.

I guess neither of us was memorable but damn, at that point it had been less than ten years!

@aria At this point I'm convinced many of the businesses who want workers to return just have leases for the office space they are already paying for, and they figure they might as well use it.

But they might be in for a rude awakening. Although not every line of work can WFH, the ones who can have had a year and a half to realize that hey... they can work for anyone. Maybe that other company located a thousand miles away will pay them better without having to deal with a 45 minute commute each way.

It's really weird how little we know or see even in the people we think we know the most.

I have a friend. We no longer talk as much as we used to, but I met him when I was 15 and he was 13, and used to hang out at his and his brother's house on a very regular basis over the years. We played Magic and D&D together, moved on to Vampire: the Masquerade, we went to (different) schools and hanged out during the summer. We ended up even being coworkers later on for a year and a half, literally in the same office. I've known the guy for 30 fucking years.

Neither of us had any idea we were both big time into basketball. All that time. He went and played with his group, I with mine. We watched games separately. It just never came up in any of our conversations over all that time.

I found out this week because I happened to see a reply of his on a post about the Portland Trailblazers' playoffs exit and when I sent him a WTF?! post thinking he might have at least gotten into it just recently... nope.

What the fuck. How much more have I missed about everyone I know? How much have they? How is this possible!

If you already have plates and a barbell, I'd also look at a landmine accessory. You can also use a corner to anchor the bar against, but it might scratch it. There are so many exercises you can do using different grips.

What worked really well for me was this, although there are like 10 different products almost identical to it on Amazon. They all work just as well, and they're relatively cheap. Basically as long as you have a sturdy object to attach the handle on (a 2x4 beam, a firmly screwed bolt, etc) you can use it for pulldowns, curls, facepulls, rows, etc. It's graded for 200+lbs which is good enough for most people since you can alter the angle, and thus the resistance.

@derp said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

It makes me unreasonably content to have the means to exercise again in my garage.

It's not about being strong; I don't play sports during the pandemic. It's not about looking good; I barely go out during the pandemic. It's not even about being healthy, or not entirely.

I've realized I need the incentive to look after myself properly though and without goals and structure I cannot do this. Or, rather, I haven't; in the last year and a half I've taken terrible care of myself. I ate badly, dressed the bare minimum needed to sit in front of a web camera for meetings every morning, and I didn't have a reason to care.

For whatever reason having some iron to lift up and put down again works for me. It gives me a reason to look after the rest of my life. And it makes me feel good about it in ways I didn't realize I was missing until they came back.

I have most of a home gym, really, and I used the hell out of it during the pandemic. To the point where I am soon going to need new weight plates.

Which now cost an absolutely insane amount of money, wtf. I remember when I could get a set of 2 25lb olympic plates for like 39.99, and now it's like, 99.99 for one.

What the hell.

Part of that is that a bunch of people all started to build home gyms during the pandemic so that's supply versus demand. But more than that it's the price of iron/steel. It's going up globally, and it'll continue to be.

I already ordered some more plates (mostly 10s and 5s as well as fractionals) since it's reasonable to expect them to go even higher.

Edit: added a source.

@kk I don't know the circumstances for the healthcare industry. I do know the Peter Principle is valid, however, so it sounds like you've made the right call by positioning yourself where you are at your very best.

In IT the managerial path just made sense for me especially as I got older. It's harder to keep up with new emerging technologies while competing with hungry people in their 20s who can afford to stay up all night and still wake up at 8. On the other hand putting all that energy to work and helping them succeed is a treat, and one of the best parts of my job is to see someone I've mentored do well for themselves and outgrow their role.

@chibichibi said in Brainstorming oWoD Games:

In this world, it's chaos. Not exactly post apocalyptic but chaos. The Technocracy and Traditions are in a huge fight trying to cover up all the crazy Marauders trying to bork with the reality while Nephandi are trying to make everything descend.

My initial advice is to ground your project's high-brow notions early on to its intended gameplay.

In other words this is what you want the game to be about, but what will PCs do on a day to day basis? How will this relate to them in practical terms?

Once you have the answer then it's time to ask another question; since you don't want a sandbox, what kind of resources (in terms of code and automation, player- or staff-STs, etc) will it take to support that vision?

@wizz Oh I feel that.

Shit flows downhill. We have considerable technical debt to pay back at my job and there are never opportunities to dedicate resources to do so since offering new features is what gets more customers, not fixing stuff that isn't broken enough.

But here's the thing, the more technical debt you accumulate the harder it is for their services to scale up. That means as you add customers it gets harder to maintain them. It also means stuff needs to be done manually - which directly translates to people getting phone calls at 2am to fix stuff which, if they had time from the daily grind, would either be automatically resolved or wouldn't be broken in the first place.

@aria said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

....Are you secretly my boss?

Yes.

Suddenly I was receiving high praise for doing the most basic things right.

Although too much praise cheapens the concept, employee recognition is a valuable tool from a corporate perspective and a decent thing to do from a human standpoint.

As a company it costs nothing to tell someone who went above and beyond to say "good job!" to them. It's literally the least you can do. Hell, do it publicly (and while you're at it, only chastise in private).

As a person... recognize the effort. Help someone feel a little bit better about themselves. Let them know they are valued.

I envy you folks with dumbass neighbors.

We have a moluccan cockatoo. She's lovely. She's also loud as holy fuck when she's angry, happy or just she's being a bird, and the songs of her people sound like someone's strangling a baby over hot coals.

I have a sound isolation headset. Hahah. She laughs at it. Or I think she does because I can hear her.

It makes me very sad during my 1:1s to be told they are not used to receiving positive feedback. That there are adults out there in their thirties who haven't been told yet they are doing a good job - at something they spend a third of their lives doing - is unsettling.

When you do something wrong you hear about it in no uncertain terms. When you're doing well you... get paid since that's what's expected?

One of the things I like about Canada is that shit like this gets confronted. Basically every nation did despicable things even in their near past, but we're at least trying to do something about it now.

And this isn't over, by the way. For example indigenous women and girls are preyed on at much higher rates than other ethnic groups in the country.

Naturally when I saw this I thought of @Ganymede

@silverfox That's amazing, great job! Are they all eating?

@mietze You made me Google this. I hope you're proud of yourself.

@silverfox said in Critters!:

@ganymede

I wish. No. I went and returned them. Opened the crate in the kitten room and sat next to it and even batted a bully away so Mimi would come out. Kept my shit together till I was back in the car then cried.

I completely feel you. Both of my cat jerkfaces are foster failures. I'm so sorry about the heartbreak.